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Wayback Trip: Difference between revisions
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Well, maybe it's a [[Stable Time Loop]], and the timeline you know only exists because [[You Already Changed the Past|you were there with silver garlic in Rome]]. But wait, weren't you worried about changing history just last week? Didn't your traveling companion [[Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act|prevent you from killing Hitler]] to avoid a [[Temporal Paradox]]? [[Timey-Wimey Ball|So what makes]] ''[[Timey-Wimey Ball|this]]'' [[Timey-Wimey Ball|any different?]]
When history has changed, and the protagonists must fix it, but there's ''no reason'' for it to have changed, that's a [[Wayback Trip]]. Unlike [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]], where the time travelers go back and defeat the villain, and as a result, history is changed for the better, in this trope, the time travelers go back and defeat the villain, and as a result history ''stays the same''. The ultimate result is then either a [[Stable Time Loop]] (Rome ''always had'' secret lycovamps all along) or a [["Close Enough" Timeline]], perhaps in which the protagonists [[Tricked
This trope seems to derive from the [[Adventure Towns]] treatment of [[Time Travel]]. Periods of history are treated like places rather than points on a timeline. New York in 1897 isn't the ''cause'' of New York in 2007, it's just 110 years down the road, and is free to have its own history and events.
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== [[Live Action Television]] ==
* ''[[
** In the original series serial "Pyramids of Mars", Sarah Jane asks why they have to stop the villain destroying the Earth in 1915, when they know it's fine in 1980. In reply, the Doctor takes her to 1980... and it turns out to be a desolate wasteland. Apparently, once the Doctor arrives somewhere, he must complete the [[Stable Time Loop]] to maintain the "proper" version of history. (In which case, one wonders... and this question has been voiced in the series... why the heck does the Doctor keep traveling around?! Arguably, if he didn't, the effect would be that 1980 Earth had ''always'' been a desolate wasteland, and there wouldn't be a "real" 1980 for Sarah to come from) In ''Blink'', the Doctor explains that time, rather than being a linear chain of cause and effect, is actually "[[Timey-Wimey Ball|a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff]]." This apparently explains everything.
** The new series has also introduced the idea of "fixed points", which amounts to there being some things you can change, and some things you can't.
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[[Category:Plots]]
[[Category:Wayback Trip]]
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