Time Crash: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{quote|''It's like, take a piece of paper and draw a line on it. Then from the end of that line draw a bunch of branches. Then from the end of each of those branches, draw a bunch more. That's time.''

 

 

It's already been [[Doctor Who|well-established]] that time is like a [[Timey-Wimey Ball|big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff]]. [[Temporal Paradox|Cause does not lead directly to effect]]; [[Grandfather Paradox|you can shoot your own grandfather and in all likelihood get away with it]], [[Stable Time Loop|take an active hand in the events that made you who you are]], [[Tricked-Out Time|and generally abuse time until it cries uncle.]]

But what about universes where time is not quite so wibbly-wobbly or timey-wimey? What about those realities where time is a rigid, orderly, and above all ''fragile'' structure, and some well-meaning fool sets off with a time machine to change history?

 

 

When you've gone and broken ''time'', [[Divide by Zero|all bets are off]]. More benign Time Crashes may take the form of a [[Groundhog Day Loop]] waiting for someone to find the magic key which breaks the cycle. In others, cause and effect itself may be shattered, resulting in a [[Fate Worse Than Death]] for all affected.

 

 

A Time Crash is not a simple thing to solve, either: usually, it involves either some serious [[Applied Phlebotinum]] or [[More Dakka|enough firepower]] aimed at the right [[Eldritch Abomination]]...if it can be fixed at all.

 

 

{{examples}}

* In ''[[Suzumiya Haruhi]]'', the titular character creates a Time Crash [[Arc Words|3 years ago]] that prevents human time travelers from going back further than that. Presumably, Yuki's faction has no problem as Yuki mentions very casually that the human's TPDD is an average method of time travelling. Moments later, she leads Kyon and Mikuru into a room and freeze the whole room, stopping time in there. It is maintained, even when Yuki engages in a battle against Ryoko in a data space created by Ryoko.

** Of course, this assumes that she created a Time Crash rather than simply creating an [[Alternate Universe]] for herself which, as a result, has no history before she created it.

 

* In the ''[[Strontium Dog]]'' "Max Bubba" story, as Bubba alters time, various meteorological and electrical anomalies occur around him, which the Vikings believe is Ragnarok. Then things start falling into Norway from various points in the future.

* The ''[[Astro City]]'' story "The Nearness of You" is about a character who's haunted by memories {{spoiler|of his no-longer extant wife}} after a Time Crash.

* This is the reason ''[[Flashpoint (comics)|Flashpoint]]'' happened. {{spoiler|[[The Flash|Barry Allen]] wanted to save his mom from being killed by the Professor Zoom and succeeds. However, doing so caused time to futz up, creating a world where most heroes are dead or out to kill each other!}}

 

** Brilliant, maybe, but also fundamentally flawed - the idea was to test a potential solution, if it worked, cause a stable time loop by seeding the loop with that solution, and if it didn't, to seed the loop with the next solution. The trouble with the plan is that it only gets to the stable time loop if he hits the solution first time, while he planned to iterate through the potential solutions in a fixed order, starting with one that he knew wouldn't work... Rather than cause a paradox by producing the solution, the situation resolved in a safe stable time-loop instead - a Time ''Error Message''.

** While the likes of Harry are properly scared by notes in their own shaky handwriting, the likes of Dumbledore know what can happen if you push it. {{spoiler|Apparently, experimenting with time got Atlantis ''erased from the timestream''.}}

 

* In the ''[[Back to the Future (film)|Back to The Future]]'' movies, this is a major concern for Doc Brown, although more often than not he'll change the future (or past) for personal reasons. He believes, for instance, [[Never the Selves Shall Meet|that present!Jennifer meeting future!Jennifer could destroy the galaxy]]. {{spoiler|It doesn't happen.}}

** The reasoning is fear of paradox: what if Jennifer seeing her future self faints, falls badly, breaks her neck, and thus can't be there to go back in time to startle herself? If you're a dabbling mad inventor who ''doesn't know'' if paradoxes might do really quite unpleasant things to reality, advocating caution is almost uncharacteristically pragmatic. (How ''do'' you do a controlled experiment to see if some event X destroys the universe, anyway?)

* ''[[The Philadelphia Experiment]]'' has this happen as an unanticipated side-effect of experiments in building an [[Invisibility Cloak]]. A Navy destroyer from 1943 and an entire Midwestern town from 1984 get [[Mass Teleportation|sucked into]] the resulting vortex, which has to be stopped (from within) lest it [[The End of the World as We Know It|destroy the entire world]].

 

** Fan's attempts to create a complete series timeline seem to always end up with inconsistencies - [[Word of God|the author cites that same Crash as the reason]].

* In [[C. J. Cherryh]]'s ''[[Morgaine Cycle]]'', it's claimed that any attempt to use the [[Cool Gate|Gates]] to change the past will result in a catastrophic Time Crash that will destroy civilization on every world that has a Gate, and there may be millions. The reason Morgaine knows this is that [[After the End|it's happened before]].

* M. Shayne Bell's short story "Lock Down" is about a team of time travelers trying to repair the continuum after one of these.

* ''[[A Tale of Time City]]'' is about three children who want to ''prevent'' this from happening when their town, Time City, falls apart.

 

* Parodied in the (as-mentioned-above) "wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey" [[Doctor Who]] universe. In a short made for Children in Need (which [[Word of God]] says is canon), the Doctor accidentally somehow merges his TARDIS with the TARDIS of [[The Nth Doctor|his fifth incarnation]]. Hilarity ensues at first as a starstruck Ten (and a real-life admiring [[David Tennant]], who was thrilled to be on the same set with his own childhood favorite Doctor) and a bewildered Five have to stop their inadvertent meeting from ripping a hole in space-time the exact size of Belgium.

** In a less humorous example, Rose causes a Time Crash in ''Father's Day'' when she saves her father from dying at a predetermined time. [[Clock Roaches|Flying Killer Time Monkeys]] [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|come out and eat everyone on Earth.]]

** ''The Wedding of River Song'': The entire universe goes pear-shaped when River refuses to kill The Doctor, even though it's meant to be a fixed point in time. Her failure to do so results all of earth's history happening at once - people travel by intercontinental steam trains and cars tethered to hot air balloons; pterodactyls are a nuisance in public parks; [[Charles Dickens]] is directing the BBC's big Christmas special; Winston Churchill is ''kaiser'' of the Holy Roman Empire, which is headquarted in London, has classical Roman trappings, and is fighting the Wars of the Roses, and his barber is a Silurian; JFK and Cleopatra are a known item, and the great pyramid of Giza has an American flag painted on the side and is known as "[[Area 51|Area 52]]".

* In ''[[Eureka]]'', the latest meddling with time causes one of these, causing 1947 and 2010 to merge at an exponential rate, which would eventually annihilate time itself.

* One episode of ''[[Sliders]]'' has Quinn meddling in a world where time moves backwards... somehow. He changes the events that lead to his incarceration and the death of a police officer that was the double of someone he loved in his world, and a wormhole akin to [[Clock Roaches]] appears. We never know what happened to that world, as the heroes manage to slide out before things get serious, but we know messing with time created that paradox and the professor wonders if "[[The End of the World as We Know It|there'll even be a tomorrow in that world]]".

 

** Unless you're [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|Crazy Joe]], who ''wants'' to destroy the universe [[Corrupt Corporate Executive|to draw in more business to his extradimensional restaurant chain]]. If he's in the game when a Time Crash happens, he wins.

* In the [[Tabletop Game]] ''[[Continuum]]'', the rogue time travelers known as Narcissists are called thus because they're self-centered enough that they're trying to ''cause'' these. In fact, the Sahara Desert was created when the Narcissist kingdom of Antedesertium was destroyed in a massive Time Crash called Interregnum. Of course, [[Perspective Flip|they think]] they're trying to [[Set Right What Once Went Wrong]]. (Appropriately enough, another name for them is the Crashers.)

* The premise of the ''Time Spiral'' block in ''[[Magic: The Gathering]]'' is basically this: the planeswalks of powerful planeswaklers and other high-energy events like blast of the Golgothian Sylex, the time-travel experiments at Tolaria, the creation of Karona and the firing of the Legacy Weapon were gradually bending time until it broke, resulting in a massive and quickly deteriorating Time Crash, centered on Dominaria and threatening the very existence of the Multiverse.

* More of a time explosion than a crash, but in ''[[Mage: The Awakening]]'', the collapse of the Celestial Ladder and the fall of Atlantis was such a magical clusterfuck that time itself grew extremely unstable around it. It's why no one's able to accurately place ''when'' Atlantis fell, despite certain mages being master-class postcognitives, why they can't even solidly place whether it actually happened in the past or was a future event cast backwards by the sheer weight of the event, and why they can't tell if anything like Atlantis will ever come into being again.

 

* ''[[Chrono Cross]]'' is the [[Trope Namer]], and the circumstances of its Time Crash forms a significant part of the backstory. In the good future resulting from the events of ''[[Chrono Trigger]]'', a time experiment sent the Chronopolis research facility back into antiquity, with the side effect of summoning a city from an alternate timeline as a sort of cosmic counterbalance. Chronopolis was able to defeat and subdue the opposing civilization, then used its extensive records of history to hide its presence from the rest of the world, subtly manipulating events to avoid any [[Temporal Paradox|paradoxes]] that could threaten its future existence. And then {{spoiler|[[Spanner in the Works|Schala interfered with the lab's plans]] and [[For Want of a Nail|rescued Serge from drowning]]}}, which screwed all this up and split the timeline in two. In one timeline where everything went according to plan Chronopolis is still able to exist, but in the other is a region where the [[Bad Future]] from ''[[Chrono Trigger]]'' is trying to reassert itself, creating a place where time is effectively broken. A collection of futuristic structures have sort of congealed into the [[Scenery Gorn|Tower of Geddon]], [[Time Stands Still|you can walk on the waves of a frozen ocean]], and ghostlike temporal "echoes" haunt the ruins... {{spoiler|including [[Player Punch|three familiar faces from]] ''[[Chrono Trigger]]''...}}

* It's not apparent from the start, but this is the central premise of ''Shrapnel'', an [[Interactive Fiction]] by [[Adam Cadre]]. {{spoiler|The protagonist and an ill-fated time traveler are caught in a particularly vicious and inescapable Time Crash caused when the time traveler's time machine was damaged by a piece of shrapnel. Cause and effect cease to exist, and the protagonist experiences several key events in [[Anachronic Order]] and dies multiple violent deaths with no lasting aftereffects before discovering the nightmarish truth.}}

* In a particular test chamber in ''[[Portal 2]]'', Cave Johnson claims:

{{quote|''Alright, this next test may involve trace amounts of [[Time Travel]]. So, word of advice: if you meet yourself on the testing track, [[Never the Selves Shall Meet|don't make eye contact.]] Lab boys tell me that'll wipe out time. Entirely. Forward and backward. So do both of yourselves a favor and just let that [[Screw Yourself|handsome devil]] go about his business.''}}

* It is implied that this was supposed to be the true objective of {{spoiler|Rasputin}}'s masters in ''[[Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army]]'', as the entire timeline has been clearly warped in a ''big'' way by way of devil summoners and alternate dimensions. Said fellow decides to blow the mission off.

* Plays heavily in the plot of ''[[Final Fantasy XIII-2]]'', with a Time Crash causing paradoxes and "debris" from the crashing timelines to fall into other timelines and frames of reference. Resolving these paradoxes is the major quest of the game.

* In a nutshell, this is basically what happens in ''[[The 3rd Birthday]]'', the underwhelming third installment of the ''[[Parasite Eve]]'' games. [[Mind Screw|We're still trying to figure out just how it leads to mutant monsters snatching people through dimensional holes.]]

 

** {{spoiler|Chaos, who is trying to destroy all of existence,}} considers a Time Crash to be an acceptable way to get the job done.

* There was a recent arc in ''[[Irregular Webcomic]]'' in which every plot thread created a time paradox at once and the universe was destroyed as a result.

** Followed by an entire arc of black black panels, and an entire arc of everyone hanging out in the afterlife.

* In ''[[And Shine Heaven Now]]'' the [[Read or Die|I-Jin]] [[The Time Machine|Wells]] goes back in time to kill one of Integra's ancestors, [[Victorian Romance Emma|Prince Hakim]]. This causing things to rapidly get chaotic until Alucard briefly comes face to face with [[Vampire Hunter D|D]] at which point time and the universe are completely torn apart and everybody from all possible timelines find themselves in the [[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy|Whole Sort Of General Mish Mash]].

* In ''[[Homestuck]],'' there is a group of characters that have a computer program which lets them speak to another group of characters in the past or future. It's eventually revealed that the groups will lose contact after an event called "the Scratch", which is shown as a timeline graph that is suddenly cut off and replaced with flickering scrawls. {{spoiler|Ultimately subverted in that the Scratch is not a Time Crash, but actually a ''[[Reset Button]].''}}

 

* A ''[[Futurama]]'' [[What If]] episode ends with the space-time continuum being shattered by Fry ''not'' going to the future. Because of his ''[[Meanwhile in the Future|previous]]'' [[Stable Time Loop|adventures]] [[Grandfather Paradox|in time]], the universe itself is tied in to his existence.

** In the main ''Futurama'' universe: at the end of ''Bender's Big Score'' Bender creates so many time paradox duplicates that he makes a tear in the fabric of reality. This becomes a major plot point in the sequel ''The Beast With A Billion Backs''.

* In the "It's About Time" episode of ''[[The Penguins of Madagascar]]'', several future versions of Kowalski show up as a result of his experiments with a [[Time Machine]]. This ends up creating a vortex that threatens to wipe out reality (according to Kowalski, anyway) and ends only after the machine is destroyed.

* In the ''[[Kim Possible]]'' movie "A Sitch In Time," it is feared that the destruction of the [[Time Machine|Time Monkey]] will result in a Time Crash. {{spoiler|It doesn't.}}

 

{{reflist}}