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{{trope}}
[[File:
{{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.''
''Now take that tree you've just drawn. Put it on a desk. And empty your inkwell onto it. That's what happens when a time machine blows up.''
|'''Tycho Green''', ''[http://adamcadre.ac/if.html#Shrapnel Shrapnel]''}}
'''For the ''[[
It's already been [[Doctor Who
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?
Then in all likelihood, you'll have a '''Time Crash''' on your hands.
When you've gone and broken ''time'', [[Divide
Garden-variety temporal wedgies need not apply in this trope. This is not about your usual temporal inconveniences, the kind that [[Ret
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.
A form of [[Divide
{{examples}}
▲== Anime & Manga ==
* 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.
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* 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.
* ''[[Zero Hour]]'': [[Green Lantern|Hal Jordan/Parallax]] deliberately triggers one of these destroying the entire timeline with the purpose of [[In Their Own Image|rebooting the universe his way]]. Fortunately, some heroes are pulled outside of normal time to deal with it.
* Happens during ''[[Crisis
** Happens ''again'' in ''[[Infinite Crisis]]'', where some of the people directly involved with the first Crisis are dissatisfied with its results, and so they temporarily divide the one stable universe into several unstable ones again, then mix it back together after shuffling the parts around a bit.
** During ''Infinite Crisis'', the [[Justice Society of America]] had a story arc in which they travelled back in time. During the journey to the present, they hit the Time Crash created by the original Crisis.
* The final story arc in ''[[Major Bummer]]'' is about the attempt to repair a Time Crash.
* One occurs in issue #7 of the short-lived ''[[Bill and Ted]]'' comic book.
* Back when ''[[The Dandy (
* This is the reason ''[[Flashpoint (
== [[Fan Works]] ==
* In ''[[Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality]]'', Harry decides not to experiment with the Time-Turner any more for fear of one of these (after a truly brilliant experiment that, if successful, could have used [[Stable Time Loop
▲* In ''[[Methods of Rationality]]'', Harry decides not to experiment with the Time-Turner any more for fear of one of these (after a truly brilliant experiment that, if successful, could have used [[Stable Time Loop|Stable Time Loops]] to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle solve any NP problem], yielded instead the sentence 'DO NOT MESS WITH TIME').
** 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''.}}
* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series
== [[Film]] ==
* The movie ''[[
* In the ''[[Back to
▲* The movie ''[[Film/Millennium|Millennium]]'' concludes with a massive paradox barreling its destructive way into the future whose time travel efforts caused it.
▲* 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?)
** As a [[Shout
* ''[[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
== [[Literature]] ==
* ''[[Discworld]]''{{'}}s History Monks (the Monks of Time, the [[The Men in Black|Men in Saffron]], from No Such Monastery) exist to prevent this sort of thing happening. Again. They've managed to piece things back together, but a Time Crash is used to explain why Ankh-Morpork has a Shakespearean theater on the same street as an opera house, and why there have been so many Battles of Koom Valley.▼
▲* [[Discworld]]'s History Monks (the Monks of Time, the [[The Men in Black|Men in Saffron]], from No Such Monastery) exist to prevent this sort of thing happening. Again. They've managed to piece things back together, but a Time Crash is used to explain why Ankh-Morpork has a Shakespearean theater on the same street as an opera house, and why there have been so many Battles of Koom Valley.
** 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 [[
* 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.
* [[Greg Bear]]'s ''[[City At The End Of Time]]'' is all about a time crash {{spoiler|and an aeon-spanning [[Xanatos Gambit]] to ensure ''something'' will still exist afterwards}}.
== [[Live
* An episode of the new ''[[The Outer Limits]]'' has a time travel experiment go wrong {{spoiler|after an attempt to weaponize it by a corrupt military official}}, which results in a [[Groundhog Day Loop]]... a rare [[Groundhog Day Loop]] with a time limit. Each iteration grows shorter, and eventually there will be no hope of preventing the Time Crash from destroying the world. {{spoiler|In the end, the disaster is averted, and the man responsible suffers a [[Karmic Death|Karmic]] [[Fate Worse Than Death]], as he's caught forever in the moment of his own annihilation by the malfunctioning time machine.}}▼
* Parodied in the (as-mentioned-above) "wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey" [[
▲* An episode of the new ''[[The Outer Limits]]'' has a time travel experiment go wrong {{spoiler|after an attempt to weaponize it by a corrupt military official}}, which results in a [[Groundhog Day Loop]]...a rare [[Groundhog Day Loop]] with a time limit. Each iteration grows shorter, and eventually there will be no hope of preventing the Time Crash from destroying the world. {{spoiler|In the end, the disaster is averted, and the man responsible suffers a [[Karmic Death|Karmic]] [[Fate Worse Than Death]], as he's caught forever in the moment of his own annihilation by the malfunctioning time machine.}}
▲* Parodied in the (as-mentioned-above) "wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey" [[Doctor Who (TV)|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.]]
** Also, the mastermind behind the cracks in the time field in [[Doctor Who
** ''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; [[
* 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.
* In [[Star Trek:
* 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
== Tabletop Games ==▼
▲== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* In the Looney Labs game ''[[Chrononauts]]'', you play a bunch of time travelers meddling with history. If there are ever 13 unresolved [[Temporal Paradox
** Unless you're [[Exactly What It Says
* 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.)
* Ontocylsms in ''[[GURPS
* The premise of the ''Time Spiral'' block in ''[[Magic:
* 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.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[
▲* ''[[Chrono Cross (Video Game)|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 (Video Game)|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 (Video Game)|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 (Video Game)|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.}}
* Speaking of [[Interactive Fiction]], ''All Things Devours'' is all about averting a time crash. The timeline in the universe doesn't take kindly to paradoxes, and will promptly "censor" them with a [[Stuff Blowing Up|huge explosion]]. [[It Got Worse|What's more]], the lab housing the time machine is in the middle of Boston, and the military experimenting on it have no idea what they're doing.
* In ''[[
** The really futzed up part is, the heroes do basically exactly that to stop her.
* In ''[[Ratchet and Clank]] Future: A Crack In Time'', one of these is caused in the backstory by {{spoiler|the Fongoids abusing time travel to the point where the space/time continuum grew thin enough to breach.}} The resulting [[Negative Space Wedgie]] took out 83 star systems before Orvus and the Zoni sealed it with the Great Clock. History would have repeated itself permanently had {{spoiler|Alister Azimuth}} succeeded in abusing it as a time machine. Which it's not supposed to be used as.
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* ''[[Pokémon Mystery Dungeon]]: Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky'' has this in spades, certain parts of the present start to break down or have time stopped when the Gears of Time are stolen, as well as in the [[Bad Future]], messing up the deity that [[Time Master|Controls Time itself]] tends to have this. Not even Celebi, a legendary [[Pokémon]] that could travel through time could escape for long.
* This was the goal of [[Big Bad]] {{spoiler|Time Master}} from ''[[Freedom Force]]'' when he tried to break the Celestial Clock. At the end of the game, {{spoiler|Man-Bot makes a [[Heroic Sacrifice]] and locks himself inside the clock to allow the rest of the heroes to escape. Wraiths of Chaos begin attacking the clock because of his presence there, locking Man-Bot in an [[Endless Struggle]] to keep the Celestial Clock going and prevent another time crash from happening.}}
* In a particular test chamber in ''[[
{{quote|
* In the original ''[[Command
* 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.
* In ''[[Blinx the Time Sweeper]]'' the titular [[Time Police|sweeper]] has to fix the [[Clock Roaches|damage]] caused by a [[
* Plays heavily in the plot of ''[[
* 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.]]
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* Black Mage's flow chart in [http://www.nuklearpower.com/2007/12/01/episode-926-schematic-representation/ this] ''[[8-
▲* Black Mage's flow chart in [http://www.nuklearpower.com/2007/12/01/episode-926-schematic-representation/ this] ''[[8-Bit Theater (Webcomic)|Eight Bit Theater]]'' comic lists a Time Crash as the only thing that would stop him from trying to kill all life on Earth.
** {{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 ''[[
* Parodied in the
* In ''[[
▲* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series (Web Video)|Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series]]'': ''Bonds Beyond Time Abridged'' features one of these when {{spoiler|Jaden spoils the end of Yugi's series in front of him}} (but spoiling who won the duel between Jaden and Yugi, which happens the end of ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh GX (Anime)|Yu-Gi-Oh GX]]'', was considered okay because it was obvious).
== Western Animation ==▼
▲== [[Western Animation]] ==
* A ''[[
** 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''.
** The most apt ''Futurama'' example has to be "Time Keeps On Slipping", in which the removal of [[Unobtanium|chronotons]] causes time to skip randomly. Professor Farnsworth explains the ramifications thusly:
{{quote|
* Chronos did this in the "Once and Future Thing" episode of ''[[Justice League Unlimited]]''. Time started to crack and fall apart, and killed several people before it was stopped.
* In ''[[Transformers]]'', this is known as a time storm, and happens whenever someone makes a massive change to history. Cases include the Quintessons bringing Alpha Trion forward in time to cause the original Transformers Rebellion to fail, Megatron killing Cyclonus, and [[
** By ''[[
* 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 ''[[
* In ''[[X
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Time Travel Tropes]]
[[Category:Time Crash]]
|