Time Travelers Are Spies: Difference between revisions
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* The end of [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s [[Time Enough for Love]] involves the protagonist travelling back to the time of his own childhood and dealing with the difficulties thereby. Despite being a 2000+ year old pansexual incestual time traveller speaking what, after 2000+ years, might as well be a foreign language in a ''very'' alien culture, he encounters no problems. However, his plan to escape having to fight in WWI is to hustle pool and flee to Brazil. He then realizes that that might get him killed by German or French agents as a spy.
* The [[Time Scout]] series doesn't say you'll be caught as a spy, but the results are the same. Get caught, get killed. Usually for apostasy or some such.
* One of [[H. Beam Piper]]'s short stories, "Crossroads of Destiny," involves a man who's briefly suspected of being a spy — except that the military intelligence officer dismisses the notion, because the fellow is '''too''' obviously odd; a real foreign agent would be trained to fit right in. The narrator alone then realizes this stranger accidentally came from an alternate universe ... one in which {{spoiler|[[George Washington]] '''didn't''' die in battle, and Benedict Arnold '''didn't''' lead the [[American Revolution]] to victory and become the first president}}.
== Live Action TV ==
* In the ''[[Eureka]]'' episode "Founder's Day", a bunch of characters from the present day appear at an army camp in 1947; the general in charge of the camp spends most of the episode chasing them around assuming they're spies.
**[[Literal Minded|They are]]. They are in disguise trying to obtain information. They are just not ''hostile'' spies.
* In ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'', the team finds themselves at the bottom of a missile silo in 1969, [[Justified Trope|leading naturally]] to this assumption. It doesn't help that the officer who just spotted them [[Bluff the Impostor|asks them, in Russian]], "Are you Russian spies?" and [[Cunning Linguist|Daniel]] promptly replies, "Nyet." O'Neill is not happy.
* This happens to Gary in an early episode of ''[[Goodnight Sweetheart]]''.<ref>knowing Himmler and Goebbels' hair colour is what did it; his claims to have seen it in a newsreel fall a bit flat because [[Did Not Do the Research|Newsreels were monochrome]].</ref> He decides to play it up and manages to convince his captors he ''is'' a spy, but a British one and not a German one as they'd assumed.
* This is the premise of the ''[[K9]]'' episode "The Cambridge Spy": a [[Lightning Can Do Anything|lightning strike]] sends Jorije back to Cambridge in 1963, she's arrested as a Russian spy, and K9 and Starkey have to travel back to rescue her.
* ''[[Star Trek: The Original Series]]'':
** "[https://web.archive.org/web/20110311092322/http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/
** "[http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Assignment_Earth Assignment: Earth]". When the ''Enterprise'' is deliberately sent back in time to Earth in 1968, Kirk and Spock are arrested as spies when they're caught inside McKinley Rocket Base.
* The Doctor and his companions in ''[[Doctor Who]]'' sometimes fall prey to this, such as when they go to Skaro in "Genesis of the Daleks," where they are mistaken for the Kaleds' deadly enemy the Thals (or their common enemies, the wild mutants that run around in the nuclear wasteland). Everyone being [[Human Aliens]] in this case did not help. Sometimes the Doctor genuinely ''is'' a spy, working for himself, simply by virtue of being too nosy for the villain-of-the-week. Other times, such as in "The Brain of Morbius," the irate locals correctly identify him as a Time Lord but automatically assume he's there to steal their stuff because they're suspicious of Time Lords in general. The titular Morbius similarly assumes the Doc is there on behalf of the Time Lords to hunt him down and was just stumbling into the creepy castle as a ruse.
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