An episode or arc of a series has your characters supposedly getting transported through time, whether that means they went to the past or future, or became trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, or even time itself has stopped. They spend the next few scenes or longer trying to figure out how to fix things, only to realize things aren't quite what they seem. As it turns out, the characters have not become stuck or misplaced in time at all.
In reality, the characters were having their memories tampered with by some outside force to make them forget the passage of time, or they were trapped in a repeating dream throughout the course of a single night, or someone decided to play a prank on them. Any number of reasons, be it mundane or supernatural, can be used to justify what could appear to be someone travelling through or getting stuck in time.
Compare Wrong Time-Travel Savvy for when a character's knowledge of time travel gets called into question, Faked Rip Van Winkle for another prank variant, Mistaken for Apocalypse if they fear messing with time caused this, Not Where They Thought if the characters believe they've been misplaced in another location and/or time period, and Mistaken for Afterlife if the situation is feared to be a form of purgatory.
Examples:
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Advertising
- This 2014 Superbowl commercial
for Doritos has a kid trick his neighbor with a fake time machine to steal his chips. An old man walks out just as he exits, convincing the man he's arrived in the future.
Comic Books
- The Dark Phoenix Saga: Jean Grey believes she's psychically being shifted back in time to live out the life of a Revolutionary War-era ancestor. It's actually the X-Men's old foe Mastermind projecting his Master of Illusion powers directly into Jean's mind with the assistance of his new telepathic ally the White Queen.
Literature
- Mother of Learning: Zorian is experiencing a constantly repeating month, but all the research on time magic says that travelling back in time is as impossible as drawing a square circle; it simply doesn't make sense. Turns out he's not travelling back in time, but what's really happening is still a result of epic divine intervention: He's in a planet-sized pocket dimension containing a complete copy of the world, experiencing massive temporal acceleration, and with the whole thing being periodically destroyed and recreated according to a template, so thousands of iterations of the month can take place in a real-world fraction of a second. The main difference from an actual loop, from his perspective, is that it can't be escaped by stopping it from resetting, only by leaving the pocket dimension and returning to the real world, still at the start of the month.
- Roys Bedoys: In "Christmas is the Season of Loving, Roys Bedoys", Roys seemingly wakes up one morning to find that he has time-travelled to the future when he is an old man who's inherited his parents' house, his siblings have moved out, and he is still friends with his friends but Maker has moved out of town. However, this turns out to have been All Just a Dream.
Live-Action TV
- Delta Wave: An episode had a rich man targeted by scammers, who tried to sell him a "time machine" they demonstrated with an elaborate ruse pretending they sent him back to the Sherlock Holmes days.
- Legends of Tomorrow: "Here I Go Again" shows Zari trapped in a time loop as a result of a malfunction on the Waverider. In reality, however, this was just a simulation made by Gideon to convince her to stay with the team while she's recovering in the medical bay.
- The Librarians: In "The Librarians and the Point of Salvation", the Librarians investigate a quantum computer created using an ancient Atlantean artifact only to end up trapped in a loop. Ezekiel is the only one whose memory persists as the loop repeats, and by the midway point of the episode, he's at his breaking point trying to get everyone out alive. And then he breaks a crate in frustration only to find a health power-up inside. It turns out they're not trapped in a time loop; they're trapped in a video game.
- Red Dwarf: In "Krytie TV", Kryten openly complains to Lister how he has to suffer through showering with the female inmates, and then notices that all the men on the shuttle have gone very quiet. Kryten initially believes they are frozen in time, but Rimmer corrects him by explaining how he and the other men are just lost in thought.
Kryten: Oh my goodness, we've been frozen in time again! Curious, it must be a warp in the time-space continuum. How curious it isn't affecting me.
Rimmer: We're not frozen in time, Krytie. We were just thinking about what you were saying.
Music
- LOONA: Downplayed; Heejin's solo "ViViD" uses the idea of a time loop to highlight her desire for excitement in her mundane everyday life.
Good morning, I wish for a new day each day I wake up
- In a live skit performed by the seiyuu unit TrySail, Shiina lies to Momo saying she built a time machine in her locker so the latter can go back in time to apologize to Sora. Hijinks ensue as Sora and Shiina's efforts to trick Momo or Momo's own attempts at her apology quickly spiral out of control, resulting in Shiina knocking her out with a taser several times until they finally manage to succeed. At the very end, however, Momo appears to have actually returned from an alternate past timeline...
Video Games
- In Genshin Impact, during Act 2 of the Sumeru arc, the characters become trapped in what at first appears to be your standard time loop, but several inconsistencies eventually reveal that they're all actually trapped in a massive shared dream orchestrated by the Akademiya, and the solution to breaking the "loop" is to wake the person whose dream serves as the catalyst for this.
- Professor Layton and the Unwound Future: One of the major mysteries of the storyline is whether the main characters have actually travelled ten years into the future or not. It turns out they haven't; it's all an extremely elaborate ruse by the Big Bad, who has disguised himself as Luke Triton's future self.
Visual Novels
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice: Downplayed in the DLC case. The defendant believes that she was somehow transported back in time just as someone was trying to murder her, but it turns out that it was staged to frame her for the murder of the man who tried to kill her.
Webcomics
- In League of Super Redundant Heroes strip #739, "Groundhog", Keith's coworker becomes convinced that they've become trapped in a time loop, when in reality it's just a case of déjà vu on account of, in Keith's own words, their job sucking.
- The Order of the Stick: Roy Greenhilt's first "day" in Heaven is revealed to have lasted three and a half months. It's not due to time dilation as he first assumes, but because it's just that easy to lose track of time in a joy-filled otherworld with no natural cycles or physical needs to mark the hours.
Horace: You know the old saying, "Time flies when you're having fun"? This is the dire half-dragon version of that.
Web Videos
- In the JaidenAnimations D&D story video, Ranboo's character Tholomew is constantly paranoid over the presence of his neighbor, Thompson, claiming to have been trapped in a time loop for three years. In reality, however, this was just his own paranoia making him go crazy.
- Real-Time Fandub: In the Shadow the Hedgehog dub, Shadow initially seems to be trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, as a means of justifying the game's multiple routes. Towards the end of the dub, however, the Devil admits that he's just been gaslighting Shadow into thinking he's in a time loop, and in reality, he just sucks at killing people.
Western Animation
- Arthur: In "Go to Your Room, D.W.!", D.W. is sent to her room for ten minutes after she threatens to pinch Baby Kate. When D.W. sees that the time on her clock hasn't changed, she thinks that time is standing still. When she comes downstairs, she sees Arthur sitting still on the couch, and seemingly finds out she was right. She then takes Pal, who is suspended in the air from trying to jump over his ball, and sets him down in the Tibbles' front yard. After she calls Tommy and Timmy, who are suspended on their bicycles "Booby-faced baloney heads", it is then revealed to be an Imagine Spot and D.W. got caught sneaking out of her room by David. When she gets back to her room, it is revealed that the whole ordeal only took two minutes.
- In the Johnny Bravo short "The Day The Earth Didn’t Move Around Very Much", Johnny believes that the world has frozen in time after seeing his VCR blinking 12:00 over and over, not knowing that the power was knocked out during the night. When Johnny goes to investigate, he runs into people who, coincidentally, are standing in place for one reason or another and start moving when he leaves, as well as a Big Honking Traffic Jam both ways where every driver coincidentally decided to stop honking and take a nap. After a while, he decides to start committing some minor crimes since "no time means no rules", and once he's caught, the judge lets him off the hook because he, too, had a day where he thought time had stopped.
- King of the Hill: In "Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow", Dale enters a sports car that he mistakes for an alien craft, then believes is a time machine. He thinks he was sent into the future (seeing graffiti over a sign and thinking it to mean Arlen was renamed "Fartland") until he sees Bill trip over a pothole like he did yesterday, then he starts to think he was sent in the past. He spends the rest of the episode panicking that the world will end because he is doomed to run into his past self when using his bathroom, on account of him refusing to use any other bathroom.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Bloom & Gloom", Apple Bloom believes herself to be stuck in a time loop where she wakes up with a different Cutie Mark and the day going horribly as a result. In reality, these were all just bad dreams and Princess Luna helps quell her worries over what her Cutie Mark will be so she can wake up.
- Rugrats: In "Back to School", Didi mentions that she plans to go back to college, and then a toy starts moving backwards. These events cause the babies to fear that time is reversing.
- Steven Universe: In "Winter Forecast", Steven finds himself experiencing alternate loops of the same day while trying to spend time with his friend Connie. This is actually him experiencing Garnet's future vision powers temporarily through a kiss on the forehead, showing him potential futures to find the best possible outcome.
