Basic Trope: Foreshadowing out of chronological order, when the consequences of an act are introduced before the act itself occurs.
- Straight: Nolan sees a mangled bike on the sidewalk before seeing his friend Quentin lying unconscious on the grass nearby.
- Exaggerated: Nolan sees every event in his life happen backwards to forwards by somehow always being at the right vantage point to do so.
- Downplayed: Nolan hears Quentin crash before seeing his bike tumble onto the sidewalk.
- Justified: Nolan can see through time.
- Inverted: Nolan sees Quentin biking recklessly before he crashes.
- Subverted: Nolan thinks Quentin has crashed, but the bike isn't his, and he's just resting his eyes.
- Double Subverted: Quentin is resting from having just finished running from Paula, owner of the bike he "borrowed", who shows up shortly afterward to harangue him further about destroying it.
- Parodied: Nolan briefly thinks he's traveled back in time.
- Zig Zagged: Paula borrowed the bike she loaned to Quentin from someone else; after inspecting it, she realizes he didn't trash it at all, and that it looked just as beat-up as when she loaned it to him. Nolan suggests there's a mystery afoot, and the three set off to figure out just what happened to the bike.
- Averted: Nolan sees Quentin's crash from start to finish.
- Invoked: Nolan imagined Quentin's crash scenario as a way of wrapping his head around nonlinearity.
- Exploited: Nolan uses his precognitive abilities to solve mysteries before they occur.
- Defied: Neither Nolan, nor Quentin, nor Paula know where the bike came from or who it belongs to. It's just there.
- Discussed: "I always wondered what that Button guy felt like."
- Conversed: Nolan tries to work out in words just how a person live his life totally backwards, always seeing the future before the present.
- Implied: Nolan reacts to Quentin's crash before the audience sees the mangled bike.
- Deconstructed: Nolan anticipates the future to the point where it puts a significant damper on his life in the now.
- Reconstructed: Constantly seeing causality in reverse has given Nolan a healthy knack for avoiding unintended consequences and maximizing returns on investment, both of which result in a prosperous, if unexciting, life.
- Played for Laughs: Nolan is so focused on anticipating things that he falls into a drainage ditch.
- Played for Drama: Nolan has to stop a deadly crime using clues from events that haven't happened yet to find the soon-to-be guilty culprit.
"Maybe we should just go here instead."
"Yeah, that's probably a good idea."
