History Main / MeanwhileInTheFuture

->'''''Sarah:''' Arlington? Arlington? Where've you gone? Oh god, I'm stuck here in the late Jurassic without a time machine.''
->'''''Narrator:''' Meanwhile, in the early 20th century, Arlington Wolfe, cross-time detective, is trapped on an iceberg.''

* ''TheXFiles'' episode "Triangle" is split between modern-day shenanigans and the events of a doomed 30s cruise liner.
* The ''Series/DoctorWho'' episode "Blink" has various characters in three different time periods. There is a very eerie illusion of communication between the three periods, but in fact, with the exception of a throw-away joke at the start of the episode which is never explained, it's entirely justified.
** The communication at the start of the episode is explained in the same way all of it is, by invoking the TimeyWimeyBall. The Doctor learns the future side of the conversation in the future, then travels into the past to repeat his side of the conversation and leave other clues that aren't even his idea. He's just copying them from the future.
** Another example is "The Girl in the Fireplace", where specific time-windows are open onto various points in one woman's life. These progress in real time, making the trope justified.

-->'''''Rose:''' Two hundred thousand years in the future, he's dying, and there's nothing I can do.''
-->'''''Jackie:''' Well, like you said, two hundred thousand years, it's way off.''
-->'''''Rose:''' But it's not. It's now. That fight is happening right now.''
** Also, the whole concept of the Doctor adjusting Rose's phone so that she can ring home wherever she is in space '''or time''', and get the version of her mother appropriate to Rose's personal time line, rather than say, the people who lived in her house 40 years ago or her mother aged 80.
** Another ''Series/DoctorWho'' example: Winston Churchill calling the Doctor thousands of years in the future. Maybe his phone just picks a random point in time that the Doctor's in his TARDIS?
** Likewise, River Song contacts him via his psychic paper, with no explanation given for when in the Doctor's timeline this message reaches him.
** The classic series episode ''Terror of the Zygons'' mentioned that the Brigidier literally had a "time-space telegraph" with which he could call the doctor, though he was expicitly instructed not to use it except in extreme emergencies.
** And in ''The Pandorica Opens'', the Doctor and River are in a constant conversation over the phone while one is on the TARDIS traveling in time. After they get cut off, things stay "in sync": [[spoiler:the TARDIS explodes in 2010 and the shockwave is "immediately" felt in the second century (but not before).]]

* Justified in ''Film/XMenDaysOfFuturePast'': Wolverine's consciousness is being actively projected in the past by Kitty Pryde, causing him to simultaneously exist both in the past and future. This makes events in the future that could disrupt Kitty's projection relevant to the story.

* In the 1980's version of ''TwilightZone'', the episode "A Message From Charity" tells the story of an '80s teenage boy communicating with a teenage girl in Salem 300 years earlier, and [[spoiler:communicating what he found in a history book to save her from a lecherous "judge"]].

* A version of this is used in the ''CodeLyoko'' fic [[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3610335/1/Return_To_The_Past Return to the Past]], which jumps back and forth between March 10, 2006, the present, and June 6, 1994, where Jeremie is trapped. Each timeline does take place over the straightforward course of one day, but June 6's time loop repeats seven times over the course of the story. There is no communication between the timelines - Jeremie never thinks to communicate with the future, and the Lyoko Warriors don't know where Jeremie is until just before he returns.

** Unless characters who have interacted with each other retain the same present in different times: for example the sisters have to plant the spell before the Chris who has just left them - not the one who only has the potential to be him - meets with the danger. Makes sense to this troper, anyway.

* A running gag of sorts in {{MS Paint Adventures}}' latest series, ''{{Homestuck}}''. One comic explains this as the concept of "circumstantial simultaneity", a metatemporal way of looking at casually-related events.

* A running gag of sorts in {{MS Paint Adventures}}' latest series, ''{{Homestuck}}''.

* The last case of ''Apollo Justice: AceAttorney'' takes place both in the game's present and seven years ago. On at least one occasion, you must find evidence in the present so you can [[IncrediblyLamePun Present]] it seven years ago.

* In "The End of Time Part One" an Ood uses the phrase "Events that have happened are happening now."

* Somewhat lampshaded in ''DCOneMillion.'' Half of the JusticeLeague travels to the year 85,271 to be honored and feted. The ones in the present figure out that it's a trap, and start panicking to figure out a way to rescue their teammates before they're killed. The Huntress is the voice of reason when she points out that they have ''eighty thousand years'' to plan a rescue.

* [[Webcomic/SandraOnTheRocks Sandra On The Rocks]]: [[http://www.sandraontherocks.com/strips-sotr/some_kind_of_space_princess Meanwhile, fourteen years ago...]]

* ''KamenRiderKiva'' tells its story in 1986 and 2008 at the same time. Time jumps happen more than once per episode.

* DeanKoontz does this in his time travel book ''Lightening'', as his hero has to bounce between the time lab in 1944, [[spoiler: where he drops a few hints to Churchill about winning the war]] and helping his girlfriend in 1989 avoid time-traveling Gestopo men, so she doesn't get killed ''again''. It... gets complicated.

TimeTravel is not a neccessary element for this trope, but in those scenarios it can also reflect the ability of past, present, and future to interact with one another.

* ''MeetTheRobinsons'' briefly does this when Louis is in the future while Bowler Hat Guy is still in the present.

* During his run on ''ComicBook/TheAvengers West Coast,'' JohnByrne once used the caption "Meanwhile, five hundred million years later..." seriously, in a non-TimeTravel story. (It indicated a transition from ''memories'' of the distant past to the person remembering them in the present day.)

* Many of AlastairReynolds' books work this way. There's a climax that the book is working towards in which all the characters will end up in the same place at the same time, and parts of the book are told in rough order of how long--in that character's time frame--it will be until the character reaches the climax. Since his books are {{Space Opera}}s in a setting full of TimeDilation, this leads to quite a bit of skipping around in calendar years, especially toward the beginnings of his books.

** This is actually an egregious closed time loop: the Doctor picks up the transcript in the future so that he can record the message that he then goes back and plants in the past, so that it can be copied down by Sally Sparrow, so that she can give it to the Doctor, so that he can record the message and go back and plant it in the past... and so on. Moffat leaves us with information, the transcript, which has never been created, which is one of the cardinal sins of time-travel plots.

* The ''Franchise/StarTrekExpandedUniverse'' novel ''Literature/{{Federation}}'' cuts back and forth between three different timelines: 2060s pre-WorldWarIII, ''[[Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries TOS]]'' in 2267, and ''[[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration TNG]]'' in 2366. The 2060s storyline mostly fills out backstory, but the ''TOS'' and ''TNG'' storylines are eventually tied together by a NegativeSpaceWedgie.

* The MichaelCrichton novel ''{{Timeline}}'' justifies the time trip's thirty-six hour limit with the explanation that they weren't actually travelling into the past, they were travelling into a kind of parallel universe which existed in an earlier time, ''but in which time passed at the same rate as in our world''. The time machines only have enough battery life to maintain a connection for thirty-six hours before they needed to be recalled. Or something.