Groundhog Day Loop / Live-Action TV

Instances of the "Groundhog Day" Loop in live-action television.

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In General:

• There was a Straight-To-TV documentary about (natural) disasters following a scientists life that plays with this trope. He of course is stuck in a loop, but he doesn't actually remember it, "nature" does though. He is trying to get to work, but one thing is always different from the previous loop, causing him to die (from small things such as getting electrocuted because of lighting to big things such as a sudden tornado or tsunami hitting the city) with the narrator at one point cheerfully implying that "the world" doesn't seem to want him to reach his workplace. With each loop he gets closer to work though, only to finally reach it at the end. It is then revealed that he is a scientist working on creating a black hole. He succeeds in doing so and it sucks him and everything up. Which is the ''cause'' of the "Groundhog Day" Loop, with the documentary ending as he dies at the very beginning again, revealing that "the world" is trying to kill him permanently to try stopping the loop.

Series:

• 7 Days does this twice.
  • The fourth episode featured an 8-hour time loop caused by Dr. Ballard messing with the device somehow. Frank went back over the events several times, finally calling Dr. Ballard just before the reset point and telling him NOT to do the fix they had discussed, because Olga had just been killed and he wanted to do it again and save her.
  • The episode Déjà Vu All Over Again mixed this with Cuckoo Nest, as Frank was repeatedly sent back to the same series of events by another version of himself until he could save one of his friends without innocents dying in the process. Once again, the episode is a blatant Run Lola Run reference (if not rip-off), and a minor character of a psychologist is revealed in the credits to have the name: Dr. Lola Manson.
• 12 Monkeys: In the episode "Lullaby", a post-Despair Event Horizon Katarina sends an equally despondent Cassandra back in time to kill Katarina's own younger self before she can create time travel in response to her daughter Hannah's death, having come to believe that time travel is more dangerous than it's worth (given that it's been key to the 12 Monkeys' plans), with Cole chasing after Cassandra to stop her. However, time itself is conscious and needs Katarina's work to exist, so when Cassandra kills the young Katarina, she and Cole find themselves starting over back at the point they arrived in the past in. And, no matter what they do in each loop — saving Hannah's life, even avoiding doing anything at all — it keeps resetting. Ultimately, they find that the proper way out is to fake Hannah's death, then get her to someplace where she can be saved and raised in secret; this gives the young Katarina the drive to invent time travel, and the reveal that Hannah's still alive gives the old Katarina a renewed sense of hope.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The Season 7 episode "As I Have Always Been" involves a time loop as the team tries to escape a time storm. Unusually, the episode starts after many loops have already happened, but Daisy doesn't remember them because even though she has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, she loses it when she dies. Which she has done fourteen times. The only other person who remembers the loops is LMD Coulson, who starts every loop powered down, so he only remembers the loops where Daisy wakes him up. Also, even though every loop is the same, every loop also brings them closer to the event horizon of a time vortex, which means that they are on a timer.
• Angel:
  • The episode "Time Bomb" stuck Illyria in a chaotic version (time is repeating but not in a fixed sequence). Each time it ends with her exploding. Unusually, Illyria is not the perspective character, and we see only a few bits and pieces of loop.
  • Lindsey and later Gunn are held in a prison dimension in the form of a Stepford Suburbia; every day they get tortured and have their heart cut out by a demon in the Creepy Basement — the injuries repair themselves, their memories of the torture disappear and the next day it all begins again.
• The entire first season of The Aquabats! Super Show! is designed like this. At the end of Episode 13, "Showtime!", Space Monster M flings the Battletram with the Aquabats inside it to space, on a course to the moon. The first cartoon segment of the show also began with the Aquabats helplessly drifting through space. It comes full circle when the Bat Commander watches the cartoon segment of "Showtime!" in which the Aquabats are sent back to the events of the very first episode. Thankfully, season two fixes this loop.
• Being Erica Season 3 has this where Erica has to relive the same day over and over after Kai comes back from the future to tell her that he tried to find her in 9 years time and couldn't. Also that there will be a terrible disaster in a few years time in that area. Erica then spends her day panicking that she only has a few years left to live. Dr Tom decides to make her relive this day over and over to teach her to value the here and now.
• Black Hole High, a.k.a. Strange Days at Blake Holsey High, used this one with the twist that time will actively oppose any attempts to change the loop: if you decide to avoid bumping into someone by taking a different route, the other person will change their route to counteract this.
• In the Black Mirror episode "White Bear", Victoria is eventually revealed to be a convicted child murderer sentenced to be every day hunted and tormented in front of watching passers-by. In this episode, it was actually the 18th time she went through this.
• An episode of Blindspot has Patterson reliving the same day over and over while investigating the deaths of three soldiers. Each day is cut short by an exploding centrifuge. In a variation from the norm, the first run through is the real one and the rest take place in her mind after the centrifuge explosion leaves her near death.
• The Blood Ties episode "5:55"; private eye Vicki Nelson is hired to retrieve Pandora's box, which compels whoever holds it to open it and release the demons that will destroy the world, only for tattoos Vicki received from an old demon adversary to 'reset' her back to the beginning of the day so that her other enemy can kill her himself, the loop finally ending when she gives the box to her vampire ally Henry Fitzroy (reasoning that the box only compels the living to open it and Henry's biologically dead).
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In "Life Serial" the Trio use a spell to trap Buffy in one of these. They specifically mention the Star Trek: TNG and X-Files episodes, but not Groundhog Day itself.
  • The same premise but without time travel occurs in "I Only Have Eyes For You". The ghosts of two lovers who died in a Murder-Suicide force others to reenact the same fatal events; the loop is broken when one inhabits Angel, who can't be killed by the gunshot and so survives to grant forgiveness and enable the ghosts to move on.
• Charmed:
  • The episode "Déjà Vu All Over Again" where a demon repeats the plan of attack every day until it is perfected so he can finally kill the sisters. One of the sisters has the power of premonition which somehow allows her to have some recollection of what happened/will happen which gets stronger with each additional loop. Unfortunately, they fail to stop Andy Trudeau's death.
  • An Alternate Plane of Existence was used to force an old west town to relive a tradgedy of thug murdering a local Native American, and said plane was cursed into a time loop. Prue and Cole insert themselves into this plane and help the townspeople stop the thug from murdering, break the loop, and are allowed to move on to their respective afterlives.
• Cloak and Dagger: In the sixth episode, Tandy and Tyrone enter the mind of a catatonic Ivan Hess and discover that he has been reliving the two minutes before the rig explosion for the past eight years. By the time they get there, he's forgotten his name and the simple fact that there is anything outside the rig. Worse, it's a Year Inside, Hour Outside situation; when Tyrone pops out for thirty seconds and then pops back in, Tandy has already gone through at least two hundred loops, meaning Ivan Hess has been trapped for subjectively eight thousand years. They finally end the loop by escorting him to the core room and having him reset the rig to keep it from exploding; Tyrone had done it earlier, but it had to be Ivan because it was his mind.
• An episode of Community has Chang claim to be undergoing a 24-hour version of one of these. Of course, this is post-Season-4, so Chang is only marginally tolerated.
• Dark Matter (2015) has Three trapped in one in "All the Time in the World". Eventually, two other characters are also trapped in the loop, which helps them work out what's causing it. In a deviation from the typical pattern, the episode starts after Three has already experienced several dozen iterations of the day. As a result, he is already in the middle of both exploring the possibilities the loop offers and looking for a way out. Interestingly, when the Android attempts to fix it by recalibrating the clock thing that the looping characters touched, she ends up randomly jumping to points in time outside the loop, and just destroys it when she comes back to when she started.
• Day Break (2006) centers around this trope — the hero repeats the same day while getting repeatedly framed for the murder of a lawyer, and of course his girlfriend gets caught up in it. His injuries carry over from one repeat to the next. Also, "psychological breakthroughs" were also apparently carried across. I.e., if someone had made an exceptional hard choice or had an epiphany, they would actually alter their behavior the next loop, and all subsequent loops, with no outside interference. This mostly keeps the protagonist from having to solve everyone's problems every day, but sometimes ends up making things worse for him when someone doesn't do something he expects.
• The Dead Zone, by way of Self-Defeating Prophecy. Smith keeps seeing visions of future disasters until his plan to make them go properly is destined to succeed. He sometimes experiences this as "if this ends badly, it's a vision. If it doesn't, it's real." In particular, the episode Deja Voodoo is structured entirely as a "Groundhog Day" Loop.
• A time loop is often employed in Doctor Who as a weapon (to trap people, ships and sometimes entire planets) as opposed to the effect being a naturally occurring phenomenon that characters stumble into.
  • In the climax of "The Claws of Axos", the Third Doctor traps the Axons in a time loop to keep them imprisoned and away from Earth. He barely manages to avoid getting caught in the loop himself.
  • "Carnival of Monsters" has a variation used for commercial reasons. A ship bound for India was taken, shrunk down, and put in a miniature People Zoo. The memories of the passengers and crew are then altered to reset after ten minutes so they don't realize that they are never reaching their destination. Unfortunately, the Doctor and Jo Grant are not part of the original loop, leading to them being "discovered" and arrested repeatedly as stowaways.
  • In "Meglos", the Doctor and Romana are caught in a time loop (called a chronic hysteresis) that repeats after only a couple of minutes. Being Time Lords, they fix the loop within 10 minutes and then get on with the rest of that adventure.
    [The Doctor stumbles]
    Romana: Blast! Here we go again!
    The Doctor: What's the matter?
    Romana: Now his probe circuit's jammed!
    The Doctor: That's easy, just waggle his tail!
    Romana: Alright, I've tried everything else... [waggles K9's tail]
    K9: Thank you mistress, repairs complete!
    [beat]
    The Doctor: [concerned] That's the third time.
  • In order to prevent a war monger from launching his atomic bombs against an enemy planet, the Fourth Doctor uses the Key to Time to create a temporary time loop, buying him enough time to solve the crisis at hand. He also uses one to defeat the Vardans when they try to conquer Gallifrey, by tracing their homeworld and time-looping it.
  • In "The Big Bang", River is stuck in a loop to prevent her from dying in the exploding TARDIS. It's a relatively short loop, around 10 seconds long, if that.
  • In "Heaven Sent", The Doctor is teleported to an ever-shifting maze that resets portions of itself, pursued by a creature that attempts to kill him unless he confesses something. He eventually discovers an exit, but getting through it requires getting through a barrier of a substance ten times harder than diamond. The monster catches up with him and burns him too badly to regenerate, so he crawls back to the teleporter room he started in... and activates it as he burns up, releasing a brand new Doctor into the situation. This loop continues until the Doctor punches a hole through the azbantium barrier... a process that occurs one punch at a time over the course of four and a half billion years.
  • In "Eve of the Daleks", a time loop is initiated by the TARDIS resetting just before midnight on New Year's Eve during a Dalek attack, with the Snap Back trigger occurring at midnight. On the bright side, exterminations only last until the start of the next loop, and everyone in the building has a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, so they can learn from past mistakes. On the not-so-bright-side, the Daleks also have a Ripple Effect Proof Memory and each loop begins one minute later than the last, with the the last loop being permanent. Companion Dan even namedrops the trope.
• An episode of Eureka featured the main character Carter repeating the wedding day of Allison to Jerkass Stark. The day is eventually saved after a Heroic Sacrifice from Stark himself.
  • Unusually, time was very much not on Jack's side in this episode. The time loop was unstable and every time it happened Jack arrived in the past with worse and worse physical injuries caused by the backlash. It's a good thing he got down to business right away, because it only even went on for five loops or so but by the last he was arriving in the past with broken ribs and the scientists who had some idea what was going on predicted the universe would probably end if it looped one more time.
• An episode of The Famous Jett Jackson has the titular character experience a bad day where everyone gets mad at him: his father, whom he stood up for their fishing trip, his great-grandmother, whose oatmeal he complained about, his friend Kayla, whose new Anime Hair he laughed at, his English teacher, when Jett tried to read Poe's The Raven to a rap beat in class. The next day, he realizes that he's in a loop and tries to make things better. He fails. The day after that, he gets things perfect. However, it turns out to have been All Just a Dream. Only the first day was real. But Jett finds out that things actually turned out better than he thought. His dad not getting on their bus meant that he saved a baby from being run over, his great-grandmother calmed down after his oatmeal comment, Kayla decided that her new hair really was ridiculous and Jett was right to laugh, and the English teacher commending Jett on getting his students excited about poetry by combining it with the new "urban poetry".
• Farscape episode "Back and Back and Back to the Future".
  • The episode "Thank God It's Friday...Again" features a variation in which the characters aren't actually repeating the same day, but they are drugged into constantly believing that the current day is the end of the workweek and they get a day off tomorrow...except that day off never comes.
• An episode of First Wave shows Joshua's punishment for having aided Cade against his own people. Having experimented with quantum pockets before, the Gua have grown adept at them. Joshua is punished by being trapped in a quantum pocket he calls a gulag. It's essentially a computer simulation where Joshua has less than an hour to stop the Gua from destroying Earth in a scenario where the invasion failed, and where human authorities kill all Gua on sight. The simulation is designed to always end in failure, and always resets to the same point after Joshua's death or Earth's destruction with Joshua's memory also resetting. The loop works perfectly for countless cycles until Cade finds the gulag and enters it, also becoming trapped by the loop. However, the presence of two people causes the system to glitch and occasionally show echoes from previous loops that, eventually, help Joshua and Cade figure out a way to break out of the loop. Things get even more complicated when Cain (another Gua using a husk identical to Joshua's) follows Cade into the gulag and tries to restore the loop to normal. After Cade and Joshua manage to stop the Gua superweapon, they are kicked out of the quantum pocket, while Cain remains there as the new prisoner, with the scenario slightly modified to suit him (he has to keep trying to catch Cade and fail every time).
• An episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has Will being hexed by a psychic. The end of the episode has him waking up from the events as if they were a dream to the morning before in which the dialogue from the beginning of the episode is heard.
• In the Fringe episode "White Tulip", the Fringe team has to start a case over three times as the mad scientist trying to save his wife goes back in time multiple times. None of them realize it, but it does make for quite the tearjerker at the end of the episode.
• Give My Head Peace also has such an episode. Uncle Andy has a drunken 11th Night and wakes up on the 12th only to find that a precious Orange Banner depicting the Battle of the Boyne has been destroyed, presumably by the thuggish Scottish bandsmen who drunkenly slept the night off in his house.
• The Haunting Hour episode "Lovecraft's Woods" focuses on a group of teenagers taking a shortcut to a party through a group of woods, only to discover that they're not alone: There's a horrific creature lurking in the woods with them. The climax of the episode reveals that the creature is one of them, Erica, from a short while into the future and the present version of her has been infected, triggering her transformation into the creature. As soon as this is revealed, the episode starts over again from the beginning, implying that this trope is in effect.
• In the Haven episode "Audrey Parker's Day off", Audrey has to relive the same day over and over. She could notice the loop because she is immune to the Troubles. Significantly, her injuries transfer between loops so by day 5 she is injured and extremely tired. She also apparently does not get much sleep between loops. Fortunately since this is Haven, Nathan believes her when she says she's reliving the day, and they learn a little more with each loop.
  Nathan: You're stuck in my second favorite Bill Murray movie.
  • They eventually realize the first time around, the daughter of a man with OCD was killed in a hit-and-run. His OCD combined with his "Trouble" made the day restart, with a new person always dying. The man was unaware of the loop until Audrey convinced him. Eventually they save the daughter and he sacrifices himself to end it.
• In the slightly odd British show Hounded, the entire series is a "Groundhog Day" Loop. At the end of every episode, after his plans have been foiled by Rufus, the evil Dr. Muhahaha hits a literal Reset Button, resetting things back to the start of the day so he can try again with a different plan. The presence of Rufus' future (and clearly aged) self strongly implies that Rufus does eventually break the loop, although he never quite manages it during the series' run.
• Kamen Rider Double has a unique twist with the Yesterday Dopant, which can make people do whatever they did exactly 24 hours ago regardless of other factors. We first see it being used to make a man jump off a building, since yesterday he dived into a swimming pool.
• Let's Make a Deal did this on a Groundhog Day episode, no less. After every commercial break, the opening spiels were repeated, and the exact same contestant was brought down to play the exact same deal. However, the deal went farther every time it was played.
• In the Legends of Tomorrow episode "Here I Go Again", a malfunction on the Waverider results in Zari experiencing the same hour over and over, ending with the ship exploding. The Trope Namer is mentioned several times and serves as a code word to Nate, who immediately believes her. He gives her plenty of Genre Savvy advice, even telling her to do a "fun no consequences montage" when things get boring. It is eventually revealed to have been caused by the fact that she was sprayed with a fluid from their timeship's engines. And then subverted in that the whole thing was a simulation Gideon put Zari through in order to convince her to stay with the Legends while she recovers in the medical bay. Turns out, being sprayed with a fluid that powers a timeship is bad for your health.
• The Librarians "...And the Point of Salvation" has one activated by a Magitek quantum computer, with Ezekiel remembering previous loops. It turns out the computer was running a Half-Life-like video game, and Ezekiel is now the player character. He lampshades the trope in the second go round.
  Ezekiel: It's a time loop! Like in that movie. Groundhog Day! Or Star Trek, Buffy, The X-Files...
• The Mindy Project, when it moved to hulu, dabbled in fantastical plot lines. One of which was the season 5 episode "Hot Mess Time Machine", in which Mindy ends up reliving the same day over and over, and uses it to make things right with Ben.
• Lost has Desmond, whose consciousness has been sent back and forward through time. He essentially relives parts of his entire life, implying that he can predict what will happen. The tragedy is that any drastic changes he tries to make, such as saving Charlie's life, are smoothed out or "course-corrected" by time.
• In Lucifer, it's revealed that this is how everyone is punished in Hell, with the people who go there getting trapped in loops of their most shameful moments with all the other roles played by demons. So far, we've seen four examples, two in season two's "A Good Day to Die" (one involving a doctor who became a serial killer and one for Lucifer himself), one in season three's "Off The Record" (the death of Reese Getty, ex-husband of Lucifer's therapist Linda Martin), and another in season five's "Really Sad Devil Guy" (the death of Lee, a thief who had previously met Lucifer and others).
• The Magicians:
  • The entire first season is the fortieth iteration of a time loop created by a woman trying to find a way to stop the Beast, an extremely powerful wizard. Whenever the main characters fail, she resets the loop and alters events slightly to see if she can get a better outcome. The problem is, powerful wizards — the Beast included — can perceive the loop even if they can't break free of it. Succeeding this time becomes important when the Beast finally catches and kills her, meaning there won't be any more resets.
  • The episode "Oops, I Did it Again" features Eliot and Margo trapped in a time loop twelve hours before the end of the world. Discussed by Josh when he finds out, too.
    Josh: Like, uh, Groundhog Day? Or Russian Doll? Or Happy Death Day or Happy Death Day 2U? Or Source Code? Oh, that The X-Files. The Star Trek. Edge of Tomorrow but really All You Need Is Kill and it's, like, why change the title like that, right?
    Eliot: Wow. You really love time loop stories, don't you?
• Mashin Sentai Kiramager: Reset Button Jamenshi weaponized this trope. He has the power to rewind time and he uses it every time he's defeated by the heroes so he can back to try again knowing everything that happened until he emerges victorious. The heroes turn his power against him by forcing him to reset before he can learn anything. Driven insane after countless resets, the Jamenshi simply surrenders and hands over his reset button to the protagonists while storming off. He runs into his boss Galza to whom he admits there's no way for him to defeat the heroes. Galza promptly destroy him for failing his mission.
• In the Mutant X episode "Possibilities", a mutant with the power to travel back a short period of time is trying to stop a bomb from being detonated. When Brennan is caught in the explosion with her, he is sent back as well.
• My Name Is Earl gave us an inversion. One guy on Earl's list was a stuntman named Sweet Johnny whose girlfriend cheated on him with Earl. When Earl went to meet Johnny, it turned out Johnny hit his head so many times, that "his brain can't make anymore memories," meaning he's stuck in one of these, but he's the only one who isn't aware of it. When Earl informed him of this, he didn't take it too well. Earl then decided maybe it would be better if he didn't cross Sweet Johnny on his list yet.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: Mike's tripping!
• The New Adventures of Robin Hood: In "Day After Day", an evil warlock curses a village to live the same day over and over until the woman he obsesses over agrees to marry him.
• In Once Upon a Time, Storybrooke worked this way before Emma arrived. Every day everyone did the exact same thing, with no one except Regina (and later Henry) noticing. The reason it's in the "variant" section is because outside stimulus could cause the loop to edit itself. For example, on the first day of the loop, Mary Margaret went straight home after teaching class. After Regina shows her a John Doe coma patient in the hospital (actually Mary Margaret's husband, though she doesn't know that), she goes to the hospital every day after class. Regina initially liked it, as she had won, but the tedium of it got to her fast. Henry, having been born outside of Storybrooke, is the only one who ages within the loop.
• In an episode of The Outer Limits (1995) titled "Déjà Vu", a time loop occurs due to a failed wormhole experiment. It takes the third loop for one scientist to realize what's going on. However, at each round the loop gets shorter and shorter, with less time to prevent the impending disaster. On the fourth go-around, the scientist is able to pull a co-worker into the loop with him so she can help him figure out what's happening. The protagonists succeed, with the General Ripper who sabotaged the experiment becoming trapped in a seconds-long version, just enough time for him to see that the triggering explosion is about to happen and cover his face. The Control Voice's opening and closing narration for this episode were identical.
• In Painkiller Jane, the Neuro of the episode "Playback" could reset time for a day while trying to kill a Chinese diplomat, and would do so whenever the team prevent him from carrying it out. While he (initially) was the only one completely aware of it, Jane started realizing it as well. Once he realized the team would show up to stop him, he started leaving behind various traps to delay them. When that failed, he set a trap and changed his method (from sniper to drive by shooting) allowing him to successfully kill the diplomat. The team then killed his mother to force him to go back a day, Jane tackled him when he did which meant she went back as well, and then she took him down. Notably, this episode showed that it was possible for Jane to die, if the Chunky Salsa Rule was employed. However, this trope then took over, and she was fine in the next loop.
• An episode in Person of Interest is presented through the Machine running several simulations of how events will play out based on what it tells Root to do, with it "resetting" back to real-time events every time the outcome is unfavorable.
• In the Pixelface episode "Reset", Claireparker causes this by using a literal Reset Button in an attempt to create 'the perfect day'.
• Used in Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue episode "Yesterday Again", in which Carter accidentally loops to prevent the other four Rangers from dying when Olympius nabs their BFG.
  • Although in this case he actually traveled back in time; how he did so is never revealed.
• In the Power Rangers Zeo episode "A Brief Mystery of Time", Prince Gasket traps the people of Earth in one of these so as to set up an attack to seize the world in one swift stroke that the Power Rangers would be unable to counter. Unfortunately for Gasket, his earlier tampering with Tommy's brain allowed Tommy to notice the loop and Zordon was able to track down the device causing it once made aware.
• In the Preacher version of Hell, sinners are forced to relive the worst days of their lives, over and over again, forever.
• This is the premise of the go90 series, Replay. An aspiring DJ is granted her wish to re-live her disastrous 25th birthday 25 times until she gets it right.
• The Netflix series Russian Doll has this as a premise with the main character dying and restarting at her birthday party. Even when she makes it to the next day, if she dies, she ends up back at the party.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • The episode "Window of Opportunity". In the episode, the term "Groundhog Day" is used at one point in a partial Lampshade Hanging that implies the characters are aware of the film and its premise, even though the similarity was not actually discussed within the episode. When the episode was originally written, apparently one of the writers worried that they would be seen as ripping off "Cause and Effect" (see below), to which another retorted "we're not, we're ripping off Groundhog Day." Only O'Neill and Teal'c remember the events of previous loops — every 10 hours — and have to partially learn Latin in order to figure out how to stop the loops. In a slight variation, it turns out the device causing this affects 14 worlds at once. Due to time running normally everywhere else the rest of the galaxy was out of sync for the duration of the time loops. When a character wonders how long they had been stuck in the loops it is mentioned that one of Earth's off-world allies had been trying to contact the SGC for "three months" — they don't try to communicate all that often so who knows how long the loop was going on before they called the first time. At one point they turn to Daniel in the hope of him helping translating the writing on the device causing this, but this is so slow that the loop happens before he can finish. Only for Daniel to start taking a Double Take when O'Neill "updates" Daniel on what he's done in the previous loops so the translation can go faster. Also, when Daniel casually points out that O'Neill and Teal'c can pretty much do anything they want without fear of consequences, Hilarity Ensues. Especially since they're trying to stave off going crazy from going through the loops. For years, this was voted SG-1's best episode. Ever.
    [O'Neill is standing in the Gate Room hitting golfballs through the Stargate, presumably with the intention of breaking the world's longest shot record]
    Hammond: Colonel O'Neill, what the hell are you doing?!
    O'Neill: [pauses, turns around] Right in the middle of my backswing?!
  • Also used (although much less humorously) in the episode "The Gamekeeper", in which Daniel and Jack (the others are immune because they have naquada in their blood, and the writers couldn't think up an appropriately angsty backstory for them... yet) have to repeat a specific day/moment of their lives over and over. For Jack, it's a particular covert op in his pre-Stargate days gone wrong; for Daniel, it's his parents' deaths. When it's revealed that they are basically being used as entertainment for a bunch of bored aliens, Daniel and Jack independently choose not to participate as they realize they can't actually change things.
  • "Avatar" has another virtual-reality version in which Teal'c is trapped in a training simulation that resets each time he "dies", and ramps up the difficulty whenever he gets close to winning.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • The episode "Cause and Effect", in which the ship keeps exploding but also sends the crew back in time a few hours until they figure out how to prevent it. This is an example that predates the film; "Cause and Effect" aired March 23, 1992, while Groundhog Day premiered February 12, 1993. Some airings of the episode also looped the commercial breaks; you've got to wonder how much money the station was giving up to do that... None of the characters retained full memory from loop to loop. It was only over time that various members of the crew started to feel like the day was a little too familiar. Having one character (or a few characters) be aware of the loop was a part of the trope that was later popularized by Groundhog Day and is now a standard part of it. Note that the loop was only internal. In other words, the universe around the Enterprise and the Bozeman kept moving while they looped (The D was stuck for 17 and a half days, the Bozeman was stuck for 90 years). "Cause and Effect" also reused as little footage as possible during the loops; each iteration had to be shot slightly differently, in order to make it more visually interesting. A lot of shows would later reuse shots where possible in order to save money.
    • Also, "Time Squared". "There is the theory of the Moebius, a twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop..."
  • The first part of the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Coda" has a constant reset of Captain Janeway and Commander Chakotay appearing in the shuttlecraft, with each loop beginning after Janeway dies in the previous loop. It turns out the entire thing is an illusion; after Janeway was injured in a shuttle crash, a creature invaded her mind. It wanted to feed on her energy, but it could only do so if she was dead and it lacked the ability to kill her outright, so it created scenarios with the intention that she would give up and accept death. Because she remained Defiant to the End every time, the creature kept having to create new scenarios to induce her to give up. It fails when, in the final loop, she becomes aware that it's an illusion and is subsequently able to break it.
  • The Star Trek: Discovery episode "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad" has Harry Mudd infiltrate the Discovery and use an alien device to keep looping the same half-hour period dozens of times in order to Save Scum his way into learning everything about the ship in order to take it over and sell it to the Klingons. He also uses it as an opportunity to exact his revenge against Lorca by killing him in various ways at least 54 times. The only one (besides Mudd himself) with Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory is Stamets, thanks to injecting himself with "tardigrade" DNA a few episodes prior. It's mentioned that Mudd previously robbed a Betazoid bank using the same method (doubly impressive, considering Betazoids can read minds).
• An episode of The Suite Life on Deck had Cody trying to impress Bailey at the school dance yet failing, and suddenly getting stuck in a time loop because of lightning striking the ship as it crossed the International Dateline. The loop is solved when Cody manages to slow down the ship's speed.
• In the Supernatural episode "Mystery Spot", Sam replays the Tuesday Dean dies over and over. The Snap Back trigger is Dean's death. When Sam tries to explain, Dean responds, "like Groundhog Day." Every. Single. Time. It's entirely likely the loop repeated roughly several thousand times, when asked, Sam says that he lost count after "about a hundred and fifteen". And, as we see in the Death Montage, Dean's deaths become exponentially more comical. Sam's efforts to save Dean reach a level of paranoia and desperation that causes him to accidentally directly kill Dean himself at least once. And indirectly many more times. The kicker? The Trickster is "preparing" Sam for Dean's untimely death in the season finale so he doesn't go off the rails. The Trickster's goal — to teach Sam that "you Winchester boys are so eager to die for each other... and the thing is, the bad guys know it too" — was thoroughly ignored and sidestepped by Sam, who instead learned just how much life without Dean would suck. The second montage shows Sam becoming a death-seeking recluse, hunting anything in his path, slipping where morals are concerned, and generally appearing to have crossed a horizon. And as far as the real goal of the fiasco, Sam is more angsty, just a bit more unstable, and even more desperate to find a loophole. The Trickster lampshades this effect, telling Sam that "whoever said Dean was the dysfunctional one has never seen you with a sharp object in your hands. Holy Full Metal Jacket." And next season when Dean finally returns from Hell, one of the first things Sam says is that he tried everything to save Dean, including trying to make deals with demons, but no one would deal.
• Happens in the penultimate episode of The Thundermans. Max and Phoebe relive day before they find out if they will get into the finals for the Z-Force over and over. No matter what changes they make, nothing gets them out of the loop, which goes on for nearly a month. It is finally revealed that Max had created a gadget that made the same day repeat as he was nervous about whether or not he and Phoebe actually got into the finals and just wanted to prolong the wait. The end of this episode directly led to the finale.
• In Torchwood, it is mentioned that Jack Harkness and John Hart were stuck in a two-week time loop together for 5 years.
• This is the premise for the series Tru Calling:
  • Recently-deceased people being processed by Tru (a coroner's assistant) suddenly animate and ask for her help. Tru's day immediately resets to the point where she awoke that morning and she relives the day so she can fix something for the dead person (usually, but not always, preventing their death). In a few episodes it was shown that if Tru fixes things "wrong" she will continue to relive the day until she gets it right.
  • There is also an inversion of the normal loop in Tru's nemesis Jack, whose "calling" is to relive the same days that Tru does, but ensure that things play out as fated—the same way they did the first time.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • In "Shadow Play", Adam Grant who has the same dream every night, about being convicted for a heinous murder and being executed for it. The difference here is that it's told from the perspective of the other characters. They eventually grow to realize that if Grant is put to death, he'll wake up and they will cease to exist. They do it anyway.
  • "Judgement Night" is set on a passenger liner on the Atlantic in 1942. One of the passengers, Carl Lanser, has no memory of how he got on board but realizes the ship will be sunk by a German U-boat. He tries to warn the crew but they don't believe him. The ship is torpedoed and everyone on board is killed. It is revealed Lanser was the captain of the U-boat and that he is now doomed to spend the last night on the ship and share the same fate as the people he killed over and over again.
• The Twilight Zone (2019) has two variations.
  • In "Replay", the protagonist is actually in full control of the loop, but continues to repeat it until she can get the outcome she wants.
  • In "Try Try", this is the main plot. Mark has been stuck in one for around a thousand days. Unusually, however the episode does not take place from his perspective, but from that of the woman he has been continually trying to seduce during that period.
• The Vampire Diaries:
  • In season 6, The Gemini Coven traps Kai Parker in a prison world after he kills his family on May 10, 1994. He is cursed to live May 10th over and over again until he meets Bonnie and Damon and finds a way to escape.
• Weird Science: "Universal Remote" did this at the end with the "remote control that controls the world" trope later made famous by the movie Click. Gary and Wyatt wish up a remote that allows them to affect the flow of time, and Gary sees it as a way of "skipping the dull parts" of a dating to get to the kissing part. It seems to be working with the Girl of the Week, until she realizes he knows absolutely nothing about her. She's so frustrated that she throws the remote control aside, and it hitting the floor causes time to skip back a few minutes. With each loop, Gary tries and fails to get the remote back, getting continually yelled at by the girl for his behavior and hassled by a Jerk Jock for good measure. Due to being in on the wish, Wyatt notices his French class constantly looping, and he eventually gets in position to catch the remote before it breaks, thus ending the loops. (Incidentally, Wyatt refuses to use the remote to bail Gary out any further, saying he has to actually talk to the girl for a change.)
• In the Westworld series, the hosts are programmed to repeat the same behaviours day in, day out, with the only variations being the actions of the guests and Lee's "special events", and their memories are wiped at the end of each day. The pilot episode illustrates this by showing Dolores going through four separate loops; the first two start identically, the third is thrown off-track by her father malfunctioning, and the fourth is identical to the first two except that her father has been replaced by a completely different host.
• In The Worst Year of My Life, Again, Alex inexplicably finds himself reliving a year of his life. The plot revolves around him trying to change things for the better this time.
• Xena: Warrior Princess:
  • Season 3 Episode 2, called "Been There, Done That", where the male half of two Star-Crossed Lovers—classic Romeo and Juliet complete with rival houses—makes a deal with Cupid to have the day repeat itself until he finds a way to keep his lover from killing herself and their families from killing each other; until a "Hero would come along to save [the girl], make peace between the houses and end the loop."
  Star-Crossed Male: I was expecting Hercules, or at least Sinbad.
  • Xena — resident hero — is the only other person who realizes they are repeating the day and it nearly drives her crazy before she figures out how to end it. Largely a Comedy episode with MAJOR Angst thrown in.
    Gabrielle: We've repeated the day that many times.
    Xena: [visibly frustrated] Yes.
    Gabrielle: Then I d—
    Xena: [looking from Gabrielle to Joxer and back] No, no, yes, no, I tried that, yes both ways, no, I don't know, no again. Are there any more questions? Good.
  • Punch line? Eventually ends with Xena sorting out all of the local problems—with the use of her trusty chakram—just in the nick of time, having spent several loops calculating the exact way to do so. The loop-breaker event that she had to intervene in happened just moments after she wakes up each time, so the final loop has her bolting awake and immediately letting fly with her chakram.
  • The Elysian Fields is an afterlife in which the dead separately live out a day in which they believe they are to be reunited with their loved ones the next day, only for the day to repeat ad infinitum without their knowledge. Xena's son Solan is informed of this and refuses to enter, unaware that the alternative is much worse, and is eventually rescued by Xena and taken back to the fields.
• In The X-Files episode "Monday", Mulder and Scully keep finding themselves in the middle of a bank robbery, but the robber has explosives strapped to his body and always ends up killing them all. The only person who is aware of the loop is the robber's girlfriend, who's repeated the day more times than she can remember—she keeps trying to warn people, Mulder especially, but it never works. It turns out that her death is what breaks the cycle—her boyfriend accidentally shoots her during the robbery, and he's so stunned and despondent that he doesn't even care about the bomb anymore, finally allowing Mulder and Scully to disarm it. Before she dies, she looks at Mulder, smiles, and says, "This has never happened before." It subverted the standard format of this trope by having the characters act slightly differently in each repetition. This was said to be due to quantum uncertainty. In filming it also meant that the actors had some leeway and didn't have to get absolutely everything right each take. Also interesting was how Mulder managed to invoke the Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory trope—the woman warns him about the explosion, as she always does, but this time, when he sees it, he repeats to himself over and over that the man in the bank has a bomb right before the explosion—when the next loop comes, he remembers the mental note he left for himself and knows that he's in danger before it's too late.

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