Distant Prologue

"Millions of years ago, in a distant galaxy..."

— Stargate: The Ark of Truth

The Distant Prologue is a short introduction scene that takes place a significant amount of time before the main plot starts.

Bonus points if it has subtitles in visual media: for example, "8,000 Years Ago", followed by "Present Day" after the Time Skip to the period when the majority of the work takes place. Can overlap with When It All Began.

Supertrope to A Minor Kidroduction (the prologue introduces a character as a child before cutting to the present) and Myth Prologue (the prologue tells a fantastical story around which the plot is based). Contrast of course Distant Finale. See also Framing Device.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The AKIRA film starts with a very short prologue set in 1988 (basically showing the destruction of Tokyo with what initially appears to be a new kind of bomb) and quickly cuts to the year 2019.
• Doraemon
  • Doraemon: Nobita's Drifts in the Universe begins with a flashback 300 years ago when the denizens of Planet Laguna evacuates their home in a Planet Spaceship, one of them collecting a sapling. Cut to the present, Doraemon and friends managed to rendezvous with the Space Knights, a group of heroes descended from the denizens of Planet Laguna, and there's a 300-year-old Holy Tree serving as their protector.
  • Doraemon: Nobita in the Wan-Nyan Spacetime Odyssey begins in an ancient, advanced civilization of andromorphic cats and dogs, existing on earth millions of years ago, with an elderly dog-man leaping on a Time Machine trying to travel to the present for reasons unknown before being hit and de-aged by a time drift. The story then cuts to the present-day.
  • Doraemon: Great Adventure in the Antarctic Kachi Kochi has a prologue set 100,000 years ago involving the new main characters, Carla and Hyakkoi being pursued by Octagon the giant squid in an ancient city. Carla lose a valuable gold artifact in the process, and the scene cuts to present-day Tokyo.
• Dragon Ball Z Kai opens with the final scenes of the Dragon Ball Z TV special Bardock: The Father of Goku, set 23 years before the start of the series.
• Flame of Recca has the prologue take place 400 years earlier.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS begins with Nanoha rescuing a child Subaru before fast-forwarding to the present time with a now teenage Subaru preparing for her qualifying mage exam for B-Rank. According to the lore, four years pass in-between.
• My-Otome, to 14 years ago, when all three main characters were infants (and the series is intentionally misleading on which one of them appears in the prologue).
• One Piece starts with the execution of Gold Roger on the first page, time skips to Luffy's childhood for the rest of the first chapter, then time skips another 10 years to when Luffy becomes a pirate. (In the anime, Gold Roger's execution was exposition put in the start of the opening theme and Luffy's backstory became a Whole Episode Flashback just after Zoro joined the crew.)
• Pokémon films have done this in the fourth, seventh, and eighth movies.
• The Silent Möbius TV series opens with Project Gaia going awry in 1999 and then cuts to somewhere around 2029 or 2030.
• Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee begins with Gauche Suede taking Lag to Cambel Litmus to live with his aunt after his mother is abducted. A few years later, Lag sets out with the goals of becoming a Letter Bee, meeting Gauche again and finding his mother.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has "Parallel Works 8", a video made after the show's end that shows the first war between humanity and the Anti-Spirals, 1000 years before Simon fought against them, and Lordgenome's crossing of the Despair Event Horizon that led to him betraying his own people, in a desperate attempt to save them at all costs. It was later incorporated into Lagann-Hen.
• World Witches:
  • The Strike Witches episode "Magical Girl" opens with the Neuroi's invasion of Karlsland in 1939, five years before story begins.
  • Strike Witches: The Movie begins with the Neuroi's attack on Europe in 1943, one year before the formation of the titular squadron.
  • The Luminous Witches episode "WONDERFUL WORLD — Nice to Meet You" begins in 1941, which depicts Grace Maitland Steward's participation in the Dunkirk evacuation and Virginia Robertson's encounter of Moffy.

Asian Animation

• The beginning of episode 1 of Flower Angel occurs in the past, having An'an's dad tell her the story of Labelle and its secret envoy at bedtime. The actual events of the episode take place in the present day.
• The first episode of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf begins with an introduction to the wolves and their history with attempting and failing to capture the goats, which took place in the year 3010 whereas the rest of the series is supposed to be in the year 3513.

Comic Books

• ElfQuest starts with the arrival of the first elves, trolls and preservers on the World of Two Moons and their fateful meeting with humans, and then jumps forward about ten thousand years between two panels!
• Immortal Iron Fist starts in the 13th century with one of the early Iron Fists defending his home; from this point on the story takes place in the modern day.
• The Magnificent Ms. Marvel: The first issue begins hundreds of years in the future, with a Saffan father telling his child about the legend of the Destined One — that is, the events of the story.
• Ultimate Marvel:
  • The first issue of The Ultimates (2002) narrates the ultimate fate of Captain America during World War II. The next one continues in modern day, half a century afterwards.
  • The first issue of Ultimate Vision details the Vision's creation and journeys across the space, thousands of millions of years ago (previously included as bonus scenes in Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X Men and Ultimate Fantastic Four). The second issue starts the actual story, set in the modern day, right after the Ultimate Galactus Trilogy.
• Legends of the Dead Earth:
  • Adventures of Superman Annual #8 begins with a Hologram of Jor-El appearing to Superman in the 20th Century and downloading a great deal of information about Krypton into his brain. The remainder of the story takes place on Colu 500,000 years later, where the same thing happens to the Curatti Willigig.
  • In Superboy Annual #3, the first scene depicts the metahuman Sanson posing as the god Quetzalcoatl and promising the people of Aztlan that a superman would be delivered to them. Sanson then pretended that his previously secret powers were a gift from Quetzalcoatl. The rest of the story takes place 500 years later when Aztlan is ruled by a tyrannical Superman who abuses his great power for his own benefit.
• Ronin (1983) begins in Feudal Japan, depicting the titular Samurai and his battle with the demon that murdered his master before cutting away to the Cyberpunk future the story takes place in. It's actually a subversion; the whole prologue in ancient Japan is really just a clip from a Show Within a Show that Billy watches, which has heavy influence on how his Psychic Powers manifest (namely, creating robot facsimiles of the Ronin and his supporting cast to make his personal fantasies real). The scene transition from "past" to present is, in truth, a brilliantly disguised pan from the TV screen Billy is looking at to his face.
• Pathfinder: Hollow Mountain #1 takes us back all the way back to the last days of Thassilon, where Alaznist, Runelord of Wrath and mistress of the mountain, entombs herself in her Runewell just as the first meteors of Earthfall begin to strike. We then fast-forward nearly ten thousand years to the comics' present day in the mid-4700s.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): The very first scene in the first chapter is set during the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), just after San is decapitated from Ghidorah; whereas the rest of the story is set after the events depicted in the film.
• The first chapter of the "Rewrite the World" arc in the Alternate Tail Series starts in the year X761 with Joseph and his students facing off against a powerful water-controlling horse.
• In the Total Drama fanfic, Courtney and the Violin of Despair, the prologue is set roughly 230 years before the beginning of the main story.
• An inversion of this trope: the beginning of "Days Of Future Smurfed" in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf takes place in the early 21st Century, with Empath and his great-grandson Polaris Smurf (who would soon become Traveler) as the last two Smurfs alive. The rest of the story cuts between that time period and the medieval Europe time period that the entirety of the series takes place in, as Polaris!Traveler's purpose is to create a Stable Time Loop.
• The Legend of Genji: The prologue has Jinora delivering an eulogy at Avatar Korra's funeral just days after Korra's Heroic Sacrifice. The first chapter of Book 1 then jumps ahead seventeen years to the main story.
• The Pieces Lie Where They Fell: Chapter Zero takes place a thousand years before the main events of the story.
• The prologue of the Medaka Box fanfic World as Myth is split up into three parts. One kicks off the plot. One happens fifteen years before. And one happens one hundred and fifty years before.

Films — Animation

• Atlantis: The Lost Empire was originally supposed to start with a group of Vikings searching for Atlantis and then being dispatched by the Leviathan, but it was decided that, in order to become invested in Kida's arc in the story, they needed to show the actual destruction of Atlantis
• Batman: Under the Red Hood: The film opens with the Joker murdering Robin, five years before the events of the main story.
• Brother Bear opens with an Inuit clan gathering around a fire as an elderly Denahi tells them the story of his brother Kenai.
• Eetu ja Konna: The opening scene shows how the intelligent frogs were originally forced into hiding in their secret pond society by cavemen who ate them.
• The Jungle Book (1967) and Tarzan start off with the discovery of an orphaned or otherwise abandoned child.
• Hercules has not one but two of these: first, the Muses talk about "Back when the world was new" and show the battle between Zeus and the Titans; then a few scenes, taking place about two decades before the main plot, show baby Hercules beign born and getting kidnapped and turned mortal by the minions of Hades.
• Kung Fu Panda 2 begins by showing the prophecy surrounding the villain Shen's fall, his extermination of the pandas, and banishment from Gongmen City, many years ago. The whole thing is rendered in Chinese shadow puppetry for added effect.
• The Prince of Egypt: The "Deliver Us" number takes place decades before the main story.

Films — Live-Action

• 28 Days Later: The movie opens before the titular 28-day time skip, with an Animal Wrongs Group accidentally releasing a fast-incubating Hate Plague from a Cambridgeshire laboratory, which leads to the post-apocalyptic state of Britain.
• 28 Weeks Later: Has a fairly lengthy one which takes place inside the original 28-day outbreak from the first movie, depicting the backstory of Don Harris and his reluctant abandonment of his wife and his kids' mother Alice when they were attacked by the Infected.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey starts out at "The Dawn of Man", and then flashes forward to 2001.
• Alien:
  • Alien: Covenant: The film starts well before the plot of Prometheus, let alone Covenant; showing David interacting with a much younger Peter Weyland and choosing his name and having the seeds of his disdain for humanity safely rooted.
  • Prometheus starts with an Engineer drinking some liquid and dissolving into primordial goo, thus kick-starting life on Earth billions of years ago. The events then move to the future.
• Armageddon (1998):
  Narrator: This is the Earth at a time when the dinosaurs ruled a lush and fertile planet. A piece of rock just six miles wide changed all that.
  65 MILLION YEARS LATER
• Black Panther (2018) has a "Just So" Story discussing the origin of Vibranium and Wakanda before we jump to 1992. After this we jump to the present day, a week after the events of Captain America: Civil War.
• Bram Stoker's Dracula begins by showing the backstory of Dracula in 15th century Wallachia.
• Demolition Man starts out in 1996 and then John Spartan and Simon Phoenix are frozen and thawed out in 2032.
• The Fifth Element starts in c.1914 when aliens take artifacts from an archaeological dig. The story then jumps forward to the far future, where we meet the main characters... and they end up needing to look for the artifacts.
• The Final Sacrifice has the opening scene, the opening credits, and then "Seven years later." In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, they ask, "Seven years after the credits?"
• Genesis II (1973) starts in 1979 with scientist Dylan Hunt taking part in an experiment in suspended animation. A collapse covers him up, and he's awakened 154 years later in the year 2133.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra opens with Destro's ancestor getting a mask glued to his face (which is referenced when the villain's head becomes metallic).
• Godzilla (2014): The film starts in Japan in 1999, where Joe Brody tragically loses his wife at the power plant before cutting to the main plot fifteen years later.
• Headless Horseman opens during The American Civil War when two Confederate soldiers guarding a bridge are attacked by Headless. The film then jumps ahead about 150 years to a group of teens on a road trip to attend a Halloween party.
• Hellbound: The movie opens during The Crusades, then flashes forward to the twentieth century.
• Hellboy (2004) begins by showing the origin story of Hellboy during World War 2 before cutting to The Aughts.
• Hocus Pocus opens with the hanging of the Sanderson sisters in 1693 and then flashes forward to 1993, the year the film is set.
• The Hot Chick begins in Abyssinia 50 B.C. and tells the story of Princess Nawa and the curse of the body switching earrings.
• Indiana Jones:
  • At first, it looks like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade opens with a pair of boy scouts stumbling upon one of Indiana's archaeological digs. Then the man in the fedora looks up and we see that he's not Indiana Jones. It's then revealed that the scene takes place in 1912 (twenty-six years before the rest of the movie) and one of the boy scouts is a young Indy.
  • Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny opens with Indy going on an undercover mission during the waning years of World War II before jumping to The '60s.
• James Bond:
  • GoldenEye: The film starts with an Action Prologue in 1986 with Bond and Alec "006" Trevelyan on a mission to blow up a secret Soviet chemical warfare compound. The rest of the film happens nine years later in 1995.
  • No Time to Die: Twofold. The film opens in The '90s in Madeleine Swann's childhood when Lyutsifer Safin killed her mother and nearly killed her. Then it immediately cuts to the present-day aftermath of Spectre, with the love life of Bond and adult Madeleine being disturbed in Italy by a Spectre ambush. They end up separating, and the rest of the film happens five years after that separation.
• Jumanji has the first minute of the film taking place in 1869, the next ten minutes taking place in 1969, and the majority of the film taking place in 1995.
• Jurassic World Dominion; the film opens in the Late Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago, and shows dinosaurs living in their natural habitats before cutting to the present day and showing the disruption brought upon by new dinosaurs in modern society.
• Kong: Skull Island: The film opens with Lieutenant Hank Marlow's backstory, showing him and Gunpei Ikari getting stranded on Skull Island during the Second World War, before the film cuts to the main plot in the 1970s.
• The Last Witch Hunter has the prologue set in the times of Black Death plague, then jumps forward eight hundred years to the present day.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The Thor franchise likes doing this, with the first film opening with Odin narrating the Asgardians' battle with the Frost Giants in Norway circa 965 A.D., and the second one continues the trend, but with the war against the Dark Elves around 2988 B.C.
  • Ant-Man and it's sequel also play with this, with flashbacks to the sixties when Hank Pym was active as the titular superhero.
  • Spider-Man: Homecoming opens years earlier with the aftermath of the Battle of New York, setting up the actions of the main villain.
• Mirror Mirror (1990) opens with a scene in 1950s Iowa where Mary Weatherford sacrifices her sister Elizabeth in front of a large mirror, stabbing her to death on a bed. The movie then cuts to 1990 with Susan and Megan Gordon moving into the house.
• All three films of The Mummy Trilogy start with a retelling of the origin for the film's Big Bad, which takes place in 1290 BC, 3067 BC, and the 200s BC, respectively, before shifting to 1923, 1933, and 1946, respectively.
• My Science Project opens in 1957, with soldiers destroying all of a UFO except for the central mechanism, which is apparently indestructible. The movie then skips to 1985.
• Only Love begins in 1981 following Heller's rescue in Africa where Silvia breaks up with him to marry Nico as part of a deal with her father and the film jumps to 1998, where the two met again when she has brain tumor being treated by Heller, her former fiance.
• Pineapple Express:The movie begins in the year 1937 where the military conducts a secret experiment on "Item 9" also known as the smoking pot before declaring it ‘Illegal’.
• Rules of Engagement opens with a jungle. Obviously it's going to be Vietnam, and it is. It's a prologue to establish Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson's characters.
• The Sorcerer's Apprentice has several. The first one takes place in 740 AD, with Merlin and Morgana's final battle. Merlin is killed (due to one of his apprentices betraying him), and Morgana (along with Balthazar's Love Interest) is trapped in a Soul Jar. We then see several short flashes of Balthazar traveling the world throughout history, trying to find the Prime Merlinian, a good sorcerer who is destined to become equal to Merlin in power. The plot then moves to the year 2000, where a 10-year-old boy named Dave finds Balthazar's antique shop during a field trip. Dave accidentally releases Balthazar's rival Horvath from the Soul Jar. During the resulting battle, both sorcerers end up being trapped in a different Soul Jar for 10 years (to the day). Time Skip to 10 years (to the day), and the now free sorcerers start looking for Dave, who is now in college.
• Stardust has this, in both forms, where it depicts the father of the actual protagonist crossing the Wall and eventually meeting up with the mother of the protagonist.
• The Stargate-verse loves doing this, in both movies and TV series.
  • The original Stargate movie had two distant prologues: one in Egypt in 8,000 BC, followed by Egypt in 1928, and finally the United States of the "present day" (which is somewhere in 1994-1996 — the franchise is somewhat inconsistent about this).
  • Stargate Atlantis starts with a flashback to "several million" years ago, when the Ancients left Antarctica for the Pegasus galaxy in the titular city-ship.
  • Stargate: The Ark of Truth starts with a Distant Prologue in an even earlier time period, when the Ancients left their home galaxy for the Milky Way galaxy. The specific wording also sounds like a parody of Star Wars. Which would hardly be the first time Star Wars got brought up on the show.
• Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek (2009). The former shows the launch of the USS Enterprise-B and its encounter with the Nexus to set up Picard and Kirk's meeting; the latter shows Nero's initial appearance at Kirk's birth to set up pretty much the entire film.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring starts with Galadriel narrating several crucial events leading up to the series. These include the creation of the Rings of Power (c. 4900 years ago), the War of the Last Alliance (c. 3000 years ago), and Bilbo Baggins taking the One Ring from Gollum (60 years ago). It then cuts to Bilbo's 111th birthday party and his departure for Rivendell, leaving Frodo and the One Ring behind, which happened a decade before the film proper begins.
  • The opening of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King explains how Smeagol came into the possession of the One Ring, which corrupted him into Gollum. This takes place 556 years before the rest of the film's events.
  • The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey opens by showing Erebor's rise and fall to Smaug, around 170 years ago.
• The Tree of Life starts at the Big Bang and goes on from there.
• Underworld: Evolution starts in 1202, showing the capture of the Lycan Elder William by his twin brother Marcus (the first vampire), Viktor, and the other vampires. Viktor then betrays his word to Marcus and has William hidden away in a secret dungeon, far away from his brother. The events then shift to shortly after the end of the first film, with Selene and Michael fleeing after the fight in the catacombs of Budapest.
• V for Vendetta: The movie starts with Evey Hammond narrating the story about Guy Fawkes' failed Gunpowder Plot and his execution.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men begins with a scene in Nazi Germany before cutting to The '90s.
  • The Wolverine opens with the atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, where Wolverine was a POW. Logan then wakes up in 2013 somewhere in the Yukon wilderness.
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: The caption of the introductory scene reads, "Nile Valley, 3600 BCE." The opening credits sequence is a time tunnel which takes viewers to Ohio, 1983.

Literature

• Eagle Strike, the fourth novel in the Alex Rider series, begins with a prologue set some two decades before the main plot of the book. It does not become clear how the events of the prologue are relevant to the rest of the book until the end of the penultimate chapter.
• Angel Mage starts off with a prologue set during the Doom of Ystara where the nation's last Cardinal and her last surviving guard have a moment of refuge from attacking monsters before their deaths. It then jumps ahead 137 years to the main plot.
• Almost every book in The Belgariad and its sequel series, The Mallorean. Most of the time these prologues are told in the style of a historical document or legend.
• Chocoholic Mysteries: "Kidnapping Clue", the short story that kicks off the series, features Lee as a sixteen-year-old who's staying with her aunt and uncle for the summer. The first novel then picks up twelve years later, when she's twenty-eight and has moved up to work in their shop full-time.
• Death Day has a prologue set about 500 years before the main story.
• Every novel in the Dirk Pitt Adventures starting with Raise the Titanic! features one, sometimes two. Sometimes, the plot point established in the prologue doesn't come into play until about halfway through the main story.
• Discworld: Going Postal has "The 9000 Year Prologue" and "The One Month Prologue". The former is from the point of view of a golem stuck on the bottom of the ocean.
• Empire from the Ashes: The first book starts out 50,000 years ago.
• Although the prologue in The Fall of the Sea People is set nearly 900 years before chapter 1, it is a character's childhood example rather than an ancient history example: Éirime is an immortal by the time she returns home.
• Good Omens has three. Genesis, sealing the garden, and twelve years ago.
• Goosebumps: The Horror at Chiller House, Wanted: The Haunted Mask, Zombie Halloween, The 12 Screams of Christmas and I Am Slappy's Evil Twin all begin with prologues set some decades prior to set up the backstory.
• The first chapter of the first book of the Harry Potter series, "The Boy Who Lived", takes place right after Voldemort's attempt to kill baby Harry backfires and Harry is left on the Dursleys' doorstep. The next chapter takes place right before Harry's eleventh birthday.
• One of the novels in The History of the Galaxy series starts with a Space Battle nearly a thousand years before the setting of the novel itself. Naturally, the novel deals with the consequences of said battle. Another novel has the prologue take place 3 million years ago, which is trumped by yet another novel with the prologue set a billion years ago.
• In The Lord of the Rings, roughly 15 years pass after Bilbo hands off the ring to Frodo, then Gandalf shows up with an Info Dump of the ring's history (which roughly corresponds to the prologue in the movie), and only after that does the actual adventure get underway.
• The 1979 YA novel The Lost Star opens "long ago," with the Toapa civilization fleeing their planet as the titular "lost star" (their sun) prepares to go nova, then state that one of their generation ships had landed on the distant world where the action takes place. During the course of the story proper, humans and their allies (along with the descendants of the Toapa refugees, who have reverted to a foraging culture and are viewed as something akin to docile space bears) view the supernova from a distance as the Toapa ship is excavated from its ancient resting place.
• Done in several books in the Malazan Book of the Fallen, either in the form of The Time of Myths or conventionally.
  • The prologue of Memories of Ice, for instance, starts at -320,000 something years prior to the series' timeline, jumps forward to about -120,000, then jumps to the "current" date.
  • The prologue of Midnight Tides takes places at an unnnamed point during The Time of Myths, in this case during the Sundering of the Realm of Kurald Emurlahn in the Time of the Elder Gods, and is continued as the prologue of Reaper's Gale.
• Master of the Books begins with a couple visiting a seer, who foresees the future of the unborn Fergus and Marcel. The next chapter skips to the present day, with the two children now tweens.
• The Modesty Blaise novel The Night of Morningstar opens with a prologue describing Modesty's first encounters with two characters who will be important in the main plot, which takes place over a decade after the prologue.
• Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds, maybe (it appears at first to take place in the distant future, but it doesn't take too long for the main action of the book to move into the even more distant future).
• The Radix: The story is set in modern times, but the prologue takes place in 1502, featuring Cesare Borgia and Niccolo Machiavelli.
• The Red Dwarf novel Last Human begins with a short prologue detailing the birth of the first human, before jumping forward to the series' main setting: 3 million years in the future.
• Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder has a slight subversion. The book opens with a group of scientists accidentally creating the Sphere of Destruction that drives the plot, and then jumps about six hundred years forward to the beginning of the main story. But since most of humanity is immortal (bordering on Starfish Aliens), six hundred years isn't considered a particularly long time.
• Lightweights all. The prologue to The Silmarillion takes place before the Creation.
• The first chapter of Sisterland describes three devastating earthquakes that hit the Louisiana Territory in the early 1800s. Most of the rest of the book is set in 2009.
• The Society of Sylphs opens with the protagonist's grandfather almost getting shot by Nazis during World War II.
• The Stormlight Archive: The Way of Kings starts with a prelude set roughly 4500 years in the past, followed by a prologue 5 years in the past, then has an 8 month time jump between the first and second chapters.
• Stranger in a Strange Land begins with the first ship to Mars taking off, along with some information on the crew before it crashes. It picks up again years later when the next ship to Mars is sent out and Michael is found.
• Several Warrior Cats books have prologues which take place long before the main story. The most notable ones are Firestar's Quest and SkyClans Destiny, which take place several generations before the story begins, long enough that SkyClan - the Clan featured in the prologues - has been forgotten by the modern Clans.
  • Also notable is Dark River, which takes place at least twice as early as those: before the Clans were formed, and before even the Tribe of Rushing Water was formed.
• The Wheel of Time starts with Lews Therin Telamon finding out that in his madness he killed his wife. He kills himself and the story picks up 3,000 years later where Lews Therin is reborn as Rand al'Thor.
• The Wrong Side of Goodbye: Starts with a soldier going down in a helicopter crash in Vietnam, before jumping 2016. Harry Bosch's investigation eventually leads him to find out who that boy was and who his daughter was.

Live-Action TV

• The prologue of Avatar: The Last Airbender (2024) depicts the Fire Nation's genocide of the Air Nomads a hundred years before present.
• Awaken: The prologue takes place twenty-eight years before the rest of the series.
• Being Human (UK): The Cold Opens of series two and three are flashbacks to Mitchell's Mysterious Past (except one that shows Ivan recruiting Daisy). Series four occasionally does the same, one such prologue being some centuries in the past.
• The 7 Yüz episode "Büyük Günahlar" opens in a Balıkesir schoolyard, where a trio of girls discuss a classmate, Mete, whom Elif has a crush on; they are interrupted by the sound of fighting on the court. The rest of the episode occurs in the present-day, but its close returns to the original scene, providing critical context to the inciting incident.
• Air Crash Investigation: The China Airlines Flight 611 episode opens 22 years before the crash, showing the tailstrike that eventually led to the plane's breakup.
• Better Call Saul opens with an inversion: it shows what happens to Saul long after the end of Breaking Bad, which ended in-universe around 2010, then skips back to 2002 long before Saul met Walt.
• Cybervillage starts with Nikolay and Konstantin as young men, working on a consciousness transfer device.
• The pilot of Defiance opens in 2013, showing the Votan Ark fleet descending into the atmosphere as the astonished people look up. The view then shifts to 33 years later. The ending of the pilot flashes back to the arrival, showing that the scene was taking place in St. Louis, which returns to the "present" to show the town of Defiance, built atop the ruins of that city, with the Arch still in the same place but slightly damaged. Additionally, the opening shows a teenage boy looking up in awe at the Votan ship. The ending makes it fairly obvious that Nolan was that boy, and he is looking at what has become of his hometown.
• Breaking Bad limits its use of Flashbacks (and Flash Forwards) to the Cold Open of episodes. Some of them take place earlier in the series, while others can go back as early as a character's childhood.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos" begins with the two Ux choosing a spot on their planet to build a structure, before being interrupted by something appearing. The rest of the episode takes place 3,407 years later, and deals with the fallout of that moment.
  • "Resolution" begins in the 9th century, chronicling how three armies defeated the villain before splitting it into three and entrusting the parts to three custodians who were supposed to guard the pieces. The rest takes place 1200 years later.
• Good Omens: Like the book, season 1 starts with Genesis, Adam and Eve being cast out, and then 11 years before the main series. Another episode also shows flashbacks of Aziraphale and Crowley running into one another over the centuries. Season 2 also starts with Genesis, with Aziraphale helping Crowley (still an angel) kick-start his part of the Creation. Another episode shows them running into one another during the torment of Job.
• The Flash (2014) starts when Barry is a boy, witnessing the Man in the Yellow Suit killing his mother, resulting in his father being imprisoned for the murder. The story then moves to the present day, with Barry working as a crime lab tech for the Central City Police Department, while secretly looking for anything "weird" that might be related to his mother's murder. In a twist, Barry ends up going back to that night in the season 1 finale in an attempt to prevent the murder, only to be stopped by his future self. He does get to say goodbye to his mother this time, though. At the end of Season 2, he goes back to that night again and saves his mother, creating the Flashpoint timeline. At the end of the Season 3 opener, he allows the Reverse-Flash to go back there again and put things back the way they were... sort of.
• Fresno starts with Spanish explorers entering the area of land that would become the city of Fresno. They also think the grapes taste nasty.
• House takes this to extremes in what might be its only use of the trope, opening centuries ago aboard a slave ship that is host to an epidemic of what may be smallpox.
• House of the Dragon: The series opens at Harrenhal during the event that saw Viserys being chosen as king nine years before the present time of the first episode, with narration by Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy).
• The Legend of Xiao Chuo: The prologue is set eighteen years before the main series.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power starts with Galadriel narrating her Minor Kidroduction in Valinor, than jumping to the War of Wrath which takes place at the end of the First Age. Galadriel does inform the audience that she spent several centuries searching for Sauron. Current events take place in the Second Age.
• Lost's "The Incident" begins in a period that's at least a couple hundred years prior to either main plot.
• Love and Redemption: The prologue is set over a thousand years before the main series.
• Mouse (2021): Different parts of the first episode take place twenty-five, twenty and fifteen years before the rest of the series.
• The Optimists: The first scene of this Russian TV series is set at the American National Exhibition in Sokolniki in the summer of 1959, in a scene that establishes both Cold War tensions and several characters. The action then springs forward the better part of a year to April 30-May 1, 1960, and the downing of the U-2 spy plane, which opens the story.
• Power Rangers Dino Charge: The series' distant prologue begins 65 million years, at the end of the Cretaceous period (to be precise, on the day that marked the asteroid impact that kicked off the K-T boundary).
• Red Dwarf starts off in 2180 (though that date has changed several times. Only the first book and Ouroboros have confirmed this, with the first two series saying late 21st century and series 3/4 saying 23rd). Skip three million years once Lister enters stasis.
• Search: The prologue is set in 1997. The main series takes place over twenty years later.
• Inverted in the Star Trek: Voyager series finale "Endgame", where the story starts off in the year 2404, about 17 years after the current time-period where Voyager is still in the Delta Quadrant, and Admiral Janeway travels back to the past to help her self and her crew get back home sooner to avoid certain personal catastrophes such as Tuvok becoming mentally ill and Seven of Nine's death leading to Chakotay's.
  • Also inverted in the episode "Timeless", where Chakotay and Harry Kim discover Voyager buried and frozen in ice 15 years after the quantum slipstream accident had caused the ship to crashland on a barren planet in the Beta Quadrant.
• Stargate Atlantis: The opening scene of "The Brotherhood" depicts Porta and Astrum, the last surviving members of the Quindosim, being culled by the Wraith ten generations earlier.
• In Timeless, episodes frequently start with certain historical events being showcased (e.g. the Hindenburg crash, the Lincoln assassination, a V2 launch, the Moon landing, the killing of Bonnie and Clyde). The protagonists then have to go back to those events and try to keep Flynn from changing them. Most of the time, the events do end up changing at least a little, such as the Hindenburg crash killing only two people, Lincoln being shot by Flynn instead of Booth, the V2 exploding, Neil Armstrong's speech delayed, and Bonnie and Clyde being killed a few hours earlier in their hideout instead of on the road.
• UFO (1970) begins one year in the future (i.e., 1970) with Colonel Straker witnessing a UFO attack. The rest of the series takes place 11 years in the future (1980) when Straker is head of the anti-UFO organization SHADO.
• When the Camellia Blooms: The opening scenes of the first episode, in which Dong-baek comes to Ongsan and starts her bar, are followed by a six-year Time Skip. The bar is a success and her toddler has grown to an 8-year-old boy, but the mean ladies of the neighborhood still hate her.
• A few episodes of The X-Files have prologues that take place years after the actual episode is set, such as Duane Barry and Young At Heart. The opening scene of The Movie actually opens in prehistoric times and then flashes ahead to 1998.
• The Barrier: Most of the series takes place when New Spain has been a dictatorship for twenty-five years. Its very first scene happens when one of the adult protagonists is still a young child, on the day the dictatorial government takes over.

Video Games

• If used in video games, it's often a Justified Tutorial. For example, in Final Fantasy XII, the prologue puts you in the shoes of a rookie soldier caught in an unexpected ambush, having to quickly learn the ropes. Afterwards, you flash forwards to his younger brother, in another time and place, and the game proper begins.
• Alba: A Wildlife Adventure: The prologue is set ten years earlier, complete with "Ten Years Later" caption when it ends.
• Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse opens with Marques leaving Castell del Sants with his mother to escape from fascists during Spain's civil war of 1936-39. Then we cut to present day Paris.
• At the start of Dead Space 3, you control Private Caufman, a rookie soldier of the Sovereign Colonies Armed Forces, sent to retrieve a MacGuffin on a crashed ship apparently vital to stopping the Necromorph infestation. Once you get the MacGuffin stolen by General Mahad, he shoots you in the face, then kills himself. Then the game skips 200 years in the future, back to the familiar setting and characters from the past 2 games.
• In Dishonored, both Corvo and Daud's prologues involve the assassination of Empress Jessamine, 6 months before the story continues for either.
• Dragon Quest III has a prelude showing bits and pieces of your father Ortega's journey, leading up to his fateful confrontation with a dragon atop a volcano. After he vanishes, the king declares that you, his then-infant son or daughter, must continue his journey once you're old enough. The game proper begins on your Dangerous 16th Birthday.
• Dragon Quest V starts with the main character's birth.
• Dreamfall: The Longest Journey starts with Brian Westhouse (a side character from The Longest Journey) in a Tibetan monastery in 1933. Chapter one is about Zoe Castillo, resident of Casablanca in 2219. DF then tops it by having a reverse-Distant Finale: The Stinger is about Briant Westhouse before he arrives at the monastery in the prologue.
• The opening text scrawl in Dungeon Maker II: The Hidden War tells the story of a war from 70,000 years ago.
• The beginning of Fallout 4 takes place on October 23, 2077, the day of the Great War. It also serves as a tutorial and character creation stage in the first part. The second part involves you running towards the Vault, getting there just in time before a nuke hits. Inside the Vault, you get stuffed into a tube in order to get "decontaminated". You wake up briefly 150 years later to witness Kellogg killing your spouse and kidnapping your son before being put back to sleep and woken up in 2287 by a system failure that killed everyone else in the Vault. The game begins there.
• The opening stage of Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel is set in the 1960s, where you play as a prisoner named Luis. The following stage skips to 2009 where you play as Roberto, the real protagonist.
• The intro from Freelancer picks up almost a century after Starlancer ends, with an "800 years later" separating the intro from the game proper (making the total gap between games about 900 years).
• Gerda: A Flame in Winter starts in December 1939 with Gerda returning to Tinglev after her time in nursing school and being received by Anders and Dieter, with World War 2 having begun but not yet reached Denmark. The game proper begins near the end of the war, in early 1945, with the Nazi occupation starting to crack down on opposition.
• Homeworld, as seen here. This turns out to be just a taste, as the backstory of the video game is extended further, later, and a prequel game fleshes it out even more.
• Horizon Zero Dawn's opening cutscene shows Rost taking an infant Aloy to be blessed by the Matriarchs. The game starts with a tutorial level, with the player controlling Aloy as a child and finding her Focus device before jumping again a few years to Aloy growing up as a teenager.
• Lufia & The Fortress of Doom starts in the shoes of Maxim and his party fighting and defeating the Sinistrals. The main game proper starts 99 years later with Maxim's descendant.
• Lunar: Silver Star Harmony opens with the final battle of the Four Heroes, several decades before the story begins.
• Max Payne starts off with a scene from the ending, then jumps back three years, to the day Max's wife and daughter were murdered, then forward to the start of the game proper.
• Inverted in A New Beginning—the intro takes place almost six centuries after the main game thanks to time-travel shenanigans.
• The first few levels of Red Faction 2 start on Mars with the player controlling a Commonwealth soldier sent to recover a piece of Ultor nanotech. The game then Time Skips to several years (or decades) later and shifts the setting to the Commonwealth on Earth. The recovered tech was used by the dictatorial Chancellor Sopot to make a squad of nano-enhanced Super Soldiers (the player now controls one of them). Thinking he made a mistake, he orders them killed, resulting in them joining the local Red Faction in order to take out the tyrant.
• The intro to Return to Castle Wolfenstein shows the sealing of Heinrich I in 943 AD. The actual game is set in 1943, with the player attempting to halt the Nazi SS Paranormal Division's attempts to bring Heinrich back.
• Sakura Wars (2019) game opens in 1930, with Sakura Shinguji rescuing Sakura Amamiya from a demon attack. It then skips forward 10 years.
• Used in the little-known Steambot Chronicles, where the tutorial shows a young boy being taught how to maneuver one of the titular Steambots, prior to a lengthy boat-trip. The game proper begins with another boy waking up with Easy Amnesia after a shipwreck.
• System Shock 2 opens with a cutscene setting up the game's main premise, then jumps back four years previous to when the player character enrolls in the armed forces. He then spends the next four years in training before the main story begins.
• Many of the Tomb Raider games begin this way:
  • The original game begins in an unnamed time period but it's heavily implied to be the Trinity Test, as the next cutscene flashes forward to the present day, where we meet Lara for the first time. Anniversary uses the same type of intro, but with minor script changes to reflect the change in continuity and improved graphics.
  • Tomb Raider II also begins on an unknown date centuries in the past, when the Chinese army was defeated by the Tibetan monks, who returned the Dagger of Xian to its place in the Great Wall of China. After the title screen, the game flashes forward to present day when Lara lands in the Great Wall of China area.
  • Tomb Raider III begins in prehistoric times when a comet wiped out the dinosaurs. After this, it flashes forward to present day when some Antarctic scientists discover said meteor.
  • Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation features two levels at the beginning where you control teenage Lara, guided by her (then) mentor Von Croy. After these tutorial levels, the game switches to present day.
  • Tomb Raider: Legend begins when Lara was nine.
• The intro reel for X3: Terran Conflict starts in 2146, with the Hopeless Robot War against rogue terraformer ships ravaging Earth. The game takes place almost 800 years later, with an advanced Earth State still smarting about the Terraformers, now known as the Xenon.
• Xenogears has an opening cutscene set several thousand years before the main plot. Its connection to the plot only becomes apparent many hours in.
• Xenosaga opens with the discovery of a mysterious artifact on Earth. The games take place a long long time later, after Earth has been lost.

Visual Novels

• The prologue of Daughter for Dessert starts with Lainie’s death, and the protagonist raising an infant Amanda on his own while opening up a diner to support them. The story proper starts 19 years later.
• Downplayed in Double Homework. The prologue takes place at the end of winter or beginning of spring, while the story proper starts at the beginning of the vacation period for that summer.

Webcomics

• In the pilot chapter of Bronze Skin Inc. , right on the first page we are introduced to the fateful day when the women became giants, some pages ahead have a leap of three years in time, showing that the prologue was an explanation of Vanessa.
• The first storyline of the "Sister 3" arc of El Goonish Shive takes place several centuries before the rest of the arc and, indeed, any of the other events of the comic for that matter.
• Errant Story opens with a scene involving a pregnant Sarine and her human husband, then skips to 2000 years later for all the rest of the action, except of course Sarine's painful flashbacks.
• Rain (2010) opens with a prologue set in 1999, back when Rain was about four years old. The main story takes place in 2012, during her final year of high school.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: The prologue takes place mostly Just Before the End, while the later part of it and the main story take place 90 years After the End.

Web Videos

• Stopmotion Chess: In the beginning of the video a text tells us the black and white armies fought each other seven years ago.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • "Joker's Favor" has an introduction scene taking place two years before the main plot starts.
  • "The Clock King" introduction scene takes place exactly seven years before the main plot starts.
  • The debut episodes of the Riddler, and Lock-Up also begin at their Start of Darkness before skipping ahead to their actions as supervillains.
• Batman Beyond:
  • The first episode begins with Bruce Wayne's final night as Batman in 2019, twenty years prior to the rest of the story.
  • "Lost Soul" begins with a news report of Robert Vance's death, thirty-five years before the main story (which is kicked off by the activation of his AI avatar).
• Played for laughs in Bojack Horseman when Todd starts writing a sci-fi rock opera called "Newtopia Rising, Book I: The Search for a New Utopia", which begins in a farmhouse in 19th century Georgia.
• The pilot of Futurama starts off in 1999, and the rest of the season takes place in the year 3000.
• The Storybook Opening of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic pilot tells of Princess Celestia sealing away her sister, Luna, corrupted into Nightmare Moon, 1000 years ago.
• The first episode of Shaolin Wuzang opens with a montage of paintings depicting Heihu's first reign of terror and his subsequent defeat and sealing, which take place a thousand years prior to the rest of the series.

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