Future Self Reveal

Past Adam: You're me?
Future Adam: That's classified. But yes. I was.

— The Adam Project

In some Time Travel stories, The Reveal is that a character is really the future version of another character, usually one of the protagonists. Whether the present-day version is able to escape this fate varies by story.

Sometimes, the character will realize it and decide to become this future self for no other reason than it has to happen. It can also become a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy where the character becomes this future self in trying to prevent it.

This is particularly common with villains, a fate that the present-day character will naturally try to avoid. This can result in Future Foil, Future Me Scares Me, Evil Me Scares Me, and a literal version of His Own Worst Enemy. In these cases, the present-day character can try to avoid this unfortunate future by changing the present.

Sometimes, it's not even clear that the story involves time travel until this reveal takes place.

Note that this trope does not apply if the reveal happens in the same scene as the future character's introduction.

Subtrope of My Future Self and Me and Two Aliases, One Character. Will often involve a Time-Shifted Actor in live-action media. Compare Narrator All Along, …And That Little Girl Was Me, and Tomato in the Mirror. Contrast Never the Selves Shall Meet.

As this is a form of The Reveal, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• EDENS ZERO: In the Lendard arc, it's revealed that Ziggy, Shiki's adoptive grandfather and the Big Bad after he Came Back Wrong, is a future version of Shiki from an Alternate Timeline where an attempt to stop the Antimatter bombs on Nero 66 led to him and Rebecca being blasted 20,000 years into the future, leading to Rebecca's death and his own rebuilding into the robot Ziggy. He ended up in the past during a failed attempt to reach Universe Zero, losing his memories and altering the course of many timelines.
• Lonely Castle in the Mirror: After the seven kids realize that they attended the same school at different points in time, they discover that one constant among all of them is the presence of a teacher named Kitajima who helps all of them overcome their personal issues at school, in particular the main protagonist Kokoro and her bullying problem. All except Akiko, who is the oldest of the students chronologically, and the absence of Kitajima in her time period is what triggers the events of the climax as she hides in the castle past the deadline so that she doesn't have to confront her issues. At the end of the film, it is revealed that Akiko is Kitajima, having changed her surname after getting married, who decided to become a teacher following her experiences in the castle leading to her being present in the lives of the other six kids.
• Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation: At one point, Rudeus is asked by Hitogami to enter a basement, only for him to be stopped by a mysterious old man. Rudeus learns that the old man is a future version of him who did as Hitogami requested, and in doing so got tricked into instigating a series of events that caused the deaths of all of his loved ones, including all three of his Love Interests, and turned him into a monster. Before he expires from the strain of the spell that allowed him to go back in time, he bequeaths unto his past self a diary detailing the Bad Future he came from and warning him of Hitogami's true malevolent nature.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Pokémon 4Ever: A character named Sammy, a boy that has been transported 40 years in time to the present day by the Mythical Pokémon Celebi. Ash and his friends meet him unconscious near a shrine dedicated to Celebi and nurse him back to health. Sammy plays an active and important role throughout the film, defending Celebi from poachers and a twisted villain that wants to use its power for himself. At the end of the film, Celebi and Sammy part ways with Ash and company, going back to the past. In the original Japanese version, it's unstated but heavily implied that Sammy is in fact the present-day Prof. Samuel Oak, a beloved prominent recurring character in the franchise. In the international version (which actually had new scenes added to it), it is explicitly shown to be the case when we see a time-faded sketchbook previously established as belonging to Sammy in Oak's possession. Despite this, Oak decides to keep this secret to himself.
  • In the series Pokémon the Series: Ruby and Sapphire: In the season 7 episode "Me, Myself and Time", Ash and co meet a girl named Calista and her Baltoy. Together, they have an adventure in which they help a mysterious woman reach some ancient ruins. It turns out the woman and Calista have a lot in common regarding their interest in ancient artifacts. At the end of the episode, it is revealed the ruins are a time machine of sorts that Baltoy can activate, and that the woman is Calista's future self. She came back in time to encourage Calista to never give up her dream and continue her research.

Comic Books

• In Final Crisis: Legion of 3 Worlds, Superboy Prime arrives in the future and is received and treated as a god by the Legion's villains who admired him for years and asked him to lead them to destroy the Legion. All of this was made by the Time Trapper, who brought Prime to this future. Later, it's discovered that this Time Trapper comes from Earth-Prime, and even more, it's revealed that his identity is a future version of Prime with long hair and beard but with the same Superman symbol scar, confirming they're the same person. However, the future that leads to him is not stable, evidenced when the Legion score out Superboy-Prime's S-symbol scar, and the Time Trapper has suddenly has a matching old scar.
  • The original Time Trapper was revealed at one point to be the future self of their own apprentice, and during Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! was the future self of Cosmic Boy. The Post-Zero Hour version was revealed to be the future self of Lori Morning (who may have been the Reboot version of the aforementioned apprentice). Brainiac 5 has speculated that the Time Trapper's timeline is so unstable that their true identity is always changing.
• Loki: Agent of Asgard: The story begins with the current Loki capturing a corruptive presence inside Thor, which is taken back to Asgard and turns out to be Loki, looking like the original (and quite dead) Loki. When Present Loki and "Old" Loki meet, he reveals he's not the Loki-that-was, he's Loki from the future, turned evil and insane again.
• The elderly homeless man who passed the Access powers on to Axel Asher in Marvel Versus DC was revealed in All Access to be a future version of Axel himself. All the stuff about a line of defenders of whom Access is the most recent was a lie; it's only ever been him.
• The Old Man who gave Ken Connell the titular Star Brand likewise lied about being a centuries-old Dutch trader, and was later revealed to be a version of Ken who was thrown back in time 500 years.
• Venom (2021): Eddie is killed in the first issue, and his body winds up in The Garden, supposedly the resting place for time-displaced Kings in Black at the end of time, overseen by Meridius (who is the one responsible for Eddie's death. Eddie doesn't know this, but quickly pegs him as suspicious). At the end of issue #10, Eddie winds up back in the Garden again, and discovers Meridius is his future self, as are the four other Kings he met there, and the issue shows there's another, final version beyond them. Eddie doesn't meet this version until issue #18. Fortunately, the final Eddie is a good guy.

Comic Strips

• A twist eight years in the making in Safe Havens: Only a few months after she helps Maria Hamper be born, Maria Novello reveals she is Maria Hamper, and her time jumping abilities were a direct result of her mother Samantha being pregnant with her while they were in space. Her main reasons for coming back in time seem to be a) ensuring her past self is born, and b) ensuring Earth survives first contact with Mars. Present day Maria is still a baby, so is likely unaware of who the older Maria really is.

Fan Works

• Early in The Apprentice, the Student, and the Charlatan, Nova, Trixie, and Twilight are suffering from nightmares, and they come to the conclusion that whoever is causing these nightmares must be someone who knows them in-and-out. It turns out the pony causing these nightmares is none other than Nova's two-years-older self, fresh from a foray into the past and trying to get them moving to set the events of the story into motion.
• In the first story of the Facing the Future Series, Team Phantom deals with a pair of mysterious ghost that are leaving them in the dust and incapacitating ghost hunting organizations. At the end of the third chapter, following the return of Dark Danny, Danny's evil future self, the two ghosts are revealed to be Danny's actual future self and his partner, a ghost-half version of Sam.
• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction Four Lefts In A Row is about the Cutie Mark Crusaders getting lost in the Everfree Forest and receiving directions from a cloaked stranger. By the end, it's been all-but-stated that this stranger was an older Sweetie Belle (one of the crusaders).
• The Desert Storm: Several characters find out that the enigmatic, immensely skilled but severely traumatised Jedi with a Dark and Troubled Past who goes by "Ben Naasade"^note which means "nobody" in the Mandalorian language, and ends up being a Meaningful Name on many levels is Obi-Wan Kenobi from a Bad Future at various points, but it's not until very late in the first story series that his younger self is finally let in on it. Ironically, by that point Ben has come to feel that he's not really Obi-Wan Kenobi anymore, and has quite definitely sent events so far Off the Rails that there's no chance of Obi-Wan's future looking anything like his own.

Films — Animated

• Lightyear: This incarnation of Emperor Zurg is unmasked to reveal that he is a future counterpart of Buzz Lightyear, reflecting who he will become if he let his obsession with "finishing the mission" consume him.
• The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part: Super cool space ranger Rex Dangervest is revealed to be a future version of Emmet who was left under the washing machine and became bitter because he was left behind by all his friends. Some clues before this reveal were Emmet and Rex's Black Bead Eyes (most of the other characters have the modern LEGO eyes with smaller white dots) and the fact that both are voiced by Chris Pratt.
• Bender's Big Score: In this film, we meet Lars Fillmore, an older man who starts dating Leela. The main plot involves Fry accidentally going back in time and creating a duplicate of himself. One Fry remains in the past and lives out the rest of his life as he would have if he was never frozen for a thousand years in the pilot, while the other goes back to the future without knowledge of this. After living several years in the past, Fry's house is burnt down and his hair is singed off, giving him the appearance of Lars. He then realizes that he was Lars and he goes to freeze himself so he can be with Leela in the future.
• Meet the Robinsons: The time-traveling villain known as the Bowler Hat Guy is revealed to be the future self of the protagonist's room-mate Goob. And the patriarch of the Robinson family is revealed at the end to be the protagonist's own future self.
• In the Family Guy film, Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, Stewie and Brian see a man on TV who looks and talks exactly like Stewie. Convinced this person is his real father, Stewie travels all the way to San Francisco to try and meet him. However when he finally does, Stewie is shocked to find out that the man is not his father, but himself from 35 years in the future.

Films — Live-Action

• 41 follows Aidan as he travels through time via a hole in a motel room floor. At the end of the film, after he travels decades into the past and prevents his grandfather from drowning, Aidan is shown aging into the motel's manager from previous scenes.
• Lake Mungo:
  • The horrific malformed body that was following Alice in the weeks before her death turns out to be her corpse, or how it will look after she drowns and her body isn't recovered for a week.
  • Alice has a creepy experience of each of her parents being in her bedroom and being unable to hear her. This is because these are apparently their future selves.
• Los Cronocrimenes: Hector is antagonized by a bandaged stranger in the woods before accidentally traveling back in time and becoming him.
• Predestination:
  • Jane recalls being seduced by a handsome young man who ultimately abandoned her, kicking off a chain of misfortunes that ended with Jane changing sex and renaming herself John. In the present, the Temporal Agent offers him a chance to go back in time and kill Jane's lover before he can ruin her life... but when John gets there, he finds himself bumping into Jane and unwittingly repeating the words that sparked their relationship in the first place.
  • Early in the film, the Temporal Agent is badly burned by one of the Fizzle Bomber's explosives and is only saved when a mysterious stranger pushes his Field Kit into his hands, allowing him to send himself to the future for emergency surgery. It eventually turns out that the stranger was actually the agent's future self, left unrecognizable after reconstructive surgery.
  • Jane was originally abandoned on the doorstep of an orphanage, her parentage left unknown. However, prior to the sex change, Jane successfully gives birth to John's daughter and decides to name her Jane as well; a few days later, the Temporal Agent sneaks into the maternity ward and kidnaps baby Jane, depositing her on the doorstep of the orphanage.
  • The Temporal Agent eventually shows up to recruit John for the Bureau, becoming the direct cause of John's "abandoning" Jane. John is furious enough to put a gun to the Agent's head... only for the Agent to effortlessly disarm him by admitting, "You see, I love her too." Later shots confirm that the Agent still sports the marks from Jane's sex change and a caesarean scar across his stomach.
  • In the finale, the Temporal Agent finally manages to corner the Fizzle Bomber... only to find that the terrorist is none other than his future self, suffering from Temporal Sickness-induced psychosis and convinced that he's saving history. He warns the Agent that killing him will mean that he'll go on to become the Fizzle Bomber just as he did, and the only way to stop it is for the two of them to be together. The Agent refuses and shoots him dead... only for the final seconds of the movie to show him in the midst of a devastating case of Sanity Slippage.
• Tenet:
  • At Freeport, the Protagonist and Neil are attacked by two masked men. Priya explains these to be the same individual, moving opposite directions in time. Midway through the film it turns out that individual was the future Protagonist, moving backwards through time and perceiving the fight as being in self-defense.
  • At a highway, the heroes are attacked by the Big Bad Sator, who seems to know all their moves ahead of time. It turns out this is the Sator of 20 minutes from now, having been fed intel by a past Sator who he then gives to his next self in a Stable Time Loop.
  • Returning to her husband's yacht, Kat sees a woman jump off and assumes it's someone Sator was having an affair with. The ending reveals the other woman was the future Kat herself, escaping after killing Sator.
  • Twice in the film, the Protagonist is saved by a mysterious masked agent with a red trinket on their backpack. This agent turns out to be his best friend Neil, and he claims to have been aiding the Protagonist for years, that is, the far future Protagonist who's been secretly running the show all along.
• Triangle: Jess and her friends end up on an passenger ship and all but Jess are killed by a masked stranger. Jess gets caught in a time loop and eventually becomes the masked stranger when she realizes the only way she can get off the boat and back to her son is if she kills everyone on board and resets the loop.
• Zathura: Part-way through the film, the characters meet an astronaut who'd been trapped in Zathura for a few years. He becomes part of the team but manages to get on Walter's nerves in his attempt to protect everyone from the aliens. At the end, it's discovered that the astronaut is an adult version of Walter who got trapped in Zathura after he used his wish card to wish his brother Danny out of existence. Because Walter only asked for a football this time, though, he's also from an alternate reality and wanted to ensure his kid self didn't make the same mistake twice.

Literature

• The Saga of Darren Shan: When Harkat Mulds first speaks, he tells the vampires (and the readers) that he's a ghost of a person who died, given a solid body (though not a human-looking one), but that he has no memories from when he was alive. The twist in book 10 is that he was a vampire who Darren first meets later in that same book, who doesn't die for several books after that. Harkat's past self was actually one of the Vampire Generals who interrogates him in that book. He does regain his memories when he finds out his identity.
• Johannes Cabal and the Fear Institute: Having been transformed into a ghoul, Johannes lives with the other ghouls in their warrens outside of time and formulates a cure for himself. He's aghast when the ghoul leader steals the cure and vanishes... then clues in and takes command, closing the Stable Time Loop.
• In Monday Begins on Saturday, the director of the Sufficiently Analyzed Magic institute Janus Nevstruev comes in two selves — ordinary administrator A-Janus and Absent-Minded Professor genius U-Janus. The ending reveals U-Janus is the future self of A-Janus who has placed Merlin Sickness on himself somewhere in the future. It's unclear to what extent present-day A-Janus is aware of it.
• In the Neil Gaiman short story "Other People", the demon in Hell who tortures and interrogates the damned protagonist turns out to be the man himself, mutilated beyond recognition. Whether or not that means an eventual release for him is left ambiguous.
  Demon: Time is fluid here.
• Robert A. Heinlein:
  • "—All You Zombies—": The Unmarried Mother, her child, and the child's father are the same person at different stages of life due to time travel (and a forced sex reassignment). The final twist is that the Bartender who the Unmarried Mother has been speaking with is the future version of the same person, having begun a career as a temporal agent. This story was later adapted into the film Predestination.
  • "By His Bootstraps". As the result of Time Travel shenanigans involving a Time Machine and a Stable Time Loop, the protagonist meets three different men and eventually realizes that each of them is one of his future selves.
• In Time Twister by Ged Maybury, the protagonist travels into the future and meets a man who introduces himself as "Yos", and tells the protagonist what he needs to do in the present to avert an imminent catastrophe. Near the end of the book, he learns that his sister has also travelled into the future and met Yos — but the Yos she met was a woman. They realise that "Yos" is an acronym: Your Older Self.
• In the Silver John story "Who Else Could I Count On?", John is asked for help by an old man who has traveled from forty years in the future to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. The reveal comes after it occurs to John that the man is old enough to have a younger self in the present, and he asks the old man what will happen if he meets his younger self.
• In Johnny and the Bomb, a rich old man named Sir John is introduced early in the book as having some kind of connection to the events taking place in Blackbury. He catches up with the gang shortly after Wobbler is stuck in the 1940s, at which point his real identity is treated as a reveal, but not as that much of a surprise.

Live-Action TV

• Arrowverse:
  • The Flash (2014):
    • Season 3's Big Bad is Savitar, a god-like speedster from the future who is destined to kill Iris, the love of Barry's life. The team spends most of the season pondering Savitar's identity and potential ways to stop him, and Barry eventually realizes via a Flashback-Montage Realization that Savitar is a future version of himself. Confronted by Barry, Savitar confirms this by getting out of his metal suit and explaining that he's the result of a causal loop and needs to kill Iris to ensure his existence.
    • In the season 5 episode, "Failure is an Orphan", the Big Bad Cicada/Orlin Dwyer learns that his comatose niece Grace is a meta-human and thus acquiesces to have himself and Grace take the meta-human cure. After Orlin is cured, an intruder breaks into S.T.A.R. Labs, killing Orlin's doctor and taking Orlin to an unknown location. The Stinger reveals that the intruder and Orlin are back at Orlin's cabin and the intruder is a future version of Grace.
  • Legends of Tomorrow: Half-way through season 1, in "Marooned", Mick Rory is seemingly killed off-screen by his old friend and partner in crime, Leonard Snart. However, it's revealed two episodes in "Left Behind" later that Snart spared Rory, who was then found by the Time Masters and brainwashed into becoming Chronos, the time-traveling bounty hunter who had been pursuing the Legends throughout the season.
• Babylon 5: In "Babylon Squared", a mysterious figure in a spacesuit appears several times amidst the temporal anomalies wracking the Babylon 4 station, whom Zathras refers to as "The One". The conclusion of the episode reveals that The One is in fact a future version of Babylon 5 commander Jeffrey Sinclair.
• Avataro Sentai Donbrothers begins when Haruka Kito has her manga pulled from circulation due to being exactl identical to that of an author named Naoki Shiina. When we meet the other author, we learn that he wears a mascot suit and never speaks during public appearances, and Haruka’s attempts to get answers reveals that he also somehow recreated her recipe for beef stroganoff. Near the end, the mask comes off to reveal that Naoki is a version of Haruka from a future where she never had her career ruined by plagiarism accusations, who inadvertently got sent back in time when requesting a vacation. After Passing the Torch of concluding the manga to her younger self, Future!Haruka returns to her own time… without resolving the fact her younger self is believed to be a plagiarist.
• Dark (2017):
  • Midway through the first season, Jonas receives his father's suicide note in a package. Reading it, he discovers that his father, Michael, was no other than young Mikkel Nielsen, who unknowingly time-traveled back to 1986 on November 4, 2019 and never came back, growing up as Michael Kahnwald.
  • In the first season finale, the grizzled, mysterious time-traveling stranger who has been popping up around Winden is revealed to be the future self of Jonas Kahnwald, who is taking steps to keep the Stable Time Loop in order. The latter is not happy when he is forced through things his future self has already lived.
  • In the second season, the mysterious, scarred old man seen in a luxurious house is revealed to be the future self of Jonas and the Stranger, Adam, who is manipulating both of them, as well as a host of other characters, to ensure his endgame.
  • A downplayed instance of this is the man who young Noah kills with a pickaxe in 1921 at the beginning of Season 2. Only in the penultimate episode is it revealed that this man was Bartosz, who is Noah's father. This reveal is never directly regarded in the show, however.
• Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor in "Logopolis" is followed by a mysterious being known as The Watcher. Following a lethal fall, the Watcher is revealed to be a manifestation of his future incarnation, and combines with him to regenerate into the Fifth Doctor.
• Misfits: The mysterious, seemingly-omniscient Superhoodie is revealed to be future!Simon.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Firstborn", the Klingon K'mtar is revealed to be Worf's son Alexander, time-traveled back to try and change a future where Worf was killed due to Alexander's choices in his youth.
• Tales from the Loop: Episode 1 follows a young girl named Loretta who befriends a boy named Cole while searching for her mother. Loretta visits Cole's house, and Cole's parents appear in a few scenes before it's revealed that Loretta had accidentally traveled into the future and Cole's mother is her older self.

Music

• The Black Sabbath song "Iron Man" features a man who travels back in time to stop some iron monster from causing a calamity. When no one believes him and instead they distrust him due to his being made of iron after his time-traveling methods had unforeseen side-effects, it's revealed that he decided Then Let Me Be Evil and became the monster he was supposed to destroy.

Video Games

• The humorous Point-and-Click game Ankh contains an amusing yet convenient example of this. Set in ancient Egypt, at one point the protagonist Assil comes across what looks like an exact clone of himself while walking across the desert. He chalks it up to a Fata Morgana and tosses a rock at the supposed apparition, making it disappear. At a later point in the game, Assil briefly uses a time machine, and, sure enough, he's transported right in front of his past self, who bonks him in the head with the rock. The rock comes back with him when he returns to the present day, which is just as well, since it needs to be used to complete a nearby puzzle.
• BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger: Through various hints scattered between their story modes, it's revealed that the legendary hero Hakumen who fought the Black Beast 100 years in the past is the future self of the largely villainous Jin Kisaragi due to a 100 year long "Groundhog Day" Loop.
• Dragalia Lost:
  • At the very start of the game, Euden and Zethia run into a mysterious masked girl who stands in their way. Upon removing the mask, they notice she looks like Zethia. Come chapter 5, it is revealed that this Zethia is from the future trying to prevent a calamity just as present Zethia gets possessed by a being known as the Other, who blocks the future Zethia's ability to return to the time period up until Chapter 14.
  • In the "Fracture Futures" raid event, Euden meets a dragon named Chronos who offers to take him back to prevent the Other from possessing Zethia and Aurelius. However, during his efforts, he runs into a man calling himself Audric who makes sure things go as they are supposed to, eventually revealing it being because Chronos was using Euden to get an opportunity to kill Future Zethia. Come the end of the event, as Euden and Audric part ways, Euden realizes Audric is Aurelius from an alternate future.
• Fire Emblem: Awakening: Near the start of the game, a mysterious masked swordsman is introduced, referring to himself as Marth, the same name as the legendary Hero-King. During one pivotal chapter, Marth is revealed to not be the actual Hero-King, due to being a Sweet Polly Oliver. After a Time Skip, Chrom ends up married with a daughter, named Lucina. A few chapters after the introduction of the baby Lucina, Marth reappears and reveals herself to be the future version of Lucina, having traveled back in time after the world was devastated by the Fell Dragon Grima so that she can prevent this ruined future.
• In Ghost Trick, it is revealed that "Ray", the helpful lamp from the first level, is Missile from a timeline where everyone died. After failing to recruit Sissel in his timeline, he traveled back in time to try again. This is only revealed after he successfully Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
• inFAMOUS: In his final moments, Kessler telepathically reveals to the main hero Cole that he is Cole's future self. In his timeline, Kessler was hunted by a villain known as the Beast who killed Kessler's wife and two daughters and left the planet devastated. Kessler went back in time in order to make his past self strong enough to take down the Beast.
• Little Nightmares II: whenever Mono finds a working TV, he receives a vision of a closed door at the end of a hallway. Behind the door is the Thin Man; once Mono opens the door, he kidnaps Mono's friend and tries to stop Mono from entering the Signal Tower to rescue her. After battling the Thin Man and erasing him from reality, Mono finds himself trapped in the Tower, unable to leave. Under the Tower's watchful eyes, he slowly ages into... the Thin Man, trapped behind a door, waiting to be released by his past self.
• MapleStory: Kao, the Identical Stranger who appears or is referenced in several questlines, is revealed in the Arcane River story to be the future player from a timeline where they lost their ability to wield the Arcane Symbols. Kao continued their journey anyway but was defeated by the Black Mage, and was transported back in time with no memory of who they were or where they came from. When Kao regains those memories, they sacrifice their life defending the player character from the monster that stole their powers in their own timeline, granting the player their first Arcane Symbol.
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within: It's revealed that the Sand Wraith the Prince has had confrontations with is a future version of him.

Visual Novels

• Endless Summer introduces The Endless, a mysterious figure in a red space suit, who plays a big part in the time-looping nature of La Huerta. They turn out to be an elderly version of the player character, having gone through 2,139 loops to ensure the survival of the group.
• Fate/stay night: The cynical, nihilistic Archer is revealed to be an alternate Future Badass version of Shirou himself, who took his younger self's "Hero of Justice" mentality to an extreme and brought peace through extreme violence.

Webcomics

• In 8-Bit Theater, Sarda is revealed to be the future version of the Onion Kid, who went back in time to the beginning of the universe in an attempt to remake it in his image.
• In Sluggy Freelance, Hereti-Corp executive Dr. Newguy, never seen without a bag over his head, attends a time-flux experiment upon disgraced agents Drake and Tyler. Tyler gets zapped first, ending up in the past, where he leverages his knowledge of anime futures to build a new identity with a doctorate and a diagnosis of extreme rosacea: Dr. Edris Ilba Newguy. He then escapes with Drake before she can be subjected to the horrifically painful experiment too.

Web Video

• Tribe Twelve: One of the Collective members Noah learns about is "Firebrand", a scary-looking monster with pin-hole eyes and a creepy smile. Firebrand eventually appears in a video and horrifies Noah just before he gets flung into a Stable Time Loop trip. In this episode, it's revealed that Firebrand is Noah from the future, after he gets absorbed into the Collective... and after he breaks away and becomes a "rogue God".

Western Animation

• Ben 10: Ultimate Alien: In "Ben 10,000 Returns", Eon from Ben 10: Race Against Time also returns, now known to be hunting down different versions of Ben from across the multiverse. After Ben's team and Ben 10,000 (Ben's future self) fight Eon and his minions a few times, they learn that Eon's henchmen are the aforementioned alternate versions of Ben, made into Eon's minions and having their powers absorbed by him. Eon then reveals that he is another future version of Ben, and he intends to absorb Ben 10,000 and replace this timeline with one where he is the only Ben.
• Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys: Towards the series' end, the crew encounter a powerful time Traveller named Mandrax the Mandrill, who takes it upon himself to become something of a Trickster Mentor, much to the annoyance of the Monkeys. However, his vague hints and riddles do help inspire Captain Simian to come up with a plan that ultimately stops Nebula's evil plan and finally captures him. As the Space Monkeys fly off in search of more adventures, the now wiser Captain Simian explains Mandrax needed to be obtuse to prevent Nebula from figuring out what was happening and stopping it. Simian then laments that he won't get a chance to thank Mandrax. Cue a final shot of Mandrax standing out in space watching the Primate Avenger blast off, only to suddenly transform from a mandrill into an older Captain Simian, smiling wistfully before winking at the camera.
• The Fairly OddParents!: Channel Chasers: Timmy spends the second third of the movie being chased through TV Land by a mysterious masked adult, who he doesn't trust for being an adult. Said adult eventually reveals himself to be the future Timmy, who came back in time to stop Vicky from taking over the world, at which point Timmy starts trusting him.
• Final Space: Halfway the first season, Nightfall, the mysterious morally ambiguous mercenary who has been assisting the squad from the shadows against the Lord Commander, is revealed to be none other than an older version of Quinn Ergon. In her timeline, Gary ended up dying plugging the hole to Final Space, so as to avoid this, Nightfall kept traveling back in an attempt to change history. However, due to her constant changes, the present timeline has become to divorced from her own time, meaning that she's not longer Quinn's future, merely her from a possible time line.
• Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H.: In the episode "Enter, the Maestro", the mysterious intruder from the future that attacked Future Hulk and fought Hulk and his friends turns out to be the future version of A-Bomb. Not only that, but it turns out that he's not a villain, as Hulk's friends assumed, but is a member of La Résistance who's actually trying to prevent the Bad Future that was caused by Hulk's infection by the Gamma Meteor that would lead him to become Maestro, a.k.a. Future Hulk, who came to past to ensure that present Hulk remains infected, preserving his status as an Evil Overlord in the future.

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