Law of Time Travel Coincidences

"We're in Pompeii!... And it's Volcano Day!"

— The Doctor, Doctor Who, "The Fires of Pompeii"

Time-travellers just can't seem to avoid trouble. If they visit a time and place that's close to a famous event (sometimes by accident), they're almost guaranteed to arrive right before it happens. If they visit the Cretaceous, it's on The Day the Dinosaurs Died. If they visit Europe in 1939, it's at the beginning of World War II. If they visit Pompeii, it's just before Mount Vesuvius erupts. Et cetera. This can also apply to fictional historical events that are very significant in the story. Sometimes, the time-travellers will even cause the events.

Why is this? Rule of Drama and Small Reference Pools. It's more exciting to watch characters get involved with a disaster or atrocity that most of the audience already knows the stakes of, instead of them bumbling around on a boring day.

Note that this trope only applies if the characters arrive at major events by coincidence. If they intended to go there, that's not this trope.

Compare In the Past, Everyone Will Be Famous. Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act will be invoked if someone travels to the end of World War II instead of its start.

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Examples:

Fan Works

• The Palaververse: In "The First Stitch'' Rarity suffers a time magic accident and lands right before her nation is founded, and tries not to mess it up.

Films — Live-Action

• Back to the Future:
  • Back to the Future: Doc types in "November 5, 1955" into the time machine, the day he came up with the Flux Capacitor. Marty ends up going back to that day, which also happens to be the exact same day his parents met, which he unwittingly prevents.
  • Back to the Future Part II: Discussed when Doc finds out that Old Biff travelled to the same day, November 12, 1955, that Marty departed from in the first film. It's also the day of the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance where Marty's parents fell in love and the historic thunderstorm that stopped the town clock. Doc ponders if the date could have some "cosmic significance" but shrugs it off as an incredible coincidence.
• Time Bandits: Kevin and the dwarves arrive on the Titanic not long before it sinks.
• The Final Countdown: The nuclear aircraft carrier U.S.S. Nimitz is near Hawaii when it's transported through time by an electromagnetic storm. It ends up a short time before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: The titular artifact is revealed to be a device that can detect rifts in space-time. The antagonist believes that by flying into one of these holes in 1969, he can end up in one that's over Berlin in the 1930s, where he can kill Hitler and ensure the Nazis win WWII; however, Archimedes, the designer of the mechanism, actually intended for anyone who came through the rift to end up at the Siege of Syracuse in 212 BCE, in the hopes that aid from the future could destroy the Roman invaders.
• The Last Sharknado: It's About Time: The film is a Time Travel plot where, in order to prevent Sharknados from occurring in the first place, protagonist Fin and several other characters who are brought Back from the Dead via Time Travel end up encountering Sharknados at various points in history, even meeting King Arthur, George Washington and Billy the Kid throughout their journey.

Literature

• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court: When Hank Morgan travels back in time to The Middle Ages, he arrives within a few days of a historical solar eclipse that he knows the exact day and time of. He uses this knowledge to escape a charge of witchcraft.
• Doomsday Book: Time traveller Kivrin arrives at the start of the Black Death epidemic of 1348, twenty years later than she intended to arrive. The explanation is that history resists people from going to any time but specific dates, hence why she must arrive in 1348.
• The Magic Tree House: This happens many times during the series. It's justified because the books are usually meant to take them to a specific event like the Pompeii eruption, but Jack and Annie often don't bother to read further in the book until said disastrous event is happening. Ironically, this is averted in the first book when the duo end up in the late Cretaceous, and there's not an asteroid in sight.
• The Pendragon Adventure: The third book, "The Never War", has Bobby arrive on First Earth (a version of Earth from 1937; Bobby is from Second Earth, which is in the early 21st century) just days before the Hindenburg disaster happens. He ends up having to cause it in order to prevent Nazi victory in World War II.
• Timeline: A medieval history teacher and his students, working in an archaeological dig at a (fictional) ruined castle in France, travel to 1347 — mere days before the castle was taken by the English during The Hundred Years War. The trope is played even more straight when they return to the present and kick the Jerkass Corrupt Corporate Executive that built the time machine into the time machine, sending him to the same place... in 1348, just as the Black Plague arrives. Since he never comes back, they assume he caught it and died. The Film of the Book condenses this and just has the guy thrown into the Final Battle in 1347, right in time to get a sword strike to the head.
• TimeRiders: Because of alternate timelines, examples include accidentally landing on the lawn of the White House minutes before a Nazi invasion, prolonging the siege of Nottingham for about a week (in-universe predictions held it to hours at best under the pressure of Richard I's armies) and the fact that one of the team was a steward on the Titanic is explained thoroughly; the Agency needed to know exactly when and where these teenagers would have died. What better than someone known to have been missing in action at the bottom of the ship in one of the most infamous voyages of the twentieth century?
• Voices After Midnight: Although the kids slip in and out of various time periods throughout the story, the main one they visit in the time of the Dunlaps is during the Great Blizzard of 1888. Downplayed, and even a bit subverted, however, in that not only does it take them several tries to zero in on the right period, the whole reason they are traveling back (at the behest of the house, it seems) is to Set Right What Once Went Wrong one tragic aspect of the disaster. So while they weren't there to avert the overarching doom, and in fact didn't even intend to visit the past at all let alone that specific event, they wouldn't have time-traveled if not for the storm. And finally, the snowstorm of 1888 is not a particularly well-known and famous disaster anymore, and would not have been to kids from California, either, so isn't exactly one that would immediately jump to mind as likely to happen during a Time Travel visit.

Live-Action TV

• Blackadder: This happens in the special episode "Back and Forth" when Blackadder uses a time machine, but he cannot set a specific date, because Baldrick forgot to label the dials with numbers, so it's pure luck where and when they end up, and appropriately, the dials are labelled like reels on a fruit machine. One event is The Day the Dinosaurs Died, and a dinosaur (presumably the last one) is killed by Baldrick's underpants. Blackadder happens to travel in the time machine to the Battle of Waterloo and accidentally kills the Duke of Wellington just before he is about to deliver his master plan, thus dramatically altering the course of history. Blackadder also notes that the time machine appears to be tracking their DNA through time when he realises that many of the people they meet are extremely similar to his modern-day counterparts (and played by the same actors).
  Blackadder: We've started to affect history, and that's dangerous. We've already wiped out the dinosaurs and killed Robin Hood, God only knows what will happen next.
• This is often the driving plot device of Doctor Who. The Doctor and their companions will arrive at some key moment in time just before a volcano explodes, a ship sinks or a war breaks out (and usually find an alien plot behind it). Eventually, the personification of the TARDIS explains why, and it's exactly what fans had speculated for decades:
  The Doctor: You didn't always take me where I wanted to go.
  Idris: No, but I always took you where you needed to go.
• Hannah Montana: In "The Way We Almost Weren't," Miley and Jackson are waiting for their dad to finish eating at a retro New Mexico diner, with Robbie wanting to tell a significant sentimental story about it that the two aren't in the mood to listen to. In the process, Miley almost gets struck by lightning and falls back into their trailer. When Jackson and Miley exit the trailer after the lightning strike, they realize they've been sent back in time to the day their parents met. Unfortunately, their parents keep unwittingly missing each other's meeting, which ends up putting Miley and Jackson's own existences in jeopardy. While Miley ends up managing to get both Robbie and Susan to meet in the past, it's ultimately subverted when it turns out the whole thing was just a dream Miley had after being knocked out by the near lightning strike. The dream motivates her and Jackson to go back and listen to Robbie recount how their parents met at the diner, which is the story he wanted to tell in the first place.
• Red Dwarf: In "Tikka to Ride", when Lister insists on using a time machine to go back to 21st century Earth and order a few thousand curries, the time machine misses and winds up depositing them in Dallas, on the day of JFK's assassination... right in the book depository as Lee Harvey Oswald's lining up his shot.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In the double episode "Past Tense", Sisko, Dax and Bashir beam down to earth and accidentally end up in the then-past just before the major then-historical event of the Bell Riots. When Bell himself is killed protecting Sisko and Bashir, the two of them must ensure these riots follow the historical record to prevent history from changing.
• The Time Tunnel: If the protagonists end up in a place where a historic event took place, they always arrive just before said event occurred. Indeed, the very first episode sends them to the Titanic.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • "Back There". A man living in Washington, D.C. travels back in time and happens to end up on April 14th, 1865, the day President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. His attempts to prevent the assassination fail.
  • "There's No Time Like the Past": This is done intentionally at first, as a man goes back in time to attempt to warn the people of Hiroshima about a nuclear bomb in 1945 (hours before it hit), prevent the sinking of the RMS Lusitania (hours before it was torpedoed), and kill Adolf Hitler before World War II. But when he decides to stop trying to change the past and go live in 1881, this trope still comes into play. He arrives the day before President James Garfield is assassinated but decides to let it happen. Then it turns out he arrived a few days before a huge fire killed some children at the local schoolhouse, and he struggles with whether or not to prevent it, only to end up causing it when he does try to intervene.

Video Games

• Bayonetta 2: Bayonetta ends up revisiting Vigrid from the first game through Loki accidentally losing control of his time travel powers, throwing her 500 years into the past. Not only is she sent back to the day of the Witch Hunts, but she also meets her mother, Rosa, and fights alongside her. This event also is the exact day that Rosa dies at Loptr's hands (disguised as Loki) and both young Balder and Bayonetta witness her death, an event that would shape both of their lives, before heading back to the present to confront Loptr.
  Bayonetta: I know where this is... I know when this is!
• Chrono Trigger: In-Universe Example: each of the gates the party finds leads to a point in time that is mere days, if not hours, away from some significant event, which the party now retroactively has a hand in.
  • In AD 600, it's the abduction and assassination of Queen Leene, and subsequent escalation into war with Fiend-kind that eventually leads to Frog fighting Magus.
  • In AD 1999, the party fights Lavos on the day that it emerges from the Earth to cause the apocalypse.
  • In 65,000,000 BC, shortly after defeating Azala, Lavos crashes into the planet, heralding the end of the age of the dinosaurs, and the start of the Ice Age.
  • In 12,000 BC, during the Ice Age, the party witnesses the fall of the floating kingdom of Zeal, and the rise of the Black Omen.
  • Discussed Trope in the aftermath of Robo taking The Slow Path to fix Fiona's forest—back in the "present day" (of the story), he wonders if there is some "Entity" directing the party to arrive at key moments in history but given that there's no proof all he can make of the thought is idle philosophizing; afterward, a time portal opens up just in time for Lucca to save her mother from being permanently crippled by one of Taban's inventions, but in a way that still inspires the younger Lucca to take up the path of a scientist so there is no Ontological Paradox.
• Runescape: The quest "Meeting History" involves the player character doing just that, being flung back in time through use of an Enchanted Key in order to meet some of the first humans on Gilenor — in the process revealing that humanity is not a native species to the plane, but instead come from another realm.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2006): An ambiguous case of this on top of the other time travel shenanigans. In most cases of Sonic, Shadow, or other characters using space-time travel, their destinations are pre-determined. The one time it seems to be a coincidence is when Silver and Shadow accidentally induce Chaos Control at the same time, opening a time-space rift. Shadow's dialogue implies this instance wasn't an intentional case, but he realizes that they will learn the truth if they go through the portal and into the past. Somehow, the portal takes them to the exact moment that the Solaris disaster occurs in Aquatic Base, causing it to be split into Iblis and Mephiles. With the two hedgehogs ending up in the past, Shadow has to seal Mephiles into the Scepter of Darkness himself, and Silver assists with sealing Iblis into Princess Elise. Their actions end up creating a Stable Time Loop and changing the past at the same time. Mephiles absorbs Shadow's power in the future after Shadow accidentally releases him from the Scepter of Darkness and Silver leaves behind the blue chaos emerald that Elise has at the start of the game's story. It's unclear if Silver or Shadow intentionally wanted this portal to go to this exact moment before or after travelling through it.

Web Original

• TFS at the Table: Zig-zagged in the one-shot special campaign "The Eye of Jupiter," where the party realizes they've been sent back in time, but not of their own volition. They get hints that make it clear that they're in Ancient Rome, with the audio recording device they have on them specifying Napoli. Their client then tells them what treasure they need to reclaim and how they got there, while also adding that they only have a day before "everything literally goes to hell." Naturally, they're in Pompeii, the day before the Vesuvius eruption, so the party was sent there by a force who pre-determined the time and location but are unaware of it until they arrive. As it turns out, the treasure they're stealing, the titular Eye of Jupiter, is the cause of the volcano erupting, and the one they steal it from is the guy who was the infamous supposedly masturbating man, who now has a more dignified statue of himself flexing after they lead him out of the city's gates.

Western Animation

• Family Guy: In "Road to Germany", Brian and Stewie travel back in time to Warsaw, Poland (though how they got to Poland from Rhode Island is never explained), September 1st, 1939, the date that Germany invades Poland and kicks off World War II (the Germans did not reach Warsaw until a week later). They have time for one Jewish wedding before tanks start rolling in.
• Freakazoid!: In "Freakazoid is History", Freakazoid is transported back to just before the attack on Pearl Harbor and decides to stop Japan's attack on Hawaii.
• Futurama: In "Roswell that Ends Well," the Planet Express crew fly into space to watch a supernova. However, Fry pops some popcorn in a metal container in the ship's microwave at the same time as the supernova, causing a reaction that sends them all back to 1947, specifically the site and day of the Roswell, New Mexico UFO incident (which they accidentally end up being the cause of, among other things).
• Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM): In "Blast to the Past, Part 1," Sonic and Sally use the Time Stones to go back in time to stop Robotnik's coup from happening. Unfortunately, due to Sonic's intrusive thoughts about chili dogs, they are taken to the day Robotnik launched his coup.
• Time Warp Trio: The Book's mechanisms randomly transport both sets of the trio — Joe, Sam, and Fred, alongside their great-granddaughters — to historically significant events that have some relevance to what was going on in their modern day at the time. For instance, discussing the palindrome "Able was I, ere I saw Elba" results in Fred, Joe, and Samantha being transported back in time to meet Napoléon Bonaparte, who was exiled on Elba at the end of his life.

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