Time Loop Trap

Dormammu: You cannot do this forever.
Doctor Strange: Actually, I can. This is how things are now! You and me, trapped in this moment, endlessly.

— Doctor Strange (2016)

Sometimes a prison isn't enough. Sometimes a villain or hero is so powerful that not even death is a solution for their enemies. So what is there to do? Trap them in time. This is when a character is trapped inside of a time loop. Once the loop begins there is no where for them to go nor any when. Everything leads back to the place and time of origin.

No matter what they do they end up back at the beginning of the loop. This usually happens without any memory of the loop having taken place. This lack of Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory is either to prevent their awareness of the prison and thus prevent their escape or a spot of mercy from their captors.

Subtrope of Stable Time Loop and related to "Groundhog Day" Loop. Compare to Sealed Evil in a Duel.

Because this trope is usually used as a twist or surprise ending, all spoilers are unmarked.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Bleach, Mayuri Kurotsuchi creates a drug capable of placing its victims in a mental time loop: every time they kill Mayuri, the loop is reset. After ten resets, the victim will undergo full-body paralysis for 30 seconds, leaving them at Mayuri's (lack of) mercy. He uses this drug to neutralize a zombified Hitsugaya, who until then was mopping the floor with everyone else.
• In Chainsaw Man, the Eternity Devil has the power to turn any area into an Unnaturally Looping Location and also loop the time around it to remove any possibility of outside interference.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: The Anti-Spiral's Multiverse Labyrinth works sort of like a cross between this and a Lotus-Eater Machine, placing the consciousnesses of its victims into an endless series of continuously branching parallel realities while their bodies lie comatose. Only by calling upon Spiral Power and reintegrating the multiverse were Simon and the others able to escape.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Bites the Dust works this way, looping time to undo a mistake Kira wants to avoid. It binds a target to a secret that cannot be revealed to anyone, under the penalty of blowing up that person and resetting time again. Even once time is reset any deaths caused by Bites the Dust will occur at the same time they did in the previous loop, increasing as more people discover it. There is absolutely no way to escape unless Kira manually undoes Bites the Dust, but in exchange he is unable to summon Killer Queen while Bites the Dust remains active.
  • In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind, this is the method to dispose the Big Bad Diavolo, forcing him to die over and over again in different ways for all eternity without even the escape of death.
• In Naruto, Uchiha Itachi places Kabuto Yakushi in an illusion version of this called Izanami, forcing him to mentally relive their battle until he can come to terms with his mistakes.
• In Go, Go, Loser Ranger!, the Invader Executive Magatia uses his powers to trap himself and several kidnapped civilians in a 7 day time loop so they can live out a peaceful high-school life. If anyone is seen breaking school rules, the time loop resets with everything undone except that dead people, like suicide or murders, stay dead forever. Worse, every time Sakurama and his friends trigger the loop they get just a little bit more brainwashed into wanting to stay.
• In Pokémon: Giratina and the Sky Warrior, Dialga traps Giratina in a time loop to escape after the latter tries to drag Dialga into its dimension to punish it for its actions in the previous movie. Whenever Giratina tries to leave its own dimension under using its own power, it jumps back a moment in time so it can never actually reach the portal out. It does retain its memories of the loops so it gives up after a while. The curse is only broken if it escapes using a portal made by somebody else.

Asian Animation

• Mechamato: A variation. Ninjamera has the ability of trapping others in a back-and-forth loop, making them experience an embarassing moment over and over for him to record until someone else pulls them out of the trap.

Comic Books

• Darkseid's Omega Sanction follows this — anyone trapped in it will live out their life and die, whereupon the time loop resets to the point of initialisation. The one caveat is that each life will always be worse than the previous one.
• In Superman storyline A Mind-Switch in Time, Lex Luthor traps Superboy into a loop, forcing him to relive the same day over and again.
• Galactus once did this to the Sphinx in a Fantastic Four storyline, forcing him to relive his life (including his defeat by Galactus) over and over again endlessly. He eventually managed to escape, though.
• One of the more successful attempts to get rid of the Superman villain Doomsday was to trap him in a time loop. It was only undone when the same heroes who started it deemed it necessary to bring back Doomsday to fight a greater threat.

Films — Animated

• DC Showcase – Constantine: The House of Mystery. Because he helped the Flash create a new Flashpoint, The Spectre consigns John Constantine to eternity in the House of Mystery, where he sees his friends as demonic version of themselves who kill him over and over for centuries. The irony is the House of Mystery was meant to be a Lotus-Eater Machine where Constantine could live forever with his loved ones, safe from those who mean him harm, but his guilt and self-loathing turned it into a Self-Inflicted Hell.

Films — Live-Action

• In Doctor Strange (2016), the main villain is ultimately defeated this way. As an Eldritch Abomination from beyond time itself, Dormammu has no concept of time, which works against him when the film's title protagonist traps him in a time loop. Doctor Strange offers to bargain with Dormammu but is easily killed by the Multiversal Conqueror. Each time he's killed, the timeline resets and Strange offers to bargain again, and again, and again. Because Dormammu exists outside of time, he has a Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory and no idea how to counter the spell, meaning he sees each and every loop like it's a continuous thing, with Strange resurrecting each time he kills him, but he has no idea how to stop Strange from resurrecting. Ultimately realizing just how futile it is for him to keep killing Strange over and over, he agrees to hear out Strange's bargain; Dormammu and his mooks will leave the Earth alone and in exchange Strange will release him from the time loop. Faced with the alternative of remaining stuck in the Time Loop Trap, he agrees.
  Dormammu: You will never win!
  Doctor Strange: No... but I can lose. Again, and again, and again, and again forever... And that makes you my prisoner.
  Dormammu: No! Stop! Make this stop! Set me free!
• The Stinger at the end of Happy Death Day 2U has Tree, after seeing that Danielle is an asshole in both timelines (a straight-up Alpha Bitch in the normal one and a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing in the alternate one), suggesting her for DARPA's experiment into the reactor that caused the time loop. Cut to Danielle waking up screaming from what is likely the latest of many days trapped in a time loop.
• In Triangle, it's not clear who put Jess in the time loop(s) or how, but there's no visible way for her to get out, and a plausible case can easily be made that she's in either Hell or Purgatory, and we see some reasons someone or something with that power might feel she needs to be punished.

Literature

• In The Dark Tower (2004), it is revealed that Roland is stuck in one of these, and is doomed to repeat his quest for the Dark Tower again and again. However, the epilogue which starts a new loop shows that one small thing has changed (Roland has regained the Horn of Eld this time) so there is a possibility that the trap will not be eternal.
• Incarnations of Immortality in ...And Eternity, Hell is shown to work this way, with souls condemned to relive each sin until they repent. One sin at a time, until it is repented, then on to the next.
• Star Trek: Voyage to Adventure, a choose your own adventure-style book based on Star Trek: The Original Series, can have this fate befall the reader's avatar. Taking a job in Mr. Spock's lab sees the protagonist witness Spock vanishing into a glowing field, and they're able to parse his notes enough to figure out that a lever in the room controls the experiment. By pulling back on the lever, time itself starts to rewind; if the reader chooses to let the lever go, time resumes as usual, but then the protagonist finds their hand grabbing the lever of its own volition, now stuck in a time loop.
• The ChronoGuard in the Thursday Next series use this as a means of imprisonment for high-risk criminals, including the title character's nemesis Aornis Hades, who is trapped in a loop of waiting to pay for clothes at a department store.
• The villain of The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The World is stuck in one, Ironically, the Special Corps have brought this about without meaning to, provoking his violent hatred of them.
• In Worm, this is the power of Grey Boy, one of the original members of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Not only can he trap his opponents in a loop running over a few seconds each time — loops which will last, according to Word of God, for at least a few thousand years — but any torture he chooses to inflict on the victims will recur and accumulate from loop to loop. He's easily the most feared member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, to the point where Jack Slash is only willing to produce one clone of Gray Boy compared with dozens of clones of the other members.
• Trazyn the Infinite is doing this to a squad of Chaos Marines in Warhammer 40,000. Or rather, they are doing it to themselves: they broke into his storage vault to steal a time warping artifact and he let them. He even pops by some loops to explain what they're doing to themselves, since activating the artifact sends them back in time as well, but naturally they don't believe him.

Live-Action TV

• Multiple examples in Doctor Who:
  • At the end of "The Claws of Axos", the Doctor permanently traps the malevolent alien entity Axos in a time loop.
  • "Image of the Fendahl": It's revealed that the Time Lords placed the lost fifth planet of Earth's solar system in a time loop to prevent the Fendahl from escaping from it. It didn't work.
  • "The Armageddon Factor": The Doctor uses the partially-completed Key to Time to trap the Marshal of Atrios' command vessel in a time loop, to stop him from launching a nuclear attack on the planet Zeos.
  • "Meglos": The titular villain traps the Doctor and Romana in a time loop referred to as a "chronic hysteresis". Since they're both Time Lords, they realize what's happening and manage to break out of it.
  • The two-parter "The Pandorica Opens" and "The Big Bang": River Song is trapped in one by the TARDIS itself, looping around the final moments before the console room explodes. It's a safety protocol meant to save her, but also means that she is trapped in the heart of the explosion.
  • "Eve of the Daleks". The Doctor thinks that the Daleks are employing one against them, but it turns out to be a subversion: it's the TARDIS, in reset mode, saving them from the Daleks by creating a decaying time loop (it's left ambiguous whether this is deliberate or accidental). It's also a "Groundhog Day" Loop which means both sides have to anticipate each others reactions and counter-act them, with the winner being whoever is still alive when the final loop runs down.
• In the French-German TV series Find Me in Paris, the Time Collectors trap Henri's father in a time loop, where he keeps dropping an apple from his desk and picking it up again and again and again.
• A version of this occurs in season 3 of The Flash (2014), where the main antagonist of the season, Savitar kills Barry's love interest, Iris. This causes Barry to create time remnants in an attempt to defeat Savitar, but it fails. The sole surviving time remnant, shunned by Team Flash for not being the original Barry, goes insane and travels back in time to become Savitar. Eventually, Barry traps Savitar inside of the Speed Force, and the loop begins again, with Savitar repeatedly getting imprisoned.
• Zari is put through one in Legends of Tomorrow episode "Here We Go Again", where the Waverrider continuously blows up killing everyone on board, before resetting to a point in time. However, Zari is the only one who can remember, so she uses the time loop to try and discover where the source of the explosion is, investigating each of the Legends and getting to know them better. They finally discover the time loop is the result of Time Bureau Agent Gary's device, which he was using in an attempt to keep the Legends alive so they could discover the bomb. However, Mick destroys the device and they are only left with one attempt to find the bomb, to which they discover it was from the souvenir they brought onto the Waverrider. Zari pulls a Heroic Sacrifice, sealing herself and the bomb in the Captain's quarters and using her powers to contain the explosion. Turns out the whole thing was a Secret Test of Character carried out by the ship's AI Gideon via a Lotus-Eater Machine and was using this to help Zari get closer to the Legends.
  • After Thawne's death (well, one of their deaths), they were brought back to life only to be put in one of these, trapped in the June 28th, 1914, forced to stop the endless wave of time travelers trying to save Archduke Ferdinand. After Thawne is killed again, the Legends get rid of Robot Nate by tricking them into taking Thawne's place in the time loop.
• In Loki (2021), Mobius puts Loki into one — endlessly looping him through repeatedly getting beaten up by an angry Lady Sif — when he thinks Loki is messing with him. Well, more than is usual for a Loki, at any rate. Loki has Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, possibly deliberately imposed on him by Mobius, so that he's aware of the loop — but nothing he can try can break him out of the pattern.
• This is how Hell works in Lucifer (2016). When someone enters Hell, they are placed in a torturous scenario (usually related to how they died), and once the scenario runs through, the loop starts over again, with a lot of the inhabitants not even consciously remembering the loop. This is also one of the rare examples of this trope where escape is possible, with the prisoner only having to forgive themselves for what they've done in their life. Though, according to Lucifer, no one has ever done this during his tenure. Lee Garner, better known as "Mister Said Out Bitch", escapes his loop with Lucifer's assistance, proving that it is possible. In the finale, Lucifer turns this into therapy, with the goal of eventually rehabilitating everyone in Hell.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus has a sketch centering around the concept of Déjà Vu, but which in practice works like this trope for the poor commentator.

Music

• At the end of the Evillious Chronicles franchise, most of the major antagonists (or their reincarnations), including Gammon Octo, Adam, Eve, and Irina Clockworker, are subjected to the Court ending. Here, they're all sucked back into the past 1000 years of Evillious' history, made to play out the events of the series on loop forever.

Tabletop Games

• Timemaster: Just called a "loop trap" in-game. A common assignment in the Time Corps is to be voluntarily looped into an important event (say, the assassination of Julius Caesar) to make sure someone's on hand should the Demoreans try to alter the event. Can also happen accidentally, if a time traveler doesn't keep track of when they've been.

Video Games

• Destiny 2: Forsaken sees this happening in the Dreaming City, following the canonical events of the "Last Wish" raid. The death of the last Ahamkara, Riven triggers a curse orchestrated by Savathûn. Savathûn wants to break into the Distributary, where the accelerated timestream will allow her to supercharge her strength by slaughtering everyone there. The loop resets whenever the Guardians kill her daughter, Dul Incaru. What makes it more horrifying for everyone is that everyone in the Dreaming City is aware of the loop, but are unable to not act the same way they did in previous loops, and they can't warn people of ambushes or their impending deaths. Only the Guardians are capable of doing anything different, but thus far haven't been able to break the loop.
• In Fallout: New Vegas Old World Blues, The Reveal is that the supposed Big Bad Dr. Mobius was a Well-Intentioned Extremist who did this to his former Mad Scientist friends in order to prevent them from wreaking havoc on what was left of the world without harming them. Their mental patterns were on a loop, so they were barely aware of what they were really doing (until Elijah, Christine, Ulysses, and you showed up). They don't remember the outside world except in the vaguest sense, and they continuously do the same experiments over and over, learning nothing from them. In fact, to reinforce it the new names Mobius gave them deliberately have to do with infinite loops and endless repetition. A 0 (a loop), an 8 (a sideways infinity symbol), Klein (as in a Klein bottle), Mobius (as in a Möbius strip), Borous (short for Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail — though you can point out that it is spelled incorrectly), and Dala (short for Mandala, a circular geometric pattern).
• In Fate/Grand Order the plot of the Summer 2018 event turns out to be this. There's a "Groundhog Day" Loop that occurs every 7 days in Hawaii, which traps everyone, including our protagonist, within it. Near the end of the event's story, it's revealed that the culprit was BB, who borrowed powers from Nyarlathotep in order to set this all up. She did so in order give everyone, and especially our protagonist, eternal bliss.
• The final boss of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates tries to undo his loss by constantly jumping to a more optimal world, but the protagonists turn it around on him and bind his fate to that one moment, trapping him forever.
  "My power can undo this... over and again!" Please...someone help...me...
• Honkai Impact 3rd: This is what "Sakura Samsara" is in a nutshell, where Sakura('s soul) is trapped in a looping time inside her "stigma dimension", courtesy of "Hellmaru", the Honkai Beast that was sealed with her. Specifically, Sakura is trapped in the times of her backstory (including the death of her sister and Kallen coming to the village), and the time loops when either Sakura "dies" or Kallen does. This is all so that Hellmaru can break her mind and that the beast can fully possess her body and break free. This has happened for approximately 500 years, and Sakura can only dream for her "white-haired savior" to save her from this nightmare. That eventually comes to pass with Kiana's help, with her helping to defeat the beast, turning the dimension into a Dream Land that reflects Sakura's memories, allowing her and Kallen to live together in peace.
  Bronya: If someone doesn't intervene, this tragedy will just keep repeating itself. Those trapped in it will never be set free, either.
  Kiana: I WILL find out what happened and prevent the tragedy.
• In LEGO Dimensions, Lord Vortech manages to do this to the heroes early on by putting them in a rift loop which they don't notice until they realise that their dimension-hopping journey is taking longer than usual, only to get rescued by The Doctor. After a nasty encounter which has the heroes aware on how near-unstoppable he is with his dimension-warping abilities, it's suggested that they could lock him in a properly-constructed rift loop like how he did earlier, so he can't use his powers to escape.
• Quan Chi's ending in Mortal Kombat: Armageddon; After defeating Blaze, Quan Chi ascends to the heavens, where the Elder Gods transform the necromancer into a kamidogu- Shinnok's medallion. The Elder Gods then send the kamidogu back in time for Shinnok to discover...
• Phantasy Star Online 2:
  • To prevent the Profound Darkness from reconstituting itself and destroying the universe, [Persona] uses the power of the Time Stream to drag it back in time, effectively locking it in a period where it rises, scatters into the Dark Falz Collective, is imprisoned, gets set free, reunites courtesy of [Gemini], infests Matoi, is driven out, gets taken in by [Persona] and defeated. Every time. The start of Chapter 5 is an attempt to break [Persona] out of the loop using aether power, but things go fruit-looped and the dimension of Omega is made manifest as a result.
  • If you think that's crazy, there's an even bigger one. After Shiva is defeated, the Profound Darkness goes into the Guardian, who promptly opens the Time Stream and goes all the way back, essentially making the entire PSO 2 story a "Groundhog Day" Loop to keep the Primordial Darkness from unmaking all creation. Only by saving all worlds and retaining the strength to fight (indicated by completing all the main story chapters and clearing the penultimate mission with an S grade) can the Guardian have a shot at changing the outcome and banishing the Primordial Darkness once and for all.
• Undertale (unsurprisingly) uses this in an usual way, pulling it against the player. Sans, the final boss of the Genocide playthrough, has full knowledge of the players ability to save and reload and attempts to stop them by presenting a final boss so difficult the player will never be able to get past, regardless of how many times they try. The fact that the player will be attempting the fight more than once is acknowledged throughout, and Sans holds absolutely nothing back, throwing out as many brutally unfair attacks as possible, and, if the player makes it far enough, going so far as refusing to end his turn to prevent the player from getting their turn and winning the fight.
• Your Future Self places the main character and his future self in a time loop. The younger version is instructed to convince the future version that what was done is wrong, and has to build a conversational rapport to be convincing. You're told that you'll leave the time loop once the future self feels the guilt of the crime, as that will fix the key point in history that resulted in a large number of deaths (and cascaded into societal collapse.)

Visual Novels

• Happens in Book 2 Chapter 2 of Endless Summer where Taylor realizes they're caught in a time loop and they're the only one not only knows it, but can't tell anyone else about it. They have to subtly get their party to break the object that's causing the time loop. During that time, they can also use each loop to get info about mysteries that were still lingering from Book 1 by Everett Rourke who had come out of cryostasis.
• In Remember11, it turns out that the entire plot circling back and forth between a few days in 2011 and a few days in 2012 was all an elaborate trap by the original Satoru to trap the audience in one of these as revenge. To him, the audience is essentially a multidimensional being that can wander freely through time and space and change reality wantonly through their understanding of it.

Web Animation

• In Season 16 of Red vs. Blue, the main antagonist of the season, Chrovos, is shown to be imprisoned inside a black hole, sent there by his creations, the Cosmic Powers. In season 17, one of the powers, Genkins, steals Chrovos' power and travels back to the beginning of the universe to gain power over the ages. However, over time he forgets who he is and becomes Chrovos himself, creating the Cosmic Powers, including Genkins, who then imprison him.

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: In "Doc Gets Rad", Doctor McNinja defeats Sparklelord by throwing him into a time portal, which sends him back to the moment he first came to Earth, causing him to constantly relive that portion of his life over and over. However, in "The End, Part 1", Doc needs Sparklelord's help to defeat King Radical, so he uses a magical summoning device to free Sparklelord from the time loop.
• Tales of Greed: "1 Minute" is about a watch that can rewind time by one minute up to three times per day. Going over that limit causes the watch to loop the minute over and over, as Sucheol Jang finds out. Sucheol repeatedly gets beat up by his bully until he dodges the attack and eventually defeats the bully, but he can't stop the loop until he takes off the watch. He then uses the glitch to become a Time Master. At the end of the story, Sucheol is kidnapped and bound by the watch's previous owner, who kills him before glitching out his watch, forcing him to experience being killed again and again.
  Sucheol: I am trapped inside one minute.

Western Animation

• The final arc villain of Ben 10: Omniverse, Maltruant, was defeated at the beginning of the universe, with three parts of himself key to his power removed and hidden. Over the millennia, Maltruant puts himself back together and eventually decides to go back in time to the beginning of the universe to try and reshape it in his image. He is then defeated by Ben and Rook, with Paradox disassembling him, thus starting the loop over again.
• In the Justice League episode "The Once and Future Thing: Time, Warped", the time-traveling villain Chronos is eventually dealt with in this fashion by Batman. This is done by reprogramming his Time Machine to bring him back to a few seconds before he used it, thus keeping him (and his wife) in an eternal loop.
• One episode of The Mask has Amelia Chronos stick a device on Stanley Ipkiss that traps him in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, while she positions herself in specific spots on each loop as part of a plan to gain control over time. At the end of the episode, the Mask gets the device off, resets it to a loop of a few seconds, puts it on Chronos, and then drops a grandfather clock on her face. In her next appearance, Chronos states that, before she finally got the device off, she was put through the loop for the equivalent of a thousand years. Naturally, she's royally pissed. To make matters worse, said episode ends with her getting trapped in another time loop, this time involving an exploding brie bomb…
• Played for Laughs in Rick and Morty when Rick returns to his original universe after decades in the Season 6 premiere and discovers that he got drunk and did this to all of his neighbors, trapping them in a mental time loop and making them relive the same day over and over while their bodies continued to age. He makes sure to Mercy Kill them before he leaves again.

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"Dormammu, I've come to bargain!"

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