A trope commonly seen in mysteries. Cut from Scene A to Scene B, or alternate between two scenes. The viewer assumes that B shortly follows A in the first case, or that both are occurring simultaneously in the second. In truth, there is a much larger gap, or the scenes do not occur in that order.
Often used for temporally-based examples of Cut Apart. See also Meanwhile, in the Future… and Flashback B-Plot, for when events from different time frames are edited together for the sake of suspense or exposition, without necessarily being deceptive.
As this is a form of The Reveal, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- The Beginning After the End: In the chapter right before the climax of Volume 11, Arthur fortifies key locations across Dicathen to distract Agrona's forces, all while keeping his allies Locked Out of the Loop. At the end of the chapter, it seems Arthur's true location is the djinn sanctuary in Darv as Eleanor and Wren are there to see him off. However, the sanctuary turns out to be a decoy meant to distract the Legacy, with Arthur's true location being Sylvia's cave Where It All Began. This is concealed by the line in Arthur's narration after he parts ways with Eleanor and Wren: "The journey to the refuge I'd prepared did not take long". The syntax makes it appear that Arthur went further into the sanctuary before entering the keystone, when in actuality he went to Sylvia's cave which would not have taken him long enough given his ability to teleport or fly.
- Higurashi: When They Cry: Ending to Watanagashi-hen. Scene cuts from a woman announcing she's killed all her targets to police investigating outside the last target's apartment. In fact, the last target is still alive at the time of the announcement.
- Oshi no Ko: The Stinger of Season 2 shows Hikaru Kamiki - Aqua and Ruby's father - out in the mountains after having murdered another fling of his. Initially it seems this crime occurred concurrently with the end of the season's events. However, midway through Season 3 after Aqua had revealed that he and Ruby were Ai's children, it's revealed that Hikaru's victim - Yura Katayose - had actually been contacted for the biopic on Ai that Aqua and Director Gotanda were making after said announcement. Meaning her death occurred much later than what the sequencing suggested.
- So I'm a Spider, So What?: One of the biggest twists in the entire series, but obvious when you think about it. All of the reincarnators were born at the same time, so everything happening to Kumoko, active from the moment she is born, is happening over a decade before everyone else, who had to actually grow up. The deception is further augmented due to Julius, Shun's elder brother, being a dead ringer for Shun during Kumoko's time (with the only hint that it isn't Shun being Kumoko's analysis of his stats showing Julius' name being briefly shown). The two most blatant hints are that Administrator 'D' informs Kumoko that her fellow reincarnations are all babies, and she even encounters Sophia as a newborn despite the viewer having already seen Sophia in adult form in the present day.
Comic Books
- One Futurama comic has Fry, Bender, and Leela forced to get into separate escape pods, which freeze them until they land on a habitable planet. Fry ends up in a Western planet, Bender ends up in a parody of Mad Max, and Leela ends up in a parody of Avatar. Near the end, it's discovered that not only are all these planets the same, but the trio landed within days of each other and met the exact same natives. After the outlaw attacks, Fry was the one who convinced them to invent automobiles and build a giant post-apocalyptic walled city. Then Bender took over the city, destroyed it, and caused them to flee into the woods, where they shed their clothes (freeing their tails) and covered themselves in blue war paint in an attempt to scare Bender away. These are the "Na'vi" Leela met (called the "Na'ive" because of their willingness to immediately change themselves whenever a stranger tells them to).
- At the end of the first part of Tag and Bink Are Dead, the two protagonists are on board the Death Star, disguised as Imperial soldiers (with helmets hiding their faces). Darth Vader shows up, informing that Rebel ships are incoming and orders them to follow him. The next scene shows, apparently, Tag and Bink fighting in the battle of Yavin as Vader's wingmen, then dying when the Death Star is blown up. However, the beginning of the second part reveals that these were just two random Imperial Soldiers; Tag and Bink ran off as soon as Vader turned his back, and by luck they escaped the Death Star in time. Then the author, Kevin Rubio, makes a brief appearance and comments on the trick.
- Watchmen: The protagonists' confrontation with Ozymandias is intercut with the on-the-street scenes in New York. Once he explains his Genghis Gambit, he adds "I did it 35 minutes ago." Cut to all those people being killed, which we then know all happened before the other scenes began. Note that there are clocks all over the place in both the Karnak scenes and New York scenes, so readers paying careful attention wouldn't be surprised.
Fan Works
- In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Our True Colors, what at first appears to be a flashback describing how an orphaned Scootaloo came to Ponyville is in fact a second plot line detailing a different pony's past.
- The Ace Attorney Online
mini-case The Tangled Turnabout features a Locked Room Mystery that appears to be impossible to solve due to everyone seemingly having an alibi. The solution micro-case, The Untangled Turnabout, reveals that most scenes were out of chronological order (as the case's name suggested), making the murder not a locked room at all and solvable by realizing that everyone but one character was with someone else around the time of the murder (you're told in advance there is only one culprit and no accomplices).
Film — Animated
- Your Name: Two Japanese teenagers, Taki and Mitsuha, begin switching bodies at random. They've never met, but as they keep switching they start learning more about each other. Eventually Taki decides to take a train to meet Mitsuha- but discovers she died three years earlier, and they've been switching through time as well as switching bodies. The rest of the plot involves them trying to stop her death from occurring.
- Another example occurs much earlier in the film. The very first scene is "Mitsuha" waking up, and we quickly deduce that it's actually Taki, a guy, in Mitsuha's body. The very next scene is "Mitsuha" coming down the stairs... except it actually is Mitsuha. The next day. She (and the viewer) then proceed to find out what all happened in the day between those two scenes.
Film — Live Action
- Arrival is dotted with flashbacks of protagonist Louise's backstory, raising her daughter who died of cancer at the age of twelve. Late in the film, she asks the heptapods who the little girl is that she's been seeing in these visions — they're actually flash-forwards and the daughter hasn't been born yet; her grasp of the heptapod language has allowed Lousie to become a Non-Linear Character like them.
- Babel: The four story threads appear pretty much concurrent. At the end, it turns out the subplot involving the deaf girl takes place about a week after the three others.
- The Batman (2022): This happens when it's revealed that the Riddler is now targeting Bruce Wayne, with Batman trying to race home to stop whatever he's planning, intercut with shots of Alfred going through the mail to create tension. Batman is shown desperately trying to call home with no one picking up, as Alfred is shown finding and slowly inspecting a suspicious package. Another servant eventually answers the phone and reveals that what Batman is trying to stop already happened just as he comes within sight of Wayne Tower and sees smoke already billowing out of the penthouse. The next shot is of Alfred realizing what the package is and throwing it away just before it explodes (his split-second reaction saves his life, as he's later shown to be hospitalized but not killed). The servant then reveals the shots of Alfred happened an hour ago.
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The first scene, where Joel goes out to Montauk and meets Clementine, actually takes place after most of the events in the rest of the film, right after Joel's memories are completely erased.
- In Kamen Rider: The First, there's a sub-plot of a man in a hospital and a girl who tries to befriend him (against his will) that seems to have nothing to do with anything. Slowly, she gets him to defrost, and we find she is ill as well and just likes making people happy. They plant flowers together near the end. We cut from that to the field where the two defeated Shocker lieutenants have landed - it's the same one, and the flowers have grown, as the hospital scenes were in fact years go. The two generals, seeing the flowers, remember their true selves as the two from those scenes, just before dying.
- Mulholland Drive, in its last act (which conflicts with much of what is shown before), does some rapid intercutting between scenes that take place before and after the second-to-last scene.
- Ocean's Twelve: There was a segment where we see Ocean's team and a rival thief both trying to steal a MacGuffin, but find out that the rival got there much earlier and the Macguffin is gone.
- Used several times by the Saw franchise as a form of The Reveal:
- In Saw II, there are two plot lines: the victims in the Nerve Gas House, and the police watching them on closed-circuit TV. It later turns out that the TV footage is recorded, and Eric's son is in fact in the same building in which he's watching the recordings. It's an interesting example since the characters have the same mistaken impression as the viewer — to tragic effect.
- Saw IV plays a similar trick. The first scene is chronologically the last; everything else takes place during the previous film.
- Jigsaw goes even further — the barn game takes place over ten years before the rest of the movie's events.
- Triangle makes it seem as if the scene with Jess at her house and the one where she arrives at the dock happens one after another. There is a crucial time gap between the two, in which she kills her alternate self and takes her son out, only to get him killed in a car accident. In fact, we don't even follow the same Jess; the one in the opening is the one killed.
Literature
- The Fifth Season follows three main characters- a girl named Damaya, a young woman named Syenite and a woman named Essun. It is eventually made clear that all three are the same person, in flashback. Somewhat played with in that it was always clear that the Damaya and Syenite segments took place in the past, as the city of Yumenes is destroyed in the Essun segments but still exists in the other plots. The exact temporal relationship isn't clear until later on however.
- The Hike (2023): The main plot following the four women is intercut with chapters from Leif's perspective; he's informed that two hikers have found what appears to be an injured or possibly dead woman up on Blafjell Mountain, with Leif racing up there to help. It's suggested that Leif's chapters take place a short time after the protagonists' hike goes horribly awry only for it to be revealed near the end that they're actually set a whole year earlier, with the woman's body belonging to Karin - who is missing in the present day - rather than one of the protagonists; this further reveals that Leif knows far more about Karin's death than he led everyone to believe and had a reason to cover up her murder.
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: Doctor Sheppard (the narrator) notes how he wrote that he visited Ackroyd's study at 8:40 and left at 8:50, in a manner that suggests that nothing particularly interesting happened in those ten minutes. However, it is later revealed that he actually murdered Ackroyd himself in that time frame, and observes in-narrative that if he had phrased that encounter some other way then the reader would have been more curious about what happened in those ten minutes.
- The Reader (2016) makes it seem like Lon and Mareah's studies are taking place at the same time as Sefia's quest. In actuality, they happened years before, and Lon and Mareah are Sefia's parents.
- The Three Coffins: The murders actually occurred in the opposite order from what appears.
- The Silent Patient: The book follows psychoanalyst Theo as he tries to unravel the mystery behind his new patient's criminal past while grappling with his wife's infidelity. In a final twist, however, it's revealed that his wife's affair actually occurred six years earlier, Theo himself had been stalking his patient, and his actions ultimately triggered the crime that sets the story in motion.
Live-Action TV
- House invokes this during the Three Stories episode. House is telling the medical students about three cases involving leg problems and each with its own diagnosis. At one point, the flashback scene shows House talking with his own staff about one case, then brings up one of the other cases — only his team looks confused, and House reveals that that case didn't occur until three months later.
- How I Met Your Mother had a season 4 episode that used this effectively: the title itself, "Three Days of Snow," was already a hint.
- Jonathan Creek, episode Angel Hair: Events that we think were recorded days in advance actually turn out to be happening live over a closed-circuit TV system rigged to look like a VCR. An exact inversion of the trope use in Saw II.
- Lost:
- Every episode in the first three seasons devotes much of its runtime to flashbacks to the life of that episode's centric character before they landed on the Island. The Season 3 finale appears to depict a Darkest Hour in the life of the de facto protagonist Jack, which in the end turns out to be flash-forward to after he and five other survivors managed to escape the Island. Flash-forwards to this aftermath became the norm in Season 4.
- One particular Season 4 episode featured what appeared to be flash-forwards to Sun being in labor while Jin desperately tries to buy her a gift and meet her at the hospital on time. As it turns out, Jin's segments are actually flashbacks to him buying a gift for his boss's wife, from a time when he and Sun had been married for mere weeks. The flash-forward then clarifies that Jin was not one of the six who left the Island.
- Once Upon a Time (2011):
- "Broken", the first episode of Season 2, alternates between events in Storybrooke, and the Enchanted Forest version of Sleeping Beauty. Since Season 1 has primed the audience to think of Enchanted Forest scenes as flashbacks, and "What happened to the Enchanted Forest after the curse?" is not a question that's even been asked at this point, the lack of regular characters is not enough to clue the audience in that the scenes are happening simultaneously.
- Similarly, Season 7's "Is This Henry Mills" interweaves Adult Henry resisting the truth in Hyperion Heights with Young Henry finishing school back in Storybrooke (shortly before he leaves for the New Enchanted Forest, as seen in the season opener). Not until Roni tells Adult Henry that the reason nobody in Storybrooke knows they're missing is that the curse sent them back in time, does it turn out that Young Henry's graduation is happening now. (This is the least of the chronological confusions in this season, but most of the others are explained as they come up.)
- The big twist in The Prisoner (2009) involves a Flashback B-Plot that turns out to be something rather more complicated. The audience is led to assume that the scenes in New York are all set before the protagonist's arrival in the Village — and then the protagonist in New York remembers something that happened in the Village. It turns out that the Village isn't a physical location, but a shared subconscious dream state, and that the protagonist's conscious self has been going about his life in New York at the same time that his dreaming self has been exploring the Village.
- Sherlock: After Moriarty's apparent death in "The Reichenbach Fall", the show starts teasing the possibility that he actually survived. This culminates in "The Final Problem", where Moriarty shows up in person on the island where Sherlock and John have just been taken captive — only it turns out that Moriarty's visit to the island actually took place years earlier, before "The Reichenbach Fall". It is then explained that the person he met then has been faking Moriarty's continued existence using recordings he made before he died.
- Westworld:
- In the first season, William and Logan's story is strongly hinted, and eventually revealed by the ninth episode, to be taking place years before the other events of the series, with William going on to become the "Man in Black" seen elsewhere in the story.
- Several scenes appear to feature Bernard chatting with Dolores. They actually took place decades ago, before the park even opened. Bernard is a Host made in the image of Arnold, who Dolores was actually talking to.
Music
- Funeral for a Friend's album Tales Don't Tell Themselves is mostly a concept album about a man who is having trouble at sea and hopes to get back to his family. However, the tracks are arranged to flow rather than to tell the story in a coherent order. The opening track, "Into Oblivion (Reunion)", seems to imply it's actually one of the last tracks chronologically. Confusingly, some of the tracks concern the character walking home through the desert but it isn't explained how he made it to land.
Video Games
- AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative initially presents itself as two investigations taking place six years apart, when different halves of a victim's body are uncovered. The "past" protagonist Ryuki's already-fragile mental state deteriorates further due to stress as the investigation remains unsolved, and the "present" protagonist Mizuki is a child in the "past" that grows up to become an investigator and takes over the case. However, there are some discrepancies in events, which is revealed towards the end to be because of this type of deception; half of Ryuki's segments actually take place in the "present", and half of Mizuki's segments were actually the player taking control of her older doppelganger in the "past". As such, except for the first body (which has a separate explanation) the mystery of how half of a dead body could appear much later than the other half is only for the player, and not for the characters (since in reality, the two halves of the later bodies were actually found at around the same time).
- The Five Nights at Freddy's series manages to do this across games. The second game initially presents itself as a direct sequel to the first game, with emphasis on a brand new restaurant with shiny new animatronics (known as the "Toy" animatronic line) replacing the original ones from the first game, who are in a state of disrepair and left in a maintenance room. The paycheck that the protagonist gets after completing the fifth night eventually reveals it's actually a prequel, with the supposed new restaurant being later closed down to move to a small location, the Toy generation getting scrapped, and the original animatronics getting refurbished and used again.
- Neva: The game opens with the heroine Alba and two wolves, a parent and a cub, facing the forces of corruption. The parent wolf dies, leaving Alba to raise the cub by herself. The screen then fades to black, and the first chapter of the story begins. The game follows Alba and the cub, Neva, as they fight against the forces of corruption. Neva grows with each passing chapter, and eventually has a cub of her own. Then, we discover that the opening scene was actually the end of Alba and Neva's journey. The parent wolf in the opening was Neva all along, while the cub is called Bruma. Neva dies, but the ending reveals additional context around the scene, showing that Neva and Bruma actually managed to defeat the corruption before Neva succumbed to her wounds.
- Played with in Second Sight where the narrative seems to alternate between the present and flashbacks into the past. The order of events is correct, but the "flashbacks" are actually the present, while the "present" is actually a flash-forward into a possible future.
- Undertale opens with a scene of a human child falling into the Underground in the year 201X, and upon starting the game you are given a prompt to "name the fallen child". The child in both of these instances is not the game's Player Character, but rather the original fallen child whose death served as a pivotal moment in the game's backstory. The player character, Frisk, is an entirely seperate child who fell into the Underground sometime in the far future.
Visual Novels
- Infinity series:
- The prologue of Ever17 switches back and forth between the two possible protagonists (Takeshi and the Kid). The two viewpoints are made to appear as though it is a mere perspective flip (including some scenes in which the viewpoint character changes in mid-conversation), but are actually similar events that take place on either side of a 17-year gap.
- Throughout the entirety of Remember11, the viewpoint switches between Kokoro and Satoru's bodies (though not their minds). Roughly halfway through the game, it is confirmed that there is a 1-year gap between the two time periods. Additionally, the end of the game also reveals that there was an additional 33 minute gap between perspective switches, which had remained undetected until then due to an inaccurate clock.
- Similar to Ever17, 12Riven's opening features what appears to be a mere perspective flip of the same incident. In the final route, we find out that these perspective flips are actually between two very similar events, exactly 24 hours apart.
- Lucy ~The Eternity She Wished For~: The game is interspersed with what appears to be flashbacks but are actually flash forwards. The short interludes with the Doctor and Lucy are in actuality the player character and Lucy interacting 15 years after the original ending.
- The Many Deaths of Lily Kosen: The start of the game mentions that it's Saturday, and the mysterious hooded figures - who are clearly the main group of friends - mention not having expected that their night would end up this way based on that morning. We then cut to Saturday morning, and it looks like it's going to build up to explaining why they're doing a ritual...but the events at the start of the game are eventually revealed to have actually taken place a year ago, with the ramifications of them only being felt now.
- In Zero Time Dilemma, after "Coincide", the camera alternates between the three teams as all of them receive the game rules by Zero. However, each team is getting information at completely different times, with each exposition separated by two hours. The scene the player sees is the conjunction of every scattered exposition in the form of a quick summary, effectively fooling the player into believing that all three teams are listening to Zero at the same time when actually they're not.
Web Animation
- Battle for Dream Island: The Power of Two, in "The Great Goikian Bake-Off", we see Team Just Not ending their 38-week long campaign of "Goikys & Dragons" in their big treehouse. Cake then calls for Golf Ball, which cuts to her humming a tune from afar while standing by Tree. Book then gets her attention, by throwing out their game, which cuts back to her, when a tiny board game shoots from Tree's head, and hits her. As it turns out, Just Not had shrunk themselves with Golf Ball's shrink-a-tron, so they can play inside Tree.
- Charlie the Unicorn's finale alternates between between two different plots, one with a new character named Nyx dealing with an unleashed Sealed Evil in a Can, and another with the Blue and Pink unicorns taking Charlie with them to deal with said Sealed Evil in a Can. In part 4 it is revealed the plot with Nyx actually took place ten thousand years in the past. We are actually seeing the story of how the demons possessing the Blue and Pink unicorns were unleashed upon the world. The Sealed Evil in a Can Blue and Pink were talking about was probably a lie.
Webcomics
- The first four Acts of Homestuck concern four friends, all young teenagers, who begin playing the videogame Sburb on the same day. Things get very confusing from there, so much so that Act 5 ends with characters triggering a Cosmic Retcon and jumping into a new universe. Act 6 begins with four new friends, all slightly older teenagers and obvious parallels of the comic's starting cast, starting their own game of Sburb. One of the twists in this Act is that these four teens aren't even living in the same century: Jane and Jake are living in 2011, while Dirk and Roxy are living about four centuries later. They communicate like they're contemporaries via a chat client that can send messages backwards and forwards in time.
- Used to convey the impression that Amber and Ethan are waking up next to each other in Shortpacked!, before The Reveal that they are both waking up next to Mike. The next strip continues alternating between the two scenes, but the last panel establishes the Ethan one happened first, and then Mike went back to Amber's room.
- This Wapsi Square strip contains a particularly extreme example. The transition from panel two to panel three looks almost instantaneous, but there is actually a time difference of roughly 80,000 years.
Western Animation
- American Dad!: In "Max Jets", Roger plays as the Smith's rich uncle "Max Jets", and showers them with gifts and money. But then, he falls in love with a waitress named Gina, who seems to be taking advantage of him so she can claim his fortune. So the family plots to kill him so they can claim his fortune, but the family bickers over who to kill him to get the extra cut, so they each plan to kill him separately. So we cut to nighttime, where Steve is dropping some scorpions into his morning soup, Hayley placing a toaster by his bathtub, and Francine hooking his oxygen mask to tank of poison… that's until she notices the kids are also prepping in the same bedroom as she is, and they bicker again. But then, Francine sprays some toxic gas into her face, knocking herself out, pushing Steve into Max Jet’s breakfast cart off the stairs, and bumps Hayley into the tub, and gets herself electrocuted.
- Futurama: In "Fry and Leela's Big Fling", Fry and Leela attempt to have a romantic time together, but with everyone around they can't get time alone. They end up going to a reserve where they are completely alone, and served well. Meanwhile, Amy, Bender and Zoidberg make a delivery to a planet inhabited by primate, including Guenter. He then gives the crew a tour of his planet, where the last thing he presents an Alien Zoo where animals are in fence-free enclosures but held in captivity with force fields. After Fry and Leela resolved their feud they come together and start to kiss, but little did they know, the fireflies in the background would actually be flashes from the visitors' cameras, as they are in the zoo enclosure for the human species, much to Amy, Bender and Zoidberg's disgust as they watched them. The crew then tries to help Fry and Leela break out to save them from humiliation.
- Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire: In the "Hatima" short, it first looks like that the plot is going back and forth between a battle in the Fish People underwater settlement and a young human woman on the surface who is studying the Hatima right as the battle is happening. It then turns out that the human segment is actually depicting the forgotten origin story of the Fish People, who were all ill or disabled people who considered transforming into one to be a reasonable price to pay to be cured, only to find out that the other humans didn't agree.
- In an episode of Young Justice (2010), one of the heroes is cornered by two supervillains; the show cuts to commercial and then returns to what seems to be the same moment, with the hero starting his escape. It later turns out that the hero is an unwitting Manchurian Agent pawn of the villains, and spent the commercial break in a trance as they gave him his instructions.