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The reset button technique (based on the idea of status quo ante) is a plot device that interrupts continuity in works of fiction. Simply put, use of a reset button device returns all characters and situations to the status quo they held before a major change of some sort was introduced. Often used in science fiction television series, soap operas, and comic books, the device allows elaborate and dramatic changes to characters and the fictional universe that might otherwise invalidate the premise of the show with respect to future continuity. Writers may, for example, use the technique to allow the audience to experience the death of the lead character, which traditionally would not be possible without effectively ending the work. Image File history File links Circle-question. ... Status quo ante is a Latin term meaning, the state of things as it was before. ... A plot device is a person or an object introduced to a story to affect or advance the plot. ... Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ... In fiction, continuity is consistency of the characteristics of persons, plot, objects, places and events seen by the reader or viewer. ...

The term may be based on the reset button found on a video game console or computer. When pressed, such a button automatically restarts the machine, losing any unsaved data. Reset button can also refer to the plot device known as the Reset button technique. ... A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or electronic device that manipulates the video display signal of a display device (a television, monitor, etc. ...

Effective use of this device depends on the audience being unaware of the continuity status, or successful suspension of disbelief that continuity is or will be interrupted, and the eventual communication of the status of continuity to the audience. It is usually employed as a plot twist that effectively undoes all the happenings of the episode. Common uses of this technique draw liberally from science fiction and metaphysical ideas, perhaps contributing to its widespread use in those genres. Examples of the reset button technique include dream sequences, alternate-history flashbacks, daydreams, time travel and hallucinations.

Continuity-wise, television shows belong in a continuum between the serial and episode-by-episode extremes. In serial shows, each episode not only follows but builds on previous material, and although the reset button can still be used, any use generally leaves a negative imprint on the general continuity. In episode-by-episode works, on the other hand, the RBT is often utilized to eliminate dangling plot threads. Soap operas are almost universally serials; American cartoons and sitcoms are almost universally episode-by-episode. Johnny Vaughan, in discussions about his sitcom ’Orrible, stated one rule about the writing: “No richer, no wiser,” meaning that everything must be back to normal by the end of the episode.^{[citation needed]} For Philippine soap opera, see Teleserye. ... A cartoon is any of several forms of illustrations with varied meanings that evolved from its original meaning. ... This article or section seems to contain too many examples (or of a poor quality) for an encyclopedia entry. ... Johnny Randall Vaughan (born July 16, 1966) is a British writer and broadcaster. ... Orrible is a British television sitcom produced by the BBC. Broadcast in 2001, it was written by and starred Johnny Vaughan. ...

The danger of the reset button is that the audience will become frustrated and cynical because they are expected to suspend disbelief and emotionally invest in the characters, yet know that anything the characters do to improve their selves or their world is destined to be futile, since a change in either would require the show to have continuity rather than be stand-alone episodes. Audiences are forced to conclude that it is too painful to care in the first place about the characters or their world, so why bother watching the show at all?^{[citation needed]}

History

The idea of a return to the status quo ante is certainly not original to television; Shakespeare scholars have recognized it as a regular device of his comedies^{[citation needed]}, and it is in fact a standard literary device in general. Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ...

Examples

• The various Star Trek series (most notoriously Star Trek: Voyager)- The writers would often kill or significantly alter characters or situations, but reset near the end of the story arc to avoid permanent changes.(Example episodes include:“Year of Hell”; “Yesterday’s Enterprise”; “All Good Things...”; and “Twilight”.)

• The television sitcom “Gilligan's Island” - It appears that nothing the castaways do ever jeopardizes the continuation of the series, as nothing they do actually succeeds in getting them off the island.

• The television show “Dallas” - An entire season of the show, including the death of a major character, was written off as a dream of another character.

• The radio series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” - This series used the technique of “Dallas”, explaining the entire second series as being a hallucination by Zaphod Beeblebrox, brought on by drinking too many Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters.

• The supernatural drama “Charmed” - The reset button was constantly used in episodes in which one of the main characters was transformed into some kind of demon or magical creature for the duration of the episode, but returned to normal at the end of the episode.

• The TV series “Smallville” - In the episodes when another character discovers Clark Kent’s superhuman abilities, there will be some unforeseen side effect of some element of the episode that causes that character to lose the part of their short term memory and forgetting what they had witnessed.

• The TV series Quantum Leap - The very premise of this show, Dr. Beckett's "leaping from life to life" through time, provided a natural and complete reset device for each episode. As long as Dr. Beckett never leaped home (to stay,) nothing substantial in his situation could change, since at each episode's end he would leap out of the time, place, and identity he had occupied for the duration of that show, to be assigned a completely new setting and identity in the next episode.

• In some TV westerns of the 1960s and early 1970s (and notably prominent on the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service), if any male character on the show got seriously involved with a woman, as soon as he married her, she would die in the same episode. This reset button technique was used so that the main character could have serious love interests in each episode while returning to status quo ante at the end of the episode.(The same form of this technique was also applied in “The Big Valley”, “Bonanza”, and “CSI:Miami”.

• Several animated series (especially anime) also employ the reset button so that no new design work is required, and to be able to reuse existing cells. Animation writers enjoy poking fun at the constraining practice when possible. Examples include:
  • “Cardcaptor Sakura” - An episode exists where Sakura captures a card known as “The Time”. This event has the card’s spirit continuously repeat that same day over and over again, using the reset button multiple times in the duration of the episode.
  • The “Excel Saga” - The anime widely parodied the whole concept, with “the Great Will of the Macrocosm” repeatedly resetting the whole universe whenever things head off unsatisfactorily (Over five resets occur in the first episode alone due to the main character dying multiple times).
  • The French animated television series “Code Lyoko” - the main characters have access to a supercomputer that can turn back time. This is used consistently through most first season episodes to undo nearly every unwanted change. In the second season, Code Lyoko embraces a story arc technique, and the reset button technique is used only to reverse emergency situations.
  • The Japanese series Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon - A Magic Silver Crystal is first as a MacGuffin, then as a reset button. In the final act, it restores the lives of just about every character in the series except Usagi, who survives throughout.

• The “Doctor Who” Eighth Doctor novels - After the Faction Paradox storyline, the Doctor is left with no memories of his travels, has his ability to travel in space and time taken away, and is left alone on Earth, therefore resetting the series of novels. (This sort of reset button allows writers freedom from complicated story arcs, and allows them to focus on individual adventures for the series.)

• The "Doctor Who" episode "Last of the Time Lords" - At the start of this episode, the nefarious Master has conquered 21st-century Earth with the aid of the mutated descendants of humanity from millions of years in the future. To neutralize the obvious time paradox produced by the mutants exterminating their own ancestors, the Master has constructed a "paradox machine". When the Doctor and his companions succeed in destroying this machine, the flow of time is reset to the point before the Master and his allies invaded Earth. Only they, and the Master, remember the state of things before the "reset button" was hit.

• The video game Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time incorporates the reset button directly into the game play, by allowing the player to use the Sands of Time along with a magic dagger to “rewind” time by a few seconds in order to correct fatal mistakes. At the end of the game, the entire episode is rewound to the beginning by replacing the Sands of Time into the giant hourglass whence they came, then destroying the villain who would have released them.

• The game Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories has the main characters rapidly losing most of their memories. In the end of the game, their memories have to be restored, which causes them to forget the events of the entire game. In the next game, Kingdom Hearts 2, the only lasting effects from Chain of Memories are lost time, weaker strength (from sleeping for a year), and a slight change of scenery; all of these are soon forgotten.

• The first Pokemon movie employs the reset button technique in the ending, where Mewtwo reverts most everything to the way it was before the events in the main plot transpired. This was used as the backdoor to the plot of a later direct-to-video film, Mewtwo Returns.

• The film Galaxy Quest has the Omega-13 device, which is initially under Unopened Door status: everyone agrees on it's importance, but no information is present on it's function. A fanboy of the Galaxy Quest series reveals to the captain that they believe the device is used for time travel. The captain activated Omega-13, prompted by that exchange, in a dire situation as a last ditch effort to stop a murderer who snuck onto the ship. The Omega-13 is revealed as a reset button which sends time backwards by exactly 13 seconds.

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The cover of the booklet included with the Collectors Edition CD set release of the first two Hitchhikers radio series. ... Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod Beeblebrox, from the TV adaptation. ... The Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is a fictional alcoholic drink which is mentioned in Douglas Adams humorous science fiction radio series, novels, computer game, movie, comic book mini-series, and television series The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. ... Look up Supernatural in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... This does not cite any references or sources. ... Charmed is an American television series that ran for eight seasons on The WB. It was produced by Aaron Spelling and is about three sisters who are the worlds most powerful good witches, known throughout the supernatural community as The Charmed Ones but known to everyone else as the... Smallville is an American television series set in the fictional town of Smallville, Kansas. ... For other uses, see Clark Kent (disambiguation). ... 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Animation refers to the process in which each frame of a film or movie is produced individually, whether generated as a computer graphic, or by photographing a drawn image, or by repeatedly making small changes to a model (see claymation and stop motion), and then photographing the result. ... “Animé” redirects here. ... Serialized in Nakayoshi Original run 1996 – 2000 No. ... The rear-face design of the Clow Cards The rear-face design of the Sakura Cards The Clow Cards ) are fictional magical items and characters from CLAMPs manga and anime series Cardcaptor Sakura. ... Serialized in Young King OURs Original run April 1997 – Present No. ... Macrocosm and microcosm is an ancient Greek schema of seeing the same patterns reproduced in all levels of reality. ... The Universe is defined as the summation of all particles and energy that exist and the space-time in which all events occur. ... 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The series depicts the adventures of a mysterious time-traveller known as the Doctor who travels in his TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space) time ship, which appears from the exterior... Last of the Time Lords is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... The Master is a recurring character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a third-person action adventure video game published by Ubisoft. ... The Hourglass with the Sands of Time This article is about the magic Sands from the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time trilogy. ... Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories is a video game for the Game Boy Advance and the second installment in the Kingdom Hearts series, bridging the gap between Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II. This game was released in the United States on December 7, 2004. ... Kingdom Hearts II is an RPG video game sequel to 2002 Kingdom Hearts. ... 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Parodies of the technique

• The animated series “The Simpsons” - The reset button plot device was often parodied by having Mr. Burns being unable to remember Homer even though Burns’ assistant Smithers reminds him that “all the recent events of [his] life have revolved around [Homer] in some way.”

• The adult animated series Family Guy - Parodies of various Reset Button techniques are used in the episodes “Mind Over Murder”(which uses Stewie’s time machine as a reset button, resulting in the episode’s events never having happened), “Da Boom”(the episode’s events are revealed to have been a dream by Pam Ewing, parodying the Dallas season reset), and “He’s Too Sexy for His Fat” (Peter has his fat surgically removed and at the end he falls into a large vat of lard, returning him to his exact weight as earlier). In the Family Guy movie Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, the reset button is used when Stewie travels back in time to save himself from the lifeguard chair; before he can explain the events of the future to his past self, he is vaporized by the present Stewie, thus putting everything back to the way it was and Stewie having no knowledge of the future.

• The animated series South Park - Kenny is very frequently killed, only to be brought back to life in an unexplained fashion.

• The animated series Futurama - An episode titled “When Aliens Attack” mocks the widespread use of the reset button technique. In the final scene, Fry remarks that the secret of television is that in the end, everything is back as it was—all the while the camera zooms out to reveal a New New York in ruins. The joke, of course, is that the city will be restored, without explanation, by the next episode.

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Time-Loop Stories

Main article: Time loop

Some movies and television shows use the reset as a mysterious plot device; in these cases, the events of the story happen repeatedly. Usually, one character is aware of the reset, struggles to understand the cause, and/or attempts to return “time” to its forward flow. A time loop is a fictional situation in which time runs normally for a set period (usually a day or a few hours) but then skips back like a broken record. ... A plot device is a person or an object introduced to a story to affect or advance the plot. ...

• Stargate SG-1 - The episode “Window of Opportunity” involves a time loop that two of the main characters must escape.

• Star Trek: The Next Generation - In the episode “Cause and Effect”, the Enterprise crew discovers that for 17 days it has been caught in a "Temporal Causality Loop" repeating the events leading to the ship’s destruction.

• Xena, Warrior Princess - One episode saw the heroine reliving the same day multiple times. She eventually learned that the goddess Aphrodite had caused the time-loop so that Xena could aid a pair of star-crossed lovers.

• The comedy film Groundhog Day is probably the best-known example of the time-loop plot. Whenever Bill Murray’s character dies or goes to sleep, he wakes up to realize that the same day is happening again. This premise was also used in the series Day Break and the movie 12:01. In another series, Tru Calling, the main character would be asked for “help” by the ghost of murder victims; this would cause her to wake up on the day of the victim’s death, giving her a chance to prevent the tragedy.

Stargate SG-1 (often abbreviated as SG-1) is a science fiction television series, part of the Stargate franchise. ... Window of Opportunity is an episode of the science fiction television series Stargate SG-1. ... The title as it appeared in most episodes opening credits. ... Cause and Effect is considered by many fans to be one of the best episodes of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation. ... Xena. ... Groundhog Day is a 1993 comedy film directed by Harold Ramis, starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. ... Day Break is a television program for which one 13-episode season was produced. ... Tru Calling is an American television program, which premiered on the Fox Network in October 2003. ...

Avoiding The Reset Button

One science fiction television series that presents a notable exception to the rest is Babylon 5. Due to the fact that creator J. Michael Straczynski served as a writer for the vast majority of the episodes, the series was able to maintain a progressive continuity, and consistency that wasn’t reliant on the reset button technique. Hence, the series was able to feature many interspersed stories, spanning multiple episodes, where characters evolved substantially over the course of the greater story arc, and events from one episode had serious repercussions throughout the rest of the series. Babylon 5 is an epic American science fiction television series created, produced, and largely written by J. Michael Straczynski. ... Joseph Michael Straczynski (born July 17, 1954) is an award-winning American writer/producer of television series, novels, short stories, comic books, and radio dramas. ...

Since then, the reset-button technique appears to have gone out of style, with many writers seeing it as distasteful. Witchblade, Lost, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (although its spinoff series Angel did use the reset button technique for dramatic effect in the episode I Will Remember You), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Alias, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica are modern examples that do not use the reset button (though some, such as the Stargate SG-1 in the episode “Window of Opportunity,” have exploited the time-loop for comedic effect). Following a pilot film in August 2000, the cable network TNT premiered a Witchblade television series based on the Witchblade comic book series in 2001. ... Lost is an Emmy Award and Golden Globe-winning American serial drama television series that follows the lives of plane crash survivors on a mysterious tropical island, after a passenger jet flying between Australia and the United States crashes somewhere in the South Pacific. ... Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated American cult television series that initially aired from March 10, 1997 until May 20, 2003. ... Angel is a spin-off of the American television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. ... List of Angel episodes I Will Remember You is episode 8 of season 1 in the television show Angel. ... Space station Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (ST:DS9 or STDS9 or DS9 for short) is a science fiction television series produced by Paramount and set in the Star Trek universe. ... Alias is an American Spy-fi television series created by J. J. Abrams which was broadcast on ABC from September 30, 2001 to May 22, 2006, spanning five seasons. ... Stargate SG-1 (often abbreviated as SG-1) is a science fiction television series, part of the Stargate franchise. ... Stargate Atlantis is a Canadian-American science fiction television program, part of the Stargate franchise. ... The Battlestar Galactica science fiction franchise, which began as a 1978 TV series, was reimagined in 2003 into the TV miniseries. ... Stargate SG-1 (often abbreviated as SG-1) is a science fiction television series, part of the Stargate franchise. ... Window of Opportunity is an episode of the science fiction television series Stargate SG-1. ...

References

See also

• Deus ex machina
• Retcon
• Status quo
• Reboot (continuity)