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Most Convoluted Timelines

You shouldn't need a series of diagrams to fully understand a story, but some fiction timelines are just too complicated to keep up with. We list some of the more notorious offenders.

By Evan Saathoff January 11, 2012

There are few plot devices as instantly troubling as time travel. Unless the person driving the bus is pretty sharp, paradoxes are going to start popping up instantly once you begin messing with the past. Some stories really do pull it off. Many more simply fail to work things out in a believable way. Others, however, just keep digging deeper and deeper into their own mythology in an effort to make sense out of itself. By the time it's all over, nothing makes much sense at all, and keeping track of it is migraine inducing and requires a white board....

Take a look at our list of the Most Convoluted Timelines.

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Credit: Shout! Factory

Transformers: Beast Wars

So, in the original Transformers cartoon, Autobots and Decepticons are fighting in a spaceship which crashes on Earth millions of years ago, and they don't actually wake up until 1984. Simple enough.

But Transformers: Beast Wars complicates things significantly. The Transformers on this show are descendants from the Transformers we know and love. Somehow they end up fighting on pre-historic Earth and bring their fight to The Ark, the crashed spaceship full of Generation One Transformers. In fact, once they all realize this, killing the original Optimus Prime becomes a main goal for the show's villains. It's all pretty crazy but manages to stay true to the original's continuity, though it can give a headache to anyone who thinks about it too hard.