Time Skip



""There was a long period of time during which nothing much happened.""

- The Narrator, The Bard's Tale

A Time Skip is similar to the Distant Finale, but rather than coming at the end of a series, occurs somewhere in the middle, usually between seasons or Story Arcs. A Time Skip can also happen when a series gets a sequel that picks up after the Distant Finale. Naturally, this occurs far more in animated series and comics than in live action, unless a long period of time passes in real life. A mid-series Time Skip in a manga usually causes a break between series in the anime adaptation. It's also a common point in the story for filler to be fitted in.

A Time Skip also provides another advantage for animated series that isn't necessary for live-action series: after a certain number of episodes have passed it looks more and more ridiculous that the characters haven't aged, however, animation doesn't really allow for the extremely subtle effect of gradual aging. Thus, the best way to show aging has happened is to jump ahead to when they're older.

A Time Skip usually takes no less than three years, and may indicate a shift in the Competence Zone, or at least the characters' place in it. The Official Couple now has a kid, the kid sister... Wow! She Is All Grown Up! When a time skip occurs in a Shōnen anime or manga, you can bet that almost the entire cast will have Taken A Level In Badass.

Time Skips can cause/result in a dramatic shift in the tone of a series, especially if the main characters were kids or teenagers. Alternately, it can be a "The Next Generation" situation, with the children of the previous protagonists taking up the mantle of their parents. A common device of such a variation has the previous protagonists realizing that they now have to put up with the same shenanigans they put their own parents/commanding officers through.

Tends to be used as a follow up to a Wham! Episode.

Often leads to Ridiculously Successful Future Self for one or more characters.

In a story that runs on Webcomic Time, an occasional periodic Time Skip is almost a requirement to keep the time frame current with the real world. Some don't bother. Alternatively, multiple time skips can be chained together in any medium to produce a story with a larger time span at the expense of insignificant events between major plot turns--see Dashed Plotline.

See also: Offstage Waiting Room.

A Time Skip that doesn't get covered in enough detail tends to be prime Fanfic Fuel.

Contrast Spinoff Babies, which instead makes the characters younger.

Anime and Manga

 * Claymore has a 7 year Time Skip in the manga. The anime ended before it could reach that point.
 * Dragon Ball had a number of time skips during its run. This happened after every major story arc (apart from the Vegeta arc which led directly into the Frieza arc). The original manga ran for eleven years, with about three times that amount passing in-story. This amounted to no less than seven time-skips lasting a year or more. The most notable was the five year gap between the end of the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai and the arrival of Raditz (which marked the end of the first Dragon Ball anime series and the beginning of the more sci-fi oriented Dragon Ball Z), and the seven year skip back into a more comedic (but still dramatic) tone between the Cell and Majin Buu arcs.
 * The follow-up anime series Dragon Ball GT is set a few years after the Distant Finale of Dragon Ball Z, shown in the current page picture. The finale itself was ten years after the Boo arc.
 * Death Note features a time skip after . The post-time skip part of the series takes place three years later.
 * Naruto has undergone a two-and-a-half year timeskip, in which most of the main cast got a whole lot stronger in the meantime. Notably, the former rookies are taking major roles in the battles against the Big Bads, where in the previous volumes/series they mostly fought each other and left the major fighting to the adults. The post-timeskip chapters in the manga are simply called "Naruto: Part II", but in the anime it's technically a different series titled Naruto: Shippuden.
 * Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha undergoes a ten-year timeskip between the second and third series.
 * It undergoes another six year Time Skip for the fourth series. The initial announcement that Nanoha is now 25 years old was met with various Fan Art and Fan Web Comics of Nanoha lamenting that she's now an old woman.
 * Martian Successor Nadesico undergoes a timeskip between the series and The Movie. The gap is filled in with a video game, appropriately titled Martian Successor Nadesico: The Blank Of Three Years.
 * Three years pass between the end of Digimon Adventure and the start of Digimon Adventure 02. This allows for a new generation of Chosen Children, since the old generation is now past the Competence Zone. The exception would be Takeru and Hikari, who are promoted from their previous statuses of Tagalong Kids.
 * Actually, their usefulness hasn't gone down, at least for some. Yamato and Taichi were still capable of accessing Omegamon and while they weren't as active as the other kids, they still took an active role in doing offscreen work (especially Izumi).
 * Robotech undergoes many timeskips due to the Macekre of fitting three series together, but also the more direct timeskip between the Macross section of the series and the attempted Sentinels series. The post-Mospeada Shadow Chronicles also serves as a timeskip for a number of characters.
 * Not to mention the two-year timeskip within Macross itself, immediately following the climactic battle of Space War 1.
 * Sonic X had a six-month Time Skip halfway through the first season.
 * The Recycled in Space third season took place after the second season's Distant Finale, but each universe skipped a different length of time, providing a Plot Relevant Age Down.
 * Mobile Suit Gundam 00 has a time skip at the exact middle of the show (episode 25/26) of 4 years.
 * There was a two year time skip between Gundam Seed and Gundam Seed Destiny
 * Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann had a seven-year time skip between its second and third arcs.
 * Code Geass features a one-year timeskip between the first and second seasons. Due to the way the first season ended, this is somewhat jarring.
 * Then in R2, a one month time null occur, before Lelouch and Suzaku made themselves, respectively.
 * Another time skip comes in the final episode of R2, between.
 * Not occurring in the middle of the series, but also not just for the finale, time begins skipping between some chapters late in Yokohama Shopping Trip. Particularly jarring since time had previously passed at around the same rate as real-time.
 * Blood Plus had a one year time skip between, and Saya and Haji deciding to take off and disappear for a year in episode 32, and their return in episode 33. During this year, both Kai and Saya became more badass, and David.
 * In Clannad, in the episode after, it's stated that five years had passed since then.
 * There's a timeskip between each of the four arcs of the Getter Robo. Earth (and the universe) change significantly, and characters who were teenagers in the first arc are now aging men in the final.
 * Twentieth Century Boys does this three times. But much of the plot is in Anachronic Order so it's to be expected.
 * Phantom ~Requiem for the Phantom does after the WhamEpisodes. Skips six months in which
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's has a six month Time Skip after the end of the Dark Signer Arc.
 * Fist of the North Star skips an unspecified amount of years after the end of the Raoh saga. In the stories that followed (the portion covered by the second anime series), Kenshiro's former child companions, Bat and Lin, were now young adults.
 * Happens in Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. One arc in the manga, and later sound novels, we meet an adult Mion,, in the world where Rena blows up the school (Atonement chapter). Similarly, in the anime, we see an adult Rena, in that same world. However, she is the only surviving person from Hinamizawa.
 * In the Trigun manga, they have a six month or so skip while nothing exciting is happening.
 * Billy Bat suddenly starts doing this constantly at chapter 14, spending just two chapters in a time period before moving to a completely different one with no apparent rhyme or reason besides the appearance of the titular bat image.
 * Subverted in an early issue of the Tona Gura manga, when what we think is the finally-together Yuuji/Kazuki away at college living together is actually a fiction written by Onee-Chan Hatsune. Kazuki is less than thrilled.
 * In XxxHolic, there is a four year time skip after
 * Later on in the manga there is another time skip, this time for six years. and then 100 years for the last story.
 * There's a year or two's worth of Time Skip between the two seasons of Darker Than Black. However, a couple of important things have clearly happened during that time period, and there's an Interquel manga series.
 * There is a time skip between every arc of Pokémon Special, which can range anywhere between a few months and a few years. As Comic Book Time is not in effect in this world, everyone ages accordingly. The first gen heroes started out as eleven, and in the HGSS arc they are now nineteen.
 * Soul Eater appears to have gone through a timeskip, although it's not outright stated. Black Star is almost as tall as Tsubaki now, and both Soul and Maka look a bit more mature. This could partly be Art Evolution, but considering Soul's, it means him and Maka had to go out and gather 99 more souls. It's likely maybe a year went by during that time.
 * ...Which unfortunately would mean that Kid's been gone for a year with no progress on getting the guy back. Stuck with Noah and his team of nasty morons. Makes the party look all the more inappropriate, if that were possible.
 * About ten years pass between the final episode of Transformers Armada and the first of Transformers Energon. The main human characters from Armada return Older and Wiser.
 * The anime Mnemosyne is completely composed of Time Skips between nearly every one of the six episodes. The length of the skips are: 1 year, 20 years, 14 years and 30 years. Only the last two episodes don't have a skip inbetween. The result is a change of the third protagonist three times, who all are the child of the last one (the two other protagonists are immortal). Not to forget the change in technology.
 * Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure has one of these between each story arc, as the focus changes from protagonist to protagonist. The only exception is part 6, which ends with
 * There is approximately a six month time skip between chapters 83 and 84 of Fullmetal Alchemist.
 * The conclusion of the first chapter of the One Piece manga is a time skip, focusing on when Luffy was seven and jumping ten years later at the very end. In the anime, this was changed to a flashback, with the first episode being the second chapter.
 * The plot also recently started up again after a two year timeskip before the crew reunited, which in real time was about how long it had been since they were split apart in the first place. Notably, that's more than twice the length of time that passed in the main plot which was told over the course of 13 years.
 * 5 Centimeters Per Second has two time skips, one at each chapter break.
 * The fifth volume of Bunny Drop abruptly skips forward ten years, leaving Rin a teenager and.
 * The second Lupin III anime series begins with the gang reuniting after five years apart.
 * Stitch!! was recently revealed as an approximate two decade jump ahead from Leroy and Stitch in a Tear Jerker of an episode.
 * The final episode of Eureka Seven had a one year timeskip which disappointingly only show Axel Thurston and the 3 kids, as well as a small glimpse of Dominic and Anemone. The fate of others, including the protagonists Renton & Eureka are left ambiguous, though the blinking lights that symbolize them can be seen in a far off forest.
 * Berserk has many. Most take place during the Golden Age Arc, with Guts growing up in the care of his adoptive parents (skipping from the time of his birth to ages three, six, eight, eleven, and fifteen/sixteen respectively), then when Guts joins the Band of the Hawk which picks up three years later, and after Guts leaves the Hawks and Griffith gets imprisoned, which picks up one year later. The final time skip takes place after the Eclipse, when Guts sets out on his Roaring Rampage of Revenge which ends the Golden Age Arc. There is a two year time skip after this, which proceeds to the Retribution Arc.
 * Tiger and Bunny has a two; ten months between the end of episode 13 and the beginning of ep. 14, and a year between the events of episode 25 and the Grand Finale of the series.
 * After 400+ chapters, Bleach got a proper time skip (17 months), with character redesigns and everything.
 * Fairy Tail got one after a parictularly brutal Wham Arc. It jumped seven years . When they got back they promptly skipped
 * Interestingly
 * The final chapters of Hellsing have a thirty-year time skip between and.

Comic Books

 * The fourth volume of the Pre-Crisis Legion of Super-Heroes began with the words "Five Years Later", leading into a controversial Darker and Edgier revamp of the series.
 * The Animated Adaptation also has a Time Skip between seasons, or rather, two Time Skips in one: the second season takes place a couple of years after the first, and when the new Big Bad arises, Superman is brought back from the 21st century... but where season one Supes had been pulled from his Smallville days, season two Supes has been pulled from his Justice League days. Where everyone else has aged two years, Superman has aged about ten and goes from being the least experienced member of the team to an Older and Wiser adult hero.
 * The entire DC Universe jumped forwards a year following the Crisis Crossover Infinite Crisis, during which time Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman were out of commission. The weekly limited series 52 filled in the events of the missing year in real time through the eyes of several minor characters.
 * The third Mirage Comics volume of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mirage starts fifteen years after the last one; its sister title Tales of the TMNT sometimes fills in the gap with stories taking place during the Time Skip.
 * The X-Men family of comic books used a time skip for a revamp of the line in 2000. It was only six months, but is still worth mentioning since it was uniform across all the X-Men spinoffs. Its success at revamping the titles is dubious; two were cancelled the following year, and another was revamped again.
 * The IDW Transformers Generation 1 comic skipped forward three years between the end of All Hail Megatron and the start of the ongoing series. Transformers Last Stand of the Wreckers has a few flashbacks that take place during the time skip.
 * The Sonic The Hedgehog comics did an interesting variation of this: at the end of issue #125, Sonic is teleported across the universe, and spends the next several issues making his way back to Mobius. In issue #130 he finally makes it home, only to discover that - due to relativity - what had been a few weeks for him was actually a whole year on Mobius, during which many things had changed.
 * Meanwhile, in Sonic the Comic, Sonic and his friends were sent forwards into the future by Dr Robotnik in one of the earliest issues, during which time he had managed to make himself emperor of Mobius.
 * In Sillage, it happened between issue #7 and #8. In this time, the mentor of Nävis, Mackel-Loos, died.

Film

 * The film Hook featured a grown-up version of the perpetual child Peter Pan.
 * The film Cast Away has a four year skip in the middle of it, between Tom Hanks' initial efforts to survive on the island, and his eventual escape from it.
 * Star Wars. The movies have a 19-year time skip between the prequel and classic trilogy, and the Expanded Universe is even worse, sometimes skipping thousands of years at a time. The most notable time skip is to Legacy, which is in 137 ABY, or 133 years after Return of the Jedi.
 * Besides the 19-year time skip from the prequels to the original trilogy, within the prequels, The Phantom Menace to Attack of the Clones was about ten years.
 * Ten year time skip in-story in Ever After.
 * Toy Story has a huge jump in time between 2 and 3, most notable with Andy having already graduated high school and going off to college. This was done to accommodate with real-time since most of the kids who watched the first two movies are already in college.
 * The voice actor for Andy had grown up also and they wanted to use his voice for all three movies, so it made perfect sense that Andy had grown up to match his voice actor.
 * There is a three year Time Skip between Star Trek's original series and Star Trek the Motion Picture, then a larger skip to Star Trek II the Wrath of Khan. Khan directly follows into the next two films, but then there are further time skips over the other films.
 * The 2009 film starts with Kirk's birth and the introduction of the main villain, then Kirk's childhood, then Spock's childhood, then Kirk in the bar fight and joining Starfleet, then three years after that, the rest of the film. Later on,, you could argue that the vision   is another Time Skip, albeit one to an alternate future.
 * Charlie Chaplin's The Kid has a time skip from the time the orphan he picks up is a baby to the time he's five years old.
 * A Bronx Tale has the first act with the main character a 10 year old, and a second where he's 17.
 * The Dark Knight Rises takes place 8 years after The Dark Knight (twice the real-time gap between films).
 * It takes place 9 years after Batman Begins. It'll be released seven years after said film. Not a significant time difference.
 * Wrath Of The Titans takes place 10 years after the first film and also gives Perseus a 10 year old Son to boot.

Literature

 * The Tom Clancy novels, particularly between Clear and Present Danger and The Bear and the Dragon, generally follow a pattern of pseudo-Webcomic Time, with generally around one or two years taking place between novels. Thus, a timeline which was originally set Twenty Minutes Into the Future began to lag behind into the past. His latest novel of the series, Teeth of the Tiger rectifies this by staging an 8-10 year timeskip into the future.
 * The Dune series skips thirty-five hundred years between Children and God Emperor, then another five thousand before Heretics. By comparision, the three-year skip during the first Dune book (covering the early years of Paul leading the Fremen) looks like nothing.
 * In Prince Caspian, the Pevensies return to Narnia to find that thousands of years have gone by there, while only one year has passed for them. Similar time skips occur throughout the series. Subverted in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where the now fourteen-years-older Pevensies are chasing the white stag in the last chapter, only to be transported back to the real world as children.
 * Peter David's Star Trek: New Frontier series has the three year timeskip between Stone and Anvil and After the Fall, during which time various characters have been promoted, changed allegiances, married, and, in some cases, previously implacable near-enemies have apparently become friends. Oh, and there was a major war (which was precipitated by the heroes in the novel before the jump).
 * Alexandre Dumas wrote sequels to The Three Musketeers: Twenty Years After and The Viscount de Bragelonne: Ten Years After.
 * The Legend of Rah and the Muggles does it a lot, to the effect of making important things happen offscreen and Stouffer cock up basic arithmetic.
 * Several thousand years pass between Ender's Game and its sequel, Speaker for the Dead.
 * Rip Van Winkle, the ultimate time skip story.
 * Schismatrix skips more and more time the longer it goes. The first four chapters all take place over the course of around 19 months, while the last two chapters alone contain skips of 53 and 32 years. Also, in universe, there is a group that practices "ice assassination", by forcing people to experience a time skip through cyrogenics.
 * Warrior Cats: There is a 12 month skip between the first and second series (although this gap has been filled by Firestar's Quest and Ravenpaw's Path), and a six month gap between the second and third series. The fourth series is also supposed to start around six months after the end of the third.
 * George RR Martin originally intended to utilize a five-year time skip between the third and fourth books of his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series. After investing more than six months of labor, Martin figured out it wouldn't work and had to start over on the fourth book. The ramifications of this are still being felt.
 * Cory Herndon loves this trope. In both the Mirrodin Cycle and the Ravnica cycle, there is a timeskip of five years between the second and third books. Also both times, the protagonist is as confused as we are, due to in the first case and  in the second.
 * The German Space Opera Perry Rhodan regularly features TimeSkips between arcs varying in length from a few years to a few centuries. The longer TimeSkips have the nice side effect of whitteling the cast of Loads and Loads of Characters down to more managable levels with everyone who was not immortal, a member of a particularly longlived race, a robot or AI, frozen in stasis or a godlike or ascended higher being having died of old age in the interim.
 * The last part (The Uji chapters) of The Tale Of Genji skip forward about twenty-five years and are about Genji's son and his peers (as the opening chapter says right off, Genji's dead). Since the Tale is often considered the first Novel (or at least the first psychological novel), it just goes to show.
 * Ian Douglass' Heritage, Legacy and Inheritance trilogies have time skips between them of century scale - the first takes place in the mid-21st century, the second in the 24th century, and the third begins at the end of the third millennium. As well, the second and third books of the Inheritance Trilogy have a Time Skip of ~1000 years between them, with the third starting with the reawakening of Marines kept in stasis for centuries - but none of them are characters from the previous two books.
 * There are multiple skips of several months in Death Star. They never get announced; it's always through dialogue or the narration.
 * There's a time skip in Quantum Gravity where we come back to find that Lila has spent a lot of time in Demonia.
 * Then there's another one forward fifty years.
 * Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence has many time skips. The book Exultant hops back and forth between the first few nanoseconds of the universe and 28,000 years into our future, while Ring starts in the year 3951AD and jumps to 5,000,000AD.
 * The Left Behind book Kingdom Come has a few time skips right in the story itself. It starts off at the beginning of the Millennium, then jumps ahead to 93 years later where it stays for most of it, then jumps again to the end of the Millennium.
 * In Ghost Story, Harry unwittingly experiences a Time Skip of over a year in the course of a single conversation, apparently because it's easy to lose time when.

Live Action TV

 * The new Battlestar Galactica Reimagined skipped forward one year during the second season cliffhanger, "Lay Down Your Burdens". For reference, the previous events had taken up only nine months.
 * Of course, there are the 80 or so years between Star Trek the Original Series and Star Trek the Next Generation. Due to being preserved by Applied Phlebotinum (Scotty) or Negative Space Wedgie (Kirk), they show up in TNG. McCoy, Spock, and Sarek take the long way there; McCoy is an extremely aged human (and as his actor has died, he probably did the same for the same reason), Sarek dies of natural causes, leaving just Spock. Then again, Vulcans and Klingons live a very long time. (That doesn't stop children, however, from growing up at warp nine.)
 * If Ashes to Ashes is really happening, and not all in the main character's head, there's been a Time Skip of eight years since Life On Mars.
 * In the 'present', Ashes to Ashes starts about one year afterwards.
 * Season two of Alias ends with Sydney passing out after a grueling fight, and waking up on the streets of Hong Kong. She calls her boss, and Vaughn soon arrives, telling her she's been missing and presumed dead for two years. Interestingly, over the summer quite a few fans theorized that the time skip wasn't real, and she wasn't talking to the real Vaughn. The following season premiere plays into this, with Sydney not believing Vaughn and beating him up, then getting hit with a tranquilizer dart. She wakes up back in America and discovers she really has lost two years.
 * On 24 there is a Time Skip of anywhere between one and four years between each season.
 * The fourth season finale of Desperate Housewives ended with a "five years later" jump that saw most of the wives in radically different places in their lives. For instance:
 * One Tree Hill skipped five years between seasons, allowing the characters to be the same age as the actors portraying them.
 * Lost has undergone a time skip in the major off-island action, which takes place three years after the Oceanic 6 were rescued. Of course, for those on the island, it's only been a few days.
 * Those on the island have caught up, except . At the start of season six, . Locke is the only character to not age significantly during the timeskip . Then, in season six (because of the events of the end of season five)  . It's... complicated, and going through all the time skips   in the first half of season five will make this even longer.
 *  Power Rangers had three time skips. The first was a thousand years from 2000 (Lightspeed Rescue) to 3000 (Time Force, although most of the action from that season took place in 2001), and the next season jumped back to 2002). The second was from 2004 (Dino Thunder) to 2025 (SPD), and they again jumped back to the date of broadcast the next season The third is from 2008 (Jungle Fury) to some unknown date somewhere after 2028 and before 2100 (RPM). We don't know the exact date, but we know its after the second time skip, and in the 21st century.
 * Six Feet Under had a time skip of around a year during the first few minutes of the first episode of the third season. Yeah, it was disorienting.
 * iCarly uses timeskips to try and establish that their random Guy of the Week is very important to whichever of the Sam and Carly is about to get cheated on by them. Not huge ones, but 3 months such as in iParty With Victorious to establish Carly's relationship with Steven is a long time for a show set in high school.
 * Angel had a timeskip of several months where Angel was buried at sea, and Cordelia ascended into heaven.
 * Pretty much every single season premiere of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel begins about three months after last season's finale. This is partly because early Buffy would begin around the start of the educational year (August-September ish) and finish at the end (May-June ish). The reasons that summers in Sunnydale and L.A. were very quiet, or that major events in the character's lives (The example above, the time Buffy fled to L.A., the time Buffy was dead for the second time, the time Willow spent in England) took about three months was never explained.
 * There was also a timeskip of 18 months between the last season 7 episode of the Buffy TV show and the first issue of the Buffy season 8 comics.
 * The Ultraman series Ultraman Mebius takes place in the same continuity as the original timeline, with all the cast of the original shows except Taro returning.
 * Ghost Whisperer had one immediately after Melinda had her baby, skipping forward to the baby's fifth birthday.
 * Edmund Blackadder presumably had to spend a year trapped in a dungeon with a lunatic having a year-long laughing fit in the last episode of season 1.
 * Tracy Beaker Returns takes place five years after the end of the first series with Tracy now as a careworker instead of a child in care.
 * Weeds has a six-month timeskip in season 5 between the fifth and sixth episodes.
 * And again in the seventh season, which is set
 * Probably the least noticeable, The X-Files had roughly a 15 month time skip between it's pilot episode and "Deep Throat". Though there are never any dates given in the episode "Deep Throat", the CD-ROM The X-Files: Unrestricted Access puts the episode during August, 1993. The pilot is dated March 6-22, 1992. Since this time skip is never mentioned by the characters and only evidenced in time-stamps and events mentioned in-passing, not many fans even know there is a time-skip, especially evidenced by many fanfics putting Mulder and Scully's meeting date as "September 1993".
 * There was also a three-month time skip at the beginning of season 8 episode Deadalive, the skip encompassing the time between
 * Mad Men has had a time jump between each season, the longest, between season 1 and 2, was about 15 months and the shortest, between season 2 and 3, is a little under 9 months.
 * The third season of True Blood ends with Sookie being spirited away to the Faerie realm. In the fourth season premier, she is there for less than an hour before escaping, but due to the funky way time passes there, a year and some odd weeks have passed on Earth, and the first episode largely deals with how everyone in Bon Temps has changed during that time.
 * Supernatural has done it at least twice between season finales and premieres. The fourth season premiere began 4 months after the third season finale. The sixth season started a whole year after the fifth season finale.
 * Merlin skipped a year between season two and three and then another year between three and four.
 * Didn't it skip two years between Season 2 and Season 3? In this case, though, it was justified by plot, as the used the time in-between for  offscreen.
 * There is indication that there will be an even bigger one between Seasons 4 and 5, given the leaked fact that  The show-runners have confirmed this in an interview.
 * Off-screen due to time travel on Doctor Who - in "The Impossible Astronaut" The Doctor claims to be 1,103, even though Amy points out that two months earlier he was 908. Oddly plausible because of, but complicated in that , and producer Steven Moffat's claim that The Doctor can't even keep track of his age anymore.
 * In General with a High School Show if the season finale is around the end of the school year, the next season with start at the beginning of the next school year, without the summer in between

Mythology

 * Older Than Feudalism: The Odyssey is pretty much a sequel to The Iliad and starts about one year later. It then lasts ten years, with time skips from one to seven years in the middle.

Newspaper Comics

 * From the newspaper comics, Funky Winkerbean was Frozen in Time for many years, following its High School cast. Then, out of the blue, it time skipped nearly 20 years, almost re-syncing with real time, and follows both those same kids as parents, and their kids as well, attending the same high school. It was frozen for another stretch, but recently, at the conclusion of a long story arc that ended in a character's death from cancer, it skipped another ten years. The intervening years are occasionally covered as flashbacks.

Tabletop Games

 * BattleTech had a number of timeskips:
 * The 20 Year Update made the jump from 3028, just after the 4th Succession War, to 3049, right before the Clan Invasion. The War of 3039 was presented as backstory.
 * A much longer timeskip happened with the launch of Mechwarrior: Dark Age. It is set in the same timeline as BattleTech, just in 3132 instead of 3067 (where BattleTech was at the time). Because of that, it presented the major Word of Blake Jihad, started in 3067, entirely as backstory to the Dark Age era. This also massively spoiled most of the major events of the Jihad era. Combined with the radical changes to the game's rules, moving to a CCG-style rather than BattleTech's standard board-game, fans were not pleased.

Theatre
"'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings / Carry them here and there, jumping o'er times / Turning the accomplishments of many years / Into an hourglass"
 * A hundred years pass between the acts of Sunday in The Park With George.
 * Sixteen years pass between the third and fourth acts of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, following his most famous stage direction, "Exit, pursued by a bear".
 * The time skips are Lampshaded in the Prologue of Henry V:


 * In between the first two acts of Our Town, three years pass, and, between the second and third act, 9 years go by.
 * The second act of Show Boat abruptly jumps from ringing in the new year of 1905 past World War I to 1927.
 * Vanities does this at least twice (three times in The Musical). The first act/scene is in 1963, the second in 1968, the third in 1974, and the musical's finale is sometime in the mid 80's-early 90's.
 * The Pitmen Painters goes through multiple timeskips, starting in 1934 and ending in 1948.

Video Games

 * The fourth Fire Emblem game, Seisen no Keifu (Genealogy of Holy War), has a time skip in the middle, after which the initial party's children take over. There's even a side game titled Thracia 776 which takes place during the skip.
 * Fire Emblem: Rekka no Ken (the first one localized in English) also has one, in between Lyn's story and Eliwood's, constituting one year.
 * Invoked in Rune Factory 2. The game skips forward seven years after you build the school. After the time skip, you take over as the original protagonist's son/daughter.
 * In Rune Factory 3 as well; after your wife has a child, the game skips forward one year. Although it's as if nothing happened other than your kid growing up; anything you left behind will still be there.
 * The second Lufia game was actually a timeskip prequel, which ended in the exact same spot where the first game opened (and also where that game ends).
 * There is also a time skip during the game proper, when
 * And the first game has a 9-year time skip between when the hero meets Lufia and the start of the game proper.
 * Final Fantasy VI skips ahead a year after the Cataclysm reshapes the planet's surface.
 * Final Fantasy IV has a mobile phone sequel with a 17 year time skip, having both the original heroes and their children fighting side-by-side.
 * Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core is essentially made up of time skips that jump from one important moment in Zack's life to another. Some are as short as one month apart, but others span years.
 * Twice over the course of Dragon Quest V: The game begins with the child hero adventuring with his father, continues ten years later with him as an adult, and ends after his children have grown up.
 * This still makes him only about 23, though, and looking even younger due to.
 * The first batch of Resident Evil games took place in 1998, including Code: Veronica. RE 4 then jumped to 2004, the autumn before its release; while RE 5 is set four years afterward. Part of the time between Code: Veronica and RE 4 are accounted for in Umbrella Chronicles and Darkside Chronicles, which feature scenarios retelling the events of the earlier games, as well as new scenarios set before RE 4.
 * There's also a Time Skip of two days in the middle of Resident Evil 3, while Jill is incapacitated. It's during those two days that Resident Evil 2 takes place, making 3 both a prequel and sequel to the previous game.
 * Marathon. The second game took place around seventeen years after the first, with the player in stasis for that entire time. The third game's Alternate Continuity actually starts off at about the same point in time, with the caveat that events during the Time Skip have gone somewhat differently, culminating in
 * The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time features a timeskip from Link's childhood to the time when Ganondorf has conquered Hyrule. You can, however, travel between these two periods of time.
 * The 15-game series is likely set over a thousand years or more, and has ten distinct Links and Zeldas and two separate timelines. Notably, Spirit Tracks is stated to be set 100 years after The Wind Waker and Phantom Hourglass in a Hyrule founded by those two games' Link.
 * Between the end of the third Phoenix Wright game and the beginning of the first game of his successor Apollo, seven years pass.
 * Super Robot Wars W uses a six-month Time Skip about halfway through the game. This allows it to feature a lot of series (Tekkaman Blade, GaoGaiGar, Martian Successor Nadesico, for starters) as well as their sequels and OVAs in the same game. Never mind that between the original anime, the delays between parts were wildly different; three months for Full Metal Panic, a year for GaoGaiGar, three years for Prince of Darkness and ten for Tekkaman Blade II. The game dealt with the character design changes differently. The Nadesico cast changed (with Ruri suffering from extreme puberty, which was pointed out), while the Tekkaman crew stayed the same, except for a short period where D-boy uses his appearance from Blade II as a disguise.
 * In Tekkaman Blade's case, they don't even wait until the ending. They go about three-quarters of the way, then skip to Blade II, then more or less go from the sequel's Here We Go Again ending to finish off Blade's storyline, with a lot of backup (even not counting the heroes from the other anime).
 * The last few episodes of Full Metal Panic are also combined with the beginning of The Second Raid. It's a bit weird, but works.
 * Breath of Fire III, following a truly stunning revelation, skips about seven years, during which Ryu grows up and the world changes a great deal.
 * In the "Sleeping Beauty" episode of American McGee's Grimm, Grimm busies himself waiting for the title character's Dangerous Sixteenth Birthday, and later for the hundred years it takes for Prince Charming to show up and awaken her, by messing around in two other fairy tales: Rapunzel and Rumpelstiltskin.
 * Both Assassin's Creed games have gaps between certain parts of the memories, which can explain what some percieve to be the Hollywood Atlas in the first game (Would you want to go through the uneventful days it took Altair to travel between the cities?). The second game have some years skipped, having the events of the game span 23 years of Ezio's life.
 * The second Jak and Daxter game has a two-year time skip in the intro. Jak's been imprisoned and experimented on, Daxter's been trying to rescue him, and Keira and her father are MIA.
 * There is a three-month time skip in Brutal Legend, between assassinating Lyonwhite and getting attacked by Dark Ophelia's minions.
 * In Strong Bads Cool Game for Attractive People - Episode 2: Strong Badia the Free, after Strong Bad takes over the King Of Town's castle, it skips forward a week later, where he's bored of his duties and wants to leave.
 * Implied in several cases of story progression in World of Warcraft. Each expansion seems to cover a year ingame, and the phasing technique very much invokes this feeling whenever you return to a reclaimed area and find the good guys having moved in and in some cases even having built new buildings. The quests make sure that you aren't there when it happens but it still feels like you missed months of ingame time.
 * Portal 2 is said to take place.
 * Lampshaded by Wheatley, who mentioned there was a long period of time where "absolutely nothing happened".
 * Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty has a two year gap between the prologue portion with Solid Snake, which is set in 2007, and the main portion with Raiden set in 2009.
 * Likewise, fourth game has a time skip of 5 years, being set in 2014. The third game is a prequel and as such has a backwards time skip of 45 years, occurring in 1964. Before that, MGS2's prologue is set two years after Metal Gear Solid, which itself is set 6 years after Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake, which itself is set 4 years after Metal Gear.
 * Grim Fandango uses a year-long time skip to separate each chapter in the game, dividing the game into a four-year journey.
 * Act 1 and Act 2 of Infinite Space are separated by a 10-year time skip.
 * Legacy of Kain. The second game, Soul Reaver, takes place 1500 years after the first game, Blood Omen. Blood Omen 2 takes place 400 years after Blood Omen. Defiance takes place after Soul Reaver 2, and it's two storylines have different timeskips. Kain's storyline has a timeskip of anywhere to a few weeks to thirty years after the end of Soul Reaver 2, Raziel's takes place 500 to 530 years later. There's a lot of time travel involved in the series, to make it a bit more confusing.
 * In Pokémon, three years pass between Generation I/III and Generation II/IV. Generation V is known to take place after II/IV, but the exact amount of time that has passed is currently unknown.
 * There is also a 2 year gap between Pokémon Black and White and Pokémon Black 2 and White 2
 * Castlevania. Large multi-generational time skips are the rule of the series, with very few games actually taking place close to each other timewise. The exceptions (games with much smaller time skips between each other) are mainly the first two games (with Simon Belmont) along with the fourth game (which was just an Enhanced Remake of the first game), the first two Game Boy games (with Christopher Belmont), the Rondo of Blood/Symphony of the Night duo (with Richter Belmont), and the Chronicles of Sorrow (with Soma Cruz and Julius Belmont). Characters (other than immortal or long-lived ones) almost never reappear between the many time skips, except sometimes as memories, ghosts or Doppelgangers. Of the larger time skips, probably the closest is between Castlevania Bloodlines and Portrait of Ruin with the latter being only one generation later and featuring the children of the former's protagonists. All of this gives Castlevania a very rich series of events, but they're heavily fragmented with so many loose ends.
 * Mass Effect 2 starts off very soon after the original ends, but skips forward two years very shortly, from the time when
 * In Mother 3 there is a three year time skip between chapters 3 and 4. This is shown by the massive change of Tazmily from a quaint, quiet village in a more modern town and the child main characters (and the child npcs) getting taller adolescent sprites.
 * Record of Agarest War spans five generations, so Time Skip is a must. If anything, you get to see both Ellis and Alberti grow up during these times.
 * Tekken 3 takes place 19 years after Tekken 2. Half the characters from the first two games are missing and have been replaced by expies (although most of these characters have returned by the time of 5: Dark Resurrection). Heihachi's hair has gone from black to gray. All the Jacks (from this point onward) can fly. And the game got a considerably more modern setting as well as a rock soundtrack (rather than techno).
 * T4 is set two years after 3 (roughly placing it about two decades after 2) and most prominently features the return of Kazuya (who was presumed to be dead when Heihachi threw his broken and battered body down an erupting volcano at the end of 2). Since then, there have been skips between the next games, but these are in much smaller increments (only a few months at a time).
 * The Soul Series series has done this a few times. Soulcalibur takes place three years after Soul Edge/Soul Blade, where it's revealed that Siegfried has taken Soul Edge for himself, becoming the Azure Knight, Nightmare. Soulcalibur II is set four years after Nightmare and Inferno's defeat by Xianghua and Kilik, with Siegfried (having regained his lucidity after his defeat) becoming Nightmare again and attempting to restore the shattered Soul Edge. III and IV take place in quick succession after II (in all, a total of maybe a full year has passed between SCII and SCIV), with Siegfried finally breaking free of Soul Edge's control, Nightmare having been given his own body, and Siegfried attempting to atone for his sins by destroying Soul Edge once and for all with the power of Soul Calibur. The recently announced Soulcalibur V will jump ahead seventeen years, after Nightmare's defeat at the hands of Siegfried, with the role of series' lead being passed over to Patroklos, Sophitia's son.
 * Mega Man X is set one century after the original Mega Man series, Mega Man Zero is setone century after the end of the X series, and Mega Man ZX is two centuries after Zero. Mega Man Legends was originally in its own continuity, though it was later retconned to be at least four millennia after ZX. Mega Man Star Force is set two centuries after its predecessor Mega Man Battle Network, itself an Alternate Continuity from the original series where Dr. Light's networking technology flourished over Dr. Wily's research in robotics.
 * After  in Nie R, the game skips ahead five years.
 * Frequent in the Red Faction series. Red Faction: Guerrilla is set 50 years after Red Faction II, and Armageddon is set another half-century after Guerrilla.
 * Call of Duty: World at War does this - the first American and Russian missions both take place in late 1942, then the rest of them skip ahead to September 1944 and April 1945, respectively.
 * In Kid Icarus: Uprising
 * X: Rebirth, the seventh game in the X-Universe series, takes place roughly a thousand years after X3: Albion Prelude, just after which the games' jumpgate network shut down.
 * Tales of the Abyss has a short time skip mid-game. It's implied that 6 months have passed in game after

Web Comics

 * Order of the Stick had a Time Skip come out of the blue when
 * At first, Dominic Deegan had each adventure following on the heels of the last. Lately, after every arc the comic skips forward a few months.
 * After much speculation by the fans about the timeline, Questionable Content had a time-skip long enough for it to become winter and for Dora's hair to grow out, exposing her blonde roots.
 * Coga Suro has an eighteen-year time skip between 'Coga Suro' and 'Coga Suro 2' [imaginatively named sequel].
 * Arthur, King of Time and Space had a timeskip after  and the sabbatical. Although the sabbatical only lasted six months, the strip picks up again two years later, when present-day Guenevere is expecting her second child, and.
 * It's since been established that previous cartoons have been pushed backwards so it's still "the present" in the contemporary arc, meaning.
 * A second sixth-month sabbatical took us forward 10 years, from  to.
 * Darths and Droids has a two-year time skip in the "real word" at the same time as a ten-year time skip in the roleplaying game the characters are playing, between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.
 * And then another two "real" years, along with the three in-universe years, pass between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. Presumably this trend will continue through the remaining three movies.
 * Rumors of War features a two-month Time Skip between the first and second Story Arcs. In the first arc, the characters are en route to the city of Varna and encounter adventure during a layover, while in the beginning of the second arc they are implied to have not only reached their destination, but to have been there for some time. In the meantime, several characters have vanished and several new ones have appeared, owing to the comic's Loads and Loads of Characters.
 * Not too long after the reset Fuzzy Things skipped forward two years, so that the main cast are eight instead of six years old.
 * The Last Days of Foxhound skips seven months after FOXHOUND allies themselves against the Patriots, but other than that they seem to skip indeterminate amounts of time between major story arcs and even simple conversations within an arc.
 * The initial storyline of Collar 6 involves a spanking contest that's three weeks off, and the first year of story only covered a single day, so it was inevitable that they'd use a Training Montage.
 * All Roses Have Thorns started off during the early 16th century, it is currently now in the 19th century, with various skips forward in time inbetween.
 * Homestuck, sort of. The story for the first five Acts takes place over a single day, disregarding Flashbacks and characters in the far future. Act 6 takes place about three years after that day...in an Alternate Universe. Later we find that the characters from the original universe will take about three years to travel to the other one, essentially synchronizing their personal time to the time of the other universe.
 * At the end of Act 6 Act 2 another Time Skip occurs in said Alternate Universe
 * Earlier, there is a four-months Time Skip into a Bad Future where . It gets reverted though.
 * Eight Bit Theater had a time skip relatively early on... Which was accidentally undone by "The Wizard Who Did It", while he was making dinner, before we really had a chance to see anything.

Web Original

 * Tech Infantry is mostly organized into seasons in conscious imitation of Myth Arc-laden series such as Babylon 5, with a few shorter stories considered "TV Movies". The first two seasons take place a hundred years after a prequel movie, then time skips 20 years for third season, several decades more for the fourth season, then the fifth through seventh seasons are set several centuries later, then eighth season jumps back to an alternate timeline 20 years after the fourth season, then there's the Aborted Arc Tech Infantry: Exodus spin-off project, set several centuries after the seventh season.
 * Chaos Fighters II is set 100 years after Chaos Fighters and Chaos Fighters: Chemical Warriors.
 * Happens twice in Greek Ninja during the journey to and from Japan.

Western Animation

 * Rugrats sequel series All Grown Up follows the baby characters from the first series after a ten-year time skip. This was launched by an unintentional Poorly-Disguised Pilot; a tenth-anniversary special that showed what it might be like if Rugrats hadn't been Frozen in Time the length of its run. In an interview at the time of the supposedly Poorly-Disguised Pilot, the producers of Rugrats said that they weren't sure if it would become a series, because they were currently looking at other spin off series.
 * The original plan was to do a show about Angelica and Suzie in preschool, which would have necessitated a timeskip as well, but a much smaller one. The ratings for the special were so good, though, that Nick decided they wanted a spinoff based on it instead. The preschool show was made too, but only four episodes were made before it was canceled.
 * In any case, because of several contradictions, AGU ended up being a Continuity Reboot instead of the Timeskip that it initially appeared to be.
 * Ben 10 Alien Force: As with Naruto, largely used to free the Kid Hero from always holding the Idiot Ball as well as making the series Darker and Edgier.
 * Re Boot combined a Time Skip with Year Inside, Hour Outside. During the third season, Enzo and AndrAIa found themselves trapped in the Game after losing it, moving from system to system. After their initial loss, the series time-skipped to Enzo and AndrAIa as adults, with significant, but much less time having passed back on Mainframe.
 * Transformers Generation 1 skipped about 20 years (from then present 1985 to 2005) between the last episode of the second season and The Movie, during which Cybertron fell to the Decepticons and two of the four biggest Transformers ever were built.
 * There is also a timeskip in the Japanese animated continuity - there is a one year gap between the end of Transformers 2010 (American season 3) and The Headmasters.
 * Nickleodeon recently announced their intentions to launch a teenage Dora the Explorer series, where the main plots will often involve Dora going shopping at the mall and hanging out with the boys at school, maintaining her educational values from the original series by solving mysteries, and sport a slightly older character design.
 * Interestingly, Nickelodeon did not intend to show off imagery of the new Dora until the fall toyline, releasing only a teaser silhouette of her. Some parents and children liked it, though some were worried about how much Chickification Dora's about to go through. Nickelodeon properly unveiled her in attempt to settle the outcry.
 * Moral Orel does two timeskips in the second to last episode. It time skips from the Spring Season foward Six months to the fall season, then at the end of that episode it skips to Christmas.
 * The Secret Saturdays has this to start off the third season. Six months have passed and in that time:
 * Darkwing Duck. No less than 3 years pass between the pilot and episode 17, where Gosalyn remarks Darkwing turns into a camping maniac every spring (at least 2 of them would be needed for it to be a pattern), and that it's spring again. The implication is that all this happened right after the pilot, as Darkwing transformed from a totally inept nobody to one of the most respected superheroes on the planet, called in for help by the world police on a number of occasions.
 * And between the end of the TV series and the new comic by Boom Studios, a year and a half has gone by.
 * Batman: The Animated Series had a follow-up called 'The New Batman Adventures' taking place three years later.
 * Likewise, Justice League Unlimited takes place about a year after Justice League.
 * And of course, Batman Beyond takes place more than 40 years after all of the previously mentioned series.
 * 40 years after the end of JLU, and according to Word of God, the Joker kidnapped Robin after Darkseid and Lex disappeared.
 * Total Drama Action had a timeskip from the finale, to the recent special and the third season. It's not known exactly how long, although a year is probably the best guess (enough time for about half of Heather's hair to grow back, and most of them to try to grasp fame and fail at it).
 * A Fairly Odd Movie: Grow Up, Timmy Turner!, the Live Action Adaptation of The Fairly Odd Parents is set 13 years after the series. Interestingly, by the time this airs, the cartoon will have been around for almost that long.
 * The second season of Young Justice takes place five years after the first one. This was particularly surprising since there was no indication this would happen; the first episode of the second season even tries to make it look like it picks up where the last episode left off, at least in the beginning. Also, Nothing Is the Same Anymore.
 * Word of God says that there will be another time skip if the show gets a third season, but will not say how much of one.
 * Word of God says that there will be another time skip if the show gets a third season, but will not say how much of one.