Fiery Coverup: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

'''Fiery Coverup''' is the act of [[Stuff Blowing Up|blowing up]] or [[Kill It with Fire|burning down]] the evidence implicating you in some crime. Very popular among [[Mega Corp|evil corporations]] and [[Government Conspiracy|governments]] who go as far as torching entire city parts to cover up something particularly nasty. Often takes place when [[Outrun the Fireball|the heroes are in the middle of discovering said evidence]].

 

A [[Sub-Trope]] of [[Revealing Coverup]]. Also compare its sister tropes [[Gas Leak Coverup]] and [[Kill It with Fire]].

 

* [[Mega Corp|Aoyama Pharmaceutical]] in ''[[Mnemosyne]]'' demolishes Sayara Yamanobe's secret lab soon after it is compromised in the first episode.

* Common in ''[[Detective Conan]]'' when the Men-In-Black are involved.

* In ''[[Death Note]]'', Light has an elaborate setup to hide the Death Note. It's in a drawer, under a false bottom, with a circuit underneath the false bottom, around the Death Note. There is a rubber pad that keeps the circuit from being completed when the false bottom is down; the only way to take it out is to slide the ink barrel of a pen through a small hole on the underside of the drawer to block the circuit and push the false bottom up. If the circuit is completed, the Death Note will be ignited. This way, even if they suspect that he's Kira, even if they know about the Death Note, even if they realize that there's a false bottom on the drawer, the Death Note will be reduced to ash and they will have no proof.

** Later he uses fiery deaths to dispose of {{spoiler|his girlfriend and Mello.}}

 

== Comic Books ==

* Lex Luthor does this to one of his own buildings at the beginning of ''[[Black Orchid]]'', incidentally [[Decoy Protagonist|burning up the title character]].

 

* In ''[[Aeon Entelechy Evangelion]]'' the OIS forensic team tries to find any evidence on the group who compromised the airport security on the day Shinji arrived. Problem: They are doing in the aftermath of battle, where one side, the NEG Army, was desperate enough to lob relatively small tactical nuclear warheads at the other side, the Third Harbinger Asherah, who casually violates spacetime and reality while pwning the humans with ease. Suffice to say, there is not much to dig.

 

== Film ==

** Taken [[Up to Eleven]] in the sequel, where Moriarty succeeds not only in destroying the room where the crime took place, but killing everyone who was in the room at the time by blowing them up. But Holmes manages to figure out that it was a cover to hide the shooting of the owner of a weapons factory (the owner himself was shot in the head by a sniper seconds before the explosion happened).

*** [[Fridge Logic|Which begs the question, why even bother to shoot the guy if everyone else in the room was killed by the bomb?]]

 

== Literature ==

* In the novel ''Jericho Falls'' the U.S. government {{spoiler|arranges a fully loaded airborne tanker to crash on a small town, destroying it in the massive fireball to cover up their killing of everyone there}}.

* In the [[Stephen King]] novel ''[[The Green Mile]]'', Eduard Delacroix killed a young girl, then tried to burn her body to cover it up. The fire spreads to the rest of that apartment, killing six more. Thus, he ends up on Death Row.

* In the [[Dean Koontz]] novel ''Sole Survivor'', an NTSB engineer named Minh Tran analyzes the flight data recorder from a crashed plane, but someone doesn't want the public to know what's on it. He is killed and the recorder is destroyed in what is described as "an impossibly intense fire."

* In the [[Alastair Reynolds]] novel, ''[[The Prefect]]'', the villain arranges it so that the exhaust from a starship drive would destroy a habitat where something nefarious was occuring.

* The criminal of the second book in the ''[[Knight and Rogue Series]]'' is actually trying to destroy evidence that he extorted money. To make it look less suspect, he burns several other building before going for the one he wants.

 

* In the first season of ''[[24]],'' Keith Palmer's therapist dies in a fire as part of a government conspiracy. (It was probably arson. But you can't prove that.)

* In [[The X-Files]]'s pilot, Mulder's motel room is burned to the ground to destroy evidence of alien abductions in Oregon.

* [[Monk]] has this happen in one episode. "Mr. Monk Can't See a Thing" has a murder where the victim is strangled and then her house is set on fire. Then the perpetrator forgets his keys, and acquires a firefighter's coat and helmet by force (bludgeoning and killing a firefighter with the bottom of a shovel and then blinding Monk with a bucket of cleaning acid) to get them back.

* Played for laughs in ''[[Arrested Development]]''. When Michael discovers that a storage unit his father tried to keep him from finding out about has burned down, it doesn't take him long to connect it to the recently released arsonist who's been set up with a job at the banana stand (which he [[Funny Moments|readily admits to]]).

 

== Video Games ==

** When Max actually reaches the bunker and finds out exactly what Horne and her people have been mixed up in (as well as the truth about {{spoiler|his family's murder}}), he eventually has to escape the facility before it blows sky high.

 

* Subverted in ''[[Girl Genius]]'', when someone wants to try this but a more [[Genre Savvy]] conspirator points out just how [[Revealing Coverup|suspicious]] that convenient fire would be. It can be found [http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20060802 here] and [http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20060804 here].

** Merlot tries this as well, to destroy information about Agatha. Since one of the things he had to burn to destroy this knowledge was the people who had read the files, it is not surprising he got sent to Castle Heterodyne anyway.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:This Index Is On Fire]]

[[Category:Stuff Blowing Up]]