Halfway Plot Switch: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

Any plot which is dropped halfway through an episode in favor of a brand new one. Often involves [[Genre Shift]].

 

== [[Anime and Manga]] ==

 

 

== Film ==

* ''[[Funny People]]'' was advertised as a funny yet touching story of a famous comedian coming to terms with the value of his own life when he's diagnosed with a deadly disease. About halfway through the film, however, he's cured, and he spends the rest of the film getting entangled in a romance with his married ex-girlfriend.

* ''[[Psycho]]'' starts out following a woman who succumbs to temptation and steals money from her employer. The film changes to a horror story about forty minutes in when she's murdered out of the blue by a psychotic motel manager, and the rest of the film follows him. [[Alfred Hitchcock]] threw his original audience off even further by [[Dead Star Walking|hiring a well-known actress]] to play the [[Decoy Protagonist]].

* ''[[The Sound of Music]]''. A cute heart-warming family-friendly musical romp about a nun-turned-governess who teaches her wards the joy of music, and redeems their father, winning his love. And look, at the two hour mark they marry in a show-stopping number. Cue end-credits any time n--- oh wait no, that's right: Nazis. Cue 45 minutes of defiance, heartache, [[The Quisling|quislings]], and [[Dark Reprise|dark reprises]].

* ''The Cottage'', a British movie begins as a black comedy about a bungled kidnapping before turning into a dark horror comedy about a Leatherface-type slasher killer half way through. Presumably it was inspired by ''From Dusk Til Dawn''.

* The classic ''[[Predator]]'' starts with Arnie Schwarzenegger trying with his fellow soldiers to save an US politician from a band of South American terrorists. After he discovers that this was just an excuse to save some Black OPS agents, this plot is conveniently thrown out of the window when an alien with an explosive plasma [[Shoulder Cannon]] and a [[Visible Invisibility|cloaking device]] begins [[Hunting the Most Dangerous Game|hunting them]]. Unlike some other examples, this wasn't a surprise to original audiences, and the film begins with something falling to Earth from space.

* ''Miracle Mile'' {{spoiler|What looks like an indie romance-comedy suddenly takes a right turn when it looks like the world is going to end.}}

* ''When the Cat's Away''/''Chacun cherche son chat'' {{spoiler|like the Simpsons badger example above- the missing cat just wanders back into the movie and is found, but the plot keeps going.}}

** Stanley Kubrick did this alot with his later films. It's actually a trademark of his that his films were split into two distinct halves, and it got to the point where he'd even explicitly label them.

*** To name a particularily ineresting example, [[2001: A Space Odyssey]] does this not once, not twice, but ''four'' times. The first plot focuses on the evolution of man, and then we switch to a plot centered on Dr. Floyd paricipating in a top-secret mission to the Moon which turns out to be because {{spoiler|they had found the first conclusive evidence of extratterestrial life}}. Then much of the rest of the film is switched over towards showing the lifestyles of the two conscious astronauts aboard a long-distance flight when some strange things happen, before taking a dark turn where {{spoiler|Hal kills everyone except [[Sole Survivor|David Bowman]]}} at which point it becomes an incredibly surreal series of occurences that lead to the next stage of human evolution.

* The first half of ''[[Stripes]]'' deals with the irreverent recruits just barely pulling it together to pass boot camp. The rest is about their first mission as they're sent to Italy to recover a militarized RV.

* ''[[The Descent (Film)|The Descent]]'' is somewhere between this and [[Developing Doomed Characters]], as the film spends a while dealing with the personal interactions and physical hardships of a group of female spelunkers, then adds subterranean cannibals.

* In the French "thriller" ''Cache'', a couple is being sent video tapes of their house, and they can't figure out who's video taping them; this starts to grate on their marriage, leading to their son ending up missing {{spoiler|though he really just went to stay with a friend overnight without telling his parents}}, and the wife finding out about her husband's dark past. Halfway through the movie, we find out that {{spoiler|the husband, George, when he was little, had an adopted Algerian brother whose parents died in Paris in a rally, and George ended up framing the Algerian kid for something, getting him sent to an orphanage}}. The rest of the movie involves the Algerian massacre in Paris while ignoring the thriller plot, to the point where {{spoiler|it's never even revealed who was making the tapes}}.

** {{spoiler|While it's never revealed who's sending the tapes, the husband still tries to blame the brother for it, which leads to the plot switch.}}

* The John Sayle's film ''Limbo'' starts off as a movie about a fisherman in a small Alaskan town who starts a romance with a single mom and the trouble he has bonding with her daughter. Then they go on a boat trip with his wayward brother who is suddenly attacked and murdered by drug dealers the brother owes money to. The three characters are then forced to seek shelter and fight to survive on a nearby uncharted, uninhabited island.

* The Kaiju film ''[[Rodan]]'' starts with a mining company dealing with a localized infestation of quite-large prehistoric insects, and then switches to two gigantic pterosaurs emerging from the mine and causing havoc across Japan.

* ''[[Flight Plan]]'' starts with a recently-widowed woman waking up on a plane with her daughter nowhere to be found with no one on the flight crew or among the passengers remembeing a little girl. Soon, even she begins to doubt her own sanity, especially when the captain proposes that her daughter died along with her husband, and that she's in deep denial over this. After discovering that it's all a plot to blackmail the airline for a lot of money and frame her for it, the movie promptly turns from a psychological thriller into an action flick, where she tries to find her daughter, while trapped on a plane with a killer and his accomplice.

* 1980's Russian movie ''Air Crew'' (''Экипаж'') starts off as a [[Kitchen Sink Drama]] and then switches to a [[Disaster Movie]].

* ''Evil Dead Trap'' starts off as a [[Slasher Film]] about snuff films, then becomes a near-incomprehensible supernatural horror story.

* ''[[Mad Max]]'': Beyond Thunderdome starts off as a typical post-apocalyptic action flick until Max is brought to the Oasis. Suddenly, the whole situation in Barter Town is left behind, and the theme changes to something akin to the Lost Boys from Peter Pan. Only when Max and the kids reach the Barter Town Underground are the two plots combined.

 

== Literature ==

** Most of [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s longer stories tend to have this structure to some extent, though not quite as tenuous.

** ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]'' is arguably the same thing in reverse.

* ''Double Image'' by David Morrell - A photographer takes pics of something in Bosnia that really pisses off a Big Bad. As soon as that plot line is resolved, said photographer becomes obsessed over a mysterious woman in some pictures he finds.

* [[Sidney Sheldon]]'s ''If Tomorrow Comes'' is divided into three "books". Books One and Two, which take up a little over a third of the novel, tell the tale of Tracy Whitney's horrifying [[Break the Cutie]] experience when she's framed by the Mafia for a robbery and wounding, and how gets her revenge on the guilty parties. In Book Three, her struggle to make an honest living while paroled from prison leads to her becoming a [[Classy Cat Burglar]] who finds herself matching wits not only with European authorities but a fellow con artist. The main nemesis is an insurance investigator who briefly met up with her in Book One as part of his investigation of the false crimes; he becomes obsessed with tracking her down when his employer is besieged with claims for things she's stolen.

* Very much so in "Brainjack", where the beginning is about a [[The Cracker|Cracker]] who ends up being hired by a government White-Hat hacker group after hacking the White House and a major telecommunications provider for a neuro-headset. The plot then brutally murders its previous self and becomes about a group of the hackers trying to subvert the neuro-headsets' [[Hive Mind]] from destroying them. Can also be considered a [[Malignant Plot Tumor]].

{{quote| "[T]he plot arrives late to the party, drunk, in a beat-up '53 Chevy pick-up truck. It drives away about fifty pages later and crashes into a tree, gets sent to the hospital, and is rarely heard from again throughout the course of the series."}}

** The same things happen in the other books. In ''New Moon'', most of the book is devoted to Bella recovering from Edward leaving her, finding out about the werewolves, and the werewolves hunting for Victoria. Suddenly, the climax of the novel goes to being about Edward planning to commit suicide via the Volturi, and Bella and Alice having to save him. In ''Eclipse'', most of the story is devoted to the Bella/Edward/Jacob love triangle, and only gives focus on the matter of the vampire army and Victoria near the end of the book. In ''Breaking Dawn'', the first two sections of the book (as well as a bit of the start of the third) are focused on Bella and Edward marrying and her having and raising her half-human daughter. Most of the third section is about the Volturi arriving to use Renesmee as an excuse to kill the Cullens, with flavors of a vampire conspiracy and the set up for an epic battle {{spoiler|that never happens.}}

** An even worse one would be "Wildlife" where they were called to a case because a bodily fluid was found on a victim saliva. The murder weapon was described as a number of sharp uneven pointed things (obviously teeth) and there did not appear to be any sexual aspect to the crime. This did not stop them from investigating animal smugglers which resulted in them nearly blowing an FBI investigation getting an innocent man (and his pet tiger) eaten by wild hyenas and having Elliot shot (granted it was implied he took the case so he would not have to spend time with his family).

** Possibly the weirdest, though, was the one that had what looked like a case of child molestation ''somehow'' turn out to actually be a [[Government Conspiracy]] to test new poisons on poor immigrants, essentially [[For the Evulz]].

** This was justified in the first season because they only had a 13 episode contract to start, so the plot begins at Midnight and every thread is resolved by 1PM. When the series was extended, they dropped in a Sequel Hook scene and continued the plot from there.

* The first five or six episodes of ''[[Cougar Town]]'' are about Jules entering the world of the cougar, and after that, the show shifts to a more ensemble-y show about Jules and her family and friends.

** In the episode "Emohawk: Polymorph II" it happens ''twice''. First the crew is being chased by a rogue Space Corps police probe... this leads them to crash onto a Gelf moon, where they have to deal with the locals to fix their ship's oxygen system... this leads them to being back on the ship with the titular emohawk on the loose. Apart from the connections mentioned above, none of the previous parts have any effect on each new plot.

** "Justice" begins with the crew finding a stasis pod drifting in space. They determine that it came from a [[Prison Ship]] and contains either a living human woman or an insane, murderous simulant - and it will open automatically in a matter of hours. They go to the prison station to learn more, only for the prison's AI to scan their minds and find Rimmer guilty of causing the accident that killed Red Dwarf's crew. Most of the episode is then devoted to getting Rimmer released. That done, they decide to head home...

{{quote| '''The Cat:''' Come on, let's get out of here. I don't know what made us want to come to this hellhole in the first place!<br />

*** In the end, the key to defeating the new threat is in how Rimmer dealt with imprisonment.

* ''Father Ted'' 's "A Christmassy Ted" starts off being about the characters getting prepared for Christmas, which involves getting lost in the largest lingerie section in Ireland. Halfway through the plot changes to being about Ted being eligible for a Golden Cleric award. Graham Linehan has admitted the plots would have worked better as separate episodes.

* The plot of ''[[Kamen Rider Decade]]'', where Decade is the destroyer of worlds, is outlined in the first episode. The rest of the series is about Tsukasa visiting alternate Rider worlds and solving their problem of the week, all the while wondering why people think he's the "destroyer of worlds." We don't actually get back to that plot until the last episodes and the second movie. The first movie and some of the last episodes didn't exactly help as they introduced a new plot in the form of Dai-Shocker.

 

 

== Music ==

** Also ''I Hold Your Hand In Mine'' which starts out like a regular love song but then reveals that {{spoiler|the hand isn't attached to her body}}.

* [[The Beatles]]' [[wikipedia:A Day in the Life|"A Day in the Life"]] is the ultimate Halfway Plot Switch song. Paul even confesses that the middle part was a piano piece that he was initially working on independently.

* "Charming Weather" from Lionel Monckton's ''The Arcadians''. It starts off obviously leading into a marriage proposal - until {{spoiler|they realise they aren't alone}}, and it turns into {{spoiler|banal smalltalk}} for the chorus. Unusual since, being music, it can ''do it all over a second time''. Youtube has a [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2_mEwNq86M rather badly performed recording of it].

* Katrinah Jospehina by [http://www.universalhallpass.com Universal Hall Pass]. The first half of the song is the tale of a girl (the eponymous Katrinah) who decided to explore beneath the earth. The second half consists of a twisted, echoing beat accompanying backwards-sounding fragments of the lyrics. This change is never really explained, but it's heavily implied that {{spoiler|Katrinah is either mentally ill or trapped in hell... or both.}}

* [[Gorillaz]]'s Empire Ants song, in the new Plastic Beach album. It starts with 2D singing, backed by sweet almost lift-like tropical tunes. Then, full stop, and it starts what appears a new song, with electro-techno sounds, bass, and even new vocals, from guest artist Little Dragon. And it's awesome.

* "Miserable Lie" by [[The Smiths]] seems constructed out of ''three'' separate songs, opening with a slow, gentle, serious introduction that seems to represent the end of a relationship. The song then turns on a dime to an uptempo number with a series of bitter, (yet comical) stream-of-consciousness lyrics. This shift in tone gets escalated to a manic level in the final part of the track, as Morrissey switches to a falsetto voice, howling about his perceived inadequacies in life and love. It can be argued that the ''theme'' of the lyrics stays constant, but then again, said theme is dominant in most of The Smiths' songs, as well as Morrissey's solo work.

* The mother of them all, ''[[Metal Gear Solid]] 2''. The player spends roughly the first two hours playing as Solid Snake, the protagonist from the previous game. Then the plot moves forward two years, to a different location, with the player in control of an entirely new character (ambiguously implied to be Snake for the first few minutes) for the rest of the game. The game's creator, Hideo Kojima, went out of his way to minimise the risk of anyone seeing this twist coming.. [[Broken Base|Some thought the twist was brilliant. Some wanted Kojima's head on a stake]].

* ''[[Guild Wars]] Prophecies'' starts of as the story of a war between the human kingdom of Ascalon and the Charr that's not going well for Ascalon. You leave Ascalon after the fourth mission, and most of the rest of the story is about a religious war in rival kingdom Kryta. After the first few quests in Kryta, Ascalon and its refugees are only occasionally mentioned, and even then only in passing. (Ascalon's King Adelbern [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades this in the endgame area]]: ''"Maybe now that you are finished with this nonsense, you can come back to Ascalon and help deal with the filthy Charr infestation."'') To be fair, it does all tie together pretty well from a [[Myth Arc]] perspective.

* The [[Stealth Based Game]] ''[[Spy Fiction]]'' starts off as a campy spy game about secret agents investigating a virus being made by a weapons manufacturer. Then these characters are all killed off and the last half of the plot is about [[Metal Gear|fighting a terrorist who's disguising himself by wearing glasses and pushing his hair back who is the protagonist's brother who was probably created in a government soldier cloning project and then the protagonist's father (who is a secret agent turned terrorist and wears an eyepatch) shows up out of nowhere and the protagonist abruptly starts lecturing people about the meaning of war and]]... I guess they [[Follow the Leader|knew their audience]].

* ''[[Marvel Ultimate Alliance]] 2'' starts with Nick Fury invading Latveria illegally, which leads to the Registration act coming into effect. A super hero [[Civil War (Comic Book)|Civil War]] breaks out... for three missions. Then it is dropped for {{spoiler|The Fold, a sentient network formed from nanites injected into super villains in order to control them. As the world descends into chaos, everyone, naturally, stops caring about whose side they are on, and both forces unite to defeat The Fold. Afterwards, the Registration Act is pretty much made redundant and void by the Government. Despite the fact that no one actually dies because of their conflict, and neither side really does anything incredibly bad to the other, Cap and Iron Man feel that their team won't be quite the same as it was before the war. But they still are happy to work with one another again.}}

* ''[[Disgaea]]''. The first half of the game focuses on Laharl's quest to claim his throne. After he succeeds, the second half, a [[Space Opera]] spoof, focuses on the human world. When the mastermind behind the {{spoiler|invasion}} is revealed, it leads to a [[Rage Against the Heavens]] story, and the two stories intertwine together.

* ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' tends to do this a lot, beginning the plot with the heroes rebelling against [[The Empire]] and escalating it to averting an [[Apocalypse How]] caused by an [[Omnicidal Maniac]]

** ''[[Final Fantasy VI]]'' starts off as a campaign against the Gestahlian Empire until halfway through, [[The Dragon]] becomes a god and destroys half the world, leaving you to recover your lost allies and destroy him.

** ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'' begins with Cloud and AVALANCHE's brave struggle against the evil Shinra company executives, who are draining the life out of the planet to maintain an electricity monopoly. About five hours into the game President Shinra is killed and the Shinra's relevance to the plot dies with him, the focus then shifting to leaving Midgar to pursue Sephiroth across the planet and stop his scheme to summon Meteor and become a god.

** Mostly averted in ''[[Final Fantasy X]]'', where the overarcing plot is always the pilgrimage to destroy Sin. Once Seymour is revealed as an antagonist, rebelling against Yevon and uncovering the secrets of the organization becomes another major plot point, but it never overtakes the fight against Sin as the game's focus.

* [[Oddworld]]: Stranger's Wrath starts off with The Stranger as a [[Bounty Hunter]] who's earning money for an unspecified operation needed to save his life by capturing outlaws until he's finally captured and stripped of any upgrades he has. His captors soon find out that {{spoiler|The Stranger is actually a Steef, a species that have been hunted to near-extinction and the operation is an attempt to transform him into a true bipedal creature. With this revelation, The Stranger is now hunted down by everyone, including the Clakkerz he used to do business with. However, he soon comes across the Grubbs, the oppressed indigenous population who worship Steefs and eventually takes up the mantle of their protector and fights to bring down [[Corrupt Corporate Executive]] Sekto. This affects the gameplay as well since although Stranger has now lost any health upgrades he previously bought, he later gains access to upgraded versions of his ammo and now that he is no longer a bounty hunter, he no longer needs to take enemies alive.}}

* ''[[Perfect Dark]]'' switches half-way from [[Cyberpunk]] to [[Space Opera]].

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'''s Vashj'ir zone. In the wake of the Cataclysm, a new island is formed several miles off the coast of Stormwind. Both factions begin sending troops, with the Alliance seeking to secure Stormwind's coast and the Horde wanting the island as a staging point for an attack. However, on the way there, the [[Player Character]]'s ship is attacked and destroyed by the [[Kraken and Leviathan|Kraken-like Ozumat]], and from then on Vashj'ir is about helping the Earthen Ring fight Ozumat and the Naga. Exactly what happened to the island is never explained, and while you can travel to it, other than a flightmaster there's nothing there.

* Zig-zagged in the first case of [[Ace Attorney Investigations]] 2. It begins with an asassination attempt on the president of a foreign country, with Edgeworth looking for the perpetrator. About halfway through, you find out that the president is fine, but one of his bodyguards has been found dead, shifting the case to a more traditional murder investigation as per the rest of the series. {{spoiler|Then you learn that the asassination attempt was staged, and the murder plotline is put on hold until you can prove it. Afterwards, theb murder plot resumes, but at the end of the case you find out that, amidst the fake asassination, someone planned to kill the president for real, setting up a [[Sequel Hook]] for the next four cases.}}

 

 

== Webcomics ==

* Close to being standard practice for Mountain Time, such as [http://mountaincomics.com/2011/05/30/shorts-blaster/ here], when the plot switches to an entirely new set of characters in a completely different scenario, and much more pronounced in longer story arcs like [http://mountaincomics.com/2010/08/16/the-unstartled-giraffe/ this one].

 

 

== Web Original ==

* ''[[Bonus Stage]]'' did this constantly.

 

* ''[[Futurama]]'' does this now and then. In "The Cryonic Woman", the first part of the episode was about Fry, Bender and Leela losing their jobs at Planet Express, but that plot was dropped in favor of Fry's reunion with his old girlfriend. The [[Reset Button]] issue of getting their jobs back was only picked up at the end.

** Far more obvious in Bender's Game. The first two episode-length quarters are about the Planet Express crew trying to stop Mom from getting a special die. The second two quarters are pretty much the same plot again, in the crazy ''[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]'' reality that Bender's accidentally created.

* The second episode of ''[[Clone High]]'', "Episode Two: Election Blu-Galoo". The whole episode centers around the student body presidential election, but the only reason JFK runs is to abolish term limits and reinstate Cleopatra. By the time Abe enters the race, JFK and Cleo's plan is completely discarded for the story of Abe and JFK's competition for Cleo's affection. By the end of the episode Cleo's presidential ambitions have evaporated in favour of seducing whoever's in office, a plotline abandoned within the first two minutes of the next episode.

* Two animated shorts from ''[[House of Mouse]]'' starring [[Goofy]] are like this: One short, called "How to be a Waiter", is actually about Goofy becoming an actor as a result of him being tired of being a waiter (ironically, at the end of the short, it's revealed that the first character Goofy played in his entire film career is yes, a waiter), while another, called "How to Wash Dishes", is actually about Goofy using a credit card to go on vacation as a result of him being tired of washing dishes. However, at the end of the short, Goofy uses up his entire credit card money, and as a result he had to [[Work Off the Debt|make up the lost money by yes, washing dishes]].

{{quote| '''Puggsy''': [[Wham! Line|"The name is Puggsy.]] [[Suddenly Voiced|What's yours?"]]}}

** Most of the rest of the plot is about helping a [[Heartwarming Orphan]] escape her [[Rich Bitch]] aunt and find her long-lost [[Adventurer Archaeologist]] father.

* ''[[The Fairly Odd Parents]]: School's Out [[Musical Episode|The Musical]]'' switches plots, like, four or five times. It starts out about Timmy on summer vacation...okay, then it's about his parents trying to send him to a boring camp, that's still related...but wait, now it's about kid's ruling the world? And ''now'' it's about the Pixies taking over Fairyworld? And half of it's about some business guy who's [[Non-Ironic Clown|actually a clown]]? ''[[Mind Screw|What?]]''

* ''[[Sonic Underground]]'' used and invoked this in "Wedding Bell Blues." Since Queen Aleena didn't show for her forced marriage to Robotnik, they'll instead crown Sonia queen in her stead—with Robotnik as the real power.

 

{{reflist}}