Indy Ploy/Quotes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Doctor Who

Doctor: 'Cause this is what I'm going to do: I'm going to rescue her! I'm going to save Rose Tyler from the middle of the Dalek fleet! And then I'm going to save the Earth! And then, just to finish off, I'm going to wipe every last stinking Dalek out of the sky!
Daleks: But you have no weapons, no defences, no plan!

Doctor: Yeah, and doesn't that scare you to death?
The Ninth Doctor vs. the Daleks, "Bad Wolf"

Mickey: You're just making this up as you go along!

The Doctor: Yup! But I do it brilliantly.
—"The Age of Steel"

Martha: (hiding from a monster with the Doctor) You mean you don't have a plan?
Doctor: Yes. The plan was to get inside here.
Martha: Then what?
Doctor: Well, then I'd come up with another plan.

Martha: ....In your own time, then!
—"The Lazarus Experiment"

Rory: He'll be fine! He's a Time Lord!

Amy: It's just what they're called. It doesn't actually mean he knows what he's doing.
—"The Doctor's Wife"

Doctor: I'm dying. But I've got a plan.
Amy: What plan?

Doctor: Not dying. See? Fine.
—"Let's Kill Hitler"
"I'm a User. I'll improvise."
Sam Flynn, Tron: Legacy

Indy: Get back to Cairo. Get us some transport to England. Boat, plane, anything. Meet me at Omar's. Be ready for me. I'm going after that truck.
Sallah: How?

Indy: (mumbling) I don't know. I'm making this up as I go.

Harry: So what do we do if they switch the patrols?
Nate: We figure it out as we go.
Harry: We will not fumble our way through this.
Nate: I don't fumble, I improvise.

Chloe: Oh, is that what you call it?
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Elena: I hope you know what you're doing.

Nate: I don't have the faintest idea!

Elena: And then what?

Nate: I haven't thought that far ahead!
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, in which Nate boils this trope down to its essence.
"The plan is... to make up the plan in the car."
Nate, Leverage, "The Ho Ho Ho Job"
"Here's the plan: I walk in, hit people in the face hard, we see how it goes from there."
Angel, She
"No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy."
Napoleon, and Murphy's Rules of Battle

Dr Clef: I can't really see that Dr Kondraki made any mistakes in his termination procedure up to this point, no.
Interviewer: Seriously?
Dr Clef: None at all. He had a primary kill mechanism, a backup plan and a tertiary plan as well. The fact that his plan didn't survive first contact with the enemy wasn't his fault. The deaths of MTF-Rho-2 were a sad and unforeseeable consequence of the Euclid-class SCPs being moved.
Interviewer: I see. So tell me, Dr. Clef, what if all of this wasn't part of some plan, and he'd been making it up as he went along?
Dr Clef: (laughs) In that case, sir, I'd say that Dr. Kondraki was a suicidal fool. But he certainly wouldn't have...
Interviewer: ...
Dr Clef: ...he did?
Interviewer: I have here a copy of Dr. Kondraki's termination procedure proposal. Step one is his plan to use cat urine and a pistol loaded with silver bullets. Backup plans two, three, four, and five are listed as, and I quote, "Wing It," "Make Something Up," "Cross That Bridge When I Come To It," and "Put My Head Between My Knees And Kiss My Ass Goodbye."

Dr Clef: [EXPLETIVE REDACTED]

Mutt Williams: What's he gonna do now?

Marion Ravenwood: I don't think he plans that far ahead.

George: So, what's the plan, Harry?
Harry: There isn't one.

Fred: Just going to make it up as we go along, are we? My favorite kind.
"Hermione, since when have any of our plans actually worked? We plan, we get there, all hell breaks loose."
Harry, lampshading it up in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2
"Oh, John, what the fuck are you doing?"
John McClane, while tying a fire hose around his waist, Die Hard
"I'm just makin' it up as I go!"

Calvin: Last night. The game. You were surrounded. What'd you do?
Student: ...I ran. I took the ball and ... ran straight through.
Calvin: Exactly. When the odds are against you, your only hope is quick, decisive action. Robert E. Lee knew this. More than anything, it's why he fought so well, so long. Be fast, be sure, be bold ... and you might just win before the enemy realizes you "can't."

Oar: Tell me your plan and let me judge for myself.
Pollisand: Tell you my plan? I can't tell you my plan. My plan is so complex, your brain doesn't have the capacity to comprehend it. This entire universe doesn't have the capacity to comprehend my plan -- there aren't enough quarks to encode the simplest overview. I've got fifty-five million backup universes grinding away at figuring out what I have to do next, and that's just the underlying logic, not the user interface. No way I can tell you my plan.
Oar: In other words, you do not have a plan.

Pollisand: Well, I've got a few rough ideas. My greatest strength is improvising.

Quentyn: You think I'm just going to jump in, willy nilly, without a plan...?
Sam: Aww, naaah. Where would I get that impression? ...she said to the fuzzball who threw a pie in a Fae lord's face.

Quentyn: That was just one time! And there were extenuating circumstances ... okay, there was that other time with the gragum ... and, um, the wight-rats... okay so maybe I do jump into things headfirst a lot....
"Plan...? Strategy...? Fuck that shit. Sitting around chatting? Is this any time for that?"
Kaneda about to go into a fight in the Akira Manga
"This is some rescue. When you came in here, didn't you have a plan for getting out?"
Princess Leia, Star Wars

Winston: W-what do we do now!?
Michael: Plan B!
Winston: What's plan B?

Michael: I'm working on it...
Burn Notice season 4 premier "Friends and Enemies".


Max: Uh, what's going on here? Do we have a plan?

Michael: Plan? No. I got some tactical goals and a rough approach.
Burn Notice season 5 premier "Company Man".

Roxanne: So what's the plan?
Megamind: It mostly involves not dying.

Roxanne: That's a good plan. I like that plan.
Always be prepared to improvise, Freckle. That's rule number one for jazz players and vigilantes alike.
Rocky Rickaby, Lackadaisy

Axel: I've been in loads of final battles, each one more final than the last. All of them involved complicated plans that failed miserably. So this time, I'm just going to wing it!

Marluxia: Coming from you, that fills me with absolute terror.
Ansem Retort Strip #80
"You know my strategy... speak first, think later!"
Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney: Justice For All

The Doctor: Well, that seemed to go according to plan. In the end.

Amy Pond: Do you even know what a plan is?
Doctor Who: The Adventure Game

Kotomine: Such a shame. Have you really run out of plans so soon?

Shirou: Shut up! I never actually had a plan in the first place!

Heavy: DOCTOR, ARE YOU SURE THIS WILL WORK!?

Medic: Ha ha! I HAVE NO IDEA!
Team Fortress 2: "Meet The Medic"

Tigress: What's your plan?
Po: Step 1, free the Five.
Viper: What's Step 2?

Po: To be honest, I didn't think I'd get this far.

Leia: I hope you know what you're doing.

Han: Yeah, me too...

Church: Okay. Well, I'm gonna go do whatever it is that fixes all this. Wish me luck, guys.
Previous!Church: What're gonna do?

Church: You know what? I'm just gonna go free Tex and wing it. Cause every time I've made a plan, it's fallen apart. I figure, why not just improvise?
Red vs. Blue (It works.)
"He... Kollberg, he's not smarter than you, Hari. Very few people are... He just... He goes for what he wants, y'know? He's always shaving the odds, always taking another baby step toward where he wants to go, even when he doesn't know how it'll all pull together in the end... When you do that long enough, hard enough, eventually things fall into place and... and you look like a genius, when you never really planned anything..."
—Duncan Michaelson, Heroes Die
"Make good in every situation."
Longshanks, Braveheart
Plan A is "Take it as it comes," Plan B is "First come, first served," and Plan C is "Wing it."
Spike Spiegel explains his philosophy of bounty-hunting.

Kouji: There's no choice but for me to go and take it back!
Sayaka: But you don't even know what the enemy is...!

Kouji: I'll find out along the way!
Mazinger Z: Relic of Terror
Harry couldn't claim it had all gone just as planned. It had all gone just as completely made up on the spot.

Finn: I have a sick plan!
(Finn slides up the wall and evades the charging ice bull)
NEPTR: That was a great plan!

Finn: Nah, that wasn't a part of my plan. We got lucky.