It's Going Down: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|'''Natalya Simonova:''' Do you destroy every vehicle you get into?<br />

{{quote|'''Drew:''' Things you can say to describe your boat, but not your girlfriend.<br />

Used to describe structures that will be destroyed by the end of the movie, usually in [[Stuff Blowing Up|a massive explosion]], even if for no other reason than the [[Rule of Cool]]. Your town has a large windmill in the middle of a field? It's toast. It's likely to explode because of loose flour, or to get burned down by an [[Angry Mob]]. Same rule applies to bridges over chasms.

* ''The Seeker: [[The Dark Is Rising]]'', when a bunch of windmills fall victim to Will's hissy-fit.

* Pretty much any windmill in any action movie (an alternative name suggested for this trope was "Burn Windmill Burn"). Oddly enough, the more techy modern windmills that make up wind farms tend not to get burned down, although they're so new there probably isn't a trope for them yet.

** These tend to undergo [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3FZtmlHwcA catastrophic failure].

* In ''[[Saved]]'' it is... unsurprising what fate befalls the giant cardboard statue of Jesus.

* The whole burning-windmill thing probably got its start with the climax of the original ''[[Frankenstein]]'' film.

** It's more [[Truth in Television]], actually. Most old windmills were made to grind grains to produce flour; flour is incredibly flammable, and generally when you add friction/heat to a flammable substance in a large building constructed primarily of wood and fitted with huge bits of oiled or waxed canvas...

* Both Death Stars in ''[[Star Wars]]''.

** The ''Executor'' survives ''Empire'', but blows up in spectacular fashion in ''Jedi''.

** As will any vehicle involved in any sort of chase scene. James' car may not blow up, but it's bound to get trashed.

*** One time, it actually got ''[[The World Is Not Enough (Film)|sliced in half. Lengthwise.]]'' And was [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] immediately afterwards by Bond.

*** {{spoiler|Although the Venice building that sinks into the Adriatic compensates the lack of a [[Collapsing Lair]] in ''CR''.}}

* As soon as [[V for Vendetta|V]] promises to blow up the houses of Parliament in the first act, the ending is a foregone conclusion. Nothing would satisfy but a massive explosion. Set to the 1812 Overture.

** In the book, Parliament's the first thing to go, followed by the Old Bailey, and, a year later, Downing Street.

* As soon as I saw that road tanker in [[The Terminator]], I just KNEW it would end up exploding.

* The pagoda in almost every single Godzilla movie.

* Barad-dûr in ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''. It's a mile high and powered by pure liquid evil, so its eventual epic collapse was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

** And the Tower of Tol-in-Gaurhoth in ''[[The Silmarillion]]'', which crumbles after Sauron is forced to flee it, though [[Magic Music|Luthien]] was the one who actually triggered the collapse.

** Not that AM doesn't get torched. Heck, the ''very first book'' opened with the city in flames. Plus the time the dragon took over. The fact that the populace knows how to stop a [[Crazy Prepared|city-wide fire]] (close the sea gates and flood it out) shows that it probably happens more often than plausible.

*** Define "plausible". And then look up the history of Tokyo back when it was named Edo.

*** Okay, if this exchange wasn't written by Pratchett, it should have been!

* The [[Falling Chandelier of Doom|chandelier]] in ''[[The Phantom of the Opera]]'' is a classic example of this, enough to be a trope on its own.

* The titular structure in The Fall of the House of Usher by [[Edgar Allan Poe|Poe]] {{spoiler|collapses into the surrounding lake/swamp}} as the narrator flees, having learned that {{spoiler|Madeline was buried alive, and Rodrick knew she was alive at the time.}} It's a metaphor for Rodrick's mental state as well as the {{spoiler|end of the Usher family, hence the title.}}

* In ''[[Otherland]]'', the mile-high tower of J Corp, located conveniently in the Louisiana swamps. It goes out most spectacularly when {{spoiler|[[Death From Above|a satellite deorbits and crashes into it]]}}.

* [[Mistborn|Kredik Shaw]] ''almost'' lasts out the series {{spoiler|Until Vin flattens it}}.

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

* ''[[Lost]]'' had an [[Elaborate Underground Base]] imploding (but still producing an enormous blast), and both a DHARMA station and a submarine blowing up (all three with John Locke's involvement, but the first wasn't intentional).

* The entire town of Sunnydale California on ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]''.

== [[Video Games]] ==

* More windmills! The beautiful centerpiece windmills of Bruhl didn't last past the initial invasion in ''[[Valkyria Chronicles]]''.

* Odds are that any place [[Half Life|Gordon Freeman]] sets foot is going to blow shortly after he's been there.

** The test chamber, teleporter, and all of Black Mesa in ''Half-Life'' and ''Opposing Force''.

** City 17 in its entirety, at the end of ''[[Half Life]] 2: Episode 1''.

* Once a game in the [[Professor Layton]] series

* Planets visited by Samus in the side-scrolling ''[[Metroid]]'' series have a tendency to explode. By the end of the fourth game, ''all'' of the places she'd gone to had been taken out (discounting those from the 3D ''Prime'' series).

* Anything and everything that resembles a tower in ''[[Split Second]]''. That airport control tower? BOOM! That [[wikipedia:Space Needle|Space Needle]] rip-off? BOOM! That crane? BOOM! ... And so on. They'll almost always end up on top of several cars.

* In the history of war games no landing boat has ever made it to shore, they will be destroyed after which point the player will in a cut scene flail around helplessly for a few moments before remembering he can swim.

* [[Ratchet and Clank|Ratchet]] has a problem with destroying spaceships for no discernible reason. He's [[Ace Pilot|capable of handling them just fine in a dogfight]], and they don't seem to have mechanical malfunctions, but even [[Word of God|Insomniac themselves]] have admitted that ''they don't know'' why he crashed that first one. And considering half of the game's fun comes from [[Stuff Blowing Up]], it's not surprising he and his [[Robot Buddy]] Clank have left more than a few places in worse shape than they found them.

* Most vehicles in the [[Mass Effect]] series that aren't the ''[[Cool Ship|Normandy]]'' ({{spoiler|and once even the ''Normandy''}}) tend to explode in a spectacular fashion. Of particular note are Sovereign in the first game and the [[Humongous Mecha|YMIR mechs]] and the Collector base in [[Mass Effect 2]].

* Practically every single Pelican dropship in the ''Halo'' series.

== [[Western Animation]] ==

** If this troper isn't mistaken, the producers said in commentary that if they couldn't figure out how to end an episode, they'd blow up the villain's lair.

*** All but two (three maybe?) episodes of ''The New Batman Adventures'' ended with a large explosion, usually the villain's lair.

* The original ''[[My Little Pony]]'' cartoon does this a couple times. In the pilot special, Tirak's fortress basically evaporates at the end. In the four-part episode ''Return of Tambelon'', the eponymous city gets sucked into another dimension ''twice'' - once in the backstory, and again at the episode's climax.