MacGuffin Delivery Service

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Way To Go, Serge -- It will eventually turn out that, for a minimum of the first sixty percent of the game you were manipulated by the forces of evil into doing their sinister bidding for them. In extreme cases this may go as high as 90%. The clear implication is that it would have been better to not get involved in the first place.
—The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Cliches, #168

The Adventurer Archaeologist has gone through all manner of Death Course hazards and exhausted himself narrowly escaping from certain death, but he has succeeded in retrieving the idol! ...except that he emerges to find his arch-nemesis aiming a gun point-blank at him, casually ordering him to hand it over.

The Hero has collected a ragtag band of fellow survivors and enemies of the Evil Overlord, and even ventured deep into the very underbelly of the earth, fighting his way past killer trapped doors and all manner of random encounter beasts to get hold of an artifact of legendary power before the Big Bad gets to it, and thereby safeguard it from his Evil Plan.... but when the team comes struggling up out of the dungeon to return to the surface, half dead and gasping for a save point, there's the Big Bad, confronting them with overwhelming power fresh from an HP/MP restore! He seizes the artifact, and leaves them Only Mostly Dead, as his Evil Plan moves forward.

Sometimes you just have to wonder why the good guys never say to each other, "Hey, I've got an idea. Why don't we hide out near the entrance of the dungeon, get a good night's sleep, and wait for him to go in and fetch the MacGuffin for us, this time?!" Ah, the magic of Genre Blindness. (This could make sense in the event that the Big Bad only needs to get his hands on the MacGuffin for an instant in order to triumph; but of course, that's never the case in a story involving a MacGuffin Delivery Service, since the plot would end rather abruptly if it were.)

This is one of the rare cases in good vs. evil where evil invariably triumphs, and its popularity is due to the fact that the audience wouldn't get to see the Evil Plan play out in full if the good guys win this scene. We want the good guys to win in the Grand Finale, where the Big Bad is as big and bad as possible while still being beatable. Otherwise it could get downright anticlimactic, if the guy who burned down your Doomed Hometown has to give up and go into hiding because he can't Take Over the World without the one MacGuffin you managed to hang onto, preventing him from completing the set needed for his Evil Plan. Nobody likes a hero who hunts down and murders a villain that already threw in the towel.

Of course, that means that even if the hero does get a hold of it, expect it to leave his hands before they can use it, getting us back to the start of the trope. Often a Xanatos Gambit: if the hero doesn't try to get the Maguffin before the villain than there's nothing stopping the villain from getting it first. Likewise, the whole scenario can be a Batman Gambit by a Big Bad Friend or treacherous leader to manipulate the heroes into willingly giving them the MacGuffin. You can expect these villains to enjoy some Evil Gloating, asking "Did You Actually Believe? all that tripe about 'The Power of Friendship'?" Or most frustratingly of all, the villain may just teleport behind the hero and yoink it away. If something is promised in exchange for the MacGuffin and the villian goes back on his word, it's a case of The Cake Is a Lie.

This is a subtrope of Unwitting Pawn, where the villain's goal is unknown to the heroes. In a MacGuffin Delivery Service, the heroes know the villain wants the MacGuffin, and preventing the villain from getting it is, ironically, the reason for the whole quest. Maybe not the only reason, but a major reason throughout the story arc.

Polar opposite of Keep-Away. Compare You Can't Thwart Stage One. Subtrope of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.

Not to be confused with MacGuffin Escort Mission, where the good guys give the heroes a mission to deliver the item somewhere. This is an inversion of that trope.


Examples of MacGuffin Delivery Service include:

Anime and Manga

  • This happens so often in the Lupin III movies that it becomes a shock when Lupin doesn't have to fork over the treasure-of-the-film.
  • Pokémon episode "Mantine Overboard". Team Rocket let Ash and his friends do the hard work of finding a treasure chest in a sunken ship, then stepping in and taking it away from them.
  • In Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne, in both the anime and the manga version, the titular character spends a good part of the story unknowingly working for the devil.
  • Averted in Chouja Reideen, where the heroes are completely unaware of the MacGuffins' existance until late in the series.

Comic Books

  • In the Legacy story arc in the Batman comics, Ra's al Ghul used Catwoman this way to get to an ancient wheel that was a recipe for plagues.
    • The Riddler also tried it on Catwoman during the "When In Rome" storyline, using her to get a ring that makes the wearer the head of the Mafia. He ends up with a fake ring and a lungful of Scarecrow's fear gas, giving him visions of everyone around him on the plane as the Joker.
  • In Captain America (comics) Annual #13, the Red Skull is after Hitler's Strongbox. The Skull learns the strongbox is located in the castle of Albert Malik, the Communist who impersonated the Skull in the 1950s. The Skull, knowing that Captain America will not resist attempting to stop him, issues a challenge which contains the strongbox's location. Cap makes his way through Malik's booby-trapped dungeon to the vault. At which point the Skull comes up behind Cap, death ray in hand, and tells him "I must thank you for activating all the many defenses Malik devised to protect the true strongbox." When an angry Cap declares "So you didn't arrive here first! You maneuvered me into being your stalking horse!" the Skull responds "You should feel flattered. I had so much faith in you surviving Malik's death traps, I followed hard on your heels."

Fan Works

  • In With Strings Attached, the four knock themselves out collecting the three pieces of the Vasyn, one by one. Returning triumphantly with the (much smaller) third piece, they are horrified to discover the other two (huge) pieces missing! (Paul: Who would want them? Who could steal them? John: We could!) Subverted in that the four had no idea anyone else would want the Vasyn, and the thieves didn't even know the four were fetching it until they returned to Ta'akan and found the first two pieces sitting there.
  • In Queen of All Oni, the only method Jade has for tracking the masks on her own is astral projection, which she doesn't trust. So, she has bugs planted in Uncle's shop, so that whenever Jackie and the others discover the location of a mask, she can simply follow them there. This is also what led her to the first tablet of the Teachings of Eternal Shadow, which set off the story's secondary Plot Coupon hunt.

Film

Lampshaded in the second instance in Raiders;
Belloq: Again, Doctor Jones, what was briefly yours is now mine.

  • In the film Oceans Thirteen, Linus Caldwell and his father are about to escape Banks' building with some obscenely valuable diamonds when they are confronted by Francois Toulour (the antagonist of the previous films), who takes the diamonds at gunpoint. Subverted, however, after Toulour leaves the protagonists reveal that the diamonds they gave to Toulour were fakes, and they escape with the real ones.
  • In The Fifth Element, Leeloo fights off a squad of Mangalores to retrieve a case of Applied Phlebotinum stones, only for Zorg to take it from her at gunpoint. Subverted when the case turns out to be empty.
  • In For Your Eyes Only, James Bond and Melina salvage the ATAC after being attacked by some of Kristato's mooks, only to surface and find Kristatos and his other mooks, having killed their crew.
  • In Tomb Raider II: The Cradle of Life, Lara goes through all the trouble of locating the elusive Pandora's Box and finding it, for the Big Bad to show up at just the right moment to seize it.
  • |Dungeons and Dragons, if it weren't enough of a Cliché Storm already.
  • In Bullet to Beijing, Harry Palmer is told by his contact Louis that one component of a deadly biological weapon will be on the bullet train to Beijing. When the train is nearly at its destination, Harry discovers that the vial is in the doll that Louis's grandson gave him before he began.
  • Both National Treasure movies involve the Big Bad luring Nicolas Cage into some treasure hunt filled with riddles, letting him do the hard work in solving them and leading the villain to the treasure. Cage is all too willing.
  • G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra opens with a combination of this and MacGuffin Escort Mission, with Duke and Ripcord leading the convoy to transport the nanomite missiles.

Literature

  • Harry Potter:
    • In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone: Harry plans to get to the Stone before Voldemort. His actions in trying to do so simply make it easier for the Villain to almost succeed.
    • In Order of the Phoenix, Harry breaks into the Ministry of Magic based on visions (from Voldemort) which everyone he tells about urge him to block in order to get the prophecy for Voldemort, as he's one of the few that can. It's two tropes in one; a pretty case of a Batman Gambit by Voldemort that results in Harry almost serving as a MacGuffin Delivery Service
  • The plot of the Deptford Mice sequel Thomas is basically one huge example of this trope. The difference being, the chessmasters behind the good guys actually intend the bad guys to get hold of the MacGuffin, because they've left it hallowed and thus useless for resurrecting the Cosmic Horror.
  • In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel First & Only, the villains originally try force and searching his room to find something in Gaunt's possession, but eventually decide to try this.
  • Tad Williams' trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn turns out to be a giant Kansas City Shuffle: the prophetic dreams many of the protagonists have are actually sent by the villain, in order to get them to bring the three titular swords together.
  • In Septimus Heap, Marcia Overstrand is tricked into returning to the Castle with the Akhu Amulet, which DomDaniel wants to take for himself, via a faked message.
  • In Dead Beat of The Dresden Files, the villains are all looking for both the Word of Kemmler, and a book to summon The Erlking. Harry is the first to find both, and ends up summoning the Erlking himself to keep the villains from using him...at which point said villains show up, club him over the head, and take both. Notably, Harry at least has the foresight to speed read and memorize the Word of Kemmler as soon as he gets it just in case.

Live-Action TV

  • Doctor Who: The Key to Time Story Arc hangs a lampshade on this, with the heroes expecting the Big Bad to try to get every part of the Key. Eventually they discover that he simply got his Dragon to look after the last part and wait for the others to come along, in order to save himself the trouble. "The Five Doctors" has a villainous Time Lord get the Doctor's five incarnations (and various of his companions) to retrieve the secret of (true) immortality for him.
    • Also found in some of the Animated Specials.
  • The Librarian: Quest for the Spear. If the Sword of Destiny hasn't been found in all these years, why don't they assume it's safe where it is?
  • Subverted on Blakes Seven: The crew of a prison ship find an abandoned space ship in the middle of nowhere and decide to have a few of the convicts go on first to find booby traps. The convicts are the heroes and they take the ship as their own.
  • In Tin Man, Azkadelia has spent years unsuccessfully searching for the Emerald of the Eclipse, which she needs to bring her plan to plunge the O.Z. into eternal darkness to fruition. Enter DG and friends, who decide that they have to find the Emerald to stop her. Not one of them suggests that they can foil Azkadelia's plot by just sitting down and twiddling their thumbs until the eclipse has passed.

Tabletop Games

  • The Dungeons & Dragons adventure "The Apocalypse Stone": The first half or so consists of the PC's going on a false mission on behalf of the Big Bad to get him the magical Stone he covets but is under a Magically-Binding Contract not to remove. Unfortunately for everyone (well, except maybe members of the Doomguard), it's not just a MacGuffin; the Stone was actually holding the world together, and removing it from its place has some nasty effects.

Video Games

  • In the original Tomb Raider, Lara inadvertently helps Natla reclaim her original Scion piece, and also the other two.
    • Same in Tomb Raider 2, Tomb Raider 3, Tomb Raider Revelatio- Okay, this happens a lot. Pretty much the basic plot of every game is Lara beating the villain to the treasure of the game, then somehow losing it to the baddie anyway and having to tackle a supernatural final boss.
    • Zig-zagged in the case of Tomb Raider 3, in that Lara collects the final four artifacts in the game for her employer, Dr. Willard. While his claimed intentions were that of merely archaeological curiosity, it turns out that he was using Lara to collect the artifacts to power up an ancient laboratory of "accelerated evolution". Having seen the results of previous experiments, resulting in grotesque and vicious mutations of the human guinea pigs, Lara turns rogue and later kills Dr. Willard, getting the artifacts back.
  • Sonic Adventure uses the Chaos Emeralds this way.
    • So bad that this trooper's friend, who hadn't been paying that much attention to the plot, thought he was collecting the emeralds for Eggman.
      • Erazor Djinn too in Sonic and the Secret Rings. And he almost killed Sonic, too!
  • Final Fantasy IV sometimes does this with elemental crystals. Notably when after the final dark crystal in the sealed cave, and after fighting the incredibly annoying evil wall, Kain reaffirms his status of hypnosis and makes off with the crystal, bringing it back to Golbez. Keep in mind that the Sealed Cave is riddled with instant death dealing Trapdoors, powerful monsters, and That One Boss, so maybe Golbez and Zemus, who's controlling him had it in his best interest to let Cecil do the dirty work for him rather than pour in minions or do it himself.
    • Hell, it's outright stated that Golbez can't get into the cave. You even leave him to try for the duration for an entire subquest, and Golbez still fails to get into the cave, because you need a special key to get in at all. You'd think after all that, Cecil and the gang would realize that the crystal was perfectly safe right where it was, but nooooOOOOoooo.
      • To be fair, Golbez and the Baron military have already successfully taken several "impossible to steal" crystals, including the one that the Dwarf King was almost literally sitting on. It's not exactly a bad assumption on Cecil's part that the sealed gate won't stop him for long. Given his past records however, the idea that it's safer in his hands might be a stretch.
    • Not only that, but in the DS remake, going to your inventory screen has whichever character is in front display a little thought balloon with what they, personally, think of the situation. On your way back up through the cave, Kain's reads: "This feeling...I've felt it before..." then, "No...no! Not again!" Mind telling us that out loud there, Kain?
    • This trope is almost inverted during gameplay, when Cecil and Co. hatch a plan to storm the Big Bad's stronghold to get the crystals that they've obtained over the course of the game. Unfortunately, it turns out that the first step our heroes take into the Crystal Room is onto a trap door - even if everyone has the 'Float' status.
    • The first major quest in Final Fantasy IV is this trope. Cecil and Kain take a ring to the Village of Mist. Once they get there the ring burns the town to the ground. Although, in this case, the Big Bad certainly could have done it himself.
    • And Final Fantasy IV: The After Years has you doing the exact same thing, except at least this time it's mentioned that the villains might be able to get through the seal using brute force.
  • Skies of Arcadia, to the point where it's a surprise to keep a Moon Crystal.
  • This was used on the NES Ninja Gaiden game: Ryu Hayabusa gained one of the two Demon Statues that would awaken Jashin, only to have to give them up to Jaquio who was holding Irene Lew hostage. He was then promptly dropped down a conveniently non-lethal pit for his trouble.
  • Baten Kaitos does this with the End Magnus.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has a double example. When you fight The Dragon who has the last of the Plot Coupons, he tells you that he was just waiting for you to bring the rest to him. After you've collected them all and go up against the Big Bad, he tells you that he gave the final Plot Coupon to The Dragon knowing you'd defeat him, so that you'd bring all the Plot Coupons to the final area.
    • And if, by chance, The Dragon managed to beat them, the Big Bad would also be able to get to the final area. It was set up so that whatever the outcome, he'd still win.
  • Happens twice in Final Fantasy VII with the Black Materia.
  • Pulled off at the end of the Tex Murphy installment The Pandora Directive.
  • An interesting version of this trope occurs in the 2007 Ghost Rider game. The player travels to various locales to hunt down Blackheart's demons who threaten to open the gateway to Hell on Earth, only to find that the gate opens anyway, as the path the Rider took drew an evil symbol on the Earth in the flames left behind by the Rider's bike.
  • One of the side quests in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is based around this trope. (It's even called "Nothing You Can Possess," in reference to the Raiders of the Lost Ark quote.) A wealthy collector hires you to retrieve a particular carving from a ruin. Upon exiting the ruin, you're immediately accosted by a rival treasure hunter and his hired goons, demanding that you turn over the carving.
    • Something similar happens in the Mages' Guild quest where you must retrieve a replacement amulet since the original was stolen. As soon as you grab it, you are confronted by the butt-ugly Nord whom you knew did it all along.
  • Also used in a side quest in Knights of the Old Republic, on the planet Korriban. Subverted if you choose to simply kill the student trying to threaten you, or if you give him a fake and let Uthar do your dirty work for you.
  • There's a reason why the RPG cliche list calls this 'Way to Go, Serge'. The plots Serge falls into in Chrono Cross get so mixed up at times, though, that fans dedicate whole documents on [GameFAQs] to just untangling and explaining them all.
  • This IS the plot of KOTOR II. If you're dark side, you're killing Jedi Masters. If you're light side, you're gathering Jedi Masters so that Kreia, the Manipulative Bastard Man Behind the Man Big Bad can kill them all. Either way, you end up with four dead Jedi Masters .
  • This happens to the titular protagonist of Shantae after obtaining the last Elemental Stone. That genie that looks suspiciously like the Big Bad who seemed to know everything about the Stones and would stop at nothing to help you get the last one? You shouldn't have been so surprised when you exited the dungeon only to be tackled and robbed by her.
  • Metal Gear Solid and its PAL key again. The bad guys were counting on you obtaining the keycard, but in the course of the game you defy the odds to get it back, find out how it works, and use it to activate the nuclear weapon.
  • Very much true in Fallout 3. Very galling as you know that the big bad is looking for the mcguffin, and although you should by rights be able to torch him, his two little helpers and half his army (and in fact do exactly that later in the game) you cannot stop him from stealing the G.E.C.K. in a cutscene.
    • Well, technically you can. In the brief period that you have the G.E.C.K., you can try to activate it. It then warns you that it will destroy everything in a several-mile radius for raw materials. You can then confirm that you want to activate it...
  • In Terranigma you spend the majority of the game reviving the desolate planet Earth, with the last piece revived being Beruga who wants to wipe out the majority of what you just spent the first 75% of the game reviving and preserve the remainder as technologically-created zombies, according to the plans of Dark Gaia, for whom you've been unwittingly working the whole time. Oh, and did I mention that Beruga was the one responsible for wiping out all life on the surface world in the first place?
  • In The Force Unleashed, you spend the second act collecting the Rebel leaders and organizing the Rebellion for Vader. He then takes them all, revealing that he never intended to use the Rebellion as a distraction so you could kill the Emperor, but just wanted to round up and destroy all opposition to the Empire.
    • This then backfires in predictable fashion; the rebellion, having been organized together by the player, is suddenly a credible threat against the Empire rather than a bunch of scattered malcontents.
  • This happens in Okami - partly. Having retreived the Fox Rods from inside the Water Dragon, Amaterasu then proceeds to hand them over to Rao, who then turns out to be Ninetails in disguise.
  • this is the entire plotin Mortal Kombat Deception's Konquest mode.
  • In Summoner, you spend the first third of the game gathering up the four Rings of Summoning so that you can turn yourself into an invincible warrior by using the Forge of Urath on your ringed hand. As it turns out, all that does is burn off your hand, release four demigodly demons trapped within the rings, and allow your traitorous girlfriend to sell you off to The Empire. All thanks to your mentor, who was possessed by the most powerful of the demons. Now you need to beg the Khosani for four new rings, and imprison all four demons again. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
  • Happens right off the bat in Golden Sun, where Saturos and Menardi follow Isaac into Sol Sanctum to take the Elemental Stars as soon as you've retrieved them.
    • Isaac and company manage to do it again atop Venus Lighthouse, when they try to barter for Sheba's release and fail miserably. Except it turned out that Saturos and Menardi were Well Intentioned Extremists trying to save the world, and the Wise One had given Isaac incomplete information.
    • Happens yet again at the climax of the second game, when Felix and company reach the top of the final lighthouse only to learn that completing their mission will give Alex the ultimate power of the Golden Sun.
    • And Dark Dawn takes it to a ridiculous extent. Right from square one, the villains let slip that they're manipulating you. At one point, the Big Bad even gives you a MacGuffin that you need to fulfill your (read: his) ambitions. Quite literally everything you do in the game with the sole exception of winning the final boss fight is exactly what the villains need you to do.
  • Oddly enough, shows up in Bomberman 64. Altair is hyped up for the entire game to be the Big Bad, except if you've gotten all of the Gold Cards. If you do that, instead of fleeing after you've beaten him, Sirius, the guy who has been helping you out, showing up on almost every level and giving you hints, and dropping you the Remote Bomb powerup before every boss, flies in and kills him, then points out that the guys you've been fighting stole the superweapon from him, and you've been unwittingly helping him recover it. After that, all of the hint-givers in the previous levels tell you that you should die because it would be easier. They aren't lying. The hidden final world is WAY harder than anything and everything that came before it.
    • Bomberman Hero did this as well, after you've finally recovered all of the data disks, you hand them over to what you think is Princess Millian. It turns out to be Natia in disguise.
  • Not played straight in Gun. The protagonist retrieves something from a safe, but the bad guy who shows up to collect it doesn't bother to actually snatch the item before gloating about the situation. So the protagonist just tosses the thing back in the safe and slams the door.
  • In Klonoa 2, Klonoa has retrieved three Elements and hands them over to wise man Baguji. As it turns out, the villain, Leorina, was dressed as Baguji and can now proceed to cause The End of the World as We Know It.
    • Might just have happened twice, considering that It kinda seems like the King of Sorrow was the one behind everything in the first place.
  • Final Fantasy IX makes you do this after your allies get grabbed. Not as jarring since it's basically an evil fetch quest.
  • Lampshaded in Unreal II the Awakening, where your Little Miss Snarker second-in-command repeatedly points out the stupidity of gathering all the pieces of an Artifact of Doom together in one place. Sadly, you fail to listen to her.
  • Eye of the Beholder 3. A mysterious figure sends you off to kill a lich. Once you finally manage, it turns out to have been a good lich (despite the fact that he, you know, tried to kill you) and the mysterious figure teleports in, gets an unnamed MacGuffin, reveals himself to be the evil dark god, and flees. The rest of the game is spent chasing him.
  • There is a Nancy Drew game where you discover that the Aztec stone pillar is hollow and contains an important artifact. When you open it, the villain immediately appears, takes the artifact, and shuts you inside the pillar (from whence you have to escape). There's no option of, say, just telling people that the pillar opens.
  • In Crash Bandicoot 2, the goal of the game is to gather Crystals for Cortex so he can shield the planet from a planetary alignment (Cortex's actual plans for them, of course, aren't as heroic as Crash's: Instead he wants to use the crystals to power a massive mind control device).
    • Lampshaded before the final battle in Warped:

Uka Uka: You seem to have overlooked one small detail, you little orange delivery boy! Now that you have gathered all the Crystals, all we have to do... is TAKE THEM FROM YOU!

      • And subverted by the fact that Crash wins those battles. It's even more grandiose in the 100% Completion boss fight, where Uka Uka gloats that he'll be able to achieve ultimate power with both the crystals and the gems.

Uka Uka: Yes, it is true! The bandicoot has brought all of the crystals, and all of the gems. Ultimate power is mine! The world as we know it is about to end.

  • In Final Fantasy XII the empire improvises one of these. It turns out that Vossler, who joins your party on the way to the Tomb of Raithwall, was actually a traitor who told the empire about your plans to recover the Dawn Shard. So when you exit the Tomb you are met with a fleet of airships and Judge Ghis, forcing you to hand over the Dawn Shard that you just spent the last three hours of gameplay fighting to get.
    • And then you get a double dose of it later on. Cid taunts you by revealing his plan to travel to Giruvegan, but once you fight through all the baddies you find out that he never bothered to turn up, and tricked you into travelling to Giruvegan so that you could retrieve the Treaty Blade for him. Which is bad enough already, except that...
      • At Giruvegan you discover that the lost race who live there have been secretly manipulating one of your party members all along, and they give her the Treaty Blade so they can travel to Ridorina - which is where Cid is waiting for them to deliver the blade - because they want her to defeat him and use the blade to create an even more powerful McGuffin which will put the human race back in its place. So yeah, definitely one of the "90%" versions of this trope.
  • World of Warcraft has an interesting version of this during the Lich King encounter: After getting him to 10%, he instantly kills the entire raid and reveals his plan to let Fordring assemble the world's greatest warriors (the players), kill them, and resurrect them to form an unstoppable army. The entire fight against him was just a test, to see if they were worthy.
    • In Cataclysm, you're helping the game's Captain Ersatz of Indiana Jones to search for a valuable artifact. This being a massive Indiana Jones reference, of course his nemesis shows up to claim the artifact for himself. Subverted when the artifact bites back a la Raiders, thanks mainly to the timely intervention of famous explorer and archaeologist Brann Bronzebeard.
  • In Secret of Mana, the heroes are asked to retrieve the stolen Water Seed. They go to the underground tunnel, fight a boss, get hold of the Seed and bring it back to the Water Palace. Too bad Geshtar is there waiting for them, and the Seed gets stolen again.
  • The basic plot of all three Uncharted games.
    • In Drake's Fortune, the bad guys steal Drake's treasure map (which he spent his entire adult life searching for), but are too stupid to figure out anything else. Drake follows them to the island, where he eventually finds a more precise map - which they steal as well.
    • In Among Thieves, Drake wouldn't even be involved except the bad guys keep sending him to fetch stuff. Flynn "helps" Drake steal the first treasure map, waits for him to decipher it, then strands him for the cops. He spends three months in a Turkish prison for his trouble. When he gets out, he goes chasing after the bad guys to steal back the treasure. The bad guys are so stupid that he finds another map in less than three minutes - and the bad guys take it from him and try to kill him. He escapes and finds a third map - and they try to kill him again. When they catch him again after he finds another clue, they've figured out that they need him to finally get to the MacGuffin, and offer him a Sadistic Choice - and try to kill him again once he helps them again.
    • In Drake's Deception, the bad guys don't even bother looking for anything. They just follow Drake around and steal his plot coupons. He eventually wises up and, upon finding a star-based map, doesn't write down in his journal to be stolen, instead relying on Sully's knowledge to find the location. Surprise, surprise: Sully gets kidnapped. At one point, Elena attempts to talk Drake out of his quest, pointing out that the bad guys wouldn't even have gotten this far if it not for him. He brushes it off.
      • This part has more Unfortunate Implications than all the Mooks Drake wastes combined - the mooks in each game belong to a different Gang of Hats, so that's understandable. What's not so understandable is that they need Drake to find all the clues for them. "They are just uneducated thugs who need an American to work hard so they can steal from him."
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Ganondorf pulls one, when He storms into the Sacred Grove just as Link has gotten all of the Spiritual Stones, played the Song of Time on the Ocarina of Time, and was just about to grab the master sword. Turns out that Ganondorf had been following Link the whole time so he could do all the dirty work and the 'pure of heart' junk for him.
  • In Monkey Island 2 Le Chucks Revenge, Guybrush spends more than half the game collecting four map pieces to the legendary treasure of Big Whoop, only for the two bad guys LeChuck and Largo (who twiddled their thumbs the whole time whilst Guybrush was out retrieving the map pieces) snatch it off the cartographer he leaves it with.
  • BioShock (series) has the end-of-second-act plot twist where Andrew Ryan shows that the player was being mind-controlled into doing Atlas' bidding through the whole game, and orders the player to kill himself, after which he pilfers Ryan's body and delivers the Genetic Key to Atlas, who reveals himself as Frank Fontaine, Ryan's biggest rival.
  • Legacy of Kain uses a variant of this, where Raziel plays right into the Hylden's hands by resurrecting the ancient vampire Janos Audron for the Hylden Lord to use as a host, and even murders Kain, the Scion of Balance, in the process. Take your pick on which is the proper MacGuffin: The Heart of Darkness, which had been used to resurrect Kain, or Janos himself.
  • Pulled off in the last game of Kirby Super Star, "Milky Way Wishes." The sun and moon begin to fight, throwing Popstar's day-night cycles out of balance. Marx, an adorable jester, tells Kirby that in order to make peace between the sun and the moon, he must ask the wish-granting comet Nova, who can only be summoned once he collects the power from all the neighboring planets. This was all Marx's plan. He was the one who tricked the sun and moon into fighting, knowing that Kirby would try to solve the problem by doing all the dirty work for him and summoning Nova. Once Kirby does summon Nova, Marx knocks him aside before he can make a wish, then wishes to control Popstar.
  • A variation occurs in Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. The brothers are racing to find the legendary Chuckola Reserve soda to cure Queen Bean, but the self-proclaimed "shadow thief" Popple also wants to get his hands on it. At one point in the forest, the Bros. have to use their new Hammer techniques to get three Chuckola fruits to pass a guardian. Once the Bros. get all three, the guardian lets them pass... at which point Popple and Co. come out of the bushes, enthused about how, since they couldn't get through the gate, their plan to wait for someone else to come and open it worked! The Bros. are not amused.
  • There's a minor attempted example in Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn in Firkraag's lair, where some tomb raiders try to trick you into doing their dirty work and then kill you. Of course, it doesn't work.
    • In the main plot, you end up delivering a very important Macguffin to the Big Bad without realizing it until it's too late: your own divine soul. It stops being a Macguffin the moment you lose it, since the power it grants the Big Bad is made all too obvious. Worse, the loss of it grants you new and terrifying powers since your soul was the only thing keeping the essence of Murder at bay.
  • In Tales of Symphonia, Lloyd and his friends end up playing this role during the Journey of Salvation, when they end up powering the MacGuffin (Colette) and unwittingly hand it right over to The Dragon (luckily, Yuan intervenes). They end up doing the exact same thing again when they cure Colette's crystallization sickness only to ill-advisedly attack the Big Bad's lair, who was of course expecting them and instantly recaptures Colette.
  • Dead Island has you doing this for a whopping 96% of the game (as noted by the fact that when you get betrayed by the mysterious voice, your main plot progress is at 96%.) Since you're immune from zombification for some reason, the voice guides you to all sorts of venues before finally guiding you to a lab where scientists are working on a zombie antidote. When it's complete, the voice tells you to meet him on a prison island where you have to do some favors for prisoners before getting access to him. Once you finally meet he hits you with sleeping gas, steals the antidote, and calls in an order to nuke the island.
  • In Mass Effect 3, a mission on the Asari homeworld of Thessia has Commander Shepard activate the Prothean VI in their temple only to lose the fight against Cerberus assasin Kai Leng, and have it taken away by him.

Web Comics

  • Inverted in the Web Comic Adventurers!, where the heroes were tasked with collecting the elemental artifacts. Their enemy, Rio the thief, was ordered to steal one of the elemental artifacts so that they couldn't, but in typical Rio incompetence, he stole the one artifact that had previously been successfully kept away from them. Shortly after, he confronted Drecker, who proceeded to steal it from him, resulting in the heroes' success.
    • Played straight when the heroes finally reach the end of a dungeon, only to have Khirma show up and take the crystal they were trying to keep from him.
  • Subverted with lampshade in the webcomic Narbonic, the "Crystal of Marinia" story arc.
  • In Order of the Stick #821, Tarquin offers this advice to Nale.
  • A bit literally in The Fourth. First, Lord Skärva sends his minions to acquire a flower for use in a potion; second, the hero Blank confronts Skärva only to find the items he'd collected in the dungeons were food from Skärva's pantry, which he promptly put back there.

Web Original

  • In the Kate Modern episode "Seven Dials: 5pm - 23rd November 2007", Charlie emerges from a building carrying the software, with Terrence in pursuit, only to meet the Watcher, who beats up both of them and drives off with the software.

Western Animation

  • Happens often in Jackie Chan Adventures. In fact, all seasons end with the villain getting what they wanted, but of course they still lose to the heroes. Both sides constantly run into each other throughout the series. Even Valmont pointed out how it was sometimes easier to have Jackie do the work for him of getting the MacGuffin.
    • An interesting variant happens in the season four where the heroes and villains race to collect the masks that contain the spirits of Tarakudo's generals. In the end, it does not matter which faction collects all the mask as long as they are collected together, making this Failure Is the Only Option as far as preventing Tarakudo from rising again is concerned.
  • Happens in an episode of Beast Wars. Rattrap, at great risk, dives to the sunken Axalon to retrieve the Sentinel control module - only for the Predacons to blast him and swipe it when he gets to the surface. It changes hands a couple more times before the episode ends, but the ending isn't happy.
  • In Kim Possible, "Monkey Fist Strikes" has Kim go through numerous death traps to retrieve a monkey idol in what may have been a Shout-Out to Indiana Jones, but that night, a ninja creeps into the camp and stole it. Of course, the ninja did turn out to be the masquerading villain all along.
    • In "Hidden Talents", Drakken fakes messages from Wade in order to manipulate Kim into stealing one of Professor Dementor's inventions and bringing it to him.
  • Subverted in Disney's Aladdin, Aladdin fetches the lamp and lo and behold, the Big Bad Jafar is waiting at the entrance to the Cave of Wonders and snatches the lamp, double-crossing Aladdin and shoving him back into the collapsing cave. Later, it is shown that during the chaos, Aladdin's monkey stole the lamp back from Jafar before they were shoved in. After this point, the Lamp ceases to be a MacGuffin as its specific powers become central to the plot.
    • The use of this trope is one of the things taken from the Persian folktale the cartoon is based on.
  • The Simpsons The Hellfish Bonanza.
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