Magic Countdown/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: As the clock ticks down to an impending disaster, time elongates, usually to increase dramatic tension.

  • Straight: A time bomb is set to go off in 30 minutes. At one minute remaining it starts ticking down half as quickly, at thirty seconds it ticks down one-fourth as quickly, etc.
  • Exaggerated: A time bomb is set to go off in 5 minutes. Each minute takes a full 22-minute episode to pass, except for the last minute, which takes two episodes.
  • Downplayed: A time bomb is set to go off in 20 minutes. It takes approximately 20 minutes and 5 seconds of real time to count down to zero.
  • Justified: The timer starts malfunctioning as it nears the end of the countdown, and starts ticking down slower as a result.
  • Inverted: An athlete attempts to qualify for a race. Although his run appears to be about 30 seconds, the stopwatch actually indicates that he took a full minute.
  • Subverted: A time bomb appears to be ticking down slower to increase dramatic tension... but then it goes off before it hits zero, indicating that the timer was just malfunctioning.
  • Double Subverted: ...except it turns out that the bomb exploding early was just imagined.
  • Parodied: The timer on the bomb is set at 25:00. Everyone looks away, and when they turn their attention back to it 30 seconds later, they find it now reads 22:00. They quickly learn the timer is upside down; it was actually originally set to 00:52.
  • Zig Zagged: Sometimes the timer on the bomb runs unusually fast or slow while not in view, and other times it displays the time you would expect given how much time passed between viewings.
  • Averted: The timer ticks down in real time.
  • Enforced: ???
  • Lampshaded: ???
  • Invoked: ???
  • Exploited: ???
  • Defied: ???
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???

There's plenty of time to return to Magic Countdown before the timer reaches zero.