Myopic Architecture: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

This door is absolutely impenetrable. It's [[Made of Indestructium|made of 100% Indestructium]], is guarded by robot monkeys with crossbows, and opens only to authorised personnel who pass the DNA test, pass the retina scan and present a valid birth certificate. Yes, no one will ever force his way into — ''did you just break the door off its hinges?''

 

Compare [[Dungeon Bypass]], [[Cutting the Knot]], [[Steal the Surroundings]]. Contrast [[There Was a Door]].

 

* Played straight in a TV ad for [http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichet_Serrurerie_Batiment a French reinforced door company]: France's equivalent of a SWAT team is raiding an apartment building and hits a particular door with a battering ram: This only makes a huge hole in the wall around it, with the door and its frame still standing.

 

* In ''[[Doctor Strange]]: The Oath'', a door is sealed with a magic sigil. Strange asks Wong to break the door down. Seconds later, the Night Nurse calmly picks the lock [[Hairpin Lockpick|with a hairpin]].

 

* ''[[Pirates of the Caribbean]]'' presents a lesson: Don't build a jail door using half-pin hinges.

* ''[[Star Wars]]'' has The Death Star. Surely no one would shoot missiles into an open chute that leads directly to the main reactor. And it wouldn't hurt to place said chute at the end of a long valley that puts any attacking fighters out of shot from the defensive guns.

** This is ''heavily'' lampshaded in the ''[[Family Guy]]'' version.

* [[Justified Trope|Justified]] with Helms Deep in ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'', as the designers could not have anticipated that Saruman would use explosives, mostly because he apparently invented them just for this battle.

* There are many examples where someone is prepared to break down the door when someone says, 'wait' and turns the knob of the unlocked door.

** In ''[[The Pink Panther]]'' Inspector Clouseau is prepared to shoot the lock when Mr. Tucker says, "Don't do that old man" and opens the door.

 

* The main gate of ''[[Redwall|Redwall Abbey]]'' is large and thick, impervious to even the most dedicated of sieges. Basically, not one invading vermin horde has ever gotten through it. The tiny wicker side-gate, on the other hand, has been breached by countless invading hordes over the seasons, probably accounting for every successful invasion of the abbey. This is presumably intentional, since it would be easy to station three well-armed, armoured guards there during a siege to hack up any single file intruders who tried to get in. Unfortunately, being peaceful monk and villagers, the Redwall inhabitants never think of that.

** In ''[[Redwall|The Bellmaker]]'', the heroes are able to escape their prison cell by hacking the hinges (which are on the inside) off.

*** Which is [[Justified Trope|justified]], as the heroes' "prison" was a peaceful residence, and was invaded practically only weeks back. The occupiers locked the heroes into the tallest tower, i.e. the place with the least chance of escape (but it is highly suggested -because of it being the ''tallest'' tower-, that it probably was the keep, and hence built defensively. Therefore, the hinges naturally were on the ''in''side]].

** At one point a point is made of the wonderfully-made reinforced hinges on the door of the notorious bar The Mended Drum. The point made is that they held up beautifully as the whole frame was ripped from the wall.

'''Cohen:''' I think they're for other people. }}

* In one of [[Christopher Anvil]]'s ''Interstellar Patrol'' stories, the villain boasts of how impregnable his [[Elaborate Underground Base]] is. When the protagonist puts this to the test, he finds that neither the villain nor his contractors realised that it's no good having foot-thick walls if they only go up to ceiling height, with a convenient access void above them.

 

* In one episode of ''[[The Mentalist]]'', the [[Victim of the Week]] was killed via exposure to a deadly virus kept in a high security vault accessed by retina scan - which didn't work right and would let in anybody who presented their eye for scanning.

* A minor example in ''[[The Sarah Connor Chronicles]]'', someone shuts a metal security door in their faces, and Sarah asks Cameron if she can get through it. Being a Terminator she could given time, but it's faster to punch a hole in the concrete wall. Of course, the person they were going after was expecting human pursuers, against whom the wall would have been sufficient.

* A common conceit in Michael Weston's voice-overs on ''[[Burn Notice]]'' is that people are more apt to reinforce doors than the nearby walls.

 

* There is a ''[[Hagar the Horrible]]'' strip where Hagar returns from a-plundering, handing Helga a large, well-crafted castle-style lock, noting that she's been worried about people breaking into their house. She's initially overjoyed, untill she asks where he got it. "Oh, it wasn't too hard — it only took me five seconds to rip it out."

* In a ''Gnasher and Gnipper'' strip, after the dogs knock over Dad one time too many, he buys a pair of special gnash-proof chains to keep them restrained. Fortunately for the dogs, while the chains were completely gnash-proof, the wall wasn't.

 

 

* In ''[[A Very Potter Musical]]'' Ron assures everyone that Voldemort can't get in, because he's barricaded the door. Seconds later, Voldemort enters through a curtain right next to the door.

 

* Often exploited by Revan in ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]]''.

* The [[Big Bad]] of ''[[Second Sight]]'' {{spoiler|eventually hides himself in a room behind a large pane of glass which, apparently, is immune to not only bullets but all of your various psychic powers. Too bad for him the ''frame'' is ordinary metal.}}

* Similarly, in ''[[Leisure Suit Larry]] 7'', the door to the staff room is heavy steel and, if you get too close, about a hundred weapons emerge from the walls to point directly at your head. Security measures include testers for DNA, fingerprints, retinal scans, tongue prints, and urine analysis. But, it turns out, the latch doesn't work properly and you can get in by just pushing on it.

* Similarly to the Pirates example above is the cell door on the pirate island in ''[[Shadow Hearts]]: To The New World.'' Natan just lifts it up and walks out.

* A common mistake for newbies to ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'', rarely realized until the fort's defenses are put to the test.

* ''[[Jagged Alliance|Jagged Alliance 2]]'' has several locations with doors that are extremely difficult to lockpick and resilient enough to withstand a blast from an anti-tank rocket. The walls these doors are placed in, however, are completely ordinary and can be blasted to rubble with an ordinary dynamite stick.

* The Geomod engine from the first ''[[Red Faction]]'' game let the player destroy just about anything in the environment. Bulletproof windows, however, were completely indestructible. The walls around them were not. With enough explosive, a player could leave a glass pane floating in the middle of a twelve food wide void.

 

 

* In an episode of the 1967 ''[[Fantastic Four]]'', Diablo is running from Thing and retreats into a panic room. He assumes he's safe, since the door is made of titanium, which Thing is not strong enough to break. When Thing reaches to room, he just breaks through the wall.

 

* After a long and bloody siege that they had pretty well held off up to that point, Constantinople finally fell when someone left a small supply gate open, allowing the invading army to come in.

* Cryptography brings us the "Single Point of Failure". Basically, if each part of your system is secured with a different password, a cracker who gets just one of those passwords will have a hard time doing much damage. But if you use the same password for everything, you're hosed.

** Cryptography has this issue in more ways than one. There are branches of mathematics devoted to developing crypto-systems that are pretty much mathematically guaranteed to be secure. However, once these systems are developed, they are turned over to people who use passwords like "password" or leave their login information on a little sticky note on the monitor.

** Thus leading to the following expression: "The user is the biggest threat to any security system."

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Action Adventure Tropes]]