Needle in a Stack of Needles: Difference between revisions

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* Happens {{spoiler|by accident}} on ''[[Homicide: Life On the Street]]'', when a murdered body is left ''in the morgue'' by a killer, and the incongruity isn't noticed for hours because no one thought to check how many bodies were supposed to be there. {{spoiler|Turns out the killer hadn't even realized the victim was fatally injured, and had laid the soon-to-be-corpse (his cousin) on a handy table to recuperate after they'd fought, then gone home.}}

* Rabbi Garfinkle explains on ''[[In Plain Sight]]'' that finding the needle is easy "If you are willing to look at each and every piece of straw." The rabbi has patiently spent years in a methodical search and successfully found one of Mary's witnesses. He tells her that witness protection works because "Criminals are lazy. That is why they are criminals. I on the other hand..."

* In one episode of ''[[Covert Affairs]]'', an operative is killed right before delivering important information to the CIA. They know that he hid the information inside a period on a piece of paper. His cover was a college professor, so his house was ''full'' of books and writings. Trope played straight, but Auggie inverts the [[Stock Phrase]], describing it as "like finding a needle in a haystack... in a forest full of haystacks."

* ''[[The Amazing Race]]'' is a huge fan of this trope. One notable Road Block involved finding fake pieces of food amongst a huge table of real `food. The catch was that if you chose wrong, you had to eat the food you picked. This, obviously, became a huge problem when some teams made several dozen wrong choices...