Revealing Coverup: Difference between revisions

{{quote|'''Father Brown:''' For an intelligent murderer, such as you or I might be, it is an impossible plan to make sure that nobody is looking at you.

'''Flambeau:''' But what other plan is there?

 

 

Generally speaking, when you're a [[Diabolical Mastermind]] and you want to cover up [[Evil Plan|some kind of nefarious activity]], the general desire is to be low-key, go about one's business and [[Villain Ball|not attract undue attention]]. This is especially critical when you don't want the other guys to know that you're being nefarious all over their business. What's the point of breaking in and stealing the codebook if they know you have it and simply change the code? So you keep it simple, keep it quiet, don't rock the boat...

An occasional subversion is someone organizing a '''Revealing Coverup''' because they ''want'' to keep the heroes interested. Compare [[Kansas City Shuffle]].

 

 

{{examples|suf=s}}

* Used to extreme effect in the eleventh volume of ''[[The Kindaichi Case Files]].'' The killer followed Kindaichi throughout the two-parter mystery, killing people after they provided messages which was supposed to lead to a manuscript he wanted to keep from being published. What neither the killer nor Kindaichi realize until after the last message was a dead end is that the message itself was irrelevant. The real clue was hidden in the order of the now dead message givers. Because of the murders meant to silence them, the newspaper following the last murder would inevitably print them in order of killing, providing the same clue to ''everyone'' who read the paper, guaranteeing ''someone'' would figure it out before the killer could and prompting a desperate grasping of the [[Villain Ball]].

* In ''[[One Piece]]'', the denizens of Punk Hazard try to trick Smoker out of investigating their island by putting out toxic gas. The idea was to make him think it was still uninhabitable after a prior accident. Unfortunately, Smoker knows the history of that island and this only makes him ''more'' suspicious.

* In an episode of [[Detective Conan]] a criminal attempts to acquire a demo tape that implicates him in a murder. It's especially note worthy that before the criminals attempts to acquire the tape Conan thought nothing special was on it. (He had listened to it previously in hopes of finding out why the artist was being stalked.)

 

** Not only murdered, but killed in such a needlessly elaborate and gruesome way that it inevitably attracts the attention of half the country, never mind the obsessive detective.

 

== [[Fan Works]] ==

== [[Literature]] ==

* This happens a lot in [[Terry Pratchett]]'s ''[[Discworld]]'' novels involving the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. You'd think people would have learned that if you try to cover something up in Ankh-Morpork, Commander Samuel Vimes is only going to get suspicious, dig deeper, and then come down on you like a ton of rectangular building things.

*** Indeed, it's also revealed eventually that a Klatchian pretended to be the villain and fled to Klatch in order to lure Vimes there so he could actually help.

*** It helps that the Empire's army of 700,000 men is already confused about why the barbarian army of seven men is cheerfully marching out to fight them. The [[Big Bad]] tries to be [[Genre Savvy]] when he realizes the rumour won't be squashed, by spreading the tale that those ghosts in fact are there, [[Refuge in Audacity|and that this has enraged the spirits of the Empire's ancestors]]. It backfires because the empire's armies have been fighting a lot of civil wars, and many soldiers are not keen on meeting the spirits of their late opponents either.

* In the [[James Bond]] novel ''[[You Only Live Twice]]'', evil mastermind Blofeld decides to best way to lie low is to operate a castle with a poison garden for people wanting to commit suicide. If they change their mind, the "gardeners" assist them. No one is going to pay any attention to that, right?

'''Markmor''': You were dealing with a businessman. What do you think he does? He buys and sells things, that's what he does.

'''Markmor''': At times like this I could almost justify destroying you, talented or not. Brain damaged is what you are. }}

 

== [[Live Action TV]] ==

* One episode of ''[[The Good Guys]]'' has the [[Villain of the Week]] set up a bank robbery to be performed by expendable, unarmed, unwitting henchmen (including [[Minion with an F In Evil|"the worst getaway driver in the business"]]). This was only meant to draw the entire Dallas police force to that location so that he could set off explosives on the bridge between the cops and his ''real'' target, a jewelry store. {{spoiler|Jack and Dan figure out the plot just in time [[Spanner in the Works|to scare the thieves off]], but aren't able to catch them. Their presence does make the legitimately dangerous crooks wonder if their [[Manipulative Bastard]] boss had set ''them'' up to be the fall-guys, however, leading them all to kill each other off.}}

* An episode of [[Republic of Doyle]] begins with Des being arrested ([[Noodle Implements|while wearing a snorkel]]) after robbing a convenience store and a male strip club while drunk, and leading every police officer in St. John's across the city to distract them from the ''real'' target that evening, a priceless statue.

** Pulled earlier {{spoiler|by [[Spy Master|Garak]] when he sees a Romulan assassin on the station. Garak blows up his own shop to make Odo think the assassin did it, but Odo discovers otherwise that the assassin works with ''poisons'' not explosives.}}

*** And then {{spoiler|the assassin gets killed anyway as though someone was covering their tracks, which only stokes Odo's curiosity further. By the time Odo and Garak figure out what's going on, the Romulans and Cardassians are making a joint first-strike on the Dominion.}}

* In a variant compressed into less than five seconds, the team on ''NCIS'' needs to locate some terrorists hiding among any of a dozen warehouses. Knowing they're pressed for time, Gibbs whips out a shotgun and blasts a nearby street light, which causes the terrorists' rooftop lookout to immediately open fire and give away the bad guys' position. Had he had the sense to quietly keep his head down, the team would've been too late to stop them.

 

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* On ''[[Gargoyles]]'' [[Dragon with an Agenda|the Weird Sisters]] actually manage to get away with this: they have Demona and Macbeth steal the [[Time Travel|Phoenix Gate]], the [[A Darker Me|Eye of Odin]], the [[Spell Book|Grimorum Arcanorum]], and [[Cyborg|Coldstone]]'s body. As Coldstone is much larger and more noticeable, and as the other three objects were only being held by the Gargoyles to keep it out of other people's hands, they only initially notice Coldstone's absence, which was [[Batman Gambit|exactly what the Weird Sisters were hoping for]].

* On ''[[Young Justice]],'' [[Humanoid Abomination|Klarion]] and his allies cast a spell that splits the world in two, with one dimension for adults and one for children and teens. While the heroes are eventually able to trace the magic to its source and stop them, they fail to notice that in the confusion, [[Archnemesis Dad|Sportsmaster]] and [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass|the Riddler]] {{spoiler|steal Starro's tissue sample from STAR Labs}}. Klarion's colleague [[Brain In a Jar|the Brain]] even [[lampshade]]s the fact that causing a ''world-wide catastrophe'' for the cover-up was "''[[Poirot Speak|peut-etre]]'' extreme," but that's Klarion for you.

 

== Real Life ==

** Averted in the case of the science fiction story "Deadline", which featured a fairly accurate description of the atomic bomb—in 1944. ''[[Analog|Astounding]]'' editor John Campbell convinced the FBI agents who showed up at his office that attempting to pull the issue from distribution would only [[Streisand Effect|call attention to it]].

* Tommy Robinson's case, recursively. UK had a football hooligan turned political activist arrested for filming from outside the courthouse during a particularly infamous case, while being ordered by the court not to do this. Cue "#FreeTommy" hashtag, photos and screenshots from his videos all over internet, people outside UK turn to thumb nose at them with "[[Banned in China|It's illegal to report this story in the UK.]]" and donate to his bail and legal fees. Surprise, a locally infamous case becomes infamous world-wide. Then, of course, those opposing this began to call the first crowd names, throw themselves into strawman arms race with wild abandon, provoke responses in turn and give journalists more to talk about, thus inevitably attracting attention of people who somehow managed to miss the initial explosion. Who do you think wins? {{spoiler|Answer: Change.org, because it got an opportunity to [[Playing Both Sides|milk ''both'' sides]] for profit, rather than mostly being limited to the market of virtue signalling globalists like before, and now that a "loud" precedent was established, it's in a better position to do this. }}

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Contrived Stupidity Tropes]]

[[Category:Stupidity Tropes]]

[[Category:Plots]]