Overt Operative: Difference between revisions

* Max Smart in ''[[Get Smart]]'' has been outed any number of times before friends, courts (complete with juries and an audience), police, etc., KAOS knows not only his identity but his address, and he still continues his career as a "secret" agent. And that's just in the first half of the first season! That's the magic of parody for you.

** Doubly subverted by Agent 99, who never reveals her real name, even to Max. (On the other hand, she's consequently also routinely addressed in public as "Agent 99.")

* In the British show ''[[Murphy's Law]]'', despite being a career undercover cop, Tommy Murphy almost always uses his real name. This doesn't seem to cause any problems until the third series, when the bad guys get curious about the "Tommy from Belfast" currently testifying in a criminal trial, and even then the matter is quickly dropped.

* The entirety of the ''[[Torchwood]]'' organization, which is theoretically secret. They barge into crime scenes and restricted areas using their status as Torchwood agents to explain it. In the first episode someone trying to find them does so by going to a pizza place and asking if one of their agents was a customer, and learned nothing. Then she asked if they'd had any orders from Torchwood. That brought her right to them. In a later episode someone managed to find their base by going to Cardiff and just asking people in the street where Torchwood was. They have an SUV marked "Torchwood" and get yelled at by name by random old ladies in the street by the second series, so the whole secrecy thing is a half-joke by now.

* Subverted in the [[Discworld]] book ''[[Discworld/Maskerade|Maskerade]]'', with two operatives are extremely overt due to being Corporal Nobbs and Detritus, some of the Watch's best known and least deceptive members - who are there to distract attention from their real agent, who's been there for some time already.

** Vetinari uses a similar plan in ''[[Discworld/Going Postal|Going Postal]]'' when he had someone tailed by an incompetent agent: if you see Vetinari's spy, it's a spy he wants you to see.

* ''[[Geronimo Stilton]]'': One of Stilton's old friends, Kornelius Von Kickpaw, is a secret agent who always wears [[Conspicuous Trenchcoat|a trenchcoat and dark glasses]]. His sister, also a secret agent, always wears a distinctive perfume.

* Compared to his cinematic alter ego, the [[James Bond]] of [[Ian Fleming]]'s novels is portrayed in a relatively realistic manner. Nevertheless, when he's in London, Bond's real name is known, as is his true employer ("Something at the Ministry of Defense.") The precise nature of his job is still unknown, but the fact that he's doing ''some'' sort of secretive work is not. This is pretty much [[Truth in Television]] (see Valerie Plame, below, for what's actually a rather typical, if unusually widely-known, example, below.)

*** Fair play towards a former enemy does admit that while it may have been trigger happy, they might have had a point, depending on the situation. And it was likely a hard decision for a sentry to have to make.

** French and British operatives were also killed in the missions.

* SIS handlers used the position of Passport Control Officer in British embassies, though by the late 1930's it had become a [[Paper-Thin Disguise]].

 

[[Category:Overt Operative]]

[[Category:Example as a Thesis]]