39,327
edits
The Key Is Behind the Lock: Difference between revisions
m
update links
m (update links) |
|||
Line 3:
Something important is locked. There is a key. However, this key is inside. You need the key to reach the key.
While this trope can be [[Played for Laughs]] with trivial situations such as locking your car keys in the car, many works that use it choose to employ it in a far more dramatic manner. The hero is on a quest to find the key, eventually finding some other way to reach what he needed the key for - and then he finds out that his initial quest was futile; the key was inside all along.
{{examples}}
== Anime & Manga ==
* In one episode of ''[[Cardcaptor Sakura]]'', [[MacGuffin Girl|Tomoyo]] has been trapped in a classroom as {{spoiler|Eriol messed with the floor plan as a test for Sakura}}. Sakura needs to find her, and Syaoran says he has a magical technique that can locate lost people, provided she has left an object behind. (Not unlike a dog using scent, except it works off auras/energy signatures.) Tomoyo ''did'' have an umbrella...but it's with her in the very classroom they're trying to locate.
== [[Comic Books]] ==
* In the [[Donald Duck]] story "[http://coa.inducks.org/story.php?c=W+WDC+206-02 Sagmore Springs Hotel]", Donald, as a Hotel Manager, accidentally locks the combination to the hotel safe inside the safe. In his attempts to open it, he ends up devastating the entire hotel and destroying his uncle's important cheque.
== [[Film]] -- Animated ==
Line 30:
== [[Literature]] ==
* In ''[[Blå Tornet]]'', the Guardian has been sleeping on the High Altar for over a thousand years. There are a lot of prophecies about how a chosen one will one day wake him. In the meantime, one of the worst blasphemy someone can do is to touch The Guardians holy sleeping body. It turns out that they artifact needed to wake the Guardian is in fact inside the altar: Only a blasphemer can heal the horrible wrong that happened so long ago, and lead the civilization back on the quest the creators had originally intended.
* There's a recurring gag in the [[Discworld]] novel ''[[Discworld/Thief of Time|Thief of Time]]'' about "opening the box with the crowbar you will find inside".
** Also, in ''[[Discworld/Jingo|Jingo]]'' the Bursar has locked himself in the Unseen University safe and taken the key with him. "It's not even as if there's a keyhole on the inside".
** In ''[[Discworld/Going Postal|Going Postal]]'', Vetinari plays mind games with condemned criminals--if they use the spoon they get with their gruel to try and dig a stone block out of the wall as part of an escape attempt (ruining the spoon in the process), they finally pull the block out only to find a little alcove behind with a shiny new spoon in it.
* A fairly standard situation in the [[Locked Room Mystery]] is for the police to have to break into the Locked Room, because the key is inside with the deceased.
* Subverted in a short story by [[Isaac Asimov]], where people are searching for an uranium asteroid an illegal miner found, and due to the miners dying in an accident, all they have is a statement by a silicon based alien that the coordinates are "on the asteroid" (the alien died right after saying that). {{spoiler|In the end it turns out that the alien wasn't good in astronomy, and the coordinates were actually ''on the ship'' - [[Hidden in Plain Sight|hidden among the registration codes of the equipment]]}}.
Line 40:
* Happens in ''[[Corner Gas]]''. Hank had a combination lock that stored the lock's combination.
** Then there was the time he locked his keys in his truck, and didn't notice that his passenger side window was down.
* That happens in an episode of ''[[Get Smart]]'' too, regarding the wall safe in the Chief's office.
{{quote|'''Chief:''' Have you got the new combination, Max?
'''Max:''' ''New'' combination?
Line 65:
* In ''[[Zork: Grand Inquisitor]]'', there is a glass box ("In case of adventure, break glass") containing a spell scroll, a sword and a hammer. It can be easily opened, but the clamp holding the sword will not let go. The obvious solution is to {{spoiler|open the box, take the hammer, close the box, break glass. Then the clamp lets go and you can take the sword}}.
* In the NES port of ''[[Metal Gear 1987]]'', the keycard required to enter Building No. 4 is inside the building itself. {{spoiler|This requires Snake to get captured on purpose in order to get inside said building.}}
** A similar situation occurs in ''[[
* The first level of ''[[Mystery of Time and Space]]'' has the key in the keyhole on the other side of the locked door. To get it, {{spoiler|you have to slide a poster underneath the door and then push something small enough through the keyhole to make the key drop onto the poster, which you can then retrieve}}.
* The [[Interactive Fiction]] game ''[http://www.wurb.com/if/game/1821 Savoir Faire]'' has one locked door where you can see the key through the keyhole. The solution to unlocking this door is more creative than the usual ones, due to the game world's [[Functional Magic]] which lets you "link" similar things to each other so that doing something to one of them will similarly affect the other: {{spoiler|link the key to your sword (it's ornate enough to allow the link) and then turn your sword in its sheath. Voila, an unlocked door!}}
| |||