Wham! Shot

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You're watching a show or reading a graphic novel. It all seems well. Then one image makes you stand up straight and pay attention. "What is happening?!" you may ask dramatically.

A Sister Trope to both the Wham! Episode and the Wham! Line, the Wham! Shot is when one shot or image changes the narrative drastically. You may get a plot twist that puts everything in context, or sends the plot in another direction. We also get another side of a character, Hidden Depths or reasons for their motivation.

Compare with The Ending Changes Everything.

WARNING! There are unmarked Spoilers ahead. Beware.

Examples of Wham! Shot include:

Advertising

• Many cereal commercials use these when doing story arcs and encouraging people to follow along by following the cereal or going online. Case in point...
  • A literal shot is when Cap'n Crunch goes missing from the Crunch Cereal boxes. His image is missing, as newscasters order people to report any clues they find in their cereal.
  • One Pebbles ad featured Barney dressing up as a mermaid, as usual, and stealing Fred's Pebbles cereal. A sea monster then interrupts them. After Fred arrives at the surface, he then stops to think that "Mermaid - fish tail= Barney." Fred says, "I have to save him!" and dives back in to rescue his friend from the sea monster. This would lead to a maze game on the back of cereal boxes.

Anime and Manga

• Pokemon showed Gary effortlessly getting his badges, and catching much more Pokemon then Ash does. Then he faces Giovanni at the Viridian City gym. At first he curbstomps the first few Pokemon. Then Giovanni reveals a mysterious masked Pokemon that curbstomps his battle monsters. Gary and his cheerleaders wake up in shock that he lost.
• Sailor Moon
  • Manga only
    • You think this is going to be a cutesy magical girls story where a teenager learns to fight monsters and protect her friends. Then Zoicite comes up with a near-foolproof plan to lure Sailor Moon into a trap, and successfully gets her in a chokehold. Tuxedo Kamen can't attack without hurting Sailor Moon, watching with helplessness. So do the Senshi. Just as it seems Zoicite will kill Sailor Moon, a crescent beam incinerates him. It's Sailor V!
    • The Chaos Galaxia arc starts with Usagi seeing off Mamoru at the airport, as he gives her an engagement ring and promises he will be back soon from studying abroad. Then someone shoots Mamoru in the back, and it's confirmed that this killed him. Usagi blocks out the memory because it was so traumatic.
  • Anime only
    • When a youma attacks Ami in her debut episode, a symbol appears on her forehead, the kanji for Mercury. Luna realizes what this means, that Ami is a Sailor Guardian.
    • Zoicite's youma impaling Nephrite with thick plant barbs as he attempts to protect Naru. Amazingly, this was kept in the DiC dub, including Naru's futile attempts to remove the barbs.
    • A fake Sailor Moon is going around fighting crime, stealing the real Sailor Moon's thunder as the Guardians wonder if she could be the Princess. When Kunzite seems to capture the fake, Tuxedo Kamen launches a rescue. Then said Sailor Moon gives an Evil Laugh and stabs him with an icicle. "She" unzips a costume, revealed to be Zoicite in disguise. Turns out it was a Dark Kingdom plot to eliminate the Senshi and Tuxedo Kamen all at once. And they nearly succeed.
    • To show that the DD girls mean business, they pose as the girls' loved ones. It seems they're holding Tuxedo Kamen hostage, and Sailor Moon rushes to him. The girls dogpile her; as she protests, Tuxedo Kamen gives a Psychotic Smirk and shoots vines at them, just as Sailor Mercury shouts that it's a youma!
    • Sailor Jupiter attempts to stay behind and launch thunderbolts at the youma. They catch her off-guard by changing into Motoki, and all five start electrocuting her. Sailor Jupiter ends up using herself as a lightning rod and electrocutes herself to take out two of the five DD girls. When it's over, she lies prone on an ice floe. Slowly, the Senshi realize that Makoto is dying, and there's nothing they can do.

Art

• La Guernica was Piccaso's depiction of war. It shows the titular town being bombed, with folks in chaos.

Comic Books

• The Death of Superman shows Lois holding a dying Superman in her arms after he faces Doomsday, and Matrix failed to provide backup support. She begs him to hold on until the paramedics come, as he murmurs if Doomsday is defeated. Jimmy Olsen stands in the background, hesitating on photographing this moment.

Film

• Snow White has this when the Queen changes her appearance. She makes and drinks a potion that will turn her into a "peddler". You may get an inkling that this is not a nice spell when the Queen combines mummy dust, a hag's cackle, a scream of fright, thunder and wind. But then the transformation finishes, and we see her face. You can't blame the crow lurking in the dungeon for jumping in fright.
• The broken Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes, which gave rise to the Planet of the Apes Ending, is, if not the Ur Example, at least one of the earliest and most iconic.

Literature

• Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone has this in the climactic chapter. Quirrell has revealed himself as the mole helping Voldemort. When Harry obtains the Sorcerer's Stone and tries to lie about it, a cold voice demands, "Let me speak to him." Quirrell unwraps his turban. It reveals a face on the other side, that can talk. It ends up being Lord Voldemort, parasitically sharing a body with Quirrell.

Live-Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a few:
  • Season 2 has Buffy prepare to fight Angelus to the death. Then just as she's about to behead him, Willow completes the soul restoration from her hospital bed. Angel returns, confused, and asks what's going on, as the hell dimension opens behind him. Buffy asks Angel to close his eyes, stabs him, and pushes him through the portal. No wonder Buffy is traumatized for most of season three's beginning.
  • Faith has taken Xander's virginity in "The Zeppo". Xander assumes it means they have a special bond. Buffy informs him that Faith sleeps with men for casual sex, so it means nothing to her. Nevertheless, Xander goes to talk to Faith, to attempt to reason with her. Her response is to push him on her motel bed, start feeling him up; then she tries to strangle him with her Slayer strength. Angel has to save Xander.

Music

• The music video for "Thriller" shows Michael Jackson becoming a zombie while taking a girl out on a date and attacking her in a graveyard. While it seems to be an Imagine Spot, the video has The End - or Is It?.

New Media

• Wham! City, a comedy group with no relation to this trope, loves incorporating these shots in their digital media:
  • Unedited Footage of a Bear starts as a parody of an allergy medicine commercial that interrupts YouTube footage of a bear. Then things start to get really weird when the protagonist, a mom with several kids, sees her doppelganger. The audience has to find supplemental material on a separate website to get the full story.
  • This House Has People In It, an interactive web series has this in the already-weird short film that features a girl falling through floors. It ends with an ominous figure decked in pink staring at the camera. Like with Unedited Footage, one can uncover supplemental videos and fake websites that provide a few answers-- and lots of questions.

Newspaper Comics

• Curtis had an arc where Curtis's brother starts sneaking extra milk and is hiding in the basement. To Curtis's shock, he finds Barry with a baby in his arms, that he's named Missy. As Curtis put it, he thought Barry had adopted a cat! Barry explains that he found the baby in the trash, and someone needed to look after her. Realizing this is a situation they can't hide from their parents, especially when Missy starts crying and won't stop, Curtis calls his mom and dad for help. They end up surrendering Missy to the hospital because she's a crack baby, likely with developmental disabilities, and the mother is a drug addict. The doctors tell Barry that they have the resources to take care of Missy, and will find her a loving foster family. While it was good that Barry found Missy, since she would have succumbed to the elements if left in the dumpster, he ought to have come to an adult he trusted immediately rather than trying to be a parent before he even hit puberty.
• For Better or For Worse
  • April wanders outside with Farley when her parents aren't paying attention. She finds a toy boat and thinks it's a good idea to test it on the nearby river. Only when April leans to put the boat in the water, she slips on the rocks. One comic strip ends with her submerged in the river currents. The rest of the arc becomes a race against time as Farley jumps in the river to save April, while his son Edgar runs home and barks at the adults.
  • Liz's coworker Howard has been weird with her. He's followed her to her parents' house, where her dad calls the non-emergency police line to report him for stalking. Liz thinks that if she ignores him and defuses Howard's creepy behavior, he will get bored of her. Nope; when they're alone in the gardening store, Howard corners her against a wall. The next comic shows Liz punching him in the face repeatedly and calling for help. That one ends with someone putting Howard in a necklock, and pulling him off Liz. Turns out to be Anthony.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

• Every time Krishna reveals his true form, the other characters treat it as a Wham! Shot. Seeing it convinced Arjuna to enter battle in The Mahabharata.

Puppet Shows

• Sesame Street had one or two in its various long-term arcs:
  • When Slimey goes into space, a farmer tells the WASA commander that his chicken is in the worms space shuttle. The official tells him the shuttle can only carry tiny worms. Cut to a chicken clucking from the bottom of the ship as it breaks from the Earths' gravity.
  • The worm-astronauts fight over a bowling ball late at night. The balls goes loose and hits the Wrong Way button. This causes the ship to go off-course.

Web Comics

• Check, Please! has Bitty make a dangerous play on Jack's orders during the playoffs. As he receives a hip check, he sails through the air monologuing how much he hates this. Cue paramedics fussing over him, and Jack softly calling his name.

Web Original

• Nostalgia Critic
  • Doug's A Simple Wish review ends with him trashing Mara Wilson as a child actor, saying that her movies were terrible. Then someone appears on the screen, with a very familiar face, a "modern-day" haircut and a stern expression. It's Mara Wilson, all grown up! Mara proceeds to chide Doug for judging kid actors on their performance and forgetting they were kids. To prove it, she rolls several embarrassing videos that he made as a kid and starts giving them the Nostalgia Critic treatment.
  • Doug once made a video of "Top 11 Worst Avatar Episodes" under the belief that everyone is an adult and since Avatar The Last Airbender has no technically bad episodes. The show ends with a Gilligan Cut where Rob Walker delivers the news of the fandom being disgraced to a familiar face...Dante Basco, the voice actor for Prince Zuko.

Western Animation

• Gravity Falls has enough Wham! Shots to make a drinking game out of them:
  • Episode 1
    • Norman decides to reveal his secret to Mabel. She hopes that he will be a vampire, and thinks it repeatedly. He then opens his coat...revealing himself to be a bunch of gnomes, who pop the question to her. Mabel understandably collapses in shock and disappointment because she's not ready for nonconsensual polyamory. As Dipper puts it when he finds out, "I was way off" because he thought Norman was a zombie.
    • The episode ends with Stan punching a code into the Mystery Shack vending machine. It opens a secret door, and he goes inside.
  • Episode 4 reveals that Gideon Gleeful has Journal 2.
  • "Dreamscaperers" has one, when Gideon opens Journal 2 to reveal the mysterious figure who appears at the end of the opening credits. It ends with Gideon revealing he dynamited the safe holding the Mystery Shack deed, and sets his bulldozer on the Pines just as they wake up from fighting Bill Cipher.
  • The season one finale "Gideon Rises" show what's behind the vending machine: it's an elevator to underground levels of the Mystery Shack. Stan reveals he has Journal 1 and uses it, as well as Journal 2 which he stole from Gideon and 3 which Dipper lent to him, to activate a giant machine. The episode ends with Stan saying, "Here we go.".
• Amphibia
  • "Best Fronds" has Anne hoping that Marcy and Sasha are okay. The episode ends with Commander Grime confronting someone in a dungeon, holding Anne's missing shoe. That person ends up being Sasha, chained up and leveling a Death Glare at him.
  • "Anne Vs. Wild" has Hop-Pop look up the music box in one of the old family books. He goes Oh Crap when a page reveals it's called a Calamity Box, surrounded with lots of handwritten warnings about how dangerous it is.