What’s the name of the trope where a starship finds itself being engulfed by an alien life form and the Chief Engineer spontaneously comes up with a solution like: “if we could just adjust the wavelength of the phase emitter array to an asynchronous frequency, it might eject us.”
Since I was a small child the “Everything is going wonderfully, however don’t do this ONE THING or everything will suck… 2 minutes later … Protagonist does the ONE THING, everything sucks” trope has really bugged me. Starting to read to my daughter I’m seeing it come up again and it still bugs me. I realize I have the author of Genesis to thank for this, but as a narrative arc it bugs me as much now as it did when I was 5. OF COURSE they are going to do the ONE THING, OF COURSE it is going to suck, everyone involved knows that the story isn’t going anywhere unless they do it, so they are going to do it.
It seems a bit less prevalent in today’s kids books (I’m guessing less biblical influence on kids fiction than 40 years ago) I still see it, but mainly in older books E.g. just read Strega Nona to my daughter. Spoiler alert OF COURSE Big Anthony is going to mess with the pasta pot, even my three year old daughter could see that coming!
In The Silver Chair, one of the Narnia books, the kids are given three things, and screw up the first two. Mind you, the screw up is not willful, so at least that is avoided.
OTOH, anyone who reads or even watches movies should know by now to never, ever tell the kids, or whoever to "never, ever open that door into the attic’ or whatever. Since sure as the sun rises, they will.
Generically, it’s Technobabble, the Reverse Polarity subtype, with the related trope of Applied Phlebotinum.
The specific flavour you’re thinking of is also known as Treknobabble.
Kids, never, ever fire Chekhov’s Gun.
I’m a bit fan of fairy-tales and have read thousands of tales from all around the world, and this trope comes up in every second story. I’ve read maybe ten different fairy-tales where someone is given free reign and the keys to all the rooms of a castle, but who under any circumstances shall not open one mysterious chamber with the little golden key. Of course, everybody does.
Gremlins, I’m looking at you! Seriously, everyone involved was at fault. The Chinese guy tells him the rules, but absolutely no mention of what happens if you don’t. The father remembers the rules, but he had absolutely no followup questions like, say, “What’ll happen?” And then of course the recipient can’t break all three rules fast enough.
Another trope that irritates me is the “evil corporation” trope. I have no problem with corporations being evil, IRL corporations can be evil AF. But as a trope its just lazy writing at this point. You don’t need to explain why the corporation is being evil, what they hope to get out of it, and how they hope to get away with it, just pull out the “evil corporation” card and you have ready made antagonist to drive the plot along.
The most ridiculous example of this is the Resident Evil series, what possible profit motive is there for Umbrella Corporation behind wiping out the human race? And then continuing to plot and scheme with morally and financially dubious scientific experiments after bringing on the zombie apocalypse? There’s a fecking zombie apocalypse on, what possible benefit do you see in continuing to be a dick to Alice at this point? Is that going to unzombifiy your customers so they can buy your products (whatever they are, we don’t see single revenue generating Umbrella product in the whole franchise.)
Plenty of other examples in less crappy films too. E.g. the new Bladerunner:
When Luv strangles K’s boss, in her office, in the middle of a busy police department. I’ll buy that in this dystopian society no one cares about corporations flying heavily armed drones around blowing up desert marauders (hell, I wouldn’t bet against corporations getting away with that in IRL 2021.) But Koshi is a senior police officer, Luv, acting on the orders of the Wallace Corporation, just straight up blatantly murders her in her office. Governments tend to really pay attention when you start murdering the people they pay to enforce their laws.
Speaking of fictional fairy tales and the “don’t do this ONE THING or everything will suck” trope, in the very first instance of this trope, I have to stick up for the protagonists who do the one thing they’re not supposed to.
I’m of course talking about Adam and Eve in The Garden of Eden. God says "see this ‘Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil’ here? The one that if you eat the fruit of it you will then gain all the knowledge and wisdom verily of a god? DON’T TOUCH. One bite and you’ll be in big trouble!
I mean, OT God was clearly setting them up for a fall. What a prick.
How did they have the bike tie with the plane? Not a plane, but I used to be into powered paragliding, and once, out at the lake, I was flying into the wind and being outpaced by bicycles. But those things fly slow under the best of circumstances.
Yeah, being too evil is a problem.
My example is always Baltar in the original Battlestar Galactica. This guy is plotting with the Cylons to betray the human race. Okay, great, but the Cylon’s plan is to wipe out the entire human race, which happens to include Baltar. What exactly did he imagine the endgame would be?
I can see it if the plan was to conquer the human race. Baltar could have reasonably expected to be set up as a puppet ruler over his fellow humans, and have all the slave orgies one could imagine, or something, but when the plan is straight up genocide, siding with the Cylons makes no sense at all, it’s too evil.
It’s actually stated onscreen that that is what Baltar thought he was doing. The genocide took him by surprise. He was shocked to learn that the Imperious Leader had lied to him.
Great, now I have to go back and watch it all over again, since that’s not at all what I recall. I hope you’re happy!
‘Would it be good, or evil, for us to do that?’
There’s a short animated film called “World of Tomorrow”. It’s a wonderful short-film. Related to this, the future society is able to time travel but still working out the kinks - lots of people arrive in the future 100M below Earth’s surface, or just outside Earth’s atmosphere, or on Earth’s surface but in the middle of Antarctica…and “die horribly”.
It’s the plot of several movies - The Boys From Brazil, The Island, Never Let Me Go, Gemini Man, so on and so forth. I feel like that always causes more problems than it solves.
If you want a movie about cloning that isn’t a horror film and avoids all the cliches have a look at Creator (1985), starring Peter O’Toole as a Nobel laureate who’s trying to clone his dead wife.
It sounds like a standard bad SF setup, but the film is witty and interesting and believable. With Vincent Spano, Virginia Madsen, Mariel Hemingway, and David Ogden Stiers. Screenplay by Jeremy Leven, based on his novel of the same name.
This one kills me. The number one cause of death in TV shows ‘blunt force trauma to the head’…like the kind you see people knocking out guys with.
Lots, if not most, of the head blows in TV and movies would result in critical injury or death.
In all fairness, I think Luv had lost her shit by this point in the film. Unlike K, Luv seems incapable of disobedience. But she isn’t a mindless automaton and clearly has her own sense of agency. Luv is visibly disturbed when Wallace kills the new drone in front of her and kills Lt Joshi because she’s enraged to find out Joshi had K “destroy” Rachel’s child. Luv isn’t “evil”. She is just in the unenviable position of having to search for a missing child so her master can use it to populate his slave race (her people). The whole time, she is thinking K’s mission is to hunt the child down and “retire” it, just as any blade runner would.
I’m sure the last thing Wallace wants is for it to get out that one of his replicants murdered a police lieutenant and a medical examiner (not to mention all those marauders). Given how their society is so sensitive to their slave robots running amok that they have an entire police force dedicated to hunting them.
No, if anything annoys me about Blade Runner it’s how Earth is both dangerously overpopulated and underpopulated at the same time. Like you really need more “people” that you have to manufacture them? And yet why are all these giant megastructures so empty?