One thing that I seem to remember from older movies set in the past (from sword-and-sandals to Westerns):
The main body of a large military force, led by a protagonist, suddenly comes on to something unexpected, in plain sight.
I’d have thought scouts, outriders, vanguards (different roles, I know) have been a thing since the dawn of organised warfare. For that matter, wouldn’t a large civilian party also send people ahead?
On the other hand it’s sometimes amazing what even a modest slope can hide from view until you’re close to the crest of the slope. Such a slope near my home means that I can be surprised by oncoming traffic when coming to a left turn I frequently make.
In movies/TV when you have a bunch of explosives in a defensive position around your perimeter, what you do is have them ALL linked to the same explosive switch (either manual or proximity) so when the first thing trips the perimeter alarm the ENTIRE perimeter explodes, looking super cool on the screen but also means you just wasted an entire defensive perimeter for a single wave.
think about star trek–new “planet” so they send top officers to explore, not lower-ranked scouts? who would do that?
And if you encouter anything important as a scout you don’t report what you see, but you say “you better come here and look for yourself, sir”.
I would fanwank that Starfleet remotely explores myriads of systems with fly-through sensor sweeps, while any indication that a system is inhabited gets flagged for potential contact protocols. The latter calling for senior officer participation.
Or two armies facing each other. Then they both just run as fast as they can at each other. No thought of tactics or strategy.
Yes. IIRC Roddenberry said something like - “If it wouldnt happen on the bridge on the current USN US Enterprise, it shouldnt happen on the show”. Sure, so the Big E finds a new island, so of course the Captain, Exec officer, and Chief medical officer get in a rubber boat with two marines and go explore. 
ST-tNG tried the “away team” idea, but Picard had to go along more and more.
The episodes Roddenberry wrote at the beginning were notably different to the later episodes: the bridge scenes made sense. Like a ship, where there are people looking out the sides, where he can’t see, and people summarizing inputs he can’t control.
Not like those later episodes where the bridge staff just repeated stuff we’d already heard and seen.
They ran out of scouts, AKA Reshirts …
That is the Leeroy Jenkins maneuver.
I sense great confusion.
A bad guy who shoots the cops loved ones then gives up and unironically goes BUT YOU HAVE TO ARREST ME, YOU’RE A COP, YOU CAN’T BREAK THE LAW!
Then of course acts completely surprised when the cop beats the shit out of him/shoots him.
What I really like is that, in the middle of this unorganized mess of a melee, the two leaders inevitably find each other and square off in one-on-one combat.
Usually happens in bad sci-fi/horror stories.
An group/expedition arrives in a hostile land. They immediately set-up camp but then for some reason completely fail to also set-up a defensive perimeter or even sentries so, they all go to sleep or eat and then while this is happening the bad things show up and completely destroy the camp killing most of them and leaving a few survivors who run off to escape.
I think the dumbest one I read was this Army Special Forces team is helicoptered into the Pacific Northwest to find an alien, they IMMEDIATELY set-up camp and go to sleep for absolutely no reason (they’re in country, just how much sleep do you possibly need?!) and of course the alien gets them when they’re all fast asleep.
And with 24th (or even 23rd) century tech, you don’t send back video. I used to think hand held video would be a big improvement, but now I’m leaning to drones. Basically, the bridge would see what we the TV audience sees. Heck with AI you can even have the drone dramatically pan or cut between the crew depending on who is speaking, or being eaten by alien salt vampires, or oil slicks, or whatever.
They had one episode where they linked Geordi’s visor to the main viewscreen, so we saw what he saw. But they 1) stupidly spent all the time marveling at the image rather than seeing what the mission was about, and 2) forgot they could do that for the rest of time.
The recent sci-fi movie Mickey 17 takes the “send lower-ranked scouts” to its logical conclusion. (BTW Robert Pattinson is great as the sad-sack Mickey)
We can do that now with police body cams.
Ugh. I just rewatched this episode. Season 1 was so poor, I’m really surprised that there was a second.
Murder victim breaks their watch, which stops, thus pinpointing rime of death to exact minute. Has this ever happened in real life?
Clever murderer sets the broken watch to the wrong time, thus establishing an alibi. Happened in a few Columbo episodes. Any real murderer try this?