History Main / StoppedClock

* In ''{{Chinatown}}'', Jack places a watch under the car of the person he's tailing. That way he could know at what time he left by the time the watch was run over.

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/broken_clock1_1395.jpg

A useful method of telling when a certain disaster/event happened is that all of the clocks have stopped at the same time. This can also happen to individual time pieces that have been damaged.

* ''TheWarOfTheWorlds'' (1953). After the Martians use their heat ray for the first time, all the watches of the people in the nearest time stop. When this happens, the people notice that all of the watches stopped at the same time.

* The Hatter's pocket watch in ''Literature/AlicesAdventuresInWonderland'' doesn't tell the time, but does tell the date. (Unfortunately, it's two days slow.) This may have something to do with the fact that, according to him, Time is angry at him for "murdering the time" while singing at a concert, causing the clock to never change for him and his friends.

* In ''SilentHillHomecoming'', all the clocks in town are stopped at 2:06.

* The clock tower in BackToTheFuture stopped after being stuck by lightning, giving Marty and Doc a precise time to use the lightning to time travel.

* In ''GreatExpectations'', Miss Havisham's clocks are all stopped at 8:40 -- the exact moment her groom-to-be jilted her.

* {{Fallout}} 3 has every single clock you see stopped at the exact time the Chinese attack occurred. Seems like some of them would have been wind-up or something...

* ''HomestarRunner'': In the Strong Bad Email "vacation", Strong Bad sends a postcard from (among several other places) "It's that CLOCK (Look at it go!)". Of course, the clock isn't going at all.

* AgathaChristie used it, of course. In "At the Crossroads", it's one of the stock detective-story elements faked by the GenreSavvy murderer to make himself look innocent.

* In the AgathaChristie pastiche InteractiveFiction game ''Death Off the Cuff'', the victim's watch stopped at the time that he was stabbed. [[spoiler:Except that, much like in the actual Christie example, it was faked to draw suspicion away from the perpetrator of said stabbing.]]

* The clock tower in BackToTheFuture stopped after being stuck by lightning, giving Marty and Doc a precise time to use the lighting to time travel.

* In the adventure game ''GrayMatter'', strange [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane and seemingly supernatural]] events happen around the Oxford University campus, and each time the clock stops at the time of the event.

Power cuts can be neatly illustrated with a digital clock flashing '12:00' or 00:00

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!!Examples:

[[folder:Live Action TV]]

* In the ''Series/DoctorWho'' episode "The Wedding of River Song", ''every single'' clock on earth is stopped at 5:02pm on April 22, 2011, because time itself is broken by [[spoiler:River refusing to kill the Doctor, which was a fixed point in time]].

[[folder: Newspaper Comics]]

[[folder: Video Games]]

[[folder: Western Animation]]

* ''JohnnyBravo'': Subverted. A jet cutting a power line stops Johnny's clock at 12:00, and after seeing similar events, he's convinced that time has stopped for everyone but him.

* One episode of ''{{Columbo}}'' involved the time of death being established by a broken watch. Columbo figured the watch must have been planted on the victim's body with the time pre-set, because he was a tough sportsman who wouldn't have wanted to be seen dead wearing such a wimpy, fragile timepiece.

* In DeadSpace2 all the clocks have stopped (permanently) at 12:00, odd, considering they are powered L.E.D clocks that would normally keep going, or at least flash.

* In the ''DoctorWho'' episode "The Wedding of River Song", ''every single'' clock on earth is stopped at 5:02pm on April 22, 2011, because time itself is broken by River refusing to kill the Doctor, which was a fixed point in time.

* In ''PansLabyrinth'', at one point it is implied that Captain Vidal's pocketwatch originally belonged to his father, which the latter broke at the time of his death so it would freeze at that time in order to show his son "How a brave man dies" and later Vidal had it repaired out of spite ([[UnreliableNarrator Vidal denies this]]). [[spoiler:As Vidal is about to be killed by the rebels he takes out his watch presumably to break it again and asks that his son be told the time of his death only for Mercedes to cut him off to say "He won't even know [his] name" followed by her brother shooting him.]]