Handy the hand puppet: Even now, he sulks in his tree house like Achilles in his tent!
Everyone else: (blank stares)
Handy the hand puppet: ...Achilles?... The Iliad?... It's Homer?...
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The Human Ton: Your Tick won't come. He's sulking in his tent like a guy from Chilè!
Arthur: ...Don't you mean 'Achilles'?
Handy the hand puppet: *To the Human Ton* You're making us look like jerks! I told you already,
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—
The Tick —
"The Tick vs. Arthur's Bank Account"
A member of a team (often
The Lancer) gets into a fight with everybody else and quits, vowing to never, ever return to the people whom they now hate
so much. A threat then comes that is precisely suited to the missing member's talents. The other team members beg the quitter to come back, but with no success. The team head out without their ex-member, and are about to all be killed horribly.
Then the ex-member, seeing them about to die, realizes that he still cares about them after all. He leaps in with a
Foe Tossing Charge, saves everybody, and all are reconciled.
An Aesop about friendship and teamwork ensues.
When done well, this is tied directly into the
Story Arc. The bad guys know about the quitter, and send a specialized threat precisely because the quitter is missing. When done badly, the
Monster Of The Week just happens, by an amazing coincidence, to match the quitter's talents — and next episode, everybody will forget that the whole thing ever happened.
Sometimes, the quitter is a character who doesn't seem necessary or even desirable. The episode is thus about giving them some character development and showing both the audience and the characters why this person was on the team. Common with
What Kind Of Lame Power Is Heart Anyway characters, but has the danger of falling into an
Eigen Plot.
This goes all the way back to Achilles sulking in his tent in
Homer's
Iliad (whence the trope name), making it
Older Than Dirt.
Contrast
Ten Minute Retirement,
We Want Our Jerk Back. Often followed by a
He's Back moment.
Compare with
Just Fine Without You and
Holding Out For A Hero.
Examples:
- Named for the famous incident in The Iliad, which fits the formula almost perfectly, with an added touch. Agammemnon tries to coax Achilles back by meeting the demands he originally made before the new threat, but Achilles now refuses them, making it a Pound Of Flesh. Also, in stark contrast to modern TV examples, Achilles does not learn An Aesop about teamwork or friendship. He re-enters battle out of pure blood rage, after his best friend Patroclus kicks the bucket, and winds up forming an Odd Friendship with the enemy king instead of with Agammemnon.
- One of the arguments used by Phoenix to convince Achilles to return to battle was the story of Meleager in a similar situation. It didn't work.
- Samurai Pizza Cats had an episode like this (No Talent Guido). Speedy and Polly get contracts for a singing career, leaving Guido feeling left out. The Monster Of The Week attacks Little Tokyo while Speedy and Polly are recording a song. Guido refuses to fight, saying that maybe he had better things to do, too. Francine sends the rescue team to fight the monster. They do well until the Rude Noise engage them. Guido finally snaps out of it, when he sees the rescue team get blown away.
- Kim Possible: Ron quits when he thinks Kim is jealous of his new success at Bueno Nacho. Kim thinks she can do without the goofy sidekick, but it turns out he's vital.
- Teen Titans: Cyborg quits after a fight with Robin, returns just in time to save everybody with the Foe Tossing Charge.
- This Troper seems to recall a similar incident in another episode, specifically set up so that Cyborg could betray the Big Bad when he revealed that he hadn't switched allegiances at all...
- W.I.T.C.H.: Cornelia quits when the team fails to protect her best friend, Elyon Brown, from the bad guys. Without the full team, everybody else's powers are weakened (which strangely didn't happen the last time the girls had to send a partial team), and new monsters attack who Cornelia's powers would have been perfect for. She inevitably snaps out of her funk in time to save everybody. This turned out to be a turning point, giving Cornelia real Character Development for the first time.
- A rare non-combat example: the 1980s children's puppet show Letter People. In an early episode, Miss A gets into a fight with the other letters and quits. Since Miss A was the only vowel in the cast at this point, nobody can form a word without her and they have to beg her to come back. (Since she was also the only female letter introduced at this point, this may have been a sly way to teach feminism to the target audience.)
- A variation of this is show in Transformers: Beast Wars, where Tigatron does this after he accidentally kills a (non-Transformer) tiger friend in a firefight, and only returns after he realizes the bad guys aren't going to stop destroying if he does nothing. Somewhat unique in the fact that the teammate that attempts to coerce him back into the fray is a battle-hungry warrior who attempts to strongarm him under threat of death, which certainly didn't help matters any.
- In Angel, Wesley will occasionally do something terribly wicked (or someone else on the team will, making Wesley leave it) and get outcast by the entire team. After a good couple of episodes, either something happens that can only be solved by him and they come begging to him (except Angel when he's being stubborn) to come back, or these events will just slowly pop up throughout episodes, reminding the team of what he was there for and missing him. Or both. Regardless, he eventually returns.
- Also happened in an episode of Parker Lewis Cant Lose, involving Larry Kubiac and the football team.
- This happened between Agumon and Masaru/Marcus in Digimon Savers. After they fell out, Masaru tried to fight alone. He managed to beat up some jerk ass baseball hooligans, but when the Monster Of The Week shows up (a Black Garurumon) that's when he runs into trouble. Kutamon even lampshades this by saying how Geogreymon would have been perfect to battle him.
- Happens in the Pandemonium segment of Final Fantasy IX, where Zidane Tribal, the main character, becomes depressed and alienated upon realizing himself to be a Genome and not "normal." Zidane goes off on his own, the party follows him, and eventually arrives in battle to rescue him.
- About What Kind Of Lame Power Is Heart Anyway... Uh, yeah, Captain Planet had at least two episodes with Ma-Ti angsting, trying to quit the team and having to come back to save the day.
- Hell, Kwami, whose power was Earth, tried to quit once in the middle of an Heroic BSOD, and he was the de facto leader of the team.
- Considering the fact that they were all inevitably useless, it's a wonder they didn't just call up the Cap any time something even minorly eco-unfriendly occurred. Or set their rings to automatic. Or something that would not require their actual involvement.
- Shinji does this in Neon Genesis Evangelion, after his Eva is forced to try to kill one of his best friends. His return in the following episode becomes his Crowning Moment Of Awesome.
- "You're all clear, kid! Let's blow this thing and go home!"
- Then he does it again at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. However, he barely gets to spend two minutes in his tent this time before he discovers that Luke has gone missing and he pops back out again.
- Well, he didn't so much sulk in is tent the second time as have a desire to keep bounty hunters from killing him. As the rest of Empire shows, that probably would've been a good idea.
- This trope pretty much defines Sting's character in WCW through the entire year of 1997. Hell, we might as well call this trope Sting In The Rafters.
- Ken (also known as Mark) of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman / Battle Of The Planets fame made a positive habit of quitting in a snit or going awol for his own reasons at the worst possible times.
- As the page quote reveals, this happened in The Tick to the titular character.
- An inversion of this trope happens in a sports shounen manga, Fight no Akatsuki (Akatsuki's Fight), in that the leave-taking is actually an admirable and sensible thing. Two best friends, Akatsuki and Kiyo, are on opposite teams. The coach of the Opposing Sports Team orders his players to injure Akatsuki so bad that he can't play anymore. Kiyo hurls a basketball at the jerk's head, says nuts to that, and sits the game out rather than be a part of that. After they fail to stop Akatsuki, Kiyo returns to the game to play against his best friend fairly.
- Parodied somewhat in Team America World Police, where Gary is accused of this despite the fact that his abilities would have been obviously useless. He still plays the end of the trope straight, though.
