Demolitions Expert

"Bombs? You want 'em? They're his, my friend."

"What makes me a good demoman? If I were a bad demoman, I wouldn't be sittin' here, discussin' it with you, now would I?!"
[...]
"One crossed wire, one wayward pinch of potassium chlorate, one errant twitch... and KABLOOIE!"

— The Demoman, Team Fortress 2

When a group needs to stop Stuff Blowing Up (or cause it), the Demolitions Expert is the guy they will turn to. He's an expert at defusing or planting explosives, and will often get creative about ways to design or use them.

Often The Smart Guy of The Squad or a Caper Crew. Differs from a Mad Bomber in that he's (usually) more disciplined and focused. If he is wounded and unable to do the disposal of a bomb himself, he may guide another squad member through the process. A Demolitions Expert is often the Token Minority (usually Asian or Black) of The Squad or a Caper Crew; another popular option is to make him an Irish Explosives Expert.

Depending on the setting, he may also be The Engineer.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Baccano!: Nice Holystone serves this function in the delinquent gang during the 1932 arc. With gusto.
• Desert Rose has Jessica Clearkin and Colleen Anderson, counterterrorist mercenaries whose specialty within their division is bomb defusal. Colleen acts as Jessica's back up, but both had their own story arc focusing on their skills at Bomb Disposal.
• Wille of Jormungand. One of his favorite tactics is rewiring bombs then turning them against their planters; a habit that landed him on the FBI's Blacklist. The only other member of the team on that list? Koko.
• Deidara from Naruto. He uses explosive clay in the form of creatures he makes with the mouths on his hands.
• Jun the Swan on Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. She's wired a number of enemy machines (including a nuclear reactor) to explode, and has a yo-yo bomb containing fusion cylinders.

Comic Books

• This is Robina Arthur's very particular set of skills in Desolation Jones.
• In the Disney Ducks Comic Universe, Donald Duck took this job and became so good he could blow up a building without blowing down a house of cards in a nearby house, or spreading more than two tiny pebbles outside the perimeter of the building.
• This is Lightfoot's official role in G.I. Joe, although several other Joes sometimes acted as demolitions expert, including Tripwire, Tunnel Rat and Depth Charge.
• In Hunter's Hellcats, Juggler is a safecracker and the team's expert with explosives.
• Tinus Trotyl, although usually more of a Mad Bomber, has occasionally shown his demolition skills by clearing a road blocked by a rock avalanche, defusing an old WW2 bomb, and saving a mountain village from an avalanche. He does tend to have a little too much fun doing it though, and isn't shy of giving spectators heart-stopping scares while he's at it.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: Arda Prosperous, one of Etta's Holliday Girls, is quite handy at spotting and defusing bombs. She doesn't always have enough time to defuse them which once allows a criminal to blow up the building they're in the basement of.

Fan Works

• Between Minds, a HalfLife/Portal fic by 3theCaptain has Sam, a short, Asian teammate who seems to take glee in blowing as many things up as she can.
• In the Discworld Tarot series, Guild of Assassins explosives expert Johanna Smith-Rhodes is most definitively not asked by Lord Vetinari if she can conceive of a way to remove the Tump Tower, an embarrassing hangover from corrupt financier Reacher Gilt, in such a way that there is the absolute minimum of loss of life, there is no collateral damage from its collapsing, potentially over a very high-rent area of Ankh, and the whole thing is completely deniable, and can be put down to the Tower being built too tall from shoddy materials to a bad design. Johanna's proposal involves the right sort of explosive Devices placed in exactly the right amounts in exactly the right places on the night of a very bad thunderstorm. The contract to inhume an entire building appeals to her; at the time of writing she is yet to come up with a working plan.
• Shikako, the self-insert of Dreaming of Sunshine, learned how to seal by starting with explosive tags. By the finals of her first Chuunin Exams, she's got the explosive seals down to a touch. She's of the opinion that if explosives can't solve your problems, you're not using enough of them.

Films — Animated

• Atlantis: The Lost Empire has the Italian demolition expert Vinny, who chews a matchstick and treats explosives as office supplies.
• The Incredibles has the unforgettable Bomb Voyage, a French one-man heist crew who gets by with nothing but his talent in explosives.

Films — Live-Action

• The two main characters of Blown Away, Jimmy Dove (real name Liam McGivney) and Ryan Gaerity, are both Irish Explosives Experts who were most active at the time of The Troubles. Gaerity ended up in prison, escaped and sought revenge against McGivney who, meanwhile, used his knowledge and skills in explosives to become a Bomb Disposal police officer in Boston.
• The Deserter has Chaplain Reynolds. Kaleb recruits him for the squad because he is the best dynamite man in the army. He instructs the squad on the correct use of explosives as a weapon.
• Disturbing the Peace: Pyro is the biker gang's demolition expert. He is the one who blows open the doors on the armoured car, and rigs up the fire bomb on the church to kill all the occupants.
• In Executive Decision, the special forces team includes such an expert, who is badly injured when they first board the plane. The two civilian experts brought along on the mission work on figuring out how to defuse the bomb, until the expert wakes up and is able to talk them through it (not to mention stopping them from cutting the wrong wire).
• A Fistful of Dynamite stars James Coburn as a 19th century IRA explosives fanatic who is for some reason running around Mexico during the Revolution with a steady supply of nitroglycerin, blowing things up just right.
• Firefly from G.I. Joe: Retaliation.
  Making more things go boom by 9:00 a.m. than most people do all day.
• Sergeant Muldoon from The Green Berets, who got his start when his father gave him a chemistry set as a kid and, in his words, "It got bigger than the both of us."
• Corporal Miller from The Guns of Navarone.
• In The Hot Rock, Greenberg is the Caper Crew's demolitions expert. His main task during the first heist is blowing up a car outside the museum to distract the guards. He later creates the bombs the crew use when storming the police station.
• The members of the EOD team in The Hurt Locker, James in particular.
• Left Ear from The Italian Job (2003). Helps the Caper Crew with all of their explosive needs.
• Logan Lucky has redneck safe-breaker Joseph "Joe" Bang. He's quite wacky, but he knows his science about explosives. He can build a bomb out of bleach, salt substitute and gummy bears, for instance.
• Mei-lin of Mercenaries. She's introduced improvising a cherry bomb to blow up the prisoners' toilets for fun.
• Zig-Zagged in Munich, where after the bombs used by the team continuously malfunction, the bomb expert admits that he was trained to dismantle bombs rather than to build them. He ends up blowing himself up while building one.
• Ocean's Eleven has Basher, master of power-cutting and safe-blowing explosions.
• "Nitro" Jones in Once Upon a Texas Train. Of course, his eyes and his hands aren't what they once were...
• Bill Dolworth in The Professionals is hired specifically because the teams needs an explosives expert.
• Referenced in Pulp Fiction. Mia's Show Within a Show Pilot Episode "Fox Force Five" featured five foxy chicks. "The black girl was a demolition expert."
• In Sky Bandits, Barney is an expert dynamiter. However, his Mad Bomber tendencies mean that he always uses too much dynamite.
• The War Wagon: Billy is recruited for the crew because of his expertise with explosives: being as good with explosives as Lomax is with a gun. The blase way in which he handles nitroglycerine tends to unnerve everyone else.

Literature

• Captain Federer in the Ciaphas Cain series is the 597th's chief sapper, which means he has two jobs: build things on the battlefield, and blow things up on the battlefield. Guess which one he prefers. In one memorable instance in Caves of Ice he plants a bomb to take down an ork Gargant using a truly colossal amount of ordnance. It doesn't get used to its original role, though — instead it's repurposed to touch off an entire fuel depot, creating a shockwave felt on an orbiting troop ship. Federer's reaction is elation. And then there's the persistent rumor that he was in training for the Adeptus Mechanicus, but was kicked out for blowing up the school...
• Halo:
  • In Halo: First Strike, Grace-093 is the Spartan-IIs' best demolitions expert, described as being able to "shape a charge to cut through a single steel bolt with only a whisper sound, or rig a hundred thousand liters of kerosene to blow into a firestorm from hell".
  • In Halo: Ghosts of Onyx, Spartan-III Dante is described as being almost magical with finding, disposing, and setting bombs, and serves as Team Saber's explosives expert.
  • In the Halo: Evolutions short story Headhunters, Roland is the explosives expert of the duo. His partner Jonah is also trained for demolitions duty, in case Roland bites it.
• The heartless troop in The Hearts We Sold has Cal. He's the group's scientist and technology guy, so he handles making things blow up when they fight monsters. Riley takes over after he dies. She's not quite as refined or careful as Cal was, but what she lacks in precision, she makes up in passion.
• Ben in The Leonard Regime.
• In River of Teeth, Hero Shackleby is hired by Houndstooth based on their reputation as both a demolitions expert and a Master Poisoner. Mainly it's Hero's job in the gang to devise a plan on how to scare the hippos out of the Harriet by using explosives without demolishing the already cracked dam. Not only does Hero manage that, they also have a back-up plan on hand in case that is not enough fire power. Hero is also black, though not the only minority in the crew.
• Wylan of Six of Crows is handpicked by Kaz for the heist on the Ice Court due to his intimate knowledge of demolitions and chemistry as well as his being the son of Jan van Eck, Kaz’s employer. Despite his area of expertise, he is painfully shy and considerate, and is newer to crime than any of the other main characters.
• In the Star Wars Legends X-Wing Series, Wraith Squadron member Kell Tainer is the team's explosive expert and is frequently called upon to disarm booby traps or create new explosives, which he sometimes refers to as "works of art".
• Wet Desert: Tracking Down a Terrorist on the Colorado River: They are called in to blow up the spillways at Hoover Dam so that water can be drained at lower water levels. And later to pre-emptively breach dams which can't be saved farther down the Colorado.

Live Action TV

• On The 100, Raven serves as an all-purpose engineer, but building bombs is acknowledged as being her specialty.
  Bellamy: That bridge has survived a nuclear war and 97 years of weather.
  Raven: It won't survive me.
• In an episode of Barney Miller Detective Yemana is searching their records so they can track down a professional bomber. He rattles off a list of names, noting how many of them have the nickname "Boom Boom".
• Burn Notice: Ex-terrorist Fiona doubles as this, in addition to being the resident Gun Nut. Whenever the team needs something to blow up, Michael can just turn his head and say, "Fi...".
• Fred Dibnah, a steeplejack from Oop North, became a TV star because of his engaging personality, dry wit, and his talent for bringing down tall structures in a visually spectacular way.
• Doctor Who: The Seventh Doctor's companion Ace was a self-taught one, with a couple bugs to work out, but if Seven needed some Stuff Blowing Up, he could be reasonably sure Ace "wasn't carrying" a couple cans of her favored concoction.
  Ace: Do you feel like arguing with a can of deodorant that registers nine on the Richter scale?
• In the 1967 Dragnet episode "The Big Explosion" a couple Neo-Nazis steal a cache of dynamite from a construction site. Two demolition experts are brought in to advise Detectives Friday and Gannon how to safely proceed, and to help remove the dynamite and blasting caps when found.
• The F.B.I.: In "The Problem of the Honorable Wife", Maury Maddock served as an army explosives technician in The Korean War, but defected to the North Koreans. He is employed by a ring of Dirty Communists to blow up an army warehouse. Erskine sums it up when he examines the remains of one of Maddock's bombs and comments that they looking for an 'an amateur, expert bomb maker'.
• Spike on Flashpoint
• Hogan's Heroes: Sgt. Carter has a real genius for - and very much enjoys - blowing stuff up. He's also the team Cloud Cuckoolander, all of which might be slightly worrying if he wasn't such a nice guy.
• L.A.'s Finest: Nancy was an EOD (Explosives Ordinance Disposal) expert in the Navy. This comes in handy when she and Syd are forced to deal with a bomb.
• Angus MacGyver in MacGyver. He served in a bomb disposal unit in Vietnam War (or the Second Gulf War in the remake).
• Edgar K.B. Montrose from The Red Green Show is a parody of this, as his hearing loss and missing finger can attest. And he's ready and willing to solve any problem...as long as it involves explosives.

Edgar: Oh, I'm all ears, Red!

Red: Of course you are. Just no eardrums.

• Revolution: Nora Clayton. She seems to specialize in trip wires and can even make a little gun to hide up a sleeve. You can see it in action in episode 5 and the first season finale.
• In the Sherlock Holmes 1954 episode "The Case of the Careless Suffragette", the title character hires Boris Turgoff, proud anarchist who makes bombs big and small, to build a small bomb for her.
• Malcolm Reed from Star Trek: Enterprise loves blowing shit up. He once disables a Romulan drone ship with a single phase pistol set on overload.
  (to "Trip" Tucker) "You're good at building things; I'm good at blowing them up."
• The Wild Wild West: Artemus Gordon. Usually he falls into the "creatively blowing things up" category, but on at least one occasion he's called upon instead to defuse a situation.

Podcasts

• Downplayed by the local village hoodlums in Wooden Overcoats. When trying to figure out what Jerry's planning, already certain he's up to no good, Antigone goes to them for help, revealing the suspicious purchases Jerry's made in the last day or so to see if they have any idea what it could be used for. The hoodlums immediately realize he's purchased most of the ingredients necessary to make a homemade cherry bomb, and also assure her that it won't work unless he can also get ahold of some gunpowder. How or why they know this is unclear, especially given that they're teenagers, but there's nothing to indicate they've ever built a bomb themselves, or have any desire to do so. (They do display an interest in anarchy from a political standpoint, but none of their demonstrations hurt or even bother anybody.)

Roleplay

• Dino Attack RPG has at least two major explosives expert, both rather crazy. Demoman is a drunk but Firecracker (an expy of the Hitler Rants version of John Mallory) is a psycho who joined the team solely so that he could blow stuff up (he even got fired from a demolition company because of how much he loves dynamite).

Tabletop Games

• Stratego has the Miner, the only unit that can knock out bombs.

Video Games

• Battleborn has DLC character Ernest, a pudgy pink bird of the military-themed Peacekeeper faction who serves as the demoman of his faction. While he uses primarily explosives in his kit, he also has some support options with his Power Egg, which buffs allies around it.
• Battlefield: Bad Company: one of the four core protagonists, Haggard, has a terrible case of pyromania, which was what threw him into B-Company to begin with.
• Borderlands 2 gives us a number of examples, all of whom are as skilled with explosives as they are bonkers.
  • Tiny Tina, the deadliest 13-year-old on Pandora and the game's signature Cute and Psycho Cloudcuckoolander. She's the main supplier for the Crimson Raiders on the matters of bombs, boomers, kablooies and such, and according to Roland, she's one of the best at her trade on the entire planet.
  • The second boss in the game is Boom-Bewm, the Sibling Team of Bandit explosives experts Boom and Bewm. Light the fuses, bitches!
  • The second DLC introduces Mr. Torgue, founder of Torgue Corporation. Despite being a screaming maniac, he personally designed all of Torgue's weaponry (all of which are of the Explosion element).
• In Brink! the Soldier class focuses on the Stuff Blowing Up aspect of this trope, planting HE charges to complete objectives, and utilizing special grenades and satchel charges against enemies, whilst the Engineer class focuses on the Bomb Disposal aspect, disarming explosives planted by enemy players (though they can also plant land mines).
• COD 2 Spanish Civil War Mod: The engineer you escort as Marion to plant explosives under one of the towers in the Alcazar fortress.
• Command & Conquer: Generals has two examples:
  • Aside from the rocket launcher, the Chinese Tank Hunter can plant a TNT charge on buildings and vehicles. The explosion is not particularly powerful, but they can place it instantly by getting close enough. It's not a good idea to run them over with a vehicle unless you consider it disposable.
  • Colonel Burton, the USA's Hero Unit, can plant demo charges that'll one-shot anything short of a superweapon structure or command center. The main problem of it is that they take a very long time to plant and take up Burton's full attention to plant, so he'll be uncloaked the whole time and unable to retaliate; if you force him to do anything else before he's done, he'll have to start over from scratch. Jarmen Kell, the GLA's own Hero Unit, also has access to those same demo charges if you're playing as General Rhodall "Demo" Juhziz.
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 has the Crazy Ivan unit, a Time Bomb specialist who can put bombs on anything and destroy them with a single well timed blast. This includes your own forces, encouraging the creative use of Suicide Bombers among your tactics. Though a talented bombsmith, Ivan is every bit the Mad Bomber his Call Sign implies him to be, and will gladly answer your summons by cackling madly into the microphone.
• Commandos has Thomas "Inferno" Hancock, the Sapper. Polite, cheerful, and rather enthusiastic about his work, his specialties include planting time bombs and wire bombs, as well as defusing enemy land mines and stealing them for his own use. He eventually equips a flamethrower and becomes the deadliest member of your squad by a wide margin.
• Deep Rock Galactic makes the Driller into the team's excavation and demolitions expert by virtue of giving him the C4 remote bomb as an equipment choice. He can toss this item on walls or floors (or the occasional low ceiling) or place it precisely in a desired location, allowing the Driller to quickly and effortlessly remove terrain, carve out his own bunkers, and generally turn the caves into his playground. Unfortunately for both the indigenous wildlife of Hoxxes and the other Dwarves, the Driller is also a Blood Knight with a reputation for attracting particularly psycho players, and it's not uncommon for Drillers to C4 their enemies, their teammates, and often themselves, either by accident or design.
• The Objective Specialist Mercenaries of Dirty Bomb can handle the bomb planting and disposal aspects of this trope twice as fast as any other Merc. Fletcher and Proxy in particular also have sticky bombs and trip mines, respectively. Lesser so is any Merc with access to the "Mechanic" Augment, which speeds them up in defusing and planting, though not to the same level as an Objective Specialist. Fragger and Thunder also qualify; they have frag grenades for blowing up deployables and groups of enemies, and flashbangs that double as EMP grenades, respectively.
• In the Gears of War franchise, Samantha Byrne is Delta Squad's EOD member. Though her knowledge only comes into play once in Gears of War 3, it is used more in the novels.
• Klee from Genshin Impact is very skilled at crafting magical explosives ranging from ordinary bombs to explosive teddy bears and loves to toss her explosive weaponry at anything, such as the surrounding environment and fish in water. She get very reckless with her bombing habits due to her high energy and young age, so the other members of the Knights of Favonius have to keep a close eye on her to prevent her from causing further trouble.
• Grim Dawn: The appropriately-named Demolitionist class uses various manners of potent explosives, amplified by a little extra magic, to take on their foes. Their official role before the collapse was to tackle both fortifications and massed enemies, scattering both; now, they blow up every abomination against nature that crawls the wilderness.
• Halo 3: ODST has Michael "Mickey" Crespo, who rigs the bridge leading to the ONI building to blow up and prevent Covenant ground forces from crossing it, and later destroys the ONI building itself to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.
• The Mercenaries who specialize in explosives in the Jagged Alliance series. Many of them them are a bit more enthusiastic about their craft than is really healthy, hence why they're in some Banana Republic getting shot at instead of knocking down old factories or doing practical effects for action movies.
  • The explosives expert roster in each game includes one Consummate Professional, a couple who hit the Mythbusters sweet spot of "professional and enthusiastic", and the rest are full-on Mad Bomber types who are by far the craziest characters in a series whose main selling point compared to XCOM is that you're commanding quirky individuals instead of faceless mooks. At least one of them had a gameplay quirk of occasionally setting timers and fuses for far shorter than you told him, and is noted in Jagged Alliance 2 to have died between games from doing just that.
• A late-game mission in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption involves Samus protecting a group of demolition specialists as they make their way to a heavily reinforced door that cannot be opened any other way.
• Minecraft: Story Mode: Magnus of the Order of the Stone. His demolition skill is why Axel suggests enlisting his help to fight the Wither Storm.
• Mother:
  • Loid from EarthBound Beginnings has some of the best weapons in the game, including bombs and bottle rockets.
  • EarthBound (1994): Jeff is Loid's Expy in the sequel. However, it should be noted that in this game, anyone can use the bombs, unlike in the first only Loid can. However, Jeff is still the only one who can use the bottle rockets, of which the strongest kind deals so much damage that it is a Game-Breaker.
• This is specifically the role that Alias plays for the squad in Red Faction II.
• In the Sly Cooper series of video games, starting from Sly 2: Band of Thieves onward, Bentley is the team's "Brains and Demolitions Expert" as the back of the game box says. He uses a wide variety of unique explosives to pull off amazing heists, as well as defend himself. In the third game, the crew end up recruiting The Panda King (a villain from the first game who combines fireworks with martial arts) as a dedicated demoman.
• Delta-62, aka "Scorch", from Star Wars: Republic Commando is noted to be the team's expert at setting up and detonating explosives. Technically, all four members of The Squad, player character included, are equally competent at anything you can have them do, but they each have their own specialty and will comment if someone else ends up performing an action that falls under it; for instance, if Cold Sniper "Sev" ends up planting a demolition charge, Scorch may interject by asking if you're sure you want the guy with the death wish arming an explosive device.
• Havoc Squad, the Republic Trooper's team in Star Wars: The Old Republic, begins the game with a dedicated demolitions man nicknamed "Fuze". Like the other veteran Havocs, he defects to the Empire, who puts him to use designing bombs. However, he returns to the Republic when he realizes that the Imperials are testing his creations on civilians. His replacement, Tanno Vik, is an ex-street gang member with such a broad criminal streak that he was actually dishonorably discharged, but was recommissioned because he's just that good. And it's not an exaggeration — on the mission he was tapped for, he plants a few pieces of heavy ordnance that destroy an entire Imperial cruiser (albeit from the inside) and the superweapon prototype it was carrying.
• The Demoman in Team Fortress 2 is either this or a Mad Bomber (it depends on whether he's on your team or not). His weapons of choice are a grenade launcher and a gun that shoots sticky mines. Then, if you want, you can even replace your melee weapon with a WWII German stick grenade. However, it's not thrown; instead, it's meant to hit people, exploding when you do and essentially turning the Demoman into an Action Bomb.
• In Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, the dwarves (Alliance) and their Evil Counterpart the goblins (Horde) are specialized units that blow stuff up. Each unit is only good for a single explosion, killing the demolitions team in the blast of its own attack. They are, it would appear, so willing to die for the cause that they chose a specialty that makes every mission a suicide mission.
  • In Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, the dwarves, having suffered terrible losses among their sapper teams in the Second War, have been developing a method of delivering those explosives that do not require the demolition dwarves to themselves to get near the target. Hence, the dwarven mortar team replaces the old sapper units.

Visual Novels

• Grisaia Series: Yuuji himself, as a jack of all trades, can handle explosives, under his tutelage Sachi becomes somewhat of an expert in both her after story in Labyrinth, and in Eden.

Webcomics

• Schlock Mercenary currently has as the company demolition expert Lt. "Pi" Pibald, a Mad Bomber swinging between acute (if not always unjustified) paranoia and lapses in self-preservation related to explosives. He's also good enough to casually manufacture high explosives in an ant farm in his cabin, and implies he could make explosive french fries (apparently the yield drops just a little if they need to be edible). There were two previous demolition experts: Hob blew himself up (heroically) and Pronto was too enthusiastic about duct tape, but ended up simply shot in the chest.
  • In addition to the aforementioned characters, the entire profession was recognised in Maxim 3: An Ordnance Technician at a dead run outranks everybody.
• In Stand Still, Stay Silent, one of the main army jobs is Cleanser, which includes burning down and blowing up buildings in which Plague Zombie monsters could be dwelling.

Web Original

• Door in Hunter: The Parenting frequently mentions his 'old mining days', implying that he is familiar with dynamite. He's not a former miner, he's a former EOD technician for the US Military. The mines he worked with are landmines. It's implied that he set up the minefield in Kitten's front yard.

Western Animation

• Rattrap from Beast Wars is the main Maximal when it comes to explosives.
• Rico from The Penguins of Madagascar, to the point where "Kaboom!" is one of the few intelligible words you can get out of him.
• Transformers: Prime has Wheeljack on the Autobots, who much more of a combat engineer than his usual Gadgeteer Genius portrayal.
• Wrecker from Star Wars: The Bad Batch is the team member who's in charge of destroying things, either with his own physical strength or with Stuff Blowing Up. In their Poorly Disguised Pilot on Star Wars: The Clone Wars, he literally sheds Tears of Joy when Anakin gives him the remote that blows up a Separatist cruiser.
  (tearing up) "This is the happiest day of my life!"

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