Earth All Along - Television Tropes & Idioms

redirected from Main.PlanetOfTheApesEnding

You finally, really did it. You MANIACS! You BLEW IT UP! Aw, damn you! GOD DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

— Charlton Heston, Planet Of The Apes

"The only danger is if they send us to that terrible Planet of the Apes. Wait a minute... Statue of Liberty... that was our planet!!"

— Homer Simpson, The Simpsons.

A variety of the Tomato Surprise, in which at the very end of a Speculative Fiction story, the apparently alien setting turns out to be the Earth, warped and twisted by disaster, disease, the passage of time, or some other instrument of drastic change.

Almost invariably this involves a character who was sure he was anywhere but Earth discovering the Awful Truth.

Named, of course, for the famous concluding scene of the original 1968 version of Planet of the Apes, where the revelation that the hero is back home comes when he comes across the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, which acts as The Constant. (The 2001 remake, while treading the same ground, uses a quite different ending based on that of the original French SF novel.)

At some point, this actually was very shocking (partially because humanity was very close to blowing itself up in the 1960s) and is one of the most famous kinds of Twist Ending. Through over-use, these days, it's become The Untwist; it would usually be more surprising if the apocalyptic planet turned out to be anywhere but Earth.

Variations:

A classic Twilight Zone twist: the characters in the story turn out to be Human Aliens. They're stranded on a primitive planet and now have to colonize. On resigning themselves to their fate, the leader says, "And I shall call this planet 'Earth'." Double points if his name is Adam. (The original Twilight Zone actually used this plot in "Probe 7—Over and Out".)
The preferred Outer Limits version: the peaceful folks living in fear of alien invasion are really humanoid aliens. The aggressors? Humans. - this variation also a classic Twilight Zone episode- "The Invaders".
Instead of believing it to be a different place, believe it to be a different time. The two variants: You believe you're in caveman days, but later realize you're in the future After The End, or you believe you're in the future, but later realize you're in the past during an enlightened period that will later get destroyed (with all record of it also wiped out). Since the actual Planet of the Apes Ending generally includes a level of time travel, this variant only counts if you were never confused about which planet you were on.

As you might expect, this is an Ending Trope, so there are many spoilers below. However, once you've read the description above, most Planet of the Apes Endings are self-spoiling anyhow.

Examples:

It Was Earth All Along

In addition to the Homer quote above, The Simpsons episode "A Fish Called Selma" includes a musicalized stage version of Planet of the Apes as a Show Within A Show. The song that Troy McClure, as Taylor, performs during the final scene literally names the trope in its lyrics:
I hate every chimp I see
From chimpan-A to chipmanzee
But you'll never make a monkey out of me!
Oh, my God! I was wrong!
It was Earth all along...
The punch-line of the first season of Transformers: Beast Wars was that it wasn't a sequel to the original series, but a prequel: the primitive planet on which they found themselves was, indeed, Earth all along, millions of years in the past, and the entire series was set during the period of dormancy while the Autobots and Decepticons were unconscious in their crashed ships halfway through the first episode. However, all the characters were from long after the original series, winding up on prehistoric Earth due to time travel. There are some dead giveaways Stonehenge was made by aliens!, but enough red herrings to make them look like they aren't dead giveaways. Speaking of red herrings, the second moon turns out to not be a moon at all. The reveal is handled nicely, bringing the plot together for second and third seasons with episodes far more connected than those of the first.
- Particularly well handled considering that Megatron believes it is earth from the first episode, though Dinobot does not, given the two moons and lack of civilization. Audiences were given conflicting evidence to support either a primitive earth or an earth-look-alike until discs came into play.
It wasn't the ending, per se, but the Doctor Who story "The Mysterious Planet" did feature the discovery (due to a Tube sign) that the planet the Doctor and Peri were on was actually Earth and it had been shoved half way across the galaxy.
- Similarly, the audio drama "Terror Firma" has the reveal that the setting of the story is a Dalek-conquered Earth.
- Also, in the comic "The Glorious Dead", the Doctor discovers that the planet Dhakan is in fact Earth with an altered history, after the discovery of St Paul's Cathedral.
Stargate SG-1, "Solitudes": Two members of the team seem to have been shunted to the wrong planet due to an overloaded Stargate. Turns out it's a second Earth gate, buried under the ice in Antarctica.
- This also serves as a great big lampshade for the whole Single Biome Planet thing.
In Eureka Seven, it turns out that the planet everyone escaped to to get away from the aliens invading Earth is actually Earth itself, terraformed. However, there were no clues to the audience before this point that it had been Earth that they'd escaped from; the show completely changed direction when this was revealed.
There are sufficient hints at the end of Mai-Otome to make the viewer at least wonder if the apparent colony world is in fact a far-future and much-changed Earth.
One of the numerous Goosebumps books focused on Camp Nightmoon, a seemingly harmless summer camp where kids are taught military-style lessons to invade another planet... that planet, of course, being Earth.
- The TV Show episode portrays them more as alien explorers, and the end result may be a non-Vulcan version of the First Contact.
In Andre Norton's Star Rangers, a decrepit patrol ship from a decaying human-dominated galactic empire finally breaks down for good far from the galactic core and its civilizations. The faraway fringe world on which our heroes are stranded seems almost too perfect to the human crew members, though...
A hybridization of Earth All Along, the Adam And Eve Plot, and an anti-Earth All Along occurs in the '70s BBC Radio Drama Earthsearch: The crew of the colony-ship Challenger tries to return to their home planet, Earth, to find it missing, and finally decides to settle on the new planet Paradise. Paradise is a lot like Earth, but it has saltwater oceans, and a heavily cratered moon. They eventually start referring to the planet as "their" Earth. There are a number of clues and red herrings — the other planets in Earth's solar system have different names, but we're told that the planets were renamed centuries earlier, for example. Just in case you didn't work out the original "Earth" wasn't Earth at all, the sequel begins with a global flood.
- The prequel, Earthsearch: Mindwarp has as sort of a Planet Of The Apes First Act, in that it takes place in an underground complex thought to be surrounded by rock infinitely in all directions, but when the main characters escape they find themselves on the original "Earth", but this happens early on.
The ending of the first season of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy radio series, as well as The Restaurant at the End of the Universe in its novelization adaption, features the main characters unexpectedly once more on Earth, with a rather unflattering secret about mankind unveiled in the process. We're apparently descended from a race of aliens who're all Too Dumb To Live.
Appears in the Music Video for "Sing For Absolution" by Muse. After flying a spaceship across the galaxy, Matt Bellamy and his crew collide with an asteroid and plunge onto a desolate desert planet. They step out... and find themselves on the ruins of Westminster Bridge, London, with the smoking remains of the Houses of Parliament behind them.
City Of Heroes has a weird version of this: the a lot of the game's plot revolves around an alien invasion from a world in a parallel dimension. Which turns out to be an alternate version of Earth, where humans have been heavily modified into killing machines.
The short story "The Hunters" has an invasion by ferocious aliens who destroy the civilization of the planet. At the end it is revealed that the invaders are humans.
The Roleplaying Game Earthdawn has a metagame aspect of this trope: the setting takes place A Long Time Ago on Earth, but there is no time travel, and the inhabitants naturally aren't affected by this. However, the clues were few (with only very small maps available), so most players actually never figured it out.
- Note, by the way, that the RPG Shadowrun is in contrast one of the most successful RPGs on the market, while being the same universe as "Earthdawn", just Twenty Minutes Into The Future rather than A Long Time Ago.
In Combat Mecha Xabungle, the low-tech worker-caste "Civilians" scrape out a hard-scrabble existence on a desert world, believing themselves to be descended from Terran colonists; over the course of the series, the planet is revealed to be (of course) Earth, stretched to the very end of its ecological rope. The 'colony' story was spread by the high-tech ruling-caste "Innocents" to cover up their plans to escape off-world and leave the Civilians to die.
Parodied in the mockumentary The Independent starring Jerry Stiller: one of the films Morty Fineman creates is entitled What Planet is This (Oh My God it's Earth).
In a bizarre case of this trope (it was not the end of the series, but Cliff Hanger revelation for the issue), the Archie Comics Sonic The Hedgehog series had Mobius revealed to be Earth far into the future, after an attempt by Cthulhu-like aliens to wipe out humanity for crimes against them. This was done to make the comic fall in line with its video game brethren, which had Sonic and company on Earth from the get-go. Some fans were not amused.
Gary Paulsen's SF novel The Transall Saga.
In the movie of Logan's Run, Logan and Jessica make it to the surface only to find the ruins of Washington, D.C.
- In the book, it was made very clear where they were to begin with—Washington was not in ruins; it was not After The End, but just in a Brave New World-like pleasure culture. This is why they wind up safe not on Earth but on the moon.
Ea of the EaCycle turns out to be Earth millions of years into the future.
In the Justice League episode "Hereafter" Superman wakes on a planet with a red sun after being blasted by Toyman and presumed dead. He makes his way across the wasteland to a jungle area, dealing with strange local creatures along the way. Considering the page I'm writing this on, you can guess what he learns when he meets up with his old 'friend' Vandal Savage.
In Supreme, during the Alan Moore run, Supreme's buddies visit an alien planet and help the humanoid aliens fight the savage cannibals that live on underground caves. The twist, of course, is that the savage cannibals are humans, modified by exposure to nuclear radiation after World War Three. Then, they realize that superheroes are powerless in the face of nuclear threat.
In Michael Marshall Smith's typically mind screwy debut novel, Only Forward, The City was mistaken by the protagonist for a parallel dimension but turns out to be a future Earth. The Constant here is Nelson's Column.
Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Love, Do You Remember? has a Planet of the Apes middle, when Hikaru and Misa find out that the planet they were transported to is Earth after a Zentradi attack.
Lampshaded in Futurama: "The next day, Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth! Don't date robots!"
In the Red Dwarf novels (not the TV series), Lister is trapped on Garbage World, where humanity has dumped centuries' worth of its waste, for 30+ years. Early on, he finds the oil- and acid-rain-soaked, but still recognisable, shape of Mount Rushmore with its five presidents' heads (don't ask).
Clow Country in Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle is the Tokyo from the Tokyo/X arc, just at a different point in time. This also counts as Nice Job Breaking It Hero since the protagonists were at least partially responsible for what happened to it.
Parodied in Keroro Gunso: Giroro and Natsuki get warped into a Desert of the Real by accident, and while searching for signs of civilisation, find it in the form of a familiar landmark in the series, the NPG Radio Tower - in ruins. The untwist: they're NOT in the distant future, the tower was merely declared obsolete after the NPG company built a better one. And there's several other previously obsoleted towers in the immediate area, just to hammer the point home.
Star Trek The Motion Picture has a variation. At the heart of "V'Ger", the crew finds the fictional NASA probe Voyager 6 (there were only two Voyagers in Real Life, both launched shortly before the film's release) with its nameplate scuzzied up so it reads "V'GER". Apparently, the living machines which "improved" it knew English phonetics, but never invented Windex.
Yasuhiro Yoshiura's Pale Cocoon inverts this. It was Moon all along. People thought they were living under destroyed Earth, and lost most of their historical records, but actually they were living in a Moon-colony with artifical gravity where people escaped environmental destruction. And when the protagonist looks at the sky for the first time, he sees blue Earth shining in the sky, as a sign that the planet has healed long ago, but no-one had thought to look.
The Nitrogen Fix by Hal Clement kicks this up a notch by making Earth actively uninhabitable to human beings (as in, survival domes and oxygen masks), and introducing an alien race that thrives in the new environment.
Shua spends much of Sky Blue talking about how great Gibraltar will be, and how he'll go there after the fall of Ecoban. Guess where Ecoban is.

It Was Our Homeworld All Along

It wasn't actually Earth, but the twist ending to the fifth season premiere of Andromeda was that the dystopian Seefra-1 was really Tarn Vedra, the captain's home planet and former seat of the Commonwealth.
Dragon Quest III (Dragon Warrior III in America) had the protagonist fall into the Dark World, where he must defeat the demonlord Zoma. After defeating him, the locals celebrate by giving him the title of Loto (or Erdrick, in American NES versions). This reveals that the "Dark World" is actually Alefgard, the kingdom the first game takes place in (which also appears in the second), and that III was a prequel.
- Mind you, if you had played the first two games, the map of the Dark World and identical town names were a pretty big clue. By the way, the overworld of the first world of Dragon Quest III is a distorted Earth. I always thought it looked a bit like those Continental Drift drawings of earth not-too-many millions of years ago.
  - And all the kingdoms are named after real-life ones: Romaly (Rome), Portoga (Portugal), Zipangu (Japan), and so on.
The Elseworld mini-series/graphic novel Red Son ends with a twist: Krypton is actually a far future Earth, a utopia created by Jor-L's famous ancestor Lex Luthor, who founded it after defeating the Comrade of Steel (see Temporal Paradox).
In The Pendragon Adventure's eighth book, The Pilgrims of Rayne, Ibara is revealed to be an island on Veelox a few miles off the shore of Rubic City. 300 years in the future. Upon visiting Rubic City, Bobby finds the place a ghost town, with the Lifelight Pyramids now being tombs, and the only humans around are crazed pirate-like scavengers. It's rather terrifying.
Urinetown: The Musical: "For when the water dried up, they recognized their town for what it really was, what it was always waiting to be..."
Asimov's The Stars Like Dust is a veritable cornucopia of Planet Of The Apes Endings. About half the chapters end with the reader's sudden discovery that the story's location is not what it seemed. Contains examples of "It Was Earth All Along", "It Was The Homeworld All Along", and "After The End".
Zork Zero, prequel to the seminal Zork text adventures, makes its setting in the timeline fairly clear from the start. The twist comes at the end of the game, when you inadvertently transform the castle in the story into the little white house from the opening of the original game.
An award-winning Star Trek short story called "Our Million-Year Mission" had an Uber-Enterprise (comprised completely of holograms from the galaxy's best minds, including the crews of all the Enterprises...and a very real Data; no one but him knows any of that until The Reveal, however) that finds a replica of the Milky Way galaxy devoid of life billions of light-years from where it should be. Only it's not a replica...it is the Milky Way, and all of its life-forms have ascended to a higher plane of existence, making it a sentient galaxy.
The 2000AD short story "The Last Hurrah of the Platinum Horde", by Alan Moore, has a gang of space age barbarian warriors deciding to leave their home planet and set off in a straight line across the universe raping, pillaging and killing everything in their path. It turns out that the universe is curved, and they end up coming back to their homeworld from the opposite direction and inadvertantly sacking it.
The early Arthur C. Clarke short story "Encounter in the Dawn" depicts First Contact between a technologically advanced galaxy-spanning empire and a primitive caveman tribe on a backwater planet. The description of the explorers is pretty much humans in the Standard Sci Fi Setting, however when the survey team is recalled, it is revealed that the cavemen they interacted with would eventually found the city of Babylon.

Starting Earth from Scratch

A Silver Age Superman story (which hasn't been in continuity for decades), "A Name Is Born", had two astronauts from other worlds land on prehistoric Krypton, fight, save each other's lives, and get stranded. Naturally, when they took off their helmets, one was male and the other was female — and they were named Kryp and Tonn.
Gall Force: Eternal Story had a variation where the MacGuffin world being fought over was a terraformed version of Earth's moon. The story ends with the moon left lifeless and two of the cast stranded on a prehistoric Earth.
In a popular MST3K episode, Women of the Prehistoric Planet, the captain of the ship leaves his illegitimate daughter Linda behind on said planet with Nature Hero Tang, the son of the survivors of the ship they were trying to rescue. He accepts that they'll be happier together on their new world, then pronounces (in the cheesiest way possible), "The third planet will henceforth be known as... 'Earth'."
Odin Sphere features the chipper, happy ending of almost every human being on Earth dying horribly. However, two people survive, who presumably go on to become that world's equivalent of Adam and Eve. The game proper ends, followed by the framing device (a little girl reading a storybook) complaining that it ended like that before noticing a coin on the cover very similar to one of the MacGuffins in the book. As she walks away, a character from the stories appears and takes the coin, implying that the de facto Adam and Eve actually are.

Before The Beginning or After The End

Land Of The Lost: Not Earth, but a similar situation; an advanced, civilized Sleestak arrives in the Land of the Lost by Time Travel, only to discover that the primitive Sleestaks aren't from his past, they're from his future, After The End.
M. Night Shyamalan's The Village is actually set in the present day instead of the past. This is a variation in that it is the time period that the viewer is being deceived about, not the location.
In the MST3K-ified film Teenage Caveman, the twist ending is that it's After The End, and not One Million BC.
This is the main twist of Yor The Hunter From The Future, and the film's excuse to include Space Clothes, laser guns, and Mecha Mooks in the last act.
- Although the film's American title title kind of gives it away. The original Italian version is titled Il mondo di Yor (The World of Yor), which makes the final act much more of a twist.
In the 2000s Battlestar Galactica... Well, it's complicated, but manages to touch pretty much all the versions of this trope:
- After The End: When the finally reach Earth, it's a desolate wasteland, devastated thousands of years earlier by a war between human-form Cylons and the Centurions they'd built
- It Was Our Homeworld All Along: The "final five" Cylons turn out to be the last survivors of Earth, which makes the long-sought thirteenth colony their homeworld
- It (Wasn't) Earth All Along: The thirteenth colony was called Earth, but wasn't our home planet: our earth is named after the earlier planet
- Before The Beginning: The human and Cylon survivors decide to go native on a primitive but hospitable planet, which they decide to name "Earth" because after four years looking for a planet called Earth, they'll be damned if they're gonna settle.
- The ending of the first episode of the original series had a bit of a Planet of the Apes ending when they revealed that the lost 13th colony that they were going to search for was called "Earth."
Utawarerumono is set at a time where the descendants of genetic experiments made during an apocalyptic period have repopulated Earth. This is a variation where you are led to believe that it is an alternate fantasy world.
Quintet's Heaven And Earth series, which involves Soul Blazer, Illusion Of Gaia, and Terranigma. Although the first of those games doesn't explicitly claim to occur on Earth, it's a direct prequel to Illusion Of Gaia, which does (the ending reveals that Will's world eventually gave rise to modern civilization.) Terranigma is set long After The End, but the player isn't clued into this until after the end of the first act.
- Of course, this all depends on you interpretation of the series. Fan theories give rise to every possible scenario from alternate dimensions, Time Travel, to some sort of bizarre "New Game Plus"-inspired theory that claims that the efforts of all three games lead to "our Earth".
The horrible Star Trek The Original Series episode "The Omega Glory" has a clear Planet of the Apes Ending, but the episode makes so little sense that it's difficult to judge what the writers were trying to do. Any adult who doesn't figure out who the "Yang" and "Kohm" tribes represent within the first 10 minutes isn't trying.
A comic based on Star Wars has the Millennium Falcon crash on a distant planet; Han is killed by the natives. Millennia later, the Falcon's wreck and Han's corpse are discovered by the famous archeologist... Indiana Jones. Who was trying to discover the Sasquatch, previously known as Chewbacca.
An interesting manga variant with an Anvilicious Aesop, delivered by mangaka Rumiko Takahashi in the early 1970's. A time vortex opens up in a classroom and starving primitive peasants spill out. Clues lead the class to assume that these are time-travelers from a historical famine centuries in the past. Since the class had been discussing the world's declining resources, they give huge amounts of food to the starving peasants before sending them home. "Home" turns out to be thirty years in the future - evidentally the people in the past would end up sending so much food through the time portal to help "the past" that they would end up collapsing civilization.
Etrian Odyssey has a fairly typical medieval fantasy swords-and-sorcery setting, with some cryptic intro on the title screen about some disaster long ago that ended the previous age. This is shattered when you reach the fifth stratum in the first game, Lost Shinjuku (as in, this Shinjuku, with the backgrounds looking almost exactly like those pictures and everything.) It turns out that recklessly advancing science and technology brought about global warming and miscellaneous environmental calamities to the point that Earth was an uninhabitable wasteland, killing off almost everyone. The few survivors started something called the Yggdrasil Project to try to restore the environment, eventually leading to the low-population, completely lush greenery-everywhere medieval fantasy-looking world you're used to.
Parodied in a Futurama episode, where Fry thinks that he is in a post-apocalyptic New York, but it turns out to be Los Angeles. Fry protests: "But there was this gang of 10-year olds with guns! But everyone is driving around in cars shooting at each other! But the air's green and there's no sign of civilisation whatsoever!" and his friends reply: "That's L. A. for you!"
Teenage Caveman, directed by the immortal Roger Corman, features cavemen discovering that they exist in a postapocalyptic wasteland.
Women of the Prehistoric Planet, which you may remember from Mystery Science Theatre 3000, features the accidental colonisation of Earth as a result from one of the few fictional vehicles ever to take relativity into account.
The World of "The Runestaff" by Michael Moorcock, is Earth in a distant Future, where all technologie is lost.
In the alternate-reality Superman comic Red Son, it is revealed that Superman is the distant decendant of Lex Luthor sent back in time, and Krypton is actually Earth, destroyed by the death of the Sun.