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Establishing Series Moment
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Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Some series have a really straight forward premise which they execute immediately. Others play it close to the chest until the very end of the first episode. Either way most shows need to establish their tone and/or premise in their first episode to both make the viewer feel comfortable and filter out the people who wouldn't like the show.
Most of these moments are based on HSQ or just showing us what either the premise or the execution would be. It's normally done in a straightforward way. With no anticipation or foreshadowing to both overwhelm and surprise the audience and make them addicted to the show. Note that promotional materials can spoil these moments.
Can overlap with First Episode Spoiler, but an Establishing Series Moment doesn't have to be a spoiler. Contrast with Halfway Plot Switch. Compare Establishing Character Moment where the purpose is to show us a character's personality in one single moment, and with Growing the Beard where the quality of the show is established.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
Comics
- Transmetropolitan starts with Spider Jerusalem getting a call to get back to work. In his way there, the guy destroys a bar with a Rocket Launcher for the hell of it, establishing the fact that Spider is not only completely amoral, but that the series doesn't shy away from Black Humor.
- In chapter one of All Fall Down, a news vendor comforts a small boy by telling him "Nothin' bad ever lasts in the comics. Death, doom, disaster? There's nothin' they can't fix." Moments later, a superhero plummets out of the sky, destroying the news stand and dying instantly.
- Bone opens with a few pages of amusing bickering by a standard Comic Trio of cartoonish anthopomorphic bones. Cue an attack by a horde of locusts, which splits the three of them up and strands them in an unfamiliar place.
Fan Fiction
Film
- Run Lola Run starts off as a standard crime thriller. Lola hears from her boyfriend that he's a dead man if he doesn't get 100 thousand Marks for some mobsters in the next 20 minutes. Lola hangs up and runs out of her apartment to help him. Then, one-third into the movie, Lola gets shot and killed. Suddenly, we're back in Lola's apartment, and Lola hangs up the phone and runs out the door again.
- Shoot 'Em Up begins with a close up of Mr Smith. He just stares out into space, then takes a bite of a carrot. This sets up the silly, cartoony sense of humour. Later, at the beginning of the very first fight, Smith shoots a tanker of gasoline, causing it to spill everywhere, runs at it... and uses it to slide along the ground, shooting everyone. This sets up the balls to the wall awesome action we'll be seeing.
- His brother was killed by a toon.
- The introduction of the DeLorean in Back to the Future. Prior to that, the film could pass as your standard '80s teen comedy. Of course, it still is a teen comedy, but not exclusively.
- The Usual Suspects seemed like just an average crime thriller up until the name "Keyser Soze" was mentioned.
- The first few minutes of Kung Pow!: Enter The Fist looks like an actually serious kung fu flick. That is until Master Pain opens his mouth.
Literature
- The first chapter of A Song of Ice and Fire is told from the viewpoint of a seven-year-old excited to be going to his first beheading.
- If that scene doesn't do it, the scene where a man pushes that same seven-year-old out the window because the child caught the man screwing his sister will.
- If the first time Harry opened his mouth didn't do it, blowing up the toad demon and breaking into the Varsity did it for the Dresden Files.
Live Action TV
- How I Met Your Mother's moment is either the first ten seconds, which establishes that the show is a story Future!Ted is telling his children, or the last ten seconds, which reveals that Ted and Robin's relationship is destined to fall apart, instead of being another Ross/Rachel mess.
- The Wire starts with Officer McNulty talking with a witness and investigating a murder. The subject of the conversation (not about what happened, but about who the victim was) establishes that the series has a rather different outlook than your usual Police Procedural, and the tone of the conversation demonstrates where the show stands on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism.
- NCIS: They steal Air Force One in the pilot.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer defines itself as a subversion of horror early on when we are shown two kids (a girl in a Catholic school uniform, and a biker boy) and are led to expect the girl to be the Monster of the Week's first victim. Then she turns into a vampire and kills the boy. Note that at the time, this was one of the first instances of this trick.
- Angel's moment was when he fails to chat up a girl who may be in trouble showing his "brooding, mysterious protector" schtick isn't gonna work. New show, new strategy.
- The Event pilot was building its mysteries (Where's Leila? Who attacked the Buchanan family? etc, etc) but there was no reason to believe that this wasn't a realistic show about a conspiracy. Cue the disappearing plane...
- LOST started with the main characters in a deserted island, and seemed to be about the survival of these people. Then we hear a mechanical roar at night. And later a fucking polar bear shows up.
- Life on Mars has a pretty obvious one in the first episode. It starts as as a normal police procedural, until one of the officers is captured by the supposed killer. When her DCI boyfriend is mourning her in the middle of the road, he gets out of the car, is run over, and well... wakes up in 1973, not knowing if he's mad, in a coma, or back in time.
- The spin-off Ashes to Ashes starts of very similarly. Alex Drake goes to work, gets shot in the face and wakes up in 1981. She's also aware that she's in a coma (in the future/present) and getting stalked by the clown from Bowie's music video Ashes To Ashes.
- The Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood appears to be a normal British police drama, until Captain Jack appears and starts using Alien technology to interview dead people. A few minutes later, Torchwood member Owen is seen using an alien date rape drug to seduce a woman and her boyfriend against their will, very definitely setting the show apart from Doctor Who.
- The revival of Doctor Who had Rose stumbling upon the Autons and then brought in the Doctor to rescue Rose while defining the show in one word: "Run!" And then made the place explode to get rid of the Autons.
- True Blood: The very first scene of the very first episode of this series uses this trope. A goth gas station attendant tricks some tourists into thinking he's a vampire. After they leave a red-neck vampire tells him that if the goth ever impersonates a vampire again he'll kill him.
- Dexter starts with the title character kidnapping a choir master, who's also a child rapist and murderer, and showing him the dead bodies of the victims shortly before killing him. It shows the internal monster in Dexter that loves to kill, while also showing a human side that refuses to kill children, setting the base for the Character Development that is the main point of the show.
- Early on in the pilot of The Black Donnellys, the oldest Donnelly, Jimmy, is about to get in a bar fight. His younger brother Tommy tries to calm him down, but Jimmy just leaps over the bar and bashes a guy with a glass. Immediately Tommy jumps in to help Jimmy out, and their other two brothers disengage from what they were doing — hitting on girls and playing pool — to help their older brothers out. It's a minute-long scene that establishes that this show is about how family comes first and to hell with anything else.
- The various Star Treks pretty much lay it all out in the "Space, the final frontier" opening monologue.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine established itself as a darker Star Trek series by killing off the main character's wife in the opening minutes of the first episode. It wasn't really the death that set the tone, but the way that it was handled.
- Star Trek: Enterprise opened with a Klingon crashing landing on Earth in a rural farm with the farmer coming out with something that looks like a cross between a laser rifle and a lever action shotgun, establishing the prequel nature and Twenty Minutes In The Future setting compared to the other series.
- Of the Holy Shit Quotient variety, the pilot of Heroes, particularly the scene wherein Claire is seen being videotaped throwing herself off a crane and hitting the ground with a splat. She gets up and promptly pops all her broken bones back into place. She then looks directly into the camera and says evenly, "My name is Claire Bennett, and that was attempt number 6." In fact the scene was so iconic, that when her friend who was videotaping gets Mindwiped, it's used as a callback.
- In the pilot of 24, the same slutty ditzy chick who banged a photographer on a cross-country flight suddenly puts on a pressure suit with a parachute, sets a bomb, and blows a hole into the plane before jumping out. Seconds later the bomb destroys the plane completely. That scene sums up the thriller, Anyone Can Die, Plot Twist nature of the show that will be 24.
- The opening scenes of the pilot episode of Miami Vice feature the lead characters "in their native environment" so to speak. In New York, Tubbs heads into a nightclub with the intent to assassinate a Colombian guy, but is nearly killed in the process. After the credits roll, we see Crockett his partner making small talk about home life before they head off to a meet a drug dealer. All this happens before the two guys meet and before even the audience knows that both men are in fact police detectives. The good guys being bad guys to catch the bad guys nature of the show, along with it's use of Music Video techniques is firmly established. Also counts as Establishing Character Moment.
- The first five minutes of Firefly are an Establishing Character Moment for Mal. The next five minutes serve as an Establishing Series Moment, showing the humour, excitement, and focus on character interaction the series has.
- Xena: Warrior Princess using some serious Wire Fu on the bad guys showed just how Crazy Awesome her show was gonna be compared to Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.
Video Games
Visual Novels
Web Comics
Western Animation
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