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Popularized by film critic Roger Ebert, a term for a plot that hangs together only because the main characters behave like idiots. It's not so bad if the characters are supposed to be acting like idiots, but it's very bad if the Idiot Plot depends on a character suddenly acting stupid enough for the plot to work.
A much more grating form is the "second-order idiot plot", in which the plot can only function if every character involved, including side characters, suddenly loses about 50 IQ points. In fact, Damon Knight originally coined the term "second-order idiot plot" to refer to science fiction stories in which the entire fictional society relies upon its citizens behaving like idiots.
See also Idiot Ball, Too Dumb To Live, Wall Banger, Credit Card Plot, Plot Induced Stupidity and Stupidity Is The Only Option. Often a major cause of Fridge Logic.
Examples
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Anime
- School Days. Somewhat excusable by the fact that it masquerades as a comedy for, oh, about one episode and a half; afterwards it becomes truly cringe-worthy.
- The ending of Gundam SEED Destiny hinged on the Minerva crew acting like complete idiots so that they would fight the Three Ship Alliance. The crew ignores Gilbert Durandal creating a fake Lacus Clyne and his plan to control people's destiny. They even let slide the fact that Durandal is willing to use his newly acquired doomsday cannon to blow away entire countries if they don't agree to his Destiny Plan.
- Durandal's plan to replace Lacus Clyne with an impostor is entirely dependent on the world population being stupid enough not to notice the impostor's vastly different personality (not to mention much larger boobs, and the fact that she dresses much more revealingly).
- Fortunately for him, they're really stupid.
- Worse than that, while ZAFT was busy invading Earth in the name of self-defense, they completely ignored the OMNI military bases on the Moon, practically in their back yard considering that they lived in space colonies. This, of course, bit them in the ass when OMNI used their moon-based laser cannon to completely blow away several colonies.
- The show as a whole turned into an Idiot Plot by episode 13, where everything up through the ending hinged on the Archangel going to war and creating conflicts due to their stubborn belief that just because anonymous would-be assassins were piloting ZAFT suits (nevermind three had just been stolen by the Earth Alliance weeks earlier, and Kira owned one himself), they must have been personally sent by top of ZAFT command.
- Special Edition adds a scene where Durandal knows that Kira is back in action and is anticipating Shinn meeting him in battle long before Kira actually does anything to mess with Zaft and in fact he would only know Kira was back if he had been monitoring that Ash team. This seems to confirm that yes Durandal did send that hit squad.
- The Gundam SEED Destiny Astray manga confirms Durandal ordered the hit. He wanted Kira dead (Lacus was a bonus) because he helped on the Ultimate Coordinator project (and felt guilt for it, wanting to wipe out evidence of his shame), and he knew Kira would become a potential thorn in his side.
- The final nail(s) in the coffin for Gundam SEED Destiny was that not only did Shinn turn into an uncaring, violent idiot by the end, every episode involving the Archangel in action was caused by idiotic reasoning on the part of borderline terrorists and the fact that not one civilian on Earth and in space seemed to have minded Durandal's proclamation of the Destiny Plan, except for the unambiguously evil faction and their pawn nation.
- If you pay attention nobody was sure what to make of the Destiny Plan and nobody had accepted yet only refused and Durandal planned to Requiem those countries declaring that "Anyone who refused the plan was an enemy of mankind" and would be dealt with.
- Two nations from several, and Scandanavia was entirely forgotten, so only ORB, as usual, and the EA with them, refused it. Delta Astray even showed that many aspects of the Destiny Plan worked in bringing Naturals and Coordinators closer to understanding each other, making this even more of an idiotic plot.
- Lampshaded in the Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series spinoff Cr@psule Monsters:
Alex "Definitely Not A Villain" Brisbane: Step on the map. Yugi: Make me. Alex Brisbane: Oh, come on. I'll be your friend. Yugi: Look. There's no way I'm stepping on any freaking map. Alex Brisbane: What if I told you there was candy inside the map? Yugi: You've got to be kidding me. I'd have to be an idiot to fall for that. Tea: Candy? That sounds pretty good. Tristan: Yes. Let's go get the candy!
- Sonic X takes this to absurd proportions when everyone on the planet Fails Astronomy Forever for a couple of episodes, except Sonic himself, amusingly enough. Eggman rigs the moon to block out the sun, making it look like the moon pretty much stopped, along with the sun. Nobody finds this fishy because they've forgotten that the moon revolves around the Earth, and the Earth around the sun, not to mention the Earth spins on an embarrassingly wonky axis. Eggman takes the opportunity to try and brainwash everyone with the lamps he sells, only to have his plan foiled by Sonic yet again, because he was the only one not holding on to the gigantic Idiot Ball.
- The hentai fantasy manga Dawn of the Silver Dragon is a manga about a band of female police officer-type warriors in a mildly Magi Tek world trying to fight Villain Sue Radim and his gigantic conspiracy. Radim's Materiél technology allows him to utterly control the body of any woman who undergoes the process, which he eventually uses on every member of the all-female Silver Dragon band, which was established specifically to combat this technology, despite the glaring weakness in that plan. At one point near the beginning, one of his lackeys takes one of the Silver Dragons, a known materiél, pimps her out in public in an unsubtle manner, at a time when lack of discretion could cause the plan to fall apart, and the Silver Dragons never once consider the possibility that something is wrong with their coworker until she goes missing. When that happens, the leader Celes goes to a rendezvous location unguarded and unprotected and is subjected to materiél treatment. The rest of the team goes in to rescue her with a reasonably thought-out plan, which fails because Radim is so Crazy Prepared as to be
omnipotent omniscient. Thus ends the second volume. As time goes on, we learn that virtually the vast majority of the government are misogynistic and sympathize with Radim, which is proven when he enslaves the empress and launches a coup, which he really didn't need to do because he was already pretty much in charge of the government, making the entire story pointless. The combination of the incredibly stupid main characters, the illogically invincible Villain Sue, and the Crapsack World makes the entire plot a monumental Wall Banger Idiot Plot.
- It's porn. The plot is just an excuse to have the hot female characters have sex with Naughty Tentacles and evil ugly men.
- Pretty much any hentai that isn't just sex, or a comedy will inevitably have one. The most generic is when someone is blackmailed and instead of calling the cops will basically become the blackmailer's sex slave. In their defense, its porn, you don't read hentai mangas for the story you read it for the sex.
- In X1999 The Movie, the seven Dragons of Heaven each guard a magical barrier which serves to prevent The End Of The World As We Know It. When the Dragon of Heaven protecting a given barrier dies, the barrier collapses catastrophically, and if all of the barriers are destroyed, humanity will be wiped out. So naturally, almost to a man, the Dragons of Heaven sacrifice themselves to kill the Dragons of Earth... who are trying to destroy the barriers to wipe out humanity. (The manga and the TV series handle things much better.)
- The movie was brought into existence because of an admittedly cool music video that had one of X Japan's songs (the inspiration, basically.) And trying to fit what was at least a dozen plus books by that point into 90 minutes without stripping things to the bare minimum? Ain't happenin'.
- Hiltz' master plan in Zoids Guardian Force is pure Idiot Plot on everyone's part, including his. In short, rather than launching his master plan at the start of the series - when he already had all the resources to do it - he instead spends thirty episodes destroying the scenery. The result is that not only does it lead the heroes right to his doorstep, it gives them the weapon and the technology that they used to defeat him, and wouldn't have had otherwise. The only reason one can think as to why he did this was simply "to sell more toys".
- In Sora Wo Kakeru Shoujo, Nami's sisters structurally fail to acknowledge her obvious depressed state, going so far as to kick her down even more, as Kazane does in one episode. Even after Nami's Face Heel Turn, Akiha simply tells Nami to shut up instead of listening to her during their first critical confrontation. Yeah, that really worked, now did it.
- Yuria doesn't want to have sex with Shunsuke because if she does she'll become his life-long sex slave, being a Sex Bot and all. She's pretty sure she doesn't like that idea, even after she starts wondering if she's fallen in love with Shunsuke. That's all well and good, but Shunsuke also doesn't want to have sex with Yuria because he is bafflingly devoted to his chaste, ice-cold girlfriend who he rarely hears from and even more rarely gets to see. And anyway what kind of idiot makes a Sex Bot who is intelligent and emotional enough to decide they don't want to be a Sex Bot? (oh right, that kind). Better Than It Sounds.
- My Balls. Simply put, the protagonist has a powerful demon sealed in his balls and can't ejaculate for a month or humanity will be destroyed. He does away with his Porn Stash, yes, and manages to deal with the various Horny Devils going after him, but doesn't stay away from his nymphomaniac-when-drunk coworker.
- One of the two major conflicts in the final arc of Phantom of Inferno relied entirely on one of the characters coming to a braindead misunderstanding and the protagonist not only not making any attempts to correct her, but saying whatever he could to make himself look guilty and egg on the conflict.
- Aizen's plot in Bleach's Soul Society arc depends on none of the various Shinigami finding it a bit odd that temporarily transferring your power to a human is suddenly a capitol offense.
- Slightly justified, as the Gotei 13 are a military organization under the legislative control of the Central 46, and as such can only enforce the edicts handed down to them. Several of the Captains, however, did have obvious qualms about what was going on, but were restricted to working within the system to act against it. Ukitake and Kyōraku even went so far as to fight the Captain-Commander.
- Uh they did. Didn't you notice that Ukitake, Kyōraku, Hitsugaya, Renji, and Unohana all found the orders odd? Byakuya was conflicted due to two oaths he took opposing each other, Soifon followed the rules because she thought Yoruichi betrayed her by opposing the Soul Society, and Yamamoto is the Anthropomorphic Personification of Lawful Neutral.
Comic Books
- Supreme Power, the J. Michael Straczynski reboot of Marvel's Squadron Supreme (a typically Marvel-dark riff on the characters of DC's Justice League Of America), has large parts of its plot dependent on the chronic tendency (seen before in much of Straczynski's work) for virtually everyone in any kind of government-representative role to be malicious, incompetent, or both.
- The most egregious example is in the story of Mark Milton, or "Hyperion," the Superman-analogue: when a superpowered child falls from the sky in a spaceship, he is taken within minutes by the government and put in the custody of two dedicated agents, who pretend to be married so they can raise him as an American citizen in an artificially created (and heavily-monitored) "perfect family environment". However, with all the effort put into creating this environment, it somehow fails to occur to anyone in the project that getting an actually-married couple to play the role of Mom and Pop would be far easier on the agents, far more psychologically healthy for the child, and far safer should he ever, oh, find out about any of this.
- Their justification was that if an actual couple ever had an actual squabble, it would screw up the "perfect family environment". Also, by making the pretend parents emotionally separate they hoped to maintain detachment - their "Plan B" if Hyperion turned out to be a threat was to kill him - an actual couple might get into the role too deeply.
- Angel Densetsu raises the Idiot Plot to an art form - the entire concept is that the main character unwittingly becomes the most fearsome gangster in Japan because of the whole cast's inability to communicate properly. Granted, this is well-justified by the personalities of the characters involved.
- The infamous Spider-Man storyline One More Day, because making bargains with a devil is never a good idea.
- In the So Bad Its Horrible Wonder Woman storyline Amazons Attack!, the entire Amazon race (the only apparent exception being Wonder Woman herself) carries an Idiot Ball the size of the moon. On the advice of Circe, an evil goddess who has tried to exterminate the Amazons on multiple occasions, they decide to declare war on one of the most powerful nations in the world; one that is home to many of the strongest superheroes in the DC Universe. The end result? The Amazon race is scattered across the world, they suffer Character Derailment that makes them a bunch of Straw Feminists, the entire USA hates them, and the reputations of heroes associated with them (Wonder Woman, Wonder Girl, Supergirl to name a few) are left tarnished.
- Oh, and the secret weapon they were going to use to bring the US to its knees? Giant magical bees. While awesome, a bunch of giant bees doesn't exactly measure up to jet fighters, attack helicopters, cruise missiles, anti-aircraft guns, or nukes.
- Quoth Batman: "Bees. My God." Taken out of context, it's a perfect Face Palm statement that sums up the idiocy of this storyline.
- Issue #36 of X-Men. To summarize: Professor X and Banshee have been kidnapped in the Alps, and the X-Men need to get to Europe to rescue them before someone uses their powers to conquer the world. The problem? Their plane is out of gas, Warren's parents are out at sea, and the X-men don't have access to Professor X's bank accounts. They apply for a loan, but get rejected and as they drive away the bank manager notes that they were driving in a Rolls Royce (easily valuable enough to serve as collateral for said loan). The rest of the issue is the X-Men trying to get part time jobs to raise cash. The question is, why don't they just sell the damn car? Surely it would get them enough cash to get to Europe, and hanging onto it can't be as important as rescuing their mentor and saving the world. Sheesh.
- The Green Goblin is being hailed as a hero, and is now basically in charge of America's self defense. Just to be clear, Norman Osborn was outed months ago. He was convicted of mass murder. He strafed his own arraignment hearing with pumpkin bombs on live television. He is known to be dangerously bipolar, and that's when he's on his medication. He's the single most infamous example in Marvel of why superheroes need secret identities, given that he's the first MU villain to murder a hero's supporting cast *coughGwenStacycough*. This. Man. Now. Has. Every. Registered. Superhero. On. File. And. Under. His. Authority. Legally. This. Is. Madness.
- In addition, they also disbanded SHIELD and gave Norman Osborn full authority to create and run its replacement, HAMMER. So not only have they given him his own private army and intelligence agency, they're not even maintaining the minimal control that having him direct personnel already chosen and loyalty-screened would give them. Instead, Osborn gets to recruit all his own people. Appointing Charles Manson the Director of Homeland Security would make more sense than this.
- New Avengers #50 ended with Ronin (Clint Barton) actually going on TV and (with understandable shock) rehashing out all the above issues and just how mind meltingly stupid the people are for accepting a known psychopath as their new leader. Of course, this being the Marvel Universe, it didn't work.
- Later Norman Osborn (in Dark Avengers) mentions this, points out the the above was a criminal who helped the USSR steal Stark Tech, and gives a heartfelt speech about how he used to be all that, leaving the reader feel that Osborn really wants to save the world, in his own twisted way.
- He actually doesn't have the database. Tony Stark rigged it so that the first time he tried to access it without a warrant, it deleted itself. Leaving only "Iron Man - Tony Stark" as a final twist of the knife.
- Thor: Vikings by Garth Ennis assumes no other heroes are in New York to help out, but it's okay since Doctor Strange is there, but his plan relies on finding a couple people to fight an invincible opponent and his army face to face, instead of using his own powers to temporarily subdue, banish or restrain them, protect the city with some kind of force field, evacuate people, or find a more clever solution than watching and complaining about how invincible the opponent is.
- Any plot that involves Thor or anyone else trusting Loki becomes one of these after, oh, his tenth betrayal (so, since the mid-1960s). The current mega-arc by J. Michael Straczynski would be the most recent example.
- The entirety of the Marvel Civil War storyline. Superheroes and the government lose their minds and start up a pointless brawl over laws that had no authority at the time because one superVILLAIN blew up a school. Marvel was going for a moral ambiguity story, but the the fact that the writers never actually wrote down what the big law was supposed to do and the pro-registration sides numerous atrocities torpedoed any chance of that. The entire storyline devolved into a mass of Author Filibusters in between fights. Let's not even speak of Sally Floyd.
- In Sonic The Hedgehog issue 108, Eggman, using a machine and the residual effects of Chaos Knuckles' reality-warping powers, finds a way to reconstitute the scattered atoms of his predecessor, the original Dr. Robotnik. What do these two geniuses do with this startling turn of events? Have Robotnik form an alliance with the Freedom Fighters on the premise that he escaped Eggman's control, and lure them back to the machine so the two doctors can use the process that revived him to annihilate their hated enemies once and for all. Of course! I mean, what else could they do in that situation? It's not like they couldn't have combined their respective 300 IQ to come up with another Ultimate Annihilator, or used the alliance ploy to relearn the location of Knothole and/or learn about and/or sabotage their defenses or something diabolically useful like that, right? Fortunately, the Freedom Fighters get wise to this plot from the get-go, and only play along so they can destroy the machine so Eggman can't use it again (having learned that Robotnik's revival was only temporary)...but even they don't seem to realize how much of a freaking security leak having Robotnik in Knothole was.
Fan Fic
Fairy Tales
Film
- The movie X-Men: The Last Stand features a double idiot plot. The government hears that Magneto is raising an army to attack the mutant cure laboratory on Alcatraz. In response, they arm the guards there only with mutant cure dart weapons in plastic dart rifles, thus leaving them totally defenseless against an attack with conventional weapons (Magneto could easily take care of firearms, but the dart rifles should be able to use the Instant Sedation darts seen in the second movie). Then, Magneto's army attacks, and no one in it brings along any weapons.
- It's actually a triple idiot plot. Magneto and his army are attacking an island compound in order to kill the mutant being held within, as his blood is being used to make a mutant cure. In order to get there, Magneto rips up a bridge and hovers it over to the island, with his entire army standing on the bridge. This looks very cool. However, rather than dropping the bridge at the entrance to the island and then fighting a pitched battle to get to the mutant, Magneto could have literally dropped the bridge on the mutant.
- The whole thing is full of "it's not as if" moments — Magneto is surprised to realize that the guns are plastic, partway into the fight, but it's not as if he had some kind of ability to sense metal at a distance that had been highlighted in the plot about fifteen minutes ago; Logan has to kill Jean Grey, 'cause it's not as if there's a bunch of needles full of make-you-not-a-mutant juice nearby...
- And then there's Magneto's apparent decision that he's playing chess rather than fighting a war during the attack by sending in the "pawns" while the queen sits around doing abso-frigging-lutely nothing. Apparently Magneto was so focused on scheming the rest of his war that it took up 90% of his brain cells.
- Not to mention the fact the "pawns" are mutants, the very people who Magneto has made perfectly clear are the superior form of humanoid life. Yet he sends them off to be killed and stands around watching it happen. Some mutants must be more superior than others.
- DVD bonus materials feature a deleted scene in which Magneto kindly asks Jean to lend him a hand in the battle by unleashing her unstoppable powers on the troops, to which she smiles and answers "No." This leaves a somewhat puzzled and freaked out Magneto with the pawns to fall back on (not that he had to keep Pyro for later, but that's another story). That's one deleted scene you wish they left in the movie, isn't it?
- The villains in Signs are aliens who have a vulnerability to water. They invade a planet that looks like this
 ◊ without wearing protective suits, or any clothing at all for that matter.
- And they want to eat people, who are mostly made of a fluid that burns them like acid. It'd be like humans invading Venus so they can drink from large vats of boiling sulphuric acid...
- The ending of the original Ocean's 11 movie. How stupid could the team have to be to put the money in a coffin and not make sure that it wasn't cremated?
- If the coffin in question was a regular burial coffin, and not the flimsy version used for cremation, then we either have a classic case of Did Not Do The Research, or a legendarily stupid operator at the crematorium.
- Much of the tension in Spider-Man 3 could have been relieved if Mary-Jane had asked Peter "You do realize my role in the play was replaced, right?" Or if Peter would have taken a deep breath and talked things through with her after "killing" Harry. On the other hand, he was under the effects of the evil suit, but it felt like he forgot her entirely after getting his revenge. In fact, there were a lot of problems with that movie's plot, many of which were pointed out in a HISHE episode.
- Don't forget the admittedly in-movie (but treading actual What An Idiot territory) stupidity of, on a whim, publicly giving an open-mouthed kiss to his lab partner at the same time he was still going steady with Mary-Jane. "Special kiss" in and of itself or not, and not even going into fidelity issues, it doesn't take a sociologist to realize that that is going to raise some hackles.
- Harry gets his memory back, and then threatens Mary Jane, telling her that he would hurt Peter unless she breaks up with him. Both Harry and Mary Jane somehow forget that Peter is just as strong as Harry. Mary Jane proceeds to break up with Peter, and forgets to tell him that Harry got his memory back, is once again dangerous, and that he threatened her.
- Harry's butler tells Harry that Peter did not intentionally kill his father. Either the truth about Harry's fathers death slipped his mind for several years, or the writers retro-actively made the butler an idiot to advance the plot, and make Harry and Peter friends again. Not to mention wall-banger when Harry just accepts this out-of-the-blue confession despite being obsessed with revenge. At least the writers claim the butler scene was supposed to be an hallucination of Harry's and was just Harry's subconcious finally putting all the facts together.
- Scientists detect extra mass in their experiment (which has to take place in a pit open to the environment for some odd reason), but rather than actually go check, they assume it's a bird and keep going with the experiment.
- Not to mention that Sand Man; a man with ability to easily move an infinite amount of sand decides that the best way for him to make money with his abilities is to be a criminal. It's not as if there are places with tons and tons of sand that need moving, perhaps to access a valuable resource of some kind.
- Also, its not as if the United States was not currently fighting a war, in a desert. Or as if families of active duty military did not get unlimited free health care. (Granted that he's currently a fugitive from justice, still, if the man can't convince the US government to trade one free pardon in return for a guy who can single-handedly kick the ass of the entire city of Fallujah without getting scratched, he's just not trying.)
- If you pointed out that most villains could make a fortune legally with their powers, it would put an end to 90% of superhero stories
- Into the Blue hinges almost entirely on the main character, Jared, being nose blood-inducingly dumb at every possible turn. Why does he drive his girlfriend away by refusing to tell her that her life is in danger because of his dumb deals with the gangsters? Why doesn't he try to tell the gangsters why there's been a delay in the plan instead of getting into a firefight without a weapon? Why does he leave his girlfriend tied up at the mercy of the gangsters to dive in the water WITH his hands tied behind his back? Why does he destroy the drugs when they're the only thing the gangsters are interested in? Why does he randomly tell them all they need to know about the giant treasure?
- Hellboy 2: The Golden Army: Is rife with these. Beside the usual "I'm pregnant but I won't tell him as to maximize the angst" plot, the heroes rapidly capture one of the Mc Guffin the Big Bad needs to awake the titular Golden Army. Now, they realize that they have no particular need for that item or the Golden Army, but rather then destroying it by giving it to the one team member who can melt anything, they leave it with Abe's Shallow Love Interest, who told them explicitly that she acts as a magic homing beacon for the Big Bad. Guess what happens?
- Open Water 2: Adrift concerns six people who sail a luxury yacht into the middle of nowhere and decide to go swimming. It would have been nice if one of them had remembered to lower the boarding ladder first. The one hydrophobic woman who didn't want to go swimming gets thrown overboard by her oh-so-sensitive husband trying to cure her fear of water. So now we have six people trapped in the water and an infant alone on board. Believe it or not the stupidity level increases from there.
- Sybok's Xanatos Gambit in Star Trek V The Final Frontier is pretty dumb and only works because everyone else in the galaxy is apparently an idiot. He takes a Federation officer, a Klingon and a Romulan hostage so that a starship will be sent for him and his primitive followers to hijack. This plan relies heavily on only one of the three most powerful governments in the galaxy bothering to make a rescue attempt, that they sent one ship rather than a whole fleet, and that that ship would not have functional transporters.
- Hilariously, Sybok is outraged when Kirk and company attack Paradise City, saying he didn't expect violence to result. Yes, how dare the Federation take the forced overthrow of Nimbus III as a hostile act! And that's to say nothing of how the Klingons or Romulans would treat it...
- Con Air starts off with an Army Ranger meeting his wife in a bar, and her getting hit on by a drunk guy who later tries to beat him up in the parking lot, along with two friends. The drunk guy had to rip off the lead's ribbons-several rows of 'em-before starting the fight. Poe, of course, rips 'em a new one, culminating in the first guy pulling a knife, whereupon Poe gives him a strike to the head that accidentally kills him. Cut to the courthouse, where his lawyer advises him to plead out so he can get a reduced sentence. The judge disagrees, citing the fact that Poe should be held to a higher standard because he's...an Army Ranger. Given that he was wearing a uniform before the fight, and the assailants tried to rape his wife and kill him, he should've gotten off with self-defense. The lawyer doesn't even have him dress in a spare uniform at the trial. The rest of the film can be excused by Rule Of Cool.
- His wife implies that he was a hellraiser before he joined the army ("You were almost 'that guy' again"), Poe's wife runs before the knife comes out, and the guys' friends take the knife with them as they flee. This might make a self-defense claim risky...if there hadn't been dozens of witnesses in the bar to prove that the other guy started it earlier in the evening. The Idiot Ball was bouncing off every character in that courtroom.
- In 28 Weeks Later the so called "shelter", where people are crammed in at the first sign of trouble without first checking whether the zombie that started the trouble is inside or not! And then demonstrate how the doors to this impenetrable shelter can be breached by zombies and panicked humans alike from inside - had no-one in the military heard the saying "don't put all your eggs in the same basket"?
- That's not even the start of it. For no reason whatsoever, they turn off the lights which not only lowers visibility and harder to see the (so far) lone infected coming, but greatly panics the civilians before it even shows up. Wouldn't it have been easier/safer to tell everyone to stay in their rooms? And what's more, the infection started because a man tried to see his wife (who was carrying the virus but acting normally due to a genetic condition) was able to enter the room. The room was completely unguarded.
- The fact that the room the wife was in was guarded so poorly. She's carrying the deadliest disease in history, and she isn't given the tightest security possible. Not even a low yield nuke would be guarded like that.
- Bruce in Bruce Almighty: Gee, I'll answer everyone's prayers without any thought that it might cause a problem. He not only can't think of any logical way to use the powers of GOD but he doesn't even think to ask someone wise...which being God you could call up Einstein (or anyone) for advice. Idiot Plot indeed.
- Burn After Reading is one of the few examples of an Idiot Plot done deliberately. And thus, it manages to be hilarious and entertaining rather than annoying, like most straight examples.
- Comedian Richard Jeni had an extended bit on the massive Idiot Plot that was Jaws IV: The Revenge.
- In Sliding Doors, so much trouble could have been avoided if James Hammerton had thought to say to Helen Quilley on their first date 'Oh, by the way I'm separated from my first wife and we're getting a divorce, but don't worry, it's all amicable'.
- Bride Wars. The entire plot is driven by everyone involved being petty, self-absorbed, vindictive, and above all stupid. Granted, it's a decent satire of wedding preparation insanity...
- Movie reviewer Eric D Snider felt that the film version of Mamma Mia had an Idiot Plot. Sophie invites all three of her possible fathers to her wedding, believing she'll just know which one is actually her dad when she sees him. And then when they individually figure it out and each tell Sophie that they're giving her away, she just goes with it. So Yeah.
- Star Wars, specifically Return of the Jedi and the Battle of Endor. On the Imperial side of the ledger — the Emperor's plan is to let the Rebels think the second Death Star is vulnerable to attack so they will plan a fleet assault against it, then cause the failure of the Rebels' attempt to sabotage the Death Star's shield generator and thus have the Rebel fleet destroying itself by attacking an impregnable fortress, yes? Would somebody please explain to me where in this strategy is there any requirement to let the Rebel sabotage team land on Endor at all? There isn't any, of course. The only thing that needs to happen here to let the grand scheme go forward is for the sabotage team to accomplish nothing. Having their shuttle tractored into the Executor's hangar bay and then be peeled open at leisure by Darth Vader and 500 stormtroopers would qualify for a whole lot of nothing. As to how the Emperor is supposed to know which shuttle has the Rebel sabotage team — the entire thing is a Xanatos Gambit of his design. The Rebels are using an access code he arranged to have leaked to them. He is a complete idiot for not writing down which code he leaked to them and arranging to be paged if someone using that particular access ID # showed up.
- Attack of the Clones scored a major idiot moment by Obi-Wan being told point blank that the clones had been made for the republic years before. Does anyone think that an army of clones made this far in advance is a little suspicious? No, they just take the clones, and be glad they have an army to fight with.
- Independence Day. To invoke Roger Ebert again: "I only observe that it is a wonder these aliens have traveled across uncounted light years of space and yet have never thought of a computer virus protection program. (My theory is that any aliens who could be taken in by this particular plan probably arrived here after peddling across space on bicycles.)"
Literature
- Mentioned one of Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers stories: One character mentions he's having trouble writing his story without it turning into an Idiot Plot, and was trying to find a way to prevent characters from asking the obvious question that would resolve the mystery. Their guest then causes another Idiot Plot in much the same way.
- Tom Godwin's short story "The Cold Equations" was originally a brutal, much-needed subversion of early 1950s science fiction and its omnipotent men of SCIENCE!. That trend is over and done with, so attention is instead drawn to the idiotically negligent design and procedure choices of the starship builders. This results in a Broken Aesop.
- The White Tower rebellion plotline from Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time has turned into this. One side of the conflict has rediscovered several lost spells, has a large army led by a famous general, and has surrounded the White Tower, preventing most movement. The other side, inside the tower, are at each other's throats, constantly in-fighting, and are vastly outnumbered due to their leader being Too Dumb To Live. Not to mention the fact that the Chosen One will never make a treaty with the Tower because their leader ordered his kidnapping, and beating. Granted, The Mole organization is doing its best to foster these problems, but one would think that the Tower's ruling body would, at some point, notice that they are in a ridiculously weak position, their leader is a fool, and remove her from power. And all this is going on with the final battle over the fate of the world just around the corner...
- The whole thing ends with the White Tower raising Egwene and only because Elaida was captured by the Seanchan followed by Egwene calling the entire tower aes sedai disgfaces because only Sylviana had the balls to do what was right.
- A strong argument could be made for the series consisting almost exclusively of Idiot Plot, particularly where the various relationship issues are concerned.
- Stephenie Meyer's Twilight. If Bella were smart enough to stay away from Edward, there would be NO series, period. For the first book specifically, almost every plot point is introduced because Bella is a moron. About the only plot point not directly caused by Bella is Tyler's death van, and that was just stupid in itself.
- Bella's decision to wander Port Angeles alone, as it got dark, and in the back alleys, is how The Reveal is set up.
- Bella's decision to go to a meadow, alone, with an admitted serial killer, and let him wander around behind her, is how the great romance is begun.
- Bella's decision to do as James said - regardless of the likelihood of him actually had her mother or the fact there were two more-than-capable vampires with her who could have at least given some advice - is what causes the climax.
- Bram Stoker's Dracula: The title character would have never sunk his fangs in Mina's neck if the heroes had remembered anything they'd learned about vampires during their ordeal with Lucy. Especially since Mina was displaying all the symptoms of being a vampire victim that Lucy displayed earlier... Exacerbated by the fact that Mina was with her when Lucy was first attacked and started displaying those symptoms. And they had Van Helsing with them the whole time.
- Also for an all powerful vampire, you'd think Dracula would have had more common sense. Such as taking Lucy with him after fully vamping her rather then leaving her behind. Not only did he give the heroes an example of what a vampire was like and what they could do - he practically led the heroes straight to him. What the point of making undead women if you're not going to use em? =P
- Another vampire example, the entire plot of Barb Hendee's Hunting Memories depends on the heroine's (using that term loosely, since she is a mass murderess) stubborn refusal to even consider the possibility that the villain (arguably, he is just defending himself) has completely given up after the end of the first novel, and will never try again, even though he was clearly a fanatic. and one of her companions, who knew the villain much better, didn't think he'd just give up.
- The story of Adam and Eve in The Bible. They can do whatever they want, have eternal life, eternal youth, and their work consists of stuff like making up names for species and subduing the Earth. The only condition is that they don't eat the fruit of a certain tree. No prizes for guessing what they end up doing, but it makes this trope Older Than Dirt.
- To be fair, God gets a turn with the Idiot Ball for this one too — if He didn't want Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, why not just transport it to the top of a tall mountain 5,000 miles away? Or erect a twenty-foot-tall unscalable wall around it? Or any of another hundred and one solutions?
Crowley: "If you sit down and think about [God] sensibly, you come up with some very funny ideas. Like, why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they canb see it with a big neon finger flashing on and off saying 'THIS IS IT'?" — Good Omens
- Some Islamic philosophers believe that they got thrown out on purpose; knowledge of good and evil would bring them closer to Allah, which was worth the suffering.
- The conventional explanation is that refraining from some act intrinsically important or terrible would be just self-interest, but refraining from a meaningless act simply because you were asked not to do it is an opportunity to show love and respect. Omniscience doesn't come into it—free will does.
- Incidentally, this is the central theological debate that C.S. Lewis raises in Perelandra.
- Similarly, God orders Lot and his family to flee the burning city of Sodom if they are to survive—with the arbitrary condition that they must never look back. Lot's wife does anyway, and God reacts by turning her into a pillar of salt.
- Only if you take it literally. The writers of the Bible were setting up an extended metaphor with the Aesop that it's hard to give up wicked ways once you've left them. Still doesn't justify the arbitrary condition in the context of the story, however.
- The BC strip actually joked once that the last words of Lot's wife were "the heck with your fanatical beliefs, I'm going to take one last look!"
- Jewish lore has it that Lot had two older daughters, who were left behind, because they had married men who lived in S&G. Lot's wife looked back, because she heard one of her daughters crying out.
- The Draka stories by S.M. Stirling. There's this empire in Africa which conquers everything it can grab (talking about whole continents here), enslaves pretty much everyone, has an extremely supremacist ideology, plus supreme technology, acts like it's independent even while being a British colony, but no one - whether Nazis, Communists or good democrats - decides to do anything to stop them.
- The premise is that the Draka are a sort of Evil Twin society to the United States. Historically, no major nation decided to stop the US from becoming powerful from 1812 up to World War Two. The catch, and this is where the idiocy comes in, is that the US wasn't deliberately expanding into the spheres of interest of countries powerful enough to stop it, except for a few minor border clashes with the British Empire over a river valley here and there. Whereas the Draka do, especially during their alternate version of World War One.
- There's more idiocy to that, because during much of their power grab the Draka are still a British Dominion, and not once does the British Empire even attempt to slap them down despite repeated brutal, hostile and illegal actions.
- Pretty much everything that PG Wodehouse ever wrote, but the man was so incredibly good at it, you barely notice. Plus, let's face it; when you're dealing with characters like Bertie Wooster, what else do you expect?
- Thank goodness for Jeeves...the main non-idiot.
- Being There, both novel and film, is a satire that uses an Idiot Plot to help make its point. The whole story hinges on how people who believe themselves to be sensible and intelligent nevertheless jump to their own, desired conclusions time after time in their dealings with Chance The Gardener, never asking the questions most people would be tempted to ask based on what he says. This is partially because he appears to be a sensible, intelligent person himself, but is in fact an imbecile who doesn't understand what's going on and thus isn't able to correct others.
- The entire Dutch novel Descartes' Dochter (Descartes' Daughter), which revolves around the discovery of a lost manuscript of Descartes. When the main character Henriette returns home to her girlfriend Maartje in a coat covered in blood, Maartje gives up trying to find out what happened after a half-assed attempt at questioning, and the two proceed to make love. Later in the story, when Henriette murders her own mother, Maartje does not go to the police, does not get the hell away from Henriette, but e-mails the French professor she has been corresponding with about it. Who responds with only some vague philosophical stuff about "the gift". Later on, Maartje converses with a German professor about a lost manuscript of Kant that has turned up. When the German professor hears that Maartje has also been corresponding about it with that French guy (the actual French philosopher Jean Luc Marion), she exclaims: "Oh no! A Catholic!" and takes a train to Holland straight away, where she is immediately murdered by Henriette. Later, Henriette lures Maartje into the toilet on a train and then kills her. Serves her right for being too dumb to live.
- Tristan and Isolde is a juggling convention of Idiot Balls. Most egregious examples:
- Tristan is finally allowed to marry Isolde after a bunch of totally epic adventures ending in winning her heart while he's naked in a bath even though she had sworn to kill him. So he decides she'll marry king Mark instead. She hates him for it.
- They accidentally drink the Love Potion meant for Isolde and Mark. They don't even consider asking king Mark permission to marry or anything. Granted, an oath is a pretty big thing, but so is permanent magic, and it's not like Mark cared that much.
- Tristan meets another woman (also named Isolde), is asked if he wants to marry her, and says "OK" completely out of the blue in a Diabolus Ex Machina. He immediately regrets it and refuses to have sex with her, making her jealous. Then the first Isolde also gets jealous, despite knowing the effects of the Love Potion are permanent and exclusive.
- Kathy Reichs' Temperance "Bones" Brennan novels depend strongly on this trope for about half the plot, and nearly every major climax. This is particularly true when the climax involves the main character, who seems to pick up the Idiot Ball on nearly every possible occasion. Particularly when it would get her into yet another life-threatening situation by going somewhere alone and unarmed, no matter how many people are telling her not to, which she does in the majority of the novels. When other characters do this, it's either because they've picked up her Idiot Ball, or because they're Too Obsessed/Absent-Minded/Naive/Fluff-headed To Live.
- J.K. Rowling's explanation of how James and Lily Potter got killed by Voldemort is a prime example of this. Here's the set-up: the Potters are in hiding with their one-and-a-half-year-old son. One person, and only one, is supposed to know where they are. Voldemort, who is not that person, walks boldly into their house. Now, logically, James and Lily should have cast Shield charms on themselves and either a) double-teamed Voldemort with the Full-Body Bind and the Entrail-Expelling Curse or b) grabbed their son and Apparated anywhere else in the world. Instead, James rushes at Voldemort without picking up his wand and Lily runs upstairs, picks up Baby Harry and locks the door after her—ignoring the fact that all Voldemort has to do to open the door and get to her and the baby is cast the Alohomora spell.
Live Action TV
- Pretty much every episode of Three's Company.
- Ditto for virtually every episode of The Secret World of Alex Mack.
- Primeval too. When half the plots wouldn't happen if the main characters didn't think they had to evade their security team, and everyone is convinced the Deadpan Snarker is a villain without any evidence...
- The entire premise of I Dream Of Jeannie. Major Nelson wears the Idiot Ball around his neck for the first five seasons.
- Smallville, episode "Whisper", in which Clark gets super-hearing and everybody's IQ drops 30 (desperately-needed) points. Even the villain!
- Another glaring example is "Action", where super-secretive Clark Kent stupidly rents his farm to a film crew for the Movie-Within-the-Show, "Warrior Angel". This is especially idiotic because only a few episodes previous, Clark's Super Powered Cousin, Kara, arrived and she's far less careful about keeping her secrets than Clark is, increasing the chances of being found out tenfold. Also, why a big-budget movie is being filmed on a goddamned Kansas farm rather than in California, or, better yet: Canada is never made clear.
- Once the plots got a little longer and more complicated than finding out who the Monster Of The Week is and having Clark throw them thirty feet, this has been happening all over the place. Mostly because Clark is so powerful he could stop everything bad from happening if only he would get off his ass.
- Heroes has so many examples of forced railroading that this trope page may as well be called "Heroes Plot".
- Near the end of the season, Claire has several Damsel Scrappy moments, fleeing from people who obviously had her best interests at heart and into trouble on more than one occasion. Ando's deciding Hiro would give up if he had one more conversation with his dad, and thus going to take on Sylar(!) alone (!!), isn't much better.
- In "Landslide", Peter Petrelli telepathically eavesdrops on Sylar's plans to enlist the police's unwitting aid in attacking Ted Sprague... and then does nothing when he's subsequently arrested.
- In "How To Stop An Exploding Man", Mr. Bennet warns Parkman not to confront Sylar because "he'll kill you" - but one would think just telling him Sylar is telekinetic and has Ted Sprague's powers would be more viscerally persuasive.
- Parkman is telepathic. Bennett shouldn't have needed to tell him. Also, Parkman already knew Sylar was telekinetic from their first encounter.
- The idiocy of the Company in controlling their superpowered prisoners seems pretty key. Depowering Sylar was a good idea, but leaving him alone and guarded by only one person, whom he wanted to kill anyway with no means of knowing their condition, is roughly the worst idea imaginable. And Adam? Oh, let's just keep him in a cell. Next to the impressionable idiot with god-like powers. It's not like Adam has had decades to plan his escape or anything. There are so many more, it would probably be easier to list plot points that weren't pure stupidity.
- In season 3, a group of supposedly Bad Ass freakjob villains escape. Their big plan? Hurt people and rob a bank. Joker they ain't.
- Also from season 3, basically anything to do with Mohinder and his impromptu reenactment of The Fly.
- Basically every time Peter shows up on screen and forgets that he can teleport or read minds (ie, always). Notable examples include not bothering to mind-read the villainous Adam to find out if he can be trusted.
- Most of the things that have gone wrong in the series, have been either directly, or indirectly caused by Hiro. Actually, everything was indirectly caused by him, since he caused the formation of the company.
- Also, Peter Petrelli meets his father, Arthur Petrelli, who was presumed dead despite the fact he hasn't seen him in years and is the head of a shady organization, does not stop to read his mind to understand what the hell was going on, and why he had disappeared for so long. Instead, he runs to give him a hug, and loses his powers (all of the ones he absorbed) to his father (who took in a lot of powers to begin with), launching the latter ever closer to A God Am I status, and the former being telekinetically thrown out a window by Sylar, as Arthur's way of saying "thank you" to his son. In fact, Sylar spared him death even if his idiocy didn't suggest so.
- Arthur Petrelli is easily the stupidest villain ever. He absorbs every power Peter ever absorbed, which is a hell of a lot of powers, including teleportation, phasing, many, many ways to blast somebody to pieces, and healing, so they can't really hurt him back. In short, there's nothing to stop him from going over to Primatech and kicking everybody's ass. What's he do? He sits on his ass, drawing the future, and sends out his incompetent mooks to fail at doing his dirty work. Furthermore, he draws a future where Claire is dead, and he needs her alive. He could teleport straight to her, capture her, and teleport back to ensure her safety. What's he do instead? He sends out his two most psychopathic followers to capture her, and is surprised it didn't work. What An Idiot indeed.
- As stupid a villain as Arthur Petrelli is, his wife, Angela, may well surpass him. Deciding that the best way to fight Arthur was to send Hiro to fetch Adam was just one of a long string of extremely questionable choices she has made over the course of the series.
- The latest season finale (Volume 4) takes the cake. Having finally rendered Sylar helpless, do they finally kill him? No. They need Nathan to convince the President to end the project, and Nathan's just been killed by Sylar. So they use Matt Parkman to brainwash Sylar into believing that he's Nathan, and using his shapeshifting to support this. And the episode ends with Sylar having been left in this imposture for weeks. Angela Petrelli, Noah Bennett, and Matt Parkman are just having Sylar walk around in Nathan's role and life permanently and expecting everything to be OK. Why? Why not at absolute minimum dispose of Sylar the instant he's finished with what you needed "Nathan" for? Better yet, since Peter had already absorbed/mimicked the shapeshifting power from Sylar, why not just have Peter pretend to be his brother for a little while, convince the President, and then pretend to go missing or die? And above all else, why not at least tell Peter, Claire, et al that "Nathan" isn't actually Nathan, so they don't trigger inevitable disaster via their ignorance next season?!?
- Why the hell couldn't they have just used Claire's blood to heal Nathan? SHE WAS JUST DOWNSTAIRS.
- They aren't Genre Savvy enough to realise that Sylar will get his memories back, and they need to get Sylar out of the picture. What else are they supposed to do with a literally unkillable (as nobody knows where he has to be hit to die for real) telekinetic shapeshifting serial killer? Telling Peter or Claire would throw them into a murderous rage, probably leading them to attack Sylar and die horribly. Peter can only copy one power at a time, so all he has at the moment is shapeshifting presumably, and Claire couldn't really do much to Sylar given the sheer number of powers at his disposal, and the fact that he knows what spot to hit that would prove fatal where she doesn't know his.
- Have Matt mindwipe Sylar into catatonia (a significantly less complex task than rewriting his mind to act like an entirely different person), then destroy Sylar's helpless body cubic inch by cubic inch? Cremation and/or tree shredders would entirely hit the hidden spot, by hitting all spots.
- Adding onto this, "Nathan" will still have all of Sylar's powers, so he's never going to get sick, and if he gets so much as a cut he's bound to notice the fact he instantly regenerates it. Furthermore, if he ever tries to fly he'll find himself unable to do so given that's one of the few powers Sylar never got.
- Or, you know, they could just teleport him into the sun.
- They have the Haitian on speed-dial. They could call or teleport to him, have him disable Sylar's powers, then just shoot him.
- As of the most recent episode with "Nathan" in it, he just thought he had some sort of power copying power as well, and given his brother and father, it makes some sense.
- Too many episodes of Star Trek Voyager to count, but it occurs in Star Trek Enterprise, too. Either the main characters have to act like morons for the sake of "conflict" or "suspense", or the crew runs into some stubborn Aliens Of The Week who behave like belligerent jerks or fanatical idiots solely so that there will be a conflict of interests.
- Not to mention the Original Series...
- A few of the Next Generation plots had this too, like the 'Datalore' episode where Picard sends Wesley to check on Data, and when Wesley says that Lore is disguised as Data, no one believes him. Queue the obvious signs that Lore is disgused as Data.
- One of the most egregious examples is in the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode "By Inferno's Light", in which the plot hinges on a captured Federation runabout being left unsecured and fully operational outside of a Dominion prison camp asteroid, close enough for transporter range, yet far enough away to make a getaway. Later lampshaded in the episode "Inquisition", in which it's used as evidence that Bashir is a Manchurian Agent.
- One episode of The Twilight Zone had some people rob a bank of gold and then put themselves in suspended animation (which one of the robbers invented) for years in order to avoid getting in trouble for it. Had they just patented and sold the invention not only would they have probably become made more money than they did in the bank robbery, it also would've prevented them from having to worry about the law in the first place.
- As the above-linked trope indicates, this is actually the problem with a LOT of villainous inventors.
- CSI Miami. Many, many times. When the main cast aren't being idiots for the sake of contrived personal issues, the case of the week inevitably depends on everyone else being idiots. The acting and writing varies between So Bad Its Good and So Bad Its Horrible.
- Not to mention the series can't go two episodes without having some form of Strawman Political. So not only do we have idiots, we have smug idiots.
- Although really, these problems abound in all of the CSI series. New York, Miami, Original Recipe, Extra Crispy, They're all like that.
- In one episode of Scrubs, JD is distraught about turning 30 without having accomplished anything on his "Things To Do Before I Turn 30" list. Understandable enough. Two days before his birthday, he finds out that a couple of the hospital's sad sacks are competing in a triathlon; very convenient, as "finish a triathlon" is one of the things to do on his list. You can guess what happens next. This would be a perfectly acceptable, if thoroughly silly, sitcom plot, if one of the other to-do list items wasn't "learn the difference between 'Senator' and 'Congressman.'" Five minutes with the Constitution or, even worse, 30 seconds on Google would have given him a solution and an end to his angst.
- You're really over-estimating JD's ability to learn simple things. He read "The Iraq War for Dummies" and still didn't understand simple concepts. Besides, how often do you get to run in a triathalon? He could always learn that crucial difference later.
- For all the well-written plots Firefly had, "The Message" had a huge, glaring plot point that relied on Mal not taking five seconds to explain the plan they came up with to Tracy. Instead, they had a tense standoff with guns drawn, trading barbs and threats for a good five minutes straight, and Mal never bothers telling Tracy how they're going to get him out of trouble.
- It's definitely second-order at that. Most of the crew knew of the plan, and Tracy didn't bother to ask why his old commander would suddenly be so willing to sell him out either. On top of that, Mal repeatedly stated that Tracy had gotten himself into that mess, and they weren't going to help him out of it, as if he actually wanted it to end the way it did.
- Tracy just took a girl hostage. He is simply not going to believe Mal Also, everyone who threatens or hurts Kaylee dies. No exceptions..
- Veronica Mars season one ends with Veronica finding the tapes that implicate Aaron Echolls and then, rather than immediately going to one of the many state troopers who would certainly have been present in the house, since the governor was attending a party there, she drives away all by herself except for the full-grown man she somehow managed to avoid noticing hiding in the backseat of her Chrysler LeBaron. (The entire last third of that episode was more like a horror movie than a detective show, complete with a Made Of Iron Big Bad.)
- Don't forget the season finale where she singlehandedly went after a very powerful organization with absolutely no regard for the consequences. She doesn't even check for security while breaking into their mansion headquarters so of course she gets caught on tape. When another character states she just made some powerful enemies, she just HandWaves it away with "It wouldn't be the first time." No, you idiot: This time you pissed off the kind of people who can make you disappear and the fact that this is America isn't going to save you. At the end of the episode, the head of the organization states quite clearly to a shocked Veronica (who literally thought she had won) that he's decided to make her life a living Hell because he knows she's responsible. He does.
- In an episode of CSI New York, an escaped convict's plan to escape to Canada involves hijacking a commercial airliner flying out of New York and landing at an abandoned airstrip in Montreal. Leaving aside the writers apparently not realizing that Canada does, in fact, have police who would respond to a hijacked plane entering Canadian airspace, there's also the stupidity of the plan given that the bad guy could have taken a bus or train to upstate New York, gotten off, and found someplace to quietly walk across the Longest Undefended Border in the World.
- The BBC remake of Survivors has 99% of the global population killed by a plague. The survivors apparently suffered massive brain damage given their behavior. In episode #6 the protagonists head into Manchester, now a cesspit of disease populated by scavengers and countless unburied dead, to try and find a runaway teenager who doesn't want to be found. And they do this while being hunted by one of the local colonies who is trying to take them in by force under the pretense of being the new government. Naturally they make no attempt to protect their meager supplies from the desperate survivors who remained in the city. From the way they act you'd think nothing had changed and it was just another day out in the city.
- In The Sarah Jane Adventures, Mark of the Berserker, there's a serious issue. Rani gets the bright idea of leaving an Artifact of Doom alone, unguarded in the room, Sarah Jane shut down Mr. Smith while she was out, Clyde decides to spill all his secrets, Rani, when she starts to act, forgets to grab the Artifact of Doom. Clyde also, you know, spills his secret to his iffy father.
- The miniseries Kingdom Hospital is about 80% filler. The hero is hit by a car, whereupon a monster appears and tells him that he won't die, if he helps them. An ambulance then takes him to the titular hospital, where he talks to ghosts and other presences. The reason he got taken there is because they want him to break their curse. Of course, they don't mention how, and he doesn't figure it out until the last few minutes of the finale. To top it off, the task at hand - drawing a fire extinguisher which becomes real in the dreamworld, and using it to put out the mill fire that killed the children which started the curse - takes all of two minutes.
- Well, The ghosts couldn't have talked to him if he wasn't in the hospital, the problem couldn't be fixed until a very specific moment, so telling him how to fix it long beforehand would have been equally irrelevant, he was the only one who could fix the problem, and how does it matter that it only took two minutes? Shooting the bad guy takes half a second, you still give James Bond credit for saving the world.
- In a season 5 episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the titular heroine goes on a vision quest in the desert. Meanwhile, Spike has ordered a robot replica of her to use as a sextoy. Buffy's friends stumble upon said robot and cannot figure out that the eternally cheerful vapid robot having sex with Spike is, well, a robot, and not their friend. All the wacky hilarity that ensues depends on Buffy's best friends not being able to figure out the difference between her and a robot, even though a few episodes earlier, it took them all of five minutes to detect that a woman they had never met before was the same kind of bot.
- Let us remember that that same robot spent the entirety of time between seasons 5 and 6 successfully convincing everyone it met in Sunnydale that it was Buffy, when her friends were using it to cover for Buffy's absence. Its not inconceivable that Warren's Buffybot was an improved effort as compared to his earlier Aprilbot... which was, we must remember, the first crude prototype.
- The Series Finale of Stargate Atlantis was a major Idiot Plot. First, the control chair for the Ancient outpost gets destroyed because it was, at the International Oversight Advisory's insistence, moved from the outpost in Antarctica to Area51 in Nevada, despite the fact that the IOA was created specifically so that America wouldn't have sole control over advanced alien technology, and the non-American members have long been paranoid about exactly that happening. This is explained with the ridiculously flimsy premise that international treaty requires Antarctica to be demilitarized, ignoring the fact that a prehistoric structure could in no way be covered by the treaty. Later in the episode, when Atlantis tries to dial Earth and instead reaches a Stargate inside the Wraith ship attacking the planet, their response is to send a small team through to infiltrate the ship. Obviously, anybody who's not carrying the world's largest Idiot Ball would've just sent a nuke through.
- Atlantis didn't have nukes. Naquadah generators, on the other hand...
- That example also illustrates a recurring Idiot Ball in both Atlantis and the original. Dear Bad Guys, GUARD THE GATE!
- The Goa'uld in SG-1 at least sometimes put some guards at the Gate at their major outposts, and sometimes they even bother to set up a BFG or two rather than just foot soldiers! The Wraith in Atlantis? Not so much.
- To use just one arc from Home And Away: Aden's utterly traumatized because his father Larry's drinking problem left him open to sexual abuse from his grandfather. After a collision leaves Larry concussed and kills another cast member, he's suddenly on the run from the police. At about this point, Aden and his (then) girlfriend Belle come across him in this state, and he persuades Aden to get him "one more drink for the road". So Aden drives off to the Bottle-Oh, and Belle, instead of staying to watch and make sure he doesn't do anything stupid, goes off with Aden. This provides Larry with the perfect opportunity to torch his own car and do a runner, leading, eventually, to a point where Aden just snaps and holds Larry, Belle and Rachel hostage while waiting for his father to die (it all works out fine in the end).
Mythology
- A good portion of mythology involves people doing the one thing that they've been warned they must not do under any circumstances:
- Orpheus looking back on Eurydice
- Psyche lighting a lamp to see Cupid
Theater
- Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. Antipholus of Syracuse has been looking for his long-lost twin brother, and comes to a town where everyone seems to know him, including someone claiming to be his wife. Somehow, neither he nor anyone else manages to come to the obvious conclusion that this is where his twin has been living.
Video Games
Videogames really can't get away with these, as they can cause brutal Gameplay And Story Segregation, but developers try anyway. If the player character is the idiot, see Stupidity Is The Only Option. Plot-essential NPC stupidity can go here.
- We got pretty far without mentioning Katamari Damacy. Basically, the King of the Cosmos destroys all the stars in the sky one night because he drank too much, then sends his son to fix it by rolling up balls called katamaris that everything sticks to. Belive it or not this wasn't made on drugs. In the sequel the king goes to please the fans of the game by rolling katamaris for them.
- The Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney series is really guilty of this. Most of the time your clients are in a pickle because they won't talk.
- The fourth game (Apollo Justice) is a major offender. You have to figure out a magic trick, not because it has any relevance to the case but simply because the judge wants to know. Furthermore, everyone except the judge and the main character have already figured out the trick but refuse to help since "you can't tell a magician's trick". These statements are made by the woman who loves your client like a son and would sooner die than see him go into prison, your partner who works on the case with you and is a magician (who also expressed extreme sympathy for your client) and even the prosecution whose self-declared duty it is to "find the only truth" regarding murders. However, that part wasn't half as stupid as the fact that practically everyone is convinced that the frail little fourteen-year-old pianist who was unlikely to have ever handled a weapon before in his life managed to use a 45-caliber pistol to kill the victim, despite the fact that it's constantly mentioned that the recoil would be enough to dislocate the arm of a grown man of average build. The most the prosecution says about this is that it may have thrown the boy's aim off a bit, and nobody else questions it. And after firing two shots from the gun, the small child apparently had the strength to carry the corpse of the victim (a large adult) a fairly long distance to where it was found. The question of whether he would be strong enough to do this is never even brought up.
- Gumshoe in Kenji case 3 gives false testimony and implicates himself because he refuses to admit that he shared a cookie with the young Ichijou Mikumo, who broke her promise never to take anything from strangers. He only cracks when Edgeworth not only deduces the entire sequence, but also the reason he wouldn't spill.
- The Bards Tale - the modern version had an idiot plot, that only revealed itself to be an idiot plot at the end. It turns out the Distressed Damsel is really an imprisoned demon queen, thing is the Druids not only did not warn The Bard that he was being manipulated to unleash a great evil (not that it would be the first time the Bard did it). If anyone stopped to explain anything, then well, there goes the whole game.
- And that the cute little dog that the Bard adopted wouldn't have been killed in the game's major Kick the dog moment.
- Much of the conflict from Sonic Adventure 2 comes from the fact that people can't tell Shadow and Sonic apart. Although the two are fast, the same height and share similar facial features, their color patterns are vastly different (Sonic is blue, Shadow is black and red, and the two aren't mirror images of each other, such as Shadow's chest hair vs Sonic's stomach) and their spines are shaped differently, making it very easy to see the difference between the two, even as blurs.
- Similarly, Mario and Shadow Mario in Super Mario Sunshine. Shadow Mario looks like he's made of dark blue water, while Mario is Caucasian with a red shirt and hat (although the overalls are blue).
- An even more egregious example is the entire plot of Sonic The Hedgehog 2006. It's not an exaggeration to say that everything, every single thing in the plot is the result of rampant stupidity on the parts of the characters. The examples from Princess Elise alone would take multiple paragraphs to explain. It got so bad that SEGA was forced to fire the then-current writing staff (which has worked out pretty well for them).
- Mega Man 9. Dr. Wily, the villain for the last 8 games, appears on TV to declare that Dr. Light, the man who helped put him away the last 8 times, is the true villain. He then goes on to ask for money to be transferred into his Swiss bank account, so that he can fight Dr. Light himself. For some reason, a planet full of idiots falls for this, and Dr. Light is arrested.
- Every Mega Man game is full of idiots. In Mega Man X, humans actually thought it was a good idea to build robots with free will, and then give them a massive amount of built in weapons, and then keep producing them till they outnumber humans. And later on, they make them godlike by giving them copychips, which allow them to transform into ANYONE else. And they put the thoughts of the main villain Sigma, into the chips.
- In every sequel to Mega Man Battle Network people ALWAYS seem to forget that Lan saved the world in the previous game(s), which makes for a bunch of WallBanging dialogue of how he is just an ordinary kid or how unexperienced he is to fight this time. Massive amnesia there.
- Its even worse in Mega Man Star Force, as both times Geo (as Mega Man of course) faced down and the big bads of the first two games, he'd been witnessed doing so by THE ENTIRE PLANET!!!! Yet in the third game Ace questions whether or not Megaman is gonna be of any use to him. Dude, Geo was Ace's senior when it came to EM wave fighting, why wasn't there even that kind of respect for him?
- Geo certainly was holding the Idiot Ball for most of the third game in regards to WAZA. How so? Well WAZA = NAZA, AKA the guys who sent Geo's dad on that doomed space mission, and who Geo expressed a deep hatred for in the first games. This is justified, however, as Geo, near the end of the first game, learned his father's true fate and that he is, thankfully, still alive out there. This helped ease off the loathing that, by the time the third game rolled around, it didn't exist anymore.
- Many of the Story Arcs in City Of Heroes, especially when Nemesis gets involved. A lot of it involves blatantly misplaced trust in blatantly villainous organizations with proven track records. None of it quite compares to the free comic books involving the Freedom Phalanx, however. They basically get turned into total caricatures of their in-game selves, completely incompetent to a level that makes one wonder how they could have become the premier superhero group. They also get defeated by opponents that, in-game, would just go squish in a single attack from them (although Gameplay And Story Segregation could technically apply here). It has to be seen to be believed. It still bothers a majority of the players that these comics are, sadly, canon.
- The Dungeons And Dragons computer game Death Knights of Krynn featured a stunning moment of idiot plot. For most of the game, the party have been accompanied by Sir Durfey, a veteran knight and expert undead hunter. Bear the latter in mind. During the penultimate dungeon (an evil tower in this middle of undead-infested countryside), the party rescues Lenore, a (very large and muscular) serving girl who is blatantly Kitiara (minion of the Arch-boss) in disguise. Durfey immediately volunteers to leave the party and escort her home on his own. Repeat: The expert undead hunter wants to lead the thinly disguised henchwoman home through undead country. He leaves (the player can't control this; he will leave the party regardless) and is, unsurpsingly, ambushed by the undead, killed and bought back as a Zombie to fight the party.
- Note that he's only two rooms ahead of the room that he left from. That's right, he was killed, bought back as a Zombie and positioned with an army of minions to fight the players in the time it takes to cross two rooms.
- Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks is a humongous offender of this, made especially egregious when you realize it's an action-adventure remake of Mortal Kombat 2, where our heroes aren't nearly as moronic. Whereas our heroes' foolish actions in MK 2 is forgivable due to their unfamiliarity with Outworld and distractions of other important things (like taking revenge for the death of an entire shrine or rescuing a fallen comrade), Shaolin Monks used Character Derailment to make everyone so brick-stupid as to fall for a Thirty Xanatos Pile Up that could've only succeeded if they weren't smart or perceptive enough to realize their "friends" are not themselves. Well...Johnny Cage retained enough Genre Savvy to realize what was going on, but his keen insight unfortunately didn't rub off on anyone else.
- While all the Resident Evil games fall into this trope, special attention should be given to Code Veronica. In his spectacular Let's Play, The Dark Id takes colossal fuck-up Steve Burnside to task - noting that the game is significantly longer due solely to his screwing up...
- He refuses to hand over gold-plated guns needed to open a door unless you can give him "something fully automatic" - which sends you an a wholly unnecessary fetch quest.
- Actually finding the guns results in falling into the [1]'s trap.
- When he has an opportunity to shoot an unarmed Big Bad he completely freezes up because it turns out said Big Bad is a transvestite (at least, that's what it looks like; he has a good thirty seconds to pump the guy full of lead and doesn't). This gives him time to set the self-destruct system and force you to go to Antarctica when you do escape.
- While trying to escape Antarctica, Steve screws up operating a crane and flooding the room you're in with poison gas. Because -ready for this?- he's too busy staring the player character's butt.
- Clock Tower 3. Alyssa gets a message from her which amounts to "Whatever you do, don't come home for your fifteenth birthday." Go ahead and take a guess what she does. When she arrives, an obese cadaver-looking man hints that he's killed her mother and basically threatens to rape her. Her reaction? "I have to save Mum!" Later, when the Big Bad is revealed, things get ever more idiotic, such as Alyssa's grandfather's name apparently being Dick. Not Richard. Dick. Someone actually named their son Dick Brown. And this leads him to believe in a totally ridiculous set of myths which require him murdering his granddaughter with no real hope of reward.
- Valkyria Chronicles. Almost every problem in the second half of the game that isn't strictly the war itself could have been easily solved by someone, anyone, looking at Alicia's Valkyria abilities and the affects they would have on her from an objective standpoint, instead of making assumptions based on the bad example set by Selvaria and her first traumatic power eruption. Welkin only manages to come close by tying it in with his love confession, and of course this only happens at the most dramatic moment possible rather than taking her aside to reassure her when she first expressed how overwhelmed she was. By the time she decided to attempt the Suicide Attack on the Marmotah, Alicia had clearly gained control over her new abilities, and could use them as much or as little as she chose. Everyone could have avoided a lot of trouble if someone had just pointed that out early on and attended to her emotional state for five minutes, instead of Welkin waiting until the last minute while everyone else ignored her repeated cries for help.
- In Legend Of Dragoon the major town in the second act has a castle under generally heavy gaurd. The chapter would be SO much easier if the king in your party would just come right out and say, "I'm King Albert, here's my proof, and I can vouch for these people." But he never does. Oddly enough he even comes right out and says he will not bring up his royalty to get around, despite the rather massive stakes.
- Suikoden I. For fuck's sake, they straight-up call it Robber's Tea! Even if the Heroic Mime main character is suspicious, the Boisterous Bruiser will still drag him along. It all wouldn't be so bad if the Boisterous Bruiser in question didn't usually seem to be so clever as to be utilizing Obfuscating Stupidity.
- Starcraft, Brood War, full stop. Kerrigan's plan only works because almost every faction takes her lies more or less at face value. The Only Sane Man, meanwhile? He'd been previously long established as a strawman Obstructive Bureaucrat. Whoops, this time he was right all along.
- Mario And Luigi Bowsers Inside Story. The game would be much, much shorter if everyone wasn't busy eating dangerous types of mushrooms given out by a stranger who happens to be Fawful. Or if Bowser didn't actually eat the Dark Star, which would have ended the game about two chapters and one Marathon Boss earlier.
Western Animation
- Virtually every episode of the most recent Fantastic Four animated series involves a catastrophe either A. started when Reed Richards' latest invention malfunctions, B. triggered by Johnny Storm's stupidity, or C. set off when Johnny Storm's stupidity causes Reed Richards' latest invention to malfunction.
- The entirety of The Grim Adventures of the Kids Next Door was just one big Idiot Plot that involved all kinds of KND and Billy and Mandy characters falling for some of the most pathetic Paper Thin Disguises in fictional history. We can expect this thing from those minor Billy and Mandy characters but every single KND moon base operative too? The ony ones without an Idiot Ball attached were Mandy, Grim, The DCFDTL and (most of the time) Numbuh One. Billy, on the other hand, is an idiot ball, so he doesn't count.
- As mentioned above, this is standard fare for The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy, to the point where few episodes begin without being catalysed by Billy AKA Idiot Ball incarnate and Grim and Mandy stupidly giving in to his demands. Sure, Grim is their best friend/slave forever, but one expects better from the relatively Genre Savvy Mandy.
- Mandy does it because it amuses her, and to torture Grim.
- Grim also never realizes that he only promised to be their best friend for ever, not their slave. He's fully capable of doing just about anything he wants that a friend could do such as standing up for your self or even being a jerk to them as long as he still is considered their best friend (think Mac and Bloo from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends).
- One episode does somewhat address this issue, with Grim getting tossed into Underworld Jail for breaking his contract with Billy and Mandy when they denounce him as their friend.
- You'd think Scooby, Shaggy, and the rest of the gang would have the common sense not to run from EVERY monster they see after so many frauds...
- Happens more than it should to poor Eddie Spenser, Jr. on Filmation's Ghostbusters. It doesn't help that he gets a few episodes where he's quite capable of busting ghosts along with the best of 'em.
- The various Super Mario Bros cartoons were often driven by the characters being suddenly weakened to the point where they walk into or can't escape traps that they would have easily dealt with before. Some ridiculous examples include them just standing and watching as Harmless Villain King Koopa tosses Chain Chomps at them, which latch onto their ankles like makeshift manacles and leave them easy to capture and, in the Super Mario World cartoon, they get forced to jump into a warp pipe leading to a Magikoopa's haunted house HQ when he threatens to throw Bob-ombs at them"!
- Almost any given episode of Super Friends. Seanbaby elaborates here.
- One Chaotic episode involves Kaz's science teacher receiving scans from the UnderWorlders in exchange for the technology to travel between dimensions. Did he not stop to consider that if Chaotic was invaded, all his scans would be worthless? (It Was All Just A Dream though.)
- What's with Andy? is a walking Idiot Plot as you'd have to be a complete idiot to fall for ANY of Andy's pranks.
- In Transformers Animated episode "Where Is Thy Sting," first when Bumblebee and Wasp switched places with none of the other Autobots noticing that Bumblebee (Really Wasp) has purple eyes as oppose to his normal blue ones. This was visible even with Bumblebee's battle mask up. Then, Optimus and Ratchet get into a battle with Jetfire and Jetstorm of the Elite Guard which could have been avoided.
- Every single episode of Thundercats relies on the titular characters being as thick as possible. Lion-O, with a firm grip on the Idiot Ball, is the worst offender, though since he's a kid in an adult body it's somewhat excusable. Occasional episodes, however, will have him pass it off to the others, usually Tygra who gaily runs with it straight into trouble.
- On Phineas And Ferb, the incredibly awesome Fireside Girls are trying to raise money to protect an endangered critter. They ask P&H's help because their attempts at making money, like running a lemonade stand, ended in disaster. Unlike other instances of sudden ability lack on the show, it is not presented as ironic or even pointed out that these girls have been a race-pit crew, mission control on a space flight, and rebuilt a time machine despite faulty instructions. Yet they cannot run a lemonade stand.
- Hey you can't be good at everything
- Two Stupid Dogs - this IS the plot of this entire show. Still awesome.
- How has nobody mentioned The Fairly Oddparents yet? The Idiot Plots don't detract from the show since they're a large part of what drives it along, but they're there nonetheless (and, as stated, are a HUGE part of what drives it along). The only reason nobody discovers Timmy Turner's fairies is because of the stupidity of everyone else. Even when they're disguised as ordinary objects, with obvious faces, and they speak while in this state, in front of large crowds. Timmy's parents (and even random people on the street at times) will, instead of questioning Timmy's various talking possessions, simply remark that "That [object that clearly should not be speaking but did] is right!"
- Even more obvious is how most of Timmy's bad wishes that fuel episode plots could be easily resolved with one counter-wish. (Usually hand-waved with "Magic can't effect [antagonist]!"
- And most were created through a brief Idiot Plot to begin with. Timmy never seems to think anything through...
- As awesome it was, even the DCAU was not immune to Idiot Plots from time to time. One notable example is the Justice League episode "War World". Though closely adapted from a popular DC Comics storyline from the early 80s, "War World" is easily the weakest episode of the first season of Justice League, in large part because of its flaming idiot plot. This World's Finest review says it best:
"Ebert defines an "idiot plot" as a plot that could be solved in 5 minutes if the characters did not act like idiots. We get this in the very first scene, when Superman, J'onn and Hawkgirl are trying to detonate an asteroid. Something goes wrong with the explosion and Supes and J'onn are left stranded in deep space. We never get a full explanation for what exactly went wrong and who was at fault, a sure sign that the writer, having made one of the heroes an idiot, is trying to avoid pinning the blame on anyone. But if this person had not screwed up, we wouldn't even have a story. Nor is this the only occasion when someone acts like an idiot: Why are GL and Hawkgirl gassed in part two? Because they're arguing like idiots. In the fights on War World, why doesn't Superman just fly away from Draaga? Because he's an idiot."
Other
- Newspaper comic Watch Your Head had a long-running subplot about Handsome Lech Quincy's impending marriage to his pregnant girlfriend Erika. Whenever Quincy was in focus, we would hear about preparations and get evidence that the less-than-brilliant Quincy saw no reason to give up his womanizing ways. After about a year of this, the entire thing comes crashing down at the altar when local Jerk Ass Omar points out that the bride has been allegedly pregnant for over a year and has not even gained an ounce of weight in that time!
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