Impossible Task

"Ask him to find me an acre of land
Between the salt water and the sea-strand,
Plough it with a lamb's horn,
Sow it all over with one peppercorn,
Reap it with a sickle of leather,
And gather it up with a rope made of heather,
Then he'll be the true love of mine."

— Scarborough Fair, "Child #2"

The Impossible Task is a favorite theme in myths and legends, folklore and Fairy Tales the world over, and is Older Than Feudalism. The task might be undertaken to win a boon, or a bride, to gain land, to break a Curse, because everyone will know about it if you do it, to prove your worth to Baba Yaga (who may agree to be your mentor if you succeed), or because your Evil Uncle wants you—the rightful heir—out of the way. Some creators try to set up one as the Fantastic Fragility flaw.

In general, the person who assigns the task does not expect the hero to succeed and is trying to get rid of them or to make an excuse to not keep their end of a deal. Sometimes the Impossible Task is a quest, often involving killing an unkillable beast, but in other cases the task is a simple paradox or riddle. In other cases, it is simply searching for an item that doesn't exist.

Sometimes, the one making the task will be bound by their promise should the hero succeed, or face dire consequences if they refuse. On the other hand, it may be a form of The Cake Is a Lie when the king really doesn't want to hand out the Standard Hero Reward, and they may go on and on with the Impossible Tasks until finally one blows up in his face, or he decides You Can't Fight Fate.

On the other hand, sometimes the task-giver is pleased with the hero's success—they can now be sent out again and again and again!

On the other-other hand, the task-giver may admit that they didn't expect the task to be completed and, on the basis that they never intended to give out the reward under any circumstance...tells the hero off. What happens next tends to depend on the age group the work's for.

Classic examples:

• Carrying water in a sieve (stop the holes with mud or moss, carry something able to hold water in the sieve, or freeze the water)
• Sorting a huge pile of grains and lentils in a single night (if you helped a wounded bird or ant earlier, it will call its friends to help you)
• Making a rope of ashes (make a rope out of straw, then burn it)
• Appearing before the challenger neither naked nor clothed, neither riding nor walking, neither in night nor day... etc. (come wrapped in a fishing net, with one foot on a goat, at twilight)

Sometimes the challenge is answered like a riddle (e.g. when told to "Bring fire wrapped in paper," the hero returns with a paper lantern), sometimes by finding a witty way to demonstrate its impossibility (e.g. the king tells the peasant to bring him "yogurt made with bull's milk;" the peasant's daughter arrives the next day saying, "My father can't bring you that yogurt you asked for because he's giving birth to a baby.") Sometimes the hero returns a demand for appropriate supplies that are also an impossible task; given some thread to weave a scarf, the peasant's clever daughter sends the tsar a twig and says she needs the loom made of it. Tasks made impossible by exhaustively excluding all possibilities generally entail a Liminal Being or a Liminal Time, where something that is half between two possibilities, and so not fully either, can do it.

These fall into three categories.

1. Feats that should be too hard, but the hero is that badass (like killing one hundred Philistines).
2. Feats that sound like they break the laws of physics, but the hero treats it as a riddle, exploits a loophole in the requests (like carrying water in a sieve) or succeeds purely because he didn't know it was supposed to be impossible.
3. A Chekhov's Gun magic spell solves the problem (like in the Grimm's fairy tale of the seven servants, or Aladdin). The Mad Scientist's Beautiful Daughter is useful for that.

• Many, many folktales of both European and Chinese origin feature a number of brothers with improbable talents given impossible tasks for fame, fortune, the Emperor's service or the hand of a princess. Sometimes they resemble each other closely enough to pass for the same person capable of a wide range of miracles. One specific example called "The Five Chinese Brothers": the first (who can hold the sea in his mouth, which he uses to fish) accidentally drowns a man upon releasing the water and is condemned. Each time, the brother begs to go home so as to say goodbye to his mother, and switches with one of his other (identical) quintuplets. Thus one man supposedly survives beheading (#2 has an indestructible neck), drowning (#3 can stretch his legs long enough to always stand above the waves), burning (#4 is fireproof), and being buried alive (#5 doesn't need to breathe). They finally take this as a sign of his innocence and let him go.
• The third classic example is Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 875, in which the full list of conditions is something like that the heroine cannot visit the king by foot, by horse, in a wagon, nor in a boat. She could not visit him either dressed or undressed. It could not be day or night, a month or a year, and the moon couldn't be waxing or waning. As described above, she wore a fishing-net, balanced one foot on a sledge and the other on a goat, and went at dusk. She also went on the third day of Yule, which was considered to lie outside the normal count of the year.

Sometimes, the hero doesn't solve the task at all, but rather by being kind to others before the task is given. Be it befriending Androcles' Lion, freeing a Benevolent Genie, or otherwise gaining the Disproportionate Reward of a Sidekick Ex Machina.

Another recent variant, if the curse lasts long enough, is to wait until modern or future technology makes the impossible possible. Almost always something the witches and warlocks didn't count on. See Postmodern Magik.

Related to No Man of Woman Born, We Do the Impossible and Cutting the Knot. The Engagement Challenge is often an Impossible Task. The Snipe Hunt can be a comic form of it. See also Impossible Task Instantly Accomplished.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Big Bill Hell's brags that it is the Home of Challenge Pissing.^note That's right! Challenge Pissing!
  "If you can piss six feet straight up in the air and not get wet, you get no down payment!"

Anime and Manga

• In AKB49 – Renai Kinshi Jourei, producer Akimoto of the idol group AKB48 likes to give tasks which are effectively impossible to the trainee members to force them to improve themselves, such as requesting them to attract a full house performance within 2 months at the price of 10000 yen per ticket (performances by regular members only cost 3000 yen per ticket) or face disbandment.
• Midway through Gun Blaze West, Viu meets a ringmaster who wants to discourage him from going to Gun Blaze West, and so gives him a test- hit a bullseye at 15 meters away, which is three times the accurate range of a pistol. He hopes that either Viu will give up or gain the skills necessary to survive in Gun Blaze West.
• Since Mikado of Hayate the Combat Butler wants others to think that there's a possibility of gaining his inheritance from the rightful inheritor, he's set up several 'Impossible Tasks' for them.
  • The first, make Nagi cry and apologize which Hayate has accomplished twice before it's revoked.
  • After that, it was to steal a Mineral Macguffin her Battle Butler carried. Nagi herself destroyed the stone when it was revealed (to Hayate) that it was the connection a great spirit would be able to use to permanently inhabit the butler's first love interest. Now she's having to learn to live without the backing of the inheritance.
• Kaguya-sama: Love Is War: Since the entire series is inspired by The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (see elsewhere on this page), several references are made to Kaguya Shinomiya giving out "impossible tasks". One particular example comes when Yu Ishigami reveals that he has a crush on Tsubame Koyasu; when he deems it hopeless, Kaguya challenges him to win her heart^note Tying into the original myth, Ishigami and Tsubame's names are derived from Middle Councilor Isonokami no Marotari and the swallow's cowry shell that Princess Kaguya tasked him with retrieving. Ishigami outright calls it an impossible task, and for good reason since he's a geeky and extremely unpopular first-year while Tsubame is the most beautiful and popular third-year in the school. Unfortunately he fails because, while Tsubame is fond of him, she doesn't feel any romantic attraction to him.
• Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple
  • Takeda tried to convince James Shiba to train him. James promptly gives him several impossible tasks to get rid of him. Takeda completes the tasks anyway, and James takes it as a sign that fate must want him to train Takeda.
  • Elder says that no one can date Miu unless they can defeat him in combat. Since he is known by names like "Invincible Superman" and "The Man Without Enemies", what he means to say is that he doesn't want anyone dating Miu.
• Medaka Box: It is revealed that the Flask Plan, the project to create perfect humans for which Hakoniwa Academy was founded, was Ajimu Najimi's attempt to INTENTIONALLY invoke this. As a Not Equal who was blessed with an absurd lifespan and absurd specs, she'd acquired a mental illness that prevented her from seeing reality as any more "real" than some twisted manga. To stave off committing suicide out of sheer boredom, she spent her everlasting life searching for "impossibilities"; as long as she could actually fail at something, she could be convinced that reality was indeed real. While perhaps her biggest chosen task was to defeat a "perfect" human being (which she refers to as a Main Character), her next-biggest project was the Flask Plan, which she implemented with the hope that it would NEVER be completed.
• A skit in Science Fell in Love, So I Tried to Prove it involves a parody of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, where Kaguya challenges her suitors to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. The first suitor, who isn't good at math, is stumped. The second, who's somewhat competent, feels confident that he can solve it with assistance. The third, who is proficient, realizes that she doesn't intend to marry.
• Sword Art Online: In the Grand Quest of ALO (Episode 22), the guardians are impossible to kill due to their huge numbers. On top of that, once Kirito reaches the door beyond the guardians, he discovers it is locked and cannot be opened by normal players.

Comic Books

• Erstwhile has this in paradox form, while telling "The Farmer's Clever Daughter".
  King: Come to me, not dressed, not naked, not on a horse, not by carriage, not on the road, not off the road, and if you do, I'll marry you.
  • From the same comic, "All Fur" has a princess who tries to dissuade her father from marrying her by telling him that she'll marry him only after he gives her a dress as golden as the sun, a dress as silvery as the moon, a dress as bright as the stars, and a cloak made up of the furs of all the animals in his kingdom. Naturally, he succeeds at all of these tasks and she's forced to flee.
• Laff-A-Lympics: Yogi uses these words to describe the job of being the Yogi Yahooeys' cook.
• In Preacher, Jesse Custer punishes one of the Big Bad's flunkies by compelling him to go sit on a beach and count three million grains of sand. He does it. The hard way. As far as Custer's punishments go, this is getting off lightly. But it nearly drove him mad. Jesse realizes he'd screwed up and makes amends by using the same powers that drove him to the task to forget the whole thing.
• Werner has an impossible (for a good reason) entry ritual for former Bhagwan sect members who want to be his followers: They have to open a bottle of beer with a raw egg. Everyone actually tries.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: The Saturnian slaves are supposed to build a road from Saturn to Earth. This is a task they've been at for years and without any real progress. Supposedly the road will enable their planned invasion, but they already have Faster-Than-Light Travel and make frequent casual stops at earth to abduct more slaves. In practice the whole set up seems to be designed to make the slavers of Saturn rich and keep them from rebelling against the Emperor, who does not seem all that interested in actually invading earth.

Comic Strips

• The Phantom story "The 12 Tasks" involves the eponymous character being forced, by the tyrannical Prince Pepe of Ptjar, to do twelve such tasks to rescue Diana from the prince. Some of the tasks are completed by the Phantom just being that badass, others require creative solutions (given in parentheses):
  • Arresting the giant bandit Broko while unarmed.
  • Removing the piranhas infesting a river (done by damming up the river).
  • Winning a race against an antelope.
  • Catching a giant condor.
  • Defeating a group of dangerous apes.
  • Removing the sharks from the Bay of Sharks (done by leading porpoises in to chase out the sharks).
  • Stopping erosion in the Red River Valley (done by teaching the farmers contour plowing).
  • Stopping a disease spread by biting insects (done by teaching the locals to coat the swamps in oil to kill the insects).
  • Climbing up Glass Mountain and back down again in one day, when the record is four days (done by spending most of the day climbing up, then using the mountain's icy half to slide back down quickly).
  • Swimming across the hazardous Dead Man's Channel.
  • Stopping all crime in Ptjar for a day (the Phantom is Loved by All in Ptjar due to the previous ten tasks, so even the criminals cooperate for this day, and the Phantom only has to stop Pepe from trying to cheat at the last moment).
  • Pepe actually can't decide on the final task since he's now convinced the Phantom can do anything. The people give the final task, which is to get rid of Pepe, and the Phantom says they just need to hold a fair election.

Fairy Tales

• From the Arabian Nights: Aladdin gives the sultan a bunch of large jewels in exchange for the sultan's daughter's hand in marriage. The sultan tells Aladdin to bring 40 slaves carrying 40 trays all filled with those kinds of jewels and then he will consider. The sultan considers this impossible. Aladdin of course has a genie, so problem solved.
• In The Black Thief and the Knight of the Glen the stepmother plays a game of cards with her stepsons so she can force them on an impossible quest.
• In The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird, the wicked aunts send the children after the three things of the title to kill them.
• Child Ballad #2, "The Elfin Knight", and its folk-processed descendant "Scarborough Fair."
• The horde of chores heaped upon Cinderella by her Wicked Stepmother were of this nature. Not impossible in and of themselves, but all heaped together they make an insurmountable task.
  • In Aschenputtel (the German version of "Cinderella"), the Wicked Stepmother set such a task to let her go to the ball:
  "I have emptied a dish of lentils into the ashes for thee, if thou hast picked them out again in two hours, thou shalt go with us."
• In Donkeyskin and its variants, the princess sets four impossible tasks up for her father to dissuade him from marrying her. The first three are to make or find dresses (one like the sun, one like the moon, and one like the stars/sky); the last one depends on the version (either kill and skin a donkey that's useful to the kingdom or create a cloak made up of "a thousand kinds of pelts and furs"). Unfortunately, the king passes all of the tests with flying colors, and the princess opts to run away instead — with the gifts ultimately helping her find her own happy ending.
• In "The Drummer" -a variant of "The Swan Maiden" folktale collected by the The Brothers Grimm-, the main character must empty out one large lake with one thimble, and then lay all the fishes side by side, and according to their kind and size, within one day; the next day, he must cut down a whole forest, split the wood into logs, and pile them up, and he must be done by the evening. In the third day, he must arrange all the wood in one heap and burn it.
• In Fred Saberhagen's Empire Of The East, Ardneh makes a threatening prophecy that echoes Indra's vow in the Indian myth above. (The myth is even referred to in-universe.) Ardneh fulfills the requirements almost the same way Indra did, with a few key differences.
• In The Fire-Bird, the Horse of Power, and the Princess Vasilissa, the archer is set to produce the firebird, then the princess, then her wedding dress.
• In The Fish and the Ring, Vasilii the Unlucky, The King Who Would Be Stronger Than Fate, and many other fairy tales, a man who discovers that his child is doomed to marry a poor child tries to kill them with many tasks, before and after the wedding; in the end, he fails.
• "The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs": Unwilling to accept that the main character has married his daughter, the king orders him to fetch three hairs from the head of the Devil in order to get rid of him.
• In a German bawdy story, a clever peasant uses this as a Wishplosion device to get out of a Deal with the Devil: (cue Fartillery) "Catch it and tie a knot into it!" Even the Devil can't do it, so he breaks the contract, and the peasant's soul is saved.
• In the Russian Fairy Tale Go To I Know Not Where, Bring Back I Know Not What, the command in the title was used to get rid of a husband. (Fortunately, his wife could turn into a bird and fly off.)
  • In another version she had her house turned into a hill and herself into a rock instead, unsealed only when her husband came back.
• In "Graciosa and Percinet", Princess Graciosa's Wicked Stepmother sets her three tasks: to untangle a hopelessly tangled skein without breaking one thread, to sort a heap of bird feathers into piles by species, and to deliver a box without opening it (though this one is less impossible and more Curiosity Is a Crapshoot). Prince Percinet uses fairy magic to help Graciosa accomplish the tasks.
• In The Grateful Beasts, Ferko is to cut all the corn in a single night, gather it all into barns the next night, and summon all the wolves in the land. It stops with the wolves because they're wolves.
• In Jesper Who Herded the Hares, Jesper first uses the help of ants, then a magic whistle, and finally blackmail to evade the task.
• A Jewish fairy tale: The king told some guy to tell him the number of hairs on his head, the number of stars in the sky, and the center of the earth. The guy plucks a hair from the king's head and says "one fewer than there were before", the number of stars in the sky is equal to the number of hairs in his donkey's tail, and the center of the earth is where his donkey stamps its foot. When the king gets upset with those answers, the guy basically says "if you're so smart, then you tell me." He gets to go free.
  • Similar to an Arabic one (that for some reason the Chinese love to tell) where the king asks the thief the first two questions, then "When will you die?" as the final question. The thief replies, after convincingly answering the first two "I will die the day before you do". The king recalls his assassins.
• The fairy tale type ATU 480, "The Kind and Unkind Girls", often features this.
  • In "The Three Little Men in the Wood", the stepdaughter is sent out to gather strawberries in the snow. She meets and is polite to the title men, and they send her to a place with strawberries and give her more blessings. So the Wicked Stepmother sends her own daughter, who is rude and so finds nothing.
  • In "Mother Holle", when the girl drops her shuttle in the well, her Wicked Stepmother orders her to fetch it out again.
  • In The Two Caskets, the Wicked Stepmother sets a spinning competition between her daughter and her stepdaughter, with the first getting good flax and the second coarse stuff that no one would spin.
• Franz Xaver von Schönwerth's "Nine Bags Of Gold": Marie's father Hans declares he will allow her to marry her boyfriend if the boy hangs nine bags of gold on the mill's axes. Hans does not expect that his daughter's lover will manage to meet his condition since he is not rich, and Hans himself is the one who is paying his wages.
• In "The Nine Peahens and the Golden Apples", the mountain's old witch tasks the prince with taking care of her mare for three days in exchange for one of her horses. However, the witch mare is sapient, untameable and a shape-shifter. As soon as the prince gets tired and looks away, the mare slips away and hides away by turning into a different animal.
• In The Brothers Grimm tale The Peasant's Clever Daughter, a king promises he will marry the heroine if she can appear before him "not clothed, not naked, not riding, not walking, not in the road, and not out of the road". The peasant's daughter wraps herself in a fishnet that is being dragged by a donkey along the edge of the road.
• In Prunella, she is forced to do tasks that are only doable with the witch's son's help.
• Rumpelstiltskin, where the eventual princess is forced to spin straw into gold. Also when the eponymous character asks her to guess his name.
• In Schmat-Razum, this is done to the archer as a Uriah Gambit.
  Go ye back therefore to the Tsar and bid him command the archer to journey across three times nine lands to the little forest monster Muzhichek, who is as high as the knee, with mustaches seven versts long, and to bring hither his invisible servant, Schmat-Razum, who lives in his master's pocket and doth all that he orders him. Bid the Tsar demand this of the archer, and he shall have his will. For while Muzhichek indeed exists, no man can find his dwelling nor perceive his invisible servant, and Taraban will wander all his life long, though he live forever, without accomplishing the task, and the Tsar may have his beautiful wife.
• In the Grimms fairy tale "How The Six Made Their Way In The World", the protagonists are assigned various Impossible Tasks, such as drinking a lake, but as each of the Six has a special ability, the tasks are achieved and the Six receive their reward.
• This is the premise of tale type ATU 425B, "Son of the Witch" (previously, "The Witch's Tasks"), a subtype of the more general type ATU 425, "The Search for the Lost Husband", of the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index: the heroine loses her husband and goes after him, only to find him again at the house of his mother (or another female relative, or a generic witch). Once there, the heroine is forced to fulfill impossible tasks on the penalty of death if she fails. Examples include separate heaps of grains, collect/separate feathers from all birds, wash/iron/fold piles of clothes in an extremely short timespan, wash something black white and vice-versa (a piece of wool in Scandinavia, a cloth or felt in Turkey and Iran), etc. The witch may also order the heroine to fulfill paradoxical tasks, e.g., to sweep and not sweep the house, to cook and not cook the food, etc.:
  • The Golden Root (Italy)
  • The King of Love (Italy)
  • The Snake's Bride (India)
  • The Horse-Devil and the Witch (Turkey)
• In the Brothers Grimm's Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle the prince has set himself one: he wants a bride who is both the richest and the poorest of women.
• In The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, the Moon Princess Kaguya grows tired of being pestered by her five suitors but cannot just blow them off, so she demands they retrieve legendary artifacts in hopes that they'll give up. Three try to trick her with fakes and she denounces them, one gives up and goes home, and the fifth dies trying. Eventually the Moon itself loses patience and sends heralds to bring their princess home.
• In The Three Aunts, the girl is made to do fantastic amounts of spinning, weaving and sewing in a day, when she actually can do none of them.
• "The Troll's Daughter": The troll demands a lot of impossible things from his servant. His "service" includes being forced to feed a stable of starving animals in a single day. The stable varies from a mile long to three miles long. Somehow the boy still manages to do it. And after the "jester" (the young man in disguise) causes a lot of damage, the troll demands that the king repay him by answering four questions which no one besides him and his daughter could possibly know. The young man, who spent much of the year courting the troll's daughter, answers them all correctly.
• The Russian fairy tale of Vasilissa the Beautiful involves many of these. Vasilisa's Wicked Stepmother sends her to fetch fire from Baba Yaga, expecting the girl to be eaten alive. Baba Yaga instead sets her to work on tasks that include threshing a roomful of wheat, stripping 10,000 ears of corn, and picking out a wagonload of poppy seeds from black flour dust, each in a single night. With the help of her magic doll, she completes all the tasks and retrieves the magic fire, and when she brings it home, its light burns her wicked stepmother and stepsisters to ashes.
• The stepmother in The Well At the World's End sends her stepdaughter to the title well with a sieve.
• In The Wonderful Birch, the Wicked Witch takes her daughter to the feast, and orders her stepdaughter to pick barleycorns from the cinders while she's gone.
• In The White Dove, the prince is set to sort feathers and chop wood, and magically prevented from either. The dove knows the trick, though.
• The Wise Little Girl: Wanting to test the little girl's wisdom, the Tsar demands she comes before him within seven days... but "she must appear before me neither naked nor dressed, neither on foot nor on horseback, neither bearing gifts nor empty-handed." Seven days later, the little girl appears draped in a fishing net, riding a hare and holding a partridge in her hand which flies off as soon as she releases her grasp.

Fan Works

• The Flash Sentry Chronicles: The third test of The Great Test is designed to be this. Flash is given the task to cross a twenty-foot-wide lava pit safely while he has been stripped of his ability to fly. After considering all possibilities, Flash comes to the difficult conclusion that there is no way for him to safely cross the lava pit. This turns out to have been the correct decision, since he realized the task presented was impossible and he didn't attempt it, passing the final test and proving he has the judgment and skills to be a leader.
• In The Golden Rule, several of the Avengers are tricked into eating golden apples, resulting in them having to pass a series of tests to become gods, requiring they pass two out of three tests or else be executed. Odin decides Tony's second test is to lift Mjolnir, something both Thor and Loki call him out on.
• In The Heir to Prince Manor one of Snape's ancestors fell in love with a fae and her father asked him to build a house which was half in the mortal realm and half in the faerie realm, to represent the union-to-be.
• Hope for the Heartless is set after the events of The Black Cauldron. The Horned King, the deceased Big Bad of the movie, is suddenly contacted by the Fates in his endless Hell. For unclear reasons, they resurrect him for the period of 18 months. During that time, he must do something absurd in his ears: he must get a human to love him despite his sins. If he doesn't do this, his spirit shall be trapped inside the Black Cauldron for all eternity. If he succeeds... the only thing made clear is that he shall be free of the Cauldron.
• In Infinity Train: Knight of the Orange Lily, with it having a fairy tale motif, Self-Proclaimed Knight Gladion tells Kisaragi that he will give himself the task of stopping the Apex by trapping them in their memory tapes, forcing them to look at themselves and admit their flaws. By doing so, this would also make their numbers decrease and give them an epiphany to stop murdering denizens.
• Kitsune no Ken: Fist of the Fox: Prior to the Hyuga family's annual ball, Hiashi gives Naruto a set of challenges he needs to complete in order to gain entry to the party; among these is the clearly impossible stipulation of being in two different places at the same time, with evidence that the task was done. Naruto accomplishes this by going to the border of Fire and Lightning Counties and standing with one foot on each side of the border-line—the two counties are geographically separate despite neighboring each other—and he records the act on his phone as proof.
• The Tipaan arc in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World is centered around an impossible task given by the Circle—the four have to somehow retrieve an extremely well-protected musical instrument. (Paul: We'll have a bash. We're a bit good at the impossible. John: Especially the impossible at a luxury resort.) They confound everyone by succeeding in a completely unexpected way (basically by being nice), though it turns out that the instrument is actually a fake.
• Mortified: The Penances Jack and Maddie have to take in order to complete their punishment are technically not this, as part of the requirements is that they have to be achievable for them within the duration of their punishment. However, it can become this depending on how much help the ghosts are willing to give them.
• Not the intended use (Zantetsuken Reverse): Mentioned in Chapter 16 when talking about strange clothing because of a reference to "The Peasant's Wise Daughter" or a fairy tale like it:
  "Have you got a fishnet?" asked Mina. When everyone stared at her, she said, "Have you ever heard that fairy tale where the girl is asked to come to the palace neither walking nor riding, neither clothed nor naked, at neither day nor night, and not on the road or off of it?"
  "One leg on a donkey, wrapped in a fishnet, at twilight, and the other leg's in a ditch?" said Naoki.

Films — Animated

• Elemental (2023): When Cinder, a fire elemental, discovers her daughter Ember is dating a water elemental named Wade, she is furious. She feels that the elements cannot mix and puts Wade through an incense burning ritual, where Cinder will read the smoke of the two incenses and determine if the couple is a match. Cinder forbids Ember from lighting Wade's incense, and sees no possible means for a water elemental to burn something on his own. Wade doesn't give up and refocuses his water body to refract the light from Ember's fire into a concentrated beam of light that ignites the incense. Cinder is shocked at this while Ember only smiles at her beloved's ingenuity.
• Hercules (Pure Magic) has the title character tasked with slaying the Hydra, who is immortal. Hercules succeeds anyway by convincing (most of) him to jump into a volcano.
• Lucky Luke: Ballad of the Daltons: The Daltons have to fulfill a quest where they must murder eight people living in far away locations in The Wild West in order to obtain their deceased uncle's fortune.
• In The Magician’s Elephant, the king challenges a boy to perform three impossible tasks in order to win posession of the elephant: defeat the king's best soldier, fly from the roof of the cathedral, and make the dour countess laugh. He succeeds with the help of a few Chekhov's Guns.
• The Twelve Tasks of Asterix: In a parody of Hercules Asterix and Obelix have to fulfill 12 impossible tasks in order to prove they're powerful. If they succeed it will imply that they are gods and Julius Caesar will surrender the entire Roman Empire to them.
• Zootopia: Chief Bogo gives Judy 48 hours to solve the Otterton case or resign if she fails. Nick calls him out on it later when he assumes she failed, pointing out that there was practically no way a rookie cop could solve a case with virtually no resources in two days that the entire force hasn't cracked in weeks, and also pointing out that there's still time to complete the case, which she does.
• In Turning Red, Miriam's parents agree to let her go to the 4*Town concert but expect her to buy the $200 ticket herself. Given that she's a middle school student without a job, her parents probably thought there would be no way for her to raise the cash within a month and thus no harm in granting her request.

Films — Live-Action

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
  • King Arthur and his knights are confronted by the Knights who say Ni! To pass through their domain, they first demand a ... shrubbery! When this is completed, the Knights who say Ni! demand the following:
    "Then, when you have found the shrubbery, you must cut down the mightiest tree in the forest... wiiiiiiith... a herring!" (Scare Chord)
  • Also used in the "Happy Valley" sketch on Monty Python's Previous Record. To quickly get rid of any suitors who go after his daughter, King Otto sets them the task, "Tomorrow at dawn, armed only with your sword, you must climb to the highest tower in the castle, and jump out of the window." When the queen gets sick of this, he is forced to change the task to something a bit easier - going into town and buying some tobacco.
• For a modern film version, Chandler Jarrell (Eddie Murphy) in The Golden Child is given a glass of water. He is told he must retrieve an item from across a cavern without spilling one drop of the water in the glass. He somehow manages to keep the glass of water after passing through all of the obstacles until he's standing in front of the hollow holding the Ajanti Dagger. When he reaches for the dagger the fire flares up, foiling him. He drinks the water and the flames die down, allowing him to grab the dagger.
• A visual version of this trope is the third challenge from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade — the bridge across the ravine doesn't seem to be there at all until you do what you think is impossible and have enough faith to step off the ravine. It's then that you discover the bridge was there all along, just painted so subtly you couldn't tell it from the far ravine wall. There's also a very powerful metaphor for faith in that visual riddle: faith is sometimes described as jumping off a cliff and landing safely in midair.
• A 1991 Turkish movie had a very strange subversion to it. One of the side-plots of the film involved the lover of the protagonist's daughter trying to convince the protagonist to let him marry her. The protagonist dismissively tells him to bring the feather of a phoenix. The lover, despite fully aware of the impossibility, doesn't argue against because he doesn't want to appear as a naysayer. He eventually returns (with a feather that obviously came from a chicken), and although the protagonist is not fooled, he still judges the lover to be one of the few people around him who's not after his money (the main plot). In the end, however, the whole thing turns out to be a "Shaggy Dog" Story because the daughter moved on to a rich socialite.
• In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (and again in Star Trek (2009), the Kobayashi Maru test administered to budding Starfleet officers is this. Kirk, being Kirk, of course Takes a Third Option.
• In Star Trek Into Darkness, Kirk must learn that he cannot always take a third option, and that failure for a starship captain can mean the death of those under his command.
• John Wick: John Wick's backstory. Upon learning that his son Iosef has wronged John Wick, Viggo Tarasov explains why it was such a big mistake to piss off Wick:
  Viggo Tarasov: John...is a man of focus. Commitment. Sheer will. Something you know very little about. I once saw him kill three men in a bar… with a pencil. With a fuckin' pencil. [pops Avi for emphasis] And then suddenly one day, he asked to leave. It was...over a woman, of course. So I made a deal with him. I gave him an impossible task. A job no one could have pulled off. The bodies he buried that day laid the foundation of what we are now. And then my son, a few days after his wife died… you steal his car, and kill his fuckin' dog.
  • John Wick: Chapter 2 goes a step further, as while we still don't know the details of the Impossible Task, we know that to carry it out, John had to pull a Marker with Santino D'Antonio to get his assistance. With John now seen as back in the game in light of the first movie's events, the plot kicks off because Santino has decided it's time to cash in on the Marker.
• At the end of 68 Kill, Monica promises to give Chip anything he wants as long as he lets her live; he considers this and asks her to bring Violet back from the dead.

Literature

• The Duke in The 13 Clocks sets impossible tasks to suitors who wish to marry his niece, the Princess Saralinda:
  "If you can slay the thorny Boar of Borythorn, she is yours," grinned a traveler. "But there is no thorny Boar of Borythorn, which makes it hard."
• The Adventures of Strong Vanya: The old Tsar decrees anyone who intends to marry his daughter and become his successor must bring to him the Armor of the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, which is hidden on the other side of the White Mountains, and guarded by an inhumanly strong giant known as the Stone Knight.
• In The Brothers' War, the King of Argive decrees that any suitor for his daughter must move a huge statue across the town square. Urza builds a machine to lift and transport the statue, declaring that he had moved it with his mind.
• Discussed in A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold:
  Illyan: Do you know all those old folk tales where the Count tries to get rid of his only daughter's unsuitable suitor by giving him three impossible tasks?
  Ekaterin: Yes...
  Illyan: Don't ever try that with Miles. Just... don't.
• Cradle Series: Lindon ends up with a lot of these, of varying degrees.
  • To start with, as an Unsouled he is approximately as strong as a pre-teen child, so his duel against an elite warrior of the Iron level is completely impossible. He plans to cheat so that his inevitable defeat is at least impressive, but after Suriel shows up (see below), he manages to win instead.
  • When the Li Grand Patriarch kills Lindon with an Offhand Backhand, the celestial Judge Suriel stops time, captures the Grand Patriarch, resurrects Lindon, and shows him a vision of his future. This future is of a mostly good life, until his home is destroyed in thirty years. Lindon begs her to tell him how to save his home, and she explains that he will need to reach the Monarch level—a level so far above him that he's never even heard of it—in order to stop the catastrophe. She also says that no one, not even herself, has ever reached that level in just thirty years. He resolves to do it anyway.
  • Lindon finds himself challenged to an honor duel against an opponent four levels above him, in a world where one level above is generally considered instant death to challenge. He has only one year to prepare, and absolutely everyone tells him that he has no chance to win. Even Suriel's Presence calculates his chances as "most likely embarrassing death, slight chance for an impressive death." Eithan gives him an overpowered Path that will allow him to advance quickly, but even with it his opponent is far above him. He ultimately loses, but because he had cured his opponent's ill sister, he refuses to kill Lindon, instead only taking his arm off.
  • When Lindon finally returns to save his home, he's only Underlord—orders of magnitude weaker than he needs to be—because the Dreadgod ended up arriving some twenty years early. After doing everything he can, he ends up getting a chance to talk to Suriel again, and he begs her for help. She points out that he is the one who chose to take up this task, and he can choose when it's done. Sure he hasn't defeated the Dreadgod (it will rampage for a while and reduce Sacred Valley to rubble), but he successfully evacuated the majority of the population, including everyone he personally cares about. That can easily be enough, if he decides it is. Instead, he returns to Sacred Valley again and successfully drives off the Dreadgod, saving those who haven't been able to escape yet and giving everyone else a chance to move back in with minimal trouble.
• In The Cyberiad, to test Trurl's poetry-writing machine, Klapaucius demands that it compose a poem about a haircut that's lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom, is six lines long, rhymes perfectly, and has every single word starting with the letter "s". Trurl angrily snaps that it's an idiotic request, but the machine finishes writing the poem before he's even done speaking.
  Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
  She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
  Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed.
  Silently scheming,
  Sightlessly seeking
  Some savage, spectacular suicide.
• Digitesque: Tanos shamelessly admits that he only asked Ada to help with the ruin door because she's cute and he wanted to spend time with her. He's shocked when she actually gets it open.
• In Robert Silverberg's story Double Dare, a team of Earth engineers and a team of alien engineers are engaged in a challenge where each is to duplicate some feat of the other's technology. Both sides cheat by presenting a rigged demo of a device they can't actually build. Both teams, not knowing that what they're trying to do is supposed to be impossible, succeed.
• In The Dragon Hoard, the heroes are required to complete three impossible tasks before entering the grove containing the Hoard: taming a pair of wild, fire-breathing horses; emptying an entire lake into a single jug; and bringing back a magic orange from the grove at the far end of the kingdom in less than a day.
• Forest Kingdom: In book 1 (Blue Moon Rising), King John sends his second son Rupert to bring back the head of a dragon. Secretly, he hopes Rupert will take this as an excuse to discreetly leave the kingdom, ensuring his older brother's claim to the throne will never be contested. Rupert is wise to his father's real agenda, but stubborn enough to confront the dragon anyway. When the dragon proves both intelligent and friendly, Rupert brings the dragon back alive, which earns him a bit more respect since A) he'd stuck to his mission, and B) he's now got a freaking dragon on his side.
• Hilda and Richie: In Hilda and Richie's Wizard, Richie doesn't tell Hilda about how he originally lost his new silver pendant as commanded by the wizard Mr. Abra. That night, Mr. Abra sends Richie to a magic room filled with trinkets (cups, crowns, scepters, etc) and makes him search it for that same pendant.
• Impossible by Nancy Werlin is based on the Scarborough Fair song, explains how it came about, and the entire plot is this trope.
• In the Inheritance Cycle, dragon riders were given impossible tasks to get them really frustrated so they'd learn to use magic. It never mentioned whether or not they actually solved the tasks.
• In Ironside by Holly Black the pixie Kaye is forbidden from seeing the one she loves until she can find a faerie that can tell a lie, but promised his hand if she can. She solves this by claiming she is able to lie, without mentioning that she means lie down on the ground. Which is a sort of lie in itself.
• In the story The King of Katoren, a young Stach is given seven tasks, each one more impossible than the last, to complete if he wants to become the titular King of Katoren. Those tasks are selected among the worst creatures, aberrations and illnesses that plague the people of the country. To make it even more impossible, the last task is to sit on a monument cursed so that only the King of Katoren can rest on it. Needless to say, all of them are solved.
• Theoretically, the evil master in Krabat can be defeated easily - but he twists the words of the condition to his advantage. If a girl who loves one of the master's students asks on New Years' Eve to let him go, this would do the trick. However, she has to recognize her boy for this - and there's nowhere written that they may not turn into ravens. Which lead to the death of one girl and her boy Janko.
• In The Marvelous Land of Oz, the heroes discover Dr. Nikidik's Famous Wishing Pills at the bottom of his canister of Powder of Life, which grant one wish to whoever takes one. There is a small problem: To use one, you are required to count to count to seventeen by twos. At first, even the highly educated Woggle-Bug is at a loss on how to do that, until the Saw Horse suggests starting at half of one. The Wobble-Bug then deduces that this is true, because twice of a half of one is one, and the instructions never said you had to start at one. They try it, and that works.
  • The task the Wizard sends Dorothy and her friends on in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz could be perceived as this, as he agrees to grant their requests provided they bring him the broomstick of the Witch of the West. Even they think the task is impossible, knowing that in order to get the Witch's broom, they would have to kill her first, and she would more than likely kill them in the process. Needless to say, the Wizard is surprised when they come back alive and with the broomstick, and nearly went back on his word.
• Nettle & Bone: The dust-wife agrees to help Marra if Marra can complete three impossible tasks — sew a cloak of owlcloth and nettles, build a dog of cursed bones, and catch moonlight in a clay jar. After she completes the first two with sheer willpower, the dust-wife realizes her tactic to make Marra go away won't work, and lets her skip the third.
• In The Phantom Tollbooth, shortly after arriving in the Mountains of Ignorance, the protagonists meet a gentleman with no face who asks them to complete some impossible tasks: one of them is to carve a hole through a rock with a needle, one is to move a pile of sand with a pair of tweezers, and one is to empty one well into another with a dropper. After Milo uses a magic math-solving pencil he received from the Mathemagician to realize it would take about eight hundred years to finish the tasks, the man reveals himself to be the Terrible Trivium, one of the Demons of Ignorance and the anthropomorphic personification of wasting time.
  • Another dilemma confronts Milo when he needs to convince King Azaz and the Mathemagician to agree to let Rhyme and Reason return from exile. Both rulers are so contrary that whenever one adopts a position, the other automatically takes the opposite stance just to counter him. Milo points out to the Mathemagician that, in fact, they agree to disagree, which is enough of a Logic Bomb to snap him out of his habitual enmity with his brother.
  • After Milo succeeds in rescuing Rhyme and Reason from the Mountains of Ignorance, Azaz and the Mathemagician reveal to him that The Quest itself was an impossible task, and he only succeeded because he didn't know the task was impossible.
• Gest is challenged to do this and succeeds in Power of Three by Diana Wynne Jones.
• The title story from The Practical Princess (and other liberating fairytales) features the titular princess trying to get rid of her unwanted suitor by sending him on these. (The two tasks, a fire-proof cloak and a jeweled branch, are reminiscent of those used by Kaguya in The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, and like Kaguya the princess sees through the fakes offered.)
• In Raymond Smullyan's logic puzzle book Satan, Cantor, and Infinity, King Zorn kidnaps Princess Annabelle and tells her suitor Alexander that he'll release her if Alexander can figure out if his vizir is a knight (someone who always tells the truth) or a knave (someone who always lies) by asking only yes/no questions that he does not know the answer to before asking them (so he can't just ask the vizir, "Does two plus two equal four?"). The king believes that this task is impossible to do but when Alexander, after spending many fruitless days trying to come up with a solution, sneaks in to see Annabelle, she points out there's actually an extremely simple solution: pick a card at random from a deck of cards without looking at it, show it to the vizir, and ask him if the card is red. After he answers, look at the card and you can easily determine if he's a knight or knave. It fulfills the king's conditions because you didn't know the answer to your question before you asked it, only after you did.
• Beren and Lúthien: Beren is told to return to Doriath with a Silmaril from Morgoth's crown in his hand if he's to be allowed to marry Lúthien. His quest involves sneaking into the world's most dangerous fortress and stealing the most prized treasury from the most powerful and most evil being ever to walk the Earth, a task which whole armies have failed to accomplish during several centuries of war. Beren gets further than nobody could possibly have been expected, thanks to his badassery and, mainly, Lúthien's help, but a giant wolf bites off Beren's hand and swallows it, including the Silmaril. Beren returns to Doriath anyway, pointing out that the Silmaril is in his hand (and the hand in the wolf's belly).
• Stardust has two examples:
  • The protagonist is challenged by a crush to bring back a fallen star from the magical land outside their town in exchange for her hand. Subverted in that she didn't actually expect him to try, much less succeed, but she agrees to marry him anyway. However by this point he's matured a lot and met a better love interest, so he declines.
  • Tristran's mother is bound by a spell to remain in service to Ditchwater Sal until "the moon loses her daughter during a week in which two Mondays come together". It turns out to be fulfilled by a case of Exact Words near the story's end: Yvaine pledges herself to Tristran in the same week that Victoria is set to marry Robert Monday - thus two Mondays are joined in the same week that the moon loses her daughter.
• In Trail of Lightning Ma'ii requests that Maggie capture the sacred wind Nílchi'i in return for his help with her mission. Given that he's willing to pay in advance, it's debatable whether he even cares whether she tries.

Live-Action TV

General

• Many reality TV shows invoke this trope with strict deadlines, the most common being ones that deal with car restoration or houses.

Specific

• A Flemish TV show from the late 1990s, "De XII Werken van Vanoudenhoven" (1998-1999) had the presenter Rob Vanoudenhoven fulfill an impossible task in every episode, suggested by a local Flemish celebrity. If he succeeded the celebrity would have to fulfill a counter task. If he failed he would perform the counter task. Vanoudenhoven managed to fulfill most of the tasks, but he also failed a few times. For instance, remaining awake for a full week proved impossible after only a few days.
• The Book of Boba Fett: The Children of the Watch hold that the only way a member of their order can redeem themselves for breaking the way is to bathe in the living waters in the mines beneath Mandalore. Which were destroyed when the Empire bombed the planet into oblivion, something both the Armorer and the Mandalorian are aware of. So, in other words, barring some miracle, Din can't ever return to them. That doesn't stop him from succeeding.
• Gilmore Girls
  Lorelai: The hoops! The hoops! The jumping, and the fire, and the HOOPS!
• On a later episode of Happy Days, Joanie and Jenny are trying to join a pseudo-sorority called the Rydells. Joanie's task is to get a phonebook, but Jenny (whom they don't want as a member) is given the task of memorizing every number in the phone book. Jenny succeeds, but is then given another impossible task.
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Lower Decks" has Worf, instructing a Bajoran crewman in martial arts, take the gik'tal challenge, requiring her to fight him blindfolded. After repeatedly getting effortlessly taken down by Worf, she complains that the test is impossible and unfair, and refuses to continue... at which point Worf declares she has passed the test.
  Sito Jaxa: Sir... is there really such a thing as a gik'tal challenge?
  Worf: No, there is not. But perhaps next time you are judged unfairly, it will not take so many bruises for you to protest.
• From The 10th Kingdom:
  Tony: What is it with you people? What kind of twisted upbringing did you have? You know, why can't you just say, 'Oh, that'll be 100 gold coins'? Why does it always have to be, 'No! Not unless you lay a magic egg, or count the hairs on that giant's ass!'?
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "I of Newton", a mathematics professor accidentally summons a demon who intends to claim his soul. The demon allows the professor to ask him three questions concerning his powers, then either ask him a question he cannot answer or give him a task he cannot fulfill. However, he notes that no one's been able to do either in a long time ("What year was the Peloponnesian War, anyway?"), and the professor uses his questions to deduce that the demon is both The Omnipotent and The Omniscient: he can go anywhere in the multiverse (temporally or physically) and always find his way back, do something as physically impossible as make two electrons share the same quantum state in an atom, and has access to all information ever recorded. In other words, posing an impossible task is the impossible task. Nevertheless, the professor comes up with an impossible command: "Get lost." Since the demon can always find his way back to wherever he came from...
• Wizards vs. Aliens: "To command the Hobbledehoy to obey your will, the couplet you must break." That proves simple enough (get it to say a sentence ending in "orange", but then they have to save its life by providing a rhyme. Luckily, the grocer who supplied the orange was local grocer Mr. Gorringe.

Music

• As mentioned in the page quote and in the Fairy Tales section, the folk song "Scarborough Fair" asks the listener to give a list of these to someone at Scarborough Fair, "for once she was a true love of mine."
• In Kdyby tady byla taková panenka (If there were such a maiden...), a Czech folk song, the man and the woman challenge each other to a series of impossible tasks (the man asks the woman to give him a son while still being a virgin, the woman asks the man to make her a cradle without cutting wood, and so on).

Myths & Religion

• A poem tells the story of the Abbot of Canterbury being summoned by the king for execution, for being able to keep a better household than the king does. The king is persuaded to give him his freedom if he can answer three impossible questions and to give him a year to seek the answers. Eventually, the Abbot returns and answers all three: "How much am I worth (ie, how much money do I have)?" (Twenty-nine pieces of silver; even Jesus only sold for thirty.) "How quickly can I ride around the Earth?" (Keep pace with the sun, and you should make it in twenty-four hours.) "What am I thinking?" (You're thinking I'm the Abbot of Canterbury, when in fact I'm his clever servant. Please don't kill him.)
• African Mythology:
  • In an African myth, a man tasks his boys with buying enough objects to fill a certain room, to determine who would inherit his farm. The first two boys tried to do it with grain and feathers but failed, while the third son took out a candle and match, filling the room with light.
  • In the mythology of the Akan people of West Africa, the sky god Nyame owned all the stories on Earth. When Anansi the trickster spider offered to buy them, Nyame set a price of four dangerous and/or elusive creatures: Onini the Python, Osebo the Leopard, the Mboro Hornets, and Mmoatia the fairy. Anansi managed to capture all of them through trickery and guile, and Nyame keeps his bargain, which is why we have stories.
• The Bible examples:
  • Books of Kings: A young David is told by King Saul that he can't marry Princess Michal unless he brings the foreskins of one hundred dead Philistines. David tops him by bringing two hundred.
  • Subverted in the story of Naaman and Elisha. Naaman is a commander in the Assyrian army, but he suffers from leprosy. Having been told that Elisha can cure him, he goes out to the prophet to ask for assistance. Elisha shrugs and sends a messenger who says, "Go dip yourself in the Jordan River seven times"—a trivial task, except that its very triviality makes Naaman furious. He's about to refuse when his servant asks whether he wouldn't have attempted any difficult task required (in one literary version, "if he told you to go climb a mountain of glass"). Humbled, Naaman goes and gets his cure.
• Celtic Mythology:
  • Prince Conn-Eda loses a chess game with his evil stepmother, and her geas (her binding condition on Conn-Eda that is her right after she's won) is that he go to the land of the fairies and take the black steed and supernatural dog of the king of the fairies, and return to her with them within a year and a day.
  • In Culhwch and Olwen, one of the tales in the Mabinogion, King Arthur's cousin is given several impossible tasks to complete by the father of the woman whose hand he has asked for in marriage.
• Classical Mythology:
  • The Labors of Hercules. All of them were impossible tasks that were supposed to either take forever or kill him. One example is Labor #5: cleaning the Aegean stables in a day. The cows in the stable were divinely healthy and thus produced an enormous amount of dung, and there were over a thousand of them, and the stable hadn't been cleaned in over 30 years. This labor was meant to be doubly impossible. Not only was it physically impossible, but mucking out livestock pens (one of the lowest jobs around in Ancient Greece) would be the ultimate humiliation for a Son of Zeus. Instead, Hercules took a third option and used his godly might to redirect two rivers through the stables, thus washing them out in a single day. However, some tellings of the tale called Hercules out on not doing it by hand and penalized him with an extra Labor.
  • Cupid And Psyche: Psyche is given several of these tasks by a jealous Venus.
  • Another example of the Perseus story has King Polydectes sending Perseus to bring him the head of Medusa because Polydectes wanted Perseus's mother Danae, whom Perseus was very protective of, and wanted Perseus out of the way. When Perseus comes back with Medusa's head, he finds out that Polydectes had enslaved and abused Danae in his absence, and proceeds to turn Polydectes to stone with Medusa's head.
  • What is possibly the most sadistic example in the myth: to reclaim his father's throne, Jason was told to go to Colchis and recover the Golden Fleece, a task so hard he was expected to die attempting to reach Colchis (considering that the less dangerous obstacles included the freaking Amazons). Jason, being a Guile Hero, assembled a crew of heroes (including Herakles and other professionals in such things) and breezed through the many obstacles (with Herakles specifically dealing with a tribe of giants and the Amazons, with his Ninth Labor being taking the girdle of their queen), and upon arrival in Colchis he succeeded thanks to a combination of Medea's help and sheer badassery (one of the tasks before tackling the dragon guarding the fleece involved putting to the yoke two gigantic fire-breathing oxens that Hephaestus had made from bronze; Medea only made him fireproof, meaning he had to contend with the immense might of the two bulls at the same time with only his own strength).
  • Theseus also fulfills several impossible tasks and challenges, including the most famous one: defeating the Minotaur.
  • In The Odyssey, Penelope, to avoid marrying one of her suitors, told them she'd marry the one who could use Odysseus' bow to shoot an arrow through a dozen axe-heads. The impossible part was not the shooting, but threading the bow: not only it was massive and required enormous strength, but, as a recurve bow, required skills that the suitors (who only knew simple bows) didn't have. Still, the narration says that Telemachus, Odysseus' own son, would have succeeded on his fourth try had he not been stopped by the one who actually did complete the whole task... Odysseus himself, who had finally returned home in disguise and was about to slay the suitors.
  • These are also sometimes given as punishments in Tartarus, such as Sisyphus and his boulder that always rolls back down the mountain before he reaches the peak. Justified with Sisyphus, as he had cheated death multiple times and Hades wasn't taking any more chances.
• In one myth from India, the demon Namuci extracts a promise from the deity Indra, not to kill him "by day or by night; with the staff or the bow; with the flat of the hand or with the fist; on land or at sea; with the wet or the dry." Indra slays the demon at dawn, on the shore, by using the foam of the sea.
• In Journey to the West, The Buddha asks Sun Wukong to jump out from his palm. It turns out to be impossible because The Buddha's palm engulfs the entire universe.
• Examples in the Finnish Kalevala:
  • May be a parody: Väinamöinen is a mighty sorcerer and bard who is utterly inept in love. One girl he flirts with tells him she will never marry him unless he cuts a swan in half with a knife without a point, and knots an egg with an invisible knot. (In other words, when hell freezes over.) Väinamöinen, being both clueless and a wizard, proceeds to complete both tasks with his magic.
    Then she says she won't marry him unless he pulls birchbark off a stone and breaks off poles from a piece of ice without a chip flying off. He uses magic to do both immediately. Then she says she can't marry him unless he builds a boat out of her distaff and gets the boat in the water without anyone touching it. He uses magic to do this easily as well...but an evil spirit causes him to accidentally cut himself with his axe, and he has to go on an adventure to heal his wound, by which time he has forgotten about her. (There are a lot of moments in The Kalevala that seem like parodies of myths.)
  • Louhi, the Mistress of Pohjola also gives type 1 impossible tasks to men who seek to marry her beautiful daughter. This too was related to Väinamöinen's adventures, but ultimately it was his blood-brother Ilmarinen who was badass enough to fulfil every request and got the girl (until her wickedness got her eaten by bears, but that's another story).
• In some Middle Eastern story, a King gave a challenge with a great prize if someone could get a valuable gem that's in the middle of a large carpet without tools or setting foot on the material. Many people try stretching as far as they could and failed, until one humble person realized that the challenge didn't prohibit touching the carpet with anything other than feet. So, he simply rolled up half of the carpet and picked up the gem.
• Norse Mythology:
  • The Norse gods needed to create a chain that could hold the Fenris Wolf. Thor's two attempts to forge such a chain failed, and the Wolf was becoming a major threat. They sent a message to the dwarves, who created an enchanted chain made out of the sound of a cat's footsteps, the roots of the mountains, the breath of a fish, and the sinews of a bear. It did the job. Those things were all used up creating the chain, explaining why they don't exist now.
  • In The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, Ragnar demands of Aslaug that she visit him "neither dressed nor undressed, neither fed nor unfed", and moreover "she must not be all alone, but nevertheless no man may accompany her". Aslaug solves the task by going wrapped in a fishnet, chewing on a leek, accompanied by a dog.
  • The tale of Utgarda Loki has a variant where the characters don't actually know the task is impossible. Thor, accompanied by his servant Tialfi and Loki, are visiting the giant Utgarda Loki, who offers them all trials. Loki goes first, competing in an eating contest against Utgarda Loki's servant Logi, but fails because he only ate the food. Logi ate the table. Tialfi runs a race against one of Utgarda Loki's kids, and it's a close race, but Tialfi loses. Finally, Thor gets three tests; Drink from Utgarda Loki's meadhorn, lift his cat, and wrestle Elle, his old nursemaid. Thor, of course, fails all three, but Utgarda Loki then reveals the truth. Each trial was an impossible task, disguised by illusions; Logi was actually a raging wildfire, Tialfi's opponent was a living thought, the horn was actually the ocean, the cat was Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, and Elle was a personification of old age. All of these are obviously impossible, but Utgarda Loki admits that the trio put up a good fight.
• In the Mayan Popol Vuh, Hunahpu and Xbalanque are assigned several tasks of these during their descent to Xibalba (the Underworld). One of them was to keep a cigar lit a whole night without burning it out. They attached fireflies to the end of the cigar so they would appear lit.
• A Roman Vestal Virgin was accused of having had sex, a capital offense. To prove she was still a virgin, she offered to carry a sieve full of water from the Tiber to the Temple of Vesta "in proof of her perfect chastity". (Given that the accusation was political in nature, she may have had help to accomplish the task.)
• The story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in Arthurian Legend has Sir Gawain subjected to an impossible test of his honour and chastity by Lady Bertilak, with the expectation that he'd fail and embarrass Arthur's court. He refuses the Lady's advances, but does accept a gift from her, a green sash, only on the understanding that its enchantments would protect him from death at the hands of the Green Knight. Entirely reasonable, as even a heroic knight fears death a tiny bit.

Poetry

• Rudyard Kipling's "Blue Roses". With the unusual end that he returns in failure to discover the woman who had asked had died, and he dismisses it as "an idle quest".

Radio

• John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme: The Hercules example is parodied, with the tasks being given in an attempt to kill Hercules or just get rid of him. Problem is being a demi-god he keeps succeeding at them anyhow. At wit's end, the king and queen of Sparta suggest he go to the Underworld and steal Cerberus, which even Hercules takes pause at.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Skill checks tables show these kinds of tasks. Skill check DCs in the 50s and higher are called "nearly impossible" and include things like turning a hostile foe into someone fanatically devoted to you (DC 150), swimming up a waterfall (DC 80), or balancing on a cloud (DC 120).
  • In certain editions the Dungeon Master is expected to provide challenges like this, should players want to create powerful permanent magical items. The win conditions are generally fairly lenient, though.
  • Artifacts in the game cannot be destroyed except by a unique method that is different for each artifact, and the method is usually something that fits this Trope.
• In Legend of the Five Rings, the first emperor Hantei declared that mortal samurai Kakita was to marry Doji, one of the nine Kami. Doji agreed provided Kakita could complete three tasks: bring the dead to life, measure the width of the world, and show an image of true beauty. For the first, Kakita carved a piece of driftwood into an instrument and played a song on it. For the second, he declared that the width of the world was measured by the company you traveled with. For the third, Kakita used a mirror to show Doji herself.
• Paranoia missions tend to be this, especially after secret society goals and personal agendas are figured in. The game's stance varies from "literally impossible" to "we have no idea how to succeed, but acknowledge that sufficiently devious PCs will come up with something" to "the PCs could succeed by doing X and Y and Z, it's just ludicrously unlikely that they'll be lucky and virtuous enough to actually pull all that off".

Theatre

• Skillfully subverted in Cyrano de Bergerac: At Act I Scene V, Cyrano claims that fate has decreed that he, being The Grotesque because of his large nose, must love the most beautiful woman there is, implying an Impossible Task. The truth is, given his Mommy Issues, Cyrano himself has chosen the most beautiful so he will fight knowing that he cannot win her love.
  Cyrano: Come now, bethink you!. . .The fond hope to be
  Beloved, e'en by some poor graceless lady,
  Is, by this nose of mine for aye bereft me;
  —This lengthy nose which, go where'er I will,
  Pokes yet a quarter-mile ahead of me;
  But I may love — and who? 'Tis Fate's decree
  I love the fairest - how were't otherwise?
• The Merchant of Venice: Shylock's "pound of flesh nearest the heart" is related; in this case, it's the villain who is forced into either doing an impossible task, or giving up what is due him.

Video Games

• The Elder Scrolls
  • In Morrowind, Mages Guild Archmage Trebonius Artorius has developed a reputation as a Pointy-Haired Boss who assigns nothing but these. Infamously, he asks the Player Character to solve the disappearance of the Dwemer (and is shocked when the player actually manages to find an answer). Other assignments he has given to other guild members include taking an inventory of all of the silverware on Vvardenfell and digging a tunnel to the mainland. Knowing that he was named as the head of the Vvardenfell branch in a combination of getting Kicked Upstairs and being Reassigned to Antarctica probably helps to explain this.
  • According to the developer-written obscure text The Seven Fights of the Aldudagga, this is the case for Mehrunes Dagon, the Daedric Prince of Destruction who serves as either the Big Bad or Greater-Scope Villain for several games in the series. According to the Seven Fights, Dagon was once a kindly demon who attempted to protect parts of Mundus (the mortal world) from being eaten by Alduin at the end of every "kalpa" (cycle of time). Alduin found out and then cursed Dagon with such a task:
    Alduin: "You I curse right here and right now! I take away your ability to jump and jump and jump and doom you to [the void] where you will not be able to leave except for auspicious days long between one and another and even so only through hard, hard work. And it will be this way, my little corner cutter, until you have destroyed all that in the world which you have stolen from earlier kalpas, which is to say probably never at all!"
• In Fire Emblem Fates, when the Black Mage Odin arrived at the Nohrian court, he was assigned to serve Prince Leo. Leo wasn't really thrilled so he gave his potential retainer some missions that counted as this, some of them involving finding things that Leo made up or otherwise didn't think were real. Odin successfully completed all of them, and, being Odin, he actually enjoyed all of these "impossible" missions.
• Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City: The ninja Kirikaze is sent to complete these so that her master might earn the right to marry Princess Kaguya. Naturally, she'll fail to accomplish her task, but she'll reward your party appropriately for helping out.
• The interactive fiction story Firebird is based on the above Russian folklore.
• King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow: In order to get the Golden Ending, Alexander must rescue Cassima's parents from the Land of the Dead, which involves meeting the challenge set by Samhain, Lord of the Dead. That challenge? To make Samhain, who has seen countless millenia of tragic deaths, cry. Alexander manages this by showing Samhain the Mirror of Truth, which reminds Samhain of his own tragic history and shocks him enough to make him shed a Single Tear.
• Odin Sphere:
  • In "The Pooka Prince," Odin tasks Cornelius with fetching the drinking horn of massive warlord Lord Brigan, clearly not expecting the hard-hearted Brigan to cooperate or Cornelius, currently transformed into a comparably smaller pooka, to be able to make him. Odin's daughter Gwendolyn tells Cornelius that Odin does this kind of thing to people all the time... and, out of sympathy for Cornelius, gives him back his magic sword, armed with which he is able to kick Brigan's ass.
  • In "Valkyrie," Onyx tries to do this by asking Oswald to defeat Leventhan, as a way to indirectly Murder the Hypotenuse. Gwendolyn is not having it.
• Pokémon Clover apes the Big Bill Hell's advertisement through Big Bill Hell's Bikes, complete with Challenge Pissing^note That's right, challenge pissing!. If you can piss six feet in the air straight up and not get wet, you get a free bike. Since there's no way a human can pull that off, you need a Pokemon with a Water-type move to cheat on your behalf.
• Parodied in Pokémon Legends: Arceus: The initiation task Cyllene gives you to become part of the Galaxy Expedition Team is to... catch three Com Mons. It's treated like an Impossible Task by most of the other characters because the game is a Prequel taking place in an era before human interaction with Pokemon became commonplace, and most people are scared to death of interacting with Pokemon. As the protagonist is a modern kid transported back to the past, their familiarity with Pokemon makes the task incredibly easy, and causes many of the other characters to treat them as a prodigy.
• Touhou Project:
  • The backstory for Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night is heavily based on the aforementioned legend of Princess Kaguya. The final stage is even called "Five Impossible Requests," and Kaguya's spellcards are named after the five requests from the legend, implying that she had the treasures all along. The game's Superboss, Fujiwara no Mokou, is the daughter of one of the men humiliated by Kaguya's impossible tasks, kicking off a Cycle of Revenge that's lasted over a thousand years thanks to the Hourai Elixir.
  • In the next installments, she has invented more of those tasks; one of them is bringing her the Red Stone of Aja. The commentary makes it obvious that you have to brave an erupting volcano to obtain it.
• In Turgor the player is given such tasks by Mantid and Warden.
• In the Heart of Stone DLC of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Geralt is tasked by the mysterious Gaunter O'Dimm to complete three tasks as part of a contract he has with bandit lord Olgierd Von Everec. Olgierd deliberately makes it so that each task is either incredibly difficult or outright impossible by normal means, though some can be completed via Loophole Abuse... which considering who we're dealing with, he handily pulls off:
  • The first task is for Geralt to bring Olgierd the house of Maximilian Borsodi, part of the family to whom Olgierd lost everything via debt. The "house" turns out to be a miniature model containing documents without which Borsodi's sons would end up losing everything, forcing Geralt to pull off an elaborate heist to obtain. To add insult to injury to Olgierd, Geralt can take the model while leaving the actual documents behind.
  • The second task is to show Olgeird's brother Vlodomir the time of his life, which is difficult considering Vlodomir is dead. Gaunter shows Geralt how to summon Vlodomir's ghost and allows him to possess Geralt's body while attending a rowdy wedding, which fulfills the task.
  • The third task is to bring back a rose Olgierd gave to his wife the last time he saw her. The rose in question is inside his wife's memories which in turn can only be accessed via their estate which is guarded by a hideous monster.
  • When all three tasks are completed, Olgierd still believes he's relatively safe since his "contract" can only end once he and Gaunter are standing on the Moon. Gaunter shows up to their pre-arranged meeting place and with a wave of his hand blows away the dust on the floor revealing a mosaic of the Moon.
• In World of Warcraft it is heavily implied this is the nature of Sylvanas's punishment. Tyrande tasks her with rescuing every soul that has ever been condemned to the Maw, and only then will she be granted judgment for her own soul. Given the Maw's nigh-infinite size, this is a task which will never be completed. Sylvanas accepts her punishment without protest.

Webcomics

• SBURB, the game that the story of Homestuck revolves around, is this for all but the luckiest of players. Most don't manage to even start the game. And even then, the majority of sessions do not result in victory, making them so called null sessions.
  • A special form of null session, the so-called "void session", appears when no kernelsprite is prototyped before entry. Since prototyping is what evolves the battlefield for the universe scale chess metaphor SBURB is built around, and a fully evolved battlefield is needed to win the game, this session is doomed to fail except if someone brings in a fully evolved battlefield from another session.
  • Another special null session is the so-called "dead session". SBURB is an inherently cooperative game, so trying to play it solo results in an entirely different scenario, replacing the chess metaphor with a pool metaphor that is impossible to win unless you are a Determinator with time travel powers. And even then it's frustratingly difficult.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Subverted in this strip. A dead soul is damned to an impossible, Sisyphean task. She finds the idea to be incredibly relaxing.
  Zeus: Things are pretty rough down there, huh?
  Soul: It's bad, Zeus, it's bad.
• The test on the 21st Floor in Tower of God involves finding a small parasitic flower in a gigantic beast that flips over all the time and will go underwater after two hours. This is the easy part. The problem begins when they happen to meet a guy inside the beast who also wants the flower. Then they hear he has killed several Rankers before. And then you realize that this guy is Urek Mazino. He himself thinks that that the team was just sent here to face him and die.
• Keith, from TwoKinds is expected to bring the Grand Templar Trace Legacy back with him so that the conditions of his exile will be revoked, more or less "You can come home if you're bringing George Bush with you for dinner." ^note It started out as "Bring George Bush's son with you for dinner. Even though he went missing. While rushing into an enemy encampment. Solo.", then two years later it became "Bring George Bush Junior, the president, with you for dinner.", then Keith got lucky four years later when Trace was ambushed by a manipulative goddess and left stranded and amnesiac while on vacation.
  • Then General Alabaster altered the conditions to bring Trace back ''without witnesses'', ordering Keith to betray and murder his friends. This was an Uriah Gambit, as Alabaster intended to execute Keith once he'd eliminated his support and isolated himself.

Web Originals

• The quest in Year Four of The Questport Chronicles: to rescue the Lost Lady from the netherworld, which requires help from vampires (thankfully, one of the heroes is a vampire) and voluntary Demonic Possession.
• The Emperor in If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device, whenever he needs something impossible done, gives the task to the (extremely flanderized) Ultramarines. His reasoning being that either the Ultramarines' Gary Stu-ness will win out, and he gets what he wants, or they will fail miserably, in which case the rest of the chapter might act less insufferably smug. One of these tasks involved going into literal hell, with no force fields, to retrieve the second most powerful psyker who ever lived from the clutches of a literal god. Naturally, they succeed with minimal casualties.

Western Animation

• Throughout an episode of Animaniacs, Yakko is shown singing all the words in the English language (though he's only shown singing words beginning with the letters A, F (briefly), L, and Z). At the end, it is said that in the next episode he would sing all of the numbers above zero. He didn't.
• The terms of Zuko's banishment in Avatar: The Last Airbender. "Find a nigh-all powerful person, catch him, and bring him back alive, and then you can come home. Oh, and he's been missing for a hundred years." It's a win-win for Ozai: either he rids himself of an embarrassingly incompetent and occasionally disrespectful heir so that he can promote Daddy's Little Villain in his place, or on the off chance Zuko succeeds he gets the historical thorn in the side of the Fire Nation taken care of for him. The cool part is that he actually succeeded, although not quite how his father (and banisher) wished...not to mention the Avatar brings himself to the Fire Lord.
• In Dora the Explorer: Dora's Fairytale Adventure, Dora is assigned a number of tasks, several of which seem impossible, in order to become a "true princess" and save Boots from a sleeping spell. Included among these tasks are, "teach the giant rocks to sing," "turn Winter into Spring" and "Bring the moon to the Queen and King." She accomplishes the tasks with the aid of a variety of magical tools and artifacts acquired during her quest, such as a magical music box that teaches the rocks to sing.
• In The Fairly OddParents!, Timmy, the human child, sets a task for Wanda, his fairy godmother, in order for her to be sufficiently delayed while he and Wanda's husband Cosmo set up for a surprise anniversary party. The task: train a cat, she can even use magic. She couldn't do it.
• In Futurama, the Robot Devil challenges Leela in a violin contest, with her having to use a solid gold fiddle. Fry does point out that a solid gold fiddle "would weigh like a hundred pounds and sound really cruddy," and the Robot Devil admits it's "mostly for show." Leela does beat him, though - over the head with the extremely heavy fiddle.
  • The "impossible" part here comes not from the nature of the fiddle (the Robot Devil plays the same one), but more from the fact that the Robot Devil is a robot (with extremely dexterous hands as another episode has demonstrated), who on top of that is able to use two bows thanks to an extra arm.
• In a US Acres segment of Garfield and Friends, Orson and Wade set up a restaurant that's guaranteed to serve any food you order - if they can't make it, you get free food for a month. Roy attempts to take advantage of this with several attempts at Impossible Orders... and then gets served exactly what he orders, to his own shock. He eventually wins with "an elephant foot sandwich with mustard". Even though Orson and Wade had found an elephant, it wasn't theirs to kill and put in a sandwich, so to screw with Roy, they just showed him the elephant and pretended that they were out of mustard.
• It turns out in Gravity Falls, Stan was kicked out by his father, Filbrick for ruining his brother Standford's science project, robbing Filbrick out of his Meal Ticket. He was then not allowed to return home until he could make them a fortune. Even worse is that Stanley hadn't graduated high school, being seen as "the dumber twin" by the others, and even Stan admitting to having no marketing skills. Stanley does attempt to make a fortune, but only of his own volition. He doesn't bother trying to go back home.
• Some of the Grimorum Arcanorum's spells in Gargoyles seemed to have this as spell conditions, until modern technology made the impossible possible, so to speak. These loopholes are needed to allow humans to cast powerful magic at less cost than a spell without any loopholes.
  • The most obvious is the one that woke up the sleeping gargoyles: they would sleep until the castle is above the clouds. Xanatos literally does that, moving it brick by brick to the top of a tall building.
  • The spell which turns all who see and hear it to stone at night can only be undone by the sky becoming on fire. So they spread a non-toxic flammable gas across the city's atmosphere and ignite it.
• In Episode 73 of Kaeloo, Mr. Cat dares Kaeloo to transform without getting angry. Despite the fact that she has been seen doing this in other episodes, she claims that she can't and her consciousness is sent to a dimension for people who can't perform tasks. At the end of the episode, Kaeloo gets revenge by giving Mr. Cat an impossible task of his own: going out while coming in.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "Tanks For the Memories," when Rainbow Dash realizes that her pet tortoise needs to hibernate for the winter, she sets it upon herself to stop winter so they can have more time together. While winter is created by ponies in Equestria, so her task is theoretically possible, her attempts to disrupt the coming winter just cause a big mess and don't slow it down at all. The Aesop of the episode is accepting that times change and sometimes your friends have to leave for a while.
• In the Ned's Newt episode "Trouble Indemnity", Ned and Newton work together to destroy several "valuable" things around their house in impossible ways, so that they can get Ned's parents' money back and confuse a crooked saleswoman, who made them lose their money on a crooked insurance policy.
• Used in Over the Garden Wall, as part of the general fairytale atmosphere. The Beast challenges Greg to bring him "the golden comb" (a honeycomb), "a spool of silver thread" (a cobweb on a stick), and to "put the sun from the sky into this cup" (which he does by placing it on a stump and waiting until the sun goes down). It's a trick simply meant to get Greg to stay in one place until he passes out from the cold.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Lisa's Rival", Lisa plays an anagram game with Allison and her father. Mr. Taylor gives a famous person's name and the anagram has to be a description of that person. Allison is given Alec Guinness and comes up with "genuine class". Lisa is given Jeremy Irons and, stumped, comes up with "Jeremy's... iron". Subverted, as this was intended to be possible for a genius in-universe. In real life, there's no possible answer.
  • In "Simpson Safari", Agnes Skinner is shopping for groceries and has some demands for her bagboy:
    Agnes: I want everything in one bag.
    Squeaky-Voiced Teen: Yes, ma'am.
    Agnes: But I don't want the bag to be heavy.
    Squeaky-Voiced Teen: (beat) Um, I don't think that's possible...
    Agnes: What are you, the Possible Police? Just do it!
• A modern parody may be the South Park episode "The Wacky Molestation Adventure." Kyle's mom tells him he can't go to a Raging Pussies concert unless he cleans out the garage, shovels the snow out of the driveway, and brings democracy to Cuba. Of course he succeeds at all three, though his parents do have the decency to tell him that they didn't actually expect him to accomplish the third while telling him he still can't go.
  • He still doesn't get to go, being told specifically that they never expected him to be able to pull off that last one. Kyle decides this is unfair and applies some lateral thinking: calling child services and telling them his parents molested him so they'll get arrested and he therefore won't need their permission. It works.
• In "Help Wanted", the premiere episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, Mr. Krabs tries to prevent SpongeBob from joining the Krusty Krew by tasking him with finding a "hydrodynamic spatula, with port and starboard attachments, and a turbo drive", an item he makes up off the top of his head. SpongeBob buys one at a Bargain Mart and returns in the nick of time to save the restaurant from a horde of hungry anchovies.
• In the Star Trek: Lower Decks episode “Parth Ferengi’s Heart Home”, Captain Freeman and Admiral Vassery are attempting to recruit Ferenginar into the Federation, but Grand Nagus Rom and his wife Leeta are giving them the runaround, driving Vassery nuts as he agrees to more and more requests from them. Freeman decides to step in and not only agree to their requests along with a one billion gold-pressed latinum sign on bonus should they also recruit another world to join in as well. Rom signs it and mocks them for doing that until Freeman tells them to Read the Fine Print: they must recruit Q’onos, the Klingon homeworld, which Leeta points out is impossible. However, it turns out the entire thing was a Secret Test of Character: Rom was always wanting to let Ferenginar join the Federation, but he really wanted to make sure they understood their culture. Being swindled in such a way was proof they did.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: When Darth Sidious hires Cad Bane to break into the Jedi Temple to steal a holocron, Bane claims that what Sidious is asking for is impossible. However, as Sidious begins to speak of Bane's reputation being unearned, Bane reveals that this simply means he'll need to be paid substantially more than his already extremely high usual fee. He succeeds.

Real Life

• The University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt traditionally has an impossible task or two among the list of things to find, make, or do. One year it was "build a working nuclear reactor in a shed on the Quad", which, in best Impossible Task fashion, turned out to be not quite as impossible as the organizers had expected.
  • Especially because some other people already built one under the football stands.
• Winning Giro d'Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España in one year. Some have tried, nobody has ever succeeded. For the record, completing one of the three tends to require extreme levels of physical conditioning and leave you pretty much exhausted and needing a lengthy recovery. The pace of all three together doesn't give you that luxury.
• Joseph-Armand Bombardier, founder of the Bombardier group, wanted to be hired as a mechanic as a teenager - but the boss didn't want him. Instead of saying no, he just tasked him with figuring out how to fix an engine he had laying around that he was sure couldn't be fixed, hoping to crush his dreams in the process. He succeeded. He went on to eventually invent the modern snowmobile, and today the company is the only one that can boast making both trains and aircraft (along with a recreative vehicles group) and is one of the biggest employers in Quebec.
• For the longest time, physicists were convinced that it is impossible to levitate a magnet through repulsion (having two of the same poles face each other), as the magnet in the air would simply flip over, exposing the opposite pole and sticking to the magnet below. Roy M. Harrigan pulled it off in the late 1970s by shaping the magnet like a top and spinning it, a top's tendency to stay upright overpowering the magnetic force that would ordinarily flip the magnet over. He pulled it off because he was never taught that it was impossible—physicists before him all agreed it couldn't be done, and thus never tried it.
• This comes into play in Contract Law: To put it simply, a party to a contract is released from their obligation if it becomes impossible to fulfill. For example, if a band has a contract to perform at a venue that burns down before the date of the concert, the band no longer has to perform there. Unless, of course, the contract specifically addresses that issue.
• In Germany, first-year job trainees are often sent to fetch items that don't exist, don't make sense or are downright impossible. Examples include gearbox sand, blinker liquid, Siemens air hooks, balance bubbles, a bucket of compressed air, wi-fi cables, scanner cartridges (if scans are too pale), an amplitude cutter, a bag of ignition sparks (but the blue ones!), mercury wire, a four-sided drill for rectangular holes (which actually do exist), a screwdriver for left-handed threads or the like. Or they're sent to clean the windows in the cool storage room (which doesn't have any).
  • If trainees think they're too smart to fall for such tricks, let them fetch something that does exist, but give it a name that makes it appear like another trick. You win either way: Send them to get a sodium chloride dosing feeder. If they come back with a salt shaker, it probably means they've actually gone and asked for a sodium chloride dosing feeder. If they don't, they've failed at something as simple as fetching a salt shaker. Other examples would be a no. 710 lid (oil filler lid) or a V20/05 roofer frame (that one is tougher; the roofers actually send the trainee to get a beer crate with 20 half-liter bottles).

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