troperville

tools

toys

Must be Monday. New podcast! Just click on the fancy logo below.
SubpagesMain

main index

Narrative

Genre

Media

Topical Tropes

Other Categories

TV Tropes Org
random
Lethally Expensive
"Many Bothans died to bring us this information."
Mon Mothma, Return of the Jedi

The importance of a piece of new information is underscored by relating the loss of life incurred to bring it to light.

Examples

Comic Books
  • In DC Special #29, the origin of the Justice Society of America, a British agent tells the President: "We have received information—very reliable information, obtained at the cost of many lives—and it is now clear that Hitler plans to invade England—within weeks!"

Film: Live Action
  • The page quote comes from Return of the Jedi, when Rebel leader Mon Mothma points out many Bothan spies had died to bring the information during the briefing for the Battle of Endor. And only succeeded because the Emperor allowed it, or so he says.
  • In The Rocketeer, when Howard Hughes shows Cliff the Nazi propaganda film, he says "Keep watching, kid. It cost a man's life to get this out of Germany."
  • Happens in The Right Stuff, while the two White House staffers are showing the film of the Soviet space program.
    White House Staffer #1: This footage was assembled from souces operating under cover at great risk.
    White House Staffer #2: Very great.
    White House Staffer #1: We're fortunate this material didn't perish... with a couple of men.
  • Christopher Walken's butt-smuggled wristwatch from Pulp Fiction.
  • The crew of a hovercraft, the Osiris, dies after succeeding to relay information of an impending Machine invasion against Zion in "Final Flight of the Osiris," a digitally animated short story from The Animatrix. This adventure is canonically noted at the start of The Matrix Reloaded when Niobe, a hovercraft captain, presents the Osiris's information for all to see at a captain's meeting.

Live-Action TV
  • Invoked in Babylon 5: Sheridan orders the rangers to leak some information to the shadows. However he is concerned that they won't believe it unless someone was:
    Sheridan: "...willing to fight for it, willing to..." (he can't bring himself to say "die" in front of the very man he is ordering to his death.)

Video Games
  • Shepard recruits Tali in Mass Effect 2 after rescuing her from an important surveying mission gone south. Tali's entire squad (aside from herself and possibly one other soldier) is lost getting the data, which concerns a star destabilizing much faster than it ought to be.
    Tali: That damn data had better be worth it. It wasn't

Keep ReadingExpositionLecture As Exposition
Leno DeviceNarrative DevicesA Light in the Distance
Let The Bully WinPages Needing WicksLewd Lust, Chaste Sex

alternative title(s): Many Died To Bring This; High Bodycount Information Retrieval
random
TV Tropes by TV Tropes Foundation, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org.
Privacy Policy
5756
29