Locked In A Room - Television Tropes & Idioms

If I ever get out of here
Gonna Give it all away...
If I ever get out of here
If we ever get out of here
— Wings, "Band on the Run"

Two characters, usually two characters sharing a large amount of animosity, get locked in a room (safe, elevator, etc.) and must spend the episode alone together. During which time they learn a new appreciation for each other.

If being locked in the room also puts the characters in danger, then they are Locked In A Freezer. If their mates locked them there intentionally, to get them to resolve an issue or light a spark between them, it's also Ten Minutes In The Closet. If they must work together to accomplish something (such as escaping from the room), it's also Enemy Mine. They're in trouble if one of them suffers from Claustrophobia.

Examples

The premise was repeatedly and relentlessly beaten to a pulp in the Thats My Bush episode: "Trapped In A Small Environment".
BlakesSeven episode Sand has enemies Tarrant and Servalan stuck in a room together. Also Redemption has Avon and Jenna in a cell together. Technically, they're allies, but that doesn't mean they like each other!
Babylon 5 did a nice subversion of this trope (as well as Locked In A Freezer), in an episode where G'Kar and Londo were trapped in an elevator and came out hating each other worse than ever. G'Kar was, in fact, deeply disappointed to be rescued, as he had hoped that they would both die, because that would mean he would get to see Londo's death without having to cause it himself (which would have triggered reprisals against the conquered Narn population).
- Another Episode written by Neil Gaiman had several people locked in different rooms with ghosts. Some were lost loves, some where friends they lost, at least one had a mortal foe giving snarky advice.
Used as the Framing Device in the Rugrats Passover special: Tommy, Chuckie, and Angelica (and eventually the rest of their families) get locked in the attic with Grandpa Boris, and Boris passes the time by telling the story of Passover, Fable Remake style.
A variation of this occurred in Kenan And Kel, where people arriving in said room ended up getting locked in by the closing door.
The same happened to most of the cast on Sealab 2021, in the episode "Trapped In The Closet". One by one, over the course of the episode, they were locked into a storage closet by a malfunctioning hatch. In an ironic inversion of Locked In A Freezer, the outside of the closet turns out to be the dangerous area, with angry attack dogs running around.
Movie example: The Breakfast Club revolves around a bunch of students serving a Saturday detention, locked inside their school's library. They eventually end up as close friends.
Movie example: Saw is primarily set inside a bathroom, with two people chained to exposed pipes. Much tension ensues.
- Saw V provides an interesting example as well: each of the four traps is designed so that one person has to die for the others to move on, while all five could have survived to the end if they had worked together.
Anime example: In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shinji and Asuka are forced to spend an episode locked in a room so they can learn how to work in perfect sync with each other, in order to defeat an Angel which split into two parts that also move in perfect sync. (Admitedly, half this and half 'chained together')
- They were never locked up anywhere, they just had to do it as part of their jobs. A better example would be Misato and Kaji getting stuck in an elevator, which increases the tension of their relationship.
- Subverted with the infamou 'elevator scene'. It's only a few minutes, but...yeah.
The penultimate episode of The Prisoner features the most byzantine of all the Village's plots to break the hero: "Let's lock you in a room for six days with The Dragon while he hypnotizes you and digs up your repressed memories like an evil Sigmund Freud."
In the "Earthquake" episode of Night Court, Dan and Roz are trapped in an elevator with two sumo wrestlers.
Done with multiple groups in the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Disaster", some more annoyed at their company than others. And again in the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode "Starship Down".
Thanks to Mike and Bryan being a little too aware of the Shipping that goes on in the fandom of Avatar The Last Airbender, the character Katara has found herself trapped inside a cave alone not once, but twice, with both the main protagonist and antagonist of the show.
An episode of Mahou Tsukai Tai has Sae and Ayanojyo locked in a closet, with Sae more and more unnerved as she realizes how long it might be before someone finds them. The audience thinks it's sexual tension between her and the attractive bishonen... and then, when she's finally freed, the true problem is discovered as she races to the nearest bathroom.
The second episode of Clerks The Animated Series revolved around this. The old friends locked in an industrial refrigerator together started to reminisce about their wacky adventures, turning the trope into the framework for a Clip Show...except, since this was the second episode, there was only one episode to show clips from. This got even more surreal when the second episode was broadcast first, meaning viewers had never seen the clips it kept referencing.
The House episode One Day, One Room's main thrust was a patient refusing to speak to anybody other than House (he explicitly describes himself as "trapped in the room with her"), and the two of them forcing each other to confront their demons (being victims of rape and paternal abuse, respectively).
Eastenders has done about fifteen of these.
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip had one of these, only different: Jordan and Danny were trapped on the roof of a building.
A tenth season episode of Murphy Brown, "From the Terrace," has many characters trapped on the terrace of their new space.
Daphne and Niles in Frasier spend an episode trapped on their roof, where they were supposed to be having a romantic date.
One memorable episode of Animaniacs had Dr. Scrathensniff stuck in an elevator with Wakko Warner. One of the show's finest moments in this editor's opinion, despite (or pehaps because of) the fact that not much occurs inside the elevator, other than Scratchensniff going crazy(er).
In the Dawsons Creek episode The Tao of Dawson, Joey gets locked in a storage closet with the hated Drue Valentine, and ends up softening towards him... only for it to turn out that he could have called for help whenever he wanted.
Buffy The Vampire Slayer had the deliberate version of this - when Buffy fell out with one of the supporting cast, the rest of the cast conspired to lock the two in a limousine on the way to the prom with a note telling them to sort it out. Doubly subverted, because not only did they spend the entire journey arguing over who should have which corsage (very snidely), the journey then ended in the middle of nowhere, at which point bad guys appeared and started hunting them down like animals. Which actually did cause them to bond a little, in between running from gunmen and fighting demons.
- Played straight in "What's My Line". Xander and Cordelia were trapped in Buffy's basement, and ended up making out.
In the KateModern episode "Trait Positive", Charlie and Gavin get locked in the G&T IT office together over the course of a weekend, spanning seven episodes. Over that time, they bond. In the later episode "False Alarm", it is revealed that they also slept together that weekend.
Family Ties had an episode where Mallory and Skippy were locked in a basement together.
Invoked in the remake of The Parent Trap, when the camp counselors force Hallie and Annie to bunk together to work out their issues.
- This was actually taken from the original film, which also had the girls forced to room together.
Stargate SG 1 example from "Zero Hour," courtesy of the unique command style of General O'Neill. To force a pair of alien delegates to behave like adults and come to an agreement, he puts them in 'time out' together in a small room. With a fruit basket.
An extremely common trope for playwrights, particularly for short two-hander plays. In addition to being an easy way to force conflict, it makes set design much simpler.
After one of the fallings out (this troper forgets which and in order they occurred...or whether it was a real or imaginary one) of Katchoo and Francine, the main characters of the comic Strangers In Paradise, their mutual friends David and Casey trick them into a sound booth at a small record studio, then handcuff them together, lock them in, drop the key down Casey's front, and watch from the two-way mirror until the two reconcile. Again.
The West Wing episode No Exit, which trapped four pairs of people in a White House lockdown, giving them time to argue and come to terms with each other. Ish.
- And of course, the title comes from the Jean-Paul Sartre play - famed for the quote "Hell is other people" - making this...
Done in a hilariously bad scene of the hilariously bad Birds of Prey live action series wherein Huntress and her wannabe boyfriend get locked into a sauna together. Naturally to avoid overheating they both have to strip down to their skivvies.
Done intentionally in David Eddings' Belgariad. When Polgara finds that the bickering heirs of two rival countries are male and female, her solution to the feud is to lock the two together in a room, wait until the shouting stops, and then officiate the resulting wedding. Implausibly enough, this plan works perfectly.
In Hitohira Nono and Mirei wind up in the store room with each other, which gives them a chance to discuss their differences. Of course, the fact that Nono just lost her voice (or fakes it) doesn't make things easier.
Ron Stoppable and Mr. Barkin spended an entire episode of Kim Possible locked inside a truck. They hardly got to know each other, because Barkin got goofier and crazier.
All In The Family - In "Two's a Crowd", Archie and Mike get locked in the storeroom of Archie's bar. (This, after Archie had locked himself in the basement of his house a few seasons earlier; you'd think he would have learned...)
- The first-season episode "The Elevator Story" had Archie get stuck in a stalled elevator with, among other people, a supercilious black businessman and a Puerto Rican man whose wife is going into labor.
The Bob Newhart Show - Bob and Emily spend the 1976 Bicentennial locked in their apartment building's storage room.
Played straight with a twist on the '80s Nell Carter sitcom Gimme a Break. Nell is trapped in a basement after an earthquake with a Hispanic woman who only understands Spanish. To top it off, she's also deaf. I will never forget how to say "taco" or "cockroach" in sign language because of that episode....
Used in the made-for-grade-school Arthur: While the titular character and his little sister, DW, are locking in a refrigerator of a restaurant, they learn to use their imagination as they listen to an old radio show on the ancient radio in the fridge.
An episode of Adventures In Odyssey had Whit trapped in an elevator with a loud-mouthed radio personality...and a bomb. In the end the bomb turned out to be fake and it was all a mean-spirited practical joke.
In an episode of Only Fools And Horses, Del Boy deliberately stops an elevator in order to force Rodney to open up to him. As a nod to the frequency of the trope, Del then repairs the lift, revealing that it was never broken in the first place.
Done to a couple of minor characters in a few different David Eddings series. Usually at Polgara (or her Expy's) behest.
Friends has done this at least three times, the first time early in the first season with Ross, Susan and Phoebe locked in a janitor's closet during Carol's labour. The second was when everyone else were trapped together in Monica's bedroom by Ross and Rachel breaking up outside. The third was later, with Ross and Joey locked out on the roof after trying to watch a meteor shower.
Rito and Haruna find themselves in this situation, and in true To Love Ru fashion, they're naked.
Doubly Subverted in My Name Is Earl. The heads of two rival prison gangs were locked in a solitary cell together by a Genre Savvy warden. Once they got out, the fighting was worse than ever, but Earl later discovers that not only did the two leaders secretly make up, they became Star Crossed Lovers.
Referenced in one John Wayne movie.
"Two men spend a long winter snowed-in in a shack. They either walk out good friends or..."
"One of them walks out alone."

Subversions

Masterfully subverted in the episode Dawg Days from The Shield. After an escalating feud between two gang members threatens to spiral out of control, a group of police officers lock them together in a storage container overnight, they jokingly assume that the normal course of events will occur and the two will settle their differences. However, when they return the next morning one of the gang members walks out and proclaims of his 'container-mate' "he ain't coming".
Lisa and Jackson from Red Eye are Locked In a Plane. By the end of the flight? They definitely don't kiss and make up.

Locked In A Freezer

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