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If I ever MUST put a digital timer on my doomsday device, I will buy one free from quantum mechanical anomalies. So many brands on the market keep perfectly good time while you're looking at them, but whenever you turn away for a couple minutes then turn back, you find that the countdown has progressed by only a few seconds.
The big red readout counting down to any kind of horrible event seems to know when it's Being Watched, and cheats accordingly.
For instance, you might be looking at a time bomb which reads 00:27, 00:26, 00:25...
...Then the show cuts to the fight between Good Guy Who Wants to Stop the Explosion and Bad Guy Who Set the Bomb in the First Place. They kick and punch and wrestle and clobber each other for easily twenty seconds.
Then cut back to the bomb, which now reads 00:20, 00:19, 00:18...
This can be done subtly, to stretch things out a bit without the audience really noticing, but as a general rule it's stunningly obvious. There have been times, in fact, when literally no time passes at all while the countdown's out of shot.
Sometimes the reverse effect takes place — the character has a good forty seconds to stop or get out of the way of the destruction, then six seconds later the timer starts counting down from ten, which is a fairly cheap way of ratcheting up the suspense.
This doesn't have to involve an actually displayed timer. Sometimes a character will just yell that "There's only ten seconds left!" and the heroes will prevent the calamity 25 seconds later.
A variation is the fuse or a trail of gasoline which burns slower or faster when the camera's not on it
This can be handwaved by saying that part of the fight scene (since rarely are there splitscreens showing the fight and the timer) started when or before the last shot of the timer was shown, thus, the fight and the countdown are happening at the same time.
Examples:
Literature
- Parodied in the book and game Starship Titanic, wherein a nuclear bomb (voiced by John Cleese) can be made to forget its place during the countdown, at which point it starts counting down from one thousand again.
- Brutally subverted in the Freehold novel. A trainee is trying to disarm a bomb with a timer. He takes a moment of respite, as there's plenty of time left... then the (fake) bomb goes off. An Aesop on how bad guys in the Freehold future have read the Evil Overlord List.
Anime and Manga
- In the Naruto OVA Battle at Hidden Falls. I Am the Hero!, Shibuki is told he has 10 seconds to reveal his location before Suien kills a villager. Naruto's short speech about bravery takes considerably longer.
- Spoofed in Keroro Gunsou episode 23. Kururu shows a countdown that has 72 minutes left... then, a few minutes later, he announces 70 minutes have passed.
- On Dragonball Z, during the final fight between Goku and Frieza during the Namek saga, the planet Namek was minutes away from collapse for 10 episodes. Ridiculously, one episode actually says "two minutes" at the beginning and "one minute" at the end.
- Lampshaded later by the fact that Freiza flat-out admits he screwed up the whole 'destroying Namek' thing, and it was supposed to explode instantly... he just made up the 'five minutes left' thing to not look like an idiot.
- Exception: On Neon Genesis Evangelion, in the episode "Both of You, Dance Like You Want To Win!", the timer that counts down until the EVA units run out of power is actually shown on screen as the action sequence is played out.
- In episode 139 of Bleach, Ichigo can remain a Hollow for 11 seconds. Just the scenes with Ichigo as a Hollow already take up about a minute, so even assuming everything's simultaneous doesn't explain it. The concept of events happening at extremely high speed is rather stretched.
- Why is it stretched? Moving at extremely high speed is basically all Ichigo does.
- Factoring in all ecstatic collapses, dramatic slow-motion door-opening, and lengthy yet vital inner expository monologues, the forty seconds in the Death Note finale are inflated by approximately 850%.
- In the anime at least the inner expository of Light is justified, as every other movement is shown to stop. So his thoughts actually happen "instantly".
Film
- Notably averted in Aliens. When the computer announces how much time there is until the place goes up, that's exactly how much in-movie time it takes for the place to blow up.
- The inverse variety occurs in the movie Apollo 13. The loss of communications during re-entry is said to last 4-1/2 minutes, but actually takes about 3 minutes of movie. Given how tense that scene is watching the movie, knowing how it comes out, one can imagine how tense it was in real life, taking half again as long.
- Goldfinger: During the countdown to the detonation of the nuclear bomb in Fort Knox.
- Independence Day: "Can you get us out of here in 30 seconds?" More like two minutes. Yet cut back to the bomb, which still has five seconds on it.
- The film Stargate (the original one). When O'Neil sets the timer on the nuke, it also beeps constantly in all the scenes. Subverted slighty, in that in most scenes, counting the beeps is pretty accurate between timer shots. Played painfully straight though, in that the time between beeps varies widely between shots. In one scene, it counts down normally, in another it's almost rapid fire.
- Spoofed in the film Spaceballs, with the countdown on Mega-Maid's Self Destruct Mechanism:
Computer: Ten... nine... eight... six...
President Skroob: Six? What happened to seven?!
Computer: Just kidding!
- Also averted, since the actual three-minute self-destruct countdown only runs ten seconds too long, even with the argument over "seven".
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan features the title character counting down 60 seconds to the Enterprise crew before he does something really nasty. Naturally, this takes a good deal longer than 60 seconds, giving our heroes enough time to come up with a bluff.
- Somewhat justified as this was a character counting, not a timer. There's plenty of precedent for a counting person who doesn't really want to reach 0 to slow the counting somewhat (Think parents counting down to a punishment. 'Three... Two and a half... Two and a quarter...').
- Your parents counted backwards from three? Mine always went 'one... two... two and a half..." Sometimes they went to two and three-quarters, sometimes not.
- However, the Genesis countdown later in the movie takes longer than its advertised four minutes. Not by much, interestingly enough, and one could justify it by saying that the events in different cuts were happening at the same time.
- This troper seems to remember the countdown actually resetting slightly — in one shot the countdown stood at somewhere around two minutes, and then went back to 3:30.
- Parodied in the movie Galaxy Quest, where the self-destruct bomb is disarmed well before it goes off, but the timer continues counting down until it reaches 1 second. This happened because the alien race that made the bomb was imitating a sci-fi TV show.
- Star Wars: From "The Rebel base will be in range in thirty seconds", through the power-up of the Death Star's superlaser, to the destruction of the Death Star at least feels like it takes five minutes—when before, the Death Star could power up and blow the shit out of Alderaan in less than a minute.
- The opening credits of the GI Joe movie have Cobra attempting to blow up the Statue of Liberty. Duke moves the bomb from the statue to their airship, taking about 20 seconds longer than the clock should have allowed.
- Happens in Van Helsing - it sure takes that clock a long time to strike twelve.
- The Mask: the countdown to the detonation of the conventional explosives in the club.
- The 30 seconds that Grandpa Seth freezes time for in Troll 2 must be some of the slowest seconds in the history of the world.
- Somewhat averted in Virtuosity, because Sid's last bomb speeds up the countdown whenever it detects countermeasures...and then breaks down.
Live Action TV
- Power Rangers has at least two examples:
- In the first episode of Power Rangers in Space, Dark Specter has captured Zordon in a jar, which gradually fills up with a lava-like substance. When it is full, Dark Specter will have drained all of Zordon's power. At the rate that jar is filling up, Zordon ought to be history before that episode was up, yet somehow he held out until the end of the season.
- In Power Rangers: Ninja Storm, the rangers have a more agile alternate mode for their Humongous Mecha which can only be maintained for sixty seconds. The first time it's used, it stays transformed for precisely sixty seconds in the end, though Cam's countdown is often wildly off. Almost every use after that, though, had battles carry on for much longer than one minute.
- The Makai Knights in Garo can only remain in armour for 100 seconds. This is enforced in most episodes, but once in a while it is blatantly broken with no explanation.
- In the Lost episode "The Other Woman", Daniel is attempting to neutralize poison gas. "Forty seconds to contamination," the computer says. Forty seconds later, it says: "Twenty seconds to contamination."
- Doctor Who, episode "Destiny of the Daleks". The countdown runs at normal speed when demoed, but too slowly when Romana is actually in peril from the bomb.
- Also, in "The Daleks", a Dalek suddenly stops counting down when it became clear to the director that the action sequence would take much longer than the countdown.
- Mostly averted in the episode "42" of the new series. After the initial setup scenes, the counter and the depicted events happen in real time, as much as possible.
- Lampshaded by the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the episode Time Chasers:
Tom Servo: Eight, seven, six, five — no wait, SEVEN, six, five, four, three—no, SIX!, five, four, three, two, one — FOUR!, THREE, TWO, ONE — THREE...
- Subverted in an episode of Stargate SG-1, where the bomb does this, but it's because of a time dilation field.
- Also mentioned in the 200th episode in which a movie writer proposes a scene in which SG-1 has to escape a situation in ten seconds and debates on how long the time should be.
Daniel: What difference does it make, I mean it's not like you're have an actual ticking clock on the screen.
Marty: That's brilliant!
Daniel: That's ridiculous...
- Also Averted in the Stargate Atlantis episode Thirty-Eight Minutes. It really is 38 minutes from the Gate opening to it closing, and the countdown towards the resolution is accurate.
- "Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!" A movie magazine worked out that the difference between the time stated and the time it appears to take would mean a 57-hour day.
- Subtly spoofed in an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, where Xander is having a Circle Of Extinction with the bad guy as a nearby bomb timer is counting down. It switches between them and the bomb, and the timer seems to jump around at random, gaining and losing time, until it is of course stopped at 1 second left.
- On children's tv show, The Big Comfy Couch, one of the usual devices employed in every episode was that Lunette would look around for items inside the couch while making a mess, and then at the end of the episode she would clean the mess up in a "ten-second tidy". Usually these would last over a minute. Very likely this was done under the assumption that children can't count.
Western Animation
- Spoofed in the Futurama episode A Tale of Two Santas, where a random number generator is used instead of a timer. Added fun for negative numbers popping up.
- Also spoofed in the episode "A Big Piece of Garbage": The crew is sent to destroy a giant ball of garbage heading directly towards the Earth along with an explosive set to detonate after 25 minutes. Once they activate it, the digital timer counts down "25...15...05...bh" to the crew's surprise. The reason? The timer was upside down and thus set to 52 seconds. Way to go, Farnsworth.
- A variant of the fast burning fuse is seen in Batman The Animated Series. In "Dreams in Darkness", the Scarecrow has a huge machine mixing fear inducing chemicals to dump in Gotham's water supply. Batman shuts it off, stopping the big clock at 1:45. Scarecrow starts it up with the backup controls and the clock begins counting down again, from 20 seconds.
- This isn't event he worst part (if that even counts as "magic" to begin with) - the timer beeped with every passing second, yet the beeps clearly didn't correspond to how much time had passed when the camera cut away, and at the 20-second mark, plainly beeped more times than there were seconds remaining.
- Averted, Subverted and whatevered in Justice League Unlimited: In "Wild Cards" the Joker has hid 25 bombs throughout Las Vegas and he's televising the Justice League's attempts to stop it. He even has the timer in the lower right corner that stays consistent throughout the episode. Subverted when Batman disables the first bomb. The timer stops, then drops to 3 seconds and starts again (it was a fake bomb.)
- Sports version: Space Jam.
- Subverted on South Park in the episode "The Snuke": In a parody of 24, a bomb is set to go off when a digital clock with the requisite seven-segment display reaches 1:00. With just minutes to go, the authorities cut the power... and when it comes back, the digital clock controlling the detonator is flashing 12:00.
- Happens in an episode of The Fairly OddParents where roaches have taken over and are going to destroy the world. Cosmo and Timmy plead with Wanda to help save them as the clock ticks down ten seconds, which takes more like thirty.
Video Games
- Spoofed in Ratchet And Clank:
Biobliterator CPU: 60 seconds untill core implosion.
Dr. Nefarious: Lawrence, teleport us out of here.
Lawrence: Would you care to specify a destination sir?
Dr. Nefarious: Oh anywhere!
Biobliterator CPU: Times up!
Dr. Nefarious: What? That wasn't even close to 60 seconds!
Biobliterator CPU: Bye-bye! *explodes*
Theater
- In the recent Met performance of Doctor Atomic, about Dr. Oppenheimer and the Trinity nuclear test, a voice announces five minutes to the test firing. Eight minutes later, the two minute buzzer sounds. Eight minutes later, the bomb goes off.
Real Life
- Attempt any file transfer in any version of Windows and watch the time remaining jump about like a nervous salmon in a particularly fast river.
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