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alt title(s): Only One Our beloved protagonists are the only people who can handle the problem.
Those who have been given the job are woefully incompetent.
If the series is about a local police force, the FBI are ivory-tower glory hounds. If the series is about an FBI agent, the local police are all useless Corrupt Hick types. If the series is about the military, government higher-ups will only be interested in pleasing the voters. If the series is about the government or an anti-military type, then the military will be The Evil Army commanded by a General Ripper type who is just itching to Nuke Em back to the stone age, never mind the asking questions part. If the series is about a rogue hero, all levels of government and law enforcement, plus the military, are either corrupt or clueless. In those cases where the people who are supposed to be handling the situation are not also bad guys, you can end up with a Red Shirt Army.
Sometimes this is actually warranted by the show's premise, notably Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Dark Angel, Stargate SG-1... okay, any show featuring The Chosen One.
A variation that often occurs, particularly in shows or movies where there is a Race Against The Clock situation, is that those who are responsible for taking care of a particular situation (such as the bomb squad) will, for some reason, not be able to make it in time to resolve the problem that the protagonists are facing. In this scenario, the experts may be fully competent and on the side of the angels, but are prevented for some reason from taking care of the problem themselves, meaning that the untrained protagonists are forced to be the only ones who can take care of the problem. This often works to increasing tension; will the non-expert cut the right wire?
See also the video game equivalent, Its Up To You.
Examples:
Film
- Die Hard:
- In the first movie, the FBI agents blindly follow their standard anti-terrorist procedure, which allows the criminals to break into the vault. They also decide to launch an attack on the terrorists on top of the building, even though they expect 20-25% of the hostages to be killed. The Los Angeles deputy police chief is totally incompetent, and the SWAT team leader (a) has his team foolishly charge in and get slaughtered and (b) sends in an armored car which the criminals blow up with a missile.
- To be fair, who would have expected that terrorists would be packing antitank missiles?
- In Die Hard II, the terrorists are renegade U.S. troops, the military troops sent to take out the terrorists are in cahoots with them, and for most of the movie the airport security guards actively oppose McClane's heroic efforts.
- In Blue Thunder, the villains are a conspiracy within the U.S. government. The hero helicopter pilot/cop must fight against his own police department to expose them. Averted at the end when the U.S. Justice Department starts an investigation into the evidence the hero uncovered.
- Subverted in Lethal Weapon 3, in which Riggs persuades Murtagh that they are the only ones present who can defuse a bomb because, of course, "the bomb squad never arrives on time!" Unfortunately, Riggs fails the Wire Dilemma, the bomb goes off, and the building collapses, causing millions of dollars worth of damage... and at that point, the bomb squad arrive, having made it in plenty of time to defuse the device had Riggs and Murtagh not interfered.
Literature
Live Action TV
- In The X Files, Agent Mulder and/or Agent Scully were often the only ones who could defeat the Monster Of The Week - partly because of the astonishing amount of Corrupt Hick law enforcers they encountered, and partly because they were usually the only ones who believed or accepted that the threat actually existed in the first place.
- The Doctor is often The Only One who can save the day in Doctor Who, because he's a Sufficiently Advanced Alien who's way above everyone else.
- The local police force vs. FBI variant is the central plot of an In the Heat of the Night episode, in which the Sparta DA's daughter is kidnaped and Gillespie's force - using their small-town savvy - competes (almost literally) with by-the-book FBI agents to locate her.
- The starship Enterprise seems to be the only ship in the sector when a crisis goes down a lot of the time. Most egregiously in Star Trek Generations, in which the crisis takes place near Earth, the capital of the Federation, and the Enterprise, whose best Applied Phlebotinum won't be in until Tuesday, is still the only ship close enough. Apparently, if the Romulans ever decide to bring the fight to our heroes, they'll only have to get past one ship...
- Believe it or not, CSI Miami actually does this. The Crime Scene investigators are the only law enforcement personnel who care about getting the criminals. The DA's only care about getting convictions, even if it is a wrongful one. Judges are at best unhelpful or helpless, at worst are corrupt and seek to hinder the CSI in anyway possible. Other cops just don't care. Parole Boards are more focused on bureaucracy than on doing their job of making sure bad people stay in jail.
- Similarly, cops are unable to do anything without Horatio - a CSI. Down to the point where SWAT teams, in full gear, will wait for Horatio to show up - wearing a suit and using a handgun - before entering a location. Of course Horatio enters first. Most evident in an episode where gunfire was heard in a house,— the cops surround the house, then wait for Horatio before going in to check what happens. One has to wonder what happens if there are two crimes in Miami at the same time. Another episode has Horatio personally escorting a truck filled with confiscated drugs that are to be incinerated.
- In the new Battlestar Galactica, despite a fleet of some 40,000 plus, every job that needs doing seems to need doing by our major characters, regardless of their qualifications or profession. Thus we see fighter pilots as undercover police (Black Market), deck hands as planetary recon team (Kobol's Last Gleaming), fighter pilots as SWAT team (Sacrifice), fighter pilots and deck hands as algae harvesters (The Eye of Jupiter), etc.
- Used to the extreme in Heroes where more or less every character has once been declared "the only one who can stop" the bad guys (Sylar, usually.)
Tabletop Games
- The Living City campaign featured the most incompetent 15th level fighters imaginable as its local police, called the "City Watch". It was claimed that the police weren't incompetent, just portrayed that way so that the players could be the main heroes and not just call the cops to handle problems. Of course, many players believe that by that point, even if they weren't incompetent, they wouldn't be able to do much against high-level threats anyway.
- Also a problem in World Of Warcraft and a bunch of other MMORPGs. Level 60 guards patrol the city streets, but only you can defeat the current Dire Peril, guaranteed!
- Somewhat subverted in the Shadowrun RPG where the police are a dangerous military unit that all player characters should try to avoid. Although, in some campaigns (fortunately, not in any of the official campaigns) they still become bunglers when The Only One player characters are around.
Video Games
- In Mass Effect, despite the supposed presence of a galactic force of super-police, not to mention an advanced human military force as well as several superior alien surveillance and enforcement agencies, only Commander Shepard is able to uncover and confront the The Dragon and the Big Bad.
- To be fair, Commander Shepard is the only member of the super-police who's also part of the advanced military force, and he's got a spiffy prototype ship to boot. He really is the only one qualified.
- Confirmed. Shepard is specifically mentioned as the single best-qualified candidate to be found among the entire human race - if he hadn't been, they'd have sent the someone else who was. And at the beginning of the game, the Terran Alliance was both the first spacefaring polity to have its agents encounter the menace, and the only one that actually believed in the full scope of the oncoming horror, so the other Council races pretty much dumped the entire case on them.
- This is also a semi-subversion in that, in this case, Commander Shepard is not only the guy who's actually handling the job- he's also, for once, the one who's supposed to be. In fact, by the endgame where the military might of four species finally comes into play, they all follow his orders because the whole case is officially his show.
- It's still done for a lot of sidequests, when you arrive in a new system only to learn that you're the only one in the area of a crisis or mystery.
- Worst is one where you're called from halfway across the galaxy to take care of something on Earth's moon. Apparently, not a single person exists on Earth's huge megacities that can shoot a few drones.
- On the other hand, Shepard is the only person available to the Alliance packing the Citadel Council's personal 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card, which makes him so very useful for running cover-up missions.
- The Codex does say the the human armed forces makes up only 3% of the total population (compare to 60%+ of the turians), and most of human space doesn't have any fleets guarding it
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