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alt title(s): Plot Relevant Power Up Lucas: Let see here... we got time and space, every human emotion, every natural element and nature itself, life and death... what do we go for next?
Dawn: Only one place left to go... we go for GOD!
Lucas: Uh wait, we got that one too.
Dawn: Oh.
The plot is completed. The hero gets his due reward, the girl, and vanquishes the villain with a series of really cool moves. Everybody lives happily ever after.
But wait. Turns out that fans liked the story so much that they want a sequel. But the hero's story is essentially done. He's supposed to be content for the rest of his life with what he got at the end.
The solution: Level up the rewards and dangers the hero faces to add that extra oomph to the sequel while avoiding accusations of plot recycling. Instead of a mere Big Bad, the Sorting Algorithm Of Evil delivers a beady-eyed Diabolical Mastermind to deal with, but the hero can look forward to niftier powers and legacies.
This leveling up can get ridiculous if the series continues for long enough, with the producers being forced to one-up themselves with every succeeding installment. It might even be carried out to the point that the only way left for the hero to become any more omnipowerful is to make him Ascend To A Higher Plane Of Existence or depower him.
So Last Season plus Post Script Season. When it's the same bad guys getting an upgrade, it's a Lensman Arms Race.
Compare Changing Of The Guard.
Examples:
Film
- It seems possible that the writers of Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl were unprepared for sequels (although the added subtitle indicates they considered the possibility). The heroes went from battling undead pirates and local guardsmen to facing Davy Jones and the East India Company. Luckily, there was enough Canon Fodder and references to Noodle Incidents (namely the E.I.C.) that sequel material wasn't too difficult to come up with.
- The Back To The Future trilogy. The final scene with the DeLorean flying out to rescue Marty's son was a joke scene, and wasn't intended to be taken seriously. High box office earnings and strong positive reaction, however, allowed the creators to follow through with more films. Furthermore, Marty's future is better insured by the end of the third film, as well as Doc Brown, who gets a wife, kids and a hovering time-traveling train.
- National Treasure. The main characters went from committing the one large crime of stealing the Declaration of Independence, to breaking and entering into almost every famous government building ever built. Then, they kidnapped the president.
- Note, the writers were unprepared for a sequel, they had absolutely no plans for one. In fact, they changed the ending to avoid a Sequel Hook.
- The original Highlander movie suffered from this. The mantra, "There can be only one," seems like a joke when you consider the numerous sequels that dart back and forth through the timeline.
Literature
- Done to extremes in the Skylark series. The main hero and villain are geniuses at the start. And their brains are enhanced with each new book until they're capable of understanding five-dimensional physics and building spaceships with their brains. In case the earth getting destroyed wasn't a big enough threat, by the end of the series the whole universe is at stake. Instead of basic science-y weapons, they grab a team of psychic witches to translocate all the planets inhabited by the villainous race to a star system that is set ablaze and burns so fiercely that it'll take millennia to cool down. Or something. The details get a little muddled by the reader's laughter.
Live Action Television
- Stargate falls victim to this, but usually manages to make the upgrade interesting.
- They started by defeating a single Goa'uld (Ra) who had a single ship in The Movie.
- Then, in the the series, it turns out that was just one of many Goa'uld with many ships. However, he turned out to have been the leader of all the Goa'uld, and actually commanded many ships, although they hadn't been seen. But now he's been replaced by Apophis, who's very similar in most respects.
- They defeat Apophis, and he gets replaced by Sokar, whose schtick is that he was the inspiration for the devil. Yes, that devil. He also has some fancier tricks up his sleeve, and a bigger fleet, that make him a bigger threat to Earth than Apophis was.
- Then Apophis turns out to not have been defeated after all, kills Sokar, takes over his fleet and his armies, and now he's stronger than ever and out for revenge on Earth, rather than just generically desiring conquest.
- At some point in here, Osiris shows up as a recurring villain, mentioned as so evil the other Goa'uld got together and Sealed Evil In A Can before the protagonists inadvertently free him.
- Then Apophis gets killed (for good!) by the Replicators, who threaten to implacably devour all matter in the universe and who have been giving Earth's Asgard allies trouble since early seasons.
- That threat isn't even dealt with before Anubis, half-Ascended Goa'uld with advanced Ancient knowledge and the ability to conquer all the other Goa'uld with ease, appears. He comes up with an army of unstoppable super-soldiers, which take several episodes before the protagonists even figure out how to kill one.
- After Anubis and the Replicators are all defeated at once, and the protagonists have acquired ships that can destroy Goa'uld Ha'taks with ease, in come the Ori
toilets battlecruisers that can destroy the Tau'ri ships with ease.
- The spin-offs, not running for as long, don't suffer quite as much from this problem. The Wraith remain a constant threat from the first episode of Stargate Atlantis to the last, though they get the occasional upgrade (like the ZPM-powered Hive Ship in the finale), and the protagonists also have to deal with a fancier, more powerful kind of Replicators along the line.
- But now in Stargate Universe, the Ha'taks have caught up, and can kick the asses of the ships that could destroy the ships that can destroy the space toilets. When viewers politely asked "WTF?", the writers responded by saying that the rest of the universe hasn't stayed stagnant as our heroes have grown stronger. Presumably the Lucien Alliance stumbled across and reverse-engineered some lost bit of Ancient technology, that seems to be the source of most technological advancement in the Stargate verse.
Manga and Anime
- One could argue this is what ultimately crippled Dragonball Z, it went from over 9000 being an unbelievably high Power Level into the millions before abandoning the concept altogether.
- Sailor Moon held very tightly to its Plot Leveling with nearly every season's Big Bad hunting for some Victim Of The Week's trinket. The concept was really stretched in the last season's mangling of the manga story, where the trinkets are known to belong to any of the superpowered senshi — leading one to wonder why the Big Bad never targets any of them until near the very end.
Newspaper Comics
- Arguably this is what destroyed the original Dick Tracy comic series. While in the 30s Tracy would investigate bank robbers and gangsters using magnifying lenses and fingerprint kits, by the 40s he was stopping Nazi supervillains with his 2-way wrist radio and electronic tracking gadgets. This leveling of threat and technology continued for years; in the 50s he stopped a disembodied voice from taking over the world with an atomic laser, and by the 60s was fighting space aliens on the moon in his antigravity space cruiser. In the 70s the strip was rebooted, with Tracy returning to being a cop investigating criminals, but by that time the strip had lost all social relevance.
Video Games
- The Pokemon games have had this applied to them. Mew and Mewtwo, the world's most powerful Pokemon and its clone, were fairly nifty, but later games featured Groudon, a Pokemon who created continents; Kyogre, a Pokemon who created the seas; Rayquaza, the Pokemon that stopped their fight; Jirachi, a Pokemon who can grant wishes when awoken; Mesprit, Azelf, and Uxie, three Pokemon who created emotion, willpower and knowledge, respectively; Palkia, Dialga, and Giratina, who can control Time, Space, and according to Word Of God anti-matter, and finally Arceus, the Pokemon who created the universe. They seem to have written themselves into a corner with that last one, as far as carrying it out any further is concerned.
- Unless Nintendo decides to send the Pokémon series into some sort of alternate realm and essentially start the process of creation and elaboration over again.
- Sierra dropped the ball with this one and their Quest For Glory series. After the first one, where you save a small Barony, you jump immediately to saving the entire world from an evil genie. There's not much they can go from there, so you then save the world from an evil demon, followed by saving the world from an evil vampire, and finally saving the world from an evil dragon. Each one plays itself up like it's somehow worse than the one before it, even though the end results are pretty much the same.
- The Metal Gear series of games went to increasingly absurd lengths (naturally) to justify Solid Snake’s continual returns from retirement. Metal Gear 2 involved a replacement for petroleum and theft of nearly every nuclear weapon in the world. Metal Gear Solid involved genetically engineered super soldiers, a clone brother who took the Cain And Abel trope too much to heart, and invisible nukes. Metal Gear Solid 2 involved mass-produced Metal Gears, an anti-Metal Gear, a third clone brother, a kidnapped president, a Metal Gear fortress, and whatever the hell happened at the end. Metal Gear Solid 4 had to work hard to top that, but it did. And it was awesome.
- I want to remind you, that Bowser has gone from locking a Princess in a castle to cursing her whole castle with creepy dreamworld-doors to lifting it up into space, to trying to aspiring the take over of galaxies. But, of course, Mario wasn't lazy either. He went from "my only move is to jump on your head" to literal kick-boxer to using the power of the stars. Oh, the number of his power-up-items also increased rapidly.
Western Animation
- Though the creators are doing their best to avoid the trope, Kim Possible's uber-powerful, all-purpose battle suit, introduced at the Grand Finale, became so all-powerful (it was even powered up during the first episode of the new season) that the creators had to handwave the non-use of this battle suit as being in repair for 4/5ths of the fourth season.
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