"I will never employ any device with a digital countdown. If I find that such a device is absolutely unavoidable, I will set it to activate when the counter reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into operation."
— Evil Overlord List #15
"I never could resist a ticking clock"
— The Master
For whatever reason — be it the alignment of planets, a scheduled public event to sabotage, a "you have one hour to comply or..." threat, or just a plain old
Time Bomb — the villain's plot is time sensitive: It will succeed at a given moment and not one second sooner. The hero has until that moment to stop the villain.
Naturally, things will go down to the wire and the hero will foil the evil scheme at the
last possible second... even if it takes a
Magic Countdown to line things up properly.
This is a frequently used but still effective method of adding more tension to the story. It's especially powerful when combined with
Real Time.
One variant is that a specific time isn't the point of success; the villain must instead be stopped before he collects all the
Plot Coupons or kills all of his intended victims. In this case, the hero will stop
the last, and only the last, step in the evil plan. This sucks in the case of victims, since all but the last victim are still dead, but hey, at least the villain didn't
win...
The video game equivalent is the
Timed Mission. The video game
subversion is
Take Your Time, where they TELL you that it's a
Race Against The Clock, but you're not penalized for going at your own pace.
A rather specific subtrope is
You Have 48 Hours.
Examples
Music
- Yes, let's start this off with a music example, of all things. Madonna's recent hit "4 Minutes", and its accompanying video
, both center around having "4 minutes to save the world"— with the video even having a countdown clock as a backdrop. (Never mind, of course, that the song lasts four seconds too long...)
Anime and Manga
- A subplot in Captain Tsubasa has Ken "Karate Keeper" Wakashimazu defying his parents because he wants to play soccer and not become the Heir To The Dojo. In the original manga and old series, his father gives him one year to reach the championship with the Toho team; if not, he'll have to come back home and inherit the dojo. When Ken fulfills his word, Mr. Wakashimazu gives him his blessings.
- In Glass Mask, Tsukikage gives her pupil Maya Kitajima two years to win an award as prestigious as one that her rival Ayumi Himekawa has just won, or else Ayumi gets the ''Crimson Goddess role without further contest.
Card Games
- In Yu-Gi-Oh there is a card called Final Countdown that will end the game making the user the winner in 20 turns after being used, it can even be sped up by 1 turn by using the Pyro Clock of Destiny Spell Card. So it turns out to be a Race Against The Clock to defeat the opponent before the 20th turn is reached.
Comic
- In Final Crisis, the Guardians of the Universe tell Hal Jordan and his fellow Green Lanterns that: "You have 24 hours to save the universe."
Film
- Lampshaded in Galaxy Quest when Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver fight their way through numerous obstacles to the "Big Red Button" which stops the explosion and press it with 17 seconds left ... only to see it continue to count down, eventually to stop with one second left ... because that was a requirement of this trope.
- In Aliens the "Big Computer That Controls Everything" announces that the coolent system has shut down and the reactors will overheat and explode. It is estimated that they have approximately four hours[?]. As they get closer and closer to this arbitrary deadline, all of a sudden they're listening to a precise countdown and just as they get out of Dodge, the whole place goes up. The question is: Why did a huge explosion occur exactly and precisely at the end of an period of time that started out being merely estimated?
- Because the estimate was made by Bishop, whereas the precise countdown was made by the computer inside the reactor.
- Outland. In the space-mining colony on Io, a large digital clock is in the bar showing the exact time-till-arrival of the weekly supply shuttle. When word gets out that two hitmen are arriving on the 12:00 shuttle to kill the protagonist, the clock takes on the role of the Ticking Countdown of Doom. The protagonist has actually completed his preparations hours before; the deadline only serves to rack up his (and the audience's) tension.
- "You have thirteen hours to solve the Labyrinth, or your baby brother will be one of us forever. Such a pity..."
- A variation is used in the film Godzilla VS Destoroyah. In the film, Godzilla himself becomes something of a ticking nuclear time bomb as he's quickly going to explode/meltdown as soon as his heart reaches critical mass. The human characters even measure how high his body temperature is before he goes critical.
- Of course, it's partially subverted in a sense that the human protagonists FAIL in stopping Godzilla from reaching critical mass. Luckily, Godzilla Jr. absorbs the majority of radiation his "father" gives off and is brought back to life and grows into an adult Godzilla.
- Run Lola Run. Lola's boyfriend Manny has a meeting with some mobsters, and he just lost the money he was supposed to hand off to them. The meeting's in twenty minutes, so Lola and Manny have that long to get the money back.
- Used in numerous James Bond films - the Connery films often had the counter finishing at 0-0-7; by the Moore era the producers pushed it to the limit by having Bond disable the weapon right on 0-0-0.
- Seven Days In May. The US President believes the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is plotting a military coup under cover of a mobilisation exercise to be held in seven days. Because the general is highly popular, the President can't dismiss him without proof, so his staff have that long to find evidence of the conspiracy.
Literature
Live Action TV
- 24. Always.
- Inverted in Star Trek TOS where the good guys essentially gave the bad guys an ultimatum; "Back off or we blow ourselves — and you — to smithereens" and then start the clock ticking.
- Lampshaded in an episode on NCIS where a group of marines in a training exercise find an armed bomb with about 3 minutes left on the clock. 10 seconds later the bomb goes off and the Gunnery Sgt. reminds them of Evil Overlord Rule #15: Never assume a bomb's timer is accurate.
- Robin Hood features an episode where the Sheriff goes missing, and must be found by sunset or Nottingham will be destroyed.
- The Real Time episode of M*A*S*H, "Life Time": the surgeons have to perform a critical operation in the time frame of the episode. This is further dramatized by a ticking clock counter superposed on the lower right corner of the screen.
- Used very often in MacGyver. Of course, the timer is sometimes set by our hero himself.
- In Lost, according to Ms. Hawking, Ben has only 70 hours to reunite the Oceanic 6 and (presumably) return to the island or "God help us all."
- Happens in an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica. Strangely, the writers got confused and the meaning of the timer changed mid-plot.
Western Animation
