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Storyboarding The Apocalypse
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"First there was the dream, now there is reality. Here in the untainted cradle of the heavens will be created a new super race, a race of perfect physical specimens. You have been selected as its progenitors. Like gods, your offspring will return to Earth and shape it in their image. You have all served in public capacities in my terrestrial empire. Your seed, like yourselves, will pay deference to the ultimate dynasty which I alone have created. From their first day on Earth they will be able to look up and know that there is law and order in the heavens."
-Hugo Drax, Moonraker
Sometimes, it's enough to just say " The World Is In Danger!" and hope the hero (and the audience) understand the urgency and risk and answer The Call. Sometimes, though, a little more is in order. Storyboarding The Apocalypse is a disturbingly detailed narrated account of the impending Gotterdammerung and rise of the Ultimate Evil, accompanied by a montage to give plenty of Nightmare Fuel inducing visions of the end to all parties involved.
Storyboarding The Apocalypse is used on a few different occasions: The hero might Refuse The Call, forcing his Mentor to show him how the Ultimate Evil can hurt him, by turning his secluded hometown into a Doomed Hometown. Or the Big Bad might give a Motive Rant and expound at length on how they'll turn the world into Mordor, or bring about a new Eden via utter destruction because Utopia Justifies The Means. Occasionally this is given as a warning by less direct conventional methods; Cassandra Truth can deliver it, or via Psychic Dreams For Everyone, or Time Travel in the hope of driving the point home to the hero and the audience (and hopefully avoide those Eight Deadly Words).
Compare Just Between You And Me and Bad Future, which can be the Storyboarded Apocalypse given form. See also Unspoken Plan Guarantee.
Examples
Anime
- Just before making his wish, Emperor Pilaf of Dragonball takes a moment to visualize himself as emperor of the world, and we get a sequence showing him as emperor. (He spends the entire fantasy standing on a podium doing nothing but laugh while a crowd hails him.)
- X1999 (also known as "The Shoujo Armageddon") not only features a lengthy vision by dreamseer Hinoto-hime on how the apocalypse will proceed, it also flashes forward and flashes back to that dream sequence many times throughout the series.
Comic Books
- During the Sons of Empire arc of Fables, Lumi A.K.A. The Snow Queen details her plans to to wipe out life in the mundy world (That's our world). They consist of using warlocks and witches to spread plagues across the globe, sending dragons and fire imps to burn our cities to the ground, coming in herself and putting the whole planet into perpetual winter, and then finally leaving it alone a bit to let us wither and die without crops or any means of producing anything. When they're done the Empire will use our devastated, uninhabitable planet as a prison world.
- Almost immediately afterward, however, it gets subverted by the Adversary's son, who's lived in Fabletown until recently Storyboards the Aversion of the Apocalypse. The big problem with Lumi's plan is that we'll catch on to the fact that we're being attacked by germ warfare fairly quickly, and while that alone wouldn't help much as we have no idea how to leave this world for the Homelands of the Fables, the residents of Fabletown will likely approach the US government and go public with their existence. Once they do, they'll give us all the info we need on the Empire's location, and since the Empire has a ban on all modern technology from our world (The Adversary fears a rebellion if his subjects did carry it) our armies would obliterate theirs, and the Empire would fall.
- At the end of the arc, the Adversary decides to hold off on the invasion until they have the Fables living among us all killed so they can't intervene.
- Done in Angel: After The Fall: Wesley gives a dying Angel a vision of how the Shanshu Prophecy plays out for him, which involves a lot of heads on pikes. Angel then promptly wishes for death so he can avoid it!
Film
- In the James Bond movie Moonraker, The Diabolical Mastermind Hugo Drax had such an exposition.
- A possible parody of this occurs near the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, referring to the interstate bypass, and eerily foreshadowing the modern stripmall.
Judge Doom: I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on, all day, all night! Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations; inexpensive motels; restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food; tire salons; automobile dealerships; and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see! My God, it'll be beautiful.
- Hellboy: "I will give you a brief, brief glimpse into the future..."
- The comic book did it on a number of occasions, most memorably in "Box Full of Evil". Hellboy wonders what might happen if he cuts off his Evil Hand, and we see a splash page of a hooded man standing in a burning ruin, holding up the severed hand and chanting, "Anung un Rama..." (Hellboy's true name at the time).
- The Terminator movies gave us a glimpse of the future where humanity is being hunted down by SkyNet. The second movie also showed us Sarah Connor's nightmare of a city being destroyed, just to remind us of the nuclear holocaust, quite disturbing Nightmare Fuel for those who remember the Cold War days.
- The Core has the lead character explaining the Earth's ultimate fate with a peach and a makeshift flamethrower.
Literature
- Galadriel in Lord Of The Rings shows Frodo a vision of The Shire as an industrial work camp should he fail. In the books, it turns out she was bang on and Saruman was steadily on the way to turn The Shire into Mordor 2.0, but the timely intervention of the leveled up Hobbits did short work of his small fiefdom and restored it.
- In the original novels it is Sam who sees what is actually beginning to happen back in the Shire, thanks to Saruman (not a vision of the future.) Frodo sees Sauron's Eye searching for him.
- The Knights of the Word in Terry Brooks's overarching meta series have these occur to them every time they fall asleep.
- In the Star Trek The Next Generation giant novel 'Metamorphosis', Data learns the fate of the galaxy should he choose to stay a human.
- Although the hero of the Pendragon books is always trying to prevent whatever world he's in from falling apart, Bobby gets a good, long, disturbing look at what will happen if he fails in the third book and the Nazis win World War II.
- Ongoing subversion in the Star Wars Expanded Universe—Jacen Solo's visions of what the future will be like turn him to the Dark Side in order to prevent the galaxy from lapsing into unending war.
- An early Animorphs book has the Ellimist showing the heroes a supposedly inevitable Yeerk-dominated world, and then actually giving them the opportunity to Refuse The Call.
- Of course, this wasn't a message of doom, an easy out, or even a possible future, but a Xanatos Gambit on the Ellimist's part to show the heroes where the location of a generator that will cripple the alien invasion for a short time is.
- Parodied in Science of Discworld II: The Globe, in which Ponder Stibbons has set up an elaborate presentation to show the danger to the Roundworld Project, only for Rincewind to sum things up in one sentence when he still has "a dozen slides and a flowchart" to go.
- The Bible's Book of Revelation is pretty much the ur-example of this trope, meaning it's Older Than Feudalism. Unfortunately, as no one can agree on which parts are symbolic and which parts are literal (even "literal interpretations" can differ from one another), there's a myriad of interpretations as to what each part of its storyboarding means.
- Can't believe this hasn't been mentioned yet. During Ragnarok, how many steps backward will Thor take after slaying Jormungand before keeling over from the poison? The Poetic Edda can tell you. It's nine.
Live Action TV
Video Games
- A convoluted example appears in the game Sin And Punishment. In an effort to motivate the Action Girl to shoot her transformed-by-The Virus partner, the Mysterious Waif shows her a vision of a future in which he has become evil. This vision becomes a stage, complete with the chance to get a Game Over. Yet, despite her mowing down hundreds of enemies during the dream sequence without any noticable effect, the final shot she makes against the corrupted hero somehow causes her to shoot him in the present as well.
- A scene in Quest For Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness has the main character experiencing a hallucination and seeing the Dark One's rise to power. (Near the end, if the player loses the game, the Dark One does rise, mirroring the sequence exactly.)
- Chrono Trigger has a more literal example: when the party finds a computer in a post-apocalyptic world, it shows them a visual record of the "Day of Lavos" from 300 years ago, almost giving one of the characters a nervous breakdown.
- Leader's incredibly long infodump in Mother 3, which storyboards both the previous apocalypse and the forthcoming extra bad apocalypse.
- Alexandra Roivas receives a vision of the potential apocalypse in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem caused by the Ancient she has unleashed to defeat Pious's Ancient.
- Noticeably missing in Drakengard. Everyone loves to talk about it, but no one seems to know precisely what will happen. The hierarch Verdelet flip-flops from thinking the Seeds of Resurrection will cause untold catastrophe to thinking it involves ascending to a higher reality. And the Big Bad has more important things to worry about, like dancing.
- Done in Mass Effect, where you're treated to a detailed lecture on how the last TEOTWAWKI occurred, and then reminded in no uncertain terms that the next one is just around the corner.
Web Comics
Western Animation
- When Batman archvillain Ra's Al Ghul lays out his plan to destroy humanity in Batman The Animated Series, it is accompanied by a series of detailed stills showing the world being saturated by the Lazarus Pits, in chaos, and finally at "a blessed peace."
- At the end of the first episode of the 1994 Fantastic Four cartoon, Puppet Master takes one last stab at ultimate power and imagines ruling the world, complete with montage.
- In a fifth-season episode of The Batman, Lex Luthor uses one of these (in sepia tone) to describe his vision for the world.
- Teen Titans used this at least twice. In "Revolution", Mad Mod - who has control of the city and most the Titans on the run - gives a captured Robin a look at what he calls "coming attractions" (possibly a subtle reference to a scene in Nineteen Eighty Four, which the episode takes much of its inspiration from). On a more serious note, in "Birthmark", Slade transports Raven into a devastated world that she is destined to bring about, a vision which actually comes true in the season finale.
Slade: Skies will burn. Flesh will turn to stone. The sun will set on your world, never to rise again!
- A similar, but longer and considerably more elaborate speech is delivered to Superman by Darkseid in the final episode of Justice League Unlimited.
- In the second season finale, The Question has images of the end of the world projected directly into his mind as a form of interrogation.
- And in the Justice League Grand Finale, there's a brief image of what'll happen to Earth when the Thanagarians activate the hyperspace bypass - basically, the planet implodes. Worryingly, Batman's response is "Ingenious!"
- In an episode of Galactic Guardians, Darkseid - in a plot to hijack the space station of Star City and outfit it with weapons - almost literally Storyboards The Apocalypse in a scene made relatively well-known by Seanbaby's website:
Seanbaby: Darkseid goes all out. A lot of villains tell everyone about their plan, but Darkseid filmed an elaborate dramatization of it. Look at those special effects. He didn't just have a computer rendered picture of what his battle station will look like, he got actors to run around on an airfield while planes were getting vaporized.
- A tongue-in-cheek Storyboarding appears in the first episode of Sam And Max Freelance Police, showing the fate of the world's cereal market at stake.
- In the Rankin Bass production of Return of the King, Samwise becomes the bearer of the One Ring, which tries to corrupt him with a vision of a world in which he has become all powerful. Of course, it being Samwise, this vision involves innocuous things like turning all of the orcs into cute animals and the entire world into a flower garden. Samwise realizes how silly the idea of him being an Evil Overlord would be and is able to resist the allure of the Ring.
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