"I conceal it
I can see it
I can feel it coming
The beginning of the twist."
- Beginning of the Twist, The Futureheads
The Untwist is what happen when
Chekhovs Gun looks like a
Red Herring.
For example, suppose Alice has been murdered. The only other two people in the house at the time are Bob and Carol. Bob acts mean and surly to the detective, doesn't treat Carol well, and reveals he had both a motive and opportunity to kill Alice. Carol, by contrast, is very polite and helpful, and is visibly upset at Alice's death.
A
Genre Savvy viewer would quickly conclude that Carol is the murderer and Bob is innocent. Why? Naturally, the evidence that Bob did it was planted by the author to mislead the audience into drawing a false conclusion. On the other hand, Carol's niceness is seen to be an act to conceal her own guilt.
In many cases, the above description is exactly how it happens (see: most episodes of
CSI). However, sometimes the author pulls a fast one - it turns out
Bob is guilty after all! All that evidence against him, which the reader dismissed on the grounds of being too obvious, is actually correct and valid. Furthermore, Carol cooperated with the detective because she's that sort of person, and she was genuinely sad that Alice died.
And thus is illustrated the essence of
The Untwist. The author drops a large number of hints at the start of the story which a
Genre Savvy reader assumes to be obvious
red herrings, and thus is surprised when, later on, it turns out that the simplest, most obvious explanation was the correct one. Somehow, the author has managed to
subvert the reader's expectations by not subverting their expectations, or something.
I-->n most cases,
The Untwist is the unintentional result of a writer being heavy-handed with
foreshadowing, such that the reader assumes simple hints are red herrings. It
can be done deliberately, but doing it deliberately and
well requires a great deal of skill. A common way of doing it deliberately is by playing a
Discredited Trope completely straight.
No examples, please. Any plot twist can become The Untwist to a sufficiently paranoid reader.
