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The Time Bomb is one of the tropes popular in all forms of film and TV writing, as it adds a sense of urgency to the story — whatever the characters must do, they must do it within the time limit or the bomb will go off (the hostage will be killed, the poison will be released...).
The hero will succeed in their task only within a few seconds of the deadline - especially if there is an actual digital readout involved, counting down the seconds until Sudden Doom. If the hero is James Bond, the time remaining when the clock stops will, of course, always be 0:07. For other heroes, three seconds and one second seem common. (There's even the movie Canadian Bacon, where the clock's stopped at .7 seconds.)
Often there's the illusion of Real Time when we see the timer, but if you count the seconds and watch the clock, a 30 second countdown can often stretch as long as two minutes. Or it may ramp up and tick off far more time than has passed. (See Magic Countdown.)
In many cases, the bomb will not go off until one or two seconds after the timer reaches zero, even though the timer itself had tenths- or hundredths-of-a-second precision.
There are also rare instances where the bomb isn't defused: instead, it is made so that the explosion doesn't affect anyone (except maybe the bad guys). If this happens, there will be an Outrun The Fireball moment.
Examples
Anime
- The countdown to Graceland's destruction in Coyote Ragtime Show is not only displayed on the bomb itself, but publicly announced daily by the Galactic President.
- Constantly in Spiral. Almost every other episode seems to be about some kind of time bomb.
- Bloody-X gives you a 2 hour time limit.
- ...and the bomb itself...
Film
- The Star Trek films have used this. The Wrath Of Khan (the Genesis device activating), The Search For Spock (the Enterprise self-destruct mechanism) and Nemesis (the Scimitar activating its primary weapon) all feature variants of this trope. This extends to the television series as well.
- Beverly Hills Ninja, Cloak & Dagger, and Speed are all movies where the bomb goes off without hurting anyone, although the last wasn't a time bomb per se.
- Galaxy Quest subverts this beautifully when the characters defuse an overloading reactor with about 20 seconds to spare...but to their consternation the countdown keeps going till it reaches 1 and stops. They then comment, relieved, that "it always did that on the show" the real ship was based on.
- Subverted in The Naked Gun 2 1/2: an attempt to stop the bomb actually increases the rate of countdown. When all is lost, the fleeing hero trips over the power cord, deactivating the bomb.
- The Simpsons Movie. Homer actually causes the timer to advance when he kicks the bomb dejectedly. In another scene, a bomb defusal robot shoots itself with Chief Wiggum's gun, in a scene similar to one from Full Metal Jacket.
- The Digimon movie "Our War Game" had the clock stop with it fluctuating at .00 and .01 seconds. However, this was .005(approx.) before the missile landed and destroyed Tokyo
- Subverted in Lethal Weapon 3: a foolhardy attempt by Riggs to defuse the bomb speeds up the counter. The only thing left to do is run, and let the building be destroyed. On a related note: why do the heroes never, ever just pull the detonators out of the plastic explosives?
- The nuclear bomb in the James Bond movie Goldfinger, which stops with 0:07 seconds left.
- The bundle of explosives in The Mask, which The Mask disposes of by swallowing it.
- The nuclear Self Destruct Mechanism in The Andromeda Strain (1971), which is disarmed with 8 seconds to spare.
- In the novel, it was 34 seconds, to which Dr Hall says "Plenty of time. Hardly even exciting." But not to the people still stuck on Level V; "... to improve the subterranean detonation characteristics of the atomic device, all air is evacuated from Level V, beginning 30 seconds before detonation." Hall's response: "Oh."
- In the So Bad Its Alright The Shadow movie starring one of the Baldwin brothers (This Troper just can't remember which) there is a nuclear device (in a pre world war II 1930's setting America) which was going to blow up in 13 hours or something similar, but of course tampering with it trying to shut it off lead to ... 0.1 seconds left on the timer. Hooray!
- Disney's Peter Pan. The bomb Captain Hook leaves for the title character, which is set to go off at 6 o'clock.
- Why isn't Stargate on here yet?
- 1986 movie The Manhattan Project. The radiation from the home-made nuclear weapon causes its own electronic timer to count down with increasing speed. It is finally stopped, reading 7:16:45, which refers to the date, July 16th, 1945, of the first atomic bomb test detonation.
- Broken Arrow. Hale jumps off the train pressing the cancel button on the remote trigger exactly at two seconds.
- In Armageddon, this happens not once, but twice in a row. The first time, the timer on nuclear bomb is remotely cancelled from Earth, only to be restarted after a direct order from the President. Back on board the asteroid, the bomb is stopped again manually, the timer freezing at 2.46 seconds.
- Face/Off. Castor Troy (as Sean Archer) casually disarms his own bomb with 2 seconds left on the clock.
- In the British disaster film Juggernaut (aka Terror on the Britannic), an extortionist puts 6 identical , booby-trapped bombs on a cruise ship, promising the plans to defuse them if a ransom is paid by dawn tomorrow. Cue Richard Harris para-drops in to try to defuse them.
Live Action TV
- In 24, the Time Bomb actually went off and did some fairly major damage to CTU.
- Alias, too many times to count
- The second season opening episode of War Of The Worlds, in which the base of the Blackwood Project was blown sky-high.
- An episode of Robocop: The Series involved the title character having to dispose a nuclear bomb in the OCP building, having to align two triangle-shaped switches into an hourglass. This is accomplished with (you guessed it) one second to spare.
- Subverted in NCIS, where a military bomb disposal officer confidently proclaims that he has several minutes to defuse a bomb, which promptly blows up in his face in a cloud of dust a la The Kobayashi Maru. His training officer then explains that one should never assume the timer on a bomb is accurate and smugly comments that "the bad guys watch movies too."
- Subverted again in a different episode when Gibbs finds a bomb under a bed in the house they are investigating. The team races out of the house and dives to hide behind a car. Over an hour later the bomb goes off just as the ME arrives to ask what they're all doing sitting there.
- Stargate SG-1, "Resurrection"; the bomb is Imported Alien Phlebotinum. Also "Avatar", where the SGC's built-in Self Destruct Mechanism is used in this way by invaders in the virtual reality game.
- Then, there's the episode "Fail Safe". In an attempt to destroy/divert an asteroid headed towards Earth, SG-1 places a bomb on it. Unfortunately, Carter then discovers that the asteroid itself is a huge bomb, and their bomb will trigger an explosion large enough to destroy Earth. With only a few minutes to go before the timer reaches zero, the team climbs back out to their bomb, only to discover that the control mechanism has been damaged by a falling rock. To make matters worse, instead of the classic red-wire, blue-wire, it turns out that all of the control wires are the same color; as O'Neill puts it, "This is a very poorly designed bomb!"
- In an early episode of Sledge Hammer, Sledge has to find and disarm a time bomb hidden in a clock store.
- MacGyver featured ridiculously large numbers of time bombs, especially in earlier episodes. Pretty much the first MacGyvering we see is done to keep a time-delayed missile from exploding. There was even a time bomb in the opening credits, and an entire early episode focused on defusing some bombs on a cruise liner. Handily, Mac happens to have served in Vietnam as an expert in bomb defusing.
- The "MacGruber" skits from Saturday Night Live, which are themselves a parody of MacGyver, always take place in a locked room with some sort of time bomb. One of his allies (Maya Rudolph, later Kristen Wiig) is always on hand, counting down the time on her watch. However, the bomb always ends up exploding.
- In the Star Trek The Original Series episodes "Obsession", "The Immunity Syndrome" and "The Doomsday Device", the bomb was used by the Enterprise crew to destroy a Monster Of The Week. In each case crew members or the Enterprise had to get out of the blast radius before the bomb detonated.
- Leobon claims to have planted one in the first season of Battlestar Galactica, but he's a perpetual liar who loves to Mind Frak people.
- Played straight more than once in Chuck ("Chuck Versus the Intersect", "Chuck Versus the Sandworm") but also subverted, as Chuck and Sarah encounter a large device with a countdown timer that they believe to be a bomb. After an unsuccessful attempt to defuse the bomb, as the timer nears zero, they share a Now Or Never Kiss, but the device turns out not to be a bomb. All three of those in the first nine episodes of the series. Also played straight in "Chuck Versus the Third Dimension", in which the device has to be taken away from the crowd.
- Buffy The Vampire Slayer had a time bomb in "The Zeppo" built by undead school sociopath Jack O'Toole - in a game of chicken, Xander convinces Jack to disarm it, pointing out being undead wouldn't be as much fun in little pieces.
Video Games
- Done and re-done in the 2D Metroid series, where at the end of each 2-D game (and at the beginning of Super Metroid) to boot, where after the Big Bad is defeated, Samus has 5 minutes of Real Time to escape wherever she's in before a time bomb explodes. Always followed by an Outrun The Fireball moment as we see Samus' ship escape the explosion with seconds to spare, regardless of how much time was actually left on the clock (This Troper did Super Metroid with 2 minutes to spare once).
- Metroid Prime 2 has Samus escaping the Dark World before it is reabsorbed. Naturally, her Evil Counterpart is blocking the exit. Cue timed Final Boss battle.
- They pulled that same trick in Metroid: Fusion where you think that after beating the SA-X silly, you set off the bomb yourself that you're homefree. Nuhuh. One little old Metroid escaped and.. Has grown into an Omega.
- The Game Over screen in Final Fight features one.
- Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow had an interesting example. A bomb set to release GM smallpox into the ventilation in Los Angeles Airport has only a few minutes left on the timer, not enough to defuse it or get it anywhere containable. Sam's solution? Carry it into the main terminal building and just leave it lying on the floor. The bomb squad gets called in and they contain the blast Just In Time.
- In Illusion of Gaia you fight That One Boss, the vampire couple, with one of your best friends strapped to one!
- Call Of Duty games feature this trope in multiplayer. In Modern Warfare, planting the bomb involves opening up a briefcase filled with stacked C4 and punching in a code on a cell phone (whose screen is covered with a sticker that says BOOM.) World At War, the bomb is a few blocks of explosive, and is armed by winding a key several times, much like a clock. In both cases, the timer is always 30 seconds, with no way to change it. Also, disarming the bomb seems to be as easy as doing the exact same thing as arming it - and performing that action a third time will rearm it with the timer reset, ad nauseum.
- Subverted in the Beginning of Halo 2. You can take as much time as you want, but when you reach the bomb and killed all the aliens protecting it, a cutscene starts that has the Master Chief hurrying to the bomb and getting Cortana into the bombs computer.
Master Chief: How much time was left?
Cortana: You DON'T wanna know!
- In Trauma Center Under the Knife has you disarming one.
- In Syphon Filter, the first level of the first game has you racing to disarm one at the bottom of a subway station. The second level of the game has you trying to get out of the same subway station after you fail to stop the bomb.
Western Animation
- In the Futurama episode "A Big Ball of Garbage" the gang installs a time bomb on the giant garbage ball set to blow up in 25 minutes. Unfortunately, the timer was installed upside down, so it is actually set for 52 seconds.
- Semi-lampshaded in the Justice League episode "Wild Cards", where the Joker plants twenty-five time bombs all over Las Vegas, challenges the league to find them, sends the Royal Flush Gang to stop them, and sets the entire thing up as a reality show, complete with actual timer on the screen.
- Subverted: The league finds most of the bombs, but two go off:
- The Joker manually detonates one and nearly kills Green Lantern.
- The other one, the final one, is grabbed by the Flash and moved to the desert while it's going off.
- A Batman The Animated Series episode involved the Clock King using a portable device to slow down time so he could sneak in and plant a bomb. Batman winds up grabbing the bomb, slowing time down and driving it out of town. There's a nice shot of Batman holding the bomb as it detonates in super-slow motion.
- Played for laughs in an episode of Tale Spin:
Baloo: "How long before that bomb goes off?"
Wildcat: "We should still have five minutes!"
*building explodes*
Wildcat: "Of course, my watch is a little slow..."
- Multiple times on Totally Spies. Including one time when the Big Red Button to stop the bomb was easily accessible, but Clover, Sam, and Britney had their bodies slowed down to the point that they would never make it to the bomb in time. They are saved by Alex.
Other
- Snape, Snape, Severus Snape.
- Including it just because it was so epic: in one script for the now cancelled The Flash movie, Vandal Savage declared he'd done this. If the Flash, the "Fastest Man Alive" couldn't find it in time, it would kill his wife. Flash checks literally everywhere for it, but couldn't find it in time, and had to escape, saving himself and not carrying her away. A few decades later, Savage offhand mentions: "What bomb? I used a rocket to blow up Wifey-Poo".
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