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The resolution of a plot (usually but not always for a Speculative Fiction story) by the sudden revelation of some important detail which has been deliberately hidden from the viewer. Had this detail been made known at the beginning of the story, much or all of the dramatic tension would have been missing from the plot. Usually, it hasn't been hidden from the "viewpoint" character(s). Sometimes, it has been hidden from one character, so the character will be just as surprised as we are.
In skilled hands, a Tomato Surprise can make for a stunning ending with a powerful impact. Unfortunately, in the hands of a hack or novice writer, it will almost always come off as a cheat or a deus ex machina.
The trope name comes from a set of writer's guidelines distributed circa 1980 by Analog magazine, written by its then-editor, George Scithers. The guidelines named the trope and gave as one of the examples hiding the fact that the hero is, in fact, a tomato. Obviously, this trope is easier to implement in print than on screen.
See Planet Of The Apes Ending, Tomato In The Mirror.
Examples:
Live Action TV
- The Twilight Zone:
- The second-season episode "The Invaders" uses a Tomato Surprise to put a trademark Twist Ending on the story.
- Similarly, the episode "Eye of the Beholder" goes visibly out of its way to hide a critical fact about the setting of the story and the people in it from the viewer — until the last moment.
- The revamped Battlestar Galactica has done this several times by having supposedly human guest star characters, like the journalist D'Anna Biers, suddenly revealed as Cylons. In a more powerful variation on this plot, they've also done Cylon reveals as the Tomato In The Mirror.
- In "Tempests", an episode of the new Outer Limits series, a spaceship is attacked by aliens. The main character hallucinates that he is actually back home, suffering from hallucinations that he is on the crew of the ship. Torn between the two realities, he finally accepts the ship as real and executes a daring escape. It is then revealed that both worlds were a hallucination created by the aliens, who had already captured and mind-controlled the entire crew.
- A plot similar to this happens to Commander Riker in the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Frame of Mind".
- And to Teal'c in Stargate SG-1's "The Changeling", though instead of alien mind-control, he's just having two different injury-induced hallucinations.
- The Lost episode "Walkabout" hinges on the revelation at its end that Locke was in a wheelchair before the plane crash. In all flashbacks he is sitting at a desk or table, or lying in bed.
- Classically awful original-series Star Trek episodes with a Tomato Surprise include The Squire of Gothos and Catspaw.
Literature
- The Agatha Christie novel The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd is a murder mystery with a Tomato Surprise ending. Some readers might find this clever, others might feel cheated — there was a long and difficult debate about it in the pages of the London Times Literary Supplement the year it was published, difficult thanks to the debaters' desire to avoid spoilers.
- Novelist Alistair MacLean had a variation on this where the narrator would simply omit to mention certain essential pieces of Back Story. Done most effectively in Fear Is The Key, in which the narrator, having shot his way out of his own murder trial, taken a hostage, and led a high-speed car chase all over the countryside, reveals that it's all been a show put on for the hostage's benefit.
- Many science fiction and fantasy novels use this strategy. A particularly good example is Emma Bull's Bone Dance, in which a vital fact
 about the protagonist is very cleverly concealed from the reader.
- In Sheri Tepper's novel The Family Tree, the story is told from two disconnected points of view through most of the novel, until it is revealed when the two groups meet that the second set of characters are all talking animals. Then shortly thereafter we find out that the talking animals' dumb beasts of burden are actually human beings.
- One of Robert Sheckley's short stories appears to show two men high on drugs beginning to hallucinate that they are insects... ...when they really are insects, who have just come down off a really intense LSD peak during which they hallucinated that they were primates.
- Similar is a short story by Julio Cortázar, in which a man suffers a motorcycle accident and begins having hallucinations that he is an ancient Mesoamerican warrior about to be sacrificed by the Aztecs. The resolution is much the same: it ends with an Aztec priest cutting his heart out, as he hallucinates about a strange world far in the future.
- Bruce Coville's Unicorn Chronicles, where it turns out that the Hunter clan includes everyone who has Hunter as a last name, including the heroine, a previous victim of Only One Name whose last name is now conveniently revealed.
- actually, they mention in passing that not all people with the last name hunter are from that clan. Just that unicorn hunters have that last name.
- A Len Deighton short story in the Declarations Of War anthology ends with the revelation that it is not in fact set in the future, but during Roman times.
- Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge". A Confederate sympathizer is to be hung from Owl Creek Bridge. The rope breaks, he escapes his captors, runs all day and night, finally gets home, sees his loving wife, and then dies, as his neck is broken by the noose that is still attached to the Owl Creek Bridge, thus revealing that he imagined the entire escape.
- The above example is also shown in the psychological horror film Jacobs Ladder.
- It was also
stolen winked at in an episode of short-lived sci-fi weirdness show VR.5, where a character in a gas chamber receives a last-minute pardon and has a reunion with his family before we find out it was All Just a Dream.
- Neil Gaiman's short story "A Study in Emerald" can be described as Sherlock Holmes meets HP Lovecraft, but that's not the twist. The story gives the impression that the narrator is Dr. Watson and his detective roommate is Sherlock Holmes. Actually, the detective is Dr. Moriarty and the narrator is Sebastian Moran, who was The Dragon in Doyle's stories; the two murderers they're chasing are Holmes and Watson, and Holmes is somewhere between an Anti Villain and a Well Intentioned Extremist.
- In My Best Friend Is Invisible from R. L. Stein's Goosebumps series, Sammy ends up with an invisible friend named Brent. The twist is that Brent turns out be a human, while Sammy turns out to be a member of an alien species. The story apparently occurs in a time where humans are considered to be an "endangered species". Naturally, this twist ending is absent from the TV adaption of the book.
- This is a common twist in Goosebumps, especially the "protagonists are really monsters/aliens" version. It often has little to nothing to do with the rest of the book; note that they were able to cut out the twist in the above example without losing anything.
- Famed short-story writer O. Henry was the master of this trope, and used it in nearly all his stories.
- "The Gift of the Magi." It's It Was His Sled now, but in the original story, we don't learn till the end that the fella sold his watch for hair combs.
- "Lost on Dress Parade." A gentleman of modest means pretends, every so often, to be someone richer and more aristocratic than he is. One time when he's doing this act, he sees a beautiful woman who appears to be in a lower income bracket than his true one. He treats her nicely but plays up his act. It turns out she's really a rich, single woman who is looking for someone who isn't a shallow rich fellow — which is what he looked like to her, even though he was nice otherwise.
- And then he wrote a story about a woman returning to theatrical life. She had done a tightrope act and threw her garter into the audience each show. (Yes, that kind of theater.) But then she decided she wanted to be respectable, and became a schoolteacher under an assumed name and became engaged to a respectable fellow. This man had a box with a very special, very secret treasure. Once she became engaged, she decided to see what was in it. It held one of her old garters...
- This troper remembers an assignment in high school that brought the concept of the Tomato Surprise (though not called such, of course) into sharp clarity. Assigned a story called The Dark Ones about someone being chased by the titular antagonists, the segment we were shown ended with a spear hitting the protagonist. The assignment was to write an ending, after which we would be given the remainder of the story. This troper used it for your average sci-fi aliens/mutants/monsters thing. It turns out? The protagonist was a whale, the father of a small familial pod being chased by whalers. He's killed; the mother and young escape, but mourn his loss through whale song. It was actually pretty good.
- Given a similar assignment (though one with no "true" ending), the majority of this troper's class made the Distressed Damsel from the first half of the story into the Big Bad for the second half. I suppose we were just a particularly tomato-happy bunch.
- There's a short science fiction story called "The Hunters" in which the world is being invaded by your typical merciless alien invaders who mass murder people and destroy civilization entirely. At the end of the story it is revealed that the "aliens" are humans.
- There's an Ursula K. LeGuin short story called "The Wife's Story," which at first looks like a standard werewolf story but is not.
- In The Five Red Herrings, Dorothy Sayers explicitly says she's omitting the identity of a crucial object from the crime scene, as "an intelligent reader ought to be able to figure it out".
- The great Robert Bloch's short story "The Yougoslaves" (sic) used this: the narrator has thus far seemed to be a perfectly normal, though insanely determined old man. Then he survives what should be lethal wounds, and it's ultimately revealed that he's a vampire.
- In Roald Dahl's The Witches, the first-person narrator explains that he had two personal encounters with witches; he got away safely from the first, but was not so lucky with the second. Not so lucky, that is, in that they transformed him into a mouse.
- And then he massacred them. Yes, thank you, Mr. Dahl, writer of charming kids' stories.
- In the 13th book of Erin Hunter's Warriors series, it took until the end of the 2nd chapter or so to find out that a new main character, Jaykit, was blind.
- Thomas Ligotti's "Notes on the Writing of Horror" is a short story in essay format. It starts as a famous horror writer demonstrates his technique on a basic plot. Each retelling of the story=withing-the-story goes a little more off the rails, perhaps revealing more than the writer means to. By the end, it's clear that the author is: a) a demon; b) insane; c) fucking with the reader; or d) all of the above.
- Several years ago, this troper read a short story (the title escapes me) which has aliens shape-shifting into the "native intelligent species" of earth to study them. One injured alien apparently recounts himself flying in a squadron of fighter planes and being shot down by surface guns. Only at the end of the story is it revealed that the alien had actually taken the form of a migrating duck.
- One of Isaac Asimov's short stories The Segregationist, consists largely of a doctor acting disgusted at how a patient wants robotic organs and ranting about how humans and robots should stick to their own kind. It's not revealed until the very end that the doctor is a robot.
- In Louise Cooper's novel Infanta, the very young, seemingly sweet and innocent princess turns out to be the human avatar of the demon that the heroine has been hunting down all along. In a further twist, she kills and eats the heroine's original prime suspect. Oddly enough, this could also be interpreted as a Devil In Plain Sight: Several minor clues as to the demon's identity are dropped throughout the book.
- Diana Wynne Jones' book Power of Three has a Tomato Surprise revealed halfway in the book - the main characters are small people who live in our world, and the giants they see are ordinary humans.
- The novel The King's Thief combines this with Unreliable Narrator, as for most of the book, the narrator Gen seems to be a classic Street Rat, but he's eventually revealed to be a somewhat spoiled young aristocrat on a diplomatic mission.
- At the end of the seventh book of the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, it turns out Harry is a horcrux (an object that holds part of one's soul and makes it's owner immortal until it is destroyed) of the Big Bad. But that's not the Tomato surprise, yet. He kills himself to make Voldemort mortal again, only to discover he himself was immortal as well, as Voldemort is a pseudo-horcrux of Harry's. That means if Harry dies, Voldemort becomes mortal. And if Voldemort dies, Harry becomes mortal. Thus, "either must die at hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives", and the one who dies first is the one who undoubtedly wins (as long as Voldemort's other horcruxes were dealt with). Had Harry known this at the end of book 4 (where he becomes immortal until Voldemort dies), the whole tension and plot of the series would have been ruined.
- Science-fiction writer Randall Garrett's "Despoilers of the Golden Empire" contains the Tomato Surprise to end all Tomato Surprises. While the story is a wonderful read, this troper had wonder whether the Tomato Surprise was justified, and given that Garrett includes an apologia supporting it with the story this troper suspects he wasn't the first.
Video Games
- In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, TEC tells Peach about Grodus's plan for her. During this scene, it fades out and in again, so we cannot read what he said. We finally find out towards the end of the game.
- In the original Metroid, if players completed the game in a sufficient amount of time then Samus Aran (who had until this point been wearing a huge suit of cyborgy armour) would be revealed to be a woman, making her the first ever (humanoid) female protagonist of a video game.
- This particular example also spawned (or at least named) its own trope, which is also used in the example below.
- The Fan Vid Haloid, featuring a certain pair of armored badasses (Samus and Master Chief) taking on both the Covenant and each other, with plenty of sexual tension to go around, only to reveal at the very end that The Spartan-II wasn't Master Chief, but rather Nicole, the guest fighter from Dead Or Alive 4. This, of course, mirrors the more well-known Tomato Surprise of Samus being a woman herself. This does not defuse the sexual tension. Quite the opposite.
- Adam Cadre's Interactive Fiction work 9:05 has you waking up in a panic and receiving a phone call admonishing you on being late for work. You can go through the (logical) motions of taking a shower, getting dressed, eating breakfast, driving to work and doing your job...until you suddenly are arrested and the game ends when it's revealed that under the bed was the corpse of the actual owner of the house, who you killed yesterday while burgling the place. The game comments on how idiotic your actions were, but who were you to know?
- Used not once, but twice in another interactive fiction, the very popular Photopia. In one part, the protagonist seems to be a normal, if Mary Sue-esque, astronaut, until you take off your spacesuit and feel the wind ruffle your wings. Later, the connection of this to the other plot is explained when it's revealed that these segments were actually stories a babysitter is telling the young girl, with her as protagonist. It explains the Mary Sue-ness and also why the narrator has been defining words for you, SAT-style.
- In Planescape: Torment, the way to the final part of the game is actually located right at the start of the game. When it turns out one of your party members knew this all along, he simply replies that you didn't ask.
- Colonel Roy Campbell from Metal Gear Solid returns in the sequel, or so we think. However, after Raiden uploads the virus to the GW AI, he becomes increasingly erratic, nonsensical, and often breaks the Fourth Wall. Then Raiden happens to mention that he's never met the Colonel in-person. A few minutes later, Otacon confirms that the "Colonel" has been an AI copy of the real Roy Campbell all along.
- Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath has the titular Bounty Hunter hero saving up for money he needs to get an operation. Big Bad Corrupt Corporate Executive Sekto offers the reward on anyone who can bring him a Steef, an incredibly rare, nearly extinct creature, a bounty which Stranger does not take, despite the fact that the amount of Moolah offered would be useful in paying for his operation. This prompts Sekto to send his Mooks after Stranger, on suspicion he knows where the Steef is hiding. Following a Hopeless Boss Fight, Stranger is captured, and the Surgery Bid that has been sitting in your inventory the whole game is found by the Mooks, revealing the surgery was intended to convert Stranger from a quadruped to a bipedal creature. Removal of Stranger's boots reveal that Stranger himself is the Steef, in addition to later revealing him as the Chosen One, who would eventually defeat the Demon who had made the Mongo River run dry (Sekto had built a large dam prior to the events of the game). Ignore how Stranger would manage to hide an equestrian lower half without having difficulty walking; he just does. Later in the game this Trope is used again when It is revealed that Sekto is actually a Face Hugging parasite controlling the actions of the original guardian of the Obligatory Native Tribe, who also happens to be a Steef. Sekto's "Head" is later seen swimming down the restored river, hinting at an (unlikely as the company has stopped making games) sequel.
- In Ever17, Takeshi's real face isn't shown during the first playthrough, to conceal the fact that the two "Takeshi"s presented are different persons. This turns out to be a big part of a plan by one of the characters to save his father and friend from a deadly virus.
- This varies based on the order one plays the routes in. If one approaches the final route from Kid's perspective, he also gets tomatoed in the same manner.
- In Soul Nomad And The World Eaters, it is revealed in the last few scenes of the game that the main character is not only a direct descendant of the legendary Lord Median, not only is the mysterious black sword that once held Gig's soul an enchanted demon blade once held by Median which can only be used by his direct family line, but the main character is also a World Eater. Without any sort of build-up in advance.
- In Final Fantasy XI, it is said the beastmen are the spawn of the dark god Promathia. Once you prevent The End Of The World As We Know It in Chains of Promathia, it's revealed that all mortal life on Vana'diel are actually all parts of Promathia's body, the god himself slain by the Emptiness, with Vana'diel being formed by Altana using the Mothercrystal to try and restore him/it, with mortals as the end result. Her tears are also our souls, apparently, or something like that.
- Diablo II: The "Tyrael" Marius was conversing with in the asylum was in fact the Prime Evil Baal.
Film
- M. Night Shyamalan enjoys using these types of endings.
- The Prestige. Many critics were a little miffed when, after a series of fantastically executed plots and illusions, it turned out that the greatest trick of all was executed with the help of an honest-to-god steampunk teleporter. The disturbing implications of this discovery, and the presence of another equally shocking, but less objectionable swerve, meant most viewers didn't feel too bad.
- An alternate interpretation is that the entire thing WAS an illusion, and Angier's great accomplishment was convincing his rival that he actually did real magic. The teleportation is never shown onscreen. At the end, right as said tomato surprise is revealed, the narrator says "Don't be fooled."
- Actually, he says "You want to be fooled."
- Said critics and alternate interpretors should be reminded that the very first shot of the movie is of a field full of top hats. They're all his hat.
- Subverted in Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, when the blind main character reveals his eyes to The Man Behind The Man—implying that he was never blind to begin with—and hands the villain a Fate Worse Than Death. The final scene confirms that the hero is in fact, irrevocably blind.
- Parodied in Neil Simon's "Murder By Death." At the movie's conclusion, each of the detectives smarmily identifies the killer as someone the audience has never heard of, but the detective knows every detail about. Afterwards, the killer removes his mask to reveal someone very obvious, and angrily breaks the fourth wall to explain that he set up the entire situation to point out how annoying it is when they do that: "You introduced characters in the last five pages that were never in the book before!"
Fan Fiction
Western Animation
- Codename: Kids Next Door:
- "Op HOSPITAL": It's Tomato mixed with Continuity Nod in one, as the KND go to a hospital to guard a hospitalized operative. A few minutes from the end, it's revealed that said operative is... Bradley the Skunk from "Operation CAMP", who had been made an honorary operative in that episode. Cree is surprised to find the skunk on a hospital bed when she (and we) expected a regular kid, and Numbuh 4, who had been a bit jealous at Numbuh 3 for claiming to be in love with the injured operative (her exact words were "I love him"), is all "Hey!" when he sees Bradley.
- "Op UNCOOL": The KND go on what they think is a mission to rescue an operative Numbuh 78 that we see get captured by zombies. In fact, we even see her getting kidnapped by a bunch of zombies. Later on, when it transpires that the "Numbuh 78" Numbuhs 2 and 44 are referring to is referring to a trading card, this is Numbuh 5's reaction◊.
- You can probably guess the Tomato from the URL of this animatic.
- The animator even said in an interview that he even reduced his intended main character to just a cameo just to retain the surprise.
- Referenced on The Simpsons when Homer submits this poem to a literary journal:
There once was a rapping tomato
That's right, I said "rapping tomato"
He rapped all day, from April to May
And also, guess what, it was me.
Radio
- In 1976, Bob Vernon read one of his "Stranger than True" stories thusly: "5 years ago today, working girl Lois Goldman of Orange, New Jersey was arrested for taking a large record player out of the WNBC studios. That large record player was BIGGIE WILSON!" (This referred to another WNBC DJ of the time, who was celebrating his fifth wedding anniversary.) Here's the aircheck with that story.
- This trope is almost perfect for audio dramas: you can hide obvious physical features of primary, present characters by simply not mentioning them. A minor example is at the beginning of Paradise Lost in Space where an exchange between two characters speculating about life on other planets ends abruptly when one of the characters off-offhandedly mentions their antennae - the entire scene occurs on another planet.
Anime
- The Big O uses actual tomatoes, though in a metaphorical manner; one of the final episodes ends on the main antagonist having come to a realization about his forgotten origins, declaring to himself "I'm one of the tomatoes".
- In Naru Taru, Action Girl Shiina can't develop a mental link with her mon Hoshimaru. And that's because it's not her mon, but her friend Takeo's. She does NOT take it well.
- Although the easiest way to explain Zeon in Gash Bell is that he's his Evil Twin, the nature of their relationship is kept deliberately hidden throughout the series, and the anime ended without resolving this at all, leading many fans to speculate on what Zeon exactly was. Near the end of the Faudo arc in the manga, Zeon reveals that he is actually Gash's older twin brother, and the reason for his hatred of Gash is because Gash led a seemingly carefree life while Zeon was forced to undergo brutal training. But then Gash is able to show Zeon that his life wasn't exactly peaches and cream either, and Zeon regrets his actions, although not in time to save his book. It was very poignant really, definitely a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for the manga that the anime lacked.
Music
- Used to powerful effect in the video for Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up". The video is shot from first-person viewpoint, showing a clubgoer going about their routine... which starts with a line of cocaine and later involves binge-drinking, vomiting into a toilet, and accosting a woman in a bar. At the end, however, the camera finally turns to a mirror, and the clubgoer is revealed... as a woman. Most viewers will likely find their assessment of the preceding events jarred significantly by the discovery.
Comic Books
- This page showcases some particularly clumsy Tomato Surprises from old comics.
- In the Daredevil Story Arc Decalogue, citizens of Hell's Kitchen talk about the impact the vigilante has had on their lives, particularly in the wake of his ascension as the new Kingpin. At the climax of the arc, one of the participants in the discussion finally draws attention to the fact that Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) himself was in their midst the entire time, having used his ninja skills to pass himself off as one of them until he was called out.
Flash Animation
- Dirty doll creations take on Red Riding Hood features the classical tale being read from a book for the viewer, with the scenes played out as being told. At the end, we find out that the teller is in fact the wolf of the story, who has just defeated the hunter.
- Dirty Doll Creations -> a.k.a. Granfaloon.
Machinma
- Red Vs Blue Reconstruction 16: MAJOR spoiler alert! "Church...there's no such thing as ghosts. You're one of them. You're an A.I. You...are the Alpha."
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