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Guess what she looks like under those bandages.
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" of the character(s) or sometimes, it has been hidden from "one" character, so that subject 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 an Ass Pull.
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, The All Concealing I.
Examples:
open/close all folders
- 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.
- But don't worry, she finds hers eventually. It's a bit larger than the others, though.
- 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.
- In the novel/manga/anime series Slayers, Lina and Gourry meet a legendary hero, Rezo the Red Priest. Rezo has dedicated his life to finding a cure for his blindness. For some reason, ordinary healing spells that cure blindness in other people do not work on Rezo. Then you discover that this is because the Demon Lord Shabranigdu was sealed inside Rezo's eyes, and that if Rezo ever opened his eyes, the Demon Lord would return to destroy the world.
- Utawarerumono - The show is revealed to be in the far future, with the world's race as a result of genetic experiments, everything resembles the feudal era.
- Ef A Tale Of Memories - Pulled an awesome example, revealed in the second season of the anime (first episode_. Revealed at the very end of the game). Hiro, Miyako, and Yuuko are not in the same city as Renji, Chihiro, and Yuu. The two cities are both named Otowa, both have churches and schools. But one is located in Japan, the other is located in Australia.
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.
- The Warhammer4000 comic Damnation Crusade tells the story of three different Black Templar Space Marines: A neophyte, a battle brother, and a Dreadnought. In the very end, it is revealed that all three were in fact the same person, during different stages of his life.
Fan Fiction
- M. Night Shyamalan enjoys using these types of endings.
- In Ben X, Ben's online girlfriend Scarlite actually left the train station without recognizing him; the version of her that kept him from killing himself and helped him develop his plan was a hallucination.
- In Brazil, we discover at the end of the film that everything after the protagonist's torture begins, including his rescue, has been a hallucination.
- In Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, the narrator who we all thought was Christopher Lee was really an oompa-loompa.
- Fallen: The end reveals that the narrator all along has been the demon Azrukhal, who has been narrating in Denzel Washington's voice because the story is being told as the demon has possessed Denzel's body.
- In Fight Club, Tyler Durden is actually a hallucination/alternate personality of the nameless protagonist.
- Identity, starring John Cusack. The main characters are all the personalities of a serial killer and most of the movie takes place within his mind
- The end of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.
- Parodied in Neil Simon's Murder By Death. At the movie's conclusion, each detective smarmily identifies the killer as someone the audience has never heard of, but whom the detective knows every detail about. Afterward, 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!"
- And then, after the rest of the characters leave, pulls off this mask to reveal yet another face.
- My Bloody Valentine (2009): Tom, the last victim of Harry, develops a split personality that is a clone (or perhaps is possessed by the ghost of) Harry, even though he believes Axel to be the pickaxe killer.
- 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.
- Borden's complete devotion to his craft, revealing his own surprise alongside Angier: he was two people the entire time, a set of magician twins. The magic machine of Angier's was only used to juxtapose the values of the two men. (Although "values" is a loose term for either of them.)
- So...does Return Of The Killer Tomatoes even warrant a mention? Tara is a tomato.
- The Wachowskis pulled one (sort of...) with the identity of Racer X in the Speed Racer movie: Racer X reveals to Speed that he is NOT his thought-dead brother Rex, but later it's revealed that he IS Rex, but had plastic surgery done in addition to his masked persona. Mostly done to throw anyone who saw the original series a curve ball.
- 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.
- 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.
- Endless Night is another Christie example, and a particularly striking one.
- The Poirot mystery Murder On The Orient Express is arguably of this type as well.
- The Tommy and Tuppence short story "A Pot of Tea", the first case in Partners in Crime, features a young man coming to Blunt's Brilliant Detectives to ask for help in finding a girl who has vanished. She's actually an old friend of Tuppence's; they cooked up the plot between them to a) get publicity for the agency and b) provoke the young man into proposing to the girl.
- The Neil Gaiman short story Murder Mysteries features as the main character an archangel, created by God to serve as the living embodiment of the Vengeance of the Lord, who is tasked by God to solve the murder of another angel. In the end, though, it turns out that the culprit was God Himself, as part of a grand scheme to eventually cause the archangel Lucifer to rebel. Finally, although it's never explicitly stated, we learn that the person the Angel was telling his story too is a murderer himself, and the Angel was there to exact his vengeance upon him. Gaiman comments in the notes that there's even a clue in the title of the story - i.e. that the murder in the Angel's story wasn't the only one.
- Another Neil Gaiman story, A Study in Emerald. is a crossover between the Sherlock Holmes and Cthulhu Mythos universes. It's a re-telling of A Study in Scarlet, except the blood around the room is green. A familiarity with both Conan Doyle's and HP Lovecraft's works is preferable before reading this story. In the end, we find that the narrator is Major (not Colonel) Sebastian Moran, and the detective with whom he is sharing rooms is Moriarty. The two murderers- referred to by Moriarty as "The Tall Man" and "Limping Doctor"- are Holmes and Watson.
- 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.
- 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 VR5, 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.
- An old science fiction story featured a group of aliens who intend to take over earth. They can take the form of any living thing, so they figure that infiltrating society will be easy. They land and take the form of the first humans they see. Then they walk into town, fully expecting to blend into the populace, but are instead immediately arrested. Turns out they landed next to a nudist colony.
- 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.
- The twist is present some TV versions. Sammy and his parents turn around and in backs of their heads there is another face (Voldemort style), and the they claim they'll need to "care for" Brent and then screen fades out...
- 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...
- 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. Le Guin 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 L. 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, The Sight, 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-within-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.
- 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 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, Garrett includes an apologia supporting it.
- The short story Shards is very surreal, and starts with the protagonist awakening in a dark place. Slowly he discovers more about his surroundings, and increasingly weird things begin to happen. It's in first-person and it's clear he's not quite all there, making it difficult for the reader to work out what's really going on around him. The truth is, parts of a human brain - hence the title - have been implanted into a fish in a military experiment. This is why he perceives the world in a weird way and can't seem to interact with anything in the early part of the story - he's in a fishtank, and his brain hasn't yet worked out that he doesn't have hands any more.
- Steven Erikson's Malazan series loves these. For example, at the beginning of the second book, Deadhouse Gates, it is revealed that Cotillion and Ammannas were Dancer and Kellanved.
- Dean Koontz's novel Lightning. Throughout the story, the reader is led to believe that the totalitarian nation using time travel as a weapon is in the modern day, possibly the Soviet Union. Near the end of the book it's revealed that the nation is actually Nazi Germany just before the end of World War II. They're trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction that will allow them to win the war and change history.
- Under The Skin by Michel Faber. The protagonist was a fairly unattractive young woman who kidnapped hitchhikers with an exotic contraption in her car to bring them to a farmhouse for an unknown purpose. She also kept comparing lambs to human children. Then it was revealed that she was an alien using Translation Convention. The word 'human' actually referred to her own species, while the Earth humans were called vodzels, and before the surgical process that made her human-like she was semi-quadrupedical thing that did vaguely resemble a sheep. And the reason why she kidnapped people? Vodzel-flesh is apparently an interstellar delicacy, and as far as she is concerned, the Earth humans are just dumb animals that can make a passing semblance of sentience for the uneducated.
- Iain M. Banks' Use of Weapons conceals an amazing Tomato Surprise with its Anachronic Order, as the plot thread going further into the past finally hits a crucial event in the hero's past. Meanwhile, the plot thread working into the future catches up with one of the few characters who knows the twist...
- It's a shame that the Discworld story Thief Of Time can never be filmed as a movie or miniseries, despite its very cinematic style and action sequences. Why? Well, the fact that the two main characters are actually... let's go with "twins" (it's complicated and time travel's involved) would be spoiled immediately on screen, despite the twist only coming in during the last act of the book.
- In the Magic: the Gathering short story collection "Shadowmoor", one of the stories is "Meme's Tale", in which the titular heroine is forced to flee her goblin family, and has no idea until she glimpses her reflection in a pool that she is an elf.
- This writer mentions this fairly obscure example partly to make a point about the above example: this scenario would appear "unfilmable", but a good way to handle it if creating a video of "Meme's Tale" would be to show Meme as a goblin right up until the moment she looks at her reflection, whereupon she is replaced with her actual form, representing the change in her self-image. Such a method could be used for any such scenario; simply show the viewpoint character as s/he believes him/herself to be.
- Frederick Brown's short story The Sentry is a perfect example of this trope:The story is told from the point of view of an infantry trooper, involved in a war with aliens. After he kills one of these aliens we find out that "Such repulsive creatures they were, with only two arms and two legs, ghastly white skins and no scales." - it turns out out the invading, aggressive horrible aliens are humans, and the sentry isn't..
- A recent New Yorker short story, Daughters of the Moon, ends in a perfect example: The inhabitants of the planets turn out to be woolly mammoths! Albeit clothes-wearing, motorcycle-riding woolly mammoths with an apparent nudity taboo...
- In Charles de Lint's The Blue Girl, there are three narrators: Imogene, Maxine, and Adrian. In Adrian's first chapter, he describes the first time he saw Imogene (who he has a crush on). The sentences "She just looked right through me, the way everyone does" and "For all that was special about her, she paid no more attention to me than anyone else did" just seem like a description of a typical teenage social outcast... until we find out that it was meant literally, because Adrian is a ghost.
- The children's poem The New Kid on the Block by Jack Pretlutsky features a litany of abuses perpetratd by a new neighborhood bully. At the very end, it's revealed that the bully is a girl.
- A few of the Arsene Lupin stories actually use this. The POV character or a protagonist appears to be some normal, often helpless, man who is embroiled in a conflict between Lupin and whoever opposes him. Then the story reveals that said character is actually Lupin is disguise, keeping tabs on the other side.
- Another story (813) had this used as a Crowning Moment Of Awesome: The chief of the Parisian police is Lupin in a cover ID. He managed to get himself elected for the job so that he'd be in charge of trying to arrest himself.
- Below Suspicion by John Dickson Carr has an opening scene from the point of view of a young woman accused of murder. In the narration, the woman desperately thinks to herself that she's not guilty of the crime, and is despairing of anyone believing her. Since this is an internal narrative, the reader can be assured that she is perfectly innocent, and she is. Of the murder she's accused of. She is, in fact, guilty of another murder, and part of her despair is that her perfect alibi for the one she committed has left her open to the accusation of the one she didn't. Gideon Fell, the detective of the story, even lampshades this trope by noting that if anyone had been able to "read the thoughts" of the young woman, they would've seen a completely sincere and truthful plea for her innocence of the murder she didn't commit.
- Robert A Heinlein, "Columbus Was a Dope".
- Judith Merril's infinitely creepy short story "That Only A Mother". The first half is a series of letters from a young woman to her husband, describing the later stages of her pregnancy and how relieved she is that she's given birth to a normal healthy baby, not deformed by radiation like so many are since the war. But, she realizes/reveals, the baby's better than normal: she's a supergenius, able to speak in sentences before she's six months old! The second part is in narrative: the baby's father comes home and realizes that there's something strange about his daughter — stranger even than his wife has mentioned. Not until the last paragraphs does he realize that his wife is delusional: their daughter is indeed a supergenius, but she's also a deformed mutant with no arms or legs.
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.
- "Eye of the Beholder", currently pictured above, hides the fact that the woman undergoing plastic surgery for her horrible mishapen face has what to our eyes would be a beautiful face, while the normal people look hideous.
- That's just your opinion.
- TOS episode "Third from the Sun". A family tries to escape their planet in a spaceship before it's destroyed in a nuclear war. At the end it's revealed that the planet they're going to is called Earth.
- The Twilight Zone was also prone to the "Jar of Tang" variety of Tomato Surprise: "For you see, we are all dolls in the bottom of a donation barrel!" "For you see, we are living in a child's miniature village!"
- 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.
- Lost did this more than once. Another noteworthy example is the season 3 finale, "Through the Looking Glass", which features a series of seemingly traditional flashbacks for Jack, one of the main characters... until he meets Kate at the end of the episode, revealing that all the "flashback" scenes in this episode were actually flash-forwards.
- And then there's the season 4 episode "Ji Yeon", which appears to feature flash-forwards for Jin and Sun, who apparently both left the island... until it turns out that Jin's scenes are actually flashbacks, and he never left the island, but is considered dead by his wife Sun.
- Classically awful original-series Star Trek episodes with a Tomato Surprise include The Squire of Gothos and Catspaw.
- In the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode "Whispers," O'Brien returns to the station, finds everybody acting suspiciously, and soon come to suspect a conspiracy or takeover of some sort. In the end, it turns out that it is actually O'Brien who is a cloned sleeper agent who has been programmed to believe that he is the real O'Brien.
- Jekyll. We are originally set up to expect the twist that Dr Jackman is a clone of Dr Jekyll, and several characters suggest that - but they're wrong. Jackman's wife is a clone of the serving girl that Jekyll was in love with. Jackman is not a clone at all, but naturally descended from Hyde. Didn't see that one coming!
- The obligatory Buffy reference: Early season 6, Willow believes she's done Buffy a big favor by resurrecting her after she apparently had died and went to Hell. Buffy eventually thanks her and the gang, and apologizes for not bring appreciative, even though, as she tells Spike, she was really in Heaven, and her friends ripped her out of it. They all find out the truth a few episodes later, though, and it ain't pretty...
- Season 6 episode "Normal Again". The Trio unleash a demon on Buffy whose hallucinatory powers make her suspect that her implausible and nightmarish life as vampire slayer has actually been her own elaborate hallucination as a mental patient catatonic in an institution for the past six years. She dispatches the demon easily and reconciles with her friends, urging them to quickly make her that antidote while she stays on guard against relapsing again. Cut back to the hospital, where Buffy is still sitting in her corner of the room. The Doctor tells Buffy's heartbroken parents that she's "gone,". Buffy has succumbed to her illness and will be trapped in her life as "Vampire Slayer" forever.
- In the Babylon Five episode Comes the Inquisitor, Delenn's readiness to lead the Army of Light is tested by a Vorlon agent named Sebastian, who displays a severe disapproval of the immorality around him and says nothing about his past save that he last lived on Earth in London in 1888.
- The finale of the American "Life on Mars," shall we say, interprets the title of the show/David Bowie song in an absurdly literal way. If you want it spelled out: 1973 and 2008 are both figments of Sam's imagination. They were some kind of computer-generated simulation generated by the ship's computer while he was in suspended animation. Oh, did we not mention? Sam and all the other detectives from the 125 are actually astronauts on a search for—wait for it—life on Mars. Specifically they're looking for "genetic life", or on a gene hunt. Yes, the show goes there.
- In the Scrubs episode "My Screwup" we find out at the end of the episode that Ben is actually the patient that died and Dr. Cox has just been seeing Ben in his head.
- The Finale of St. Elsewhere it is revealed that the hospital is all just the immagination of an autistic boy.
- 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."
- 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.
- Also done in a country music video called "I Miss My Friend" by Darryl Worley. The video leads you to thinking that you're looking in on the girl that the singer misses, but in actuality, the woman is the singer's WIDOW, watching a video of her dead husband.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Justified in that although he knew this, he did not know any of the other vital details (saving him from the rage of the main character who is understandably pissed over the thought that their entire adventure that far (complete with confromting a fallen angel, seeking out a legendary witch in a near-unreachable interdimensioanl maze or visiting the plane of Hell) has been a major fool's errand). There are also several such moments in the story, where tasks or situations resolved by the hero turn out to have been related to him before his amnesia.
- 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.
- In Exmortis, five hikers wander into a forest, and stumble upon an old and decrepit house built there. Shortly afterwards, a brainwashed hermit proceeds to murder all but one of them in a plot to become a living gateway for a race of demons seeking to return to earth; at this point, the game begins with a player character waking up in the forest without any memories. At first, it's believed that the PC is the last surviving hiker; however, the PC is eventually revealed to be the hermit, AKA the Hand of Repose.
- Earthworm Jim 2. One sentence:
Narrator: And so, having defeated the nefarious Cow, our hero, the Cow, wins back the heart of the lovely Cow.
- Hits at the mid-game climax of Baten Kaitos, in a truly brilliant execution. Whatever other game has ever had the main character turn out to have been The Mole? The game even manages to explain your (you being the main character's guardian spirit of sorts) "amnesia" at the beginning of the game (from just starting it then) as part of the main character's plot to suppress your memories as you were against his evil plans.
- In Manhunt 2, Daniel's buddy Leo, who's been following him around on his journey, often urging him to use more violence and being playable in a few levels is really the personallity of a dead serial killer, implanted in Daniel's brain. The experiment was to create a super soldier who could turn off his conscience and guilt whenever he was needed to, but Leo resisted, and secretly spent the entirety of the game trying to take over Daniel's body. On top of all that, in the end he's revealed to have forced Daniel to kill his wife and kids. Yes, he's kind of a bastard.
- Mana Khemia Alchemists Of Al Revis has The Hero Vayne and his Mana Sulpher. As it turns out, Vayne is the actual Mana, and Sulpher is his contract master.
- In The World Ends With You, it turns out that Neku has been (unknowingly) acting as a proxy for Joshua - The Compser of Shibuya, who'd been in in a Game with Megumi Kitaniji, with the outcome determining whether Shibuya gets destroyed or not. Essentially, Neku doomed Shibuya. Oh - and Joshua was Neku's killer all along.
- Killer7. Somewhat alluded to shortly before the big reveal, Garcian Smith finds out his real name is Emir Parkreiner, an ace assassin that killed the Smiths and adopted their personalities out of guilt.
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
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