Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot / Live-Action TV

• 24:
  • Season 1: Plane crash → assasination attempt on David Palmer.
  • Season 2: Bombing of CTU → Nuclear bombing on US soil.
  • Season 3: Prison escape → terrorist plot by Jack Bauer's former ally to use a virus.
  • Season 4: Train bombing → launch of a nuclear missile.
  • Season 5: Terrorists seize airport → Theft of sarin gas.
  • Season 6: Terror bombings → Nuclear bombing on US soil AGAIN.
• The A-Team: In the episode "Steel", the Team is hired by a construction company manager to deal with a villainous Crooked Contractor who is trying to muscle the company out of a demolition contract. The Team eventually finds out that the reason the crooked contractor is so determined is because he is under the thumb of "Crazy Tommy T", the local kingpin, who got rid of one of his former fellow kingpins and dumped his corpse in the foundation of the now-condemned building.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The team investigating how an Average Joe gained superpowers → The discovery of Project Centipede → The season-long investigation into this group and its enigmatic leader, The Clairvoyant → The uncovering of HYDRA's plot to destroy SHIELD from within.
• Arrow: The Hood taking out corrupt people → A conspiracy to destroy the impoverished part of the city.
  • Season 2: An unethical bid by an opportunist to be Mayor → The Big Bad's goal to destroy the entire city to spite The Hero.
• Avataro Sentai Donbrothers: Discussed. The reason Tsubasa is released after Tsuyoshi rats him out in a jealous rage is because the police force had already been on the receiving end of this trope early in the show. The Cat Juto that kidnapped and replaced the missing persons at the end of Episode 9 (Notably, Detective Kenji Sayama) caused so many minor disturbances due to their limited ability to adhere to The Masquerade that the investigator assigned to the case is convinced the missing people Came Back Wrong and that a conspiracy's afoot, (It is.) enlisting the Donbrother to help her in exchange for amnesty.
• Babylon Berlin: Pornographic filmmaking (extremely illegal in 1920s Germany) and blackmail of public figures with the same → robbery, illegal arms trade, murder & conspiracy to commit high treason.
• Better Call Saul: Jimmy notices some minor overbilling on the part of his elderly client's nursing home. Digging further, he finds that the home's entire parent corporation has been engaging in outright fraud on its clients to the tune of millions of dollars.
• Bones: A recovered skull → A cannibalistic serial killer who ends up recruiting Zack as his apprentice.
• Burden of Truth: Taylor follows a john who beats up sex workers. She finds out he is one of many people being blackmailed by the seemingly reformed Sam Mercer.
• Burn Notice: "False Flag": Michael's Client of the Week is a CPA who reported some minor discrepancies in one of his client company's books. Said company hired an assassin to kill him and his entire family before he could reveal that they are the front for a huge smuggling operation.
  Doug: I can't believe this is happening! I'm a CPA, for Christ's sake!
  Sam: A CPA brought down Al Capone. There's a reason your bosses don't want you to testify.
• Castle: This appears to have been the case for Beckett's mother's murder. Decade-old murder of a lawyer → wide-ranging corruption and conspiracy, the full extent of which has yet to be revealed.
  • Also, murder of a taxi driver → plot to detonate a Dirty Bomb in New York.
  • But subverted with a second season episode where vehicular homicide of a bike messenger → terrorist attack. The attack idea came out of the sender being listed S. Nadal Matar, who turns out to be on the terror watch list. ESU breaks down a door to discover an old lady named Sally Neidermeyer.
    Castle: Our bad.
  • Also subverted in "The Lives of Others": evidence of foul play and possible murder in the apartment across the street → birthday party for Castle!
• Community: Investigation into who ruined a biology class project → catching a serial backpack thief → uncovering supplies being stolen for a meth lab. Subverted in that they don't care about those things and remain solely focused on who killed their yam.
• Crazy Like a Fox: In "Sunday in the Park with Harry," finding a pickpocketed wallet leads to the discovery of a murder scheme.
• Criminal Minds:
  • DEA raid on a suspected meth lab → an impending terrorist attack using nerve gas.
  • Investigating a series of spree stabbings in New York City → Uncovering a massive terrorist plot.
• This has happened frequently on CSI: Miami. To provide a few examples:
  • Gang shooting (that was pretty unusual for a Miami gang shootout because it ended with various gang members vaporized and literally splattered all over a warehouse's wall) → evidence of conspiracy to sell classified military weaponry (an Expy of the "Metal Storm") to foreign enemies.
  • Junkie appears with his neck snapped → dead junkie turns out to be a radiological hazard, leading the Miami police to suspect potential nuclear terrorism → local crusading lawyer turns out to have been poisoned with radioactive dye, which leads to the suspicion that a local medical company (that the lawyer was investigating for corrupt and incompetent practices) had performed the (slow and very painful) assassination → Stalker with a Crush informant within the company that provided the lawyer with important evidence for her case had taken the fact that she didn't like him back very badly, leading to him stealing the dye from the company's nuclear medicine supplies to poison her, and snapping the neck of the junkie when he tried to steal the syringes that carried the dye, believing them to be drugs. Zig-zagged all over the place, and at least the lawyer was able to pass away knowing that her poisoner had been caught and the company was going to get the book tossed at it for both the malpracticing she was investigating and allowing the dye to be so easy to steal.
  • An accidental death in a child beauty pageant → serial kidnapping and raping of 6-year-old girls by a pederast.
• Daredevil (2015): The exposure of a numbers racket inside Union Allied Construction LLC → the uncovering of a powerful figure controlling Hell's Kitchen.
• Dark Winds: The Navajo Police investigating suspected Domestic Abuse against Sally Growing Thunder reveals the Buffalo Society, a radical group who had committed the armored car robbery and murders which the series opens with.
• In the Decoy episode "Death Watch", Casey infiltrates a ring of department store shoplifters and discovers that they're also working as hitmen.
• Subverted in Dexter. In season 1, while pursuing the Ice Truck Killer, the Miami PD comes across a man named Neil Perry due to his having traffic tickets issued near the scenes of the Killer's kidnappings. The subversion comes because the man is actually a computer hacker who specifically planted those minor pieces of evidence in order to lead the police to himself. Therefore he could falsely confess for the killings and be famous.
• The Doctor Blake Mysteries: In "The Price of Love", Charlie and Lucien discover a murder (and later all kinds of dark goings-on at a military base) when Charlie stops a car for speeding, and Lucien notices blood dripping from the boot.
• Doctor Who: In "Daleks in Manhattan", the Doctor and Martha land in 1930 New York City and find that the local Hooverville shantytown is dealing with a swathe of abductions of its residents. As you may have guessed from the title, they find out upon investigating that the Daleks are behind it.
• Happened on occasion in Due South. One notable example was Frasier and Vecchio stopping to ticket a man who had parked in a fire lane, only to discover the guy's trunk was full of illegal firearms.
  • The show also had a fair bit of fun playing with this, showing us Frasier doggedly pursuing someone (through a blizzard, say, or over a waterfall) only to charge them with a minor-sounding crime which turned out to be far, far more serious than the description made it sound. (E.g. "That's the last time he'll fish over the limit!" → The crook's catch was measured in tons since he had been blast-fishing, and Frasier has also confiscated all the explosives and donated the fish to local tribes.)
• Early Edition episode 5 is about Gary investigating the theft of the Mayor's dog. He finds out instead that someone is rigging the state lottery.
• Elementary: Murder of a conspiracy theorist → A member of a group that created a terrorist plot for a government training simulation that worked too well killing/mentally incapacitating the other members of said group to prevent knowledge of their plot from spreading. It turns out that the two cases are completely unrelated; the conspiracy theorist was killed by another conspiracy theorist over a disagreement about a different theory.
  • Someone attempts to poison a prize racehorse → the capture of a world-infamous drug cartel assassin.
  • An older man is found dead of an apparent heart attack dressed in a leather gimp suit → the nanny of the dead man's children was accused of killing her abusive father in a similar way → turns out the dead man was a child molester who sexually abused his older son; the older son poisoned his father to prevent his little brother from being abused, and tried to frame the nanny.
  • Detective Bell is investigating a break-in at a dockside warehouse → discovers his boss is a Mafia plant and barely averts a city-wide mob war.
  • Played in an episode where a van runs a red light and crashes into a construction truck. The van driver and a bystander die in an explosion and the investigators find that the van was full of gasoline. The police immediately jump to traffic accident -> terrorist bomb triggered prematurely. However, Sherlock's investigation uncovers that the van driver was a thief who was transporting stolen gasoline. The investigation appears to be closed but Sherlock is curious about people who knew the dead driver insisting that he was a Consummate Professional and would never run a red light while transporting stolen goods. Sherlock keeps investigating and discovers that the traffic lights were hacked. The investigation now balloons into: van full of stolen gasoline -> nefarious hacker sabotaging New York City's traffic systems. It looks like it might expand to reveal a government conspiracy but, as witnesses come forward, it starts to deflate again till the truth is revealed: van full of stolen gasoline -> plot by construction company owner to sabotage a rival construction company and get a lucrative government contract.
  • Dock security guard being beaten into a coma → grand larceny of millions of dollars worth of maple syrup.
  • Lampshaded by Sherlock at the end of "Possibility Two", when Joan has discovered that Sherlock's "favorite" dry cleaners are the front for a smuggling/arms dealing operation: "A good detective knows that every task, every interaction, no matter how seemingly banal, has the potential to contain multitudes. I live my life alert to this possibility."
• In the third season of Engrenages, an apparently trivial incident in which a child was bitten by an inadequately-trained security dog leads to the uncovering of large-scale council corruption (the use of the dangerous dog was a sign of general corrupt penny-pinching).
• FBI: Most Wanted: In "Hairtrigger", Doug Timmons' car gets rear-ended by a drunk driver and a passing cop stops to investigate. When the cop goes to look in Doug's busted trunk, Doug panics and shoots the cop and then the drunk driver. Investigating this crime puts the FBI on the trail of a planned massacre.
• Hightown: A single young woman's murder turns out to be tied into the work of a major crime syndicate.
• JAG: In "Brig Break", a handful of prisoners busting out of the brig gradually escalates into a plot to destroy the base with a nuclear explosion and selling stolen nuclear weapons to Saddam Hussein.
• Several Leverage episodes do this, albeit on a smaller scale than a lot of the examples:
  • "The Homecoming Job". Coverup of a friendly fire investigation → multi-billion-dollar money-laundering scheme.
  • "The Snow Job". Negligent home contracting job → nationwide foreclosure-related fraud.
  • "The Stork Job". Spanish Prisoner scam with orphans → weapons smuggling.
  • "The Gone-Fishin' Job". People being scammed by fake IRS agents → anti-government militia planning a terrorist attack.
  • The canon novel "The Con Job". Dealing with a forger stealing original work from aging comic artists → preventing a Japanese real estate developer/crime boss from killing everyone at Comic-Con with a car bomb so he can set it up in his own hotel(!).
  • There are some big ones from Season 3 onwards, however;
    • "The Inside Job". A theft from an agricultural company → plot to cause a global famine so the company can profit from its monopoly on blight-resistant wheat.
    • "The Double-Blind Job". Accidentally foiled kidnapping/assassination → plot to knowingly release a toxic drug nationwide, killing anywhere from thousands to millions, earning the Evil Drug Company billions for a 15% fine.
    EDC CEO: That's like tipping your waiter. "Thank you very much for taking our drugs. Here's a little something for your family."
    • "The Big Bang Job". Investigation of international criminal → plot to destroy Washington DC with a prototype EMP city-buster.
• Lois & Clark: Frogs being stolen from a pet shop → A conspiracy to replace the President of the United States with a clone who'd then sign a pardon for Lex Luthor.
• An episode of the revival of Magnum, P.I. sees Magnum's search for a missing cat lead to a murdered FBI agent.
• Happens constantly in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. For example, in "Death on the Vine" a simple case to investigate the origin of some mysterious photographs ends up exposing a Town with a Dark Secret.
• NCIS:
  • "Enemies Foreign" starts with the team busting an identity thief. One of the identities she stole leads them to a pair of Mossad agents who are in D.C. in advance of Director Eli David—who is being followed by Palestinian terrorists who want him dead.
  • “Kill Screen” starts out with a cop witnessing a pickpocket lifting a purse from a crowd of customers at a hotdog stand. The bag has the cut-off fingertips and teeth of a recently-killed corporal, which gets NCIS involved. The case then spirals to a game developer's plot to wipe out every military computer on the Pentagon’s grid using his new video game and its mainframe to generate enough power to break through the firewalls.
  • "Troll" starts with a typical murdered sailor—and leads to a four-episode battle with international terrorists who create Child Soldiers via the internet, set off several bomb attacks (one of which kills Ned Dorniget), and almost-fatally shoot Gibbs.
  • One episode starts with the team investigating a chop shop run by navy personnel. One of the stolen cars has a severed head in the trunk.
• NewBlood is founded on one of these when the two investigators realise that their murder and fraud investigations are linked to each other and indicative of a larger conspiracy.
• The first episode of The Night Of follows, in parallel, the detectives investigating a bloody murder scene and the street cops arresting a reckless driver who refuses to take a breathalyzer. We already know him as the guy who, earlier in the episode, woke up to a damning The Murder After scenario and fled in a panic, but it's tense seeing the two investigations converge.
• Happens a few times in NUMB3RS
  • "In Plain Sight": While trying to decrypt the computer of an escaped drug kingpin/cop killer, Charlie discovers that he is also concealing pornographic images of his very young daughter on his hard drive.
  • "Black Swan": An apparent innocent bystander at the scene of a drug raid flees from the cops, and the FBI discovers that he's involved in a domestic terrorist plot.
  • An Invoked Trope in "Robin Hood"; a high-tech bank robbery turns out to be just one piece in an intricate scheme to expose the misdeeds of the bank's president.
  • "Assassin": While busting a passport forger, the FBI discovers evidence of a plot to murder the last member of an influential South American political family.
  • "Waste Not": A sinkhole suddenly forms underneath an elementary school playground, killing a teacher and injuring several children. During the investigation into why it happened, it's revealed that a construction company has been dumping toxic waste underneath the playgrounds they've built at several low-income schools.
• Happened many times on NYPD Blue. One notable example is in "Bombs Away", where a Romanian immigrant has a fender-bender with Sipowicz and Simone. The detectives hear a woman yelling and pounding in the man's trunk; he's brought in for questioning, which leads to a search of his apartment and the discovery of IEDs and a list of wealthy families in New York. He finally reveals to Sipowicz that he's holding a rich family for a million-dollar ransom, having tied them up and attached bombs to them in their home.
• Happens regularly in Person of Interest. Attempt to murder one person equals exposure of whatever crime they were trying to use the murder to cover up. This is actually The Machine's job, finding the simple links that would prevent terrorist attacks. The fact that it finds the same connections in more conventional crimes was purely accidental.
• Psych: "True Grits" revolves around Shawn and Gus trying to prove the innocence of Thane Woodson who was wrongfully imprisoned for a theft he did not commit. They find the real thief and DNA analysis proves Thane's innocence. However, the thief's DNA is revealed to be a familial match to a DNA sample found at the scene of an unsolved murder from 1981. It turns out that the murder was committed by the thief's father who wanted to keep his son's DNA out of the national database to avoid this very outcome.
• In The Rookie: Feds episode "Countdown", the investigation into a missing scientist who spent his time looking for Bigfoot reveals a plan to destroy Los Angeles with two dirty bombs.
• The Shadow Line: The death of a drug baron → A Government Conspiracy using drug money to fund police pensions.
• From the Star Trek: The Next Generation two-part episode "Unification Part 1/Part 2": Theft of a Vulcan ship from a scrapyard → Romulan plot to take over the planet Vulcan.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In the two-parter "Improbable Cause"/"The Die Is Cast", the bombing of Garak's shop → the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order making a preemptive strike on the Dominion.
• Season 3 of Star Trek: Picard starts with Admiral (ret.) Picard receiving a Distress Call from Doctor Crusher to save her and her son from bounty hunters. In answering her call, he discovers that the bounty hunters are part of a group of Changelings who have infiltrated Starfleet to assist the Borg in assimilating Starfleet and destroying The Federation.
• State of Play starts off with a murder, an affair and a suicide which are all investigated by the newspaper who find that they are all related to a much larger government conspiracy.
• Stranger Things:
  • In Season 1, a missing boy leads the main characters to a secretive government conspiracy involving psychic children, a mysteriously decaying otherworld, and an Eldritch Abomination that wants to devour the world.
  • In Season 2, a bad pumpkin crop that local farmers attribute to sabotage reveals a powerful Eldritch Abomination is beginning to cross the threshold into our world.
  • Exaggerated in season 3, where the instigating incident is barely even a crime. Joyce and (reluctantly) Hopper investigating why the refrigerator magnets in Hawkins have stopped working leads to them discovering a secret Soviet experiment into alternate dimensions on American soil. Similarly, Nancy and Jonathan trying to write a story on why rats are suddenly eating fertilizer uncovers an Eldritch Abomination building a Body of Bodies for itself.
• S.W.A.T. (2017) has the team finding much bigger cases off a run-of-the-mill call. For example, a couple of teens break into a house and the girl fires the owner's rifle at a cop. The team subdues the pair only to find the owner is selling illegal assault weapons and just made an order for a deadly attack.
• Teen Wolf: A dead woman is found in the woods → Werewolves exist, so do some other creatures, and there's a war-type-thing going on between the werewolves, the other creatures, and the people who hunt them.
• Twin Peaks: The murder of a teenage girl → otherdimensional demonic conspiracy (to confuse the audience).
• Weeds subverts the hell out of this early in the third season. The second season Cliffhanger ends with Silas arrested for petty vandalism with a trunk full of marijuana but Celia drives away in his car before the cop sees it, and a few episodes later a DEA agent shows up at the Botwins' door while they're bagging product but never gets in the door so he doesn't notice it.
  • Also played straight at the end of the third season: stolen cross → new grow house.
• A bomber in the third season of The West Wing is busted when he gets pulled over for a broken taillight.
• We Own This City: A drug dealer is robbed the night before the police are about to execute a search warrant for his apartment. When leaving the scene, one of the police goes to retrieve a GPS tracker they had placed on the suspect's car, only to find two police issue trackers on the car, the other of which is not being on file as being used for an investigation. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has sent an investigator to look into police corruption in Baltimore, and is at every turn told about officer Hershl, a notorious thief with a badge. These two lines of inquiry soon lead to the Gun Trace Task Force, a unit with a suspicious rate of succesfull vehicle searches, and spending habits beyond their paychecks.
• The Wire:
  • Season One: the unit intercepts a phonecall about a pickup at the housing projects, and when they stop the driver, he is found to be an assistant of State Senator Clay Davis. The suspicious event, and the speed at which Davis' lawyer comes up with a convinient excuse to why the driver had a large bag of cash in his car leads the unit to start looking into the finances of the Barsdale group.
    Lester: You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you
  • Season Two: Stevedores' Union leader Frank Sobotka with suspicious amounts of money buys a stained window for a church → bulk smuggling of drugs, prostitutes and goods; multiple ethnic gangs, murders agogo. Hilariously, or depressingly, the guy who tipped the unit off to the church window^note Stanislaus Valchek, Commander of the Southeastern District doesn't give a shit about the vast criminal network they uncovered, he just wants his slobby dockworker nemesis to pay big-time, and he'll gladly fuck his own people over if it will ensure that it happens.
• Without a Trace. The reason behind the disappearance of the Victim of the Week was almost always far more complicated than indicated in the opening sequence.
• Invoked in Yes, Minister. James Hacker hears of Italian Red Terrorists somehow being in possession of British bomb-making equipment and decides to tell the Prime Minister so there can be an investigation. His Permanent Secretary tells him not to get involved or it could lead to all sorts of things coming out, citing Watergate as an example and saying in politics you shouldn't get involved in anything that doesn't concern you. Hacker is then frightened off from telling the PM by the Chief Whip, who tells him it could be diasterous to some of his Cabinet colleagues along with the PM.

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