Basic Trope: A character disguises or pretends to be someone else, but he/she doesn’t know a basic, rather major detail of the person he/she is pretending to be, even if all the other, smaller details are spot-on.
- Straight: A Mole working for The Empire infiltrates La Résistance by donning a near-perfect disguise as Carl, a resistance member. However, he completely fails to recognize Carl's daughter Alice, know who she is, or even knew that Carl has a daughter. Once this is exposed his ruse quickly falls apart.
- Exaggerated:
- The Real Carl is also an amputee missing one arm, whereas the Mole has both arms intact, and writes with the one that should be missing. Obviously, this doesn’t go unnoticed to Alice.
- The Mole can't/doesn’t even speak the same language as Carl, or for that matter Alice.
- Downplayed: Imposter Forgot One Detail.
- Justified:
- It’s not widely known, even among other Resistance Members, that Alice & Carl are related. As such the mole is infiltrating to the best of his knowledge.
- The Mole is a Smug Snake who really did not think his plan through.
- Inverted: The Mole talks about a lot of information that the real Carl shouldn’t know, which blows his cover.
- Subverted: Alice reveals she was trolling “Carl” when calling him "Dad", which she regularly did with the real Carl.
- Double Subverted: That is until Alice asks “Carl” about a health problem, since the real Carl was a doctor. The Mole doesn’t know anything about medicine, so his cover is blown.
- Zig Zagged: The Mole in question is constantly improvising his responses to the various oversights on the spot. While they do make (some) sense to Alice, they simply make her ask more questions that the mole also has to improvise further, which creates more questions. And so on...
- Averted: The Mole learns virtually everything about Carl prior to infiltrating, so his disguise is flawless.
- Lampshaded: Alice says to the Mole: “You went through all this trouble to disguise yourself as Dad, but you didn’t even know a single thing about me? What kind of failure-of-a-spy are you?”
- Exploited: One of Imperial Intelligence's methods of weeding out incompetent spies to send them to infiltrate resistance cells. If a mole overlooks even basic information/research that ultimately results in capture/exposure, the Empire has no use for such a useless pawn; and if the mole manages to return unscathed, they are executed.
- Defied: The Mole contemplates but ultimately decides not to infiltrate the Resistance as Carl since he realizes he doesn’t know that much about him to begin with.
- Implied:???
- Deconstructed:
- The Mole is still a threat to have around, competent or not, so Alice shoots the him on the spot to ensure the safety of the Resistance.
- ...Or The Mole is captured instead. Because of his failure in disguising himself as Carl, he quickly spills the beans and reveals everything he knows about The Empire's plans. Since he couldn't get such a basic fact about Carl right, how could he possibly keep a secret?
- The fact that a mole couldn't get such basic information about Carl correct is simply a symptom to a much bigger problem for the Empire, and by extension its Intelligence Service: It is a Fascist, but Inefficient Nation. The infrastructure is completely mired in corruption and general incompetence, and now it verges on collapse. The Resistance realizes this from the turn-of-events with the Mole, so they now take more action in bringing down the Empire.
- Reconstructed: Because of the failure of the mole in understanding basic information about Carl, the Intelligence Service realizes it hits a low point and opts to reform.
- Played for Laughs: The Mole only knows that Alice has a father, but doesn't even know his name or what he looks like. He just goes under the fake name of "Alice's Dad", slaps on a fake mustache, and that's his "foolproof" disguise.
- Played for Drama: It turns out the Mole killed Carl before getting all information and donning the disguise. So Alice is distraught upon learning that her father is dead, and kills the mole in retaliation.
