"These things were definitely cooked up by a bored warlock."
— Angel, Angel, "She"
"No service. What a surprise."
— Yosuke, Persona 4
Man: What happened?
Woman: I tried to call for help and my phone exploded.
Man: What?
Woman: My phone literally exploded in my hand!
Woman: I tried to call for help and my phone exploded.
Man: What?
Woman: My phone literally exploded in my hand!
Sky: Hey that's my phone!
Luke: Join the club. I've gone through seven phones in two years,
— Luke and Sky Smith, The Sarah Jane Adventures
Sighing, the Lost placed a hand on her shoulder. “Let me tell you a little something. During my time here, I witnessed my share of other human beings being abducted to this place. Got to watch them spend their first few minutes on this side of the Hedge. Sometimes, they’d happen to have impressive tools or technology on them. Phones more often than not. Remember me telling you about phones, Twilight?”
She nodded dully.
“These poor people would whip out their phones first chance they got, and try to call the police or their homes, only, well, they’d never work the way they were SUPPOSED to. Some phones refused to turn on, even though their owners swore their batteries were fully charged. Other phones did… TRULY weird things that phones were never meant to do.”
— The Lost and Twilight Sparkle, Into the Hedge
These, of all cliches, are the most frivolous and abused ways to add emotion to a movie. And the cliché of "the phone is dead", not so difficult to digest but that must have died in its time, has moved on to cell phones.
And in a stupidly convenient way, they have no signal when they are needed most. In a desolate place like the mountains, it's understood, but when this happens in a city full of communication towers, I can only think that the ghosts, demons, or the supernatural crap that is after them, are nerdy and meticulous enough to cut off all wireless communications from their victims.
Or outright, in case of being a simple murderer without anything supernatural involved, they have the bad luck that the entire universe and the law of probability are conspiring with said killer against them by interrupting their cell phone signals or draining their battery at the worst possible time.
— "9 Cliches en Peliculas de Terror que deben Morir"
Translation
Translation "It's not a full day in Starfleet until the comms get blocked!"
Beckett Mariner, Star Trek: Lower Decks S3E03 "Mining the Mind's Mines"
