Try and guess what this trope is without checking.: Plan B From Outer Space

Apparently the logic of this is from The Practice, where randomly accusing the witness is "Plan B". The name's still very obscure and confusing though, so I think a definite renaming is in order.

Supported the first time it was brought up six months ago and support just as hard now. No particularly witty names come to mind, but Accuse The Family is at least clear.

This came up before? Why wasn't it changed? I can't think of an argument for it. :/

Everybody agreed that it needed changing but nobody came up with a name that caught on, and the thread petered out. Happens more often than we'd like.

Yeah I am at a loss on what a new name could be...

No I Did It Not Really

... nah that sucks.

Random Guy B Did It?

edited 4th Feb '11 5:55:49 AM by Raso

Yeah, that title is totally out there. It sounds more like "Our alien invasion/incursion was thwarted in episode such and so. Now we're back with a new strategy."

Also, I fail to see any real distinction between this trope and The Perry Mason Method (which is shown as a related trope). Maybe merge both tropes as well as renaming them?

Name proposals: Accuse Anybody, Accuse the Witness, Hostile To The Witness

Accuse the Witness seems the most clear to me.

I'll back Accuse the Witness.

Hmm, I can't see any good reason not to merge it with The Perry Mason Method, and call it Badgering The Witness. There's a distinction, but IMO a nearly irrelevant one for storytelling/troping purposes. The Perry Mason Method doesn't necessarily require that the witness is the actual perpetrator. (For instance, the witness might have been lying to protect a loved one who is the real perpetrator.)

And that way, we could use a cool trope image like this one◊.

It certainly needs to be narrowed down and made more clear, but The Perry Mason Method is about accusing the witness.

I think this one should be tweaked to cover the other possibilities — accusing some other member of the accused's family, accusing the defendant, accusing someone else entirely, accusing someone of something else in order to get a confession...

edited 4th Feb '11 9:13:58 AM by Madrugada

Nice Visual Pun... but it isn't really clear that the cop is sitting in a witness box, and not just behind his desk.

edited 4th Feb '11 9:13:12 AM by AlexThePrettyGood

Well, we can get into that if and when it becomes time for Image Pickin'. The image I linked is literally just the first one that comes up from Google Image Search. There are many variations on the theme.

We don't have a Zany Courtroom Stunt trope? Seems like both these tropes cover something close to that.

^We have several "Zany Courtroom Stunt" tropes in an index called Courtroom Antics.

Or Maybe YOU Did It

If we made these tropes more general rather than just in the court room, I think the differences would warrant their own tropes. Perry Mason method seems to be when the only way to divert suspicion is to force a confession, while Plan B seems to be when someone is accused to divert suspicion. The difference comes in with examples like the Simpsons, where they make Sideshow Bob confess by appealing to his ego, and examples of Plan B, where they accuse themselves just to prove that anyone could have done it.

What about The Accused Accuses Another, just for the Added Alliterative Appeal of the name?

Well, aside from the fact that Added Alliterative Appeal isn't always good, there's the fact that it's not the accused accusing someone else, which means that it's misleading about what the trope is.

I rather like Or Maybe YOU Did It because it takes us to the heart of the action. Pitty there isn't a way to make it more specifically... courty. Accuse the Witness is much more clear on that count.

edited 4th Feb '11 9:29:17 PM by Camacan

Strictly speaking, if the witness was always a possible alternate suspect, wouldn't calling him just a "witness" be misleading? It makes it sound like you're just accusing some random guy who happened to see something the night of the murder.

^But the witness isn't always a possible suspect. At the very least, an accused witness usually has an alibi which, until taking the stand, nobody ever questions once.

The whole point of the trope is that the witnessed being accused is viewed as an unlikely suspect, as the description details.

edited 5th Feb '11 4:18:58 PM by SeanMurrayI

Hm, well, I guess it depends what the definition of "unusual or controversial" is, and how far it can stretch. What about a case like Presumed Innocent, where if it hadn't been for the political intrigue, the wife would've been an immediate and obvious suspect?

^You mean "unlikely," not "unusual."

And again, even in this example, the witness wasn't viewed as a suspect at first... for whatever reason; it doesn't even matter what reason. She simply wasn't immediately viewed as an obvious suspect in the work.

edited 5th Feb '11 4:24:13 PM by SeanMurrayI

I think the distinction is that The Perry Mason Method involves actually exposing the real culprit by getting an on-the-stand confession out of them. With Plan B, it's just used to create reasonable doubt; the person on the receiving end of Plan B may be innocent.

Far too oblique pun: Reasonable Redoubt

I am positive there's some kind of visual image associated with this that I cannot think of the word for, where a bunch of decoys are spread out in the hopes that the target missile will eventually hit one and detonate.