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Author: AccidentalTroper

Jun 4th 2014 at 1:30:57 PM

This YKTTW has been abandoned for nearly a year, but I came across it when I was looking for a trope to describe the fact that detectives/cops/etc seem to only ever work on a single case at one time, as opposed to real life, where an average detective will have X-number of open cases on his desk at any given time.

The problem is that this trope overlaps hard with MysteryOfTheWeek, but it's not quite the same trope. MysteryOfTheWeek is a show format whereas OneCaseAtATime is a trope about storytelling. In fact, the OneCaseAtATime trope can even be used in shows that are not normally mysteries in an OutOfGenreExperience episode.

Basically, OneCaseAtATime, as a trope, stipulates that when a detective is working on a case, ''everything that happens to him will have some bearing on the case.'' This is, of course, because of TheLawOfConservationOfDetail, but sometimes shows take it to extremes (such as having seemingly random events from the detective's personal life ending up being part of the mystery as well).

The tl;dr version: If a cop is investigating a murder, and he finds another dead body, there ''will'' be a connection between the two victims, no matter how unlikely.