Archived Discussion

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

Semiapies: A few of these examples involve secrets specifically kept from the protagonists, especially in the case of The Village. That seems different and distinct from key facts kept hidden from the viewers or readers, as in the case of the Twilight Zone ep "The Invaders".

Ununnilium: It has to be kept from the viewers/readers, but it can be kept or not kept from the protagonists.

Morgan Wick: From what I'm reading, it looks like The Village is a temporal variant on the Planet of the Apes Ending.

Ununnilium: ...hmmm, yes, I agree.

Ununnilium:

This editor remembers a short story she can't remember the name of, in which a man had escaped an alien attack. It prominently featured some chaotic, fitful beings that were a threat to the main character. They weren't the aliens, as the reader probably first assumed, but children — the alien attack was designed to kill everyone over the age of 12, so the unsupervised children would throw the world into chaos.

Pulling this out until someone finds the name.

Also, took out the Deep Space Nine example, as it's already over on Tomato in the Mirror.

Dockmarm: Found this on the page:

"Famed short-story writer O. Henry was the master of this trope, and used it in nearly all his stories."

The Twist Ending most certainly, but I've read a mess of O. Henry stories and cannot remember a single Tomato Surprise. More likely, he belongs in Mandatory Twist Ending, where his works are conspicuously absent.

Pro-Mole: Okay, let's discuss The Prestige: someone suggest that the whole thing is actually an illusion, and the Twist Ending is, say, a lie. So, how did all that happen? And how to explain the cats and the hats? (If you watched, you know what's that about. If not, just go watch!)

Skiersaur: The short story "The Hunters" sounds like one I read a long time ago and have been trying to recall without much success until now. Does anyone know the author?

Pro-Mole: Eye of the Beholder needs a better reason for not having spoiler tags. It wasn't that obvious for me when I watched the remake five years ago, for instance, though I had my suspicions at the time...

Ulti S.: Removed the Basara example due to a lack of surprise.

Paul A: I've just pulled a bunch of examples out, because in my view they're just ordinary plot twists, not Tomato Surprises. Here they are, in case anybody feels like disagreeing about any of them:

In Naru Taru, Action Girl Shiina can't develop a mental link with her mon Hoshimaru. And that's because it's not her mon, but her friend Takeo's. She does NOT take it well.
- But don't worry, she finds hers eventually. It's a bit larger than the others, though.
Although the easiest way to explain Zeon in Gash Bell is that he's his Evil Twin, the nature of their relationship is kept deliberately hidden throughout the series, and the anime ended without resolving this at all, leading many fans to speculate on what Zeon exactly was. Near the end of the Faudo arc in the manga, Zeon reveals that he is actually Gash's older twin brother, and the reason for his hatred of Gash is because Gash led a seemingly carefree life while Zeon was forced to undergo brutal training. But then Gash is able to show Zeon that his life wasn't exactly peaches and cream either, and Zeon regrets his actions, although not in time to save his book. It was very poignant really, definitely a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for the manga that the anime lacked.
In the novel/manga/anime series Slayers, Lina and Gourry meet a legendary hero, Rezo the Red Priest. Rezo has dedicated his life to finding a cure for his blindness. For some reason, ordinary healing spells that cure blindness in other people do not work on Rezo. Then you discover that this is because the Demon Lord Shabranigdu was sealed inside Rezo's eyes, and that if Rezo ever opened his eyes, the Demon Lord would return to destroy the world.
- The original novel takes this one step further: Rezo is the Demon Lord Shabranigdu, or one of his avatars; opening his eyes will unleash the sealed demon lord's true power, but the implication at his inevitable defeat is not that Rezo was able to hold back Shabranigdu at the last minute, but that Shabranigdu himself held back because his time spent as Rezo left some small part of him identifying with humankind.
Kanon - The true natures of both Makoto and the demons Mai is trying to kill are pretty big tomatoes by themselves, but the author pulls this twice in fairly-rapid succession with Ayu: 1) when Yuuichi first remembers her falling from the tree, and then 2) when Akiko tells him he's mistaken - she's not dead, just in a coma.
In the Daredevil Story Arc Decalogue, citizens of Hell's Kitchen talk about the impact the vigilante has had on their lives, particularly in the wake of his ascension as the new Kingpin. At the climax of the arc, one of the participants in the discussion finally draws attention to the fact that Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) himself was in their midst the entire time, having used his ninja skills to pass himself off as one of them until he was called out.
In Unbreakable, the Magical Negro Elijah turns out to be a Genre Savvy Comic Book supervillain responsible for all the disasters alluded to in the film.
In Brazil, we discover at the end of the film that everything after the protagonist's torture begins, including his rescue, has been a hallucination.
In Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, the narrator who we all thought was Christopher Lee was really an oompa-loompa.
Fallen: The end reveals that the narrator all along has been the demon Azrukhal, who has been narrating in Denzel Washington's voice because the story is being told as the demon has possessed Denzel's body.
The end of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers.
Parodied in Neil Simon's Murder By Death. At the movie's conclusion, each detective smarmily identifies the killer as someone the audience has never heard of, but whom the detective knows every detail about. Afterward, the killer removes his mask to reveal someone very obvious, and angrily breaks the fourth wall to explain that he set up the entire situation to point out how annoying it is when they do that: "You introduced characters in the last five pages that were never in the book before!"
- And then, after the rest of the characters leave, pulls off this mask to reveal yet another face.
My Bloody Valentine (2009): Tom, the last victim of Harry, develops a split personality that is a clone (or perhaps is possessed by the ghost of) Harry, even though he believes Axel to be the pickaxe killer.
The Prestige. Many critics were a little miffed when, after a series of fantastically executed plots and illusions, it turned out that the greatest trick of all was executed with the help of an honest-to-god steampunk teleporter. The disturbing implications of this discovery, and the presence of another equally shocking, but less objectionable swerve, meant most viewers didn't feel too bad.
- Borden's complete devotion to his craft, revealing his own surprise alongside Angier: he was two people the entire time, a set of magician twins. The magic machine of Angier's was only used to juxtapose the values of the two men. (Although "values" is a loose term for either of them.)
So...does Return Of The Killer Tomatoes even warrant a mention? Tara is a tomato.
- But you'd know that if you watched the cartoon (yes really).
The Wachowskis pulled one (sort of...) with the identity of Racer X in the Speed Racer movie: Racer X reveals to Speed that he is NOT his thought-dead brother Rex, but later it's revealed that he IS Rex, but had plastic surgery done in addition to his masked persona. Mostly done to throw anyone who saw the original series a curve ball.
Subverted in Takeshi Kitano's Zatoichi, when the blind main character reveals his eyes to The Man Behind the Man—implying that he was never blind to begin with—and hands the villain a Fate Worse than Death. The final scene confirms that The Hero is in fact, irrevocably blind.
In The Faculty one of the characters we *know* cannot be the alien is revealed in flashback not to have done the test we saw them do.
Ocean's Thirteen used this when it's revealed that the FBI agent who arrests Dell and Linus is actually Linus's father, a master thief ("Just because you have the best cover in the world and you never have to worry about [disguises]...")
The Poirot mystery Murder On The Orient Express is arguably of this type as well.
The Tommy and Tuppence short story "A Pot of Tea", the first case in Partners in Crime, features a young man coming to Blunt's Brilliant Detectives to ask for help in finding a girl who has vanished. She's actually an old friend of Tuppence's; they cooked up the plot between them to a) get publicity for the agency and b) provoke the young man into proposing to the girl.
Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. A Confederate sympathizer is to be hung from Owl Creek Bridge. The rope breaks, he escapes his captors, runs all day and night, finally gets home, sees his loving wife, and then dies, as his neck is broken by the noose that is still attached to the Owl Creek Bridge, thus revealing that he imagined the entire escape.
- The above example is also shown in the psychological horror film Jacobs Ladder.
- It was also ~~stolen~~ ~~winked at~~ stolen in an episode of short-lived sci-fi weirdness show VR5, where a character in a gas chamber receives a last-minute pardon and has a reunion with his family before we find out it was All Just a Dream.
Famed short-story writer O. Henry was the master of this trope, and used it in nearly all his stories.
- The Gift of the Magi. It's It Was His Sled now, but in the original story, we don't learn till the end that the husband sold his watch for hair combs (which his wife can't use, since she sold her hair to buy him a watch chain).
- Lost on Dress Parade. A gentleman of modest means pretends, every so often, to be someone richer and more aristocratic than he is. One time when he's doing this act, he sees a beautiful woman who appears to be in a lower income bracket than his true one. He treats her nicely but plays up his act. It turns out she's really a rich, single woman who is looking for someone who isn't a shallow rich fellow — which is what he looked like to her, even though he was nice otherwise.
- And then he wrote a story about a woman returning to theatrical life. She had done a tightrope act and threw her garter into the audience each show. (Yes, that kind of theater.) But then she decided she wanted to be respectable, and became a schoolteacher under an assumed name and became engaged to a respectable fellow. This man had a box with a very special, very secret treasure. Once she became engaged, she decided to see what was in it. It held one of her old garters...
In Roald Dahl's The Witches, the first-person narrator explains that he had two personal encounters with witches; he got away safely from the first, but was not so lucky with the second. Not so lucky, that is, in that they transformed him into a mouse.
- And then he massacred them. Yes, thank you, Mr. Dahl, writer of charming kids' stories.
In Louise Cooper's novel Infanta, the very young, seemingly sweet and innocent princess turns out to be the human avatar of the demon that the heroine has been hunting down all along. In a further twist, she kills and eats the heroine's original prime suspect. Oddly enough, this could also be interpreted as a Devil in Plain Sight: Several minor clues as to the demon's identity are dropped throughout the book.
At the end of the seventh book of the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, it turns out Harry is a horcrux (an object that holds part of one's soul and makes it's owner immortal until it is destroyed) of the Big Bad. But that's not the Tomato surprise, yet. He kills himself to make Voldemort mortal again, only to discover he himself was immortal as well, as Voldemort is a pseudo-horcrux of Harry's. That means if Harry dies, Voldemort becomes mortal. And if Voldemort dies, Harry becomes mortal. Thus, "either must die at hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives", and the one who dies first is the one who undoubtedly wins (as long as Voldemort's other horcruxes were dealt with). Had Harry known this at the end of book 4 (where he becomes immortal until Voldemort dies), the whole tension and plot of the series would have been ruined.
Under The Skin by Michel Faber. The protagonist was a fairly unattractive young woman who kidnapped hitchhikers with an exotic contraption in her car to bring them to a farmhouse for an unknown purpose. She also kept comparing lambs to human children. Then it was revealed that she was an alien using Translation Convention. The word 'human' actually referred to her own species, while the Earth humans were called vodzels, and before the surgical process that made her human-like she was semi-quadrupedical thing that did vaguely resemble a sheep. And the reason why she kidnapped people? Vodzel-flesh is apparently an interstellar delicacy, and as far as she is concerned, the Earth humans are just dumb animals that can make a passing semblance of sentience for the uneducated.
The revamped Battlestar Galactica has done this several times by having supposedly human guest star characters, like the journalist D'Anna Biers, suddenly revealed as Cylons. In a more powerful variation on this plot, they've also done Cylon reveals as the Tomato in the Mirror.
In "Tempests", an episode of the new Outer Limits series, a spaceship is attacked by aliens. The main character hallucinates that he is actually back home, suffering from hallucinations that he is on the crew of the ship. Torn between the two realities, he finally accepts the ship as real and executes a daring escape. It is then revealed that both worlds were a hallucination created by the aliens, who had already captured and mind-controlled the entire crew.
- A plot similar to this happens to Commander Riker in the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Frame of Mind".
- And to Teal'c in Stargate SG-1's "The Changeling", though instead of alien mind-control, he's just having two different injury-induced hallucinations.
Classically awful original-series Star Trek episodes with a Tomato Surprise include The Squire of Gothos and Catspaw.
Jekyll. We are originally set up to expect the twist that Dr Jackman is a clone of Dr Jekyll, and several characters suggest that - but they're wrong. Jackman's wife is a clone of the serving girl that Jekyll was in love with. Jackman is not a clone at all, but naturally descended from Hyde. Didn't see that one coming!
The obligatory Buffy reference: Early season 6, Willow believes she's done Buffy a big favor by resurrecting her after she apparently had died and went to Hell. Buffy eventually thanks her and the gang, and apologizes for not bring appreciative, even though, as she tells Spike, she was really in Heaven, and her friends ripped her out of it. They all find out the truth a few episodes later, though, and it ain't pretty...
- Season 6 episode "Normal Again". The Trio unleash a demon on Buffy whose hallucinatory powers make her suspect that her implausible and nightmarish life as vampire slayer has actually been her own elaborate hallucination as a mental patient catatonic in an institution for the past six years. She dispatches the demon easily and reconciles with her friends, urging them to quickly make her that antidote while she stays on guard against relapsing again. Cut back to the hospital, where Buffy is still sitting in her corner of the room. The Doctor tells Buffy's heartbroken parents that she's "gone,". Buffy has succumbed to her illness and will be trapped in her life as "Vampire Slayer" forever.
In the Babylon Five episode Comes the Inquisitor, Delenn's readiness to lead the Army of Light is tested by a Vorlon agent named Sebastian, who displays a severe disapproval of the immorality around him and says nothing about his past save that he last lived on Earth in London in 1888.
- Another big one is the following episode, where Kosh takes off his encounter suit.
Red Vs Blue Reconstruction 16: MAJOR spoiler alert! "Church...there's no such thing as ghosts. You're one of them. You're an A.I. You...are the Alpha." Which as it turns out, means that the entire show in blood gulch was really fake, all for the purpose of keeping the alphs occupied.
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath has the titular Bounty Hunter hero saving up for money he needs to get an operation. Big Bad Corrupt Corporate Executive Sekto offers the reward on anyone who can bring him a Steef, an incredibly rare, nearly extinct creature, a bounty which Stranger does not take, despite the fact that the amount of Moolah offered would be useful in paying for his operation. This prompts Sekto to send his Mooks after Stranger, on suspicion he knows where the Steef is hiding. Following a Hopeless Boss Fight, Stranger is captured, and the Surgery Bid that has been sitting in your inventory the whole game is found by the Mooks, revealing the surgery was intended to convert Stranger from a quadruped to a bipedal creature. Removal of Stranger's boots reveal that Stranger himself is the Steef, in addition to later revealing him as the Chosen One, who would eventually defeat the Demon who had made the Mongo River run dry (Sekto had built a large dam prior to the events of the game). Ignore how Stranger would manage to hide an equestrian lower half without having difficulty walking; he just does. Later in the game this Trope is used again when It is revealed that Sekto is actually a Face Hugging parasite controlling the actions of the original guardian of the Obligatory Native Tribe, who also happens to be a Steef. Sekto's "Head" is later seen swimming down the restored river, hinting at an (unlikely as the company has stopped making games) sequel.

Archived Discussion Main / TomatoSurprise