This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
WVI: Holy hell, YES. I have ALWAYS noticed this since I was a kid. The trope, I mean.
Red Shoe: I would dispute that Mission Impossible exemplifies this. Most of the time, they plan the mission out in explicit detail under the audience's scrutiny, then carry it off with very few hitches.
Idle Dandy: Yes, but usually what we see of the planning is the players, the problem, the goal, and the roles the IM team will play. What's missing is the how, and that's what makes the show interesting. For instance, they don't say, "Then we'll melt the platinum and turn it into a grill for the car..."
Dark Sasami: The thought occurs that another way to state this law would be as follows: The total number of times the audience should hear or see the plan equals exactly one.
Looney Toons: ...Or less.
Abby: Is Mulan's trick with the cannon & avalanche really an Unspoken Plan? It seems too spur-of-the-moment to really count as one...
YYZ: The audience, ideally, hears some of the plan, but never the whole thing. As a result, you're constantly wondering when each part that you've heard about comes into play, and whether it will work - and then they hit you with something you weren't told about in the Assembling The Crew scene.
Does "The Seven Samurai" count as a subversion, and was the trope even around at the time?
Tamfang: In Firefly, episode "The Message", an unspoken plan goes wrong because nobody bothered to mention it to the person most urgently concerned. Is this a "lampshade"?
Daibhid C:
- Neatly subverted in the seventh-season Deep Space Nine episode "Badda-bing Badda-bang", in which the plan is detailed to the audience throughout the fourth act, not only with explanations but being acted out on-screen; of course, this is only so that the audience knows what's supposed to be going on in the fifth act, when everything goes wrong.
I've changed "neatly subverted" to "used", because, well, it is. We're told the plan, so we know what's going on when it goes wrong. That's what the trope is (or at least, it's the flipside of "we don't get told the plan so we can be impressed when it goes right").
Steven Howard: Removed the links and references to Good Is Dumb from the Order Of The Stick example, because that's not what the trope's about.
Trimeta: In the Mythbusters Christmas Special, Adam goes into length describing exactly how their Rube Goldberg machine is going to work; subsequently, it fails repeatedly, with a number of different parts failing. Does this count as an example for this trope, in that the explained plan failed?
