Ass Pull / Live-Action TV

• Most of the twists in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "Turn, Turn, Turn" work very well, but when it turns out Ward is a HYDRA agent, it starts feeling like they're throwing out twists just for the sake of having twists, as if the episode needed any more. Even if Word of God says that there are subtle clues in previous episodes, especially concerning how Ward got everyone to trust him, ^note (he become Skye's SO, saved Simmons, went on a mission with Fitz, etc.) not every viewer agreed that acting exactly like a protagonist constituted a hint. How poorly foreshadowed was the twist? Almost no-one believed it. Immediately after the reveal, the big debate between fans was whether Ward was a Fake Defector or Brainwashed and Crazy. Turns out it was genuine.
• Alias: The later seasons suffered from this a lot. Season 4 reached an all-time low with the constant back-and-forth between both Arvin Sloane and Jack Bristow having either good intentions or hidden agendas/being untrustworthy/evil all along, so much that you just want to yell at the TV screen, "We've already been through this a few episodes ago, and the episode before that!"
• Angel: In the episode "Guise Will Be Guise", Wesley is kidnapped at gunpoint from the office in front of Cordelia. With no clues to the abductor's identity, she decides to try to look at LAPD mugshots to see if she can identify the man. After awhile of searching through mugshots, she gets bored and decides to randomly read a celebrity gossip-rag and happens to come across a picture of the man, who it turns out is a bodyguard to a celebrity. You can tell the writer was on a deadline, or just didn't care to come up with something better.
• Avataro Sentai Donbrothers:
  • Every upgrade the Donbrothers receive throughout the show (Sans Taro's Mid-Season Upgrade) comes out of nowhere with zero explanation behind it.
  • Near the end of the show, the primary villain trio is undergoing a Hazy-Feel Turn and ingratiate themselves to the heroes by activating the Ring of Forgiveness, a MacGuffin that brings back every Hitotsu-Ki host they've ever defeated, including those thought dead. It's also housed in the Jutos' Forest Of Slumbers, a place it has no reason to really be.
• Depending on the viewer, many twists, including several Cylon identity revelations, in the later episodes of Battlestar Galactica may fall under this trope.
  (from Robot Chicken)
  Seth Green: Wow! Ron Moore! Creator of Battlestar Galactica. How about letting us come aboard and help you with your whip-smart plots?
  Ron Moore: Help? Why would I need help writing plots? I just throw a dart at the cast list and boom: they're a Cylon. Rinse, repeat, cash the frakking check. Watch... (Moore throws several darts at a board with cast member photos taped to it)... (mocking) oh, please help me, this is so hard!
  • The identities of the Final Five Cylons, in particular, were pulled out of left field. One of the clearest indicators of this was that Chief Tyrol's baby had to be clumsily retconned into an adulterous offspring since there was only supposed to be one fertile Cylon in the series.
• In Bones, it was revealed in the third season finale that Zack was Gormogon's apprentice. The initial plan had been to slowly hint at it up until the big reveal, but the Writers' Guild strike threw a wrench in that plan.
• Charmed:
  • In the Post-Script Season, there are suddenly two sisters with an Ultimate Power that is supposed to be even stronger than the Charmed Ones, after seven seasons hyping up the Power of Three.
  • In season six, they eventually determine that Chris is a good guy, Piper and Leo's Kid from the Future, and that Wyatt causes the Bad Future. Try squaring that with anything he had done up until this point in the series, and it's quite clear they had another idea/were making this up as they went along.
  • The introduction of the Magic School in season six sort of negates the very premise of the show: the sisters discover their powers in their twenties because their grandmother bound them to protect the girls from the warlock Nicholas. What's the best way to protect the girls: keep them completely in the dark about their powers, legacy and the threats they'll have to face, or let them be taken care of by experienced witches and even Elders in a place where evil can't even enter and they'll be able to take their skills to the next level?
• Dallas: Bobby Ewing stepping out of the shower and rendering an entire season All Just a Dream could be regarded as one of these... or as what it actually was, an attempt to salvage the show by doing a Continuity Reboot to the last point at which it hadn't sunk on ice.
• In Doctor Who:
  • So many episodes end with the villains being foiled by some brand-new, never-before-seen trick of time, space, the TARDIS, or the Doctor's sonic screwdriver that it's difficult to keep count.
  • The First Doctor didn't have a sonic screwdriver but he was able to use the ring he wore to fix the TARDIS' sabotaged lock. His explanation was that the ring had "certain properties" and he didn't want to discuss it any further.
  • It may sound incredible, but the now core concept of regeneration was itself an Ass Pull. William Hartnell was getting too ill to play The Doctor, but they didn't want to end the show — so Hartnell himself came up with the idea that Time Lords could regenerate into a new body.
  • The Doctor's previously unmentioned 'respiratory bypass system' which saves him from strangulation in "Pyramids of Mars" ^note At least it was established for the next dozen times it saved the day.
  • The glass-shattering scream that Gallifreyans are capable of, which resolved a cliffhanger in "The Power of Kroll" but was never mentioned before and will probably never be used again.
  • Undoing Peri's death off-screen in "The Ultimate Foe". Nicola Bryant didn't even know about this until years later, to boot!
  • Then there's Captain Jack Harkness' performance in "Bad Wolf". While completely naked he reaches behind himself and produces a small laser gun. This is immediately lampshaded when he is asked where he got it from. While the act in itself is an Ass Shove, it also qualifies as Ass Pull as there was no indication that he had it prior to using it. It was a scene played for laughs though.
  • The Gallifreyan mind meld in "The Girl in the Fireplace". Has there really never been a suitable reason to use it at any time in the previous 27 seasons?
  • "Journey's End" features some of the biggest Ass Pulls in the history of the show. Suddenly the Doctor is able to send enough regeneration energy into a severed hand to conveniently grow a half-human Doctor when a human touches it.^note As with the respiratory bypass, above, it does set up other times energy is transferred (to heal River's wrist, or to reverse her poisoning him, for example)... it's just this application that's out of left field. And when the human touching it is electrocuted she suddenly gets Time Lord intelligence, just in time to stop the Daleks destroying the Universe.
  • In "Journey's End", the Doctor is forced to wipe Donna's memories, saying that if she ever remembers him, her head will be incinerated. A year and a half later in "The End of Time", she does remember him — only then the Doctor says he added a "defense mechanism" which knocks out her and everyone in the vicinity. This comes very handy in incapacitating an enemy that the Doctor could not possibly have foreseen, though this can be handwaved by the fact that it could very well have been set up for any general enemy. However this is still a rather odd mechanism if she begins remembering, as it might not even have been an enemy and all it does from what we see is take down a few foes close to her.
  • The concept of Time Lords undergoing Gender Swap at regeneration had literally never been so much as hinted at in the 48 years prior to the 2011 episodes "The Doctor's Wife", when it was tossed into a script as a joke, one that was later taken seriously, much to the chagrin or delight of fans.
  • "Let's Kill Hitler" resolves the plotline from the previous episode of Amy and Rory's daughter been kidnapped by explaining that she somehow made it to Leadworth from New York and became their never seen before best friend, Mels. Unfortunately, it also establishes something of a timeline issue since she was in NYC in the late 1960s but grew up with them as Mels decades later. The intervening years are never mentioned or explained.
  • "Robot of Sherwood":
    • Clara's sudden and previously unrevealed knowledge of TaeKwonDo, though a downplayed trope since it has no effect on the plot.
    • Although the spoon has relevance to the swordfight, it does seem to appear out of nowhere in the TARDIS. The Doctor is discussing Robin Hood, he's flipping through a book, he turns away from Clara, we hear a "CHING" sound effect and suddenly there's a big spoon in his hand, covered with either icing or cream, which the Doctor proceeds to lick. Clara doesn't even seem to notice. And the spoon immediately appears to vanish when the Doctor starts hunting for the Polaroid. (And it should be noted there is no indication of a table or anything else holding the source of the cream/icing either.) If the Doctor hadn't later needed the spoon for the swordfight, this would have met most of the criteria for a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment.
  • In "Kill the Moon", the moon creature lays a second egg right after it's born, without any sign given before that it could, neatly sidestepping any problems destroying the moon would cause and proving Clara was right.
  • Steven Moffat has been accused of this trope with regards to retroactively establishing both River Song and Clara Oswald as bisexual in Series 9, despite neither character displaying any tendencies in this direction previously. Possibly justified as an attempt at future-proofing the canonical romance between the Doctor and the two women in anticipation of the Doctor undergoing a Gender Swap at some point.
• In Dollhouse, the reveal that Boyd Langton was the head of the Rossum Corporation, which turns him into a lunatic with a stupidly impractical master plan and, in retrospect, makes a lot of his actions earlier in the series unnecessary at best and nonsensical at worst.
• The death of Matthew in Downton Abbey. This was a case of Real Life Writes the Plot, as the actor wanted to leave, and after everything Matthew and Mary had gone through to get married, there was no way the fans would accept them splitting up, so killing him was the only option.
• Arrowverse:
  • Arrow: The series has had quite a few minor ones over the years, but there are some big ones too.
    • In general, every time the Human Target shows up, it's with zero foreshadowing to get the team out of an otherwise impossible spot.
    • In season 6, Cayden James was supposed to be the overarching Big Bad, but then his actor decided to leave. The second half of the season quickly had to be rewritten to get rid of Cayden and elevate Diaz (who had originally just been Cayden's ally) to a true threat.
  • The Flash (2014) has several, often lumped under the general category of "because of the Speed Force."
    • One case that averts abuse of the Speed Force is the solution to the problem in season 2's Christmas episode, where The Trickster has randomly distributed bombs in Christmas presents to children around the city. They have no way of finding all the bombs in time, so Harry and Cisco come up with a solution to throw one of the bombs through the dimensional breach and this will cause the other bombs to be magnetically attracted to the first and suck them all through the same breach. Somehow involving magnetism.
    • Towards the end of the second season, this pretty much became one of Zoom's Required Secondary Powers (the other being to infect the heroes with an Idiot Ball when needed). One of the biggest examples being in the penultimate episode, the team figure out a way to disable all Earth 2 metahumans using a frequency that will cause them all intense headaches (this itself being a bit of an Ass Pull). How does Zoom get out of this one? He punches a hole into another universe and escapes; bare in mind, before this point Zoom had never demonstrated this ability, and in fact it was a plot point that they'd trapped him on Earth 2 and he needed Cisco to let him out, and while it could maybe be explained by his taking Barry's speed (Barry had, after an upgrade, demonstrated he could run through to other universes, itself an Ass Pull to justify the crossover with Supergirl (2015)), they never even offer so much and the heroes react as if this was a completely expected action of his.
    • Another example is Zoom's motivation, which repeatedly keeps changing without any foreshadowing, but treated as if this was his plan all along. Firstly he just wants to kill Barry, but then Harry figures out actually he's after Barry's speed, wanting him to improve so he could have more to steal. We then, later, discover that he's doing this because he's Secretly Dying, and with virtually no foreshadowing, it turns out all along he was really Jay Garrick (or rather, Hunter Zolomon assuming the identity of Jay Garrick), who had similarly revealed he was Secretly Dying when Caitlin performs some secret tests on his DNA (despite the fact she'd done so already when they first met and never picked this up). Once this is resolved, he then suddenly wants to invade Earth 1 with an army of metahumans, with him claiming to have 'conquered' Earth 2 (something that was never shown to be true, but is treated as such; he terrorized Earth 2 Central City, but its police force were still actively fighting against him). When they defeat this army, however, it turns out he was actually building a device to destroy the Multiverse so that he could rule the only universe left, something that had no foreshadowing to even be possible and he'd never demonstrated this level of scientific capability.
  • Supergirl (2015): Season 3 hit a bad spot of Troubled Production when the lead writer was fired for sexual assault allegations. They had already filmed half the season, but didn't want to use his scripts for the remainder (morality aside, it would have required paying him royalties). This resulted in some hasty rewrites, plots going in different directions than they were foreshadowed, and a minor sympathetic villain suddenly becoming much more evil to help join a couple plots together. While season 3 was generally considered reasonably good despite these problems, the shift was so obvious that everyone noticed.
  • Legends of Tomorrow: Used pretty shamelessly in season 4. The first half of the season was written with the intent of featuring Hank Haywood as the Big Bad, willingly in league with a demon, torturing magical creatures to use as soldiers, and swaying Nate to his side. However, the writers loved Hank's actor so much that they decided they could never go through with the idea of him being evil after all, and changed it so that Hank was the Unwitting Pawn for the demon Neron, who had a wild scheme to unleash Hell on Earth. Crazier is the revelation that Hank's plan for the creatures is to create a theme park for Nate. In the span of just a few episodes, Hank goes from a sinister figure on an evil plot to a goofy guy whose plan makes little sense. Nate even says that it's such a stupid plan that the Legends really would have liked him more if they had gotten to know each other better.
• Farscape: The last 30 seconds of season 4, in which an alien spaceship shows up out of nowhere and shoots Crichton and Aeryn to pieces, give this impression. Word of God states that the episode was scripted and filmed before the series was cancelled, and was intended to be the lead-in to the fifth season. After the cancellation, the showrunners refused to go back and change the ending. Peacekeeper Wars is essentially what was intended as the fifth season condensed into three hours.
• Game of Thrones: "The Prince that was promised" prophecy made by Melisandre for most of the series seems to be referring to Jon Snow for some reason. The series heavily builds towards a big connection between Jon and the Night King, but when they actually come to a confrontation, it's Arya who kills the king and saves the day. Word of God is that they decided to make it Arya purely because no one would expect it.
  • The show established early that the zombie-like wights are impervious to any kind of melee weapon, but are extremely vulnerable to fire, while their supernatural masters, the White Walkers, ignore fire, but can be killed with weapons made of dragonglass (obsidian) or rare Valyrian steel. Then, in season 7, suddenly and without any special acknowledgement, obsidian is perfectly viable against wights, while in season 8 a fire trench fails to stop them - they just fill it in with their own bodies without catching fire.
  • Throughout the early seasons, the dragons were treated as willful and dangerous beasts, and the inability of their owner, Daenerys, to tame and control them was a major point of her plot. Then, in the end of season 6, she simply began to have that ability, to the extent that fits less beasts (even tame) and more remote-controlled drones. Despite that, season 7 claimed unequivocally that using dragons in siege warfare would inevitably lead to massive civilian casualties, despite them still being perfectly obedient and capable of surgically precise strikes in every scene they were in, including, ultimately, the very siege Daenerys refused to use them in originally!
• The reveal that Dan Humphrey, with some help from Jenny is Gossip Girl comes out of left field and makes no sense at all unless you disregard pretty much every Gossip Girl blast from the first five seasons. Given the way the show was written, this would have happened no matter who they revealed it to be.
• Guiding Light 2003, from actual YouTube video description:
  "Reva's stalker was supposed to be Jonathan, which is why Marah felt a bond with him online. This was scuttled by incoming hack Head Writer Ellen Weston, who made Alexandra the stalker which made little to no sense whatsoever."
• House:
  • Kutner's suicide. Before this, there's no foreshadowing of any kind in previous episodes that he was depressed or suicidal. It just happens off-screen at the beginning of an episode and the rest of the episode is one long Clueless Aesop about how sometimes emotionally stable non-suicidal people just kill themselves and nobody gets to find out why. The out-of-universe reason for Kutner's death is that Kal Penn abruptly left to work for the Obama presidency at the White House and his character was killed off.
  • In one episode the team's patient is a homeless man who, despite lying to the team repeatedly about his name, shows no signs of being anything more than a homeless ex-junkie. Until the ending, where it's revealed that he is a serial killer that eats his victims.
• The ending of How I Met Your Mother outsmarted itself. Early in the show's run, the crew filmed the final scene of Ted's kids listening to the end of the story to avoid problems of them aging by the time the show actually ended, so the end of the story actually was planned right from the start. Unfortunately, this also meant they were inescapably locked into that ending even as each passing season made it less and less appropriate to the story. Thus, Ted runs off to be with Robin at his kids' urging, despite our having spent the past several years getting a thorough education in how wrong they are for each other. Not to mention Barney and Robin divorce with a 30-second explanation after the past 3 seasons have established them multiple times as soul mates. As well as the mother, who we've been waiting for the entire show to meet, getting insultingly killed off via Soap Opera Disease.
• Hunters: The end of season 1 reveal that Meyer is actually Wilhelm would mean that if Ruth and the real Meyer conceived their daughter in 1945, she would be 13 when she birthed Jonah. Never mind how they would have time for sex in concentration camp conditions, or how a 1940's plastic surgeon could change Wilhem's face so well, or how only one of the Nazis recognized him...
• iCarly:
  • Inverted in the episode "iSpace Out", where Carly is suddenly revealed to be aggressively claustrophobic, and breaks the window of a training space station module to escape, despite multiple occasions earlier where Carly is perfectly normal in spaces that are half that size or less. The inversion is that the ass pull isn't used to resolve the plot, but in fact to fail the plot and bring about an end to the episode. This was done because the writers knew that having iCarly IN SPACE would be seen as a Jumping the Shark moment and therefore had to find a way to stop it.
  • Played straight with Sam liking Freddie in "iOMG". It's an ass pull because of the desire to create a season-finale Cliffhanger ending. In "iOMG" Sam liking Freddie just happens. There's no previous episode arc or foreshadowing or explanation to the audience that Sam likes Freddie. The focus is on protecting a cliff-hanger ending where Sam only reveals she likes Freddie right at the end of the episode, leaving Freddie's response as the cliffhanger. Having any indication that it's Sam and Freddie would kill the twist. They also use Brad as a Red Herring. In fact, the characters on the show itself make reference to how suddenly and strange it is, as they only mention that Sam's behaviour only started when Brad showed back up, which was only for that episode. Sam was showing signs of liking Freddie before it would kill the plot of the episode and spoil the dramatic ending. Later on in the short arc the reason is revealed to have been an incident that was never shown and took place entirely off screen, with no reference as to when it happened.
• The Killing: The season finale of the first season has not one, but two of them (specifically, the prime suspect is randomly shot out of nowhere and the until-then-incredibly likable Lancer is revealed to have been in all probability in on the titular murder)... during the last fifteen seconds. Fans and critics rage ensued.
• Life with Boys: Tess begins dating her wrestling rival Bobby and Allie, who was dating Bobby prior is not okay with it at first but then is, feels left out. Tess sets time aside to spend with Allie when Bobby gets sick, but ends up pretending to be sick to get out of it so she can go to a playoffs game. It turns out Bobby pretended to be sick so he could go to the game too. Tess breaks up with him for lying, but then realizes the hypocrisy when Allie catches her lying and decides since Allie forgave her, she can forgive him too. Cue Bobby getting another girl's number immediately at the end of the episode and the break up is permanent. That one ass pull makes the whole arc an ass pull in itself.
• Lost:
  • Everything regarding the Man in Black/Smoke Monster during the final season:
    • His conflict with Jacob, which had the added bonus of replacing the much hyped conflict between Ben Linus and Charles Widmore.
    • His nature and Freudian Excuse.
    • Plus his getting Mode Locked as John Locke. We never learn why, or how Ilana knows this. Basically, it was just an excuse to keep Terry O'Quinn on the show in the final season.
    • The claim that the Man in Black can't leave the island unless he kills all the candidates. This is never really explained properly. It's essentially a Hand Wave so that the character can do evil things, and thus give the audience a reason to root against him. For that matter, how was Jacob keeping him on the island?
  • In season 4, Hurley gets the ability to talk to ghosts out of nowhere, which is never explained. Even weirder, this is the same season that introduces a new character who can also talk to ghosts, so what was wrong with using him for these scenes?
• Law & Order:
  • Not nearly as shocking as most of these swerves, but ADA Serena Southerlyn's coming out was pretty damn surprising. The only thing that vaguely and possibly hints at this was a few episodes earlier when McCoy, in order to get around a claim of Spousal Privilege on the part of a gay couple, files suit (and wins) to prevent the state from recognizing gay marriages. Southerlyn is uncharacteristically more upset than usual about McCoy's cynical tactics (as he doesn't indicate he personally is opposed to gay marriage) and outright refuses to assist him. This episode is somewhat Hilarious in Hindsight if you watch it after having seen the reveal of Serena's sexuality since she makes quite a few references to a gay friend she had in college.
  • Over in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, we have the episode "Unstable", where the team deals with a set of rapes being done in the same manner as a guy Elliot put away a decade ago. Turns out the other guy is innocent. They catch the criminal and he confesses. Elliot apologizes to the first guy and promises to get him out ASAP... then, the guest detective of the day may or may not have pushed the guy out the bathroom window and to his death. DA shrugs her shoulders and goes "There's nothing I can do". Episode ends.
  • Perhaps the most infamous example involves a recurring character, FBI Agent Dana Lewis. The episode "Secrets Exhumed" is based on Stephanie Lazarus, a police officer who committed a love triangle murder in 1986 and wasn't caught for over two decades. It is revealed Lewis perpetrated a similar crime and used her FBI powers to cover her tracks. She attempts to pin the death on a serial killer to protect herself once and for all, only to have it fall apart when the SVU detectives realize the murder didn't fit the killer's MO and the confession was coerced. Lewis is ultimately caught and confesses. The decision to use a popular recurring character as the murderer, in effect killing her off, was not popular with the fan base.
• The Lost Room: The business about the Law of Conservation of Objects comes out of nowhere in the last five minutes of the series and is crucial to the resolution of the main plot.
• Mad Dogs undergoes several as it goes on. First, after escaping successfully from a gang of drug dealers, the group inexplicably decide to go back, against all common sense. Finally, the ending of the series was widely criticised as this, in addition to turning the whole show into a Shoot the Shaggy Dog story. The cast are intercepted by a drug dealer out for their blood on a beach. Instead of making any sensible attempt to escape, all of the main cast are hooded and executed. We then cut to a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment where the cast dream they are driving in a car. They see demonic doppelgangers of themselves driving alongside them before they plummet off the bridge, seemingly into Hell. Not only was this bleak twist rather abrupt and unexpected, but it also makes little sense that the cast end up in Hell. The people that murdered them are almost infinitely more evil and cruel, and they did relatively little wrong.
• Motherland: Fort Salem spends years telling us how desperate the bad guys are to prevent "the union of Earth and Sky" and dropping hints that this means Abigail (who has sky/weather magic) and Adil (who has earth magic) getting together will change the world somehow. Since they're romantically attracted and a somewhat forbidden love, this seems to be a hint that them having a child will be a game-changer. Later on we see them combine their magics destructively and this works surprisingly well, so that would also fit with the ongoing plot thread. Then, in the very last episode, the show suddenly claims that Abigail's bloodline was the union of earth and sky all along and Adil is completely irrelevant. Not only does this negate all the foreshadowing, but it makes no sense. How would the bad guys "prevent" a union that allegedly had already existed for hundreds of years?
• In The New Adventures of Old Christine, Christine's brother Matthew is a nanny for her son Ritchie during Season 1. Then he enters medical school, drops out later that season and then is suddenly a therapist seeing patients. He even says that he "glad he's a doctor" now, indicating that he has somehow obtained a Ph.D. in psychology over the course of a semester.
• Newsradio played this one for laughs in their conclusion to the trial of Mr. James for being the hijacker known as "D. B. Cooper." When Mr. James is up on the stand, under questioning he comes out of nowhere with the claim that Adam West is D. B. Cooper. The prosecutor laughs this off until Adam West is revealed in the courtroom and he fesses up to it.
• Once Upon a Time:
  • The Reveal that Zelena (thought to have been dead) has killed and replaced Robin Hood's wife Maid Marian out of the never-ending spite for her sister Regina was a poorly received and poorly foreshadowed twist that some theorized was there for little reason other than to get Robin and Regina together again without a hitch. The convoluted-ness of the explanation for Zelena's return didn't help.
  • Season 5 reveals that Hook became a second Dark One while in Camelot. So for all of Emma's talking about how everyone betrayed her and establishing her edging close to a Moral Event Horizon to become the Dark Swan, she inexplicably never did anything wrong at all - which contradicted about half her dialogue and motivations for the season.
  • The mid-season finale threw this to ludicrous levels. Rumpelstiltskin reveals he is once again the Dark One after Hook sacrifices himself to destroy the curse for good. The explanation for this is even more convoluted - he found a potion that would somehow steal all the magic out of Excalibur around the same time Hook was destroying it. This literally undoes a whole half-season's worth of Character Development and comes completely out of nowhere.
• One Life to Live has the "Who killed Colin McIver?" storyline. There's only one person in town who can't possibly be the murderer: Nora because she was drugged by Colin. Naturally, she did it.
• Power Rangers:
  • The franchise is limited by the Stock Footage available from the Super Sentai series, meaning many of the Artifacts Of Doom and Plot Coupons introduced during its run can teeter vicariously between being simply Deus Ex Machinas to full out Merchandise-Driven ass pulls Depending on the Writer. Some examples are worse than others. In the second season of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers the show wanted to change its stock footage from using Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger to Gosei Sentai Dairanger; however, in the show it simply explains that the Rangers need to start using the Power of Thunder!. What is the Power of Thunder? Never really explained. Where did it come from? Never asked. If it's always been available, why not use it sooner? Never brought up. The transition seriously gets a single short exchange of dialogue and is never questioned again.
  • The "transition" (term used very loosely) between Power Rangers Zeo and Power Rangers Turbo. And before that, the "Sword of Light" needed to transfer powers to another person back in Season 2 of Mighty Morphin'. Never mentioned again, and later power transfers just have the original Ranger giving their power coin/morpher to the new Ranger.
• After spoilers for The Reveal were supposedly leaked on Reddit, the writers of Pretty Little Liars wrote in an ending for the series that angered many fans, making a long-running villain a character that had been around for half a season and garnering accusations of transphobia. The reveal shown could have been what was always planned, but many fans speculate that this trope was invoked as a result of the spoiler leak.
• Though this is more of an in-universe example than a proper ass pull, Psych employs this when Shawn, desperate for an explanation, claims that a man was killed by a T. Rex. Then it turns out he was a paleontologist and, on dying, fell on a skeleton. Even Shawn is surprised by this.
• The second half of first Season Finale of Robyn Hood (2023) reveals that the Big Bad John Prince intends to flood a quarter of the city, killing everyone there, to "create a fortress against the coming peasant revolt". Up until that moment, he was only ever shown to be interested in buying Sherwood towers so he could evict the residents and replace them with "the right kind of people". There was no foreshadowing beforehand except a character being suspicious that Prince, a land developer, owned a lot of land. Some reviewers claim it was done because the writers realized at the last second that Prince hadn't actually done anything illegal or particularly evil so far beyond threatening the mayor with bad press if she tried to veto the bill that would let him buy the apartment block.
• The first season of Roswell introduces a character played by Julie Benz as their new teacher. Liz becomes suspicious of her and suspects she's secretly a government agent looking for the aliens. Instead, she reveals that she's actually the school's new guidance counselor. Needless to say, this does nothing to explain why she was impersonating a teacher in the first place. She later gets involved in the plot for reasons resulting from her actual job. (A government agent looking for the aliens.)
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch discusses this and shoots it to hell in Season 3's "Sabrina the Teenage Writer", where Sabrina is trying to finish a story of hers that's come to life. Sabrina's planned ending is a situation, and trying to force a twist that wouldn't work (the villain deciding not to blow up the school for no reason) just results in the characters rejecting it. Both the aunts suggest unexpected twists - the villain deciding not to go through with the scheme out of fear of legal issues, and a random Dance Party Ending - and the characters reject those too.
• Sherlock: In "A Scandal in Belgravia", Sherlock is tasked via livestreaming to solve a murder case, where a body is found near river and the police is clueless about how he died. Sherlock quickly finds it out, but does not provide the answer directly. Later on, when Sherlock poses this subplot to Adler as a riddle, it's revealed the victim failed to catch a returning boomerang and killed himself by accident. However, there's no foreshadowing in the earlier scenes that implied the boomerang's existance and it's never explained how Sherlock found this out just by looking through a laptop camera. It's more egregious for Adler, who wasn't provided that livestream footage yet also deduces the same way as if they were on the scene the whole time.
• In the Skins series four penultimate episode, Effy's therapist, who was introduced in the same episode, beats Freddie to death with a baseball bat.
• The fourth season of Sons of Anarchy has a whopper in the season finale. The season spends a good deal of time focusing on an Assistant US Attorney who spends the bulk of the season building a big RICO case against the Sons that eventually sees two of their members flip (albeit one of them under duress) and one of them go to prison. The aforementioned Attorney and his people are all set to move on a gun deal the Sons are planning and they're sure to at least make some arrests. Suddenly, the Cartel guys introduced early in the season drive up, reveal that they are in fact CIA agents and tell them to close down the investigation because the CIA is using the club to take down bigger fish. This plot twist (alongside the Irish's sudden refusal to deal with anybody but Clay) not only crushes the RICO investigation but prevents Jax from killing Clay, Jax from being able to leave Charming, saves Bobby from going to prison, allows Juice's disloyalty to stay a secret from everyone in the club and leaves Jax forced to do the CIA's bidding with the threat of them letting the RICO investigation go through should Jax turn on them.
• Stargate Atlantis needed a "dramatic" way to get Atlantis involved in the battle with the Super-Hive, so Zelenka pulled "ass drive" out of McKay's wormhole.
  • Every previous season finale ended on a big cliffhanger. It was obvious that the cliffhanger this time was going to be a Wraith ship in orbit of a defenseless Earth; but when they found out they were canceled, they had to wrap the plot up in-episode. A little bit of ass pulling seemed like the better alternative...
  • The whole "moving the control chair to Area 51" bit also seems like an ass pull, simply to put the chair (and the research facility with it) in a position to be blown up before it can be used to fight the Super-Hive. The reason given for moving it doesn't make sense at any possible level, either. The (real-life) treaty banning militarization of Antarctica certainly would not apply to an artifact predating humanity itself, and the IOA (which was founded for the explicit purpose of preventing America from monopolizing alien technology) would never have insisted that the chair be moved to America; as international territory, Antarctica would've been the perfect place for it from their perspective. Not that it would've done much good, given how well Atlantis's own drones do against the enemy ship.
  • Stargate SG-1 referenced this trope in "Redemption, Part 2":
    O'Neill: (to Carter) Well, you do have a talent for pulling solutions out of your butt. (Beat) Head!
• Star Trek:
  • Spock's "internal eyelid" in "Operation: Annihilate!" Never mentioned before. Never mentioned again, right up until a single episode in the final season of Star Trek: Enterprise.
  • Similarly, in the Next Gen episode "Ethics", Worf is injured seriously enough to be paralyzed. He asks Riker to kill him before finally submitting to experimental surgery. The surgery fails and Worf is declared dead. Then, in the words of Memory Alpha, "Due to the redundancies of Klingon physiology, where every organ in the Klingon body has a backup organ that activates whenever damage occurs to the first, his internal backups were initiated and Worf woke up." And everyone watching sat up and said, "...the hell??" These "redundancies" were never remotely alluded to before and, though they were discussed in a random Star Trek: Voyager episode, this theoretically extremely important and useful feature of Klingon biology is plot-relevant exactly once, in "Ethics"—incidentally making mincemeat of the episode-titling moral considerations of euthanasia, experimental medicine, etc. Particularly glaring due the fact that the Klingon's Hat of being a Proud Warrior Race who value combat above all else. Seems like this would come up fairly often with them.
  • The revelation in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that Doctor Bashir is genetically enhanced. Bashir's parents were once brought up in a conversation, and Bashir completely dodged it, a full season before his reveal established why he would hate his parents. This was the second time that happened to the character, as the two-parter "In Purgatory's Shadow"/"By Inferno's Light" revealed that Bashir had been replaced by a changeling several episodes before. The actor didn't learn until he got the script for the two-parter.
  • The third season of Star Trek: Enterprise ends with the showdown over the Xindi weapon, which has been the plot the entire season. With Enterprise, the Xindi he's convinced, and Shran, they destroy the weapon and try to contact Starfleet only to find... the Nazis won World War II! This was part of the "Temporal Cold War" plot that was forced into the show... except that Daniels, the Temporal Cold War guy, had referred only to the Xindi in his appearances. In no way did anything in Season 3 hint, foreshadow, or subliminally convey that space Nazis were on the horizon, and it completely undercut what was otherwise a fairly satisfying season finale. The episode was written at a time when a fourth season was very much in doubt. Connor Trinneer (Trip) personally believes the writers deliberately did this to stick the network with negative blowback in case the show actually did get cancelled.
  • In-Universe:
    • For an example of the "Character Made It Up On The Spot", in The Original Series episode "The Corbomite Maneuver", Kirk pulls some Corbomite out of his ass, calling it a material that can reflect the attackers' destructive potential back on them and everything else in a large area and then some. It was entirely a bluff to get Balok to back down. It worked so well, he pulls it out again for some Romulans in "The Deadly Years". Then they actually made a Corbomite Reflector — it's the special equipment of The Federation capital ships in Star Trek: Armada. It was simply named after Kirk's bluff and that games don't count in Star Trek Canon. Notably, Harlan Band tries the exact same maneuver (in a bit of a Shout-Out) against the Spung in an episode of Space Cases. It doesn't work, apparently because the Spung warlord is played by George Takei.
    • Kirk is clearly the master of this maneuver, as in "A Piece of the Action", he generates the card game Fizzbin from the orifice mentioned in the trope's name, complete with nigh-indescribable rules (thus doubling as a Bavarian Fire Drill). Suffice it to say, you don't want two jacks and a king on a Tuesday night. Kirk's mastery of this extends as far as confusing people long enough to get a good grip on the table that's going to be upended. Fizzbinn was later mentioned as a game in Quark's (in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine).
  • This trope is so endemic to Star Trek that musician Aurelio Voltaire made a song that's entirely about hanging a lampshade on it, the end of which is the page's quote.
• The entirety of St. Elsewhere turning out to be the daydream of an autistic child staring at a snow globe.
• Supernatural:
  • Eric Kripke was always adamant that angels would never appear on the show, despite the many demons who do appear. That changed because of the 2007 writers' strike and the need for a new way to get Dean out of Hell. Thus the terrifying and powerful entity that rescues Dean from Hell turns out to be an Old Testament-style angel.
  • Sam and Dean meet the mysterious mental patient Anna Milton in Season 4, who turns out to be a Fallen Angel. Anna makes a romantic connection with Dean, gets her angelic grace restored, and helps the Winchesters and Castiel defeat traitor angel Uriel. She's set up to be a major player when she's suddenly arrested by angels and disappears from the story, until she shows up in Season 5 intending to kill Sam and is in turn killed. This all happened because Castiel turned out to be the more popular angel and was given Anna's role as Dean's angelic guide instead.
  • Season 6 set up Eve and/or Raphael and/or Crowley to be the season's Big Bad. Turns out it was fan-favorite Castiel, who became a Well-Intentioned Extremist in order to stop Raphael. Castiel goes power-mad, becomes God, and eventually dies in a Heroic Sacrifice. Fans did not react well, and he was resurrected and given a redemption arc.
  • Season 10 was clearly designed to be the end of the show for most of its length, until it was renewed towards the end. The result is that in the finale the nature of the Mark of Cain is abruptly revealed to be completely different than we were always told, and we get a complete repeat of Season 8 where Dean decides to hell with the rest of the world if he can be with his brother a bit longer.
  • In Season 11 Lucifer can suddenly possess angels, which makes most of the drama from Season 5 completely pointless.
    • Then again, it should be noted that he was only shown to possess Castiel, who is subject to unique circumstances as he is the only entity in his body, raising the possibility that this contributed to Lucifer being able to use him as a vessel where other angels may have required the angel and the human to consent.
  • Also in Season 11, Sam's death by gunshot. He was actually in shock and had no problem taking out two non-bleeding werewolves minutes after waking up.
  • In the Season 14 finale, after Dean refuses to kill Jack, and Chuck suddenly begins ranting that "this isn't how the story ends!". In the end, Dean and Sam still refuse to go along with His story... after which, Chuck decides that the story's "over", kills Jack, and resurrects many evils while leaving himself as the Big Bad of Season 15, throwing out all of his Character Development for a Twist Ending.
• Tales from the Crypt: Some of the Mandatory Twist Endings can feel like this, where there is little to no hint for how the ending scene would be like. A good example is "Split Second", where there was no hint nor foreshadowing that the lumberjacks would become insane murderers. Another lesser example would be "None but the Lonely Heart", where many people probably expected a Karmic Twist Ending but there was absolutely no foreshadowing that it would be that of the supernatural.
• Thank God You're Here is a sketch/game show where various comedians are brought into different sets with different plots and as different characters. They aren't told what they're going to be doing or who they're supposed to be — though costumes can occasionally give them hints — and they are required to play the role they're given as best they can. It's like Whose Line Is It Anyway?, but without the explanations.
• 3rd Rock from the Sun: The Reveal in the Grand Finale (well, the first half of it) that Don, Sally's cop boyfriend, was actually a coward and joined the police force hoping he wouldn't have to fight crime. Yes, that certainly explains all the times he left the police station to deal with crimes and often showed up gun at the ready. It seems like the main plot Mary learning that Dick and company were aliens was apparently not enough to fill the hour, and they needed something extra.
• 24 is known for its shock-inducing twists and occasionally out-of-field subplots:
  • It was decided only towards the end of the first season that Nina would be the series's major mole, despite it contradicting some of her actions as seen earlier in the season.
  • During season six, the show revealed that season five's villain, dubbed Bluetooth, was suddenly Jack's brother, Graem Bauer. This threw off the fanbase to such baffling proportions that were never seen again. Even with the show's crazy logistics and fast-paced events, this was a twist too far. And this is coming one season after an ex-President got gunned down by a sniper and another President was involved in the terrorist plot...
  • There's season seven's out-of-nowhere revelation that Tony Almeida betrayed everyone he knew on both sides to avenge the death of his unborn child. Although it could make sense for his actions in the current season, this completely contradicted the way he acted through what little he appeared in during the fifth season.
  • In the final season, the reveal that Dana Walsh is a mole. Not only does it come out of nowhere, but suddenly the way she dealt with her criminal ex-boyfriend in the season's first half makes no sense, as with her new characterization she clearly would have just killed him.
  • Alan Wilson comes out of nowhere and is revealed to be the true mastermind behind Day 7 and Day 5 events.
• The Vampire Diaries:
  • Towards the end of Season 2 Bonnie's magic has become this, with her coming up with incredibly convenient spells for numerous bad situations the characters have found themselves in.
  • In the final season (revolving around psychic powers), Bonnie states that her Grams once told her she is psychic. This only raises the question of why the latest Big Bad tries to mentor her rather than simply eliminating a potential threat.
• The seventh series of Waterloo Road ends with an out-of-control lorry crashing into the cast because the producers didn't know who'd be returning for series eight yet.
• Watchmen caught a lot of flak from fans of its comic for its infamous retcon of Hooded Justice's identity, revealing him to be not just Angela Abar's grandfather, but also to be a black man who assumed the role after a brutal lynching incident from white cops. Fans noted that this seems to contradict lots of the comic's backstory and begs the question of how the Minutemen would know it was him if he had never taken off the hood, given that would be required for the initiation. Ignoring the unfortunate implications created by the noose symbolism too, not helping matters is that it also directly contradicts the Mayfair Games RPGs confirming Hooded Justice's identity to be Rolf Mueller, a supporter of the Third Reich and with ties to the KKK, who was theorized in-universe to be the actual identity. Adding to this is that the RPG itself is the only adaptation of Alan Moore's work that he made creative contributions to.