Jigsaw Puzzle Plot / Live-Action TV

• This is what 24 is all about. Things tend to get properly put together halfway through, though.
• Alias. In this TV series, the mythic arc takes a shadowy backseat to the "everyday" spy dramas that Sydney faces. This is one of the earliest projects of creator J. J. Abrams. His famous "Mystery Box" style of storytelling frequently leads him to make use of Jigsaw plots in his other works.
• Up to eleven with the fourth season of Arrested Development which exploits the fact that all 15 episodes were released at once with each episode being A Day in the Limelight for one character catching us up on what happened with them in the years after season 3 which leads to many overlapping storylines and setups to jokes that sometimes are not paid off for as long as 10 episodes.
• Babylon 5, pre-planned 5 year plot which was shifted by three episodes near the end due to network difficulties threatening to cancel the series a year short of the original ending, and where actors leaving and arriving meant that some functions were shifted to other characters while still getting the same effect.
• The new Battlestar Galactica. Like Lost above, they only began to plan out everything towards the end of season 1. Unfortunately, it began suffering from The Chris Carter Effect after Season 2, and by the Grand Finale it was pretty clear that the writers were making it up as they went along.
• Chouseishin Gransazer has its protagonists slowly unraveling the mystery behind the war between humanity's precursors and the aliens who wiped them out, and who have now returned in the modern day to finish the job.
• Both seasons of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency feature a lot of bizarre and seemingly unrelated events that all turn out to be connected in the end.
• Dark: A time-travel drama that features so many paradoxes and interwoven timelines that it is almost impossible to keep track of. The show begins in the present day, with several strange presences and events, and as characters begin to travel backward and forward in time, the audience gets to learn the causes of many of these events.
• Doctor Who goes into a strenuously long arc in Season 6 with the Eleventh Doctor regarding cracks in time, the Silence, an impossible girl, and the end of his life. Each one of these issues acts as its own separate arc, but all of them have a lingering through line- fighting fate- that suggests huge events are coming. The whole of it gets wrapped up nicely in "The Time of the Doctor".
  • Continued in the Twelfth Doctor era, perhaps not surprisingly. Steven Moffat is still resolving plot threads he began as many as ten years ago in some cases. Series 9 contains two direct sequels to the 50th anniversary special, one to its B-plot and one to its A-plot.
• Heroes put together an expertly crafted Jigsaw Puzzle Plot in Season 1, with almost all the loose threads neatly tied up. Subsequent seasons devolved into Random Events Plots.
• Kamen Rider has long been this way. At the beginning of a series, the hero gets his powers and monsters are attacking and... that's about all we know. The monsters' methodology makes filling an episode easy even with a lot of what is going on unrevealed. The events that set it in motion and the final plan of the enemy are filled in piece by piece. Even the more lighthearted Kamen Rider Den-O doesn't introduce the Big Bad until the series is 2/3 of the way through. Until then, all we knew is that the Imagin did what they did because someone or something was whispering in their minds' ear. Mind you, this goes strictly for the 2000s Revival and after.
• The Leftovers: Subverted somewhat. The show opens on a world where 2% of the world's population suddenly vanished one day. The show's plot has the majority of characters trying to figure out why this happened and potentially how to reverse it, uncovering other new mysteries along the way, but the show's theming heavily implies that searching for answers to these questions is a painful and pointless endeavor.
• Lost. This may be the most famous example. For the first half of the show, the writers had the task of constructing a character-driven narrative within a dense mythological framework without knowing how long the series would last. Many story threads were introduced right off the bat, but there was no way of knowing whether each phase of the story would have to last ten episodes or several seasons. Trying to avoid dragging plots beyond their natural shelf-life and putting the next piece of the puzzle into play is a difficult balancing act for a television network's cash cow. This along with certain other events caused many Aborted Arcs to occur.
• Night and Day, while ostensibly a soap opera, puts the mystery of the disappearance of schoolgirl Jane Harper centre-stage throughout - and stretched excruciatingly over 80 weeks for maximum immersion, at that.
• The same writing team gives us Once Upon a Time, which takes the multi-threaded arcs of Lost, and applies them to fairy tales. Taking full advantage of Disney's ownership, they throw in enough references to Disney's animated and live-action canon (the spin-off has even made a couple passing references to Star Wars) to give Kingdom Hearts a run for its money, and absolutely no character is entirely what they seem. One specific example is the flashback segments in all the episodes of Season 1. When all put together in chronological order, they form the full story of the events that lead to the curse that drives the present-day story coming into existence.
• The backstory of Power Rangers Mystic Force. You always get bits and pieces, some of which don't seem to fit with the rest, and it doesn't all fall into place until 2/3 of the way through. This is one of the major differences between it and its Japanese counterpart Mahou Sentai Magiranger, whose only secret is Wolzard's true identity. We learn the answer to that and trade it for one more mystery: "your mom's still alive; ask the next set of bad guys how that can be and where she is now."
• Similarly, Power Rangers Dino Fury has Amelia’s backstory, especially with her missing parents, the mysterious Area 62 and her Pop-Pop’s connection to it. Like Mystic Force, you only start getting tidbits here and there but the major pieces don’t come together until near the end.
• While each episode had its own self-contained story, the overreaching arc in The Pretender, with its questions of Jarod's family and who was in charge at The Centre, was a Twin Peaks style Jigsaw Puzzle Plot.
• The Prisoner (1967) originated the trope for an entire series. Secret agent known only as Number Six resigns for unknown reasons, and is brought to a strange island known as The Village, where an unknown organization attempts to force him to explain why he resigned.
• Each season of Australian drama Sea Patrol does this.
  • The first series builds up a mystery involving a mysteriously poisoned marine biologist, a freighter captain, a bag of contaminated crabs, the fishermen who caught them, and a crate full of water bottles. It all comes together in the season final, when Captain Gallagher is revealed to be manufacturing a biotoxin to sell on the black market.
  • The second series, subtitled "The Coup," builds up to a coup d'etat on a fictitious Pacific island, involving an Australian businessman and a group of Eastern European mercenaries. It's not done quite as well as the first, because any viewer can tell that Walsman will be behind it from roughly the second episode. Surprisingly, individual episodes in this season are on average better than in the first, but the mystery is badly handled.
• Sense8 has a jigsaw-puzzle plot for the entirety of Season 1, and parts of Season 2 as well.
• The Shadow Line does this, as it has many seemingly disparate plot points that only fall clearly into place in the final two episodes.
• Star Trek traditionally prefers standalone stories (even Deep Space Nine only planned so far ahead); however, the third season of Enterprise was a full-scale Jigsaw Puzzle Plot.
• Stranger Things: The first season has the adult, teen, and child characters each investigating the strange happenings in Hawkins, Indiana. The opening mysteries of Will Byers' disappearance, a strange telekinetic girl named Eleven, a secret government laboratory, and the attacks of a monster known as the Demigorgon all tie together by the season finale.
• By Season 2, Supernatural got pretty good at this. You usually had an episode furthering the FBI Arc ("Nightshifter"), then a Monster of the Week episode ("Houses Of The Holy"), then something to do with Sam's destiny ("Born Under A Bad Sign"), then a Breather Episode ("Tall Tales"), all the while dropping hints about the boys' usually-damaged mental states.
• Taken: There are numerous mysteries such as the reason behind continued abductions of Russell Keys and later his son Jesse and grandson Charlie, the nature of the artifact found at the Roswell crashsite, the purpose of the implants found in the heads of all abductees and most significantly the aliens' ultimate goal in creating hybrids. As the series progresses, answers to all of these questions are provided.
• The Twilight Zone (1959) doesn't have any overarching arcs (since the format of the show is that each episode is a standalone story), but more than a few individual episodes have had plots of this type.
• Twin Peaks uses this method to disguise the fact that it had no idea where it was going. Given that it was created by David Lynch, plot cohesiveness wasn't exactly the highest priority. Because it was canceled after the second season, most of the plot was left unresolved and unexplained. The Movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, provided as much of an explanation and resolution as was possible.
• The X-Files didn't start out this way, but Gillian Anderson's pregnancy early in the series forced the writing staff to get very inventive, and the show's near-legendary Myth Arc was the result. However in the later seasons it began to infamously fall victim to The Chris Carter Effect and Kudzu Plot. The later seasons are often considered a good example of when this trope is done wrong, as the puzzle pieces didn't fit together and every answer gave several dozen more puzzle pieces to work with.
• WandaVision: Taking place after the events of Avengers: Endgame, this show suddenly has Wanda Maximoff and Vision (who is supposed to be dead) living in a small town full of sitcom tropes. It is initially unclear how they ended up here, and mysterious breaks in the sitcom story hint at more sinister forces at play.
• Westworld: A story about a park full of androids designed to cater to rich guests in a Wild West themed fantasy world. As the androids, or "hosts," begin to form self-awareness, the show begins to reveal the machinations of the park's creators, Ford and Arnold, as well as the nature of the hosts and the various motivations of those in the park. This is a show that seems tailor-made to spark watercooler discussions on Reddit. Its plot is so dense and complex that the mystery overtakes almost every other element of the story.

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