Fakeout Escape

The Guards Must Be Crazy.

Say you're trapped somewhere with no possible means of escape. All you have to do to get out is make it look as if an escape has already happened. Then your guards' attention will turn to figuring out how it happened, re-establishing a perimeter further out to contain it, and that sort of thing, and you can make your escape for real.

In one common version of this, a prisoner in a cell hides somewhere (behind the door, using a Ceiling Cling, or the like). The one inept guard thinks they escaped and opens the cell, and the prisoner either knocks them out or locks them in.

Compare Decoy Hiding Place and Locked Room Mystery. Tricked into Escaping is when the captors do this to the captive.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Variant in Cat's Eye Episode 60. A hitman known as Condor is captured by the police, but ends up seemingly escaping from his holding cell. At the end of the episode, it's revealed that the escaped Condor is actually Rui in disguise, and that the real Condor is still inside the cell, Bound and Gagged behind a fake wall. It turns out that the girls faked the jailbreak and stole Condor's clothing and identity to fool the man who'd hired him in the first place.
• In Dragon Ball Z, Vegeta is imprisoned inside a healing tank on Frieza's ship. When he breaks out of the healing tank, it alerts the guards. So he blasts a hole through the wall to make them think he has escaped the ship; while Frieza's henchmen are searching for him outside the ship, he takes the opportunity to go steal some dragon balls and then escape.
• In Durarara!!, Shingen fakes Celty out by sending the elevator to the bottom floor while he hides. He then tries to make a dramatic exit using the same elevator, and the scene cuts while he's still waiting for it to come back up.

Comic Books

• Fantastic Four: There's a sequence in issue #2 of Fantastic Four (1961) in which Sue turns invisible when government officials come to check on her, then runs out the doorway during their confusion. This act is repeated in the Ultimate version as well as the movie Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
• In the Devil's Due series of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, Sheena fakes an escape from a hospital by dropping a Bedsheet Ladder out of a window and hiding behind the door. While the guards are looking at the ladder and wondering how she got away, she sneaks out the door.
• This appears in the Super Mario Adventures comic book. Princess Toadstool fools the Koopalings into coming into her cell with a Ceiling Cling, then beats them up and locks them in.
• In Usagi Yojimbo, Tomoe finds herself in trapped in a room in the villain's castle with the guards bound to enter soon. Her solution to pry up some floor boards to make it look like she escaped underneath, and then hide in a nearby trunk until the fooled guards leave the room to continue the search.

Comic Strips

• One Spy vs. Spy strip does this: the imprisoned spy is sent a cake which contains a file and... a picture of some sawed-through bars. He puts the picture over the real bars, then tosses the file out of the slot in the cell door and hides under his bunk. The guard-spy runs in, tries to "follow" the escapee out the window and knocks himself unconscious, leaving the prisoner free to stroll out.

Fan Works

• Scarlet Lady: After Captain Hardrock takes them and their friends hostage, Marinette and Luka manage to escape their chains. Captain Hardrock barges in to find Luka alone near an open porthole and recaptures him, then storms off to search for Marinette... unaware that she's actually hiding on the bed.
• In What a Strange Little Colt, this is implied to be how Gabriel escaped from Twilight and Looking Glass's attempt to bring him to the princesses..
  Gabriel: Would you believe that when someone who thinks they locked you in a room sees a broken window, they think you climbed out of it?

Films — Live-Action

• 3 Ninjas: Kick Back has the kids do this after being locked up by tricking the guard into thinking they escaped using a Bedsheet Ladder to escape out of a sealed window (given that the kids are ninjas in training anything was possible) before attacking him and stealing his keys.
• In the Peter Sellers movie After the Fox, the eponymous escape artist and thief pretends to escape, and then succeeds in escaping, by dressing up as the prison doctor, pretending he had been tied up by The Fox, and that the real doctor, who was already out of the building, was in fact The Fox. The Fox is escorted out with much sympathy, and the jailers go chasing after the unfortunate doctor.
  • Then, at movies' end, The Fox is back behind bars, and the same situation is played out - but this time the guards 'aren't falling for that again' and leave the doctor tied up in the cell. Outside, The Fox pulls on his disguise beard...and it doesn't come off. He exclaims "My God - the wrong man escaped!"
• Black Widow (2021): In the subway in Budapest, Natasha and Yelena leave a Trail of Blood to make Taskmaster think they have escaped into the service tunnels under the station while they really hide in the crawlspace in the ceiling.
• The Bourne Supremacy: Jason Bourne cleverly escaping the police pursuers on foot in Berlin by having them believe he's on a barge he jumped on, attracting attention on it and sneakily climbing back on the bridge beneath notice just when the barge passes below the bridge using a hook, then he calmly flees in a train.
• In Corvette Summer, Kenny is locked in a supply closet by car thieves. He escapes by breaking a window and hiding in an oil barrel until his captor leaves to get help.
• The Equalizer: Robert McCall leaves a bottle of pills for airsickness and a laptop showing a recent booking for an airline ticket in his abandoned apartment, to make it look like he's planning to flee the country. Unfortunately The Dragon doesn't fall for it and keeps searching for McCall locally.
• Goldeneye: While fleeing from Xenia and her goons, Natalya opens an air vent to make them think she is attempting an Air Vent Escape. Xenia sprays the ceiling with a machine gun and assumes she must have hit Natalya. But Natalya was actually hiding in a cupboard.
• Goldfinger does this quite well, with Bond tricking the guard into thinking he's escaped, clinging on to the ceiling, and then dropping down behind him once the guard opens the door.
• In Graduation, Jackson smashes a hole in the bank's floor in to drainage tunnel underneath, and throws the gun down there, to make it look like the robber escaped that way, while he and Chauncey pose as hostages and are rescued by the police.
• In Inside Man, this is how the lead bank robber Russell plans to get away with the loot even with the NYPD's ESU having the bank surrounded. He does this by having his co-conspirators dress themselves and the hostages similarly before the police come in so that the rest of the group escapes along with the hostages and make it seem like he's escaped with them. However, they actually build a fake closet inside the bank with a false wall where Russell hides along with enough food and water for a week until a fake construction company comes in to do some clean-up work after the bank's reopened for business and he walks out with the actual loot of Nazi Gold while dressed as a worker.
• Interceptor: When the mercs break into the missile control room, they find no sign of the heroine J.J., but the roof hatch is open. One of them climbs up to finish her off only to find no one up there. Realising that J.J. must be hiding in the room with them, the mercs warily approach some potential hiding places only to find them empty. J.J. turns out to be hiding in a Hazmat Suit hung up in a locker, from where she's able to ambush them from behind (ironically, one merc was actually checking the suits, only to be called away).
• In John Carter, John Carter travels to Barsoom (Mars) after finding a medallion used by the Therns as the only means of transportation between planets. His adventures end when the Therns manage to transport him back to earth without the medallion. Years later he apparently dies, but in a way which, to the Therns who are doubtless closely watching him, would make it appear that he actually faked his death while returning to Barsoom after somehow finding another medallion. A Thern comes to investigate, only for John Carter (who indeed faked not only his death but his apparent escape from Earth) to shoot him and seize his medallion, so he can return to Barsoom after all.
• In Jurassic World, the Indominus rex uses its Chameleon Camouflage and ability to mask its body heat (neither of which its creators were aware of) to make it seem like it had somehow climbed out of its pen. This causes the park staff to go into the pen to try and figure out how it escaped...realizing too late that a massive carnivore is still there with them.
• The Man Who Came Back: In his first escape attempt, Paxton deliberately gets himself confined to 'the Hole', then digs a shallow hole in the dirt floor to make it look like he has tunneled his way out. He then clings to the roof of the cell. When the guard checks on him and sees the hole, he runs off to raise the alarm and Paxton slips out the door he left open.
• North Sea Hijack: Sanna avoids being executed after their attempt to poison the hijackers fails by feigning to fall overboard and hiding in a lifeboat.
• "Pimpernel" Smith (also released as Mr. V) Leslie Howard needs to help a woman escape from the Nazis. The soldiers burst into the room where they are to find a table next to a window turned over and a vase smashed. They instantly assume that they've escaped down the fire escape. After they have run out, the camera pans to curtains and Howard comes out saying "I'm almost embarrassed to do that. But it almost always works." They then escape.
• In Please Stand By, Wendy escapes from a hospital by going into a bathroom, opening a window, and hiding under a sink so the nurse will think she jumped. Once the bathroom is unguarded, she leaves through the door.
• The Professionals. Raza's revolutionaries catch up with the train the protagonists escaped on, only to find they jumped off the moment they were out of sight and are fleeing on horseback.
• In Revenge (2017), Richard lays a false blood trail across the carpet to make it look like he left the house via the sliding door to lure Jen out of hiding to pursue him. Unfortunately for him, the blood trickling from his wound gives away his hiding spot before Jen falls for his decoy.
• Shoot to Kill aka Deadly Pursuit (1988). The mysterious killer escapes the police with his stolen diamonds via a Convenient Escape Boat waiting at a pier. However when the police chase it down with their own boat, they find the steering controls have been tied off with ropes, and the killer is actually slipping away beneath the pier on foot.
• In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter gets bonus points for not even escaping himself, but letting the guards load him into an ambulance, thinking he is their mutilated colleague.
• Star Wars: A New Hope. Imperial troops search the Millennium Falcon after it's tractored into the Death Star, and report to Lord Vader that the ship is empty and several escape pods were jettisoned, with the Falcon apparently allowed to continue on by itself as a decoy. Vader orders a more thorough search, but our heroes (who have hidden themselves in secret smuggling compartments) are able to slip off the Falcon before that happens.
• Welcome to the Punch (2013). An Icelandic police special response team raid the house where London criminal Jacob Sternwood is hiding. They find a 4WD vehicle with its lights on and engine running. Sternwood suddenly appears, knocks out the men guarding the 4WD, which careens off across the plain chased by a couple of tactical vehicles. When they catch up with it, the police find it's been rigged to drive itself. They radio back a warning, but the police back at the house have their own problems as a Booby Trap blows the place up as they enter. Then we see Sternwood escaping through the forest on foot.
• In Yojimbo, Sanjūrō's escape from Ushitora's house starts by crawling inside a large wooden chest, to make everyone think he's already escaped.

Literature

• Angie's First Case: When Jess and Angie are prisoners of the Wolfpack, they break free of their bonds and Jess pretends to escape out the front door when really he just ducks into the next room to hide there.
• In Brothers in Arms, Miles gets kidnapped and replaced by a clone. When the clone comes to question him, he considers trying to escape via this trope — claiming that he is the clone and that the real Miles somehow got free and tied him up — but quickly realizes that he has several days' worth of stubble and the clone doesn't, so it's not practical.
• Chronicles of the Kencyrath. In Seeker's Mask some guards searching for Jame find an open door in a tower and figure she made off across the roof. Jame reenters the tower after they leave; as the tower is round and the door is flat, that means it's not flush with the tower when open and you can hide behind it.
• In The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar, Lupin swears he will escape from jail, and he does, briefly, but gets back in. But when he comes up for trial, Inspector Ganimard suddenly stands up in court and swears that the man in the dock is not Lupin—he has used the fake escape attempt to substitute a flunky in his place. The court has no choice but to let the man go. Of course, the man really was Lupin, and Ganimard fell for it not only because Lupin is a Master of Disguise, but also because he genuinely expected Lupin to fulfill his promise of escaping.
• Galactic Patrol. The Patrol have captured a Space Pirate ship and examined it for its secrets which they must now bring back to their base through an approaching fleet of other pirates. So the information is copied onto tapes and the crew take to the lifepods, while rigging up a system to send their ship on a randomly programmed evasive course.
• Combined with Faking the Dead in Gold in the Sky, the 1958 sci-fi thriller by Alan E. Nourse. Minions of a corrupt Asteroid Miner corporation capture our heroes except for Tom Hunter who programs a scout ship's autopilot to take off on its own and get blown up by homing shells fired by the villains. He then clamps himself to the outside of the villain's spaceship using magnetic boots and hand-pads (and nearly falls off when they blast-off).
• This happens in the novel Girl, Stolen when Cheyenne first attempts to escape. It doesn't work.
• In the Illuminatus! trilogy, John Dillinger is actually a set of identical quintuplets. This is used to explain how good "he" was at breaking out of prison: if one of "him" was imprisoned, another one could make himself conspicuously visible outside, convincing the guards that he'd escaped and giving the one on the inside more leeway to get out.
• In the first The Stainless Steel Rat novel, the Femme Fatale escapes in a lifepod but only takes it to a nearby patrolship, murders the crew, sends off the lifepod on an evasive course, then slips away in the chaos of pursuit (as the novel is a riff on Space Opera, Harry Harrison was likely inspired by the Galactic Patrol example).
• In Two-Bit Heroes by Doris Egan, the heroine's love interest is going to be displayed in a cage. The outlaw band that she temporarily joined manages to rescue him in this way. They build a hidden compartment into the cage beforehand and then cause a distraction while he's on display that makes it look like he's been sorcerously removed, letting him slip into the compartment and get retrieved later.

Live-Action TV

• Alex Rider (2020): Knowing she's the next student to disappear, Kyra heads out onto the mountain, leaving some nice clear prints for people to follow as she doubles back to the school.
• In the second-season premiere of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the US Army has captured the Absorbing Man and detained him in a plexiglass cell. He stands still after absorbing the properties of the plexiglass, making himself effectively invisible, then waits for a guard to open the cell and investigate the "escape."
• Andor. In "Reckoning", Cassian and Luthen break into a garage to find a vehicle to escape the Pre-Mor security men hunting them. The latter see a landspeeder with tinted windows zoom past and open fire, causing it to crash. As they move in to look for survivors, Cassian and Luthen escape in the other direction on a speeder bike, while remote-detonating the Booby Trap they've left in the landspeeder.
• Arrow. In "Unfinished Business", the Count has apparently escaped from the mental hospital and is back on the street selling the drug Vertigo. But Oliver Queen realises that all the drugs he needs to make Vertigo are available in the hospital, and realises he never left. As it turns out the Count is still insane and a member of hospital staff is posing as him, having figured out how to synthesize Vertigo from the Count's blood.
• In The A-Team, Hannibal effects an escape by hiding under his bunk and deceiving his captors into believing he has escaped; they leave the cell door open, and he makes a break for it.
• Blake's 7:
  • In "Star One", a Damsel in Distress on an isolated base opens the hatch to the outside, so her pursuers will waste time searching the planet surface instead of the base.
  • In "Mission to Destiny", a murderer on a spacecraft kills a second man, then fires off a life rocket to make it look like he killed the first victim and then fled. The plan doesn't work because there wasn't time to load the body into the rocket, so when it's discovered everyone knows the killer is still on board.
  • In "Powerplay", a squad of Federation soldiers has taken over the Liberator. Avon and Dayna escape from their cell and launch an Escape Pod, then go back to the cell to hide (as it's the last place they'll look) until the soldiers have discovered the missing life capsule. It doesn't work for long, as their commander figures That's What I Would Do.
• In the "Flight of the War Witch" two part episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Buck, Princess Ardala and a Pendaran captive use this to get out of their cell. Buck and the captive use a Ceiling Cling to hide, while Princess Ardala simply hides under the bed.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In "Choices" Buffy and Angel are being chased by two henchvamps while stealing a MacGuffin from the Mayor's office. They run out the front of City Hall and dive in the bushes just as Giles and Wesley shoot past in a van. The henchvamps chase after the van, leaving Buffy and Angel free to sneak off with their prize. Unfortunately Willow gets left behind in the confusion.
• Doctor Who. In "The Enemy of the World", security men have Astrid trapped in an office. They break in to find the room apparently empty and an air vent hatch ajar, and rush off to try and intercept her at the air conditioning plant. Then the camera pans down to reveal she was hiding under the desk.
• Halo (2022). In "Reckoning", Soren's motorcycle breaks down in the middle of the desert, so he handcuffs Kwai to it and leaves her to find a new vehicle. After breaking her cuffs, Kwan buries herself under the sand until Soren returns, then ambushes him when his guard is down, thinking she's tried walking off across the desert.
• In an episode of the French series Les Intrepides (a detective-style show aimed at children), one of the two child protagonists is being held captive in a cabin on a ship. He fashions a makeshift rope out of bedsheets, ties it someplace and tosses it out the window, but it's still too high for him to jump — so he hides. His captors eventually enter the room, see the rope and surmise that he must have jumped anyway. They then leave the door unlocked, allowing him to escape for real.
• In the Leonardo episode "Perspective", Leo's master has been framed for murder. Leo smuggles him some art supplies, and together they create a fake cell wall with broken window bars which Verrocchio can hide behind.
• In the Leverage episode "The Jailhouse Job", part of the team's baroque plan to slip Nate out of prison involves using Hardison as a Body Double for another wrongfully-imprisoned prisoner to make it look as though he somehow managed to escape. (Bit of a Casting Gag there—the prisoner was played by Aldis Hodge's Real Life brother.)
• In season 2 of Luther, Luther is chasing a spree killer, who steals a motorcycle courier's clothes and helmet, walks into an office building and starts killing people. By the time Luther arrives on the scene he's told the killer has escaped through the carpark. Sure enough Luther finds the gate blocking the carpark has been pried up as if someone crawled under it. But he also sees a nearby car has been broken into, and in the trunk finds a man in his underwear. Luther realises the killer is still on the premises, posing as a wounded employee.
• MacGyver (1985): In "Nightmares", Mac lowers a fire hose through a window in order to fool the bad guys into thinking he has escaped down it. He was actually hiding under an old turned over couch.
• The Magician: In "Ovation for Murder", Tony breaks a friend out of the jail wing of a hospital and then conceals him in a linen closet on the same floor. This convinces the real criminals that he has escaped, while allowing him to convince the police that her never left the secure floor.
• Mission: Impossible:
  • In "The Crane", the IMF spring a prisoner that is being transported and hide literally metres away from where the escape took place: knowing that the authorities will throw up a cordon blocks away and gradually work their way inwards.
  • In "The Condemned", a prisoner is given equipment to create a fake wall in his cell, prompting the guards to think he's escaped. Slightly subverted in that he stays hidden in the cell until the rest of the IMF team complete their job to clear his name.
• NUMB3RS: One episode features a variant of this, where a prisoner fakes escaping for the benefit of The Cartel (who are trying to have him killed in prison before he can turn informer) rather than the guards. He makes a deal to switch ID numbers and tracking bracelets with another prisoner who is about to escape so that the cartel will look for him outside the jail. He then switches places with yet another prisoner for $1,000 so that if the cartel figures out the deception, they'll look for him in the wrong part of the prison.
• This is the resolution of one episode of prison comedy Porridge, where boss-prisoner Grouty is strong-armed by contacts outside the prison into organising an escape tunnel for a stupid but well-connected inmate. The tunnel progresses and the noise is masked by a choir singing Christmas carols. Grouty is pessimistic about pulling it off, while crafty convict Fletch frets that if a prisoner escapes so close to Christmas, privileges will be withdrawn to everyone and Dec 25th will become just another grim, grey, day inside. Fletch eventually comes up with a face-saving solution allowing Grouty to keep his cred with the London gangs who are pressuring him; allow the warders to discover the tunnel. They will be so pleased at finding it that they will not be looking for the escapee being smuggled out by other means, i.e. hidden in a garbage truck.
• The Professionals. In "Where the Jungle Ends", the police put up a cordon after mercenaries steal plutonium from a nuclear waste facility. Bodie and Doyle come across a patrol car with the constables inside murdered. However they question why the car wasn't moved off the road to hide it, and realise they were killed to make it look like the mercenaries had broken out of the cordon, when they were actually hiding out in the woods until the hunt for them had moved on.
• Jim Rockford of The Rockford Files once pulled this off with a Sleeping Dummy and a bit of bragging to escape from a small town jail. First he told the sheriff that he'd escape effortlessly, and that he'd "just walk out the door." The next morning, the sheriff tried to rouse him, and, upon seeing no movement, entered the cell to check on him, only to find nothing but a pile of blankets. After the sheriff ran off to search for his missing prisoner, Jim emerged from under the bed, and "just walked out the door."
• SAS: Rogue Heroes. Inverted when Lt. David Stirling does a fakeout infiltration when he has to slip by the GHQ guards to see General Auchinleck. After being told to bugger off, he's shown limping up on his crutches to the back of a truck which has just stopped at the checkpoint. After the truck drives through, the guards see the crutches leaning against the wall and realise he must have slipped into the back of the truck. However when they go racing after the truck to stop it, Stirling then appears from behind the wall, grabs his crutches and goes inside.
• Attempted unsuccessfully in an episode of Sliders, where the titular group slides into a world still stuck in the Old West mode. Quinn and Rembrandt are framed for murder and jailed by the local crime boss and a corrupt sheriff, to be hanged the next day. They realize they could use their knowledge of Westerns to trick the guards and escape. Quinn does a Ceiling Cling, while Rembrandt calls for help. Unfortunately for them, the person who walks in is the above-mentioned crime boss, who is also a dimensional traveler (and a Kromagg). He simply walks up to the cell doors without opening them and immediately looks up at Quinn, mentioning that Kromaggs have their own Westerns.
• In the Stargate Atlantis episode "Aurora", Sheppard finds himself inside a virtual-reality environment simulating a Lantean ship whose inhabitants don't know they're not in the real world. He can enter and exit it at will, but every time he re-enters, he finds himself in the same place he was when he exited. At one point, he escapes from the ship's brig by leaving the environment briefly, waiting for the guard to open the cell to figure out what's going on, and then re-entering it, jumping the guard, and walking out.
• Treadstone. In the pilot episode, an American agent escaping from KGB custody enters a morgue with several corpses who have been black-hooded and executed. He throws one body out the window to make it look like he fell to his death while escaping, then puts the corpse's hood over his head and lies down on the slab. The guards are fooled and rush downstairs, but their commander suspects something and goes back to the morgue, leading to a fight.

Video Games

• In Beneath a Steel Sky, right at the beginning, you escape a guard by prying your way through a door. However, this alerts the guard to your location, and only leads to a balcony (with something like a mile high drop to the ground). The PC slams the door and then hangs onto it when the guard opens it. The guard assumes you jumped and fell, and practically calls off the search for you, allowing free roam of the world.
• In the third episode of Covert Front, Kara pulls this trope off by leaving her coat on the ground and hiding in a high corner of her jail cell, out of sight. The warden passes by and notices the "empty" cell, and when he goes inside and picks up Kara's coat, she gets the jump on him.
• In Laura Bow: The Dagger of Amon Ra; when Laura is being chased by the killer at one point she has to stage escaping through a small window above a door, and then find a hiding spot, lest she lets the killer chase her into a deadend corridor. He'll smash through the door, allowing her to sneak past later.
• One of the ways Snake can escape the jail cell he ends up in Metal Gear Solid, is simply hiding under the bed while the guard is gone.
• In a way, this is an advanced evasion strategy for the Spy class in Team Fortress 2. Since their cloak takes a half-second to fully activate, and is briefly disrupted when they get shot or touch an enemy, great spies will make it LOOK like they escaped and ran away, in order to get to safety. THEN they actually run away, or attack again. Depending on the situation, pulling this off is the sign of a heavily-experienced spy that you should not take lightly.

Web Comics

• Captain SNES: The Game Masta: Using his Reality Warper powers to make his jail cell appear empty is how the title character escapes imprisonment.
• In The Order of the Stick, after Durkon's attempts to negotiate a truce with Redcloak break down, he and Minrah have to run for their lives from Team Evil. They do so by making it look like they ran into one of the doors of Kraagor's Tomb, and using the 'Meld into Stone' spell to hide in the ground. Redcloak considers the possibility of this trope in action (having engineered a similar Shell Game during the battle of Azure City much earlier), but is pressured by Xykon to follow him into the passage before he could dwell on the notion for long.

Web Original

• As you might expect, the Evil Overlord List has something to say about (preventing) this.
  "I will instruct my guards when checking a cell that appears empty to look for the chamber pot. If the chamber pot is still there, then the prisoner has escaped and they may enter and search for clues. If the chamber pot is not there, then either the prisoner is perched above the lintel waiting to strike them with it or else he decided to take it as a souvenir (in which case he is obviously deeply disturbed and poses no threat). Either way, there's no point in entering."
• During Rooster Teeth's Great Microwave Heist, Chad James and Barbara Dunkelman return to the equipment cage after a snack run to find Sam (who wasn't even intended to be part of the Heist to begin with, Chad just wanted to salvage that part of the plan after intended target Hector talked his way out) is no longer in there. A Genre Savvy Chad believes this trope is in play whereas Barbara thinks someone else let Sam out.

Western Animation

• Done by Jonah Hex in Batman: The Animated Series. There, he is locked in a cell with an earth floor — so he digs a hole, gets into it, and covers himself with his bed. It is unclear what he did with the soil dug out.
• Justice League. In "Eclipse", Flash is being chased through the Watchtower by a possessed Superman. He does an Air Vent Escape but leaves a door open to the corridor outside — naturally Superman assumes Flash would rely on his Super-Speed rather than crawl slowly through the air ducts.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars, "Bombad Jedi": Padmé escapes by picking her cuffs and then loudly thanking "Master Jedi" for helping her out of her cell while hiding by the cell door. The droids guarding her cell open the door to see how she escaped or attack the Jedi, only for her to jump them and make haste out the now open door.

Real Life

• During WW2, the hardened escapees of the special POW camp at Colditz hit on this idea. The prisoners were scrupulously counted two or three times a day to ensure they were all present and correct. Any shortfall in the numbers present alerted the German guards to the fact that an escape had happened. It occurred to the escape committee that if between four and six prisoners were to be hidden within the camp, the German authorities would only waste time and resources searching Germany for prisoners on the run. The prisoners hidden and sustained by friends in hiding places inside Colditz could then safely be allowed to escape up to two months later, when the Germans would have given up searching for them, and the escapees would have a relatively clear run to freedom. Hans Larive, who memorized an escape route into Switzerland through Singen after a prior escape attempt from a different camp, was one of those fake-out escapees.

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