Lost in a Crowd

I FREAKIN' FOUND HIM!!

For whatever reason, you find yourself being chased. You might have just pulled off the greatest heist in the history of crime. Or maybe you're an innocent man on the run, trying to prove you are innocent while dodging the cops trying to arrest you. You're dressed in a certain way, and some people who want to catch or kill you know you're dressed in a certain way. You can't change your clothing for some reason. So what do you do?

You dive into a crowd of people who are dressed exactly like you are. Hilarity Ensues. The people who are trying to get you don't know which is the real you, and start grabbing one fake after another. They tear their hair out in frustration while you casually wander away from the chase.

Sometimes, if you have a plan, you can arrange for the crowd of look-alikes to be there ahead of time. Sometimes, though, you just get lucky.

Compare and contrast with I Am Spartacus, wherein different people try to protect you by claiming they are you, but they don't necessarily look like you, and Needle in a Stack of Needles, which is this trope applied to objects.

Not to be confused with Alone in a Crowd. See also Mobstacle Course, when you're not trying to hide in a crowd so much as merely get through one in a hurry. See Ringer Ploy when identical looking characters are used to create confusion.

In Islamic settings, this can be accomplished by Hiding in a Hijab. In video games, this trope can be turned into a Blending-In Stealth Gameplay mechanic.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Code Geass R2, Zero makes a deal with Britannia to let him be exiled to an island off of China instead of killed... and then dresses up all his followers as him who, because they are all "Zero", all get exiled to that same island, which they were planning to build a base on.
• In one episode of Lupin III: Part II, Lupin successfully convinces an entire crowd of attendees, children included, to dress as himself and his accomplices. While the police are being overwhelmed trying to arrest everyone to sort it out later, the real Lupin and company make off with an entire exhibit of things belonging to the original Arsene Lupin, as well as a model of him. This is done not only under the noses of the (heavily overwhelmed) police, but of his archnemesis Inspector Zenigata, plus a special guest antagonist, the descendant of Inspector Ganimard, who was the only man to ever arrest the original Arsene Lupin.
• Yoshikage Kira is unusually non-descript for a Jojos Bizarre Adventure villain, especially a Big Bad. At one point he flees into a crowded street and Josuke realizes he can't pick Kira out of all the business men.

Films — Live-Action

• Atomic Blonde. Lorraine tries to hide Spyglass in one of the huge demonstrations taking place in the lead-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. However the KGB have been tipped off and have a sniper waiting, but at a signal from The Fixer everyone in the street puts up umbrellas to hide him from view. Unfortunately the KGB have no intention of letting Spyglass go that easily.
• Thomas Crown does this in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). He clearly shows himself to the security cameras wearing a trench coat and bowler hat, and carrying a valise. Then he walks off - and about two hundred confederates break out trench coats, bowler hats, and valises and start walking around the museum, switching valises many times. At some point, the real Crown ditches his own trench coat and bowler hat, slipping out a side entrance while everyone is looking for trench coats and bowler hats.
• One of the uses of Queen Amidala's Impractically Fancy Outfit in Star Wars Episode I is that if all her handmaidens are dressed the same, it's hard to tell who's the real Queen and who's a decoy. To take this trick even further, the handmaidens were often chosen for their physical resemblance to the Queen.
• The climactic scene in ¡Three Amigos!, where the title characters emulate such a trick from one of their movies when they find out the townspeople they are trying to defend can sew. Good thing the bad guys can't shoot for anything.
• In the film version of V for Vendetta, V uses this tactic to escape after taking over the television studio by dressing his hostages to look just like him. Later, V distributes replicas of his iconic Guy Fawkes mask across the country, and on the eve of his climactic attack on the government, London is overrun by thousands of people in V costumes.
• In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy is pursuing a pair of Egyptian men who are carrying a basket holding Marion Ravenwood. He runs into an open area filled with men, all dressed like the guys he's pursuing and carrying identical baskets.
• In The Fugitive, Richard Kimble flees Samuel Gerard by walking into a Saint Patrick's Day parade in downtown Chicago, pretending to be part of the crowd.
  • Subverted in real life, because the whole crowd apparently recognized both Ford and Jones.
• In The Saint (1997), Simon Templar hides in plain sight from the Russian mobsters who are chasing him by putting on a homeless man's coat and hat, swigging from a bottle of vodka, and acting drunk... just like the dozen or so homeless drunks around him.
• The climax of Sister Act where Sister Mary Clarence's fellow nuns disperse throughout a Reno casino to confuse Mary Clarence's ex-boyfriend's henchmen. However, they don't fully succeed because the henchmen later see all the nuns running out the back way single file, leading them to where the whole group was hiding.
• Variation in Men in Black. Whilst chasing the bug, J spots a discarded bead seat cover and realises (correctly) that the bug has hijacked a NY cab. He runs out into the street to catch him and... well... it's Manhattan at rush hour, so use your imagination.
• The end of Darkman has a scene like this, with the titular hero leaving his love interest because It's Not You, It's My Enemies and disappearing into a crowd. The effect is increased by the fact that the hero has discovered a formula which gives him the ability to temporarily assume the appearance of anyone he chooses, meaning he could literally be any of them... and whilst the love interest is looking around desperately, we see a guy we've never seen before (one of Bruce Campbell's many appearances in Sam Raimi films) looking back at her with anguish before turning and walking away...
• Part of the Kansas City Shuffle that Clive Owen's team implements in Inside Man. Everyone in the bank is (forcibly) dressed in the same outfit, making a proper SWAT Team siege impossible and allowing the robbers to escape undetected.
• The Dark Knight Trilogy:
  • Batman Begins: Ducard uses this tactic against Bruce Wayne during his final trial at the League base, making himself look identical to all the other ninjas around him ... but Bruce then uses it right back on him with a similar tactic.
  • The Dark Knight:
    • Following the initial bank robbery scene, when The Joker gets away in a school bus and merges into a long column of school buses.
    • After the attempted assassination on the Mayor is foiled, the Joker and his men (disguised as the honor guard) use the scattering police and confusion to flee. The only one of them not to get away is Thomas Schiff, who gets tagged in the leg.
    • In the climax, dozens of hostages are dressed in clown masks, their mouths duct taped shut (so they can't indicate that they're not bad guys) and guns duct taped to their hands. The impending SWAT team doesn't see anything amiss, but fortunately Batman is smarter.
  • Reused and subverted in The Dark Knight Rises, when Bane and the three mercenaries who help him in the stock exchange heist for the hostages to walk out of the doors into the police. Foley and his cops are ready to issue orders to detain everyone while they figure it out... suddenly Bane and his crew burst out of the crowd on motorcycles.
• A funny unintentional version occurs in the movie The 51st State: Samuel L. Jackson is flying into London, and he's taken to wearing a kilt. A Corrupt Cop hoping to intercept him tells a subordinate to wait at the airport for a dark-skinned man "wearing a dress." It's the henchman's bad luck that just as Jackson arrives, so do several flights from African and Asian countries where men still wear robes, sarongs, etc.
• In I, Robot, the lead robot character hides in a warehouse filled with robots, which was drawn from a similar short story in the original book I, Robot. The critical difference between book and film enabled Cutting the Knot — where in the book the extra robot was a variant with only partially Three Laws-Compliant (designed to permit humans to come to harm through inaction so they could work alongside humans in hazardous environments), the film had a totally non-compliant robot hidden in the crowd — AKA one that freaked out when a Cowboy Cop started randomly shooting robots in the head.
• In the film version of Minority Report, Anderton and Agatha (the Precog) get out of the mall as it starts raining, and he simply holds up a black umbrella (which Agatha had insisted on grabbing) as the cops run out on the roof overhead, and look at the sea of black umbrellas. Ironically, Anderton and Agatha didn't move after putting up the umbrella, so the cops were literally right over them, and never saw them.
• North By Northwest - as his train arrives in Chicago, Roger evades detection by the waiting police by dressing as a redcap (railroad baggage handler) - by the time the police find the real redcap onboard without his uniform (which Roger paid him for), Roger has disappeared into a sea of redcaps.
• In Star Trek Into Darkness, Harrison attempts to escape pursuit by disappearing into a crowd of fleeing civilians.
• Tenet. The undercover CIA agent being extracted temporarily pretends to be an unconscious hostage among all the other opera goers slumped in their seats. This takes a lot of nerve as there are still bullets flying around and he could just as easily be killed by a stray round as an aimed one.
• In The Town, it's used by Doug MacRay and James Coughlin during the Fenway Park robbery and shootout climax, when they escape a shootout in the garage with the FBI SWAT team by disguising themselves as Boston Police Department officers at the same time that some real BPD cops shows up to back up the FBI SWAT team (beforehand, they had been disguising themselves as paramedics). Doug draws a Glock and joins the group of cops entering, while Coughlin flees out another door. While it works for the moment, outside, Agent Adam Frawley overhears a police captain telling Dino Ciampa that two cops (Doug and Coughlin) robbed the cash room. This prompts Frawley to start scanning the area, looking for a uniformed police officer who is acting suspiciously. He quickly stumbles upon Coughlin walking through a parking lot (probably helped by the fact that Coughlin is walking away from the stadium, not towards it, and he's carrying his money satchels in plain sight). Doug, exiting out a nearby door, is never noticed by Frawley nor thought of as suspicious since he isn't carrying any money bags on him. He can only watch in shock as "Officer Coughlin" is chased across a parking lot by Frawley, gets cornered by the real BPD in the street, engages them in an intense close-range gunfight, and finally chooses to commit Suicide by Cop. While Frawley and the cops are approaching Coughlin's lifeless body, Doug escapes by stealing a police car.
• Assassins. While being chased by police including helicopter units, Sylvester Stallone's character hides the stolen taxi cab he's driving among a bunch of other cabs at the taxi terminal, then climbs into another cab as a passenger and rides it out of there.
• In Skyfall, Silva is pursued by Bond in the overcrowded London underground and is disguised as a policeman. Eventually "Constable Silva" stumbles into a lobby full of bobbies on patrol and is amused to realize that his cover is unassailable. Bond is able to follow his trail anyway.
• Invoked in Zorro, the Gay Blade, when Diego infiltrates the governor's costume party by walking in dressed openly in his Zorro costume ... after sending messages to every other guest that they should dress that way too, by the governor's personal request.
• In The Goonies, the escaping Fratelli family take their vehicle to the nearby beach to try and shake the cops chasing them. Ma had planned it so that they'd arrive just as a large four wheel drive race begins and they quickly blend in with the competitors.
• In Scream 3, while being chased by Ghostface, Jennifer Darling runs into a prop room filled with costume that look identical to the killer's. He's also in the room with her...
• In Catch Me If You Can, Frank Abagnale manages to escape through an airport that is crawling with cops all looking for him by putting out a call for stewardesses. He then surrounds himself with a bunch of the lovely ladies in full uniform, himself dressed as a pilot, and waltzes past the FBI agents in a state of artful distraction amid a flock of the most beautiful. The agents are too distracted touching their hats to the ladies to notice the guy in the middle of them.
• In Silent Night (2012), a killer in a Santa costume is loose... in a town full of people in Santa costumes.
• The opening chase scene of Drive (2011) concludes when the Driver takes the robbers he's working for into a parking garage... of a stadium moments before a major sporting event ends. The Driver and the robbers are thus able to walk away from the cops by blending into the crowds.
• In The Heist (1989), Ebbet tells the security staff to keep tabs on Neil while he is at the racetrack. As Neil is wearing an especially garish Hawaiian shirt, this should be easy. However, Neil has arranged for a tour group visiting the track to be wearing identical shirts and the guards quickly lose him.
• We're No Angels: The three escaped convicts make no effort to hide how they come from the prison and almost everyone just assumes they are among the hundreds of paroled convicts doing odd jobs around the island rather than the recent fugitives.

Literature

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows features this, with multiple Harrys created via polyjuice potions to protect the real one.
• One of the Where's Waldo? books (The Great Waldo Search) features, on the last two-page spread, Waldo standing among members of "The Waldo Fan Club"... all of whom are wearing his trademark outfit (blue trousers, red and white sweater with matching bobble hat).
• In The Darksword Trilogy, Simkin helps Mosiah escape from the Secret Police by casting a mass illusion spell that makes an entire crowd of people look like him. The crowd doesn't even suspect Simkin of anything underhanded, since his Cloudcuckoolander credentials are already firmly established; they just think he's attempting to start a new fashion trend.
• Done with overlap with Needle in a Stack of Needles in a short story in I, Robot: a robot with a modified First Law is told to go lose itself, so it does. In a crowd of identical-looking but non-modified robots.
• In one of the later Dune novels, swarms of Face Dancers try to assassinate a ghola by making themselves look like him. His Amazon Brigade is trained to kill anyone other than him in combat, and now they can't protect him because he is lost in a crowd of lookalikes. The ghola evades the ambush by stripping!
• In Star Wars: Scoundrels, planet Wukkar is hosting the Festival of Four Honorings, a week-long planetwide celebration with one day each devoted to the Honoring of Moving Stone, Air, Water, and Fire (with a rest day in between each). Crime lord Avrak Villachor, who likes to maintain the fiction that he's an upstanding citizen, opens the grounds of his mansion to all during each Honoring, preparing technological artworks depicting each element. Han Solo, planning to rob Villachor's safe, takes advantage of the Festival to walk right in with the rest of the citizenry. The open grounds and crowds provide the perfect opportunity for Han and his Caper Crew to case the mansion, evaluate the security, and on the final day, execute The Caper without having to worry about getting past the outer walls. While Villachor's security is certainly on the alert, the security chief grouses about how much he hates the Festival each year for precisely this reason—anyone in the crowd could be a potential thief.

Live-Action TV

• In one episode of Charmed, the sisters cast a spell that made every male everywhere look like Leo, hoping to outsmart the angel of death that way. (Of course, it doesn't work; nothing stops Death!)
• In the Stargate SG-1 episode "Insiders", all the Ba'al clones present claim to be the real Ba'al (thus also creating an I Am Spartacus moment). Colonel Mitchell even refers to them collectively as "Spartacus" during a Hurricane of Puns prompted by the name "Ba'al" and the word "ball".
• Star Trek: Voyager: Voyager's holographic Doctor has an episode where he's coerced to act against the ship. Eventually he's found out and on the run, and ducks into the holodeck. In a couple seconds, he conjures up an entire room full of... himself. A bunch of copies of his appearance. While the crew figures out how to determine which one's the real one, he's already escaped into a jeffries tube.
• In an episode of Castle, the cops drop off the ransom in a certain bag. Then they try to take down anyone with that bag. Naturally, everyone is carrying an identical bag as a part of a "performance art" piece.
• Variation from Leverage: In "The Second David Job", the team plants fake David statues in everyone's bag at the museum coat check. The real Davids were both in the display case the whole time, covered by a cloud of steam. The whole thing was a decoy while the team stole every other work of art in the gallery.
• In an episode of The Mentalist, the Monster of the Week dresses up as a clown to kill their victim (who has a clown phobia) and puts out a casting call on the internet for clowns. When the CBI shows up and tries to find the killer, based on the "clown" description, there are more clowns there than you could shake a slapstick at. Meanwhile, the killer clown has vamoosed.
• David Robert Jones uses this trope magnificently in Fringe. He draws a crowd by throwing wads of money around. Turns out each banknote has a microchip that imitates the signal of the tracker implant Fringe division put in his body. By the time Fringe agents realize what is happening, he has already disappeared into the crowd he summoned to begin with.
• Arrow:
  • In the episode "Legacies", a group of masked bank robbers subvert this by sending out their hostages in painted hockey masks similar to their own. While the police are trying to round up the hostages to figure out if any of them is in the gang of robbers, they tunnel out through the vault floor.
  • In the episode "Time of Death", a pair of thieves make their escape by ditching their cleaning crew coveralls and losing themselves in a protest rally marching outside the building.
• On White Collar, Neal is followed by Jones (who IIRC is following him because the plan required Neal to not wear the tracking anklet) into a park, where a crowd of people all wear the same outfit as Neal. Jones taps one of them on the shoulder, and the man excitedly asks if he won. Turns out Neal posted a contest on a web site for people to be dressed this way to be at that park at the right time to make his escape.
• An episode of Lupin (2021) has Assane go to a meeting in a park with someone while dressed as a fast food deliveryman. Before the meeting, he makes a bunch of orders from the same restaurant, ensuring that a whole bunch of people in an identical face-covering uniform are biking around the park. When the police attempt to spring the trap on him, he simply flees the scene on his own bicycle, and watches the cops try to pick him out from the six or seven civilian bikers.
• The Professionals. In "Long Shot", an American politician attending an anti-terrorist conference insists on his daily jog in a distinctive red-striped tracksuit. Cowley knows he can't dissuade him, so he calls up an escort—Bodie and Doyle, dressed in identical tracksuits.
• The Punisher (2017). In "Nakazat", Amy while dressed as a waitress is being followed by a couple of goons. As she walks she pulls a schoolgirl tie out of her white shirt, then turns the corner and lets down her hair and reverses her black skirt to reveal a plaid skirt. She then turns and walks past the goons with a bunch of other schoolgirls who are going home at that time.
• The 2022 Murdoch Mysteries Halloween Episode "I Still Know What You Did Last Autumn" is a sequel to the previous season's Slasher Movie spoof,in which the notority of the Clown Killer has led to both a Copycat Killer and everyone in Toronto wearing a scary clown costume for Halloween. Inevitably, there's a scene where Murdoch and Brakenreid chase the killer into a street filled with people in clown costumes.

Music

• The Australia version of Linkin Park's "What I've Done" music video involves this; a scientist at a corrupt pharmaceutical company does a Heel–Face Turn and steals a sample of The Virus the company is developing to control the populace, handing it to a member of what's presumably a resistance fighter in a black hoodie with the band's logo on it. When the company's agents give chase, they're cockblocked by several other people in black hoodies with the band's logo on it. In a subversion, however, the purpose of this wasn't just to delay the goons long enough to get the sample to the appropriate authorities; they goaded the goons into following them, in order to expose to the company just how large the resistance against them is and intimidating them into backing down from their schemes.

Video Games

• Being Lost in a Crowd is a crucial part of Assassin's Creed. Not only does the end of the opening movie shows this exact thing, but in-game Altaïr can use Scholars (who are all dressed similarly to him) as "mobile hide points." He can "blend" on his own by making a praying pose and walking slowly, but he needs the Scholars to bypass guard posts... not least because he openly carries a longsword, short blade, and throwing knives, and he needs the Scholars to block the guards' view of his weapons.
  • In Assassin's Creed II this changes up somewhat with Ezio, who can now blend into any group of four or more (sometimes three, and with Courtesans as low as two), but the Assassin Robes he wears all the time are extremely distinct, not least because he wears a Assassin emblem on the front of his belly. In Brotherhood this blending ability gets much more plausible if you choose to equip the Florentine Noble Attire (a Uplay Reward), since that outfit (his day wear from before he donned the Assassin Robes) is much more like the clothing worn by Roman civilians.
    • This can become even more ridiculous if you're using the unlockable Raiden outfit, because nothing says 'inconspicuous' like a cyborg ninja in 16th century Rome.
    • Admit it, you didn't see him the first time either.◊
  • The multiplayer mode in Brotherhood runs on this; the entire world is populated with only a handful of distinct character models, and success is often a matter of finding a group of identical NPCs and trying not to act human.
• The Maelstrom in Hitman 2 does this as his modus operandi of staying hidden within the slums of Mumbai. Even if you know what he looks like (as his appearance changes with each level reset), tailing him can become quite tricky as you can very easily lose sight of him in the slums if you don't keep an eye on him. Turn a corner and you may just lose him.
• A good way to escape notice in We Happy Few is to blend in with other Wellies, especially if you're being pursued by Bobbies.

Web Comics

• In this Adventurers! strip, an evil being from Another Dimension shows up and announces, "I am looking for a large-haired hero and his friends". He really should have been more specific.
• Niels proves that a furry convention is the best place for a hitman to kill someone.

Web Original

• In Worm, the Slaughterhouse Nine attempt this twice:
  • First, when Bonesaw uses Surgical Impersonation to make a host of Innocent Bystanders into copies of them.
  • Second, when Bonesaw uses her plague to render almost everyone in town unable to identify people by looks or mannerisms.
  • In a later chapter, Skitter pulls this off spectacularly when trapped in a high school cafeteria by Dragon and Defiant, using the almost one hundred students that she turns to her side.

Western Animation

• In the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "The Headband" — after Aang throws an illicit dance party for a bunch of repressed Fire Nation schoolchildren, the kids help him escape from some soldiers by donning their belts as headbands, as Aang has done to conceal his Airbender tattoos. Since the soldiers have been told to go after the boy wearing the headband, this creates enough confusion that Aang and his friends are able to escape unnoticed.
• This happens to the Joker twice in Batman: The Animated Series.
  • First comes when a millionaire built a casino themed after the Joker, which naturally led the Clown Prince to decide to blow it up. When the Joker shows up to do the job, though, he soon finds all the card dealers and much of the staff are dressed in his clothes and wearing make-up and wigs to resemble him. This not only helps him escape Batman for a little while (Bats kept chasing down Jokers to find they are just casino employees), but also let him march right up to a Blackjack table and start dealing.
  • A later example comes when he decides to set off a bomb on New Year's. He hands out Joker-Masks to the crowd so he'd be tougher to find. Doesn't work so well that time, though.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "The Cutie Re-Mark - Part 1", the trick is played on the audience. Starlight Glimmer isn't easy to locate among the audience for Twilight's lecture, even for those viewers who were expecting her, since she's an ordinary-looking unicorn in a crowd entirely composed of unicorns. Even Twilight isn't quite sure of what she saw after catching a glimpse of her.

Real Life

• Embroidered jeans and overly large white tee-shirts aren't a cause of urban crime, but when half the people on any given block are wearing basically the same thing...
• This case involves a guy who robbed an armored truck, then escaped into a crowd of people dressed exactly like him (that he had set up using Craigslist).
• The Swedish police was put under heat when a murderer out on a day-long permission (under surveillance) managed to flee by waiting until the Christmas Crowd was especially dense and then... started to run like hell. He was picked up within 48 hours with no drama, but still — bad police work.

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