In a Detective Drama, any time a piece of dialogue comes along which is off-the-cuff, not followed up and unrelated to everything, you can tell it's going to be very important. If a suspect turns up late and says "Sorry I'm late, my car was stolen yesterday", the alleged car theft will be significant (for example, the thief is the true culprit). If the detective remarks that the suspect has a nice keychain and the suspect says "Yeah, it's from my old fraternity," the insignia on the keychain will turn up later to reveal that the suspect and victim were in college together. Basically this happens whenever the writer can't find a neat way of dropping an important clue into an existing conversation.
See also Chekhov's Gun. Related to The Law of Conservation of Detail.
Examples:
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Film — Live-Action
- "Bad for glass" in Chinatown. This statement made by the Chinese gardener makes no sense until Gittes realizes he's saying "bad for grass", referring to the salt water pooling up in the garden and allowing Gittes to figure out Cross's land-grabbing scheme.
- In Die Hard with a Vengeance, there is an offhand reports about thirteen dump trucks being stolen the night before. Later in the film, it is revealed that these trucks are being used by the villains to cart off the gold they have stolen.
- Hot Fuzz almost parodies this trope (like it does with most police movie tropes). Sgt. Angel makes one offhand comment about each of the minor characters before they are murdered that turns out to be the exact reason they were killed. The thing is, he had no idea. He came up with a complicated theory about why they were killed that had nothing to do with those offhand comments, and he found the killers before he was told their motive.
- Just about every seemingly innocuous piece of conversation in Knives Out turns out to have some kind of significance to the plot, most not explained till The Summation. Examples include:
- Ransom explaining that he makes the help call him Hugh.
- The family complaining that Ransom didn't attend Harlan's funeral.
- Fran describing the plot of a Hallmark starring Danica McKellar to Marta.
- Fran mentioning her cousin who is a receptionist at the medical examiner's office.
- "Couldn't tell a real blade from a prop weapon."
- When David leaves the party in the rain in Rehearsal for Murder, he complains that there is a cab parked across the street with its off-duty light on. This casual comment will become important during The Summation.
- Inverted in the Firefly movie Serenity when, as the Serenity crew is entering the bar to meet Fango and Minty, the report that the Reavers invaded a nearby planet, and the survivors had locked themselves in the vault the crew had just robbed (as Mal had told them to do), is playing in the background.
- In Star Trek: First Contact, Geordi is giving routine orders to the engineering staff, and tells one of them to check the climate control, since it was getting a little warm in the engine room. It turns out that this was a clue that Borg had beamed aboard and were altering the ship, since Borg ships are warmer than Federation ships.
- Stripped to Kill contains one so subtle that it borders on Fridge Brilliance. In a scene in the dressing room, Roxanne goes to use the bathroom and one of the other strippers tells her "not to leave the seat up again". The strippers have been dissing each other all through the scene, and this sounds like just another friendly insult and is easily missed amidst the dialogue. However, Roxanne has already been killed and her identity assumed by her brother Eric. So it is entirely possible that at some previous point he had forgotten and left the toilet seat up.
- In The Thin Man, early in the movie the odd watchchain of The Old Professor was pointed out. That same watchchain was later used in an effort to frame the Old Professor by leaving it at the scene of a murder. (But the Professor's alibi was solid — at that point he had been dead for over a month.)
- In The Wolfman (2010), Sir John Talbot warns his son not to go out on the full moon, which sets up the inevitable werewolf attack. The Notable part of this is where Sir John tells Lawrence this because Sir John is the werewolf and (at least, initially) doesn't want to be responsible for his remaining son's death.
Literature
- In Inheritance Cycle's first book, Murtagh tells Eragon his life story. The thing is, Eragon already knows the most important point—that Morzan is his father—so the main point of the scene seems to be to drop enough hints for astute readers to figure out the next book's Twist Ending, that Selena is his mother.
- In the Lord Peter Wimsey short story "The String of Pearls", when the suspects are all searched the pearls don't appear but Sayers takes an apparent whimsical tangent on the weird and random stuff people keep in their pockets. Inevitably, one of these random things turns out to be a clue as to who took the pearls and where they are now. Also inevitably, the reader is expected to realise this, so some of the other suspects have random items that really are random, but which look as if they could be used to conceal the pearls somehow, or else suggest a motive.
- Any time Sherlock Holmes tells a client not to worry about going off-topic, this trope is in play.
- In James Joyce's Ulysses, a man approaches Leopold Bloom, asking to read the report on the day's horseraces. Bloom, not wanting to be inconvenienced, tells the man to keep it, as he was just going 'to throw it away'. The man walks away, inspired. The winning horse of the day winds up being the horse, Throwaway.
Live-Action TV
- This happens early in Babylon 5 episode "Passing Through Gethsemane", twice even. There's a throwaway scene involving a news report about a criminal sentenced to mind-wipe, prompting Garibaldi and Delenn to briefly discuss its merits and flaws. Brother Edward idly mentions the story of Jesus knowing what would happen if he didn't leave Gethsemane, commenting that he doesn't know if he could do the same. later we learn Edward's been mind-wiped as a sentence, and while seeking forgiveness for his crimes he gets his chance to answer his earlier comment.
- Castle uses this trope regularly, and inverts it almost as frequently. In almost every episode, minor details dismissed very early in the hour come back and provide a conclusive link to the true killer; in a number of episodes, similarly minor details pull the investigation in a different direction.
- An episode of CSI had one character make an offhand comment about the goldfish in the pond on a suspect's property. Turns out they were pirahnas that the killer had fed the body to.
- Doctor Who:
- "The Long Game": At the beginning, the Doctor and Rose get out of the TARDIS and he gives her a few pieces of information about where they've landed for her to tell newbie Adam when he comes out. After Adam gets out, Rose points out all of those things about their surroundings, but adds that they could consider turning the heating down. It's later revealed the heat comes from the massive alien that secretly runs the station, which needs to be vented away from it so it stays alive.
- Season 4 has a few off-handed mentions of the bees disappearing, which at first appears like a reference to the real life headlines about bee populations declining in 2007/2008. This ends up cluing the Doctor in on a means of tracking the Big Bad of the season.
- The InBESTigators:
- Early in "The Case of the Vanishing Koalas", Miss Tan's is complaining about the students littering toilet rolls. Later, Maudie remembers this and has a "Eureka!" Moment about how thief managed to seemingly be in two places at once.
- In "The Case of the Freaky Frequency", Ezra's elderly neighbour is complaining about her broken doorbell and wants Ezra to fix it. Ezra brushes this off as he and the others are in a hurry to get to the ice cream shop. However, he later realises that the broken doorbell is key to solving the mystery of why cars aren't locking near the ice cream shop.
- Shakespeare & Hathaway - Private Investigators: In "O Brave New World", when the hotel staff are being interviewed after the murder, one of the waitresses complains that a pair of shoes have been stolen from her locker. Guess what later becomes the vital clue Frank uses to crack the case?
- Sherlock lacks the literary Holmes's tolerance for people apparently going off topic; Sherlock has considerably less patience for the foibles of regular people. An exception to this is "The Hounds of Baskerville", where Sherlock specifically takes the case only because the witness uses the word 'hound' instead of 'dog'.
Video Games
- There would be no Ace Attorney without this trope. Most of the contradictions Phoenix/Apollo/Edgeworth catches are off the cuff, seemingly unimportant statements that wind up screwing over the rest of the witness's claims.
- There's a notable example in Apollo Justice. At the beginning of the second case, Phoenix hires Apollo. Much to Apollo's annoyance, he is not assigned to defend a client, but rather to find the culprit of three random events: A hit and run where Phoenix was injured, a noodle cart theft, and a panty snatching. Then, a murder is reported in the area and Apollo takes the defendant's case. Yes, of course all three of the seemingly random events end up playing into the murder: The driver in the hit and run was the victim, the noodle cart was stolen by the victim and he was killed while pulling it, and the "panty snatcher" (who, it turns out, actually stole two pairs of bloomers, one of which was a prop Trucy kept referring to as them panties) was both the only witness in the murder and also the reason why the victim stole the noodle cart.
- Dual Destinies has "so I lowered the emergency ladder like the detective leading the evacuation told me to". When first heard this statement means virtually nothing, until the tail end of the trial, when it becomes clear that the killer needed the escape ladder lowered to flee the crime scene... and so one innocuous line becomes the first major hint at the identity of the Big Bad.
- Star Wars Legends: In Knights of the Old Republic, you can ask Canderous why his people attacked the Republic. He shrugs and say "the Sith came to us with an offer", and the rest of the conversation is about how Mandalorians thrive on seeking out the most risky fights and challenges the galaxy can offer. You have no way of knowing at the time that "the Sith" he is referring to is Sith Emperor Vitiate, that the Sith Empire is in hiding and quietly building for conquest, that said Emperor was playing everyone including the then-amnesiac-and-unwitting player character as pawns and fools, that he would eventually get the player character from this game and its sequel to waltz right into his trap, render the player character insane through 300 years of Mind Rape, and turn them loose to play right into his Omnicidal Maniac plans...
- While Razputin tries to extract the name of Dr. Loboto's employer at the start of Psychonauts 2, Dr. Loboto keeps trying and failing to remember what sounds like the solution to an Inventory Management Puzzle: Put the egg in the basket, then the old egg in the box, then the box in the ocean. They turn out to be veiled instructions for placing the Big Bad's brain into the body of Grand Head Truman Zanatto, and Loboto was trying to remember what he was supposed to do with Truman's original brain after the switch.
