Basic Trope: A "concealed" listening or tracking device that's large and blinking.
- Straight: Alice plants an Incredibly Obvious Bug on a chair. Despite the green flashing light and periodic beep, Bob does not notice it.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice plants an Incredibly Obvious Bug outside of Bob's house. Despite the numerous multicoloured flashing lights, loud chimes, and it being three times as tall and half the width of the house, Bob does not notice it.
- Alice plants several Incredibly Obvious Bugs all over Bob's property. Despite the multicoloured flashing lights, varied sounds, and the fact that Bob did not ask for them to be installed and had secured the property against intrusion, he does not notice any of them.
- Downplayed: The bug has blinking lights, even though they don't make any sense. However, they're fairly subtle and are usually placed in unobtrusive positions.
- Justified:
- "Our technology doesn't let us make small microphones. Luckily, Bob is extremely nearsighted!"
- Bob is a time traveller from the 19th century and doesn't recognize the technology.
- The bug was actually Alice's Paranoia Gambit on Bob. She doesn't want so much to spy on him as to deter him from doing things he would otherwise do (e.g. Bob is a robber, and Alice is putting up cameras so Bob will see them and not rob her in the first place).
- Alice planted the obvious bug knowing that Bob would find it — and miss the far less obvious bug that she also planted.
- Alice is a Double Agent setting up a Bluff the Eavesdropper ploy.
- Small bugs have the problem that they don't have very sensitive microphones/cameras, batteries that don't last long enough, lack enough shielding, or have very weak transmitters. Alice had to play the odds if she was going to do a long-term stake-out and failed.
- Inverted: Alice plants a bug about as small as a needle in the hayloft in Bob's barn, and Bob notices it as soon as he goes in.
- Subverted:
- Alice plants an Incredibly Obvious Bug on a chair. Bob finds it, muttering, "Does she think I'm blind?"
- Alice appears to be planting an Obvious Bug on Bob's desk. However, the bug turns out to be the recorder Bob always uses. Alice just modified it to transmit what it records to her.
- The bug is obvious because Bob already found it, and wants people using the room to know it's there so they can feed Alice false information.
- It's actually a Kansas City Shuffle — Alice placed the obvious bug to make Bob think that was all there was to it, when the real bug was something unobtrusive.
- Alice's bug is a large device with flashing lights and a beeping sound, and it is placed among similar devices.
- The bug only looks obvious to the audience. Then Bob gets a POV shot showing us that it looks perfectly ordinary to him.
- Double Subverted:
- But the Incredibly Obvious Bug turns out to be a decoy, while the real equally Incredibly Obvious Bug was planted on a nearby coffee table. Bob fails to notice that one.
- Alice just assumed the recorder was something Bob placed himself. In reality Charlie the spy placed in there, and Bob never knew.
- Bob forgets to turn it off, scramble it, obscure the microphone (if he can), or just go out of its range when having private conversations in which he discusses his plans for real.
- The obvious bug never even worked, whether it was supposed to or not, meaning Bob didn't impair Alice's ability to listen in on him.
- Said devices are also obvious bugs.
- The obvious bug should not look normal to Bob, since we've already seen him recognize a device of similar appearance as a bug without much difficulty.
- Parodied:
- Alice plants a listening device in the form of a giant beetle figurine on Bob's desk. For a few weeks, nobody notices it, then Dan the mook goes around the room with a broom sweeping everything. When he finally gets to the scarab, he gasps, grabs it, and calls to Bob, "I found a bug!"
- A sign appears in front of the bug saying "THIS IS A BUG" in big bold print. And Bob still doesn't notice it.
- Bob doesn't even notice when Alice plants a listening device on his body or clothes.
- Bob's house is itself the bug.
- Zig-Zagged:
- The bugs are loud, flashy, and obvious. Then another, surprisingly subtle, bug type is used. Then they revert to using the flashy bugs.
- Alice plants multiple listening devices of varying degrees of conspicuousness in Bob's house. Bob notices some of the subtler ones but misses a blatant one.
- Averted:
- Alice plants a small and unobtrusive bug on a chair, and Bob never notices it because the desk toy disguise is so successful.
- Alice plants an obvious bug and whoever sees it notices it in short order.
- Enforced:
- The writers originally planned to use a small black magnetic disk as a prop but it got changed because the executives thought viewers would be confused.
- Rule of Perception, as the bug wouldn't be visible otherwise.
- The bugs in the virtual reality game were designed that way to make them recognizable to the player.
- The show has No Budget and had to reuse a prop.
- The writers introduced the item on the fly, intending it to be used as a Chekhov's Gun.
- Lampshaded: Alice cackles, "Isn't it funny just how easy it is to plant bugs without the heroes noticing them?"
- Invoked:
- Alice plants an obvious bug that she knows Bob will find, and a far better-hidden one that she's reasonably sure Bob won't find.
- Alice plants an obvious bug that she knows Bob will find ... And lets Bob's paranoia do the rest.
- Exploited: A character pays special attention to anything and everything that beeps and blinks.
- Defied: Charlie tries to get Alice fired by framing him for planting a bug without a warrant. Charlie gets arrested when it's proven that the bugs they use don't even remotely look like that. Alice points out how absurd this trope is.
- Discussed: "Just because Ike didn't catch a blatant bug doesn't mean I can't."
- Conversed: "This show is so shameless. Any six-year-old can tell that's a bug."
- Deconstructed: The bug can be detected easily because it is so obvious. As Alice is being debriefed about the failure of her mission, her boss goes into great detail about how this is unwise, especially after Bob realized he was under surveillance and fled, causing them to lose him.
- Reconstructed: The bugs start to use camouflage rather than stealth — more specifically, their blinking and beeping is designed to look and sound like other common electronic devices around them. This still makes it obvious to the audience, but to the worker who sits in front of that console every day, it's virtually unnoticeable.
- Implied: A mysterious beeping thing is attached to Bob's chair. Later, Alice successfully anticipates Bob's plan, but how she did is unexplained.
- Played for Horror: The bug emits something interpreted by Bob as a Brown Note, yet he fails to notice it, let alone neutralize it.
- Played for Laughs: Bob failing to notice obvious bugs is a Running Gag.
- Played for Drama: Bob talks about his top-secret, highly important mission in the presence of an obvious bug. When it fails and his team gets handed its collective rears in the ensuing fight, he angsts about his stupidity for having missed it and how it cost some of his True Companions life and limb.
- Untwisted: The microphone is small and easily concealed, but it requires a much larger transmitter.
Back to [Beep] Incredibly [Beep] Obvious [Beep] Bug. [Beep] And never mind that [Beep]—ing sound, It's Probably Nothing.
