Episode 5:
The Clicker
Tropes featured in this episode of Alan Wake:
- All There in the Script: When Agent Nightingale threatens Alan to get back in his cell, he stops mid-threat to check a manuscript page, recognizing the events in real-time. It doesn't save him though, getting dragged into the darkness before it becomes of any use to him. While we never find out, that was probably in the manuscript too.
- Hellish Copter: Just like episode three, the helicopter used to get to the dam is flocked by Taken birds and reduced to a smouldering wreck when it crashes. At the very least, Barry and Sarah survive the crash.
- Hidden Depths: Frank and Sarah Breaker, a father-daughter duo of Reasonable Authority Figures who have both served as The Sheriff for Bright Falls, are revealed to be readers and fans of the Alex Casey books.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: It was revealed that Thomas Zane inadvertently made the Dark Presence as powerful as it is when he tried using Cauldron Lake to resurrect his wife Barbara Jagger. Because he didn't specify how this was possible, the Dark Presence use this opportunity to use her as its avatar.
- Noodle Incident: There is a small cabal of Bright Falls citizens that have had encounters with unexplainable phenomena (this group including Sarah Breaker, her father Frank and Pat Maine), even having a code-word — "Night Springs" — to spread around to alert other members. Granted, Sarah claims that nothing they've ever encountered was as overt or extreme as the Taken, but it still brings up a few questions regardless.
- Ret-Gone: In an attempt to stop the Dark Presence, Thomas Zane tried erasing himself and it out of existence. Because of this, only people who knew him personally or were Claimed by the Supernatural can remember him, the only remaining signs of his presence being a few of his books in Cynthia's possession and an Urban Legend about him in Bright Falls.
- The Reveal: It turns out that it was Cynthia leaving those graffiti messages for Alan all this time.
- The Stoic: Sarah Breaker stays remarkably level-headed when she is exposed to real (and hostile) supernatural phenomena. She doesn't even blink that Alan knows so much about it and saves most of her questions until after they get to safety.
- Wham Episode: A few episode back, Alan mentioned a clicker that his mother gave him that would protect him from the dark. Here, it is revealed that Thomas engineered it as a means of preparing Alan to use a real Clicker that could do just that.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Before Agent Nightingale could do anything to Alan, the Darkness drags him into the other room to a gruesome fate.
