Annoying Media Tropes

Scott Hardie | March 28, 2020
There are all kinds of annoying tropes in movies and TV. I just wrote about one.

Watching Person of Interest lately, there are several more on my mind, because the show leans heavily on these:

• Antagonists who act really overtly evil, like threatening to kill each other at every turn, or killing their henchmen for minor failures. It's worse because most of them think they're the good guys! Who outside of cartoonishly evil villains goes around threatening to kill their own co-workers? If my boss ever made a death threat for me not turning in a project on time, I would walk out and not give notice. This trope popped up recently in Star Trek: Picard: The antagonists were trying to save the galaxy in their view, but they couldn't go ten seconds without putting knives at each others' throats and threatening death for minor mistakes or delays (and of course, wearing all black). It's ridiculous. Wouldn't the conflict be so much more interesting if the antagonists acted earnestly like they were protagonists?

• "Elastic villains" who are amorphous and ill-defined, who can be whatever the script needs them to be. How many henchmen do they have? How do they get their funding? How do they get their information? How do they know to show up at exactly the right place and time to interfere with our heroes? How do they continue to find good workers when they kill their henchmen so freely? What do they really want overall beyond just the next objective in front of them? Person of Interest has an especially bad case of this, with several competing organizations of villains who all vary in power from episode to episode (one week they meet our heroes with overwhelming force; the next they're staffed with a couple of easily-overtaken morons), always in the right place to screw with our heroes without explanation. To me, the more far-fetched the premise of a series, the more rules it must establish to define its world; otherwise you get villains like this. The Netflix Marvel shows like Daredevil and Iron Fist suffered from this problem too; the Hand were always wherever the script needed them to be, and exactly as powerful as the script needed them to be, regardless of logic.

• The T-bone car crash. When Hollywood shows people riding in a car, and the camera angles start showing characters from the side so we can see through the window behind them, it's almost inevitable that there will be an accident where another car or truck hits them from the side. Kelly covers her eyes as soon as such a scene starts because it's so damn common. In a spy thriller like Person of Interest, such crashes are deliberate ambushes. I've lost count of how many times on that show one character rammed a truck into another character's car from a side street as they were driving by, crashing them and facilitating an abduction or assassination. What I don't understand is how the driver knew exactly the right street to wait on, and exactly the right moment to accelerate; see above about villains having access to information without any means of obtaining it.

• I don't suppose this is a trope exactly, but a fourth thing that bothers me in long-running action shows is enemies that lack an arc. They just stick around forever, always creating trouble for our heroes. To me, any story has a beginning and a middle and an ending; it doesn't just drag on forever like a chess game where no pieces are ever captured. The X Files was often criticized for dragging out its central mysteries for too long, but at least it finally concluded the primary mystery in season 6, and its secondary mystery in season 7 (albeit anticlimactically). Some shows are too afraid to write off good villains because the replacements might not be as interesting (ahem X Files), but keeping them around without concluding their story just leads to narrative stagnation. Shit or get off the pot.

What tropes bother you?

Lori Lancaster | April 5, 2020
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Samir Mehta | April 5, 2020
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Scott Hardie | May 1, 2020
Lori, I'm no fan of the "it was all a dream" trope either. It has been used as such a cheap gimmick by so many writers, as either a retcon to fix poor plotting or a lazy shock to the audience, that it has been ruined. It's so common that many people have started to make jokes about it, and even the jokes are getting old at this point.

Could that trope even be done well these days? Well, maybe... The recent two-season revival of The X Files was a very mixed bag: The standalone comedy episodes and monster-of-the-week episodes were some of the best the show has ever done, but the four "mythos" episodes that bookended the seasons and provided a running storyline were flaming hot garbage. And the show recognized that the first season had written itself into a corner with a rushed cliffhanger ending, so it clumsily retconned all of this out at the beginning of the second season by revealing that the previous season was just a dream. This choice was terrible and widely panned (and ignored in headcanon by fans like me), but the fact that it was maybe the seventh biggest problem with that second season premiere says a lot about how execrable those bookend episodes were. Anyway, after retconning out the entire first season, the show did something interesting. In every episode of the second season, it hid the "ever dream this man?" face somewhere in the background of every episode of the second season, referencing the popular meme to suggest quite subtly that the second season was itself just a dream, thus negating the retcon. The face quietly popped up all over the place. Was this a joke by the creative team, acknowledging the clumsiness of their error? Was it a subtle hint to the fans watching closely that there are other non-obvious ways to interpret these events? Was it a form of symbolic penance for their mistake, simultaneously acknowledging it and trying to reverse it? I don't know. But it seems like the show managed to pull off a clever way to do the "it was all a dream" trope after also very clumsily abusing the "it was all a dream" trope.

Erik Bates | October 23, 2023
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Scott Hardie | October 24, 2023
Yep! To your list, it always bugs me when I'm watching TV and see women wake up in bed with perfect hair and makeup. And then there's the characters who sit down around a table to eat a meal together and don't actually take any bites because the set's been dressed that way for hours and the prop food isn't meant to be edible. And maybe the most annoying trope is when characters leave the door wide open behind them when entering a house or other building. I can't stop thinking about it while the scene proceeds!

In the end, it's all about what personally stands out to you and breaks the spell, right? I watched all eleven seasons of Cheers without noticing that the customers never pay Carla or Sam for their drinks until someone pointed it out after I finished, and thus it didn't bug me at all. But let me tell you, every time someone entered the bar through the front door and didn't close it behind them...