“Our heroes aircraft is falling from the sky! Will they pull out in time to avoid a firey crash and bring the episode, nay, the entire series, to a screeching and unexpected halt, requiring not only clever writing but also difficult actor contract negotiations with the attendant risk of turning off the existing fans?”
Bah. No, of course the aircraft will pull out at the last second. Of course.
Lazy.
Those old enough to remember TV from the 80’s will doubtless *vaguely* recall any of a number of the same scene: the *enemy* aircraft, often a helicopter, has been struck. Gun, missile, onboard explosion, someone whacked the pilot, whatever, the vehicle is going down. Will it crash? Well, since these are the bad guys and, what’s more, *unimportant* bad guy characters, yes. It’ll crash. But at the last moment it’ll go down *behind* the nearest hill. You’ll know it crashed because a fireball that sure looks a whole lot like some combination of back powder and gasoline will go FOOOOM from behind the hill. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than crashing an actual aircraft on camera, and slightly less visually awful than using bad scale models or, perhaps worse, stock footage, to depict the event. But it still got to be an incredibly tired and predictable shot.
3 responses to “This trope should be retired”
This can be a good opportunity to do a real subversion of audience expectations. Our woke hero has *their* aircraft/spacecraft dive down toward the ground, as normal per this trope, but then it actually crashes and explodes. Then an actual competent person, the real hero of the show, steps up and takes over.
This kind of things has happened a *few* times. The otherwise forgettable “Doom” set up The Rock as the main character, but then transitioned to Karl Urban.
But, yeah. I’d love to see a movie where Obvious Hero, Captain Lance Squarejaw, is the cocky, dead-sexy main protagonist while the ships engineer is some grumpy Gimli-looking feller, constantly trying to tell the Captain that his plans are stupid. A third of the way through, Captain Squarejaw sets out on the ill-conceived plan, leaving Engineer Gimli behind with a gruff sneer. Gimli watches on the viewscreen as Captain Squarejaw and his hand-picked team of beautiful yet dim people get blown out of the sky or eaten by the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast. *Captain* Gimli turns to his hand-picked team of *competent* crewmen, grumbles something to the effect of “fuckin’ morons” as he gestures towards the viewscreen, then promptly sets about actually resolving the issue.
Deliverance sets up Burt Reynolds to be the hero, too.