This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Silent Hunter: Are there any examples of this trope being played straight?
Looney Toons: Oh yeah, hundreds — thousands, even. It's just that if it's done right, you never notice, and it's not even worth mentioning — it's just considered playing fair with the audience. It's only in the breach that rule is obvious. I know that when I write fiction, I will frequently say to myself, "I need X to be available at this future point, so I'd better make sure X is obvious right now." And then I do. And I don't give it a second thought, and if I did it right neither does the reader even when X, whatever it is, becomes important. Because it's not an Ass Pull, it doesn't jar the reader out of the story.
Morgan: It's been a long time since I saw it, but... Didn't Garibaldi end up using the gun close to the end of that episode, to kill whatever that thing was? (If I'm remembering it right, they'd taken away his PPG, but didn't realize that the gun was actually a weapon.)
Travis Wells: What actually happened was that went he came up against the weird alien, he still had the bullets from the gun in his pocket (They didn't bother taking away bullets to a gun he doesn't have with him) and stuck them in a "steam tube" to make a makeshift-wouldn't-really-work gun. Which he then shot the alien with.
Dark Sasami: Should this actually be a narrative device, not a trope?
grixit: There's an episode in which Londo is seated under a sword display. Vir goes to the market, gets bullied, runs out. You know he's going to grab a sword.
In another, an old friend of Londo's is visiting. Londo mentions that the two had been classmates and members of a society dedicated to traditional centauran chivalry, thus telegraphing that they must have a sword fight.
Is there a term for when this is a character who is introduced conspicuously, disappears for awhile, and comes back to play an important role much later on?
Dr Dedman: Ebert had the "Unmotivated Close-up", which covers TV and film (his canatonical example is the cook in "Hunt for Red October".
Does this need to be split up into two tropes?
IMHO, there is a difference between background items that are prominently featured and show up later and the "007, Your equipment for this mission" style moments when the hero is given a bunch of wacky equipment explicitly for use later in the story.
Blork: "See also Contractual Immortality, Killed Off for Real, Tonight, Someone Dies, Disney Death"
Umm... why? These Death Tropes don't seem to have anything to do with the topic at hand.
Is there an existing trope for "item or prop introduced in an earlier story that suddenly becomes important again"? For example, episode 7 had a minor villain that had this dangerous weapon. The villain gets defeated and his weapon ends up in the heroes' trophy room. In the season finale, the heroes have to face the Big Bad, and they realie that the season 7 villain's weapon is just what they need to hurt the Big Bad real bad. It's definitely not an Ass Pull seeing as it was introduced beforehand, and makes perfect sense on the plot level to be where it is when the heroes decide to use it; it's not a Chekhov's Gun in the strict sense, as it was introduced for a different purpose altogether, and the season finale writer simply realized that it would be extraordinarily handy. If anything, it's a Continuity Nod, but it actually has specific significance to the plot.
Doug S. Machina: Would it be worth making a separate entry for an object introduced early to set up a gag much later? This object might have no other purpose.
It's a bit pedantic, but can you really describe the fight between Ripley and the Alien Queen as "mano-a-mano?"
Mr Death: Yes you can, because "mano-a-mano" means "hand to hand" not "man to man".
Anonymous Mc Cartneyfan: The redirect is fixed. (Oh, and let's not mix the dramatic devices with the silly jokes that remind us how to spell the dramatic devices.)
