Chekhov's Army

Chekhovs Army is to Chekhov's Gunman as Chekhov's Armoury is to Chekhov's Gun.

A Chekhov's Gunman is a character introduced in a seemingly small role and brought back into the spotlight later with a much larger, and generally more important part to play.

Chekhov's Army is when the writer uses several (and in some cases, uses too many) Chekhov's Gunmen, not all of which are painfully obvious.

The Law of Conservation of Detail taken to its logical extreme.

Carefully written and/or Myth Arc-laden shows tend to have a Chekhov's Army. It also provides good potting soil for Epileptic Trees.

Compare with Chekhov's Armoury. Might overlap with Gondor Calls for Aid and Climactic Battle Resurrection.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • With an actual army! The Briggs soldiers help out Mustang during the central riot/coup d'etat.
  • In a villainous example, King Bradley was one of dozens of nameless men trained from birth to become the host of Wrath. While every candidate prior to him died when injected with Wrath, Bradley wasn't the last one to be tested. The remaining candidates reappear near the finale as the Gold-Toothed Doctor's personal bodyguards, having spent the intervening decades training into an elite swordsman unit.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist (2003): Every single named character who doesn't die in their first appearance shows up later in the series.
• In Negima! Magister Negi Magi, roughly half of class 3A (all of which are presented in the first chapter) eventually turn out to be a Vampire or a Ninja or a Half-demon Samurai or a Time-traveller or a Robot or a Ghost or a Nun/Wizardress or a Mercenary marksman (who turns out to be a half demon) or an amnesiac princess. All this is without counting all the side characters which inevitably become very important to the plot.
• My-HiME: Every single HiME that didn't show up in the first episode, Nao and Shizuru being the most egregious examples.
  • In My-Otome, several heads of state and their Otomes attend Mashiro's coronation. The final battle is between The Alliance of nations trying to liberate Garderobe, and Nagi's minions and allies.

• So many in One Piece, and some of them take a long time to come into play:
  • The Sabaody Arc introduces The Worst Generation, nine new characters (with eight different crews) who are rivals to Luffy. Luffy only briefly meets Law and Kid, with most of the others not becoming plot-relevant until after the Time Skip.
  • At the end of the Dressrosa Arc, Luffy gains seven subordinate crews who will come to his aid when he needs it. The narration even warns that they will somehow incite a huge incident in the future.
• Chances are, if you have a name and appear in Pokémon Adventures, you're going to be plot-important later on. If you happen to be nameless, however, you will still appear some chapters later as either an ally or a throwaway gag.
• Heart Catch Pretty Cure spent its entire series building up its army! Almost every episode was the same - character A suffers from some predicament that draws them into despair, Desert Apostle turns them into a Desertian, Precure comes and revert the person to normal. With an exception of a few people, most of them don't show up again. Until episode 44, revealing that, because they were rescued by the Precures, their hearts were strong enough to withstand Big Bad Dune's assault on Earth and allowing the girls to save the day!
• Attack on Titan has one in the form of the Titans hidden in the walls of Paradis. When they are first introduced, they are the focus of a crazy cult that worships the walls and the things in them. We eventually learn that King Fritz used the Titans to create the three walls of Paradis, and that by unhardening the Walls, they can become a powerful weapon, which Eren eventually uses in the climactic arc known as the Rumbling.

Comic Books

• The Sandman (1989) probably has the most extensive one ever, including gunmen drafted from far earlier stories. Some notable examples:
  • There is a lesbian character, Judy, killed via Moral Event Horizon in Preludes And Nocturnes. Before she is killed, she tries to contact her girlfriend Donna, and one of the people she calls is her "token straight friend" Rose. Donna returns in A Game of You, The High Cost of Living, and The Time Of Your Life (the latter two outside Sandman proper). Rose appears as a main character in The Doll's House, where we learn that she is the granddaughter of one of the victims of "sleeping sickness" back in issue one (and also the granddaughter of Desire), and the sister of Jed Walker of pre-Gaiman Sandman comics in the 1970s. Rose loses her heart in the climax of the arc, but then boomerangs back many years later to tie up that specific loose end and a few others besides. (She also shows up at The Wake, but then everyone is there. You're there too.) Oh, and in The Doll's House Rose also befriends the dream denizen Fiddler's Green, who later... It just goes on and on.

Film

• In the 2009 movie Avatar, there is a moment where almost every single alien species that appears in the first part of the movie returns to beat the ever-loving crap out of the human military. Chekhov's Zoo, anyone?
• Avengers: Endgame has the trope both figuratively (through time travel, many past characters appear, most of whom are dead, such as Howard Stark, Loki, Peggy Carter, Frigga, the Ancient One, and Alexander Pierce) and literally (the characters killed by the Snap are revived, and when they appear to fight Thanos's forces, bring along all armies that have appeared in the MCU that far: the Masters of the Mystic Arts, the Asgardians, the Ravagers, and the Wakandans).
• In the French film Amélie, many characters are introduced extensively with seemingly no point. For instance, the air hostess that Amelie helps with pet sitting is the person who takes Amelie's father's gnome to various places over the world. A seemingly unimportant blind man in the subway then returns later when Amelie helps him cross the street, and then she extravagantly describes all of of the major sights along the route back to the subway.
• The Game (1997) - This 1997 Michael Douglas film fits this trope to a T when every last extra whose face was shown during the course of the movie, as well as several incredibly minor, even unnamed characters were all revealed to be a part of the Game as shown in the cafeteria scene.
• Mission: Impossible (1996): Every random extra in the background in the opening scene shows up as a secret agent in the dinner and final scene.
• Argentinean film "Nueve Reinas" is a perfect example of this trope. Every character appearing in the film plays a part at the ruse
• Taken literally with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In the 'extended version', in which 23 originally cut seconds were restored, one of the characters breaks the fourth wall and starts talking about if her scene should have been cut out. This triggers a chat between her and some past characters. After that, some future characters start yelling at her to get on with the scene, including an actual medieval army. Guess what? The army conveniently appears at the end of the film, when Arthur needs them to attack an enemy castle.
• Ratatouille: Rémy's family arriving to help keep the kitchen running.

Literature

• The Dresden Files loves this sort of thing; in particular, Grave Peril has quite a few characters show up at Bianca's party who turn out to be very important later.
  • 10 books later and the fallout from that party still isn't done yet. There's one character that hasn't been seen since (a dragon) but the amount of pure speculation means he has to come back at some point.
• Harry Potter. Sirius Black, Regulus Black, Kreacher, Mrs. Figg, and Cornelius Fudge are just a few examples of characters whose first appearances were rather innocuous, if not downright unimportant, but who would become much more relevant later on. Rowling's penchant for this sort of thing led to her publicly apologizing when a throwaway character had the same last name as Harry's mother; though he really was just a random character, the fandom had grown so used to innocuous characters becoming important, especially those with noteworthy names, that there was major speculation about what role he would play in the future books.
• The Wheel of Time - Every named character in the series.
• The Red Army from Terry Pratchett's Interesting Times.

Live Action TV

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer was fond of this. First, at the end of season three, the entire graduating class, who'd been getting saved by Buffy for the last three years, bands together to form a literal army to fight off the Big Bad. Two of the three Big Bad Wannabes of season six, conversely but similarly, started as one-off characters going as far back as season two, but joined up with each other in season six. The third was going to be as well, but the actor was unavailable so they made it his brother instead.
• In the first season of Chuck, in Chuck vs. the Alma Mater, the titular character finds a disc of everyone at Stanford who is working for the CIA... and uses it (and a regular Chekhov's Gun in the form of a code phrase about a toga party) to get a lot of reinforcements to bring in the episode's Villain Of The Week.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Series 4 finale. Hello again, Martha, Torchwood, Rose, Mickey, Jackie, Harriet Jones, and Sarah Jane!
  • A Good Man Goes to War: members of pretty much every other faction or species the 11th Doctor has ever seen come back to help, plus a few that only the 10th Doctor met.
• In The Famous Jett Jackson, on an episode of the Show Within a Show, Silverstone; the main character discovers that nearly everyone he met in the town was actually a secret agent. Except of course for the sweet old lady, who was actually the villain of the episode.
• The Good Wife has turned this into something of an art form.

Podcasts

• The Magnus Archives, with its intricate Myth Arc, introduces nearly all of its important characters in this way. An unimportant character in a seemingly isolated statement (as well as, occasionally, the statement-giver themself) will come back tens or hundreds of episodes later with much more plot significance. For example, take one of the earliest statements: "A Father's Love", the testimony of a woman who realized as a young girl that her father was a serial killer. Both she and her father are much more important than originally stated: she's a powerful Avatar of the Hunt that kidnaps Jon in season 3 and attacks the Institute in season 4, and her father was working for the People's Church of the Divine Host, one of the main antagonists of season 4.

Video Games

• Absolutely everyone in the first half of the first chapter of Alan Wake plays an important role in the plot later. This actually makes sense, because when Alan's forced to write a story about the town that becomes reality, these are the only people he knows in the town.
• The second Assassins Creed features this, where after The Reveal, the Hooker, thief, uncle, and various other minor characters end up being assassins instrumental in the endgame.
• The Mass Effect series, depending on your choices. Spare the rachni queen in the first game? They send a message promising to help you when you call. Chose not to kill Wrex in the first game and convinced Mordin to make use of his student's data of a Genophage cure? The krogan clans will fight alongside Shepard. Saved Tali from exile without getting her father implicated? Helps with getting the geth and quarians to make peace and fight the Reapers. With friends like these, who needs the Council?
  • Cerberus went from being villains of a few minor sidequests in Mass Effect to becoming extremely important to the main plot in Mass Effect 2. In Mass Effect 3, they're part of a Big Bad Ensemble with the Reapers.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda: The climax has Ryder get everyone they've met through the last hundred hours of game time for help. Depending on the player's choices, this can include the other Pathfinders, at least two of the colonies they founded, La Résistance, at least one gang boss, some krogan, and various incidental characters from any number of quests Ryder took.

• In Clock Tower, Jennifer can save a flock of birds early in the game and they fly off. Much, much later, when Mary is about to throw Jennifer into the gears of the clock tower, the birds fly over and attack Mary, causing her to back up too much and fall to her death
• World of Warcraft:
  • There is one quest chain in which the player saves a bunch of baby wyverns that follow them around for a bit. Later on in the chain, when the player confronts the person who had them trapped, the wyverns fly in, swarm him, lift him up, and then drop him off a cliff.
  • The Twilight's Hammer. Minor antagonists very early on in Classic, show up much much later in Classic at Silithus, and then become the Nebulous Evil Organization in Cataclysm.
  • The Cenarion Circle. Depending on where you go, they're a very minor faction who is later on the driving force behind several zones' storylines.
  • The Earthen Ring. Originally, they were Cenarion Circle but with Shamans. Later on, they become one of the main driving forces for good in Cataclysm, after having several pre-expansion storylines dedicated to them.
  • The Argent Circle. At the low level game in Classic, they appear to be just one of many other factions. They're later one of the driving forces for good in Wrath of the Lich King.
• At the climax of Skies of Arcadia the odds are stacked completely against the Blue Rogues. the Big Bad has an entire armada of airships at his disposal, and the two best military forces, Valua and Nasr, have been devastated. but then, pretty much every air pirate your group met and befriended show up to help
• In Ys I and II, several minor NPC's that you meet over the course of the two games are revealed in the finale to be descendants of the six priests of Ys, and the first game's Damsels In Distress are really the twin goddesses.

Web Original

• Sketch Comedy The Onion Movie has just about everyone from the previous sketches appear in some manner in the climax.
• Whateley Universe: All the devisors and gadgeteers from the Whateley Weapons Fair in "Ayla and the Tests". Knick-Knack turns out to be the incarnation of Hephaestus. Kew turns out to be the gadget girl for the Spy Kidz, and gives Phase an intro to said team. Mega-Death turns out to be a good guy who sells Phase the very thing Phase will need when the Weapons Fair 'goes Westworld'. Jericho has invented a new kind of first-aid kit which Phase wants to market. Hazmat turns out to be interested in the protagonist of another series of stories. The list just goes on and on and on... And then most of them come back for a Big Damn Heroes scene in "Ayla and the Great Shoulder Angel Conspiracy" when two devisors put Ayla and Tennyo in the hospital and then try to get away with it.

Western Animation

• In the mid-season finale of Avatar: The Last Airbender, a lot of characters came back to fight on The Day of Black Sun. Characters from various old episodes and ones the viewers had forgotten about. It was epic. Which makes it so stunning that they lost.
  • The Kyoshi warriors are this on more than one occasion.
• Justice League Unlimited. The Ultimen, the Question, Lex Luthor, Brainiac, Amanda Waller, Huntress, Galatea, and Captain Atom (among others) all have larger roles in the Season 2 myth arc and the four-part finale than their initial appearances would suggest.

• In "Madeline and the Forty Thieves", the viewers are presented with a pair of magpies briefly flying across the screen. It turns out the magpies are actually the thieves.

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