Spoiled by the Format

"The anxiety ... can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity."

— Northanger Abbey

It's a universal but occasionally unfortunate fact that any medium has some physical realization; often, facts about that physicality can allow you to figure out things about a work earlier than the creators intend.

For example, when reading a book, you can tell exactly how much of it there is remaining. If you're near the end, you might realize that the end must come in a certain specific way as any other way would take too long to resolve. (Ending on a cliffhanger is one way to avoid this.) If you're not, you might know that the apparent resolution can't possibly last as there's too much book left. (An afterword, "Preview of the Next Book," or "Q&A with the Author" feature can help avoid that.) E-readers avert both of these problems, though some of them (such as the Kindle and Nook) have either the chapters and page numbers listed (as a normal book would) or a percentage progress bar (some Kindle versions).

Books also spoil through their page format, because a heavy reader tends to be able to read quickly enough that if they are concerned about, say, a character as they read down the left page their eyes can sometimes dart over to the right page to see what is being mentioned there. Some readers try to beat this phenomenon by placing a thick sheet of paper over the right page as they read a book for the first time, and are nearing the end of the book. This problem can also be averted with an E-Reader since most, if not all, can't display more than one page worth of text at a time.

A similar phenomenon can happen for TV broadcasts due to their generally fixed length. For example, in a Dramatic Hour Long episode, any solution to a problem that comes after 20 minutes will generally fail, while any solution that takes 35 minutes will generally succeed. Even if your time sense is poor, you can often figure out whether the currently proposed solution is the correct one by counting commercial breaks. Similarly, mystery shows have a tendency to introduce the villain somewhere around the 15 minute mark: soon enough that they feel like an integral part of the episode, but late enough that they're not the first person you associate with the setup. Contractual Immortality and related tropes are another example of this in TV series: there is a clear delineation between "regular characters" and everyone else, which often spoils the suspense of whether any given character will die, get married, be promoted, etc.—or else reveals a culprit's identity before the characters guess it because there's only one guest character left that it could be.

Streaming video from the web removes the fixed-length problem, but virtually every video streaming service displays how far into the video you are as a matter of convenience. The bar disappears with inactivity, but it takes just a move of the mouse (accidental or on purpose) to make it appear again. Some videos may have a blank screen for the last part to obfuscate the video's length, but there's not much of a way to make a video go longer than it appears.

A short-term variant of this can occur when watching TV shows and movies with Closed Captioning or subtitles, since they usually display a sentence before it's finished being said. This means that if a character's words are cut off in the middle of a sentence, you know that they're going to be interrupted by something a few seconds before it happens. In some cases, when it's obvious enough what the character is going to say next, it's possible to avoid this in subtitles by showing the whole sentence anyway, then making it quickly disappear when the character is interrupted.^note Some clever closed captioning systems solve this problem by revealing words gradually, without getting ahead of the character talking. One example is NieR: Automata. Some captioning includes the name of the person doing the speaking, which is especially frustrating if that person's actual identity is an important future plot point and hasn't actually been revealed yet.

Another variant of this is when the phrase "Part 1" is in the title — you know that it must end on a cliffhanger of some kind.

This can also be caused by a Series Fauxnale or a Two-Part Trilogy. The plot appears to have this sense of finality to it, like this is going to be the end. But the viewer knows there's still more simply because they're watching something a few years late - by now there's a new season, a new arc, maybe a Post-Script Season, or maybe a new installment entirely. This can happen with print medium as well - the first print(s) of a book will make it seem as if the series is much shorter than it actually is. But later runs will list the entire series (either in the opening pages), or add "Part x of...".

This can be a good thing depending on the work and the viewer's preference. Some works may even take advantage of this trope, using the viewer's awareness to either avoid explaining the obvious or even to play with their expectations.

Compare Disc-One Final Dungeon and Interface Spoiler, which are much the same issue applied to video games, Conspicuously Light Patch, which is this trope in animation, and Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize, where casting choices spoil an upcoming plot point.

Contrast Your Princess Is in Another Castle!

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• FLCL, being only six episodes long, evokes this feeling. They even lampshade it with something along the lines of:
  Haruko: What are you doing here? This is the climax! You need to be where the action is!
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon: The Original Series: In-universe in an episode of the anime where, after several incredibly dumb attempts to steal Pokémon, the Team Rocket trio actually tries something that might work. James wonders why they didn't start out with this plan, and Jessie replies that they needed to fill an episode.
  • One of the few complaints about Pokémon Origins is that the 4-episode OVA format condensed key plot points into montages, only fleshing out other areas into full sequences (the gym battle against Brock, the Pokémon tower in Lavender Town; the battle against Giovanni, the battle against Blue; the capture of Mewtwo, and the debut of Mega Charizard X).
  • By that proxy, the acts of The Strongest Mega Evolution are often criticized for their pacing problems on their special format.
• In Cardcaptor Sakura you can almost always tell when Sakura is going to miss the catch, simply because her attempt is actually animated instead of Stock Footage.
• At the end of the second Rebuild of Evangelion movie, Shinji does something that triggers 3rd Impact. However, you know that 3rd Impact will be aborted because there are two more movies to go. Subverted in 3.0., which reveals that yes, Third Impact still happened, and most of humanity was wiped out as a result.
• Anime tends to come in rough multiples of 12- or 13-episode chunks. If you don't know going in that Death Note has an irregular number of episodes, this could be an issue.
• Played straight and averted in Dragon Ball Super's Universal Survival arc. Android 17, after a long absence finally comes back and Goku wants him to join their team, but he refuses and the episode ends on a cliffhanger. However, he is prominently featured in the introductory sequence, the eye catches and the ending sequences, thus spoiling the fact that he would eventually change his mind. Averted, however, with Majin Buu, who is also prominently featured in aforementioned intros, eye catches and ending sequences, more or less guaranteeing that he too, will be in the team, except he falls asleep midway through the arc, forcing Goku to recruit the currently deceased Freeza. The intros, eye catches and ending sequences are, from that point onwards, modified, replacing Majin Buu with Freeza.
• Invoked in an episode of Lucky Star, wherein Kagami and her family are watching an unnamed suspenseful reality game show involving a million yen up for grabs and Tsukasa can't stand the suspense so she glances at the clock; with only a few minutes left in the hour-long program, and Japanese Game Shows almost always avoid cliff-hangers, she knows the person got a question wrong. Kagami, predictably, notices this and berates her for it.
• Manga volumes in general tend to spoil themselves. When the chapters are published in magazines monthly, the tension can build, and people can wonder if their favorite characters will survive, or if the plot will be resolved. When a certain number of collected volumes have been published, even in arc-based works, it can be obvious that a Driving Question hasn't yet been resolved, or a main cast member hasn't died yet.
  • Averted in Pluto. When Gesicht, the main character, is Killed Off for Real there's still two volumes left to go. Although anyone familiar with the Astro Boy story Pluto is based on would already know this.
• In Bakuman。, over the course of the 20-volume run, the main characters get a manga launched about a quarter of the way through, and seem ready to get an anime a little over halfway through- the latter is what Mashiro hopes to get in order to fulfill his promise to Azuki, the girl he loves. It's not hard to figure out that neither case pans out for the protagonists if you know how long the series is, although it is somewhat surprising to see what happens.
• In The Kindaichi Case Files, the case will usually be solved whenever this catchphrase "All the mysteries have been solved" or "The culprit is one of us!" are said by one character in an overly dramatic fashion, usually taking almost one page. That's why when someone delivers a plausible solution not followed by those, you can tell it's not the correct one, especially when there are 3-4 more chapters to go.
• Attack on Titan:
  • The back of the published manga can cause this in two different ways since each of the volumes from before the Time Skip (features the top 10 of the 104th trainee corps. If you've read the first volume or seen enough episodes, you can figure this out easily, and the fact that they're in order from 1-10 going left to right helps. On the back of volume two, Eren, the fifth from the left, is transparent, which one would assume is to show that he was killed in book 1; but if you look at the later books, he goes back to being solid white, which means that he gets better in book 2.
  • This happens again with the cover of Volume 14, which prominently shows that Erwin has lost his right arm.
• When all of the remaining Monster of the Week in Yuki Yuna is a Hero decide to attack all at once, precisely nobody believed that the show was over, because they were defeated in Episode 5 of a 12-Episode Anime. This makes the following two episodes an exercise in waiting for the other shoe to drop. Sure enough, the Heroes still have to deal with one straggler, but even then, the series is only two-thirds of the way done... and then The Reveal happens. This trope is probably the main reason why so many fans correctly guessed that the Taisha is lying about the disabilities from Mankai being temporary.
• Doraemon: Nobita's Great Adventure into the Underworld involves the characters creating a parallel universe where magic exists. Unfortunately said parallel world turned out to have a Big Bad demon who wanted to take over the Earth. The solution? Just go back to their own universe. In the comic it has a fake ending but of course it doesn't work since people will notice a suspiciously large amount of book left.
• Fairy Tail chapter 536 ends with Zeref defeated and Acnologia sealed away in a dimension beyond time. This would seem like the end of the series... Except the same chapter revealed that there are ten more chapters left in the series, making it clear that something is going to go wrong.
• Digimon Adventure's second ending, "Keep On", showcases all eight of the original Chosen Children/DigiDestined and their respective partners' forms. The first episode this is used in is episode 27, meaning the ending spoiled four Perfect/Ultimate levels, Hikari/Kari being the Eighth Child, Tailmon/Gatomon being her partner, and the existence of the then brand-new Ultimate/Mega level.
• In Asteroid in Love, Episode 8 of the anime (adapted from Chapter 27 of the manga), which takes place on New Year's Day, has Mira learn that Ao will have to move out as a result of her father getting a transfer, something that will happen during Spring Break in March. One would think that this sort of thing would happen at the end of the series, whether as a climatic problem or the cause of a Bittersweet Ending, but there are four episodes to go in the anime. Mira and Ao manage to get Ao to stay with Mira's family near the start of the next episode.
• The Summer You Were There lasts 32 chapters, and takes place over the course of a Japanese summer vacation. In Chapter 30, Kaori, who'd been hospitalized for the latter half of the series, suddenly takes a turn for the worse near the end of the chapter. In Chapter 31, there's a Hope Spot and it's implied that Kaori might pull through. However, since readers knew that the story would last only one more chapter and Kaori's death was a Foregone Conclusion, few were surprised when Kaori passed away at the end of Chapter 31.

Audio Plays

• 36 Questions appears to have Jase and Judith happily getting back together when the second act has only ten minutes remaining. There's just one problem - it's a three act musical.

Comic Books

• Subverted in an issue of Zot!. Teen girl Terry has spent an entire issue angsting about whether she's a lesbian, and whether she should ask out the school's only "out" lesbian, Pam, or even continue to talk to Pam, afraid that she'll be ostracized if she does. At the very end of the issue, Terry's walking down a hallway, Pam says hi... and Terry keeps walking past, not even looking up at Pam. The next page is the first page of the "Letters" section, marking it as the end of the issue—except that page is then followed by the actual last page of the issue, in which Terry runs back to Pam, flustered and sheepish, and just says "Hi". Even when it was collected in book form, the formatting was kept the same, thanks to a postscript essay on the issue which served the same purpose.
• Averted in The Walking Dead: Image Comics went so far as to produce fake covers and accept solicitations for (the non-existent) issues #194 and #195 to conceal the fact that Rick Grimes dies in issue #192 and #193 is a Distant Finale. Robert Kirkman has claimed that since this was a series infamous for Anyone Can Die, then it was only fitting that the last shocking death would be that of the comic itself.

Comic Strips

• Frazz intends to avert this for his first novel.
  "When you can see how many pages are left, it gets in the way of suspense. For my first novel, I'm going to put a hundred or so pages of incomprehensible gobbledygook at the end."
• An Ottifanten strip where Opa Bommel is ranting about Sunday the 15th again eventually has Paul point out that it's actually the 16th. This was indeed published on a Sunday the 16th, and the collected edition still has the date notice, in the first half of the strip, so many people must have seen it coming. Downplayed if not outright subverted in that it is only part of the punchline.

Fan Works

• Fan Works as a whole tend to avert this trope, since there is really no limit to the media used (It can be as short or as long as the writer wants) and the authors are free to do just about anything they want with the characters. Indeed, many fan works update one chapter/episode/etc. at a time, so if a work hasn't been finished yet (if it ever will reach completion), it can be hard to say how long it will be even if they do have a table of contents.
  • Archive of Our Own potentially plays it straight, as it is possible for authors to set a total number of chapters to the story. However it can be altered at any time, and authors are not required to set a count at all.
• Many fanfiction websites require stories to be tagged, and tags can very easily be inherent spoilers. For example...
  • If a story that starts out lighthearted has the "dark" tag, expect things to go downhill eventually. The "Tragedy" genre on Fanfiction.net virtually guarantees a Downer Ending.
  • If a story is tagged as "shipping", the presence of romance won't be surprising. Most ship fics also tag the pairing itself, which can ruin the tension in Will They or Won't They? stories or those that have a "who will X end up with?" premise. Similarly, if a fic is tagged "slash", don't expect to be surprised by the sudden reveal of a character's sexuality.
  • If the presence of a certain character is inherently a twist, this can be ruined on websites that feature character tags on fanfics.
  • Some fanfic websites require Crossovers to be tagged as such. In some fics, the fact that the story is a crossover is a major Plot Twist, which is ruined by tags like this.
  • On sites with more robust tagging systems, like AO3, various plot elements can be tagged if the author so wishes. This can include parts of the narrative that don't come into play until much later, such as a character's new role in a Point of Divergence fic.
• An odd temporary example happened in the Katawa Shoujo based Rika Story, which sets out to imagine what a Rika route would be like, complete with Multiple Endings. The author wrote the bad endings first, so anyone who read it when they were the only options available would be able to figure out which choices were the wrong ones.
• Turnabout Storm: Up in the final 10 minutes of Part 4/4, the supposed conclusion, and a huge and important witness still needs to be brought in? Something tells us this isn't the real final part... Word of God confirmed that this had to be done deliberately to prevent the conclusion from being too long, even for this series' standards (Part 5/4 still ended up being over 2 1/2 hours long).
• Fallout: Equestria - Murky Number Seven is all about the title character trying to escape from a life of slavery in Fillydelphia. Chapter 3 has him execute an extensively planned escape with oft-mentioned conviction of this being his last day in chains, though considering the thirty or so chapters ahead, it's a safe bet he doesn't succeed this time.
• In Naruto Vengeance Revelations, Ronan is apparently killed for the first time in Chapter 12 out of 69. In gubgub's dramatic reading, she temporarily rejoiced, but then noticed that the many chapters she had left to go indicated his survival unless he had a son.
• If you know your Super Sentai, it's not hard to figure out that in Eiga Sentai Scanranger when the heroes have to fight a seemingly invincible enemy that nearly defeats them, they're going to get their Mid-Season Upgrade. The fic goes a step farther, however, and actually starts all the chapter titles for that arc with "Power Upgrade Part 1, Power Upgrade Part 2," etc.!
• Probably unintentional, but most of Northstar Pokeshipper's stories include notes at the start and at the end of the chapters that usually spoil what's gonna happen (mostly by asking questions with rather obvious answers).
• CN Akumas: At the end of "Count Widow", there's some tension regarding the class trip coming to an end, whether Hawk Moth will stay in Townsville afterwards, and whether Ladybug will have to give up her earrings in the interim so he can still be stopped while she's not there. Problem is, the author planned out and posted art of every akuma ahead of time — and Count Widow was number six out of twenty-six. As such, it's pretty obvious that some sort of accident is gonna keep the Miraculous Ladybug characters stuck in Townsville for a while (in this case, the airport getting quarantined after a KND mission gone wrong).
• Starscream And The Drones is only a few hundred words long, the description of its online upload mentions it being entered in a Funniest Fanfic Ever fanvote, and the I Do Not Own disclaimer mentions that the author doesn't know who wrote the "original Russian soldiers joke". From these context clues, it becomes fairly obvious that the fic is a Feghoot leading up to said joke, and the mention of what kind of joke is involved makes it easier to figure out the punchline ahead of time depending on the reader's familiarity with them.
• Principal Celestia Hunts the Undead: Anyone glancing down the chapter list can guess the twist between chapters 11 and 12, in turn named ''Chrysalis actually wants peace" and "I lied."

Films — Animated

• In Arlo the Alligator Boy, Arlo reaches New York City, learns of his birth father Ansel, gets the address to where he lives, gives a tearful farewell to his friends before going inside, and finally makes into the penthouse where he encounters Ansel and introduces himself to him, expecting a heartfelt reunion... while there is still about a half hour left in the movie. You know there's a whole lot more to come, especially what Ansel does to his own son.
• In Coco, Miguel makes contact with Ernesto de la Cruz and the prospect of being able to go home with no give-up-your-dreams clause while there's still over a half an hour left in the movie. You just know something's going to go wrong.
• Frozen (2013): After having her heart accidentally blasted with Elsa's ice powers, Anna reaches Arendelle where Hans offers to give her True Love's Kiss and heal her. But the fact that the movie still has over half an hour of running time left is a sign that this will not go as planned, and sure enough, Hans turns out to be Evil All Along.
• The closed caption version applies for Kim Possible A Sitch in Time but in a different way. When watching the movie normally, there's probably no suspicion when Ron's mother mentions her boss, but if you watch it with the closed captioning, it shows said boss's name is Ms. Ogehs thereby spoiling The Reveal that the whole thing was a Batman Gambit from a Future Badass version of Shego.
• Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost: Looks like the usual "Scooby-Doo" Hoax has been wrapped up — the townsfolk were faking the ghost sightings to boost tourism. Guess it's time for the gang to relax and...there's 25 minutes left in the film. And the character voiced by Tim Curry hasn't done anything evil yet...
  • If you know the history of the movie, this becomes a subversion. The part where the "Scooby-Doo" Hoax was revealed really was supposed to be the end of the movie, then the creators decided that wasn't good enough and is the reason the rest of the movie happens.

Films — Live-Action

• Gone Baby Gone wraps up the plot neatly in less than an hour. You'll certainly be going "Wait, already?" when it happens. Yes, of course there's a twist.
• The fact that the plot of Angels & Demons seemingly wraps up with half an hour remaining is a hint that twists are still coming.
• At the midway point of Prince Caspian, the forces of Narnia attack the Telmarine castle. Since it is the midway point, it's pretty obvious that the assault is doomed to failure from the start. For bonus points, this assault is nowhere in the original Narnia saga.
• Sunshine Superman is a documentary about BASE jumping pioneer Carl Boenish, and contains archive film and new interviews. Even if they know nothing about Boenish's life, observant viewers will soon notice that he only appears in archive material, which does not bode well for him. Yes, he did die, and yes, that ominous Norwegian cliff face in the introduction was involved.
• Days before Borat Subsequent Moviefilm came out, news broke that it contained a compromising scene involving Rudy Giuliani seemingly trying to seduce a much younger female reporter (actually the film's female lead), who he is then told is only 15. Given that the contents of this scene had real-world implications for Giuliani and his associates in terms of both their reputations and possible legal action, many news organizations wound up spoiling the scene in question in order to talk about the story.
• Halloween Kills has "Evil dies tonight" as its Arc Words, referring to killing the Big Bad Michael Myers and ending his murder spree. Before the movie was even released, a sequel was confirmed to be in the works. Considering how this is a Villain-Based Franchise, very few people ever considered Myers' death in this movie to be a possibility.

Literature

• Lampshaded in Northanger Abbey:
  The anxiety, which in this state of their attachment must be the portion of Henry and Catherine, and of all who loved either, as to its final event, can hardly extend, I fear, to the bosom of my readers, who will see in the tell-tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity.
• Discussed in the dialogue "Aria With Diverse Variations" in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. The Tortoise and Achilles decide that books where this is a problem should have a variable amount of padding at the end. Of course, if the padding consists of blank pages, or pages with some simple typographical pattern on them, anyone who casually flips ahead will know when the book is about to end, so you need the padding to actually look like a continuation of the book, but to be thematically different enough that a sufficiently assiduous reader can determine where the book actually ends. They also discuss other means of indicating the location of the "real" end, such as a hidden message or a rash of typographical errors; and sure enough, those are also used by the dialogue itself. Just when they've figured this out, two police officers show up to arrest the Tortoise for theft, and the dialogue ends. Of course, this is an ironic example because it occurs in a dialogue within a book. You can't tell from the weight of the book how much of the dialogue there is to go!
• Bored of the Rings:
  • While at Riv'n'dell, Bromosel tells of a dream he had that told him "You cash in your chips around page eighty-eight."
  • Bromosel makes two comments that lampshade this In-Universe.
    • First:
    Bromosel looked up to the top of the page and winced. "At least another chapter to go," he groaned.
    • and second:
    "We cannot stay here," said Arrowroot.
    "No," agreed Bromosel, looking across the gray surface of the page to the thick half of the book still in the reader's right hand. "We have a long way to go."
• Deconstructed in David Lodge's Changing Places. The last chapter finishes with one of the characters talking about how he believes film is a superior medium to books because you can't tell when the story is about to end just by noticing how many pages are left. He laments the fact that the only way for a writer to avoid this would be to simply refuse to resolve the story at all. At that moment, the book abruptly ends, with its main conflict left unresolved. This is followed in some recent editions by several blank pages. Only after the blank pages does the book inform you that this is actually the first part of a trilogy^note Although it wasn't written as the first part of a trilogy: marketing it as such came much later. Thus it's a double subversion: The reader assumes there will be a resolution, both because of the low remaining page count, and because he doesn't know there are two sequels. Just to drive the whole movie point home, the last chapter is done in script format (the rest of the book is prose). The novel ends with the "film" burning up in the projector before the story can be resolved.
• "You can't die in the middle of the fifth act" (from Peer Gynt — see below) is quoted by a Genre Savvy character in Jostein Gaarder's magnificently metafictional novel Sophie's World.
• Any Agatha Christie book, especially her Hercule Poirot ones. If you're 20 pages or so from the end and you have a pretty good idea who the culprit is, you are wrong.
• The Dresden Files: Lampshaded in Cold Days. Harry is about to step into a barrier that might well kill him, but there's still half a dozen chapters (not to mention books) to come. The next chapter starts with:
  Harry: I lived. Just in case anyone was wondering.
• In The Princess Bride, when the sharks are circling around Buttercup, the narrator points out that "since the book's called The Princess Bride and since we're barely into it, obviously, the author's not about to make shark kibble out of his leading lady," though he was glad that his father told him that she doesn't get eaten at that point since he was a kid back then and not Genre Savvy enough to rule out the possibility.
• Harry Potter:
  • Mary Granpre's artwork for the beginning of each chapter of the American books was sometimes very spoiling. Some American readers tried hard not to look at the illustrations as they read for the first time.
  • In at least the UK editions, the death of Sirius Black is on a right-hand page, screamed out by Harry in capital letters, so when you turn the page it's all too likely you'll see it before you should.
• Lampshaded in the Doctor Who Past Doctor Adventures novel The Infinity Doctors, in which the Doctor, captured by the villain on p229, happens to mention that if the hero's captured on p229 of a 280-page novel, he's clearly going to get out of it pretty quickly.
• The Twilight Saga: Besides Bella's not-suicide cliff diving in New Moon (as evidenced below), there's also her birthing of Renesmee in Breaking Dawn. All of the tension as to whether or not she'll live falls rather flat when one considers that it happens at the end of part two, there's a buttload of pages left for part three, and that section is told from her point of view.
• Battle Royale: The author tried to make the readers believe Shinji Mimura and not Shuya Nanahara was the male lead. As such, his death in the middle of the book would come as a big surprise. This sometimes failed because Shuya appeared on the cover designs of certain editions.
• Ender's Game: If you're paying attention to how many pages are left at the end of the book, you might guess the Command School "simulation" has to be the real thing, because there isn't enough time left in the book to do it all over again.
• Harry Hole apparently pulls a Thanatos Gambit in Jo Nesbø's novel Phantom. The release of the sequel Police (branded "A Harry Hole Novel") two years later should make his survival a foregone conclusion, making this also a Late-Arrival Spoiler.
• Invisible Monsters deliberately counters this, even more so in the "Remix" version. Not only do all versions follow an Anachronic Order (as both start at the conclusion and work backwards), but the "Remix" even removed the knowledge of remaining length; as each chapter ends similarly to a Gamebook (i.e. "Now turn to page X"), the knowledge of how and when the book ends comes as a total surprise.
• Some of the BIONICLE movie novelizations feature movie stills around the middle, a couple of which spoil some scenes or characters from the endings.
• Swedish writer Simona Ahrnstedt does this in her debut novel Överenskommelser. Beatrice and Seth, the two protagonists, have what can only be described as a really hot date. Surely they will sort things out now, after eight months of misunderstandings? Surely now Beatrice won't have to marry Rosenschiöld (who's like forty years older than her and treats women like dirt), to whom she was forced to get engaged? But wait! Don't we still have almost half the book left to go? Oh damn...
• Lampshaded in Paper Towns: "...Mom and Dad were watching TV. "Want to watch?" my mom asked. "They're about to crack the case." It was one of those solve-the-murder crime shows."
• Happens twice in Ghost, the first title in the Paladin of Shadows series. At the end of the first two volumes, Mike is shot up beyond all belief, but we know it's not actually going to kill him off. The impact is lessened the second time.
• Adventures of the Rope Warrior started ending its installments on little cliffhangers like in an ongoing serial, but the thing is that it started doing this in the second and final book in the series, and thus the installments ending on cliffhangers were chapters in the same book. So in addition to the usual problems of knowing mooks didn't really blow the hero away in a filthy alley with half the book still to go, it was made even worse by how just glancing at the first paragraph on the next page let you know the hero snuck out of his hiding place when the villains shot at it and when he winced it pain it was actually at a bad joke one of them made.
• A Certain Magical Index: New Testament Volume 10 is a Boss Rush in novel form, and the titles of each chapter make it fairly obvious what enemy will be fought in them (as well as the total number of battles). Needless to say, the format also spoils that Touma and Othinus will get through each encounter, though not necessarily by winning a straight fight. It's subverted in the final chapter, which is titled "V.S. “???” — Round_12(Secret)" to hide the fact that Othinus is the final opponent.
• Lampshaded in book 2 of The Terrible Two:
  Was this the end of the Terrible Two?
  Had the story of these two great pranksters come to an end?
  
  No way, of course not. There are still thirty-eight pages left in this book.
• The audiobook of Best Served Cold spoils two twists by the fact that the narrator reads dialogue of mysterious characters using their distinctive speaking style, making their identity obvious before the text reveals it.
  • The narrator performs Nicomo Cosca's dialogue with his unique accent and delivery in the scene after his apparent death, spoiling the reveal of his survival.
  • The Bed Trick-like sequence makes it seem like Monza and Shivers are having sex with each other but ultimately reveals that they're screwing two different people. The accents of their partners give this twist away prematurely.
• In American Gods, the reveal that the character named Low-Key Lyesmith is in fact the god Loki Lie-Smith depends largely on the reader not noticing that the words would be pronounced the same. As a result, it's much less surprising in the audiobook version.
• Subverted in Room. Most readers will probably guess that Jack and Ma's grand plan to escape Room will fail, seeing how it occurs halfway through the book. But then it actually succeeds, and then the second half of the book becomes about adjusting to life after the escape.
• The Locked Tomb: The Reveal in Harrow the Ninth that the Second-Person Narration is actually first person narration from another character works very well in the print and ebook releases. The audiobook release doesn't work as well once you realize Moira Quirk uses the character's voice for the narration. It's especially obvious for listeners who went straight from Gideon the Ninth to Harrow the Ninth and didn't have time in between to forget how their voice sounded.

Live-Action TV

• Game Shows:
  • Most U.S. poker-based shows that use the "no limit" rule (a player can go "all in" and bet all his chips at any time) qualify. If there are two players left and a player goes "all in", the game will continue if and only if the player with less money wins the hand. So if there's only a minute left in the show, the player with more money will win.
  • The Japanese edition of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? always have the current player's round ending by the end of the edition. On many exported editions of the show, as well as other contests inspired by it, if the first contestant is sent home early and a second contestant is called onstage, it's a safe bet he will drop early as well, since often there isn't enough time for him to play all the way to the ending.
  • Cash Cab has a format in which players answer questions while taking a cab ride to their destination. If they get three strikes, they get kicked out of the cab. If it's getting very close to the end of the episode and they're nowhere near their destination, it's a pretty obvious sign they're going to lose and get kicked out.
  • On The Amazing Race, it's a pretty sure sign that it's a "To be continued..." leg if it's just a few minutes until the end of the episode and still no teams whatsoever have checked into the Pit Stop.
  • On the UK version of Deal or No Deal, it's always pretty obvious how the game will unfold depending on the board situation and the time left remaining of the show. Are they deliberating at only the 3rd offer with around 10 - 15 minutes to go? Then they will accept the offer. Is there over 25 minutes remaining and they are at the 4th offer? Then they will be going all the way to the end. Have they declined a huge or significant offer at the 5th offer with only a few minutes or so remaining? Then the game will crash and the contestant goes away with a low amount and the whole thing will be wrapped up quickly.
  • There's a Taiwanese version of The Million Pound Drop which, unlike the original, does not have rollover contestants, is not aired live, and is edited down to one hour. So if it's 3 minutes to the hour and it's not the final question of the game, you know the team's going to crash out on the next question.
  • American Ninja Warrior has a significant problem with this when it comes to its season finales. Once they get to Stage 3, if the show is nearing the end of its running time, you can bet that nobody is going to clear the stage.
  • Pseudo-Dueling Works The Wall and Spin the Wheel both have the chance of the final round being cut short if the contestant runs out of money. You can tell this will happen if there is an extra commercial break inserted sometime in the mid-game.
• Law & Order
  • The show is built on a very consistent pattern: The first half is detective work, the second half is the prosecution, and the episode ends with the verdict. Some episodes avert this by having the criminal caught and convicted within the first 15 minutes. The audience knows that a stunning twist or a second crime is about to occur because the show violated its format. And if they didn't, the commercials tell them, especially in later seasons where they inevitably concluded with: "You won't believe the twist in the last five minutes!"
  • Furthermore, during all three major shows there is another pattern. If an episode has a known celebrity in it, best believe they will play an important role in how the episode ends. From being a key witness, to being the villain whom may or may not get away with it by the time the episode ends.
• Episodes of CSI and its spinoffs tend to follow a general pattern - the bulk of the episode is spent following the clues of the case of the week, with the solution coming within the last five minutes and the resolution of the B plot case (if there is a B plot) coming just before or after. As such, anyone designated as a prime suspect before fifty minutes^note  Minimum - it's certainly not unheard of for one final decoy to be introduced then, with the real culprit caught even later. into the show is virtually guaranteed to be innocent. The format is often played with, however:
  • The season 7 episode "Toe Tags" presents a series of short cases, punctuated by the corpses of the victims discussing their cases with each other.
  • "The Unusual Suspect" in Season 6 deals with a brother and sister who have confessed to the same murder; the team must decide who is lying. Neither - and they both get away with it.
  • "Turn, Turn, Turn" in which Taylor Swift guest starred as victim Haley Jones. The episode opens fairly normally, with Nick Stokes arriving at a crime scene to find Haley dead. From there, however, the episode travels backward in time to a number of previous cases at the same location, all of which have some bearing on the current one.
  • "Ending Happy" turned this into a Running Gag: each time the characters thought they had nailed the suspect, they'd get a call from the morgue doctor explaining that whatever that suspect did wasn't the actual cause of death. See the episode's entry under Rasputinian Death for further details.
  • "Chaos Theory", had a similar storyline: As the episode progressed, every possible suspect was eliminated by the CSI's own investigations. Somewhere around the 43 minute mark, someone finally proposes that maybe the "murder victim" was "victim" only of a horrible series of coincidental accidents that led to her death. This turns out to be true, but her parents can't accept that their daughter died from nothing but a series of random events. It's implied as the episode ends that they'll never give up trying to find a culprit.
  • "Check In and Check Out" seems like an ordinary episode: we have a nice couple who help the homeless found murdered in a motel room (stabbed over 100 times each), and the motel room is apparently also the crime scene of two earlier brutal murders. We get an early suspect too soon to be the culprit. Then a homeless man is accused...and turns out to be the actual murderer, seemingly subverting this. There's still half the episode to go, and another murder turns up at the motel room, prompting a closer inspection of the room itself and revealing an air freshener that sprays LSD onto anyone unfortunate enough to set it off and sending them crazy. This almost causes Hodges to kill Henry and is what happened the last four times, and ends up with the owner of the motel arrested for all those murders.
  • It can also lead to realizing something big is going to happen to a main character if the case gets resolved with more than 10 minutes of show left.
• Mayday
  • Being a documentary series, it frequently includes interviews with survivors (if there were any). If passengers and/or crew from the flight in question are being interviewed, it's a Foregone Conclusion that at least some people survived. On the other hand, if there are no survivor interviews, it's a pretty safe bet that everyone died.
  • A particularly notable example: in one episode, the narrator sets up a Commercial Break Cliffhanger with the dramatic question of whether rescue workers will arrive in time to save the co-pilot, who is trapped in the burning cockpit. Or rather, it would be a cliffhanger, if not for the fact that said co-pilot had already appeared in several interview segments.
  • In some episodes, The Teaser reveals a significant amount of detail about the outcome of the incident.
  • If the episode is less than 30-ish minutes in, whatever lead the investigation is currently following is probably going to be a dead end, or at best will be only part of the puzzle.
• Battlestar Galactica:
  • Fifty minutes (out of a usual 60) into season 2 finale, everything seems back to normal, even if our heroes had to rig an election to do it. Then the fraud is exposed, and the episode runs an extra 30 minutes to end on a cliffhanger for the next season to resolve, being the series' first extended episode...although this is played exactly straight if you looked at a TV schedule beforehand and knew the episode ran long.
  • The humans find the planet that they knew was Earth mid-way through the last season and it turns out to be devastated by a (relatively) recent nuclear incident.
• The real-time format of 24 means that most of the major action scenes don't take place until three-quarters of the way through any given hour (with very few exceptions). Also, any time an episode's final split-screen is shown with three or four minutes remaining before the beginning of the next hour (especially in later seasons), it's a sign that there's one more scene afterwards (usually as a cliffhanger). Somewhat surprisingly, this is fairly often lampshaded by characters saying something like, "I'll be there to meet the shipment at the docks in 20 minutes." If the viewer checks their watch, and it's 9:35, they can be pretty certain something important/exciting/surprising will be happening there.
• Side Hustle: At the end of "Thumb and Thumber", Lex wins a new boat for Tedward in a thumb-wrestling match, and the girls are released from their debt...while there is still about two and a half minutes left in the episode. Soon after this, Munchy gets more pressure-activated fireworks which go off, and while the boat is safe, they end up destroying the dune buggy that Jaget got, and now the girls work for Jaget.
• Star Trek:
  • The original series was purposefully episodic, as all television was at the time, so that they could be shown in whatever order the network decided. Star Trek: The Next Generation was mostly written that way itself, meaning that in both cases, if the episode had less than ten minutes left and yet the problem-of-the-week hadn't been solved yet, that it would be solved at the last minute. This often had the effect of undercutting the tension in these scenes, especially if the solution was Techno Babble, which it often was.
  • Pretty much any of the early episodes of Star Trek: Voyager where they would stumble across gateways, wormholes, or advanced alien technology which gave them the possibility of getting home early. If it happened in episode #2 of series #1 you didn't need to wait for the 60 minutes to be up to know they were going to get the Negative Space Wedgie in the end. Solved in later seasons by throwing in partial successes at times (that is, you're spoiled by the format that they won't get all the way home, but it's harder to tell if they won't be able to jump a few years worth of light-years at least).
  • Jennifer Lien, who played Kes, was credited as a regular for the first three seasons of Voyager. In the fourth season premiere, suddenly she's credited as a guest star. They might as well have named the episode "Yes, Kes is Leaving."
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager avoided spoiling multi-part episodes by omitting "Part 1" from the title of the first episode (even for season finales, though they weren't fooling anyone). Star Trek: Deep Space Nine stopped using "Part X" entirely after the first few seasons, which was more fitting as the show's longer story arcs frequently blurred the line between single and multi-part episodes.
• House usually hits upon the right diagnosis when there's about ten minutes of episode left. If the Patient of the Week seems cured before that, it's generally safe to assume that their condition is about to take a serious nosedive.
  • There was actually one episode where there were actually numerous patients, and he had cured one less than half-way through the episode.
  • There was also one where House diagnosed a patient within five minutes, and the rest of the episode is centered around their philosophical debates and their ways (or lack thereof) of dealing with their trauma.
• NCIS usually starts each segment with a brief snippet showing the last few seconds of the segment in mute monochrome. At least twice, they've put stingers in after the snippet shown in the last segment of an episode.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • The episode "Foothold". Carter runs away from the base, convinced that it's been taken over by aliens. O'Neill and Daniel track her down in Washington and tell her that she's been exposed to a paranoia-inducing chemical. You might believe them and think the whole episode is a Mind Screw... except that it's only halfway over, so they can't possibly be telling the truth.
  • Subverted in another episode. We're at the 55-minute mark, bad guys are pounding on the door, the team is frantically working on the Applied Phlebotinum they need to escape — in other words, just a normal day in the life of SG-1 — and then the bad guys break through the door, the team is captured in seconds, a Big Bad is revealed, and they spend the next episode trying to escape from a far worse situation.
  • Subverted by the Season 7 finale, "Lost City". Stargate season finales have a tendency to end on a cliffhanger, so at the forty-minute mark when an SG-1 episode usually ends, it wasn't very surprising that there was a large amount of dramatic tension and plot points that would soon be carried over in the Season 8 opening.
• Criminal Minds:
  • Most episodes are definitely played straight, but not so much with catching the criminal; it's usually obvious who the killer is by two-thirds of the way through. This trope applies to catching the killer before he kills the next victim. Will the cute blonde die before the team gets there? Nah— only seven minutes left in the episode. She's safe.
  • There's a definite inversion in the season five opener "Nameless, Faceless": the UnSub of the Week is discovered and then caught in the first 25 minutes, but the audience really doesn't care, because they're all waiting to find out if Hotch survived what looked like a point-blank shot to the head. During the investigation, Prentiss goes to look for Hotch, and finds his blood-spattered apartment, with him missing. Then Prentiss, Reid, and Garcia work the "regular" case in conjunction with searching for Hotch, and it's only when the case is finished that Reid tells the rest of the team that "something's happened to Hotch". The rest of the episode is devoted to resolving the cliffhanger from the season four finale "To Hell..."/"...And Back".
• Subverted in Farscape, as Crichton finally makes it back to Earth in the middle of a season, rather than in the series finale as might have been expected. Fortunately, by the time this happens the premise of the show had expanded enough that there were still plenty of stories to tell.
• One of the first episodes of Stargate Atlantis featured the gang stuck in a ship that was stuck halfway in a Stargate. They attempted to ratchet up the tension by reminding the viewers that the gate would automatically close after 38 minutes, severing the ship in half and killing them all. However, given that they were only a couple episodes into the first season, and there were no Red Shirts on the ship, it was pretty obvious they were all going to make it out alive.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • Actively played with, knowing the audience is smart enough to think that the actual reveal of the mother would be a big deal, so Future Ted, the narrator, will often casually spoil plot points with his way of explaining things, such as occasionally forgetting the name of whatever girlfriend Present Ted has in the episode.
  • Though played more straight with the fan theory that Ted has to meet the mother in season 8 in order for Future!Ted's children to be the right ages. This is further hinted with the episode "Trilogy Time" which shows that Ted with his infant daughter in 2015. In another season 8 episode, Ted mentions that he met the mother exactly 45 days after the episode takes place. Season 9 is set to take place in 2013, directly after season 8 with no Time Skip.
  • In an example that has nothing to do with the mother or the narrative, the end of "Knight Vision" had Daphne admitting that she sent Lily a text message about Marshall taking his new job as a judge, something Marshall doesn't want Lily to find out yet. The episode closes with Marshall's phone ringing at that moment. Whatever suspense that was there is ruined when you read the official synopsis for the next episode, "No Questions Asked", which is about Marshall trying to remove the text message with help from his friends, so in the end, that phone call at the end of "Knight Vision" has nothing to do with the text message.
• A constant in Dexter, as many season finale episodes revolve around whether or not the titular character will be discovered, killed, and/or caught.
• An Orbitz ad airing on Logo before the RuPaul's Drag Race Season 3 finale effectively spoiled the results: Alexis Mateo was seen as a dark horse as she received more criticism than Manila Luzon and Raja combined, and all three had the same number of wins - the Orbitz commercial featured eliminated queens Shangela and Carmen Carrera alongside finalist Manila Luzon. After the finale's filming, the results were more traditionally spoiled by online leaks.
• One episode of Psych had Shawn wrap up a case with a culprit and a motive that made total sense and wraps up any loose ends, however astute viewers would've noticed that there were still two commercial breaks before the ending, so that means the person that Shawn accused and had arrested is obviously not the killer.
• Classic Doctor Who episodes were serials. The last would wrap up in the last few minutes, but the earlier episodes would end on cliffhangers — and while they would be billed as first, second, third, you didn't know on broadcast out of how many (unless you read the Radio Times entry, which would specify "part X of a Y-part story"). On the other hand, it was not until the end of the half hour that you could wonder whether it was a cliffhanger or an ending. In addition, the Doctor's deaths would usually (but not always) end up at season finales.
• In Power Rangers and its original source, Super Sentai, whenever a major villain is killed or Put on a Bus early in the show's run, expect a new villain to take over or for the old villain to return respectively.
  • A good example in Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters: Messiah is an established Big Bad, yet after 30 out of 50 episodes in, he was killed. Turns out his dragon, Enter, is the new Big Bad.
  • You know that new robo/megazord you got that has clips that aren't being used? Those are for a future combination with something that's not been announced yet. A good example would be the clips on the front of Kyoryuzin, which are used for combining with Plezuon and Bragigas.
  • A lot gets spoiled by the merch. New power-ups or what the Sixth Ranger is going to look like never stays a secret long. Non-cosmetic plot points are rarer, but you still get situations like Power Rangers Beast Morphers, where there's an arc about Big Bad Evox, a villainous AI, wanting to take the body of Steel, a robot Ranger. Well, Evox's toy looks nothing like Steel, so we know what his eventual physical form is and it ain't him.
• Kamen Rider also spoils their show through their format, or rather, their toys. For one memorable example, the weapons from Kamen Rider Kiva had◊ the◊ same◊ mysterious shaped hole. As it turns out, the Super Mode's Transformation Trinket could combine with them. Another notable thing is that, unless their belts are made in a way to circumvent these (Like how the Double Driver is only an activator for the Gaia Memories which carries the sound), you could hack the belt in different ways (drawing random barcodes, rubbing two medals together to mess with the frequency, or more commonly, poking the belt/device with a toothpick) to say things that it'd either not make for the show or, in this case, foreshadow something potent. This is partially averted in later Kamen Riders, as the toys that access super modes come with their own sounds, even when the Driver itself as pre-programmed sounds.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Played with at the end of season 4: The heroes make up and defeat the season's Big Bad in the episode before the season finale, which is a Bizarro Episode that seems like filler, but actually hints at some events that occur later on in the series
  • Played straight in "Anne", Angel's sudden return to life would've been a great twist if David Boreanaz hadn't appeared in the credits at the beginning. For extra irony, the credits are a character montage, so even people who didn't know the actor's name still saw the character would come back.
  • Likewise, Spike's Dramatic Unmask in "The Harsh Light Of Day" is spoiled by the credits having already announced a few minutes prior that "James Marsters as Spike" was going to appear in the episode, leaving little doubt who Harmony's vampiric boyfriend would turn out to be.
• True crime shows like 48 Hours may feature the accused suspect being interviewed throughout the episode while in prison garb, revealing that they were found guilty.
• Occasionally used as a joke in Mystery Science Theater 3000. Sometimes a movie would seem to wrap everything up in the first couple of minutes (typically The Teaser), and the riffers would say something along the lines of "Well, it was horrible, but at least it was short" and try to leave the theater, only to realize they've got plenty of movie to go.
• Cop shows which follow a single investigation for a whole season, such as The Killing, True Detective, and Engrenages suffer from this on a larger scale, as if the case appears to be completely wrapped up with episodes still to go it's pretty certain that the detectives are barking up the wrong tree.
• Given a humorous nod in the Hollywood Crash Cliches episode of MythBusters. After finishing the initial test, Jamie considers doing the "Replicate the Results" step they usually do. Adam agrees it would be a good idea, and hey, there's still plenty of time left in the episode to do it.
• In RoboCop: The Series, the Mysterious Culprit (the real killer in "Prime Suspect," or the organ thief in "What Money Can't Buy") frequently turns out to be the only remaining guest character who hasn't been either killed already or shown to be guilty of something else.
• In the Panel Show Would I Lie to You?, there is a regular round called "This Is My...", where each member of one team claims to have a connection with a mystery guest. It will almost never be the team captain who is telling the truth, and the show has actually begun to parody this by deliberately giving the captains the most ridiculous stories to have to claim as true in this round. (Although this was eventually subverted in a Series 12 episode, where David had a claim about the guest recruiting him for an "underground ping-pong club" which sounded so like one of his usual ludicrous made-up stories that the opposing team barely even bothered to take it seriously... only for it to turn out to be true.)
• The Blacklist avoids the "two-part episode" problem by not listing "Part 1" in any of the first parts' titles. Second halves of two-part episodes append "Conclusion" to their respective first parts' titles. This won't help if you look up episode lists, but it at least avoided the problem for viewers who watched the show as it aired (or shortly thereafter).
• This is a frequent occurrence in Forensic Files: if a person is frequently named and depicted but never interviewed, no points for guessing who the killer is. The same goes for the reverse situation, namely if someone is mentioned to be a prime suspect but that person is interviewed then they aren't the killer.^note A variation does occur in a few episodes, in which the suspect is interviewed from prison. The show tries to keep it hidden to make it a dramatic Reveal, but you can usually tell that's where they are from how they're dressed (in prison garb) and/or the background. And if the "killer" is convicted and sentenced with most of the show left to go, then you're dealing with an episode where that person was innocent of the crime, or there was no crime to begin with, and the rest of the episode is about their struggle to prove their innocence and ultimately be acquitted and freed.
• Since the series is called Ozark, the whole plot line in season two about the main characters planning to leave the Ozarks is obviously not going to end in success.

Music

• Hidden tracks. On a CD, you can clearly tell if a song finishes many minutes before the actual track is finished that there will be a hidden track. On a vinyl record you can easily see more grooves, and on a tape you will see there is still some of the tape left to go. Obviously, it doesn't work at all on digital as you can clearly see the "song" is 20+ minutes long, leading to iTunes either indexing the hidden tracks separately, or keeping them as they are but making them album only due to the track length.

Professional Wrestling

• Whenever a major title match is announced as the main event on one of the weekly shows, check the time. If there's only 5 minutes left on the show, it's almost guaranteed that the match will likely end in a disqualification or the defending champion winning through some sort of tomfoolery. Or, if it's a regular main event and there's still plenty of time left after the winner celebrates his victory, expect someone to come out and cut a promo or attack them. Also shows up when the current champion is on the cards for a title defence on a PPV or an international tour, although unexpected title changes and card shuffles have happened in the past in spite of previously announced matches, often due to unforeseen injury, contract disputes or, in modern times, breaches of the wellness program. Even with pro wrestling's love of the Ass Pull, though, you'll rarely see this happen as an intentional fake-out rather than real life writing the plot.
  • Subverted with the ECW December to Dismember PPV (2006). At the time PP Vs would end after 2 hours and 45 minutes. When the winner of the last match won at the 2 hour and 15 minute mark, there was sufficient reason to believe that something would happen after. Except that it didn't, many fans demanded refunds, and there was never again an official ECW PPV.^note The fact that it was the only WWE PPV ever to do less than 100,000 buys (prior to the introduction of the WWE Network in 2014) didn't help.

Sports

• In an article written years ago by sportswriter Phil Mushnick in TV Guide, he complained about the same-day, time-delay broadcasts of the Olympics (and other sports) spoiling the endings. The specific instance mentioned was a tennis match, and although the announcers were asking, "Will X make a comeback?" there were only five minutes left in the broadcast, so of course there wouldn't be a comeback, because there wasn't enough time. If there had been a comeback, they would have edited it so there would be time.
• Match Of The Day likes to show the best games first. "Best" being decided by a combination of team popularity, match importance and result; but especially team popularity. For example, if first match up is Stoke City vs. Watford, expect a seven-goal classic or something completely out-of-the-ordinary like a UFO landing in the centre circle at some point. Likewise, if Manchester United don't feature in the first couple of games, then their match must be the kind of 0-0 draw that makes you yearn for the excitement of watching paint dry. (Several managers have lampshaded the likelihood that their very dull match will end up being on last.)
• When ITV had the rights, on the other hand, The Premiership tended to show the best game of the day last to make sure that everyone kept on watching for it (and watching all the advertising in between the games, of course).
• Mixed Martial Arts:
  • In the past, broadcasts from the UFC would insert preliminary fights from earlier in the day to fill time when the main card fights end quickly. Prelim fights aired early in the card will almost always be a quick finish used to kill a few minutes. If there's only a few minutes left in the PPV timeslot and a prelim fight is aired after the main event, expect it to be quick as well.
  • Compilations of past bouts, such as UFC Unleashed, are always edited to an hour, so if there's only a minute or two left in the timeslot, expect the current fight to end in a finish.
  • The Ultimate Fighter: each exhibition bout is placed at the end of the episode. If the in-house antics run long, then it's going to be a short fight. If the fight starts shortly after the episode's halfway point, expect a tiebreaker round.
• World Rally Championship events take place over several days worth of stages. With hours and hours of competitive footage from in-car cameras available it is practically a certainty that if the TV highlights coverage switches on board to a car that isn't one of the leaders then that driver is about to bin it in a spectacular way - with the voiceover trying to act surprised at the crash.

Theatre

• In Act 5 of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, Peer has been shipwrecked and he and the only other survivor, a mysterious stranger, are clinging for dear life to a piece of wreckage. As Peer calculates his chances for survival and bemoans his fate, the apparently Genre Savvy stranger assures him he has nothing to worry about since he's the hero and "You can't die in the middle of the fifth act." Before Peer can ask what this cryptic remark means, the stranger loses (or perhaps releases) his grip on the wreckage and slips beneath the waves.
• Lampshaded multiple times in Urinetown, particularly:
  Little Sally: (wistfully) She loves him, doesn't she, Officer Lockstock?
  Officer Lockstock: Of course she does, Little Sally. He's the hero of the show—she has to love him!
• William Shakespeare: Is it a tragedy? The title character is going to end up lying on the ground dead. Is it a comedy? It's going to end with lovers united and a wedding. Is it a history? Major events will pan out as they did in actual history. Though there were exceptions, especially once he got established as the most popular playwright in England and lost interest in following the format. They're termed the "problem plays"^*All's Well That Ends Well, Measure For Measure, The Merchant of Venice, and Troilus and Cressida and the "late romances"^*Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest.
• Dramatis personae (list of characters) at the beginning of the play often serves as such. To give just one example, in The Creditors by August Strindberg the fact that Gustaf is none other than Tekla's ex-husband is revealed right in the dramatis personae, while Internal Reveal only takes place towards the end of the play.

Video Games

• On the whole, any game that tells you a percentage of completion on the save screen will spoil how much of the game you have left to play. Some games alleviate this by not showing you the percent meter until after you've beaten the game (making it more of an Anti Frustration Feature for players aiming for 100% Completion) or by having the game go above or below 100% like Super Mario World (You can only go as high as 96 as it counts level exits rather than raw completion) or Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! that goes up to 105% (The extra 5 is the Lost World and the Golden Ending).
• In general, if you enter a shop in an RPG and you find a weapon that your current party can't use, it either means you still have a new party member coming, you're getting a new class that will unlock said weapon, or certain events provide you the opportunity to wield it.
• Chrono Trigger
  • If you get a Triple Tech stone early on, you might notice that most of them can be equipped by any of three characters - except Crono. Since you have to have Crono in your party of three, this is a pretty clear hint that something is going to happen to him.
  • Several of the images of Triple Techs in the gallery of the DS version also spoil the fact that Magus joins the party.
• A lot of players were able to predict that the Final Boss of Cuphead's DLC, The Delicious Last Course, would be Chef Saltbaker because of the combination of seemingly No Antagonist and Cuphead in general being a boss gauntlet, leaving Chef Saltbaker the perfect candidate for a twist villain.
• Subverted by Portal, along with Interface Spoiler. The New Game level selection menu clearly shows a list of the test chambers, but there's an escape sequence at the end, about as long as all the other chambers combined, that's part of the last chapter.
• Blue Dragon kills off Nene. Except not really - this is on the end of Disc 1. You know there's more coming.
• Dragon Quest:
  • In Dragon Quest VII, you pretty much restore the entire world and defeat Orgodemir. Seems like you could have ended the game right there...except that you're obviously not done. There's another disc left.
  • And Dragon Quest VIII does it too. You chase the apparent Big Bad, Dhoulmagus, down to a dungeon that's long, difficult and really has the feel of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. Then you fight and kill Dhoulmagus in a long, difficult battle in which he goes One-Winged Angel on you like any good Final Boss would. And with the vastly increased storage capacity of the DVD format, DQ8 doesn't have multiple discs to clue you in that that you're not done yet. But check the in-game map. Only about half of it's been explored by the time you reach the Dark Ruins.
• Eternal Darkness: The game was released in 2002, and the fourth-wall-breaking sanity effects that simulate someone messing with your TV or console often reflect this when trying to replay it in the present day. Many TVs during that era would have a series of green rectangles representing volume, display a black screen with "VIDEO" in a corner when there isn't a signal, etc. Playing it on a modern TV, with all their different ways of presenting such information (to say nothing of emulating it on a computer), makes the fact that the game isn't actually altering these settings immediately clear.
• Subverted by La-Mulana. While you can look around the game's files and hear the soundtrack and see the graphics for all the levels and bosses... The graphics for that cutscene are all mixed up.
• See any YouTube fighting game video. If the video isn't even halfway done when the second round starts, expect whoever won the first round to lose the second round, setting up a third round with everything at stake. If the video is more than halfway done when the second round starts, well, it's a safe bet that the second round is going to be the final round.
  • You also can notice this when watching the Grand Finals of any fighting game tournament video. If the video is close to ending, then the person in winners bracket won the event. If the Grand Finals starts with still a lot of minutes left in the video, then it's likely that the person in the losers bracket won the first set and reset the Grand Finals bracket for a shot at the championship.
  • The same applies for any Pokémon battle: If the opponent is down to his or her last Pokémon, you can tell the uploader will win if there isn't much time left, but if there's ample time, the opponent will cause a comeback (though the opponent won't necessarily win).
  • Some eSports channels will avoid this via "padding" the end of a video to make it longer than the game(s) actually took. Similarly, channels that put each match in a best of X series in separate videos will put in fake videos for the remaining games in a series if it ends before X games have been played.
• Persona 3 does all kinds of things with this trope. Ostensibly, the game takes place over one year in game time, beginning in early April and ending at the end of next March.
  • Played Straight: You defeat all of the main arcana shadows in early November. There's still 5 months left to go...Hmmm...
  • Subverted: The final battle to stop The End of the World as We Know It takes place on January 31st. You don't do anything for the next two months, as you skip right to graduation for the Golden Ending.
  • Played Straight: The Fool and Death Social Links both automatically rank up over the course of the plot. Neither are maxed at the point that pretends to be the ending. Similarly, the Judgment Social Link has not even been unlocked. The game also hints that Aigis and Mitsuru are both Social Links too, even though you've never hung out with either, because both of those are just unlocked after the Arcana Hanged Man has been defeated.
• Persona 4 operates similarly, with no less than three fake final bosses (plus another in the Updated Re-release). The Fool Social Link doesn't max out until you avoid the first bad ending (after defeating the first two such bosses), at which point the Judgment Social Link is unlocked. In Golden, if you've done the Jester Social Link, and didn't go for the Accomplice ending, you won't complete it until after you start on the path to the True Final Boss.
• Persona 5 follows suit.
  • After you finish the seventh Palace and defeat the Big Bad, you may notice that you still have one more rank to go in the Fool and Magician Confidant, revealing that the seventh Palace isn't the final dungeon in the vanilla version of the game.
  • In Royal, you may notice that the Faith Confidant maxes out at Rank 5, whereas every other Confidant has ten ranks. If you fulfill the conditions to unlock the third term, and reach Rank 5 of the Faith Confidant before then, the remaining five ranks will be unlocked during the third term.
• Stellaris has first contact procedures that initially hide information about a species when the player finds them. But if you find an alien empire's homeworld before completing first contact procedure, you can see in the population tab not only what they look like, but also what ethics they follow, which is often enough to deduce their personality.
• Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 4 seems to wrap everything up...until you realize there's a fifth chapter. It involves getting killed and wandering around the afterlife which includes several rehashed elements disguised as portals. Naturally, you have to enter the real world, return to your body and face the Big Bad again at the end.
• In the Professor Layton series, the game isn't close to ending if most of the mysteries are still unsolved, and if any of them have not been introduced yet. This is especially true with the Disc-One Final Dungeon in Unwound Future. Additionally, the closer the numbers of the main story and optional puzzles are to the hidden puzzles, the closer you are to the end.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising has one based on the estimated time most players say it takes to finish. The game takes incredible pains to trick players into thinking the 30-minute Disc-One Final Dungeon is the end, but it's not even 2/5 of the way into the game!
• In Final Fantasy XII, Princess Ashe is said to have committed suicide at the start of the game, following her family's loss of power. However, she's listed as a party member in the instruction booklet.
• Heading into the Disc-One Final Dungeon to confront Exdeath in Final Fantasy V with much of your magic menu still missing a bunch of spells will likely clue you in that there's still a considerable chunk of the game to play afterwards.
• Final Fantasy VI does this, after Kefka succeeds in bringing about Armageddon after only 20 hours through a 40 plus hour game. The heroic party is split apart across the world map and the final dungeon is open to explore for the final ending. Of course, you can take on the dungeon as three characters as soon as you get the airship, but the likelihood of success is slim-to-none without heavy grinding. Therefore, it's much better to spend the extra 20 plus hours reuniting with your party members and leveling up before challenging the final dungeon, which completes the standard 40 plus hours found in most RPGs. A more obvious example is the map that comes with the game. It has the World of Ruin on the back.
• Final Fantasy XIV, Being an MMORPG, the fact that there are multiple expansion packs signals that yeah, even if the player is apparently done (for now), there's definitely more. However, there are some examples that are far more obvious, particularly in Endwalker:
  • The most notable example is Zodiark being a Disc-One Final Boss. The story tries to make a sense of finality to it in that the Warrior of light has chased Fandaniel and Zenos to the moon in a climactic battle that would ordinarily be the climax of the expansion. Unfortunately? It's at level 83. Players have entire abilities that they still can't even use yet, as well as multiple part(s) of the map they cannot go to yet. Not that this is a bad thing.
  • On Ultima Thule, the Scions perform a Heroic Sacrifice one after the other in order to make it seem as if it will be a case of In the End, You Are on Your Own. Unfortunately, many players weren't convinced since the formula still called for one more dungeon - Plus there was no way Square-Enix would make the main characters remain dead.
• Tales of Symphonia has you going to the Tower of Salvation to complete the regeneration of the world and resolve the plot after about 10 hours or so. When was the last time a popular JRPG had only a handful of dungeons, almost no sidequests, and no visible Big Bad? Also, the Gamecube version had a 2nd disc and a character you hadn't even met yet (Zelos) on the cover.
• Plot points of user-made adventures in Spore: Galactic Adventures can often be spoiled by the creatures and props created for the adventure, which always directly proceed the it in the author's Sporepedia page and impossible to hide.
• In Super Mario World hacks, you can pretty much figure out how close you are to the end and various other things from the game format. For instance, it's technically impossible to have more than 6 submaps and a 'main' map. So if the world map design/graphics have changed 7 times, you know you're getting close to the end. You can also tell this by the number of switch palaces you've come across, only four different ones as possible without massive reprogramming so you can use them to measure your progress. And in a level, you can tell how close you are to the end just by the number of Dragon Coins you've encountered (with only five per level, if you pass four or five, you know you're probably nearing the end) Also, in Brutal Mario much the same applies, there's always five Dragon Coins placed directly before any boss, so if you ever encounter five in a row, you know you're near the end of the level.
• In New Super Mario Bros. Wii, when you reach the final castle in World 8 and defeat Bowser the first time before his transformation by Kamek, you may as well think that you won the game if it weren't for the fact that you were only able to collect at most 2 star coins of a usual 3. Sure enough, this isn't the end.
• Ōkami is kind of funny in that you might initially think Orochi is the game's primary antagonist and thus expect some sudden turn of events that prolongs the conflict. But nope, things just nicely wrap up and the characters throw a party before moving on to find other stuff to do. Granted, it does turn out he has ties to what ends up being the big picture storyline, but that's mostly a discovery in retrospect.
• Ace Attorney:
  • The second case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations has you proving your client innocent and seemingly wrapping the case up in one investigation day and one trial day, which has never happened before. (It's usually either a single trial day in the tutorial cases or two of each for every other case.) Naturally, things quickly go downhill again. The same thing happens in the DLC case in Dual Destinies.
  • In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice, there's a gimmick where the player figures out the last big revelation of each case through a visualisation of their train of thought, where the player has to answer questions based on what they know of the case so far. If the characters are acting like the case is wrapped up before this gimmick comes into play, then there's something critical that hasn't been found out yet.
  • The DLC case for Spirit Of Justice, "Turnabout Time Traveller" only has three new characters, excluding Posthumous Characters. Because of this, the biggest clue to the culprit's identity is simple process of elimination: Ellen Wyatt is the defendant, and Good Lawyers, Good Clients is in effect, so she's out of the question. Sorin Sprocket is Ellen's fiancé (the murder had happened during their wedding), so him being the culprit would be too much of a Downer Ending for such a lighthearted case. Therefore, the culprit is obviously Pierce Nichody; not because of any evidence, but because he's the only one who could have done it and still allow for a happy ending to the case.
• Dark Souls II's bonfire warp feature. After visiting a certain amount of areas, the whole menu opens up and reveals to the player savvy enough to notice, the number of different places the player can warp, and how many bonfires each area has, this also goes for the DLC areas.
• In Time Crisis, the Big Bad is defeated at the end of Act 2 out of an expected 3. Then The Dragon re-kidnaps the Damsel in Distress and you have to go through four more levels to catch up with and defeat him.
• Double Dragon Neon has you fight Big Bad Skullmageddon at the end of the second stage. Then he makes a marrow escape.
• Dragon Age II: While the descriptions for most of the promotional DLCs avert this (looking at your journal at the beginning of the game tells you that you need to find a suitable home first before you can get it), the DLC weapons and armor themselves spoil who your potential squadmates are, especially if you've bought any of the Item Packs (which all have companion-specific items).
• You'll quickly figure out in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door that if you miss the tattle information on an enemy you can only ever fight once, you'll be able to dig it out of Frankly's trashcan to avert Permanently Missable Content. However, it also guarantees you know who you will and won't fight again^note The only exception is Red Dry Bones. His tattle info is in the can after his defeat in Chapter 1, but you do face him one more time much later. This also spoils Vivian's Heel–Face Turn: after a fight with the Shadow Sirens, the tattle information for only one of them is put in the trash.
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc this one might take a bit of thinking to get, but in one of Leon Kuwata's free time conversations, he makes mention of Sayaka. The reason why this is a spoiler is because Sayaka is the victim in the first case. This would mean that if it was possible to talk to Leon during the second chapter, this line of dialogue would make no sense, and as such, it would only make sense for any player reading this line of dialogue to conclude that Leon must be the killer.
• In Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, the fifth trial involves the group confronting the supposed mastermind behind the killing game. Those who are familiar with the series will expect that there will be a sixth chapter, and there is.
• Though minor, any sharp-eyed player of Metal Gear Solid will notice that unlike every other weapon and item in the game there is a full-color image of the PAL Key in the item description field. This screams out loud that the item is unique and that its appearance must be important: When Otacon reveals to you in the final parts of the game that the card changes based on temperature and that it's three keys in one, this fact is treated as if it's a genuine twist. It's even possible to figure out the temperature twist and piece together "three temperatures = three keys" if you happen to spend too long fighting Raven or in the boiler room and notice the item changes color.
• This can happen with press events as well. For instance, Microsoft had their own E3 2019 event showing off future Xbox Game Studios releases, but they also listed Nintendo's E3 Nintendo Direct on their own E3 schedule, cluing people in that something Microsoft-related would be announced in the Direct. Sure enough, Banjo and Kazooie, creations of the Microsoft-owned Rare, were revealed as DLC characters for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
• Lost Odyssey: The booklet lists all of the party members, which changes the question from "Who will be in the party?" to "When will this person join the party?"
• League of Legends had its biggest Myth Arc play out throughout 2021 surrounding the ongoing battle against The Ruined King with tremendous hype and supplementary material to amplify it, but on top of some difficulties in telling a story in a game whose gameplay is almost completely irrelevant to canon, a few of the game's demands outright supersede it and caused some problems:
  • The story entailed many preexisting characters becoming "Ruined" while others were appointed into the Sentinels to confront and defeat them, but they were heavily advertised as alternative in-game skins before their canonicity was verified. That itself wouldn't be that a problem, except that several in-game bios explained why they became Ruined or Sentinels, most egregiously mishandled with the simultaneously-released dual Pantheon skins — a Ruined skin that showed he would fall, and an Ascended Prestige skin that showed he would come back anyway.
  • A more unfortunate case of this came about and was less in of Riot Games' control; the Ruined King: A League of Legends Story spinoff was meant to be released in early 2021 and functionally acts as preamble to the full "Year of the Ruined King" that was planned, featuring several major characters beginning their stories. Unfortunately, due to developmental complications caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic, it missed its release date and was scheduled for later. With the rest of the plot continuing without the game, now several major aspects of it will become spoiled before it had its chance to play its card, especially with the aforementioned Ruined/Sentinel skins verifying the future fates of a few characters.
• Quest for Glory I: when playing the EGA version on disks, hearing the disk drive go while in the forest let you know that you were about to have a monster encounter even if there were none on the screen yet.
• Trails of Cold Steel I: The game is about the students of Class VII at a military academy, but there is cosmetic DLC which includes alternative costumes for two characters who are not in Class VII. The party will clearly expand at some point. The PS4 version includes all DLC, which makes this harder to miss.
• Fire Emblem Heroes has a story mode in which each Book has 13 Chapters, and each Chapter has five stages. If you think a book is wrapping up prior to Chapter 13, think again.
• The World Ends with You and NEO: The World Ends with You try to mislead you into thinking that the game will end after the first week, but in both cases, it's obviously far from over. At that point, you've only uncovered a fraction of the Pins and threads, there are multiple areas of Shibuya you have yet to explore and, in the case of the first game, your other two partners haven't joined yet. NEO makes this slightly less obvious by not displaying the week number on your save file until the second week, and by not going with the original game's one partner per week format, but there's plenty of evidence that you're nowhere near finished by the end of the first week.
• Watch_Dogs 2's side missions always feature at least one group call from the rest of the San Francisco DEDSEC crew. Keen observers may notice that Horatio does not appear in ANY of these calls. From there, it's not difficult to piece together that Horatio isn't going to be around for the endgame.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: Hero Quests are always fully voice acted. So if you run into a quest marker and the characters start speaking audible lines, the quest is going to end with someone joining the party. This is particularly notable with the Machine Assassin quest, which tries very hard to pretend it isn't a Hero Quest at first, even giving you a fake normal quest that's completed after the initial battle and replaced with the true quest, but the voice acting still gives it away.
• Bug Fables: Chapter 5 is presented as the game's final confrontation, where the party goes over to the Wasp Kingdom and directly fights the Wasp King in his own castle. Players who had observed the map and/or the telescope view of Bugaria would notice that there is a suspicious foggy gray area that they cannot reach by this point and seems large and important, and that there is a fourth kingdom that was yet to be introduced. It is possible to backtrack after getting an ability and entering the former area, the Forsaken Lands, before getting stopped by an uncrossable gap. It is revealed that the Wasp King was planning a trap, leading to two more chapters of the game to go through, the first of which covers the Foresaken Lands and the Termite Kingdom.
• Yakuza: Like a Dragon: The first and last scenes of every side mission are fully voice acted. This means if you get to a point that seems conclusive, but isn't voiced, you're not done yet, while if you start hearing full lines on reaching an objective marker, the Sidequest Sidestory is about to wrap up.
• Minor subversion in Batman: Arkham City: in the beginning of one sidequest, you have a conversation with a prisoner, but he's shot and killed mid-sentence. The subtitles for his dialogue leading up to the shot are formatted in such a way that they reach the edge of the screen, so the player expects them to be replaced by subtitles for the following line—but there is no following line.
• Child of Light's story is presented as a Fairy Tale, and is heavily inspired by classic fairy tales. This has the side effect of making it easier for Genre Savvy players to figure out that Norah is a villain before The Reveal, because she's the protagonist's older stepsister, and stepfamilies in fairy tales aren't exactly known for being good people.

Web Animation

• Avoided by the Cyanide and Happiness episode "Waiting for the Bus 2" by having the end credits take up about half the video.
• In "Pikmin... in Super Mario Bros 2! (Day 7)", the Mario Bros. use their Pikmin army to defeat Wart... but it's only a minute into this thirteen-minute animation.
• Coupled with Spoiler Cover, YouTube and other video services can undermine twists when the thumbnail for the next episode is visible. RWBY is a big offender: the twist of Volume 5 Episode 12 - "Vernal is not the Spring Maiden...I am!" - is obvious if the interface is showing the very next episode, where Raven has the glowing eye fire displayed by the Maidens.

Webcomics

• Subverted by a Penny and Aggie storyline, in which a chapter numbered "N of 15" suddenly has a quintuple-length Wham Episode on the 11th update, marked "page 11-15".
• Schlock Mercenary plays with this in the arc where the protagonists split up into four groups, the story focuses on each group in turn and keeps a running tally of how much time is left until they all come back together. The two groups that left the shipyard all get into situation that get progressively worse as time passes. When the situation of the fourth group turns into a mess, the narrator says the ending isn't for another 300 hours, and say he hopes you didn't try to time the climax to that particular clock.
• Terror Island displays the most recent (and now final) numbered strip on the main page. Since the webcomic's surreal plot centers around the main characters' refusal to buy groceries, it's obvious that any plan to get them to do it will fail since there are still more strips to read.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: The author notes tend to announce the upcoming end of a chapter one week in advance at most, which means that only a limited number of things can happen between page on which the announcement is made and the chapter's end.

Web Original

• IMDb: When looking up a TV series on the site, you'll see each actor listed on the main page of the series with the number of episodes they appear in. Woe to you if you've just gotten interested in a series and see that one of the main characters appears in far less episodes than the rest of the cast — it sometimes can lead to the realization that someone is going to be Killed Off for Real or Put on a Bus. This is somewhat mitigated, though, by the fact that the episode counts are often inaccurate, due to the site's info submission format and episode-page format. It's not unheard of for the lead of a successful series to only have a single-digit number of episodes on their IMDb tally.
• TV Tropes: It's considered an act of idiocy by some to read a tropes page for a work before seeing/reading/etc. the work, and expecting not to be spoiled. On another level, even the spoiler tags can still spoil, because for example:
  • When you come to a heavily spoiler-tagged section that deals with a specific character, you're going to know something is going to happen when the character turns up — even if you're not sure what.
  • If the gender is constantly hidden by spoilers, especially if the male-to-female ratio isn't equal (or worse yet, there's only one character of a particular gender), it can be pretty easy to guess who the spoiler tags are trying to hide. It's also very easy to tell the difference between he and she. Additionally, if a character is referred to as one gender in the story, but an entry about them spoilers their gender, that spoils the reveal of one or two tropes.
  • If a character has an unusually long or short name compared to the rest of the cast, spoilering the name can end up being pointless. If the entry is about Star Trek: The Next Generation and you use spoiler tags to hide the fact that Q appears in an episode, a reader who knows the series will easily guess who you're talking about.
  • Before the 1.8 redesign, any WikiWord or Pothole hidden by spoiler markup could still be moused over, which would reveal the URL of the page being linked to. This could spoil it for any reader who accidentally left the cursor over the spoiler tag such as in cases where it was All Just a Dream.
  • Spoilers also involving people that die. Especially in a case of Aerith and Bob where most names can reach several syllables.
  • Site policy dictates that the trope being labelled should never go inside spoiler tags, meaning that even if the rest of the entry is whited out, the very presence of the trope in the list can spoil the fact that something related to that particular trope is going to happen. It's worse when it's on a Characters page.
  • The Easter Egg page has a hidden note in the description. This note is spoiled on days when Easter Egg is the Featured Trope (such as, predictably, Easter), as the description preview on the Featured Trope interface shows the text of page notes.
• Lampshaded in a video by Stuart Ashen on the subject of the fastest game-overs in video game history. When he mentions that it's possible to get a game over in Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards in 1.6 seconds, he asks if it's possible to get one faster than that before saying "Of course we can, there's still a fair bit of video time remaining!"
• Television Without Pity will occasionally snark about the episodes they are recapping in this fashion. For example, in House, when House makes his first misdiagnosis, the recapper might say something to the effect of: "Since this is just the 15-minute mark, we know that whatever treatment he's prescribed will just make things worse."
• Subverted by slowbeef in his Let's Play of Metroid Prime, who inserted six minutes of blank filler at the end of a boss fight video to keep viewers from guessing what happens based on how much time there's left in the video.
• Mentioned in Mark Reads New Moon chapter 16. In the previous chapter, Bella had attempted suicide, leading Mark to hold a GIF party in celebration. There are 24 chapters in the book, however, so Mark is in no way surprised when she's saved.
  • A similar point was made during a sporking, when it was commented that Bella might as well say "Goodbye, I love you, because of course I'm not going to survive this even though there are 200 pages left in the book and it's told in first person."
• Rooster Teeth's Achievement Horse series. Take a quick look at the video time, and you can tell from the start how close a game it's going to be.
  • Same with their Minecraft Let's Plays and their new Versus series. Especially the latter, as they tend to cut away from the game footage to show the AH crew's reactions to who wins.
  • The Criminal Masterminds challenge comes to mind immediately, as each is titled after the heist that they are up to in the challenge itself. The fact that they all appear in order with no repeats shows they at least get up to the final heist in the challenge. However, it is a downplayed example, as the AH crew do set up a system where they can "cheese" it. ^{Specifically...}They arrange a codeword (Bumcheese) that, if yelled out, is a signal for everyone to yank the power cords out of their consoles, as apparently if done fast enough this can be used to circumvent a player death from failing the challenge.
• Chuck from SF Debris in the recap of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Duet" notes that the villain has been caught and the ending monologue has been said "huh? Much quicker than usual." (Which also appears to be a reference to The Simpsons episode "Homer and Apu.")
• Many genre information sites do this. Read io9.com every day when you're the sort who prefers to wait until movies and TV shows come out on DVD to watch them and you're sure to get spoiled by the arbitrary point when the site's writers assume most people have seen a work, even though it hasn't been released on video yet.
• Game Grumps
  • Part 9 of the playthrough of Mega Man 7 is repeatedly called the "season finale" by Jon and Ego, despite the episode not sporting the "FINALE" label used in all other episodes where they beat a game. Viewers who watched the series after the fact might also be wondering why the series appears to continue for nine more episodes.
  • The Grumps like to joke about this too, particularly during game levels they are struggling with, where one will say something along the lines of "This time we'll do it" and the other will remark that, since the viewers can see the time bar, if they're only 4 minutes into a 25 minute video, odds are he fails miserably again.
• Many Lets Players who use computer game casters with replays will cover up the part of the display showing the time left in the game in order to avoid this problem.
• Analyze Phish is a podcast in which Harris Wittels attempts to get Scott Aukerman to like the band Phish, with the understanding that if Scott ever decides to like Phish, the podcast will end immediately. Occasionally, just before Harris plays the next Phish song, Scott will tell the audience that if the current episode is about to end, it's because whatever song that is about to play has convinced him to like Phish. This never happens.
• In Battleground (2012), Hulu's one-season show about a political campaign, the primary election occurs halfway through the series. Unless things had taken an unusual turn (such as having the characters all join the same-party opponent's campaign), only a primary victory for the protagonists could provide any story for the rest of the show.
• Given a big ol' lampshade in Super Best Friends Brawl: Def Jam: Fight For New York. Entering the final match of the video, it's mostly a contest between Matt and Woolie, who are both one win away from their "first to 3" series victory, while Pat still has zero wins. Once Matt gets knocked out, the video briefly cuts to a message from Matt highlighting that the game's winner (and Pat's continued failure) is a Foregone Conclusion:
  Matt's Message: "Dat awesome moment when you realize there's only 2 minutes left in the video, so it must mean Pat loses!"
• The Nostalgia Critic:
  • Lampshaded in his and Phelous' crossover review of Child's Play:
    Karen: Chucky's dead!
    Phelous: Well I'm glad that's true, because the last 10 minutes of this film are here for no reason!
  • Lampshaded in review "Top Eleven Worst Episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender." When he comments that he got through the entire review without anything bad happening, Malcolm points out that there's still two minutes left on the time bar. Cue Dante Basco.
• The Third Rate Gamer parodies this a few times.
  • At one point in his Nintendo DS review, he is conspicuously farther away from the camera, spoofing The Irate Gamer's misuse of the camera to spoil certain jokes in his Tetris review.
    Third Rate Gamer: These games suck so much, it makes me wish that a Thwomp from Super Mario Bros. would fall out of the sky in this room and crush me! Of course, you've probably already noticed that I'm further back away from the camera and there's a lot of empty space above me, so the joke is pretty much dead, but I'm gonna do it anyway. [gets crushed by a Thwomp, accompanied with a fart sound]
  • He does it again at the end of his Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers review, this time spoofing a scene from the Irate Gamer's Kirby's Epic Yarn review.
    Third Rate Gamer: And why am I on one end of the screen? [Chip magically appears on the left]
• In general, completed Lets Plays that have a Permadeath gimmick (such as Hardcore runs of Minecraft or Nuzlocke runs of Pokémon) can fall victim to this. If you're familiar with the game and see that the final episode is at a point far from the game's end, it's a fair bet that things don't go well for the player.
• Survival of the Fittest
  • It resides on a forum and consequently is very difficult to follow without spoilers, as reading a version after the fact usually requires going by character, and the site's wiki has a full list of their threads. If the topic you're reading is the last one listed as featuring that character, it's not too hard to draw a conclusion about their fate.
  • Actively participating in the game also requires reading the announcements, which In-Universe tells the students what is happening and Out-Of-Universe tells participants who is due to die. Since handlers have to read this part or else fail to discover that their own character might be on the chopping block, they will immediately be spoiled on the imminent deaths of the half dozen or so characters rolled.
• Modern social media has caused this for many, many shows with Celebrity Cameos. Suspect an actor might be the upcoming guest on your favorite show? If they've just started following the accounts of other cast members on that show, then they're probably gonna be making an appearance in it.
• The FailRace series Survive The Hunt involves the host, Alex, trying to hide from a pack of "hunter" players for 24 in-game hours in Grand Theft Auto V. The game sessions are presented without cuts, so if any episode is shorter than a day of GTA time (48 minutes), it's a given that Alex lost that game. He eventually became wise to this, and started adding otherwise unused filler footage to unsuccessful sessions in order to pad out the runtime past 50 or so minutes.
• Most countdowns on various websites (such as Screen Rant and CBR) are guaranteed to have their number 1 entry on their respective thumbnails.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons:
  • Lampshaded in "Homer and Apu."
    Homer: Everything's wrapped up nicely. Ooh, much quicker than usual, too!
  • Also in "Homer Loves Flanders" when Bart and Lisa assure each other that by the time this little adventure is over, everything will go back to normal until their next "wacky adventure." However, at the end of the episode, Homer and Flanders are still friends. "Maybe this means the end of our wacky adventures!" worries Lisa. Until Flanders calls to Homer through the window and Homer tells him to get lost. Lisa and Bart are visibly relieved.
  • Similarly, in "Brawl in the Family", the family go to a counselor (voiced by guest star Delroy Lindo) who helps them iron out their dysfunctions and disagreements. On the way home, Lisa ponders whether this means "the end of our series... of events". Except we're not even at the mid-episode ad break yet, so of course there's going to be a Halfway Plot Switch... cue the family arriving home to find Homer and Ned's Vegas wives from "Viva Ned Flanders" waiting in the driveway.
• Full-season version. In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the final-battle invasion on the Day of Black Sun was scheduled to be episodes ten and eleven out of twenty (later discovered to be twenty-one). Were they going to win and spend the next ten partying? On top of that, attentive viewers also would've caught Azula finding out about the invasion in season 2. There was pretty much no way it would've worked.
• The Legend of Korra has "The Battle for Zaofu", when Korra fights Kuvira in a duel. Considering we were only in the middle of the season, it wasn't hard to guess Korra couldn't possibly defeat the Big Bad now.
• Jumanji, several times. If the kids return to the real world (especially with Alan), especially if they solve the clue early, and there's more than a minute or two left, expect things to go to hell very quickly.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Played with in "A Canterlot Wedding" where, while not unjustifiably, Twilight Sparkle has been a colossal jerk to pretty much everyone involved and all her friends are angry. She realizes she's wrong and apologizes to Cadance... who seemingly accepts without a hitch. Yeah... with an entire second episode in the works, nobody thought it was going to be over that easily. Still, nobody saw Queen Chrysalis and her changeling army coming...
  • "Magical Mystery Cure". You know that there's going to be more coming when it looks like the problem's solved and everything's going to be all fine and dandy... with a third of the episode left.
  • In "Inspiration Manifestation", Rarity has made her creative contribution to the Foal and Filly Fair, nothing bad has happened, and she's about to return the book to Spike... and at this point, we're only eight minutes into the episode. She decides to hold onto the book for just a little while longer...
• It's quite clear from the first minute that "The Countdown" from The Amazing World of Gumball won't remain a Race Against the Clock story from beginning to end. The clock begins counting down from six minutes and twenty-three seconds, but all of the show's episodes last around eleven minutes.
• The captions for the hearing impaired on Young Justice show the name of the character speaking when the character's face isn't visible, and thus name multiple members of the Light before their identities are meant to be revealed.
• In-Universe in Steven Universe, when Steven and Connie are reading the journal of Buddy Budwick, the town's founder. They finish an entry where he's wandering the desert and feels himself starting to blackout, but they're only about halfway through the book.
  Connie: Is this the end?
  Steven: I guess so. [turns the page] Oh wait, there's a bunch more.
• In "Bluestock" from Blue's Clues & You!, there are musical clues instead of the normal drawn clues. However, the tune is that of a nursery rhyme song so utterly recognizable that the very first clue makes it 100% obvious to anyone above the age of five that the answer is "Old MacDonald Had a Farm."
• The last third or so of season one of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous revolves around the campers rushing to make the last ferry evacuating the island after the events of Jurassic World. Do they make it in time? Well, there's a second season, so probably not. Do they manage to get rescued by the end of season two? Well, there's a third season, so probably not.
• World of Winx: The Winx defeat Jim, turn Tinkerbell back to her former self and she reunites with Matt, they realize they have to get back to their Central Park concert and prepare to take the stage... while there is still about three-and-a-half minutes left in the episode. You know there's a lot more to come; the Winx are caught by Venomya, who exposes their fairy identities to the world, reveals herself as Baba Yaga the Dark Dame to Bloom, and plans a witch rebellion against all fairies on Earth. Especially helped by a cutway to the audience just before the exposure: Venomya is nowhere to be found, which foreshadows what's about to happen.

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