Basic Trope: An inventor whose creations often go awry.
- Straight: Bill is a self-proclaimed inventor/innovator, but less than half of his creations are actually functional. The rest often result in fire, explosions, citywide power outages, and Killer Robots that Turned Against Their Masters.
- Exaggerated: Bill can't even (un)screw a nut and bolt without causing an explosion.
- Downplayed: Bill's inventions often don't work, but neither do they result in explosive disasters, usually.
- Justified:
- Bill is a highly imaginative person who works by gut instinct, instead of following proper engineering principles.
- Bill is also very talented and intelligent, but lacks in common sense, logic or tact to see why his inventions go wrong unless someone else points it out and advises him on why his failures would occur and how he can improve.
- Alzheimer has started to set in.
- Inverted: Bill is a Gadgeteer Genius who's so skilled, he can build impressive machines in his sleep.
- Subverted:
- Bill's "failures" are deliberate. He just wants to spite Andrew by wasting his time and resources on trash.
- Bill tries to invent a leakproof travel mug, something that would obviously be useful, and... it works.
- Bill is of the 99% perspiration variety, most of his 'failed creations' are mere stepping stones to those that work.
- Double Subverted:
- Even when he tries to invent things properly, most of Bill's creations are duds.
- Bill's travel mug turns out to have Gone Horribly Right: it's leakproof because the beverage is, for all intents and purposes, sealed in.
- Bill claims to be taking a 99% perspiration approach, but he just doesn't have the 1% of inspiration necessary to invent something worthwhile.
- Parodied: The town holds a yearly contest for the Worst Inventor. Bill is a two-time winner of the award, and proudly accepts his trophy (made out of the debris of various failed inventions) amidst the townspeople's booing.
- Zig-Zagged: Bill could invent world-changing technology one day, but completely screw up a simple fix-up job the next. All in all, his skills seems directly correlated to his mood, and he is a notorious Mood-Swinger.
- Averted:
- Bill is an inventor with a normal rate of success.
- Bill isn't an inventor.
- Enforced:
- Bill is a clear in-universe counterpart for someone who has invented mainly things the producer, writer, or both consider useless or to have done more harm than good.
- Bill is the Wrong Way guy of a Right Way Wrong Way PSA, about laboratorial safety and the like.
- Lampshaded: "Dammit, this Thing-O-Matic prototype went bust again. Why am I such a failure?"
- Invoked: Bill's parents are inventors and want Bill to Follow in My Footsteps, despite Bill's lack of interest in the field. Bill wants to convince them that he (and everyone else) would be better off if he stayed away from that particular career choice.
- Exploited: The Mole hires Bill to "improve" the technology for the Secret Intelligence Service, who is counting on Bill's failed inventions to destroy the organisation from within, or at least hinder their operations.
- Defied: Bill, knowing that he tends to make careless mistakes, hires an assistant to keep him on track.
- Discussed:Charlie: What's that explosion?
Danny: Probably another one of Bill's botched invention attempts. - Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Bill gets seriously injured when his latest invention explodes in his face.
- Reconstructed: Bill keeps trying to fix his inventions when they lead to disasters unwittingly, gets blamed for it with facing lots of consequences, and he learns more and more how to make his inventions less disastrous.
- Implied: Frederick and Bob would always complain about how many times Bill's inventions would always destroy things when Bill was building something and nothing had happened yet.
- Played for Laughs: Bill is also displayed as the comic-relief.
- Played for Drama: Bill is a natural scientist, not an applied one, and both he and the people who ill-advisedly keep commissioning him to do applied science projects lament that his intellectual and physical efforts never pan out.
- Played for Horror:
- Bill was Obfuscating Stupidity by deliberately using his acts of clumsy ignorance in mechanics to attack and kill his enemies in sadistic ways when doing this subtly that it is rather frightening.
- The "bungling" part of the equation constantly, inevitably, turns Bill into a Lethally Stupid or Lethal Klutz character. It does not even matter whether Bill tries to prevent it — death follows him like a shroud and the stories people tell of what happened to those surrounding him because of his inventions going haywire could fill the scripts for twenty more Final Destination movies.
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