Basic Trope: A character gets in a vehicle, only to discover that the person they were expecting to be driving has been replaced by someone with malevolent intentions.
- Straight: Alice is being shadowed by Don Rossini's enforcers and jumps in a cab to get away. Only for clouds of something green to come out of the air vents.
- Exaggerated: Alice gets into the back of a taxi, metal restraints automatically fly out of the seat, a gun barrel emerges from it and shoots her in the back of the head, and the rear of the cab fills with sulphuric acid to destroy the corpse.
- Downplayed:
- The cab driver makes an innocent-sounding radio call to his boss, and Don Rossini sends a couple of goons to where Alice wants to go.
- Alice is a prominent politician who can't simply be gotten rid of. Instead Don Rossini's minion take the place of her private driver "I'm the new guy" and does the exact same things that her normal driver did. A few weeks later Don Rossini informs her that he knows her routine by heart, and she belongs to him now.
- Justified: The cab company is one of Don Rossini's money-laundering fronts.
- Inverted:
- Alice is a cab driver who gets robbed or abducted by a criminal fare.
- Alice is being forced into one of Don Rossini's cars whose driver has been replaced by her friend Bob.
- Subverted: The cab driver is a very suspicious looking person, but doesn't do anything villainous.
- Double Subverted: He apparently didn't do anything villainous, but actually planted a bug on her when he helped her out at the end of the journey.
- Parodied: A cab is about to stop for Alice, when he gets blatantly cut up by a second cab, which is driven by a guy in a fedora with a scar on his face and has "Mafia Cabs: We Take You For A Ride" painted on the side.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Alice gets jumped by her shadows before she even hails a cab.
- Enforced: "How should we create tension?" "Let's have the cab driver appear shady and villainous!"
- Lampshaded: When Alice wakes up tied up in Don Rossini's back room, he greets her with "Don't you read Sherlock Holmes? Never get into the first cab."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: Alice almost enters the cab, but notices something's off about the driver, so she backs off and turns down the cab.
- Discussed: "Whaddaya mean send her a 'special cab'? That crap only works in the movies!"
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Alice goes to get a cab at her hotel, and though we don't see anything happen, we next see her waking up in the villain 's lair.
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