Basic Trope: An estimated time is needed for a given task that is much longer than a given deadline. The task is accomplished before the deadline regardless.
- Straight: Alice estimates that it will take three hours to defuse an Incredibly Obvious Bomb with a timer flashing 30 minutes. She manages to disable it with a few minutes to spare.
- Exaggerated: Alice estimates that it will take a week despite the timer saying 30 minutes, and defuses it mid-sentence.
- Downplayed: Alice estimates that it will take 45 minutes despite the timer saying 30, but defuses it in 29.
- Justified: Alice gives a worst-case estimate, because she isn't sure how long it will actually take.
- Inverted: Alice thinks that defusing the bomb will be a simple task that will take 30 minutes tops, and isn't worried because the bomb timer says three hours. Complications arise, and it takes much longer than expected.
- Subverted:
- It seems like the bomb has been defused in record time, but Alice clarifies that was only the first step. It's still armed.
- It sounded like it should take longer to eavesdroppers, but as Alice stated "If we do it by the book, hours will seem like days"
- Double Subverted: The second phase is relatively trivial.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Averted: There is no known Exact Time to Failure for the bomb, only an estimate range, and Alice herself only gives an estimate of how long it would take her to defuse it. The two ranges overlap.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed:
- Alice had to cut corners in order to defuse the bomb in time, and while she was able to prevent it from going off at full capacity, she was unable to stop the detonation entirely and was wounded in the explosion. Had she done nothing, then she and everyone else would have been killed outright, but the aftermath still wasn't pretty.
- Defusing the bomb without it going off requires a process that is physically impossible to finish before time is up that all the angry yelling in the world won't change. Alice's choices are either to abandon the site and run for cover (and risk censure or punishment by her superiors for dereliction of duty) or stay there and die when the bomb explodes.
- Reconstructed: Alice now has more firsthand experience and knowledge in working with explosives, so despite her injuries, she actually is able to defuse a second bomb in time due to recognizing what went wrong before.
Back to Scotty Time.
