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Plot-Driven Breakdown - TV Tropes

Clicking towards oblivion. How long, K9?

Insufficient data.

Yeah, you never fucking know the answer when it's important.

Sometimes things just break down purely for plot development.

It seems that even the most prepared of heroes can have their sword shatter, axle break, fuel run out, energy pack go flat or engine overheat, regardless of how well they prepared for the journey or the top-grade equipment they bought. Or a bridge or section of the cave roof will collapse at a convenient time with no apparent reason. When this inexplicable breakdown causes plot development, the item can be said to have suffered a Plot-Driven Breakdown.

Plot-Driven Breakdowns occur when a breakdown:

• occurs at a crucial time
• occurs for no discernable (in-universe) reason
• causes plot development (e.g. so that two antagonistic characters end up stranded together for a whole episode, or the hero has to find another, more creative way to defeat an enemy)

Often the equipment in question is something the hero depends on (e.g. a Plot Coupon, spiritual enhancement, The Professor's invention). Having the equipment fail is therefore an obvious way of developing the plot, forcing the hero to Take a Third Option, reassess his chances or get more creative. It's a way of avoiding the predictable "Hero defeats enemy with his favourite weapon" conflict resolution. However, when the writers fail to provide reasonable justification for the failure, the audience's Willing Suspension of Disbelief is broken.

This trope also implies the inverse notion; vital equipment will not fail or break unless it would complicate the plot.

See also Tempting Fate ("____ will save us!" Turns out it won't...). See My Car Hates Me for when this trope is applied to cars or Cellphones Are Useless for cell phone examples.

The video game equivalent is called the Broken Bridge. Compare Phlebotinum Breakdown.

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 

• Attack on Titan:
  • Jean's maneuver gear malfunctions while he's attempting to escape two Titans in Episode 12. He immediately notes the timing of it.
  • In Episode 24, Eren is unable to transform after finding out that Annie is the Female Titan, despite her shifting right in front of him. It takes Mikasa, Armin, and Jean (only Mikasa and Armin in the manga) to help him find his resolve and shift himself.
• In Bleach, Ichigo's Hollow Mask is said to stay on for 11 seconds (give or take how temperamental the mask is), but tends to run out just before he can finish off his opponent in the battles he loses. In the battles he wins, it stays on indefinitely after the battle is over.
• In Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super Fusions will crap out right when it's really needed. Gotenks' fusion makes sense - being powered by two half-Saiyan kids, they let their power get to their heads, so they're screw around and try to act cool and when it's absolutely needed, they'll break back down to normal. The fight between Super Saiyan Blue Vegito and Merged Zamasu is infamously frustrating as Goku and Vegeta is given a one-hour mandate, they get the upper hand on the fused god... and they ended up using so much power that the fusion crapped out.
• Gundam:
  • In mecha anime Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, Trowa's BFG arsenal on his Gundam tended to run out of ammunition at some point in a major engagement. Which is probably one of the more reasonable examples, considering his battle tactics are pretty much "stand in one spot and shoot everything".
    • It's actually VERY reasonable once you realize that in about a year of nearly non-stop fighting, he only runs out of bullets about 3 times (including the movie), and each time usually after a period of intense fighting.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO, with its unusual focus on realism, this happens several times to giant war machines. Even more justified as the machines in question are usually experimental prototypes undergoing testing, so it makes some sense that they would have some flaws. In Episode 2, a destroyed Zaku's arm gets lodged in the Hidolfr's tracks, immobilizing it. In Episode 5, a Ball suffers a weapon malfunction at a critical moment, leading to the pilot getting taken prisoner rather than winning the battle.
• Inversion: In Naruto, when Naruto is fighting Gaara he tries to summon toads early on in battle, he gets Gamakichi and Gamatatsu (who are small, although better than the tadpoles he was summoning earlier) while trying to get Gamabunta (who's a 100 meters tall), but succeeds in summoning Gamabunta once it becomes absolutely necessary (despite the last time requiring him to use his Superpowered Evil Side).
• Pokémon: The Original Series: In an Orange Islands episode, Ash accidentally breaks Snorlax's Pokéball. It's lampshaded how dumb that is. The good news is that there is a Pokémon Center. Bad news it's on the other side of a mountain, which means that Ash and his friends have to carry the sleeping giant up a mountain to get there. Hilarity Ensues.
• In Sailor Moon R's Filler Arc, Usagi's Moon Tiara Magic craps out during a monster fight, requiring the other Sailor Guardians to save the day. When it happens again, leading to her being Brought Down to Normal, Usagi and Luna both realize it's because her I Just Want to Be Normal mindset has caused it.
• In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Simon is unable to pilot Gurren Lagann properly in episode 9, dealing with the huge impact of His blood brother Kamina's tragic demise. His mech is powered by Spiral Energy, which is generated through determination- but Simon is a complete wreck, causing him to get so upset in battle he loses control of Gurren Lagann to the point he pukes. Which generates Spiral Energy out of Lagann's mouth in way similar to puke. This worsens to the point Lagann by itself refuses to listen to him. Until Simon overcomes his grief in a blockbuster manner several episodes later and returns with a vengeance.
• This is usually the reason that Teen Genius Susumu's experiments fail on Wandaba Style. The very first and the third are for the "no discernible reason" variety, but the others are generally due to outside interference (a fight between his pilots damages the ship, a character falls from A Twinkle in the Sky onto the electric grid, etc.). The last part of the episode is spent trying to find a way to fix the problem and not die in the process.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's: Just as Yusei is about to be literally crushed by Kiryu's Earthbound God, his D-Wheel breaks down and crashes. Yusei needs to get medical treatment from a piece of shrapnel impaling him, but he ultimately lives since Kiryu decides to let the duel end with no contest so that Yusei can live in terror until they duel again.

    Comic Books 

• Empowered: In the case of Empowered's super suit, it is easier to list the times when the Hypermembrane does work correctly. A justified example. Emp has a theory that the suit's reliability is tied to her self-confidence. The times the suit works are usually when she's pissed off or determined.
• The Rocketeer: Hughes asks Peevy if anyone has thought of checking the fuel level on the rocket pack. Minutes later, Cliff runs out of fuel in mid-flight. There is exactly enough time for Hughes to get into a plane, catch up with him, and grab him before he hits the ground.
• Spider-Man: Possibly the Trope Maker are Spider-Man's Web-Shooters, which can be guaranteed to run out of fluid whenever it's vitally needed to catch the villain (or run away, depending on the situation), forcing Spidey to either improvise or (as was the case with the Green Goblin a lot) let the bad guy get away. Even when he finally wised up and started keeping spare fluid packs in his suit, that didn't stop the fluid from running out (and having to be changed) at the worst possible time. It's lampshaded. A lot. As a side note, later movies and the several alternate continuities avert this by having the webbing be organic... except in the second movie, where a crisis of confidence shorts out his powers.

    Fan Works 

• The Babysitting Fiasco: An akuma fight goes on for so long that by the time it's ended, Marinette realizes she won't be able to babysit Alya and Nino's younger siblings for them. But her cell phone's battery has run down and she can't contact her! Good thing she happens to spot Alya's mother and can ask her for help, blissfully unaware that Marlena did not know that Alya had been making Marinette babysit for her all the time...
• The Bolt Chronicles: In "The Mall", Bolt's normally keen sense of smell is fully compromised because of a bad head cold. He is thus of minimal use in helping to find the lost Mittens.
• Marinette's Week Off has Nino's DJ equipment break down right before he's supposed to provide the music for the school dance. While he improvises by using his phone, he doesn't have the right equipment to broadcast it across the whole gym... and soon that dies as well, leaving them without any music at all.
• Oh Lady Luck (How I miss you so!): One of the ways that Nino's Laser-Guided Karma manifests is that his DJ equipment abruptly shorts out. Despite his best efforts, he can't track down the issue himself, meaning he'll have to get it all fixed professionally or replaced... and forcing him to turn down several offers for gigs in the meantime.
• Welcome to Sonshine Farm!: The car Appule, Zarbon, Cui, and Dodoria are driving for their road trip suddenly runs out of gas in front of the farmhouse they were planning to stop at to ask for directions. Cui notes that the car had around half a tank still when they turned onto the road and that there's no reason they should have run out. The cause is some supernatural circumstances to prevent them from leaving.

    Films — Animated 

• In the How to Train Your Dragon movie, Toothless' prosthetic tail fin is burnt off by a fireball he and Hiccup are flying away from near the film's end, setting up the crash landing and Disney Death.
• In TMNT, Leonardo suffers one of these in his rooftop fight with Raphael. Being the Turtle with the most technical skill, one would think he'd know better than to leave his katana locked in Raphael's sai - a weapon designed to trap and break swords. And upon the inevitable break, one would expect him to have a better reaction than to stare numbly at the snapped-off handles until Raph kicks him to the ground. This is probably because the key problem of the film (unity among the Turtles) would have been made worse if Leonardo had won the fight. Raphael is not the sort to be humbled by defeat and may have estranged himself.

    Films — Live-Action 

• Back to the Future: The DeLorean conveniently stalls when Marty is about to attempt the time leap back to 1985. Luckily, he somehow manages to coax the engine back to life in the nick of time. Then when he makes it back, the car breaks down again before he can race back to the mall to warn Doc about his impending demise. Doc manages to fix it off-screen after surviving the attack on his life.
• This happens all the time to any source of light in Darkness Falls.
• Subverted in Double Indemnity, when Walter and Phyllis are unable to start their getaway car the first few times they turn the key. But then the engine turns over, they get away, and the temporary malfunction never affects the plot.
• In It Happened One Night, the hero's car breaks down, just as he was to reach his Love Interest and resolve their Third-Act Misunderstanding.
• Jordy shooting a cherry bomb at Jason's bike in Mystery Team.
• In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the transporter malfunction that kills Science Officer Sonak. It was initially thought that Leonard Nimoy would not be reprising his role as Spock, but when he agreed to return, Sonak had to be removed. The malfunction was only foreshadowed by prior scenes it in which characters had pointed out that the Enterprise had just undergone a major refit and wasn't ready for launch. (Plus, Nimoy had already agreed to return before they even started filming, so there was no need to "remove" a character who hadn't even existed on-screen yet; they could just as easily have killed off a random redshirt, or dropped both Sonak and the transporter scene entirely.)
• Star Wars: In The Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon's HYPER Drive systems refuse to work for nearly the whole film which means they can't easily escape the Imperial Fleet like everyone else, leading to their eventual capture, which requires Luke to divert from his training early to save them leading to his defeat by Vader and Han's capture by Fett. Basically if it had worked there wouldn't be any danger in the film at all past the quarter point. The initial failure is justified by Han's shoestring and glue approach to ship maintenance, plus having to evacuate Hoth in the middle of repairs. After leaving Cloud City, the next failure is due to Imperial sabotage.
• Top Gun: During the climactic dogfight, the aircraft carrier's catapult breaks down without warning, preventing the launch of any more planes to assist the heroes, and forcing Maverick to overcome his traumatic fears. Made especially bad by fact that they have redundant systems in reality for exactly this reason.

    Literature 

• The Maghook grappling guns, from Matthew Reilly's books. After being reliable in the first couple of books, in Scarecrow, The Big Guy (so to speak) finally comes across a situation where the Maghook happens to be out of propellant, and thinks "Come on! That never happens with The Hero." And then in the next paragraph, The Hero has his Maghook run out of propellant.

• Adrian Mole: This happens many times in the books, almost as a throwaway gag, as part of Adrian's lousy stinking bad luck. Notable examples are:
  • In Secret Diary, the coach breaks down on a highly chaotic school trip to the British Museum.
  • In Wilderness Years, one cause of Adrian's chronic unpunctuality is the exhaust pipe falling off the bus.
  • In Adrian's book Lo! The Flat Hills of my Homeland, Jake running out of petrol while attempting to commit suicide by gassing himself in his car.
  • In Cappuccino Years, Adrian's mobile phone fails him just as he calls home to discover that his young son William is awake at 1am and roaming the house, and his father is asleep or dead.
• Arthur's sword^note the one he'd drawn from the stone and anvil to become King. Merlin took him to get Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake later, while in another version, Morgan le Fay had stolen Excalibur and replaced it with a copy, and given Excalibur to his opponent just before their duel when he fought Pellinor.
• The Famous Five:
  • In Five on a Treasure Island, Dick gets hit by a splinter of wood when the Five try to smash in an underground door with an axe. Because of this nasty and bloody injury, he and Anne go above ground, which is fortunate, because they are then safe when the villains turn up, and trap George and Julian underground.
  • In Five Get into Trouble, Dick gets a puncture on his bicycle; while he is alone in the wood to sort it out, he is kidnapped by the villains who mistake him for Richard Kent.
  • The opening line of Five Go Down to the Sea is "Blow! I've got a puncture!" from Dick, serving no purpose but to add to the drama of the Five hurrying to the station on a hot day.
• In E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series, the enemy spaceship Kim Kinnison has stolen and is making his way home in suffers an abrupt failure of its usually-reliable Bergenholm stardrive, causing the ship to drop from several thousand times the speed of light to sublight immediately... and causing his pursuers to overshoot and lose track of him for a while. His engineer patches it up, but from there on, it's a "long series of hops" with the unit failing over and over again and Kinnison hoping he can get to a repair base before it quits for good (he does).
• Tress of the Emerald Sea: The "seas" of Lumar are composed of aether spores that rain down from the twelve moons, rendered fluid by gusts of air from vents on the buried surface. Naturally, this means that when the air gusts cut out, the spores settle down again and ships are locked into place. There are several times over the course of the book where a stilling happens right when there is some deadly peril coming at Tress's ship.

    Live-Action TV 

• In the Battlestar Galactica (2003) episode "Act of Contrition", a recon drone kills 13 pilots when its restraints come off seemingly on their own. The crew do note that the equipment is extremely old and worn down. It's some tragic Truth in Television, as this exact same incident had happened in reality with missiles being shuffled to their aircraft on aircraft carriers falling to the deck and going kablooie. The Master at Arms even says "I know it's hard to hear, but we were lucky. If that had been a missile..."
  • In season four a group of Cylon rebels make a deal with the team of humans searching for the route to Earth. They agree to return to the Colonial fleet together and stress how key it is that they jump back at the same time or Galactica will immediately shoot the Cylons' Basestar down. Naturally this is when the jump drive on the humans' ship fails, and when the Basestar reaches the fleet their communication systems also fail so Athena and Starbuck can't tell Galactica not to fire on them. They're spared only because Colonel Tigh has a hunch and orders a weapons hold, right before the systems start working again.
• Keeping Up Appearances: In the horse-riding episode, Hyacinth desperately wants to enter the bedroom to take care of her dreadful appearance before her guests arrive; but she cannot open the bedroom door. This matter is neither explained nor resolved.
• Axl's car breakdown in The Middle's "Vacation Days" sets him for a climactic chat with his mother on the way home. Justified by Axl not being the kind of person who would be expected to regularly maintain his car, as his father points out.
• Mimpi Metropolitan: In episode 47, Melani's motorcycle-taxi application doesn't work with no explanation right as she needs it to go home, conveniently leading to Bambang picking her up and Melani finally realizing that she is returning his feelings.
• Red Dwarf uses this trope regularly and unashamedly, seeing as the show relies more on character interaction than plot development.
• In Smallville, if Clark is being snuck up on and is about to be attacked in such a way as to expose his invulnerability to a regular character that doesn't know his secret, you can count on a coincidental chunk of Kryptonite popping up to make him vulnerable, or he didn't have his powers anyway. This could be more easily averted if the writers understood how Clark's super-hearing actually works and had him playing possum to protect his secret.
• The Stargate breaking down was, of course, the basis for some of the most memorable episodes of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis.
• The Transporter from Star Trek. Whenever they need to make a hasty retreat or get stuff to the surface immediately, there's always "too much atmospheric interference".
  • It gets worse: Remember the Enterprise's "transporter malfunction" in Star Trek: The Motion Picture? They even used it as a way to conveniently "remove" the new Vulcan science officer who was supposed to replace Spock. Granted, everyone was naturally wanting to see Spock on the bridge again, and any other Vulcan would most likely have been unacceptable. But come on! Couldn't they have just reassigned the poor guy?
  • Voyager was particularly bad at this, one episode (workforce part 2) had transporters and warp drive fail within minutes of each other, despite the sheer size of each system a single weapon hit is all that is required to take them offline.
  • Sometimes, Star Trek couldn't think up a reason for the transporter to not be working, or at least for the crew to not come down in a shuttlecraft. So half the time, it wasn't just that the transporters were down; the communicators wouldn't work either, or had been stolen.
  • Also happens with the warp drive, or more commonly, the holodecks, the latter being lampshaded by O'Brien in one episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
• DeMilo's whorehouse-on-wheels breaks down just as the heroes get to their destination in Tin Man (2007).

    Radio 

• X Minus One's "The C-Chute": Mullen's suit radio breaks down as he enters the control room so that the other passengers don't know what happened to him and prepare themselves to attack the Kloros when the door to their cabin opens.

    Tabletop Games 

• Big Eyes, Small Mouth has a similar system with the optional "Dramatic Ammunition Rules". This is coupled with an ability called One Bullet Left, that gives you one last shot when the GM declares you're out of ammo.
• Similarly the FATE role-playing system. Almost any sort of breakdown, including guns running out of ammunition, only happens when it's dramatically useful. On the other hand, the Fate Point economy means that the PLAYER may frequently suggest such breakdowns to the GM in order to get Hero Points to spend elsewhere. There's also a specific stunt, One Shot Left, that lets the player declare their gun is almost out of ammo in return for a bonus that guarantees the last shot will be plot-appropriately spectacular.
• In The Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game, it suggests not keeping track of ammunition. Instead it suggests using this trope. So instead of saying "Well, Spidey you have five shots of web fluid left." you let it run out like when the villain is supposed to escape, or whatever.

    Video Games 

• This affects Simon's phone light in Cry of Fear, where the battery lasts as long as he needs it to up until he reaches the subway for the first time, where the phone goes dead - right as Simon is about to enter the completely dark tunnels and hallways underneath the subway, forcing him to navigate them via much less potent or portable road flares until he can eventually find a new battery, which once again lasts as long as he need it to until a train crash robs Simon of his inventory.
• Guess what happens if you try to ignore plot-heavy Cosmo Canyon in Final Fantasy VII? Yep, your buggy breaks down.
• In Gears of War you can expect to be unable to access the Hammer of Dawn whenever a boss fight breaks out. Except when you need the Hammer of Dawn to hurt it. Then there will be like six of them scattered around (despite the fact that you can't carry a second one, it never runs out of ammo in Campaign, and you can only play Co-Op with one other person).
• In the second half of one of the last Los Santos missions in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, you're given an old, poorly-maintained AK-47 to defend the car you're escaping in. About halfway through that sequence (right as the police manage to set up an effective road block) it irreparably jams.
• This is the plot behind most of the Survival levels in Left 4 Dead - they present hypothetical "What if?" situations for the crescendo events throughout the game, in which an event that must be triggered to clear/complete the path during the campaign doesn't go quite as expected (for example, in one map there is a bridge that must be lowered and crossed in the campaign, but it jams and fails to lower at all in the Survival version), leaving the survivors to simply fight until they're all dead.
• This trope seems to happen in every Metroid game. Samus' powerups always malfunction or disappear somewhere whenever she needs them. Typically, this happens offscreen between games. However, the first two Metroid Prime games start you off with some items but have you lose them early on, to a reactor explosion and some thieving Ing, respectively. Other M instead has you in possession of all your items but unable to use them for plot-related reasons — not a malfunction, strictly speaking, but it serves the same purpose. Metroid Fusion explains that you had your abilities, but they were all loaded into your old Power Suit, which had to be surgically removed. Then, the X Parasites took it over...

    Visual Novels 

• In Daughter for Dessert, the washing machine at the protagonist's diner breaks down, giving him the chance to impress his way into Kathy’s pants by fixing it.
• The Many Deaths of Lily Kosen: Gabriel's car breaks down when the cast go on their camping trip, meaning that escape isn't an option when they're attacked by their demon-possessed friend.
• In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations, Phoenix bravely and perhaps stupidly attempts to cross a burning bridge to save Maya, only to have it collapse when he is half way across. He is sent plunging into an incredibly deadly river only to survive with little more than a head cold. But this accident ultimately leads to a major break in the case.

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 

    Western Animation 

• Ben Tennyson's Omnitrix never works right. Even when it's upgraded. Although it's implied that the Omnitrix/Ultimatrix is semi-sentient, and gives Ben unexpected transformations as a way of saying "Here, exercise your strategy instead of using the obvious solution". Though all too often it ends up giving him a transformation that ends up putting him in extra danger, instead, like giving him Rath when he's facing an opponent who can mind control cats, or during the Khyber story arc when the Omnitrix refused to transform into anything other than the aliens that Khyber's hound could actively counter with their natural predators.
• Captain N. It doesn't matter if he just left the palace and walked through the main gates, or if he's traveled to fourteen different worlds and then fought through 7 stages of deadly, monster-infested secret passages, his zapper/pad WILL run out of power the moment he has to fight Mother Brain. It didn't happen that much, but it was an easy out for the writers to force the heroes to retreat and fight another day.
• Inspector Gadget is a walking example of this trope. He might define it better than Spider-Man does. Most of his Gadgets don't work well anyway. Although sometimes using the wrong gadget saves the day.
• Mickey Mouse Clubhouse: In Daisy's Dance, the first episode to introduce the Toon Car as the Sensational Six's vehicle, said Toon Car runs out of gas on the Great Big Hill as one last consecutive roadblock just before Mickey Park, forcing them to walk the rest of the route to Daisy's talent show.
• The Legend of Korra has two characters need to deliver a warning before the villains can attack. Since this is the age of radio technology, this would be simple except the airship they hijack has had the radio ripped out, the town they fly it to doesn't have a strong enough transmitter, and no one on the other end picks up when they do get a radio strong enough.
• There's at least one scene (and probably two or more) in the Ruby-Spears production of the American Mega Man cartoon, where Mega Man runs low on power in a critical situation.
• This trope is the reason Scooby and the gang ever got anything done. The Mystery Machine is prone to this; it's usually the reason the gang is stuck having to solve a mystery in some out of the way locations. In one episode of Mystery Inc, they get stuck because someone stole the Mystery Machine's engine while they weren't looking.
• Work It Out Wombats!: The conflict of "The Treeborhood Parranda" kicks off when the Flapping Feathers' tour bus gets a flat tire on the way to the Treeborhood.

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