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What's your favorite plot twist from books, TV or movies?

 
 
 
Underseer

Underseer

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It goes without saying, please use spoiler tags!

My favorite is from Ghost in the Shell (1995)


The Puppetmaster isn't a programmer, he's a program!



I'll be honest. I don't care for major plot twists that come near the end of the movie and change the meaning of everything leading up to that moment so profoundly that you feel that you have been lied to (yes, I'm talking to you, M. Night Shyamalan). The above-mentioned twist isn't that kind of twist at all.

The plot twist comes in the middle of the movie, and mostly just changes the focus of the movie a bit, and alters the motives of some of the characters, but overall the same people are still in conflict with each other and the plot more or less keeps barreling along in roughly the same direction.


Of course it adds to the discussion about the nature of sentience, and adds troubling questions about what it means to be alive. The Puppetmaster himself decides that he needs to reproduce and die in order to truly count as a life form.



Anyway, what's your favorite plot twist?
 
One of my favorites, and the first to come to mind, comes from Laura:


Laura Hunt isn't dead; the dead girl found in her apartment was Diane Redfern

 
From the movie "No Way Out"

When


the villain of the story, trying to smear the hero of the story by calling him a spy when he was actually fighting to expose the abusive villain who accidentally killed their mutual lover, turns out to actually be a spy.



and in the book Outlander and this twist actually hit me hard because in the context of the romance and politics and action, you lost sight of the heroine's situation.


Our heroine has time traveled to the 18th century. Through various adventures, she ends up in a local stronghold. Then when she and a friend she has made in a local village are accused of witchcraft, the heroine manages to escape due to the machinations of her lover and this friend, only to realize at the last second before she escapes that her local village friend IS wearing the mark of a witch - the small, homely scar of a smallpox vaccination.

 
One of my favourite plot twists was Professor Snape in the Harry Potter series. The whole series, it remains iffy as to whether he's one of the good guys or one of the bad guys. Both Dumbledore and Voldemort think that he's on their side and, one way or another, he's managing to pull a fast one over one of the most powerful and intelligent wizards alive.


Then, at the end of book six, they "clear that up" by having Snape kill Dumbledore. In book seven, however, this turns out to be a fake out and Dumbledore told Snape to kill him in order to prove his value to Voldemort and save the life of one of his students. I remember how pissed off I was after book six because I was sure that Snape was actually good and was proved wrong, but then the twist that it was all part of Dumbledore's plan came in the next book and I just thought it was an awesome one.

 
My favorite is from the novel The Resurrectionist:


Killing Dale results in the deaths of everyone he's ever murdered and resurrected(which at this point includes every main character)... and his death isn't even permanent. The last thing the protagonist sees as she lies on the floor dying is Dale coming back to life.

 
Underseer said:
Oh, games are fair game too. Any popular media is.
Click to expand...

I was once playing Civ IV and was attacking a guy on one side of my empire when I was attacked by the civ on the other side. They were about to take my capital when, out of nowhere, the World Builder God intervened and his entire army just vanished and my city was safe.

I did not see tha one coming.
 
Underseer said:
Oh, games are fair game too. Any popular media is.
Click to expand...
Silent Hill 2 has a pretty dark twist at the end.

James' (the protagonist) wife didn't die of cancer, he euthanised her and suppressed the memory and is being punished for what he did

 
For games, my personal favorite was probably the ending of the original Fallout


You start out a member of a highly insular community that survived a global nuclear holocaust in an underground vault.

You start the game trying to save your vault from a water disaster. In your journeys on the post-apocalyptic surface world, you endure horrors, have to make tough choices, but eventually you save both your vault and even the world from disaster. Having saved your vault from the water crisis and saved the world, you return home expecting to be welcomed as a hero. Instead they kick you out and tell you never to come back because they fear you have been "corrupted" by the outside world and will bring strange new ideas to their small community. The closing credits roll with your character wandering into the surrounding desert alone while "Maybe" from the Inkspots plays.



 
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