It was you all the time!

There may be spoilers here, so tread with care....

I was thinking the other morning that I hate the "this time, it's personal" school of thriller writing. It's lost its sting, but it was always so phony anyway. It takes the great, vast world and makes it small and circular as an episode of Seinfeld.

In the sixth season of 24, for example, our hero, Jack Bauer, winds up dealing with his own evil and incredibly wealthy father, ultimately leaving the old man to a righteous death on a bombed oil platform. Who thought that Jack came from money before this? And from evil money, no less? He never seemed like any rich kid I ever knew. I think we all would have guessed he was from a military family. But for the sake of the "It was you all along!" moment, we had to make his dad rich and evil. How did superpatriot Jack come from this guy's loins?

Worse was the ridiculous mechanism in Spectre, the 2015 James Bond movie that went through Gordian-knot-like-loops to make iconic villain Blofeld into Bond's own adoptive brother. Billions and billions of people in this world and the most important players in it are brothers? 

"I must find out where this enemy of all that is civilized comes from."
"It's me! You coming over for the hols, Jimmy?"

Nope, too stupid. Too small. Can you imagine how much trouble the world would have been saved if the Bond house had suffered carbon monoxide poisoning one night?

I could almost forgive in 1989's Batman, where villain Jack Napier (pre-Jokerized) turns out to be the killer of Bruce Wayne's parents many years before. Of course, in the comic books, Joe Chill was the young punk who kills the Waynes, which is the kind of street-level thuggery that doesn't require a future supervillain.

Not this guy.

Joe Chill (right).

But in Batman it's Napier who thus creates Batman, who later accidentally drops Napier into a vat of chemicals and makes him the Joker. Holy incestuous relationship! At least they weren't blood relatives. I could almost forgive this if it weren't for Napier's stupid, stupid knack of saying "You ever danced with the devil by the pale moonlight?" before he shoots someone, or at least before he shoots someone named Wayne. The only reason for this is so that the World's Greatest Detective can discover by chance that the Joker killed his parents. I have been sore about that lazy writing for decades now.

Star Wars probably started the whole thing, or rather the second film, when we find out that Vader is Luke's old man. Again, the whole galaxy would have been better off if the Skywalkers had run into a bridge abutment on Naboo. (Also, we find out that Obi is a great big huge liar, but no one tumbled to that until VHS was invented.)

I want to point out again that this is not just the "It's Personal" trope as defined by the invaluable TVTropes site. They include things that become personal, like a cop character's spouse getting killed and him or her going after the bad guy in a rage, because the best police work is done by insane revenge cops. I'm talking about things that are personal at the beginning and stay personal, especially the ones that cause any amount of damage to innocent people dragged into the conflict. All the primary movers in these plots could fit in a Volkswagen Beetle.

I get that they want to bring the added motivation to the character, give the audience a shock at the reveal (which now is about as shocking as the scene where the rebel cop has to turn in his badge), but it was for things like this that the phrase "done to death" was invented. I expect that the Red Baron will turn out to be Snoopy's litter mate in Peanuts 2. "Olaf! It was you all the time!"

The next trope I may have to address is the origin convenience issue, wherein a character we meet as an adventurer of long, rich experience (do the names Solo or Sparrow ring a bell?) turns out to have gotten everything associated with him over a two-week trip to Vegas or the like, from nicknames to sidekicks to personality quirks. Suddenly it becomes Joe from Accounting: The Origin. How he got his position! How he got that expensive chair! How he got to be pals with Wendy from HR! How he got that weird cut shaving! How he got that cool Coach briefcase! All in his first month on the job.