Trick and Follow Ploy

Bernard: Why is [McLeach] letting [Cody] go?

Jake: This gotta be a trick.
—The Rescuers Down Under

Suppose you want to find out where someone or something is located, and you know who has this information, but he or she (or it could be a group of people) is unwilling to share it. How do you get this information?

No, not torture. Nor any mind-reading technology (or magic) either. You manipulate said person or people into going there, and then secretly track and/or follow them there.

Very much a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy if the character heads back to the base to deliver a warning that the base is about to be attacked. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero indeed.

Of course, the villains can just as easily fall prey to this trope, at least in works involving Evil Versus Evil and/or good guys who are willing to decieve. (And especially if the Big Bad hired a bunch of fools who will undoubtedly make it all too easy to follow them back to the secret lair.)

Can be part of a Batman Gambit or a Xanatos Gambit. See also MacGuffin Delivery Service and Revealing Coverup.

Examples of Trick and Follow Ploy include:

Anime and Manga

  • El Hazard: This is how Jinnai uncovers the location of the Forbidden Isle, which was known to only the three priestesses of Mt. Moldune. Solution: get them to show him where it was.
    • To elaborate: Jinnai spread word that he and his Buggrom forces had already discovered the island's location and were en route to unseal the Demon God: Ifurita; knowing full well they couldn't take the chance of him getting to her first. Which is why he had his communication network spy on Roshtaria and report back to him regularly. When they informed him that Makoto and entourege had departed for the island "as well", to stop him, he knew they'd taken the bait. All he had to do, was follow them there.
  • This is exactly how the Blue Guardians found the Resistance's hideout in Rave Master.

Comic Books

  • An example from Sin City: While Hartigan is in solitary, he keeps getting letters from Nancy, but she never reveals who she is. One day Hartigan gets a chopped off finger in the mail; thinking it's Nancy's, he agrees to be framed for Roark Jr's crimes just to be let out on parole. First thing he does is go to Nancy—only to find out that Roark had been bluffing... and following him after he left prison.
  • In Captain America (comics) Vol. 6 #1, "American Dreamers, part one", Cap, Sharon, Nick Fury and Dum-Dum Dugan go to visit Jimmy Jupiter, a WW 2 metahuman who's just woken from a coma he's been in since the war. Unfortunatly, HYDRA are after Jupiter too, and they follow the heroes straight to him, allowing them to kidnap the old man.
  • Spider-Man does this all the time, having invented small "bugs" called "Spider-Tracers" that he can launch from his webshooters onto a person or vehicle, and then track using his Spider-Sense.

Film

  • The movie Commando has this as well, the only way they found Matrix was that the Colonel actually leads them to him because he thought they already knew where he was and he was going to protect him.
  • In You Only Live Twice, the villains give James Bond the proof he needs that their secret base is nearby by attacking him.
    • Likewise, had the mooks in Dr. No not confirmed they were on Crab Key by firing at Bond from a search boat and later unleashing the "Dragon," they might have been able to go through with their plans.
    • Also happens in GoldenEye. Bond's search for Janus' lair gets nowhere, and just as he's preparing to leave the area, the villain fires a surface-to-air missile at his plane, revealing the base's location.
  • Parodied in Dracula: Dead and Loving It. The heroes have Reinfield released so that they may follow him to his masters lair. Fortunately he isn't smart enough to allow what little suspicions he has stop him from going to Dracula and naturally leads them straight to him.

Van Helsing: Gentlemen, we are in luck.
Steward: How so?
Van Helsing: He's a nincompoop.

  • In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves the bad guys specifically let old, blind servant Duncan escape so he can lead them back to good guy's encampment.

Will (with more pity than malice) Blind old fool led 'em straight to us.

  • In Star Wars: A New Hope, Grand Moff Tarkin's plan to find the Rebel base is to let the heroes escape the Death Star with token resistance, and then follow the homing beacon planted on their ship. It works perfectly. What happens afterwards, not so much.

Literature

  • There's a variation in the Isaac Asimov short story Each an Explorer. A pair of astronauts visit a series of planets. Each planet has a different alien species farming the same alien plant. All of the alien farmers show very little personality and the astronauts slowly realize that the plants are in charge, mind-controlling the aliens to cultivate them. Panicked, they return to earth, not realizing they are bearing spores from the mind-controlling plants.
  • The Berlin Memorandum by Adam Hall and its film adaptation, The Quiller Memorandum. The neo-Nazis explain their master plan to Quiller, then release him in the hope that he'll rush back to his base to warn his superiors. When Quiller finds himself unable to break out of their surveillance, he sets off a bomb they left in his car, faking his death.
  • In The Hobbit, Bilbo tricks Gollum into thinking that he's escaped the dark underground tunnels. Gollum goes to "chase" Bilbo, and Bilbo simply follows Gollum out of the caves.

Live Action TV

  • Paul Ballard uses this trick in Dollhouse. After he discovers that Mellie is secretly a doll, he deliberately drives her away, then shadows her until she is picked up by her handler and brought back to the Dollhouse.
  • In the 90s live-action Zorro, a poisoned Zorro tricks his poisoner into thinking that he had been subjected to the same poison so that he could follow the poisoner to the nearest source of the antidote.
  • In an episode of The Closer, a killer has been using marked money stolen from a murdered FBI informant. Brenda has enough evidence to arrest him, but she want to know where the money is being kept. So she blackmails the killer, and when he goes to his stash to get the money to pay her off the FBI follows him and seizes the money.

Other

  • Bionicle: In the 2008 story, a Brainwashed and Crazy Matoran is captured and "overhears" the Toa planning to attack the Makuta's lair. He "escapes" and flies off to warn them. He is so focused on the praise he will get that he does not notice the Toa following him. When he tells one of them, the Makuta replied, "The Toa Nuva? You mean those Toa Nuva? The ones you lead here?"

Tabletop Games

  • One of the favourite tactics of dark eldar in Warhammer 40,000 is to attack a patrol, leaving a single survivor, silently following him back to his base to launch an attack just as he thinks he is about to be saved and slaughtering the entire base. Since their scanners are superior to human onces, they could easily do without it. But being artists in causing pain, they do it all for the look on the poor guy's face.

Video Games

  • In Fallout 3 this happens to Herbert "Daring" Dashwood, leading the slavers to Rockopolis. Earlier in the series, this happens to Vault 13 if the Vault-dweller decides to buy water from merchants in the Hub: Their tracks lead the Super Mutant army to the Vault.
    • Fallout: New Vegas has one guy who begs you to save his girlfriend from mutant Geckos. Turns out, the geckos are keeping him from looting a camp at the top of a hill.
  • Happens in Soul Nomad and The World Eaters, when The Ditz isn't careful about who's following him Except its actually part of a villan's Xanatos Gambit who was merely using Obfuscating Stupidity, eliminating your village, wiping out rival cultists, and drawing the village leader out of hiding all in one stroke.
  • This is kinda what happens in the end of Dreamfall: Kian is on the mission to find and assassinate April, so it's only natural that he'd look for the rebel camp she is staying in. However, it turns out that on the way, he decided to join the rebels, so when he finally finds April, he is on her side. Unfortunately for them, Kian's superior suspected something like that and had Kian followed, so his troops also find the camp... It doesn't end well.
  • The backstory to the first Halo game, the Earth commanders specifically try to avert this so no alien ship can find Earth. For instance, a badly battered ship could not go to Earth for safe haven.
    • The humans never do lead the Covenant to Earth. However, the Covenant stumble upon Earth while searching for something else. Because the humans had been spending the last decade or two fortifying their homeworld, they caught the Covenant unprepared. However, once the Covenant realized what they had found, it went badly for the humans.
  • In Metal Arms: Glitch In The System when Glitch brings Dr. Exavolt to the safety of the rebel base he revels himself to be evil and signals the enemy forces to his location.

Dr. Exavolt: "Our plan has worked to utter perfection. Not only have i located the droid rebel command center, I am standing in the middle of it! You may initiate the invasion."
Alloy: "Ahhh dammit, we've been had!"

  • After overcoming all the temples in The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time it's revealed that Ganondorf allowed Link to move around freely so that he would eventually discover Zelda's location. When the princess reveals herself to the hero, he swiftly captures her.

Ganondorf: "Princess Zelda...you foolish traitor! I commend you for avoiding my pursuit for seven long years. But you let your guard down...I knew you would appear if I let this kid wander around!"

Web Comics

  • In Order of the Stick, Xykon and Redcloak arrange for paladin Miko Miyazaki to escape from a brief captivity in order to act as their mole in Azure City via scrying. Using this trick, they are able to determine the precise location of the Gate they are trying to capture. Later, Tarquin pulls this on Elan - the carpet he gave him has a tracking rune.

Western Animation

  • The Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame has Quasimodo and Phoebus leading Frollo's forces to the Court of Miracles via this method.
  • One episode of Justice League comes to mind, where Batman taunts Harley Quinn about how she's commanding the Royal Flush Gang in the field while Joker's just hanging out with Ace. Amusingly, right after clearing things up with Harley on how he really isn't cheating on her with Ace, he immediately blows up on her in anger for leading Batman straight to the hideout.
  • In Batman the Animated Series, Batman sets up a Mook into thinking that he killed Batman through dumb luck. It turns out, by the end of the episode, that the whole thing was an Batman Gambit on Batman's part to find Rupert Thorne's current hideout. He figured, correctly, that "the crook who killed Batman" would eventually become infamous enough that Thorne would grant him an audience.
    • A good example of how to properly do a gambit, as Batman had to go through a LOT of effort to keep this mook alive!
  • Subverted in an episode of She Ra Princess of Power where Hordak and She-Ra are literally trudging between realities, in that they are both lost as lost gets. Hordak snarks to that effect, saying it reminds him of his stint in the Horde Scouts--"We didn't know where we were, where we were going, of what we were supposed to do when we got there then, either!"
  • In The Rescuers Down Under, after repeatedly trying to get the location of Marahute's nest out of Cody, McLeach lets Cody go with the misinformation that someone else has shot Marahute, and then proceeds to casually wonder aloud to Joanna what'll become of Marahute's eggs. Cody then procceds to race off the the nest, unintentionally leading McLeach to it.
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