This episode is sponsored by World Anvil! Thanks for smuggling the ad copy in inside this cake!
If you were to analyze literature from the absolute most broad-strokes perspective possible,
you might quickly come to the conclusion that most stories are about people who don't want
to be wherever they currently are. Whether that's a vague existential malaise or a highly specific
antagonistic threat or a general I Want Song or a hero's journey hitting the consequences
for their Refusal of the Call and getting their home village burned down, most characters get
their plot kicked off by wanting to be somewhere that isn't where they are right now. In the rare
stories where this isn't the case, the hero tends to get uprooted anyway and then spends
the rest of the story wanting to go back to where they started, which conveniently loops right back
into not wanting to be where they are right now. Now this school of broad-scale analysis is fun,
reductive and typically pointless, but today it's gonna help us highlight a fun space of
stories that are basically this principle boiled down to its purest form. When you want to explore
how a character handles being stuck somewhere they really, really don't want to be right now,
you might wanna put 'em in a prison break plot. In fiction, prisons most commonly appear as
locations where villains are nonlethally disposed of and/or break out of to become problems. Their
security and impenetrability is commonly bragged of but usually quickly disproven when the bad
guys break out easily and/or repeatedly. Jokes are often made at their expense, and characters
might become self-aware of how prisons seem absolutely useless at actually keeping any
major villains from being problems. While the in-universe Watsonian purpose of these prisons
is to detain villains, the Doylist reason these prisons exist is to both give the heroes a way
to get rid of their bad guys without having to do some straight-up extrajudicial murdering about it,
and to facilitate a rotating rogue's gallery of bad guys to cycle in and out whenever the writer
wants to mix up the plot - the prison is basically little more than a villain storage facility,
so when the writer wants to bring back an old favorite problem child they'll just go from
being safely imprisoned to effortlessly breaking out in the space of ten minutes so they can make
a nuisance of themselves for a few episodes. Sometimes an extra spicy bad guy will break out
only once under extraordinary circumstances and then be defeated for good before being placed back
on the shelf for potential future use. Villain prison breaks tend to be quick and painless,
usually just serving as an inciting incident for the heroes to respond to. However,
none of this quick-and-easiness applies when the heroes are the ones breaking out.
The Prison Break Plot is a stock episode format where at least one major character is imprisoned,
almost always by an antagonist, and the plot is them escaping, sometimes with outside help. It has
hefty overlap with both the Damsel in Distress and the Heist Plot, kind of a fusion of the two where
the heisted macguffin is a character who can play an active role in the proceedings. The core appeal
of the Prison Break Plot is the process by which the characters bypass or overcome the prison's
security measures before making their clever escape, and while it's a fun thought experiment
in isolation, it also presents a unique space of interesting character potential by putting all
the characters involved in a very tense situation that automatically casts them as underdogs against
an overwhelmingly powerful and dispassionate threat, a situation that most characters are
not accustomed to. Because of this, The Prison Break Plot usually works best as an episodic
installment of a longer-running series, where an established cast of characters the audience
is already familiar with plans a breakout or rescue and the audience gets to see them handle
the unique challenges and stressors of the subplot - but it can also work in other contexts like a
character origin, the plot of an action movie, the first third of a bigger action plotline - it can
even be a cold open that starts the rest of the story, or how the band gets together before the
big adventure. It's a versatile little chestnut, probably because it's basically what you get if
you boil down internal character conflict to its absolute most concentrated form. Character doesn't
wanna be where they are, antagonist wants to keep them where they are, conflict ensues.
As a Stock Episode, the Prison Break Plot has certain elements that very rarely change. The big
one is The Authority. This is the force keeping our hero or heroes imprisoned. This authority
capturing those heroes is the inciting incident for this plot. The Authority is usually a vast,
nebulous force like a government or other legal system, but it'll typically be personified by
individual representatives like wardens - someone who can put a face and personality
to the otherwise distant and massive antagonistic figure that backs the prison. The Authority can be
a full-blown evil overlord and corresponding evil empire, but it can also be a completely
neutral party that's just enforcing its own laws in a way the heroes don't like, which
ties into the second factor, The Reason. This is why The Authority imprisons the protagonist,
and it's usually not given too much focus after the initial inciting incident - maybe the
protagonist unknowingly broke some local law, or very knowingly broke some universal law, or they
got unjustly framed by some enemy - but The Reason can also be something internally villainous like
"The Authority is innately evil and captured a good guy for Being Not Evil" or "gladiator
combat is super rad" or "prison industrial complex Bad Actually". The Reason doesn't generally factor
into the plot too much - it's not like the heroes will get a chance to disprove it in a court of law
or find a reasonable authority figure to help them out if the plot is determined to make a
Prison Break happen, but The Reason can sometimes add a ticking clock that the heroes need to work
around if it incorporates an Authority-mandated time limit - like a public execution or getting
shipped off to an even more impenetrable prison. And then there's The Defenses. This is the most
tangible, plot-relevant element to the story, because it's what the heroes are going to need
to work around to do the prison break. Wardens, guards, locks, surveillance, controls, laser
grids - all of that is here, in the problem zone. The Defenses are usually touted as impenetrable,
and the main challenge for the heroes is going to be figuring out how to penetrate them,
either from the outside to break in or, with a bit more difficulty, just from the inside to
break out. The Defenses are usually where the writer's creativity shines, because they're
basically the practical antagonist of the story, and they're what makes the prison interesting.
Prisons in these stories usually have at least one fantastical gimmick to make it more unique than
"big locked door." How will your heroes escape if the prison is housed in an active volcano,
or the middle of the ocean, or floating in space? What if there are electric floors or they have to
do gladiatorial combat or it's the entire island of manhattan?? The more buckwild the prison,
the more fun it can be to figure out how to break it. It's why escape rooms aren't just featureless
boxes with number puzzles and combination locks. The gimmicks are what make it fun.
There are a couple other elements of the story that are optional depending on the format. One
of those is The Friends On The Outside, any allies that the imprisoned character might have coming to
their rescue - this is pretty common, but it's not universal, since some breaks are completely
internal with no cavalry on the way, and it can be pretty dramatic - albeit very difficult - to have
a character figure out how to break themselves out all on their own when the prison is specifically
designed to make that impossible. But in cases where Friends On The Outside are coming to help,
they often end up meeting the imprisoned character halfway, running into them breaking
out while they're breaking in. And the other optional element is The Friend On The Inside,
a fellow prisoner who helps out the imprisoned protagonist, usually physically defending them
and/or teaching them how things work on the inside and any other helpful mentor
tidbits they might know. In stories where The Prison has a notably complicated gimmick,
it's very helpful to have one of these guys around to get the characters and audience up to speed on
what exactly is going on. The Friend On The Inside is usually either a Big Guy or a Wise Old Mentor,
and both of these stock characters have remarkably high fatality rates, so the Friend on the Inside
stands a pretty good chance of dying on the way out, which is tragic and poignant and stuff and
also saves the writer the trouble of figuring out what else to do with them, which is convenient.
Now, like all heist-adjacent plots, the Prison Break follows the Unspoken Plan Guarantee,
which is that thing where if the characters explain their plan onscreen, anything the
audience sees is guaranteed to be disrupted or get interrupted or otherwise go wrong,
but if the characters just say something like "here's what we're gonna do-" and then the
camera pans out so the audience doesn't see their explanation, then whatever the characters plan
has a good chance of success. This is less of a trope and more of a phenomenon that naturally
arises from certain elements of storytelling. If the audience has already heard the entire plan,
seeing the plan play out as described is going to be redundant for them, but if the audience
doesn't have all the information, seeing the plan play out can still be excitingly tense,
since the audience doesn't know which parts are planned and which ones aren't. Maybe the
mastermind getting captured is the plan going wrong, or maybe it was the plan all along! Maybe
one of the characters has gone rogue and sold out the team, or maybe they've coordinated it to
look like that so they earn the villains' trust! As long as the audience doesn't know the plan,
anything could be the plan. So when a Prison Break Plot is happening, the less the audience
knows about the plan, the better chance it has of succeeding. And in contrast, if we get the full
rundown of everything there is to know about the prison and exactly how they're gonna break in and
out, it's pretty much guaranteed that nothing is going to go how they laid it out on paper. Guards
will change their patrol routes or an unexpected miniboss will turn up or it'll turn out that the
bad guy knew about the plan all along and took steps to specifically thwart it. Whatever the
specifics, if we know the plan, the plan's not gonna work. It's just a fun quirk of the medium!
There are a few common bonus tropes that sometimes get worked into this plot to
make things interesting. Most common is the Captured On Purpose Plan - the easiest way
to break in to break somebody out is to just get the bad guys to do most of the
hard work of getting them in in the first place. So someone gets captured on purpose,
usually with a connection to the outside or a friend disguised as a guard that the bad guys
don't know about or some other leg-up they can arrange by controlling the circumstances under
which they're captured. Villains really like this one, but when a bad guy does it they can get away
with having the most absolutely ridiculous contingencies, like somehow having redirected
an entire train or orchestrating it so something blows up at exactly the right time when they had
no way of knowing where they would be and when - but that sort of diabolus ex machina privilege is
reserved for Bad Guys Only and the good guys are lucky if they can get away with a single friend
dressed as a guard who doesn't screw up the secret password and get captured immediately.
But sometimes the rescue mission goes awry when it turns out the imprisoned character is Not
Just Captured - turns out some other horrible thing has happened to them, like maybe they've
been brainwashed or unethically experimented on or they've even turned to the dark side of their own
free will. To preserve the twist, the imprisoned character is usually not shown during the key
parts of the story, which can make this closer to a typical damsel rescue than a proper prison
break. For extra angst, sometimes this happens to them because they helped with a different prison
escape and whoever they helped is trying to return the favor, only to find that their rescuer is in
even worse straits than before. In the more tragic cases this can make the whole scenario
a shaggy dog story where everything they did was pointless, but it most cases it just adds an extra
layer of spice and character drama to the rescue. And the grandest-scale variant is probably I Said
I Break The Prison, where the heroes don't just escape, they prompt a massive prison break where
the entire facility is emptied. This basically only happens in cases where the antagonistic force
is a cartoonishly evil empire or the prison is otherwise completely unambiguously awful
and there are absolutely no complexities to the conflict, but you do sometimes get cases where the
heroes don't break it completely but they do some kind of prison reform once they get out - like
making sure the One Nasty Warden's awfulness is exposed and the good people trying to run an
ethical prison get put in charge. Your mileage may vary on how convincing you find that one.
The Prison Break Plot has a lot of moving parts that make it complicated. At the heart of it
is the prison itself, which is functionally the antagonist of the entire plot - a hostile location
that automatically places the protagonists in the role of underdog. The design of the prison
is an opportunity for the writers to get really creative, so while some of them are pretty basic
dungeons, some of them get really convoluted and present even more interesting challenges for the
characters to solve. This trope really only has two things it's notably good at - an intriguing
escape-room puzzle-box for the setting, and the character writing that this specific kind of
stressful situation can facilitate. The imprisoned character or characters are stuck in a tense,
arguably hopeless situation with very little control, which is a context that tends to reveal
parts of a character that might not otherwise see the light of day; stress and pressure and
desperation can expose a lot of interesting complexities under the surface, and it's always
fun to explore how a familiar character handles a new and unfamiliar situation. As a side effect
of the odds being completely stacked against them, characters in this plotline might be
driven to temporarily team up with characters they were previously at odds with - maybe even
characters that are responsible for them being imprisoned in the first place, or vice versa,
which can even kick off a full-on redemption arc if the team-up goes notably well. And the
process of breaking the prison requires that the characters be clever, coordinated, sneaky and
subtle, which in more action-heavy stories can be a rare treat, and it's always fun to follow along
with characters that are being smart - even if it can take a lot of work to write convincingly.
The main difficulty with these stories is actually a little bit hard to spot. The thing is,
Prison Break stories are usually good at at least one of the two main factors of the story: the
clever escape or the fun character moments. And if it's notably good at one of those things, it can
get a little handwavey with the other. A prison break plot that gets really deep into exploring
how the characters handle the imprisonment, the breakout or the rescue can be fun to watch even
if the prison is just a garden-variety dungeon with a locked door and the actual breakout
process is just a matter of knocking out guards and picking locks. And a really complicated
prison with a ton of impenetrable defenses and wacky gimmicks can make for a very fun escape
plot even if the actual characters are basically just puzzle-solving machines perfectly executing
their clever escape. Sometimes a story nails both elements and you get a really good prison
break where the prison itself is interesting and the character arcs are fascinating to watch. But
sometimes these stories get a little bit wobbly in places, and it usually happens for the same
reason all Clever Plan Plots get wobbly - the simple fact that figuring out a genius plan is
a tall order for a writer to pull off. There's a rule of thumb when writing
mysteries that the writer always needs to know the solution before they start writing anything else,
and it's not just so the whole thing makes sense and is fair for the audience - it's also just
way easier for the writer to work backwards from the solution to construct the problem than it is
to try and solve a problem from scratch. Not to mention that if you make a problem from scratch
and then try to derive the solution, there's no guarantee that the problem even HAS a solution.
The number one way to guarantee that a mystery can be solved is to start from the solution and
then construct the mystery backwards. And Prison Break Design is kinda the same boat - except… not
really. You can start with the prison and all its wacky gimmicks and try to figure out how it can be
escaped, which is a fun thought experiment that a lot of people have a lot of fun with, speculating
over how different security measures could be bypassed - and because a prison is not a problem
designed to have a solution, this makes a lot of sense. But a lot of the time it's just easier to
start with the solution and work backwards. If you want the heroes to escape through the air vents,
the air vents need to be imperfectly guarded. If you want them to short out the electrical system,
the electrical system needs to be improperly insulated. If you want them to impersonate guards,
the guards need to be bad enough at their jobs that they can ambush them and take their
stuff. And while this makes for a cleaner, simpler solution, it undercuts the structure of the prison
by building in a weakness for the characters to exploit. And the more obvious the solution,
the less it makes sense that the prison design didn't account for it. Unlike mysteries,
puzzles, and good escape room praxis, when writing a prison break plotline,
the best results usually come from stories that don't have the solution baked into the design.
There's a fundamental difference between a character uncovering an inobvious solution
that has always been there - like a detective solving a mystery - and a character piecing
together a solution from a bunch of disparate elements that have never been combined in that
way before. The first makes a good mystery - the second makes a good prison break.
So… yeah!
And thanks again to World Anvil for sponsoring this video!
As you may know, World Anvil is a browser-based writing and worldbuilding software designed to
help creators keep all their work organized and in one place while they’re doing all
that writing and worldbuilding. No more scattered post-its and random notes files
on your phone - World Anvil keeps it organized so you’ll never misplace crucial concepts agin!
World Anvil’s got all the tools a worldbuilder needs, like interactive maps, custom timelines
and fully customizable wikis with over two dozen article templates. And features like Chronicles
let you connect maps to timelines so you can keep track of your plotlines across time and space!
Plus with the newly expanded Family Trees tool you can keep track of all the convoluted interpersonal
dynamics at play in your cast of characters! And once the world is all built, World Anvil
has plenty of tools you can use to write! With its built-in word processor you can keep all
your notes right on hand while you write your actual story straight from the dome to the page.
If you’re interested - and why wouldn’t you be? - World Anvil is offering a discount just
for you! Use code “OVERLYSARCASTIC” for 51% off any yearly membership,
and thanks again to World Anvil for sponsoring this episode!