"How stupid is the Fire Nation? They surrounded Earthbenders... with rocks. That's... like locking Popeye in a cage of spinach!"
— JesuOtaku, reviewing The Last Airbender
Half the time when good guys get locked in a cell, all of the equipment that they need to escape is in the cell with them. Bedsheets are a favorite for this MacGyvering technique.
When the improvised equipment is awesome enough to deserve screen time of its own, a Forging Scene is inevitably preceding its unveiling. If multiple team members work together, it's an A-Team Montage.
This entry was inspired by the MacGyver episode "The Road Not Taken", where MacGyver and his Girl of the Week (actually one of his many ex-girlfriends) were locked in a building somewhere in Southeast Asia and the room contained everything they could possibly ask for to make an escape and beat the bad guys.
See also Evil Overlord List entries 36, 97, 131, 140, 145 and 185. Genre Blindness comes into play often. Compare Bruce Wayne Held Hostage, Shooting Superman. Also compare Boss-Arena Idiocy, when an enemy fights in an environment that makes it easy to exploit their weakness.
If the scene is tailored for a character's specific skills, it is This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman. See also Nice Job Fixing It, Villain.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Astray, protagonist Lowe Guele (who's practically a genius-level mechanical engineer) gets locked in a weapons testing dome by a Corrupt Corporate Executive trying to force him to sell his Astray Red Frame. Besides the Red Frame, he has a whole pile of salvaged Humongous Mecha parts he was looking to sell when the deal went south. Needless to say, Lowe manages to get out by cobbling together a power converter and using it to channel the facility's power supply into his beam saber so he can cut his way through the reinforced walls.
- Taken to a whole new level in Pokémon 2000. The villain, who has just captured Zapdos, has managed to accidentally catch Ash & Co as well and put them in a cage. Then, breaking all laws of common sense, lets them go as he monologues, free to wander around his makeshift museum with the captured Zapdos and Moltres, seemingly convinced they they would not do something inconvenient, like go and break out the imprisoned birds....
Comic Books
- Batman:
- Batman is a master of this kind of escape. One Silver Age example involves him escaping from a mill that is rigged to explode using millstones, sacks of rice and a fire hose.
- The Joker. Arkham Asylum keeps trying to give Joker a job or two to do. Letting him into the janitor's closet was a really bad idea. Another story as him no longer allowed to have a TV set in his cell because he once built a taser with the remote.
- The Creeper: It's also not too good an idea to lock a scientist in a room with all his medical equipment and the very scientific inventions you are trying to steal, one of them being a serum that gives super-strength. And if you really must do that, don't lock any suspicious lemon yellow men in there with him.
- This has happened who knows how many times in Disney Mouse and Duck Comics. It's usually Mickey or Huey, Dewey, and Louie who figure out the way to escape. Often it's just the old "grind the rope against something" thing, but there are also more imaginative examples such as Mickey's "combining salpetre from cave walls with ground-up oxygen pills to make an explosive".
- Fantastic Four:
- In Mark Waid's Unthinkable, Part 3 , Doctor Doom imprisons Reed Richards behind a magical door locked with (according to Doom) a very basic enchantment that even a beginner magician could break. The room also has a massive library of magical tomes, more than enough to learn how to break the enchantment (again, according to Doom). This is a subversion, though: Reed is completely incompetent when it comes to magic, so the library only serves to taunt him and his limitation. When Reed finally admits his incompetence, it turns out to be the magic words that unlock the door. Apparently Doom never expected Reed to do something that Doom, in his arrogance, would never do. Though Reed Richards admitting his inferiority to Doom can still be seen as a win for Doom.
- A similar story ends with Reed realizing that he doesn't need to understand how magic works just to use it.
- Subverted in an issue of Ultimate Fantastic Four. The confined Frightful Four announce that they've made a teleporter from a ballpoint pen, hair, and paper. Zombie Susan just turned them invisible. She lampshades how stupid the guards would be to fall for it. They do.
- Happens to a ridiculous degree in Gold Digger, where the title character, after being tossed into a cell, creates a forge from scraps around the cell and is well on her way to creating super-technology within days of being tossed into it without her captors noticing.
- Iron Man:
- The origin story is a classic example. Capture a brilliant engineer, tell him to create weapons for you, and then leave him alone (save for a scientist who also hates you) with everything he needs to do it? Gee, who could have guessed that was going to backfire on them?
- Something similar happens in the Secret Invasion maxi-plot in Marvel Comics. Invading Skrulls want to neutralize many heroes. Their plan for Iron Man involves stranding him in a jungle and frying all his technology remotely. Too bad they literally left him in an abandoned laboratory complex. Oops.
- In Iron Man: Legacy, a team of supervillains hired by Geoffrey Wilder to assassinate Tony ambush him while he is visiting a junkyard full of abandoned machinery. One villain even points out the idiocy of attacking Tony there since Tony is a well-known Gadgeteer Genius who designs high-tech weapons for a living. This story is a flashback set while Tony still had his Secret Identity, so the villains were merely stupid, not suicidal.
- In one of the later issues of Mighty Avengers, the Avengers mansion is under attack by Ultron and his forces, who are after his creator Hank Pym due to their usual personal beef. His robotic minions pursue him until he is backed into a single room with no other issue... but Ultron is not happy to learn which room.
Ultron: You've trapped him?! IN HIS LAB?! YOU FOOLS! THAT IS THE ONE PLACE WHERE HE CAN ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING! THAT IS WHERE HE IS A GOD!
- Superman:
- Subverted in the famous Silver Age "Imaginary" story Superman #149: The Death of Superman where Lex Luthor claims he has created a cure for cancer in prison and offers to develop it if he has access to a lab. The warden is not buying this and accuses Luthor of wanting to get into a room where he can build yet another tool set to escape. When Superman convinces the warden to let Luthor do his thing, Lex actually does cure cancer. Of course it's all a scheme to make Superman trust him so he can kill him.
- In the Silver Age, giving Lex Luthor pretty much anything in prison was a bad idea, the most famous example being his creation of a time-displacing ray gun from a spring, a flashlight and some cans of fruit juice.
- In All-Star Superman, a homage to the Silver Age, while on Death Row Lex creates a robot that reads classic literature to him... that can speak at a high enough frequency to dig through solid rock. He later gets the chance to mix a cocktail for his last meal... he mixes a chemical formula that gives him Kryptonian powers for 24 hours.
- At one point it got so ridiculous that the only thing that they would allow him in prison was pen and paper. He noted to himself that he could break out of prison with just a notepad and a pen, but if he did that, the next time he got locked up the guards wouldn't let him have pen and paper anymore.
- Tintin:
- In the original comic, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin is locked in a jail cell that conveniently happens to have a diving suit in it.
- In The Secret of the Unicorn the Bird brothers lock Tintin into a large cellar room. It takes him a while, but he has no problem fashioning a battering-ram to smash through the wall using a large wooden beam, a convenient ring in the ceiling, and the sheets and blankets of his bed.
- The Man in Room Five from V for Vendetta is given access to gardening chemicals at Larkhill. He seems to be building a Room Full of Crazy by using them to make strange intricate patterns on the floor of his cell, but it turns out he is actually making napalm, mustard gas, and gunpowder, all of which he uses to stage his escape.
Comic Strips
- Parodied in the Norwegian daily comic Eon. MacGyver is seemingly locked inside the bathroom, and comes up with a brilliant escape plan involving a piece of soap, a razor, wire and some other articles, to which the main character responds: "Or we could just open the door." Turns out the door wasn't locked at all.
- In one Prince Valiant story arc, a manipulative villain plunders monasteries, bribing his followers with looted gold from their melted-down treasures. He succeeds in capturing the heroes and leaves them locked under guard in a dungeon filled with the looted monasteries' "useless" books of science and history. One recognizes books of alchemy, brews up a vial of aqua regia, and demonstrates to the guard that the gold with which he was bribed dissolves in "mere water". Convinced that he has been tricked with fool's gold, the enraged guard releases the imprisoned heroes.
Fan Works
- Trump Card: When Aegis and Vista come across a portal frame that has been used to break into an electronics warehouse as part of an ongoing burglary, Vista suggests taking the frame off, trapping the thieves until reinforcements can arrive. Then she realises that that would mean locking a presumable Tinker inside a warehouse full of high-end electronics, and would probably end with the Tinker building a giant robot to smash the wall down.
Films — Animation
- In the Wallace & Gromit short A Matter of Loaf and Death, the villain locks Gromit in the supply closet where the hot-air balloon was kept. Guess how he escapes.
Films — Live-Action
- Amusement: Perhaps it wasn't the smartest of moves for The Laugh to lock Tabitha in the back of a truck containing his various props. Including his knives.
- DC Extended Universe: The Kryptonians in Man of Steel lock up Lois Lane in a room on their spaceship that just happens to have a socket that accepts the data key containing Jor-El's downloaded personality that Superman had previously slipped to her.
- In Demolition Man, the museum armory exhibit in San Angeles has a lock-down protocol in case the weapons are stolen or used. All the weapons within are fully-functional and have ammunition, including a cannon. The doors are made of (presumably reinforced) glass. Do the math. Note that this kind of thing is the reason why weapons and ammunition in real life museums are rendered non-functional before they're put on display.
- In The Equalizer McCall inverts the trope by taking down Pushkin's entire operation this way, including locking the bad guys in with him in a huge hardware store, and proceeding to use anything and everything he gets his hands on to tear them apart.
- In Hollow Man, the heroine is trapped in a supply room, which is barred shut by the bad guy. She improvises an electromagnet from wire, metal, and an emergency defibrillator, then uses it to draw the steel bar aside from the other side of the door.
- In Invention for Destruction, Hart is imprisoned in a small shack on an isolated spit of rock. However, Engineer Serke then has a full lab installed in it in an effort to persuade Hart to aid him. Hart uses the lab to macgyver a hot air balloon that he uses to send out a message to warn the outside world about Count Artigas and his plans of conquest.
- The third Iron Butterfly (1989) film sees the hero, Lin-Jian, captured alive by the triads and handcuffed in the back in a bathroom. Too bad Lin-Jian is an escape artist himself who then uses the tap and faucet to pry his cuffs open, before using the broken cuffs to pick the lock.
- James Bond
- Diamonds Are Forever. When Bond turns up at the oilrig, Blofeld orders his guards to thoroughly search Bond (twice), then ruins that by having him locked in a storage room which has a hatch to the underside of the rig, and a rope long enough so he can climb out. You'd think Blofeld would have learnt his lesson after Bond was able to escape from the cable room at Piz Gloria—and that was a lot harder to do.
- In The World Is Not Enough, M is locked in a cage with a clock left on a stool so she'll know when a bomb will kill her (and the rest of the city). The cage is filled with artifacts being excavated from the site, most of which are useless. There is, however, a broom, which she uses to knock over the clock. When the villain comes back, they leave the clock on the cell door instead of setting it back up. M promptly uses the clock to power a tracking chip in her pocket, which they never bothered to search for.
- In M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender, the Fire Nation's stupidity is dialed up. In the show (see the Western Animation folder), they keep Earthbenders imprisoned on a large metal platform far out to sea, where no earth is available for the Earthbenders to use against their captors until they discover that the ship runs on coal. In this movie, however, they keep the Earthbenders imprisoned in a quarry, with only a handful of guards keeping the order. Even the fact that they've been psychologically broken doesn't excuse putting them in a prison that is literally made out of weaponry.
- Madeline: When Madeline and Pepito are kidnapped, they are left tied up in a the back of a truck filled with circus equipment. They are able to easily free themselves when they realize that there are juggling knives hanging from the wall right next to them. They then escape by stealing a motorcycle also left in the truck, using Madeline's hairpin to pick the ignition, which is some thing that the villain had taught Pepito how to do.
Pepit: What idiots!
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- In Iron Man, Tony Stark is kidnapped and left with various parts that are supposed to build a missile. However, supervision is relatively lax (just some cameras placed here and there) and the terrorists locking him up are mostly tech-illiterate, so he doesn't build the missile like they think he is. Instead he builds the first version of his Iron Man suit in a cave, with a box of scraps, and uses it to escape.
- In Avengers: Age of Ultron, after Ultron puts Black Widow in a cell in his underground base, she manages to make a simple transmitter to communicate in Morse code, which allows Hawkeye to find her. Although given that Ultron later tells the Avengers that fighting them is what he most wants — "all of you, against all of me" —, this may have been deliberate bait.
- Masters of the Universe uses this trope to create a Hope Spot: Skeletor has captured He-Man and taken him back to Eternia, and has broken the Cosmic Key, stranding the rest of the heroes on Earth... then he grabs the Idiot Ball and leaves the broken Key behind with the rest of the heroes, the Key's inventor, all the spare parts needed to fix the Key, and a guy who can figure out how to set the Key to teleport them all directly into Skeletor's throne room.
- Hollow Man is parodied in Scary Movie 2. Two main characters find themselves locked in a freezer while running from an angry spirit. After a "heartwarming" monologue, the heroine takes a couple of screws, cups, strings, and other extraneous items and somehow manages to create an entire bulldozer, destroying the wall and allowing them to escape.
- Spoofed in Shanghai Knights, where Chon Lin is said to have "picked the lock using a deck of rather risqué playing cards. Then scaled the walls with a mop, a fork, and various pilfered undergarments."
- Justified in Sunshine. Capa locks himself in the spaceship's airlock to escape Pinbacker, who then locks the hatch from the outside so Capa can't get out. However there are tools in the airlock used for EVA repairs. Capa burns a hole in the inside hatch with an oxy torch, then straps himself to the wall and fires the explosive bolts in the outside hatch. The force of the air inside the spaceship trying to escape through the small hole is enough to wrench the inside door off its hinges.
- Both The Thing from Another World and The Thing (1982) have this occur, except in those cases it's the villain who gets locked in by the heroes (it's locked in a greenhouse in the first version and in a tool shed in the prequel. Here Blair has not been infected however).
- In WarGames, the Air Force brings David (Matthew Broderick) to NORAD because he hacked into the missile control system computer. The first example happens when they leave him alone in McKittrick's office where he has access to a computer terminal. Next, they lock him up in the infirmary where he (not surprisingly) finds enough supplies to facilitate a crafty escape, hacking the electronic door lock using medical supplies and a tape recorder.
Literature
- The Columbo example below was an adaptation of the 87th Precinct novel So Long as You Both Shall Live where the heroine escapes in the same manner (and with the same end result).
- Subverted for laughs in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where Jim is shackled to a bedpost and could escape simply by lifting the bed off the ground, but Tom Sawyer knows that this is not how it is done in prisoner novels, so instead has Jim saw his way through the bedpost. Of course, Tom also knows (but Jim and Huck do not) that Jim's owner has set him free in her will; he will soon be able to leave at any time.
- After Doomsday. The Kandemirians force their captive humans to work on technical projects for them, but keep a strict eye on every component to ensure they don't build tools or weapons to escape. However the humans construct a fake rifle using the non-essential chassis used to house and support the components, and use it to bluff them into handing over real weapons.
- Played with in the Alex Rider book Snakehead, when Alex is being held prisoner in the Big Bad's medical facility so they can harvest his organs. The "hospital" is completely secure and escape-proof, but the "patients" arrive by seaplane, and when the first recipient of Alex's organs arrives Alex realises that the seaplane is going to stay there overnight, and nobody running the hospital factored that in, since the security was only checked when the plane wasn't there. Alex is thus able to make his escape by raiding the seaplane for equipment under cover of darkness.
- In Kennth Oppel's The Boundless, Maren Amberson is an escape artist with a disappearing act. When she's arrested and handcuffed, all she needs is a blanket so the police can't see her escape. She told them she was cold...
- In Codex Alera, not tailor-making one's prison to counter the prisoner's Furycrafting capability counts as this. Since pretty much everyone in Alera knows this it's most often averted, but the Canim leader Laharl (who has never been to Alera and regards reports of Furycrafting as myths) plays it quite straight. When he wants to imprison Tavi's group of ambassadors (which includes several windcrafters, one of whom can fly), he strands them on a rooftop with no way down.
Max: They cannot possibly be serious.
- In The Diamond Age, the bad guys lock Nell in a closet with a working matter compiler.
- Subverted in many Discworld novels that features the principal character getting locked in a cell of some sort; the characters, via narration, complain that their jailers hadn't supplied them with any of the necessary means of escape.
- A notable example in Monstrous Regiment when the eponymous regiment is locked in a kitchen — not only does their makeshift cell lack any of the useful weapon-type things one would expect to find in a kitchen (knives, rolling pins, etc.), but it also appears to contain no food at all.
- Also played straight in the same book, as one of the companions of the protagonist is a pyromaniac and the soldiers helpfully leave them in a room full of flour. (Flour, like many organic powders, is explosive when suspended in air.)
- The trope is taken to its logical conclusion in Guards! Guards!, where the Patrician is locked up inside a supposedly escape-proof cell of his own design. Not only did the guys who locked him up overlook that the door with its unpickable lock had bolts on the inside (enabling Vetinari to lock the door from the inside and keep them out), they also failed to realize that there was a hidden compartment inside the cell containing enough food and water to keep him healthy for several days should they decline to feed him, along with a copy of the key to the unpickable lock.
- Another Discworld subversion is in The Fifth Elephant, where Vimes is imprisoned by Dwarves and slipped some kind of particularly deadly assassin's weapon with which to take out his guards. It is a subversion, as he correctly reasons that the weapon was only provided so that he could be legitimately executed if he used it (plus, it's a single-shot weapon, and there's more than one guard), and thus he only knocks the guards unconscious when escaping.
- Inverted in The Last Continent. Rincewind is locked in a cell and told that its previous occupant escaped it many, many times and they checked the cell over and over. It's a solid cell, the bars are thick... and you can lift the door right off its hinges. Before putting it back in place, which is what the previous occupant always did.
- At the beginning of Going Postal, Moist van Lipwig has spent several weeks removing the mortar around a large flagstone in his condemned cell with his prison-issued spoon. This wears the spoon away to basically nothing, but he finally succeeds in moving the stone — only to discover a much-better reinforced wall and a fresh spoon on the other side. The guards then immediately come and congratulate him for not giving up, and reveal that at least one other seeming flaw in the cell wouldn't allow a prisoner to escape either. This prison may not exactly be inescapable, but in order to do so you would have to out-think Vetinari.
- Another example, from Feet of Clay, has a specific Shout-Out to MacGyver and/or The A-Team — "some villains are obliging enough to lock you in a warehouse with enough equipment to build a fully functional armoured car".
- Discussed in The Emperor's Soul. The Arbiters need Shai to make an incredibly difficult and complicated soulstamp to revive the Emperor from his coma. In order to have any chance of doing this, she will need Forging supplies and the freedom to research, experiment, and take notes. The arbiters are well aware that these are also exactly the things she'd need to make soulstamps with which to escape her imprisonment. Moreover, neither the Arbiters nor any of the handful of people they can trust with the secret of what Shai's doing know enough about Forging to be able to tell what she's actually working on. It is for this reason that they resort to calling on the one thing they don't think she can get around, a Bloodsealer.
- Stephen King's fantasy novel The Eyes of The Dragon has an extremely long sequence of this as its main plot, with the only item used for escape being napkin threads, woven into a rope over three years to climb down a tower. Slightly subverted in that the escape plan has a flaw the budding MacGyver doesn't know about — a long rope made of napkin threads has to be able to hold its own weight as well.
- In The Flower Path, Shin panics when he's locked in a burning drum tower. Then he realizes he's an idiot, and quickly starts drumming the naval code for "fire" as loudly as possible. Help arrives quickly. The trope is justified in that Shin's captor was surprised beforehand and didn't have time to make a solid plan.
- In The Foundling, the hero escapes from the cellar he's confined in using the various rubbish stored there to light a fire and burn through the wooden door. The fact that the villains didn't go through his pockets means that he still has the handy-dandy (primitive — this is 1818) cigar lighter he was seen using a few chapters previously.
- In The Dresden Files book Ghost Story, the Corpsetaker leaves Mortimer Lindquist, a wizard specializing in manipulating spirits, in her hideout's dungeon, along with a crowd of violent ghosts she used to torture him. As he puts it later as he brings those very ghosts to drag her to hell:
"You probably shouldn't have left a freakin' ectomancer a pit full of wraiths to play with."
- In the Goosebumps book The Horror at Camp Jellyjam, the kids kill King Jellyjam by refusing to clean him and allowing him to suffocate in his own putrid stench.
- The second The Laundry Files novel, The Jennifer Morgue, revolves around villains and the Laundry itself using Narrative Causality as a weapon. Bob Howard the hacker is naturally locked in a room with a working computer system, since the villain had to follow the script for the plan to work. Bob assumes that this is because he's been cast as James Bond. He hasn't been.
- Matthew Hawkwood does it in Rapscallion. The cellar in which he and Lasseur are imprisoned in turns out to contain everything they need to effect an escape.
- In the Modesty Blaise novel Sabre-Tooth, Modesty and Willie are captured by a villain who wants to see if their reputation for inventiveness is deserved before recruiting them. He locks them in a cell but deliberately leaves a means of escape to see if they will discover it. They do, then decide that is too obvious and must be a trap, and proceed to invent their own means of escape. The bad guy is very impressed.
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians has a part in the second book where Luke tries to imprison Percy (son of Poseidon) on a boat. Needless to say, they escape easily enough. Justified in that Luke actually wanted them to escape.
- This is the premise of the short story The Problem of Cell 13. A detective bets his friends that he can escape from a maximum security prison. He does, of course, using things he conveniently finds in his cell. When asked what he would have done if those items had not been there, he smugly states that there were two other ways out. (It is never stated what they were.)
- In Jules Verne's Robur the Conqueror, Robur intends to imprison Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans on his secret hideaway island for the rest of their lives... but first, he takes them on a long trip in a flying machine stocked with ropes, tools, and explosives. The inevitable escape ensues.
- In Larry Niven's Ringworld's Children, Tunesmith (a super-intelligent Night Person protector) is smart enough to lock Luis Wu out of the stepping disk system in order to keep Luis from escaping, but somehow didn't think it important to lock Luis out of the autokitchen menu. So naturally Luis orders sushi from the autokitchen, a meal that is dispensed alongside a pair of hardwood chopsticks... which Luis promptly uses to hack his way into the stepping disk system and escape.
- In the J G Reeder story Sheer Melodrama by Edgar Wallace, one of the villains kidnaps Reeder and his sidekick, and locks them in a secure storeroom. The storeroom also contains (a) the villain's supply of forged money, and (b) a working telephone. The villain's confederate is not impressed.
- In one of the ShatnerVerse Star Trek novels, Captain Kirk and his allies are separated into pairs and locked into prison cells/holodecks. The doors are not really locked, but the holodeck is programmed to "keep" the entrance away with every step taken. You can run a mile but never get to it. Thankfully, each prison pair has a super-smart Vulcan, who figures out that throwing his or her partner at the door will fool the computer. The stunned and bruised partner then opens the door and turns off the holodeck.
- Notably done in the book The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) by John Buchan, in which the hero, a mining engineer, is locked in a store cupboard that happens to contain some explosives that he proceeds to use to blow his way out.
- In one of the Tom Swift books, some villain kidnaps Tom and his father and locks them in a building in the middle of nowhere, with the lab equipment necessary to make some product which the villain want to coerce them to make. They instead fabricate a whole lot of lighter-than-air foam, with which they fill the building and then unbolt it from its foundations.
- Happens in John W. Campbell's novella Who Goes There? with a rare villainous example. In this case the heroes end up locking an alien monster in a shed where it has the equipment to build an escape craft. To their credit the alien was The Virus and they hadn't realized it had gotten the guy they locked in the toolshed.
Live-Action TV
- The A-Team: Pretty much every episode involves the A-Team getting trapped somewhere like a barn where they could bust out via an armored car quickly thrown together using the materials at hand. This trope could just as easily have been called "Locking the A-Team in the Motor Pool Workshop/Machine Shop".
- One of the worst — in one episode they are on an Army base, and get locked in the armory.
- Lampshaded in one of the novelizations, when Hannibal asks the others if they've ever noticed how often the bad guys lock them up with everything they need to escape.
- Competing with the above example, and perhaps even more bizarre, is the episode "The Heart of Rock and Roll", where the team is captured inside a prison, yet are inexplicably locked up in an unguarded workshop. The guards don't even bother handcuffing them.
- Hodgins and Brennen on Bones may have outperformed even MacGyver in the first Gravedigger episode, when they are buried alive inside a car. They can't bust themselves out, but they do manage to prolong their own lives and communicate their location to rescuers using such items as a pocket knife, camera, car horn, depowered cell phone, lithium batteries, dirt, and an extremely expensive bottle of perfume.
- In Breaking Bad, Walter White is tied to a heater within reach of a glass electric coffee jug. He accidentally flings the jug out of reach, but then escapes by ripping the wire out of the base, plugging in the other end and soldering his bonds. Justified, as his bondage was an improvised solution and his captor had no time to thoroughly sweep the room for possible avenues of escape.
- Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: In the episode "Space Rockers", Buck and the musical group Andromeda are locked in a room containing a musical device that with some minor modification is capable of sonically breaking a door lock.
- Appeared in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode where Willow got locked in a storage room. Which contained a pencil. And her guards were vampires. You do the math. Her escape from there wasn't entirely successful, and to be fair to the vampires, they probably didn't expect that she could levitate the pencil with her mind.
- Columbo, "No Time to Die" (1992). The bride of Columbo's nephew is kidnapped and trapped in a room. She uses vinegar left with her dinner to help remove the rust from the door hinges, while lubricating the pins. She scrapes away the rust with a fork and is able to push the pins out, freeing herself from the room. Sadly not from the rest of the house.
- CSI: NY:
- A variation: while investigating the death of a millionaire inside his mansion's panic room, one of the CSIs accidentally activates the protocol that seals him inside. While he doesn't use the items in there to escape (his friends call a locksmith to do that), he does use them to replace the forensics kit he left outside and complete the processing of the crime scene.
- And in a variation on this theme, an Irish drug cartel once stages a crime scene to kidnap Danny and Adam, and holds them prisoner while their teammates raid the central office (where they hope to recover several tons of confiscated drugs). Mistake #1: Adam has brought, and eventually regains access to, his forensics kit, which contains corrosive compounds. Mistake #2: the cartel leaders fail to lure Mac, Stella, and Hawkes from the CSI labs, where they have access to a whole plethora of tools and firearms with which to defend themselves and the evidence. (Mac is even able to rig up a claymore mine from ordinary lab materials.)
- Doctor Who:
- "The Dalek Invasion of Earth". The Daleks lock the Doctor in a cell with a bar magnet. Dalek doors all use magnetic locks. Invoked by the Dalek captors to see who would be smart enough to escape.
- "Attack of the Cybermen". The Doctor is locked in a storeroom containing explosives. Explosives just powerful enough to blow a large hole in a thick futuristic metal door without harming a person crouching at the other end of the small room.
- "Paradise Towers" has a villainous example in the backstory — when the authorities discovered that Kroagnon was planning to massacre all the building's inhabitants, their reaction was to do something to him that left him a bodiless spirit imprisoned in the basement... with everything he needed to take control of the building's maintenance robots and construct a device that would allow him to possess someone's body.
- "The Doctor's Wife": House possesses the TARDIS and leaves the Doctor behind on his planetoid former body, which happens to be a TARDIS graveyard.
- Averted and lampshaded in Eleventh Hour: "Eternal", when Hood and Rachel are locked in a freezer by one of the villains. Hood pulls out a rack of shelves and boxes "for protection", Rachel asks if he's planning to fashion a bomb from things in the freezer. Hood's response? "I'm a scientist, I'm not MacGyver. Shoot the lock."
- Knight Rider: "Goliath Returns". A group of Foundation employees are locked in a cell with exactly the parts they need to turn their collar tabs into a bomb.
- London's Burning of all series had a fairly plausible example. He had a little outside help, but an inmate at a Young Offenders Institute managed to improvise a delayed-action incendiary device with a block of lard swiped from the kitchen, a length of string and a heater in the carpentry workshop, then cold-cocked a firefighter and stole his uniform in order to slip away. It nearly worked.
- There are several other MacGyver examples. It even gets lampshaded in the 2016 MacGyver. When Mac gets put into protective custody by his boss, Thornton has all the furnishings of the room he's locked into removed first, claiming that if they left him a chair, he'd somehow turn it into a cannon (which Mac objects to on the grounds that he'd also need some kind of propellant to make a cannon). Mac then proceeded to break out using some wire pulled out of the ceiling and an electrical outlet.
- Murdoch Mysteries: A rather extreme example in "Staring Blindly into the Future". What happens when you lock up William Murdoch, Ernest Rutherford, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein and Marie Curie into a fully equipped laboratory? They build a Death Ray. Sally Pendrick kidnapped them all to force them to work on an atomic weapon, and although the ray wasn't used on the door like they planned, Murdoch fires it at Sally's head when she's threatening to murder Julia.
- MythBusters:
- In the MacGyver special, Adam and Jamie demonstrate that it is possible to escape a locked room by picking the door lock... with lightbulb filaments.
- Subverted later that same episode, when as part of the MacGyver challenge, they were presented with a mock campsite which contained everything they needed to create a potato cannon (PVC tubes, gas under pressure, ignition source, potatoes) — something the show had in fact covered in a previous episode — and built a signal kite instead. Which may or may not count as a subversion, because the kite worked.
- Subverted when they tried to stage a jailbreak using electricity, salsa, and dental floss to cut through the bars of a cell window. While Jamie did make some progress, he only did so by using a radio as an additional component, which he insisted the prison warden had given him for good behavior. But the electricity from the radio only sped up the reaction; it did not cause it. Testing the myth the way it supposedly happened would've taken years. The radio was just there to show proof of concept.
- On their The A-Team Special, the MythBusters first attempt to duplicate the results of a particular case in which the A-Team are locked in a lumberyard and manage to create a kind of board-throwing gun. Having shown that the method used in the show doesn't work, Adam and Jamie then set out to place themselves in the same situation: they were locked in a lumberyard full of equipment with a time limit until the "bad guys" would return, and were indeed able to create a functional board-throwing gun in those conditions.
- In NCIS, Ducky and Jimmy, the medical examiners, are kidnapped by a group of spies who need them to perform an autopsy on their deceased cohort who died before revealing where he hid the classified information he stole. The kidnappers cannot stand the smell of the autopsy so they leave the two doctors in the cabin while they stand guard outside. Ducky and Jimmy use the gastric acid from the dead man's stomach to cut through their leg chains and then make a bomb out of a cigarette, a surgical glove, a part of the dead man's lower intestine and some drain cleaner.
- In Season 2 of Nikita, Michael gets trapped in the panic room by bad guys. On purpose.
- The entire first season of Prison Break is about how Michael Scofield breaks his brother out of prison using things from within the prison (well, and things he's prepared beforehand, with notes handily tattooed all over him in a form only he can decipher). Example: One of the first things he does is turn a screw from the prison bleachers into an allen wrench that can unscrew the cell sink. It's priceless MacGyvering.
- The Professionals. In "Servant With Two Masters", Bodie and Doyle are captured and thrown into the basement of a Big Fancy House in the country. They search the place and find a chisel and wood saw that they use to force open a padlocked window.
- Red Dwarf:
- Hilariously parodied in the episode "Rimmerworld", in which Lister comes up with a lengthy and elaborate plan to escape from a prison cell, and Kryten replies "Or we could use the teleporter."
- "Quarantine" has the main characters in a—yes—quarantined room with dwindling oxygen. It just so happens that the group is locked in along with a Luck Virus. With an injection of artificial luck, Lister is able to open the door by randomly pressing buttons on the keypad-lock. Of course, it does take them five days to figure that out.
- The Saint: In "The Master Plan", Simon Templar and Girl of the Week Jean find themselves locked in a hidden cell which can only be opened by sliding a sculpture, visible through a small viewing hole, on the wall opposite the entrance. He happens to notice Jean fiddling with the beads of her necklace — by pulling the string taut, he uses it to reach the switch and release the door.
- Parodied in the Saturday Night Live MacGruber skits, in which he can get out of the room (which is always the exact same room, just with a different location sign over the door each time), but personal issues, interpersonal issues, stupidity, and totally irrelevant events prevent him from doing anything until it's too late.
- Stargate SG-1:
- The episode "Prometheus" has a hijack attempt of the Earth's still-under-construction space battleship while Sam Carter is on it. At one point, evading pursuit, she ducks into a storage closet filled with supplies the construction crew was using to finish the ship, and closes the door. Because the external door controls haven't been installed yet, the hijackers decide that the best way to keep her out of trouble would be just to lock down the door entirely, trapping her in there... This turns out to be a pretty stupid idea.
- Given that Richard Dean Anderson also appears in Stargate, this becomes an Obligatory Joke in the Hilarious Outtakes.
Amanda Tapping: You spend seven years on MacGyver and you can't figure this one out? We...we've got belt buckles, and shoelaces and a piece of gum; build a nuclear reactor, for crying out loud. You used to be MacGyver, MacGadget, MacGimmick. Now you're Mister MacUseless. [crew & RDA start to laugh] Dear God! Stuck on a glacier with MacGyver!
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Original Series:
- The episode "Patterns of Force" features Spock and Kirk escaping from a prison after making a laser from a strip of metal, a light bulb, and the crystals from the radios implanted under their skins near the beginning of the episode.
- In the episode "Arena", powerful aliens place Kirk and the Gorn captain in a rocky area and are told specifically there are the components of weapons they can assemble if they are smart enough. As it is, Kirk is better at this since the best the Gorn could think of is a net and a sharpened piece of rock for a knife, Kirk MacGyvers a crude cannon from the materials around him.
The episode was inspired by a marginally harder-science story of the same name by Fredric Brown (who got an on-screen writing credit), in which the trick is to get through a force field that allows nothing conscious to pass. The alien builds a passable catapult while the human comes up with some flaming missiles, then knocks himself out to fall through the barrier (which up until this point he thought only allowed nonliving things to pass) and stabs the alien to death with a stone knife.
- In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Unification Part II", a group of Romulans lock Captain Picard, Lt. Commander Data, and Ambassador Spock, the supreme examples of The Smart Guy, in a room with a computer terminal and holographic projectors.
- Star Trek: Discovery: When the series has its Lost Colony episode, the colony is "young" enough for its inhabitants to know they are originally from Earth, but several factors mean that the crew members from Discovery who visit have to pretend to be from another settlement on the planet. The one person suspecting their true nature at some point knocks them out, steals their equipment and locks them in his basement, which is full of relics of the technology brought in by the original settlers. And given the fact that the lock is low-tech, all they need to escape is wire and a magnet.
- Star Trek: The Original Series:
- The Tomorrow People: One of the protagonists has begun to demonstrate a limited but effective form of telekinesis — he can open any lock. A gang of criminals kidnaps him and some of his family for leverage on the superhuman lockpick. At one point, the boss asks one of his mooks if the telekinetic and his family are safe. The mook's response — "Sure. Got 'em under lock and key."
- Wonder Woman: In "The Last of the Two Dollar Bills", Steve Trevor becomes the fifth person to be locked into the cell in the basement of the coffee house. He looks around, finds a fork on a nearby shelf and uses it to pick the lock. It might have helped make the lock easier to pick when Wonder Woman bent the lock open and then bent it back into shape earlier when she needed to break out of the same cell.
Myths & Religion
- Older Than Feudalism with Greek Mythology: In the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur, Daedelus and Icarus escape from their Cretan prison by the use of hot wax and birds' feathers. Of course, we all know how this one ended.
Video Games
- Dishonored: Daud captures Corvo and keeps him inside a hole, trapped by a barrier of wood. Inside the hole however are rats that you can possess to escape, as well as about a dozen bricks that can be thrown at the wood to break out.
- In Fallout 3, after the Enclave captures you and takes you to Raven Rock, they stupidly put all your possessions in a locker in your cell. Subverted in that President Eden wants you to carry out his plan which Colonel Autumn is really against and more than suspects that Autumn might try to have you killed
- In GoldenEye 007, during the second Bunker level, James is locked in a cell next to Natalya. In order to escape, the player has to use their watch magnet to obtain the key from the guard. In addition to this, the player can also get a few throwing knives as well.
- Jolly Rover: James is locked in a ship's hold containing supplies anyone can use to escape, including a crate containing crowbars and skeleton keys, a cannon with gunpowder, and a box labeled "Escape Kit." Subverted in that he doesn't use any of those things because he either doesn't realize their potential or he can't open the crates.
- Kingdom Hearts II: When Sora is thrown inside a cell in Space Paranoids, the MCP didn't bother to lock away his abilities, so it's no surprise that he escapes the cell using the Keyblade. It also works for Tron's benefect, as all he needed to break out was to win Sora's trust and explain the situation.
- The aversion in King's Quest V may explain why this trope is so common in the genre. If Graham enters the inn, the proprietors seize him, tie him up and throw him into the storeroom. Did he save a randomly appearing rat from being chased by a cat and trade for a cobbler's hammer before coming to the inn? If the answer to either one is no, he can't escape with the items on hand and the game is over. That'll teach him to enter places of business to talk to their owners.
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
- When captured upon entering the Gerudo Fortress, Link gets tossed into a cell. Subverted in that the cell is completely empty. Played straight in that the Gerudo don't think to take away any of the equipment Link already has, not even his sword.
- Heck, in every single dungeon ever in the series, there's at least one room that locks behind you. If killing the enemies in the room doesn't trigger the mechanism to open the doors, there's always just the perfect number of crates/supplies of items in pots/ magically appearing chest with a new item to help you escape.
- Metal Gear Solid likes to use this one.
- In the first game, for example, you're locked up in a jail cell with nothing but the clothes on your back and a useless bottle of ketchup. Naturally, you lie down on the floor and pour the ketchup all over yourself. When the guard comes in to check on the suddenly bloodied prisoner, you snap his neck and haul tail out of there. Alternatively, you can hide yourself in a location in the room where he can't see you when he's busy wrestling with his diarrhea and when he can't suddenly find you when he returns, he opens the cell door to check. If both of the above methods fail, your mysterious benefactor will get tired of waiting for you to figure it out, knock out the guard and open the door for you.
- In Metal Gear Solid 3 you can operate on yourself using a fork to get to your fake death pill, handily hidden inside your body, you can open the cell door with the correct radio frequency, or trick the guard into giving you a cig spray, or throw food to the guard so that he gets diarrhea.
- There tends to be a lot of this in the Monkey Island video games. The prison on Phatt Island in the second game is a classic example. Monkey Island also likes to subvert it, by surrounding you with items, any one of which could get you out of your predicament, but they're all out of reach so you have to escape in a much more convoluted way.
- Nancy Drew: In Ghost Dogs of Moon Lake, Nancy Drew gets knocked out, tied up, and dumped in a shed that's then set on fire. The shed just happens to contain an assortment of junk that she can use to get free, merely by kicking the right objects.
- In Postal 2, you can use matches to set off the fire alarm in your cell, which automatically opens every cell in the jail.
- Averted in Quest for Glory II. The hero is captured and thrown in jail after being stripped of all his equipment, but all three classes have a way out. The fighter can just break the door down (he's strong enough for that), the wizard can use the ubiquitous Open spell (they can't strip his magic), and the thief can pick the lock with the magical pin of Katta friendship, that those who are not Katta or friends of Katta cannot see. Ultimately turns into a subversion, when the villain actually wanted you to escape.
- Riven: After having stranded his evil father-in-law Gehn within one of the Ages (worlds) that Gehn wrote, Atrus realises that Gehn ensured all his Ages would contain the necessary materials to write new Books. It takes years for Gehn to manage it, since he did lose a lot of resources by being cut off, but by the time the player arrives, Gehn has a network of Books set up all over Riven and is preparing to resume his campaign of conquest and destruction.
- Lampshaded in Spider and Web. After you escape from the interrogation room, you end up in one of the laboratories. The guards ensure the interrogator that they have you cornered. The thing is, the laboratory is being used to develop a functional teleporter. After a few stunned seconds, the interrogator orders them to blow the door open.
- TRON 2.0: F-Con probably would have succeeded if they hadn't been fool enough to lock Alan Bradley (as in, the guy who programmed Tron) in a closet full of computer parts.
Visual Novels
- The whole point of the Zero Escape gameplay. You're in a room that has exactly the items and mechanisms you need to escape your sore doom. Subverted in that the rooms are built in order for the protagonists to escape.
Web Comics
- Freefall:
- "With this amount of equipment,
I can either leave by the door or leave by taking the side of the building off."
- Of course, even if she stays in a dog pound... "The mayor gave me a direct order to stay here, she never said I couldn't build a fusion test reactor on the premises."
- "With this amount of equipment,
- As you could expect from a Spark, Agatha from Girl Genius manages to pull this off. While she was not locked up, as one of the villains points out, she is many kilometers away from any potential allies, in unfamiliar territory in the middle of harsh winter. There are also bad guys constantly looking for her with dogs specially trained to hunt down Sparks. Agatha still manages to build herself a fully functional escape device in form of... a swan-shaped sleigh, an elegant reindeer clank bristling with hidden guns, and four flying robot pigs.
- In the Housepets! story arc "Show Business", King finds himself trapped in a tool shed when being chased by Duchess. This strip even mentions MacGyver by name. The ultimate solution to his dilemma is, however, somewhat more directly violent than most of MacGyver's solutions.
- In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!, Fructose Riboflavin escapes from his prison ship by deliberately tripping and falling at the feet of his robot guard, so the guard's heavy feet snap his chains. He then disables the robot and removes its Arm Cannon to blast open the other prisoners' cells and enslave them, and to take out the other robot guards. He uses the ship's parts to cobble together a cloaking device to install on a small escape pod and uses the pod to hitch a ride in another ship's "grav wake" to get to Earth undetected. Continuing in this fashion for a couple of days, he winds up in command of a stolen space warship armed with the most powerful weapon known to science and makes ready to conquer a planet.
- In Rip And Teri, a spy has been captured by a rival and locked inside a broom closet. Unfortunately for the spy, the rival has removed everything that could possibly be of use to him to make his escape... but has neglected to put tape on the sharp edges of the doorframe, thus allowing the spy to cut through his bonds and escape. Naturally, the spy considers his rival a "rookie" for overlooking this minor detail.
- In the Haven Hive arc of Schlock Mercenary with Lt. Ventura, Major Murtaugh tried to not have the "helpless-with-the-big-eyes"-looking girl guarded by a human that might be swayed by it. She didn't even ask the prisoner's name and couldn't have known that allowing the genius roboticist with widely known and feared reputation among robots time alone with a robot and the AI controlling the spacecraft means the next phrase a human being will hear from her will be "get off my ship". The incredulous tone Ventura used at the suggestion of guarding her with a robot might have been a tip-off; her captor apparently misinterpreted it as the tone of voice one might use to say "You're posting five guards to my cell?" as opposed to the disbelief of a child over being locked in a cell made of caramel.
Web Original
- In Chrono Hustle #10 the main characters are in a holding cell made with forcefields, including ERK-147 who is a maintenance bot. Jack figures out how to create a repulsor blast with ERK-147 tech.
- A Grey World: Although she doesn't manage to escape, Alexis frees herself from her bounds as well as fashioning a crude but deadly knife and spear from some light-fittings, her bounds and the chair she was tied to.
- This Hitherby Dragons story has minions discussing where to lock MacGyver, before having to, reluctantly, lock him in a bare room. It doesn't work.
- Tech Infantry has Xinjao O'Reilly and his engineering crew captured and locked in a storage room for tools and spare parts when their space station is seized by rebels. They waste no time in grabbing tools, using them to open access panels, and escape into the maintenance spaces inside the bulkheads. Lampshaded when Xinjao incredulously remarks on how stupid it is to lock up a bunch of starship engineers in the tool closet on their own space station.
Western Animation
- In Aladdin: The Series, Abis Mal locks Aladdin in a dungeon with two skeletons. He uses a finger bone to pick the lock and escape.
- In one episode of Animaniacs, a TV anchorman tires of the Warners' antics and locks them inside the control room. When Dot asks why he would do that, Yakko responds "I don't know. Maybe he wants us to direct." Sure enough, they start messing around with the video controls and screwing up the broadcast until the anchorman is driven mad.
- In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the bad guys make many different Tailor Made Prisons to keep Benders away from their elements. But it's often difficult to lock up a Bender without them giving them any access to them.
- One of the most notable example is a case of bad (good?) luck: back in the day, the Fire Nation locked a bunch of waterbenders in cells where they dried the air and chained them up when feeding them. They didn't cut them off completely from source of their strength, the moon, but without everything else, that extra power was pointless. In theory. No-one expected one of the benders to manage escaping by inventing Bloodbending, letting her control the water in the guards.
- In one episode, they imprisoned Earthbenders on a rig out in the middle of the ocean, made of pure metal (thought to be unbendable at the time). Unfortunately for them, they overlooked the fact that the rig is powered by coal, which the Earthbenders can bend; all it takes is the proper motivation to escape and they are good to go.
- Toph gets locked in a steel cage by two men her father hired to kidnap her at one point. This just makes her realize that by using her Super-Senses to focus on the earthen impurities in the metal, she can bend steel, thus creating Metalbending.
- Somehow, Toph's ability to bend metal reaches a certain group of guards who capture her, so they put her in a cage made of wood. But Katara joins her there shortly afterwards, with no water to bend... and cuts through the bars by waterbending her sweat.
- The prison in "The Boiling Rock" is obviously intended for Firebending prisoners — it has several rows of refrigerated "coolers" used as punishment for Firebending. Once it is dismantled, the cooler's insulation makes it an ideal boat to cross the lake that surrounds the prison, which is heated to boiling temperatures by the volcano beneath it.
- In one episode of the old Birdman (1967) cartoon, a Gadgeteer Genius supervillain was allowed to spend his prison sentence working in the prison's metalshop. He built a suit of powered armor complete with a jetpack and escaped. The episode ends with the warden sensibly deciding that putting him in a metalshop isn't a good idea and switches him to laundry duty. In a later episode starring the same villain, he adds flight capability to a dryer and escapes in it. The warden finally figures out that putting the guy near any machinery is a bad idea and sends him to work in the prison's library.
- Codename: Kids Next Door had an episode where Numbah One was intentionally locked in a cell with absolutely nothing in it, since his jailers were Genre Savvy enough to know that he could use anything to create a piece of 2x4 tech and escape. They didn't count on him taking a piece of chewed gum and using it as a key.
- During the pilot episode of DuckTales, Scrooge locks Huey, Dewey, and Louie in an empty room with a bag of marbles to play with. The triplets, naturally, plan to break out of the room, with Dewey commenting that he knows "just how to do it" while holding the bag of marbles. Cue Dewey bashing the doorknob with the marbles until it breaks off.
- Justice League:
- Batman is captured by a group of criminals and is restrained, without his utility belt, in a full-body restraint made of inch-thick metal cables. He doesn't go anywhere at first, preferring instead to screw with the dysfunctional bad guy team from the inside. When that stops being fun, he promptly escapes to beat the Joker up. Then again, Batman is wearing his own store cupboard.
- In the episode "A Better World", when Batman is captured and put in a prison, his alternative universe counterpart, Lord-Batman, points out not to bother trying a certain technique since he build the prison specifically to counter anything Batman could think of (since being another version of Batman, he can think of everything Batman would). Flash then escapes by speeding up his heart rate so it appears like he has flatlined, causing Lord-Batman to open the prison to check on him. It works because Batman, and therefore Lord Batman as well, didn't know he could do that.
- The surreal reverse example in an episode of The Powerpuff Girls (1998) where three criminals get out of prison thanks to three conveniently placed man-sized Powerpuff Girl disguises within the jail cell. "This is going to be harder than I thought."
- Played with in the second season episode of The Tick animated series, "Leonardo da Vinci and His Fightin' Genius Time Commandos!" Leonardo Da Vinci and other famous inventors throughout history are kidnapped by a Mad Scientist and locked in a cage. Leonardo escapes largely by using the mattresses and flatware to make a flying machine. When the rest discuss inventing their own escape method, Ben Franklin says bitterly, "How? Da Vinci used all the best stuff!" George Washington Carver laments, "If I could just reach those peanuts...!" Then Wheel the caveman takes the sheets and invents a rope, which they use to climb out and turn the stuff outside the cell into an A-Team style war machine.
- The Transformers: In the episode "Day of the Machines", Megatron imprisons Spike, Hound, and Skyfire in a room with a bunch of debris in it, guarded by Rumble and Ravage. Spike finds an electromagnet and uses it to escape by magnetizing the wall near the door so that Rumble and Ravage get stuck and can't stop them.
Hound: An electromagnet!Skyfire: Be careful with that thing, Spike!Spike: I don't have a metal body, so it's no problem for me! Megatron should have thought of that, because it's going to cost him!"
- In The Venture Bros., The Monarch uses things that he finds in prison not only to break out but to rebuild an ersatz version of his costume, with orange jumpsuits hanging rather conspicuously off the wings.
Real Life
- Prisons are made very spartan in part to avert this trope. Many common items are specifically redesigned for prisons so that they cannot be used to create weapons or means of escape. For example, toothbrushes are made with very small handles and brush fibers that will not melt into a glue-like substance so that they cannot be made into shivs. Of course, such specialized items were introduced by prison staff only after they experienced a bit too much Truth in Television. Even with all these precautions, prisoners continue to innovate new methods of creating weapons and other contraband (such as alcohol) from items provided to them. One prisoner featured on MSNBC's Lock-Up created a surprisingly effective shiv out of several pieces of hard candy. Others have fashioned functioning shivs out of toilet paper (used as papier mache) and with lots and lots of matches.
- Frank Morris and the Anglen brothers, Clarence and John, escaped from the "inescapable" Alcatraz off the coast of San Francisco by making a raft and life jackets out of raincoats, hiding the holes they dug from their cell with fake vents made of cardboard, and putting fake dummy heads in their beds, complete with real hair from the barber shop. Experts disagree on whether they could have made it to shore or not with the materials they had. Adam and Jamie of MythBusters called this one plausible. They were also able to whip up a variety of nasty implements including a functional crossbow from items one could get in jail; like underwear elastic and newspaper.
- John Giles, the other escapee from Alcatraz. While working in Alcatraz's laundry room, he managed to assemble a complete army uniform by stealing one piece of clothing at a time. He simply put it on, stepped onto a departing military launch as if he had every right to be there, and would've been able to walk away a free man at its destination, had a random head-count not betrayed his absence.
- The suicide of William Kogut in San Quentin Prison in 1930 when he fashioned a pipe bomb out of a pack of playing cards, a hollow iron bed leg, and some water.
- Legendary bank robber John Dillinger was held at the Lake County Jail in Crown Point, Indiana in February 1934, awaiting trial for the murder of Officer William O'Malley during Dillinger's January 15th robbery of the First National Bank in East Chicago. Dillinger carved a piece of the chair in his cell to look like a gun and painted it black with shoe polish that his captors thoughtfully provided. He then held one of the guards at "gunpoint." Even though Dillinger was still inside the jail cell, the guard was tricked opened the door and released him. Dillinger snagged a few real machine guns, locked up all the guards, stole a police car, and escaped.
- The case of John Hunt Morgan, a Confederate General captured during the Civil War. Morgan and several of his officers escaped from an Ohio prison by digging through the floor of their cells to reach an airspace underneath the prison and then dug out to the courtyard. In order to finalize their escape, the prisoners utilized tied-up bed sheets to climb the outer wall. As an added bonus, a mocking note was left for their guards which included a summary of how many hours of work the escape had required and thanked the guards for their hospitality.
- Castle Colditz, a supposedly inescapable Nazi prison where the Reich bunched up its more troublesome prisoners, i.e. those who had already attempted to or escaped from other prison camps. The fact that the castle itself was a very, very poor prison in and of itself was compounded by the ingenuity of its inmates. One of the last attempts before the war ended involved a full-blown glider built in one of the attics. Although the prisoners didn't get a chance to use it, it probably would have worked. The launch mechanism was a bathtub full of concrete to be pushed out a window.
- It isn't quite an escape attempt, but during World War 2 these guys built a working radio set from scratch inside of a Japanese POW camp.
- The "Great Escape" from Stalag Luft III involved the prisoners hiding the tunnel they were building with a Wooden Gymnastics Horse built from Red Cross crates. The trick involved marking the ground to measure their jumps (actually to mark where their tunnel was), and hiding men, supplies, and dirt inside the hollow horse to let them dig while the other prisoners "played". Ultimately it was a huge success: even with a major setback, a jaw-dropping 76 men exited through the tunnel in a single night, three men (Lieutenant Michael Codner, Flight Lieutenant Eric Williams, and Flight Lieutenant Oliver Philpot) actually managed to evade capture and make their way back home, and they accomplished their secondary objective of throwing a Spanner in the Works by forcing the Germans to use a massive amount of manpower to guard the camp from that point forward. All that healthy exercise couldn't have hurt either.
- Escape Rooms are basically designed to be this on purpose. The clues to getting out of the room are built into the room itself. Sometimes they involve kludging together some items to improvise a solution, and other times it just involves finding an alternative item to open a lock that otherwise has no key present.
