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It has been suggested that this article be split into articles entitled Exposition (plot device) and Plot dump . (Discuss)

Exposition is a literary technique by which information is conveyed about events that have occurred prior to the beginning of a novel, play, movie or other work of fiction. This information can be presented through dialogue, description, news reports, or even directly through narrative. Because exposition generally does not advance plot and may impede present-time action, it is usually best kept in short and succinct form, though in some genres, such as the mystery, exposition is central to the story structure itself. Image File history File links Information_icon. ... Image File history File links Derived from public domain images featured at: http://commons. ... Plot dump or exposition is a term used by the movie and television industries to describe a plot device by which critical elements of the plot, often involving the back-story, are not depicted directly but are instead elaborated in dialogue by one of the characters or by a narrator. ... Mystery fiction is a distinct subgenre of detective fiction that entails the occurrence of an unknown event which requires the protagonist to make known (or solve). ...

Problems with exposition

When the presentation of exposition becomes awkward or wordy, it is sometimes referred to by the pejorative expressions plot dump and info dump. In written fiction, the term is additionally used to indicate giving information by exposition rather than revelation through action and dialogue; if such passages are well-written and intriguing, they may be described as "info-dumping" with no pejorative intent. This method has long been used in classic drama and modern productions where the plot is the consequence of preceding events that would either weigh down the production or would reveal too much, spoiling the mystery. Exposition is also necessary in some dramas since it is can be from the point of view and perception of a character, and may or may not accurately reveal the facts. Examples of such well done exposition include Shakespeare's Hamlet and the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... The third quarto of Hamlet (1605); a straight reprint of the 2nd quarto (1604) The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare and is one of his best-known and most-quoted plays. ... Forbidden Planet is a classic 1956 science fiction film and a subsequent novelization by W.J. Stuart. ...

An early form of exposition known as the "prologue" was practiced in theatre, for example, Oedipus the King by the Greek dramatist Sophocles. Many of the plays of Shakespeare begin with a character coming forward and speaking the prologue to set the scene - Romeo and Juliet being one of the best-known examples. In Hamlet, he has the exposition performed by Bernardo, Marcellus and Horatio in the first scene, and by Hamlet's father's ghost in Act I, Scene IV. Serge Sudeikins poster for the Bat Theatre (1922). ... Oedipus the King (also known as Oedipus Rex and Oedipus Tyrannos, Oι̉δίπoÏ…Ï‚ τύραννoÏ‚ in Greek) is a Greek tragedy, written by Sophocles in 428 BC. The play was the second of Sophocles three Theban plays to be produced, but comes first in the internal chronology of the plays, followed... Sophocles, as depicted in the Nordisk familjebok. ... William Shakespeare—born April 1564; baptised April 26, 1564; died April 23, 1616 (O.S.), May 3, 1616 (N.S.)—has a reputation as the greatest of all writers in English. ... The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet, commonly referred to as Romeo and Juliet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare concerning the fate of two young turkeys being eaten for Thanksgiving. ... The third quarto of Hamlet (1605); a straight reprint of the 2nd quarto (1604) The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is a tragedy by William Shakespeare and is one of his best-known and most-quoted plays. ...

The term is usually invoked in a derisive sense, however. Plot dumps at the beginning of a movie are often tolerated as a necessity for setting the premise of the plot; this is the case for such widely-acclaimed movies as Casablanca and Star Wars. However, a plot dump expressed by characters in dialogue during the course of the movie is often taken to be indicative of an inferior narrative. Examples of the latter sense often take the form of one character explaining elaborate details regarding another character that would seem exaggerated and out-of-place in real-life conversation. Casablanca is a 1942 movie set during World War II in the Vichy-controlled Moroccan city of Casablanca. ... This movie poster for Star Wars depicts many of the films important elements, such as Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han Solo, X-Wing and Y-Wing fighters Star Wars, retitled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope in 1981 (see note at Title,) is the original (and in chronological...

A stereotypical and exaggerated example of inferior plot dump would be:

Joe: Who's at the door?

Mary: Oh, it's my uncle, who was released from prison yesterday after serving ten years for stealing the family jewels from this very house, although the jewels themselves have never been found and are rumored to be buried in a secret chamber guarded by the ghost of my late grandmother.

Particularly egregious examples which involve characters discussing facts already well known to both of them are sometimes referred to by the phrase "As you know, Bob"[1], [2] (sometimes the other character will even say something like, "Why are you telling me this? I was there," to which an unconvincing reply will be given - for an example, see Marvel Comics' first X-Factor series, where Cyclops makes this remark during a backstory review). Fans of the X-Files call this phenomenon "cabbage head syndrome" (where the person listening to the exposition is the "cabbage head"). This is parodied in the following exchange from the fifth season of the television series Angel: Marvel Comics is an American comic book line published by Marvel Entertainment, Inc. ... It has been suggested that X-Factor Investigations be merged into this article or section. ... X-Files intro from first 8 seasons The X-Files was a popular 1990s American science fiction television series created by Chris Carter. ... Angel is a spin-off from the American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. ...

Fred: What, because we're crusaders against evil and now the law firm that represents most of the evil in the world has given us its LA branch to run however we want, probably in an attempt to corrupt, divide, or destroy us, and we all said yes in, like, three minutes?

Wesley: Your run-on sentences have gotten a lot less pointless

Interior monologue is also sometimes used (again notably in Marvel Comics) to review the previous episode of a story for the sake of the readers. This was parodied in the comic book Cerebus where the character The 'Roach, a parody of super heroes, would think "It's hard to believe that..." followed by a very lengthy recount of the entire story. A monologue, which comes from the Greek words mono and logos meaning one word, is a speech by one person directly addressing an audience. ... Cerebus the Aardvark (or simply Cerebus) was an ambitious monthly independent comic book begun by Canadian artist Dave Sim in 1977, and running for 300 issues and 6,000 pages, through March 2004. ...

More realistic but still somewhat crude is the "idiot lecture", in which a character who knows nothing is used as an excuse to give extensive backstory. This technique was widely used in science fiction of the 1930s (the "Golden Age of Science Fiction") to give the technological background to the story; the scientist would lecture an ignorant, often young character on how his invention worked. The technique is still in use for this purpose (for example, in Jurassic Park; with supernatural lore in Mulder's lectures in "The X-Files"; with history, as in The Da Vinci Code, or with nautical terminology in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series.). An amusing variant on telling another character, or displaying text on-screen, occurs in the Hammer film studio's Dracula, in which the character Van Helsing plays himself a home-made phonograph record of his detailing the particulars of vampirism and sits still, alone, while it plays. The Golden Age of Science Fiction, often recognized as a period from the early 1940s through the 1950s, was an era during which the science fiction genre gained wide public attention and many classic science fiction stories were published. ... Jurassic Park is a novel written by Michael Crichton that was published in 1990. ... The X-Files is an American television series created by Chris Carter. ... The Da Vinci Code is a 2006 feature film based on the bestselling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code, by author Dan Brown. ... Patrick OBrian (December 12, 1914 – January 2, 2000; original name Richard Patrick Russ) was a novelist and translator, best known for his Aubrey–Maturin series of novels set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and centered on the friendship of Captain Jack Aubrey and an Irish–Catalan... The Aubrey–Maturin series, also known as the Aubreyad, is a sequence of 20 historical novels by Patrick OBrian, set during the Napoleonic Wars and centring on the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his ships surgeon Stephen Maturin, who is also a physician... Dracula is a 1958 British horror film, and the first of a series of Hammer Horror films inspired by the Bram Stoker novel Dracula. ...

Villains are frequently given to making speeches about their sinister plans to helpless heroes, often foolishly prefacing their exposition with the comment that it can't hurt to divulge the plan, since the hero will be dead soon anyway. This is known as the villain speech or monologuing. James Bond villains and comic book supervillains are particularly prone to it, and it is seldom even given such justification as the villain's desire to have his cleverness admired by the one man who could appreciate the extent. One popular concept of the villain, meant to mimic the purposely distinctive visage of villains from silent films of the early 20th century. ... From the Greek , in mythology and folklore, a hero (male) or heroine (female) usually fulfills the definitions of what is considered good and noble in the originating culture. ... A monologue is a speech made by one person speaking his or her thoughts aloud or directly addressing a reader, audience or character. ... The James Bond 007 gun logo James Bond 007 is a fictional British agent [1] created by writer Ian Fleming in 1952. ... A comic book is a magazine or book containing the art form of comics. ... The Green Goblin, a supervillain and enemy of Spider-Man. ...

Plot dump tends to be more tolerated on television than in the movies because the narrative of television episodes is shorter. Plot dumps are especially common in sit-coms in the introduction of non-recurring characters which drive the comedic plot of a particular episode. In serial television drama, exposition in individual episodes is often relegated to a brief montage of scenes from earlier episodes, prefaced with the phrase "Previously on [name of series]." A sitcom or situation comedy is a genre of comedy performance originally devised for radio but today typically found on television. ... Comedy has a classical meaning (comical theatre) and a popular one (the use of humour with an intent to provoke laughter in general). ... Serial drama is a television genre defining a weekly prime time television series that has a continuing plot that enfolds in a serial fashion, episode by episode. ...

In television sketch comedy, which itself borrows heavily from the tradition of vaudeville comedy, plot dump in the most exaggerated sense is often used explicitly for outrageous comedic effect. In this case, plot dump is not seen as a weakness but as a standard and necessary aspect of the genre which is expected by audiences. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Vaudeville is a style of multi-act theatre which flourished in North America from the 1880s through the 1920s. ...

Examples of exposition

The Austin Powers film series has a character named Basil Exposition whose job was to repeatedly plot dump as a parody of the process in ordinary movies. Mike Myers as Austin Powers in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. ...

The series Mystery Science Theater 3000 always mocked movies who made blatant use of this practice. For example, in Parts: The Clonus Horror, there is a scene where a character views a videotape that explains the organization's origins and purpose in painstaking detail, basically providing all of the necessary exposition in one fell swoop. Tom Servo quips, "Good thing he wandered into the Department of Backstory!" Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988–1999), usually abbreviated MST3K, is an American cult television comedy series created by Joel Hodgson and produced by Best Brains, Inc. ... Tom Servo and his friends. ...

The Lew Archer mystery novels by the late Ross Macdonald, AKA Kenneth Millar, make excellent use of exposition. Especially in the later novels of the series, the entire plot is concerned with the teasing out of family histories dating back for decades and the discovery of long-hidden murders and child abuse. Lew Archer is a fictional character created by Ross Macdonald. ... Ross MacDonald (born January 24, 1965 in Vancouver, British Columbia) is a Canadian sailor. ...

Plot dumps are parodied in the movie Spaceballs when Colonel Sandurz explains a plan to Dark Helmet, though Dark Helmet should have already known the plan. Dark Helmet then faced the camera and, breaking the fourth wall, asked the audience "Everybody got that?" to parody the true purpose of the plot dump. Spaceballs is a science fiction spoof film written, directed by, and starring Mel Brooks. ... The fourth wall is the imaginary invisible wall at the front of the stage in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. ...

The novel Eldest by Christopher Paolini, uses the elven training of main character Eragon for several "idiot lectures" on magic and elven culture. Eldest is the second book in the Inheritance trilogy, written by Christopher Paolini. ... Christopher Paolini (born November 17, 1983) is an American writer of fantasy fiction, best known as being the author of the Inheritance trilogy, which consists of the books Eragon, Eldest, and an as-yet-unreleased third book whose title has not been revealed. ... Eragon is a novel written by Christopher Paolini. ...

The character Mr. Gibbs in Pirates of the Carribean tells Will (and in doing so, the audience) of Jack's past with the Black Pearl in the first film, and in the second film tells the legend of Davy Jones and the Kraken. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is a movie of adventure and romance set in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century. ...

Several villains in the Nickelodeon series Danny Phantom have been prone to plot dumping, especially the recurring technology ghost, Nicolai Technus. This is made into a running gag in the episode "Identity Crisis." In that episode, Technus claims to have upgraded himself, one of the advantages of the upgrade being that he would no longer shout his nefarious plot into the sky. He was able to maintain this for most of the episode (at one point even criticizing Danny for shouting something into the air himself), but eventually dictates his plot to himself near victory, immediately afterwards saying, "Nobody heard that, right?" Danny Phantom is an American animated television series created by Butch Hartman for Nickelodeon, produced by Billionfold Studios. ... Nicolai Technus (possibly a play on the scientist Nikola Tesla) is a villain in the cartoon Danny Phantom. ...

In every episode of CSI, CSI: Miami, and CSI: NY, one of the main characters will explain how they discovered a key piece of evidence, and the scientific basis for that discovery to another main character (i.e. the cabbage head). CSI may stand for: Crime Scene Investigation, a term for forensics CSI: Crime Scene Investigation , a popular television show about forensic scientists CSI: Miami, a spin-off show of the above CSI: NY, another spin-off of the above CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (computer game), a spin-off game CSI... CSI: Miami is a spinoff of the popular CBS network series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. ... CSI: NY (working title CSI: New York) is an American police procedural television series which premiered on September 22, 2004. ...