![]() ![]() It makes for a great moment of connection between an author and a reader. "At the same time, paradoxically, a twist makes the reading or viewing experience less passive, more dynamic: we suddenly have to sit up and take notice, cast our minds back, cast them forward, piece things together in a new way. "I think what we want from a novel or a film is the sense that there's a creative, controlling intelligence in charge of it, and a twist really brings that home to you," Waters tells BBC Culture. ![]() Her novels Affinity (1999) and The Little Stranger (2009) both feature them, while her much loved 2002 book Fingersmith, a gothic crime story which features an elaborate scheme to have a young heiress committed to an asylum, is widely acknowledged as having one of the great twists in modern literature. Of course, there are plenty of brilliant film and TV plot twists we're still talking about decades later: the state of the health of Norman Bates's mother in Psycho the location of the Planet of the Apes the identity of Fight Club's Tyler Durden Luke Skywalker's family tree the end of psychological horror Jacob's Ladder (Adrian Lyne's original 1990 film, starring Tim Robbins, not the 2019 remake), which owed a lot to the famous short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by 19th-Century American writer Ambrose Bierce.Īward-winning novelist Sarah Waters is a celebrated doyenne of the literary plot twist. "Mind you, we’re all still talking about it decades later, so maybe it wasn’t so bad after all." ![]() ![]() So the poor scribblers had to show Bobby in the shower and come up with the ludicrous idea that the entire season had been another character's dream," he says. "Duffy decided he wanted to leave the series so the writers reluctantly killed him off, only for Duffy to change his mind. Pharoah suggests the gold standard in this kind of bad twist was set by Dallas, with its infamous "it was all a dream" season 9 ending, which saw the character of Bobby Ewing, played by Patrick Duffy, miraculously reappear in a shower scene after dying at the end of the previous series. But a huge, unheralded, clunking great twist that hasn't been planted or set up or earned – the dreaded d eus ex machina – can be deeply unsatisfying." "At the end of Ashes to Ashes, when we revealed that Philip Glenister's Hunt was really a sort of angel who helped dead, broken cops into heaven, there were dozens of clues the audience remembered and which gave the ending closure and satisfaction. "Writing plot twists is really about surprising audiences in a way that makes them think back to the book or film and get the satisfaction of realising the twist was already there waiting to discovered," Pharoah tells BBC Culture. In fact, the publisher of Pinborough's 2017 novel thought the final revelation was such a selling point that it made it a focus of its marketing campaign, devising a Twitter hashtag (#WTFThatEnding) which viewers of the TV adaptation have adopted. Adele and David have a very weird relationship which is eventually explained by an out-of-the-blue double whammy of plot twists which seem to owe as much to the occult thrillers of Dennis Wheatley as to conventional psychological thrillers. She begins an affair with him but also strikes up a friendship with his wife, Adele, who once spent time in a psychiatric facility. In the hit psychological drama, adapted from Sarah Pinborough’s bestseller of the same name, a young single mother, Louise, has a flirtatious evening with a stranger, David, in a London bar, only to find out that he is her new boss and married. Warning: this article contains plot spoilers for Behind Her Eyes and others. With many of us around the world still locked down, TV has been a particular focal point for conversation this year – and few series have inspired more talk than Netflix thriller Behind Her Eyes. ![]()
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