Prototype

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"My most hated plot device is the "stolen prototype." For some reason, nearly all series and quite a few movies do this. It's as if no one in Hollywood has ever been involved in any engineering project, ever.

The problem is never "someone else is going to figure out how my wonderful invention works," which would be a decent plot, but instead they always tend to go with "someone has stolen the only working prototype, and if we don't get it back we'll never be able to get our invention to market," or something similar.

If an inventor has built a marvelous invention and built a prototype that works, he's likely built dozens of intermediate steps, and has copious notes on every aspect of the device. It should take only a matter of hours to take the previous attempt and modify it to the specs of the working prototype.

In fact, that would make a decent plot twist: have a movie that was predicated on the assumption that the protagonist can just steal the prototype to prevent the antagonist from causing great harm, only to end up having to fight him anyway with another copy of the device because "you silly fool, did you think I can't make another? After all, I made that one!""