Government Warehouse
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The Government Warehouse is a plot device used in movies, television series, and novels, a scenario used in role-playing games, and a belief of some conspiracy theorists. The concept is that there is a secret government warehouse where various items are stored of whose existence the government wants the general populace to remain ignorant.
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Plot device in fiction
In fiction, the Government Warehouse is a plot device used for conveniently disposing of story elements that have fulfilled their purpose in a story, but that would cause consistency or continuity problems for subsequent (or previous) stories in the same fictional setting were they to remain. In many cases, the story items disposed of are of such a nature that they would make it difficult to set up the necessary tensions and conflicts for others stories in the fictional setting, as they would make such tensions and conflicts simple to resolve.
A secondary purpose of the Government Warehouse plot device is to satirize the ineptitude of governments, the premise being that if a government found itself in possession of an extraordinary object or person, it would simply catalogue it and lose it in a vast filing system.
Perhaps the most well-known instances of the Government Warehouse plot device are the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark and the television series The X-Files. At the end of the movie, the Ark of the Covenant is hidden away in a (United States) Government Warehouse, explaining its disappearance from the Indiana Jones fictional universe. (The shot of the warehouse is believed to be an allusion to the final scene of Citizen Kane, where there is a similar shot of a private warehouse.) The television series is replete with characters and objects with unusual properties and powers that would complicate the fictional setting, or make it too simple for characters to achieve the goals that they quest for, and the Government Warehouse plot device is heavily used to explain the absence of the characters and objects, and to make the goals difficult to achieve. The plot device is in fact a central element of the series.
The Government Warehouse is not the only way that inconveniently powerful persons and objects are disposed of. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the plot is arranged such that the Holy Grail, a source of miraculous healing and immortality and thus a potential inconvenience to other stories, falls into a crevasse and is lost at the end of the film. Terry Pratchett has arranged for equally inconvenient magical objects in the Discworld novels to fall into the sea and to sink to the bottom "thereby vanishing from history".
Sometimes items are recovered from Government Warehouses in order to construct derived fictional settings. In the first episode of the War of the Worlds a triad of war machines is collected from a Government Warehouse ("Hanger 15") where they had been stored since an invasion in 1953, thus linking the television series to the 1953 film The War of the Worlds.
References
External links
- Screenshot of the Government Warehouse (http://www.indyfan.com/gallery/wander/raiders/warehouse.jpg) from Raiders of the Lost Ark
RPG scenarios
The concept of a Government Warehouse has been used as a fun scenario for role-playing games:
- Template:Web reference — an attempt to construct an RPG scenario of a Government Warehouse containing every famous item ever mentioned in fiction or a conspiracy theory as being lost or suppressed
- Template:Web reference — Notice that in this later version the introduction has been removed and replaced by seals denoting United States government agencies and a purported security classification notice, giving a greater impression of realism.
- Template:Web reference — an even more detailed attempt to do the same thing, that even includes a classification system for the objects, and includes objects that logically could not possibly be contained in such a warehouse (The planet Earth was demolished in the plot(s) of the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, therefore the spaceship Heart of Gold could not be stored in a Government Warehouse on Earth.)
Conspiracy theory
The belief of some conspiracy theorists is that the Government Warehouses exist, containing suppressed inventions, archaeological and historical evidence that contradicts mainstream theory, and objects that have famously been lost. The Vatican Secret Archives and the storage areas of the Smithsonian Institution are claimed to be real Government Warehouses.