Blocked could really use some help

If it's high-tech, he could go low-tech, use the blueprints, and escape through a ventilation shaft.

Or, he could knock out an orderly or a doctor, use the uniform, and fake his way out.

He could stage a mass escape and walk out with the other mental patients.

How far in the future is this script set, BTW?

You've just made your own key.

Futuristic means there's going to be world building involved - and you get to cheat. Work out cool as hell way to escape, then go back through your worldbuilding around the prison and look at what security measures you're putting in place

Then break them all.

Not much, but enough that the failsafe not being there makes sense, but can be exploited. A really good example of this is CCTV. You constantly see it in movies where a tech guy records a video loop and plugs it into the CCTV feed. No one blinks an eyelid at the fact there isn't a safeguard in place - even though you think by now someone would've fixed it.

If you want it "surprising, yet inevitable", you gotta layer in the backstory. Remember your book isn't eternal. So just have him break out in whatever way you think is cool, then work out what needs to change in the world-building for that to happen. Then edit for stupid, so it seems reasonable.

Most plot "near misses" are Deus Ex Machina, it's just most of them have travelled through time to make sure the conditions are right....

Try to write a bit of backstory and create something like that for the characters as well and build from there. Good luck!

No matter how advanced the technology, there will always be human fallibility. It's almost always easier to engineer a person's behavior than hack or crack a bit of technology. That's one way to do it.

Maybe some sort of patient revolt? Power outage and little staff to deal with it b/c they rely so heavily on technology? What if the "therapists" treating him are actually non-human (robots? computers?) and he finds a way to reprogram them? Some sort of external uprising/war that destroys part of the hospital? An accomplice poses as a doctor/police/etc and helps him escape? Maybe a computer glitch/virus/hack lists him as released?

Could your character be really good with technology and be able to find some loophole in the security system, or know a way to trick or override it? Or maybe the security system uses a fingerprint scanner and the character knows a way to lift fingerprints off something else a doctor has touched and use it?

What you are facing is not what is termed as writers block.

quianaa2001 said:

I want to write a spec script but the thing is I have the overall idea which is about a man being wrongly detained in a mental hospital, but I can't figure out how he should escape at the end.

It's a high tech mental hospital in the future and the trapped man is smart and clever.

I am just blocked on this part! It's really frustrating!

Please any thoughts and ideas are GREATLY appreciated!

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Don't assume he should escape at the end. He could help someone else escape and be left behind.