Nathan Bransford - The Forums

GAHH!!!

Readin a book at the moment where there's a twist in the plot where one brother steals the identity of another, but uses the confusion to lead a more altruistic life than either of them had before hand......

....Thing is this feels like it's been done before. Like a criminal comes out of prison and is mistaken for a priest, or a twin kills his wife beating brother, but takes his brothers place....that sort of plot.

But I can't for the life of me think of any book or film or TV show I've seen where it happens. And it's driving me nuts!

Any ideas?

Are you reading Brent Weeks, Hillsy?

I'm not aware of the twist in the exact same way he did it, though mistaken identity or identity stealing is not a new idea. Man In the Iron Mask, for example.

Yep - rolled my eyes and thought "Heard that a dozen times before"....then promptly couldn't remember a single one!

In Lost, Mr. Eko is dressed as a priest to do a drug run on a small airplane. His brother, who is a priest, comes to warn him that the police or military are on their way to arrest him. His brother gets shot and dies, and Mr. Eko takes his place as a priest.

Could that be what you are thinking of?

My first thought was the movie Face/Off - John Travolta and Nicholas Cage switch faces and chase each other around the other person's life. While not strictly following the format you laid out, there are a lot of similiar elements there.

It's not an exact match up, but it did remind me of Les Miserables. There's no brother in the mix though.

I also thought of Lost's Mr. Eko

There is also The Ringer. The series on WB staring Sarah Michelle Gellar. I haven't seen it, but from what I understand the bad twin takes the good twin's identity only to find out that the good twin really isn't that good.

I definately watched the early series of lost, and I remember Mr Eko now, so it could well be that....I've not seen the Ringer, but I know the premise.

I think it might have been the plot of a CSI episode at one point because I've got something lodged in my head about a man shacking up with his brother's wife in order to be a better man......either that or I'm suffering from some strange vitamin difficiency where I'm generating whole plotlines as a byproduct of some chemical imbalance or other.

I wouldn't obsess (yeah, I know, coming from me...) about it. It's the rare idea that's never been done before. Most great stories are not blindingly original (if they were, they might be hard to love), but rather the whole package fits together beautifully. The voice of the writer, the personality of the characters, the specifics of the plot, they all combine to create something new, even if pieces of it are similar to things that have gone before.