I just finished reading a taped-up, yellowed paperback copy of Forfeit by Dick Francis. The setup for the climactic chase sequence starts with the antagonist threatening to kill the protagonist’s wife and ends with his forcing him to chug twelve ounces of whiskey. The point of the whiskey is explicitly ambiguous:
I didn’t know whether Vjoesterod had made me drink for any special purpose or just from bloody-mindedness. I did know that it was a horrible complication to what I had planned to do.
Exactly! It’s a sack race: an arbitrary handicap to make the sequence more interesting. Diabolus ex machina. Does for the third act what a MacGuffin does for the first. An excellent device! Stowing it in my tackle box now…
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