Techno Wizard



The Techno Wizard is the guy or girl who can make a computer or electronic device do anything.

Among other things, they know all the Magical Databases; they know how to use the Enhance Button and the Facial Recognition Software for the best results; they can look at a wall covered with Billions of Buttons and immediately figure out which unlabeled one is the one that turns off the Self Destruct Mechanism; they can jury-rig an iPod into an Everything Sensor.

They may or may not be a Mad Scientist as well, depending on how fantastic the show is. They will often have Machine Empathy, especially for devices they use regularly.

Compare the Gadgeteer Genius, who is more mechanically-inclined than electronically-inclined, and the Technopath, who is capable of performing literal magic with technology.

Anime and Manga

 * Washuu in Tenchi Muyo.
 * Li Kohran in Sakura Taisen.
 * Sailor Moon: Ami Mizumo (Sailor Mercury).
 * The heroes and villains of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha are a borderline example.
 * Ed from Cowboy Bebop.
 * Hasegawa Chisame from Mahou Sensei Negima became one after her pactio.
 * The titular character from Battle Programmer Shirase. He can take on even the most skilled and well-equipped hacker with just a cellphone.
 * Nina from Ultra Maniac literally * is* a Techno Wizard because she needs to use a PC to cast spells due to her lack of skill.
 * Yuki Nagato from Suzumiya Haruhi. She hacked a computer game while playing and disabled the cheating of it's creators they were playing against. She played it from the motherfucking code. And she learned all those computer skills in a matter of days, as you can see her typing faster and faster every day. Of course,
 * Although much of Section 9 from Ghost in The Shell Stand Alone Complex counts, The Laughing Man leads the pack: he can, in a matter of moments, subvert an entire crowd's cybernetic eyes and show them what he wants them to see.

Comic Books

 * The Wizard, enemy of the Fantastic Four.
 * By a similar token, the chief scientist of The DCU's OSS is codenamed "Sorcerer".
 * Oracle (for the good guys) and Calculator (for the Rogues Gallery). Savant (a Birds of Prey rogue) has a few shades of this.
 * The Pied Piper/Hartley from The Flash series.
 * Gold Digger: Brianna Diggers
 * Forge from the various X Men continuities.

Film

 * Best-known film example: Q from the James Bond films.
 * Jones in The Hunt for Red October both as movie and book.

Literature

 * Special mention ought to go to Ponder Stibbons from the Discworld series, a literal wizard, and one of the few who know how to work with the Unseen University's literal Magical Computer, Hex.
 * Also Charles Stross' The Laundry Series, which includes a Palm Treo being turned into a
 * Foaly the centaur from the Artemis Fowl series.
 * Ax was the Animorphs resident techno whiz, due to Andalite knowledge being highly advanced compared to our own.

Live Action TV

 * Marshall on Alias is the current top-dog Techno-Wiz.
 * Both McGee and Abby from NCIS fill this role as the plot demands.
 * Chloe Sullivan on Smallville
 * The Technomages of Babylon Five.
 * Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
 * Jenny Calendar was first.
 * Any lab tech from CSI.
 * Adam on CSI: NY
 * Tosh in Torchwood.
 * Mickey Smith and the Doctor on Doctor Who.
 * Rodney and Sam from the Stargate verse.
 * Alec Hardison from Leverage embodies this trope - he can hack anything (except a hick). Bonus points awarded for the fact that, like a real life hacker, he uses social engineering almost as much as technical know-how to get what he wants...although he does have a tendency to take things a bit too far.
 * Interestingly, the characters of Leverage match rather well to an RPG, with Hardison in the role of the wizard.
 * Mac in Veronica Mars.
 * Penelope Garcia of Criminal Minds.
 * Topher from Dollhouse.
 * Any chief engineer from any Star Trek series: Montgomery Scott, Geordi LaForge, Miles O'Brien, B'Elanna Torres, or Trip Tucker.
 * Primeval's Adorkable genius Connor Temple. Among other magic, dude built the anomaly detector (and handheld versions) AND the anomaly locker AND figured out how to program a piece of future tech without ever having seen the equipment before. Now if he could just reverse-engineer Abby...
 * Orion  of Chuck fame is revered as a Techno God by pretty much every organisation in the show.
 * Chuck himself is quite adept, being able to bypass FULCRUM-encryption in minutes, amongst other things. He uses these skills to great effect as a Badass Normal, in season five.
 * Nikita - Birkhoff, Division's chief computer expert. Bonus points for designing his own computer network (Shadownet) and making it look enough like a computer game that any of Division's recruits can easily learn how to use it.
 * Cole on Tracker could do just about anything with human computers, including MacGyvering complex technologies from household items.
 * Several Power Rangers characters qualify; usually if there's one person responsible for development and maintenance of the team's gear. This can be either the team's Smart Guy or a separate Mission Control character. The list of these people can include Billy, Miss Fairweather, Trip, Cam, Hayley, Kat Manx, Dr. K, and Antonio.

Video Games

 * Naomi from Metal Gear Solid plays this role in the first game (with some help from Mei Ling); Otacon in the second.
 * Otacon's techno-wizardry in Stray is played up to the extent that he manages to build a homemade Time Machine.
 * Professor Edwin Gadd, Mario series (specifically, Luigi's Mansion.).

Web Original

 * Bugs, Delta Spike, and just about all the other devisers and gadgeteers (there's a difference!) in the Whateley Universe.
 * The Bastard Operator From Hell.
 * The Wireless Wizard from Teen Girl Squad.

Webcomic

 * One of Remula's personalities in Web Comic/Jix}} named Lamerix is constantly creating weird devices that wreak havoc in the comic. Even before Lamerix surfaced, Remula reverse engineered a device she had seen briefly.

Western Animation

 * Wade Load in Kim Possible.
 * Tucker from Danny Phantom, who seems to be able to hack just about anything from his PDA, or failing that, with any of the other half-a-dozen tech gadgets he's constantly carrying around.
 * "Brains" from Thunderbirds.
 * TechRat from Jem
 * Walter "Doc" Hartford from Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers is a AI Psychiatrist.
 * In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Donatello definitely fits the trope-- humorously, he's been referred to as a wizard on more than one occasion: the Back to the Sewers episode "Superquest", and constantly called "Mr. Wizard" by his dimensional counterpart in Turtles Forever.

Real Life

 * Given that the majority of computer users don't step far outside of video games, browsing the internet and email, pretty much anyone with an education in the subject beyond high school level can appear to be this.
 * Hell if you can write a bash script you can appear to be this.
 * That said, old school hacker purists will always maintain that there is a clear and important difference between "hacking" (i.e., using an original, creative and/or unconventional procedure to get a computer or system to do something useful) and "cracking" (achieving unauthorized access to a secure system, usually for nefarious ends but occasionally just to see what's there or prove that one can do it.) Hackers in the original sense generally disdain and have no use for crackers, who are widely seen as inferior in terms of their knowledge and skill level, and who often use widely-known exploits to do Bad Things. See Script Kiddie. Hollywood almost always ignores this distinction, to the extreme consternation of those that care about such minutiae.
 * That said, some people think that's just silly. The only reason you see so much obvious stupidity around computer cracking is the power-complex involved; there is just as much stupidity in computer programming circles. It also doesn't help that most "ordinary" programmer/IT people, contrary to what one might think, have next to no technical insight into computer security. Hint: serious computer cracking is hard.