Idiot Ball/Live-Action TV

Examples of Idiot Ball in Live-Action TV.

"Avon: None of us showed conspicuous intelligence on this occasion."
 * In the original V, our hero has been captured by the alien leader, Diana, and injected with a truth serum so that he will have no choice but to reveal the identity of the spy within her ranks. The serum doesn't work as well as it should and our hero is able to resist it. Does he pretend that it's worked so that he can lie convincingly to Diana and throw her off track? No. He defiantly lets her know that it hasn't worked by answering her first easy question (What colour are my eyes?) wrongly. Unsurprisingly, Diana's response is to inject him again. This time it works fully and he is forced to tell the truth, causing near disaster for the resistance.
 * Falling Skies has a few in just one episode. Tom tells us a few times that Pope is a really bad guy, so when they take him to find motorbikes he's guarded by Dai. Dai and Pope end up in a back of the bike shop and for some reason Dai turns his back on Pope and looks for something. Pope then knocks him out and flees from the group. In the same bike shop one of the skitters wall crawls his way to an advantageous spot above Tom and Dai who are completely focused on escape from the child soldiers, so what does it do? It jumps on the desk below it, makes a bunch of noise and gets filled with lead.
 * Friends, when Monica believed that Chandler found sharks sexually arousing ("The One with the Sharks").
 * Also the one where Chandler believes Monica wants plastic surgery.
 * Perhaps half, if not more, of Friends episodes center on someone grabbing the Idiot Ball and making a hash out of situations that should be very simple. Ross and Rachel spent ten years playing Idiot Ball hot potato.
 * Joey's level of stupidity bordered on the inane at times, including being unable to repeat the simplest of French syllables.
 * Every episode of Three's Company.
 * Friends even had a Take That against the show in one episode, when they're all watching the show and Chandler says something to the effect of "Oh, this is the episode of Three's Company where there's some sort of misunderstanding." Phoebe replies "Then I've already seen this one," and switches the TV off. On the other hand, if it's constantly in play it's not the idiot ball: they may be just idiots in general.
 * Hogan's Heroes had a good deal of this for Those Wacky Nazis.
 * Every episode of Bewitched.
 * The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Unification part 2." So, the villainous Romulan Sela has revealed her plan to invade and occupy Vulcan, but it's critical that Star Fleet not be warned ahead of time. Across from her is seated Captain Jean Luc Picard, Lt. Commander Data, and Ambassador fuckin' Spock-three of the smartest and most bad ass characters in all of Star Trek - whom she has managed to capture. So what does she do now? Leave the three of them in her office. Unattended. And with access to her computer. Geez, it's like she wasn't even trying.
 * The invasion force consisted of a mere 2,000 soldiers. Pacifists or not, that's a very pathetic number.
 * Sela also held an idiot ball in "Redemption Part 2." where she was supplying the House of Duras during the Klingon Civil War. The Federation decided to make an anti-cloak net by having some Applied Phlebotinum beams between a fleet of ships, resulting in a standoff. Not once does Sela or the crew of any of the other ships think that maybe, since Space is big and all, that she could just fly AROUND the net.
 * There's also Tasha Yar in "Datalore". The rest of the crew didn't do much better, but special mention must go to the chief of security for failing to recognize that a perfect twin of the second officer might possibly represent a security risk.
 * Then there's Deanna Troi in "Disaster". Regardless of whether you like or dislike the character, one has to admit that for a Starfleet lieutenant commander to have to be told what happens when the warp core breaches (answer: the ship explodes!) is sheer idiot ball.
 * Captain Picard takes the lead in "Descent". Desperate to find Data and the Borg he orders most of the crew to a planet to look for them leaving a skeleton crew led by Crusher, and apparently mostly consisting of ensigns, to look after the ship. Most people, when deciding how to split their resources, would go with using their highly experienced officers to operate the ship; leaving wandering about looking behind bushes to the lesser lights.
 * It was Riker's turn to hold the Idiot Ball in "Samaritan Snare." Riker sends LaForge over to a Pakled ship (the crew of which seems exceptionally slow) to do some requested repairs. Worf objects to sending them the Enterprise's chief engineer, but Riker blows it off. Troi tells him directly that she's suspicious and feels that LaForge is in danger. Riker blows if off again. Then Geordi gets captured because Worf and Troi were right and Riker ignored them. Scriptwriter Dennis Russell Bailey, who wrote the screenplay for "Tin Man" in the following season said, "The point at which we became serious about trying to write a script for the show was about five minutes after watching 'Samaritan Snare,' which in my personal opinion was the most abysmal piece of Star Trek ever filmed. My objections to it were that it always resorted to idiot plotting to make the story work, and that offended me a great deal worse than some of the awful shows which were done on the original series. I thought the way in which it was plotted and the way it was dealt with was an insult to the intelligence of the people who watched the show and the actors and characters in the show. None of the plot could have happened if all of the characters hadn't suddenly became morons that week."
 * Star Trek: Voyager's Captain Janeway practically is an Idiot Ball, and the members of her crew toss her around for exercise in each episode. In one episode, Janeway contracts a fatal illness that gets suppressed on a certain planet, and the crew is faced with a choice... leave her on a planet where she can comfortably live the rest of her life, or make a deal with the Vidiians, a race with a documented history of hijacking star ships and harvesting the organs of everyone inside. One unusually rational member of the crew makes it clear that negotiating with the Vidiians is a recipe for disaster, only to be ignored with the expected results. Winning decisions like this are made throughout the series, making you wonder if the HoloDoc is there to remind them to breathe every five seconds.
 * In the episode "Hatchery" of Enterprise, the entire crew of the Enterprise is playing a 40 minute game of Idiot Ball. The captain gets exposed to a biological alien substance and shortly after starts acting strange. He soon has anyone who tries to reason with him confined to their room and starts to become completely delusional. When things get worse Tucker and Phlox talk about relieving him off duty on medical grounds, but don't go through with it because they can't force the captain to get an examination without having proof he's sick! Then the senior officers agree to start a mutiny an ambush the teams of soldiers stationed all over the ship, because they don't trust Major Hayes, who's in charge of the soldiers, to believe them that the captain is acting very strange. At the end of the episode, Hayes even points it out to them, why they hadn't just told him what's going on.
 * In I Dream of Jeannie, Major Anthony Nelson constantly waves off Jeannie's amorous advances despite her being rich, having MAGICAL POWERS, and also being more beautiful than his usual dates. He did finally get around to marrying her in the sixth season.
 * The question of "consent" becomes rather iffy when the person in question is magically bound to follow every order you give. Of course, the part where she initiated the idea of a romantic relationship unprompted by him should have told him that it actually was her idea of her own free will, but... it's still doubtful enough that a man would worry about it for a while.
 * In the Corner Gas episode "Whataphobia", Lacey is revealed to be terrified of balloons. The rest of the episode centers around different reactions to this fear, such as Hank's misguided attempts to "cure" this fear. In fact, anything Hank does.
 * Hank's not really carrying the Idiot Ball so much as he's just an idiot.
 * Every main character of Torchwood's first two series has been directly responsible for at least one of the crises they've had to face - Gwen in "Day One", Ianto in "Cyberwoman," Toshiko in "" and Owen in "". People also chalk Ianto's up to the fact that his love for Lisa has blinded him to the fact that, no, that isn't Lisa anymore (even though it looks like her)
 * Captain Jack's been Idiot Balled twice in series 2:
 * . The side-effects? . Nice job, "Captain".
 * In the first season episode "Countrycide", the team goes off to inspect a body all together as a group. In doing so, they abandon their camp with some of their supplies and equipment and leave the keys in their SUV. As far as they knew, there were aliens capable of who-knows-what on the loose, and were thus giving them access to their supplies. As would be expected, the SUV is stolen.
 * From the same episode, you have two people ready to kick down a door and probably get shot at, one's a rookie with little combat experience, the other's FRELLING IMMORTAL! Which one do you send in first?
 * How about the opening of "Fragments"? Lapse of judgment number one: "Hmm, there seem to be alien life forms registering... let's split up not once, but TWICE, despite the fact that we have no idea what this alien might be or if we'll even be able to fight it alone." And number two, which is somehow even WORSE?: "Oh, look, it's not aliens after all... it's bombs that are set to go off any second now. Let's all stand and stare at them instead of running away!" While the rest of the episode makes up for it, it's pretty hard to get through those opening scenes without outright laughing at the pathetic stupidity.
 * To summarize a conversation between Jack and Ianto in the radio play Asylum: "Let's mess around with this unknown possibly alien technology that appears to be extremely powerful! Oh, drat, we foolishly cut off all communication and gridlocked the traffic around us. Wanna hot wire a motorcycle and steal it? Hello pussycat! Meow!" (And that italicized bit is direct quote.)
 * The Children of Earth miniseries has an Idiot Ball of a political kind,.
 * in Children of Earth is caused by one giant Idiot Ball shared by Jack and Ianto.
 * The Drew Carey Show lampshades and inverts this by having the characters pick up an object called an Epiphany Ball while snooping around in a laboratory at night. Whoever holds the ball suddenly gains understanding to all their problems. Predictably, after it gets passed around a bit, they fight over the ball and it is shattered as it dropped to the floor.
 * The companions on Doctor Who are regular recipients of the Idiot Ball, even if by that point they're shown to be relatively intelligent and Genre Savvy people.
 * A glaring example is from the new series episode "Father's Day", wherein Rose ignores the Doctor's warning about interference and stops her father from dying, despite seeing firsthand exactly what happens when you ignore the Doctor.
 * The Doctor's not too clever there, either. Yes, Nine, take the girl with daddy issues to the exact point where her father died. That'll work fine. Conversely, in his defense, he did warn her not to fuck up history when he did consent to take her there and gave her explicit instructions on what to do to avoid that, but the point that he grossly underestimated her emotional issues still stands.
 * The Ninth Doctor himself seems to be holding one in "The Unquiet Dead", where he urges helping the Gelth cross a space-time rift without even bothering to wonder why the corpses they have so far taken over all turned homicidal immediately. Possibly justified in that he feels responsible for the Gelth as victims of the Time War.
 * Sarah Jane Smith in The Sarah Jane Adventures story The Temptation of Sarah Jane, and her temptation to stop her parents' death, with numerous lampshade hangings. Thankfully, she's a good actor, and it's built up (she is also Genre Savvy enough to know how screwed she is).
 * The Mentalist: Way to go, Jane. It's a brilliant idea to break into a suspect's house to get proof he's a hitman. Jane would have gotten away with it if he hadn't made himself a cup of tea and left his fingerprints and DNA on the cup. Shockingly, the suspect was released.
 * Described quite nicely in a Blakes Seven episode.
 * Described quite nicely in a Blakes Seven episode.

"Buffy: No, she's a robot. She acts just like that girlfriend-bot that Warren guy made. You guys couldn't tell me apart from a robot?!"
 * Perhaps it was Idiot Dodgeball?
 * Let's face it Heroes has so many of these that it'd be easier to point out when they AREN'T being stupid.
 * If anything the frequency and size of the idiot balls has increased exponentially as the seasons passed from a reasonable suspension of disbelief to characters regularly choosing the most utterly insane, illogical and downright stupid course of action.
 * One notable incident occurs when Peter has spent several episodes attempting to retrieve a box while suffering amnesia. He get it open and finds his driver's license, and then complains that knowing his name doesn't help him know who he is. Peter, use the Internet.
 * It also has your address on it, Peter.
 * The entire Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast in the episode "Intervention." No one wonders why Buffy's acting oddly and using highly unusual speech patterns only three episodes (to be fair, the time that passed between episodes is unknown) after a robot with identical behavior and mannerisms showed up, and everybody could immediately tell it was a robot then, despite next to zero hints.
 * Lampshaded in the very same episode, when Buffy herself walks in the house and comes face to face with her duplicate. The other characters are stunned and bewildered, to which Buffy (having heard all of two sentences from the Buffybot) responds:

"Xander: We're dumb."
 * The Initiative were portrayed as staggeringly stupid and incompetent, simply because the whole nature of the show required it.
 * In Season 2, Jenny Calendar is lobbed the Idiot Ball when it's her time to die. Knowing there's a powerful, homicidal vampire with a mad-on for her clan targeting the Scoobies and anyone close to them, the Watcher's girlfriend decides that rather than go home, where vamps can't enter without invitation, she'll stay in a darkened Sunnydale High late at night and alone to work on her soul-returning spell.
 * To be honest, this really isn't fair; the Scoobies have made a habit out of staying late at night in the school library, a vampire-friendly zone, ever since the first episode. Ms. Calendar is hardly alone in this respect. For all their experience with monsters, characters aside from Buffy really are not that Genre Savvy.
 * And then Angel picks it up a few episodes later when he's trying to awaken Acathla. He has to torture Giles for hours to find out that he has to use his own blood for the ritual, even though the Latin part contains the phrase Sanguia Meam. Roughly translated, it means my blood. And Angel definitely understands Latin.
 * Also in "This Year's Girl"; after Faith has woken up from her coma, Giles and Xander are out searching for her, and try to enlist Spike's help—only for him to remind them that he hates them all, and despite his ongoing Spikeification would be more than willing to sick a rogue psycho Slayer on them. Promptly lampshaded:

"Policeman: So you found the gun, removed it from the original holder, touched it again to move it to a different spot, used a hacksaw to try to disable it and shot it, and didn't think to call the police until after that? Malcolm: Yeah. Policeman: What's your IQ again?"
 * If there weren't moments (and even an entire hour at the end of the miniseries) when he actually had a clue and wasn't screwing things up, Tony Lewis of The Tenth Kingdom would actually be Too Dumb to Live. With those additions to the character, he just carries the Idiot Ball for the entire adventure only to finally drop it during the assault on Wendell's castle. But the most obviously idiotic moment (aside from ) has to be in part one, when he proves he definitely never paid attention to Aladdin or any other wish-granting story. For his third wish on the dragon dung bean, he wishes for a vacuum cleaner which would clean the entire apartment so he would never have to lift a finger... even though for his first wish he caused his building's superintendent and his entire family to become his slaves forever.
 * Of honorable mention is his decision in Little Lamb Village to take the Traveling mirror, which had already shown a penchant for disappearing and being hard to track down, and 
 * We'd have to nominate the Midas Touch incident—mostly because by that time he'd been in the Nine Kingdoms long enough to know it ran on fairy-tale tropes, AND was warned by Wolf, who was actually native to the area, to forget it, but accepted the spell anyway, and managed to turn one of his friends to gold. Wolf later remarked, "It was almost... predictable."
 * He walks in on the Wolf Man angrily backing his daughter up against a wall... and just goes on with what he was going to say, apparently not even noticing.
 * Why, Supernatural? Why on earth would Sam and Dean even let Bela see the Colt, let alone leave her alone with it? They know she can easily unlock the safe and they certainly know that she can't be trusted.
 * They must have got it from their father. What was he thinking? Meg and her brother were obviously going to test the Colt out and they would obviously want to tear him and his sons apart when they found out that it was a fake.
 * And another one for Sam in Long Distance Caller. Leaving your unstable, few-seconds-away-from-losing-it brother alone in the hotel room, just telling him not to go anywhere and expecting him to actually stay? I thought you would have known better by now, Sammy.
 * For such a smart boy, Sam has grabbed a lot of idiot balls. The most glaring was in Nightshifter. He might be acting even colder/bitchier than normal and he certainly has all his attention on the job but telling Dean to get the guard outside where the news and police are waiting? Here's an idea, Sam, why don't you (y'know, considering you aren't the one being wanted for murder) do it while Dean takes care of the shifter. That would have made a lot more sense.
 * And then Dean in "Swap Meat". They live in a world full of demons and shape-shifters (granted, the tattoos block out the demons) and, and yet Dean goes almost the entire episode without realizing that  . Particularly glaring when Sam noticed Dean wasn't Dean in "Skin" immediately from a miniscule hint.
 * "The Song Remains The Same": Even after it is established that you can't change the past ("all roads lead to one destination"), Anna attempts to go back in time to kill Sam and Dean's parents. She also insists on walking in slow motion when fighting them.
 * The whole show has always been driven by idiot balls, from the beginning. The deals with the crossroads demon are the most irritating, but, also, a lot of their problems with the law would have resolved themselves if they'd just taken proper precautions and cleaned their crime scenes.
 * As of Season 6, the idiot balls now seem to be superglued to the Winchester brothers' hands. Most of their wangst—and the survival of so many individuals—could have been prevented if not for their incredibly dumb decisions.
 * In Numb3rs the entire FBI hauls around an idiot ball the size of the shop. While for the sake of the plot it's all right that every case they meet requires advanced math to solve, it does not explain why the FBI is incapable of any police work. One of the more outrageous example concerns a fugitive whom the FBI has been after for months. They know the man is on the run, but has not left his home county. Even with that they still cannot find him, but even worse is the fact that the show's resident math genius uses advanced math to reveal to the FBI that the fugitive is regularly stopping at his old home to visit his wife. Indeed, at no point in those long months has it ever occurred to any of the FBI's agents that the fugitive who's staying in his home county may be contacting his loved ones and that they could just catch him by putting up surveillance on the man's wife. The whole show is like this, featuring FBI agents whose only qualifications are that they are damn good at kicking down doors while shouting for people to drop their weapons.
 * Generally inverted on Reno 911!... During every sketch, one of the idiotic policemen seems to be handed the Smart Ball, demonstrating an inconsistent amount of skill and intuition in dealing with the idiot criminal or idiot partner. This could be Handwaved by the necessity of the comedic Straight Man.
 * The Smart Ball seemed to go to all the bit-characters, making them practically Mary Sue perfect in order to make the regular actors look idiotic... and more annoyingly than ordinary Mary Sue characters, since it would usually end up with the regular characters being injured or humiliated in some way, but they were also center-stage while the bit-characters were barely visible.
 * CSI's season 8 pilot gave the Idiot Ball to Sara, who should have encountered basic survival stuff at some point during her lifetime, either from a job safety kind of lecture (given how much wandering the CSIs do) or from a case involving a dead guy in the wilderness, as both San Francisco and Las Vegas have nearby places to get lost and noob hikers to get lost in them.
 * Celebrity Jeopardy, where every contestant is holding the Idiot Ball except Sean Connery.
 * Lampshaded at the end of a Malcolm in the Middle episode:

"Clark: Lois, I'm Super--- [phone rings]"
 * Actually Malcolm, despite his high IQ, has had many Idiot Ball episodes, especially in the later seasons. Though these actions seem to stem from the belief It's All About Me
 * An episode of How I Met Your Mother revolves around this. Robin and Lily spend the episode on a chase around New York to find Ted, who has (according to the stories of the people they ask) been apparently cheating on Robin and generally doing things that really "don't sound like Ted".
 * Wait - so you ask if somebody knows your friend. Said person replies with your friend's first and last name and his job and your immediate thought is "I should ask them to describe his physical features." Personally I think it's more logical to assume Ted was drunk/showing off than that some impostor had assumed his identity.
 * This trope is vividly Lampshaded and Justified in "Dowisetrepla", where a string of increasingly hand-bangingly moronic decisions on the part of Marshall and Lily ends with them buying an apartment they don't need to own located near a sewage plant they never bothered to find out about with a slanted floor they never inspected for and a mortgage they can't afford due to debt they could have avoided. Future!Ted, narrating from the year 2030 and gifted with 20/20 hindsight, lampshades every idiotic decision by showing them saying something level-headed and mature, interjecting with "...is what he/she/we SHOULD have said", and then showing the stupid thing they actually did. Basically, a cautionary tale to his kids showing them how even people who should know better do really stupid things sometimes, so that they won't repeate their Aunt and Uncle's mistakes.
 * iCarly: All of them. Spencer is especially prone, as he can switch between intelligent protective older brother into someone who will build a machine seemingly intended to fling hammers at high velocity at head height, or a "sculpture" which seems tailor-made to catch fire at random.
 * Wesley's actions during the latter part of Angel Season 3 seem to consist of one-half Deathgrip on the Idiot Ball and one-half Badass, stirred to taste and left to simmer. Why he  is an abiding mystery, the answers of which are known only to Angel's writers.
 * But Wesley does not carry the idiot ball alone there. Just as Angel is about to walk out the door with the baby, the gang already learned most of the evil plot, yet rather than say walk in the door and say "Hey the bad guys have been feeding Angel his own son's blood, making him act crazier than usually," for no reason on one even brings it up, to Wesley, who at the time was the boss.
 * Several examples in Stargate Atlantis:
 * The death of
 * McKay  got it in Season five's . If any other member of the cast had been  they would have taken the bullet first. You can hand the ball to the Ancients as well, for not sending around an email saying "don't use any Stargates for the next month or so while we go pick off our stranded enemies" before switching the device on.
 * Michael and his Hybrids are suddenly afflicted by this in their final appearance in 5.14 'Prodigal'. Specifically:
 * Not leaving Teyla unconscious until they're clear of Atlantis by stunning her repeatedly or even restraining while she’s awake so she can't, say, take her mission-critical baby and flee from your grasp at the first opportunity.
 * Leaving two dozen or so stunned humans (including The Big Guy Ronon) in an unmonitored room with an accessible door panel and a single guard posted at the other side of the door. There's nothing preventing them from having just one or two guys stationed in the room armed with stunners so they can knock them back down again if any of them wakes up. Or just killing them while they're lying immobile on the floor.
 * After making her escape Teyla hides out with her baby in an easily openable/concealable alcove from the Hybrids. While looking for her one of them notices the baby crying, but doesn’t bother to investigate the sound any further, instead reporting to Michael that they simply can't find Teyla anywhere.
 * After his plan went completely awry and having no hopes of survival anymore, failing to kill John Sheppard in a last act of spite right when he has him dangling off the top of Atlantis' main tower.
 * In Stargate Atlantis "Sanctuary", every member of Shepard's team has the Idiot Ball with the exception of McKay, who is ignored and castigated throughout the episode. Even Dr. Weir is holding the Idiot Ball in this one, as she, just like Shepard, Teyla, Ford and everyone but McKay, ignore what is before them, from the obvious lies and contradictions in the initial story told by the Ancient, to an Ancient lying through her teeth throughout the episode, to an Ancient allowing and facilitating her own worship as a false goddess. It was frustrating for the audience to sit through what amounted to a 42 minute group of Idiot Balls, wondering why they didn't see what was before them and wondering why McKay, of all the characters, was the only one who was actually seeing clearly.
 * There's an especially wacky example in the late Stargate SG-1 episode "Bad Guys". The heroes go through a gate and find themselves trapped in a museum storage area with a loud party in the next room. They think they can hide six hours until rescue arrives, but then a lady shows up, screams, and runs away. Col. Mitchell's response? He chases her, rifle drawn, into the room where the party's taking place. When a security guard quite reasonably opens fire, Mitchell shoots him in the leg and takes the entire party hostage. The kicker is that Ben Browder, Mitchell's actor, cowrote the episode.
 * Mitchell has proven that recklessness is an established part of his character. It was actually Maj. Gen. Landry who was handed the Idiot Ball when he made Mitchell the leader of the team. Carter had her flaws, but at least she seemed to think before she acted, and Mitchell's youth makes you think that he was promoted immediately after his injury, which makes it quite likely her silver oak leaves were older than his. Go figure.
 * Several members of the cast, Michael Shanks in particular, have expressed their disgust with the idiocy of that episode.
 * In SG-1's first season, there's also "Hathor". What's known about the Goa'uld so far? They masqueraded as Egyptian deities, all known examples were among the bad guys and they wield several strong close-ranged powers, including, but probably not limited to, energy blasts, stunning and persuasion. A woman appears outside the Stargate base and identifies herself as the Egyptian deity Hathor. Hey! Why not put her into a room with the senior command staff of the base? Surely no harm will come of that, right?
 * That episode is has since offially become non-canon
 * In the beginning of the SG-1 episode "Forever in a Day", several cast members pass around the Idiot Ball in order to contrive the circumstances that result in First, the SG teams are pinned down by an ambush of superior numbers just behind the nearest hillside, leaving Daniel to wander into Sha're/Amounet's tent alone, armed with a pistol rather than a zat'nik'tel. Unwilling to kill Sha're, he is almost killed by her ribbon device when Teal'c enters the tent at the last moment, also carrying only a lethal staff weapon.
 * In the last half of the episode "Rite of Passage", the entire cast held the Idiot Ball together in order to create a moral division, which was actually a false dilemma. Daniel might forget it, but O'Neill, Hammond, Carter and Teal'c would certainly remember that firstly, they were under absolutely no moral or other obligation to keep their word to the bad guy of the week, who was responsible for various genocides, and if they were, the Pentagon would never allow it. Still, they could have had it both ways. The ultimate aim for this was so that Doc Frasier could lose patience and save the day. But it did the rest of the pragmatic-at-heart members of the cast a terrible injustice.
 * In the episode "Gemini", Carter is handed the Idiot Ball so that she'd fall for Repli Carter's Reverse Psychology and lets the walking security breach access her brain and the computers at the Alpha Site.
 * In the season finale of Stargate Universe, there's a particularly annoying example when the main cast is faced with the possibility of the Lucian Alliance boarding the ship and taking it over.
 * Lee Adama is the usual carrier of the Idiot Ball in Battlestar Galactica. It's lampshaded when Roslin tells him she knows she can count on him to do the right thing, but the smart thing? Not so much.
 * The funny thing? He doesn't always do the right thing either. When it comes to the Cylons he's quite the Knight Templar, in fact. The true Honor Before Reason and champion of justice? Karl "Helo" Agathon. Though he has a fairly massive one of his own in.
 * Kara Thrace also has a few of these, although the absolute king of this trope has got to be Dr. Gaius Baltar.
 * His crowning moment at the end of season 2 involves . The results are predictable.
 * because being pushed into sex with her only friend finally broke her sanity.
 * Col. Tigh also get his hard by this trope. One amusing example was when, after ordering in the Marines to quell rioting in the fleet and being told that there weren't enough Marine officers to lead all of the necessary teams, he came up with the brilliant idea of assigning Viper pilots to lead the teams. You know, those guys who spend all their time flying around in Vipers and have absolutely no experience whatsoever at leading men into combat. To be fair, he does get told off by Doc Cottle, but still.
 * Cottle is usually immune, but when he gets hit, he gets hit badly: such as
 * Tom Zarek and Lieutenant Gaeta also get this during their attempted coup. So, they are in control of Galactica's CIC, have Admiral Adama and the humanoid Cylons in custody, but Lee and Starbuck are still at large, there are unsecured/unguarded areas of the ship, and Laura Roslin is on the Rebel Basestar (which might be beat up, but still has its weapons). So, what do they do instead of consolidating their hold on Galactica and the fleet? They spend two hours putting Adama on trial for "betraying humanity and providing aide to the enemy", taking a break to murder the entire Quorum of Twelve. At least Zarek was genre savvy enough to know that Adama was a liability as long as he was alive. Gaeta was the one who pushed to have him stand trial.
 * Every so often, House or one of his team will miss something ridiculously obvious so the plot can be padded out to 42 minutes:
 * "Maternity"—Every doctor at Princeton Plainsboro managed to conveniently forget that newborns carry the same antibodies as their mothers.
 * Admittedly kinda silly, but they were more concerned with dying babies and they were only stumped for a short time before the "Oh that's right!" moment
 * "Histories"—Foreman didn't make a connection between the bats he found at a homeless patients shelter and.
 * Normally that'd be forgivable - is ridiculously rare in the western world. Unfortunately this is House's team; masters of the rare
 * I'm not sure how forgivable it was. Surely someone on the team would have seen the episode of Ben Casey they ripped off the plot from (complete with George Hamilton as a dying anthropologist with an australian accent that will make you wish for Dick Van Dyke).
 * "Distractions"—Every doctor failed to notice the cigarette burn and nicotine stains on the patient.
 * "Skin Deep"—Every doctor managed to miss the fact that their patient had and didn't notice  despite numerous ultrasounds and scans.
 * She only had the one ultrasound as far as I can recall - Wilson mucked it up thinking her ovaries were simply undersized and wouldn't be looking for a uterus when he was searching for ovarian cancer. When they got a proper scan, that's when the problem reared its ugly head
 * A is a pretty big thing to miss in an ultrasound, even if you aren't specifically looking for it. That would be like looking at a chest x-ray to see if your patient has lung cancer and not noticing that he doesn't have ribs.
 * Foreman There is no way she would dump you after that, genius! Say it with me.
 * There's also no way
 * Also applies for at least 50% of the patients... as an example, I cite the parents who didn't mention that their son was adopted (thus invalidating his medical history) because "he didn't need to know."
 * Truth in Television unfortunately. What's important to the patient is usually not what's important to the doctor. In the given case, they gave the medical history of the birth mother and to not want to share that is understandable, given that they saw themselves as his parents in every way except biologically. Would have been simpler had they admitted it, but the scenario in the show is (for that little part at least) fairly realistic.
 * In The Itch Cameron carries an Idiot Ball the size of a house. She keeps making idiotic decisions to keep the shut-in patient at his house (or at one point BACK to his house), because if they got him to the hospital they could give him a real test and the episode would be over.
 * Actually, this happens in House almost every episode, and a huge number of their cases would have been incredibly brief had they done simple things (like the standard physical examination every doctor three seconds into med school knows to give), things they do regularly (if they don't administer antibiotics early on you know it's an infection) or things that should be on their mind (last week we ruled out an obscure disease because we couldn't find the rash it presents with, maybe we should be more thorough on our exams in the future).
 * In Spooks, it was sometimes held by . Dies while holding it because he does a handbrake turn in a bomb-rigged car and then parks it instead of jumping out and letting it run for another twenty/thirty yards.
 * One episode of Bones has Temperance convinced it is outright irrational to think her book could be connected to the series of murders that mirror exactly the ones she wrote about.
 * That's not really fair. Brennan later admitted that she knew they were connected, but she didn't want to believe it because that would make her responsible for the murders. She wasn't stupid, she was just feeling guilty.
 * Have any of the losties from Lost ever asked the Others the rather relevant question: "Why?"
 * It would help. How much, we won't know, considering how the Others are cryptic (and in the case of Ben, outright liars) in their conversations.
 * The whole "Nuke the Swan" plot line in the last few episodes of Season 5. The A-Team are convinced that setting off the nuke will prevent the Incident. Ten minutes before they're going to do it, the resident Deadpan Snarker Miles asks if they ever considered that the nuke might cause the Incident. The silence leads to Miles to mentally facepalm and say, "I'm glad you all thought this through."
 * Ilana had been training all her life for her mission and probably knew everything about the candidates (such as the fact that they can't kill each other or themselves). So in "Everybody Loves Hugo" she not only handles dynamite herself for no reason, but handles it more carelessly than Arzt and dies because of it.
 * In the pilot of Lost, some of the survivors find the plane's cockpit and the pilot still alive inside. Then they are attacked by what is obviously a very large, powerful animal which tosses the cockpit around like a chew toy. So what does the pilot do? He sticks his head and shoulders out of the broken cockpit window in order to try and see what it is. Is anyone even remotely surprised that he is promptly hauled out of the cockpit headfirst and eaten?
 * Mitchell gets one in Being Human (UK), in the episode where Tully moves in. He comes home and finds that Annie is outside, scared and crying, after Tully tried to rape her. At this point, it has begun to show that George and Tully were starting to bond over their lycanthropy, so he protests over Tully's forced eviction. Instead of Mitchell taking George aside and explaining to him what Tully tried to do to Annie, he makes out like he's simply tired of Tully being a permanent guest, which leads George to become angry (which is somewhat reasonable, since Mitchell spent the entire first part of the episode encouraging the neighbors to visit whenever and all but forced George to spend time with Tully in the hopes that it would help George deal with his condition). The result is that when Mitchell finally does think to mention the assault on Annie (as a sidenote in the argument, more or less), George is too worked up to really care. Granted it was a very icky situation and Mitchell was shown to be very protective of his friends, but still...
 * The title character from Robin Hood. After assembling his Merry Men, he has Will Scarlett craft the team their own small wooden "army tags" that are inscribed with a bow and arrow and worn around their necks. This is silly enough, but then Robin breaks into Nottingham Castle and shows one of these tags to the Sheriff, informing him that anyone wearing one of them is in Robin's gang. Buh? Sure enough, a few episodes later the Sheriff captures some men who are wearing these identification tags and duly has them executed an hour before Robin's rescue attempt. Seriously, what on earth was Robin thinking?
 * While it does have adverse consequences, this actually lines up with Robin's wisdom and character. They had just been unjustly accused of killing a nun and a child (and targeting the Sheriff) and were dealing with a huge PR problem because of it. This made it a matter of ego and necessity. It was also noble, given the Sheriff tended to assume anyone in Robin's remote vicinity was part of his gang and immediately sentence them to death. Also, Robin was never shown giving the tags to the men who were captured and killed for wearing them four episodes later. It is much more likely that  Robin specifically   since it was a matter of not only his reputation, but their safety.
 * Dollhouse has the entire staff hold this to create a certain plot element in the second season. The in the first season near the end Alpha destroys the backup of Caroline, Echo's original persona and steals the main copy of her, which is retrieved. In season two they opt to bring her back, only to find the main copy is now missing. So that leaves them with only the smashed backup that needs to be reassembled. Creates a plot element there, until you wonder why they didn't make yet another backup of the original copy with the backup effectively destroyed. Keep in mind that there is a timespan of approximately a year between these two events.
 * In Naeturvaktin, the two employees miss several obvious opportunities to get Georg, their bullying boss, fired. Instead, they grab the idiot ball at the crucial moments so the series can run to its conclusion.
 * Little House On the Prairie has a few of these.
 * In "The Award", Mary takes a lot of character derailment and sets in motion a chain of events that make you question her sanity and sense of reason. The plot can only take place because Mary acts like a complete idiot.
 * In "The Good Shepherd", Pa and Laura act like complete idiots. Pa goes on and on about his new son so much that Laura feels inferior, refuses to pray for the baby, and runs away. Laura's resentment for the baby had been building for a year and a half and it was never noticed by Pa; moreover, Laura, who is usually outspoken and very close to her father, never says a word to him about it.
 * In one episode, Mr. Edwards sends himself a letter to make the mail lady jealous. Never mind that he can't read. It may not really matter. The letter was blank anyway.
 * In "The Monster of Walnut Grove", Laura sees Mr. Oleson chop the head off of a mannequin. She runs home and tells Pa that Mr. Oleson killed his wife. Pa grabs the idiot ball when he tells her it was just her imagination and leaves it at that. This is necessary for the plot of the story, but out of character for Pa.
 * In "The Runaway Caboose", Willie Oleson trades Carl Edwards some fireworks for an aggie. Carl decides to set them off in a barn.
 * In Law and Order Special Victims Unit detectives often show abysmal timing in escorting their jittery, easily disturbed witnesses out of the building at the exact same time through the exact same door the violent rapist/abusive boyfriend/evil family member is being brought in.
 * Subverted in the episode "Savant" in which the crucial witness in a brutal assault is
 * Peter from Fringe is meant to be a genius, with an insanely high IQ and perception  At the end of last season, he and Olivia finally admitted their feelings, to some extent anyway.   Even Peter's actor admits he's gotten the Idiot Ball this season. When a reckoning came around,
 * In season 6 of The Office, Jim takes the Idiot Ball and runs with it. Jim is often the voice of reason, or at least the one able to point out when someone is being foolish. However, when  he suddenly becomes irrational and does stupid things like   and   Why he suddenly becomes an idiot after six years of relative sanity is unclear. To be fair, Jim was promoted with zero management experience, and was initially more concerned with keeping everyone happy than doing the best job he can do; the joke being that despite years of poking fun at Michael's, erm, erratic management skills, it was very easy for Jim to fall into that trap as well.
 * Plus, the raises to the sales staff issue is only unfair if you know absolutely nothing about how business works. The problem was that, due to Dunder Mifflin's decline, there wasn't enough money to give raises to everyone, and Jim makes the completely valid point that keeping the sales staff happy is important if Dunder Mifflin plans to dig themselves out of the hole they're in; this is actually a very common occurrence in business, and is a lose/lose situation no matter what you try. Jim's main mistakes were actually believing that the people of the office might actually have the decency to be even remotely mature about it, and then giving in to their petty whining.
 * It's shared around pretty equally in Are You Being Served; the characters' intelligence level can be extremely variable. However, Miss Brahms seems to get stuck with it a lot later in the series, which is odd considering she was generally quite smart earlier in the series.
 * LazyTown's Robbie Rotten has one goal and one goal only: Get rid of Sportacus and return the town to its original lazy state. So when he gets his hands on a genie's lamp, what doesn't he wish for? Sportacus to disappear!
 * Admittedly, Robbie eventually did use his final wish to get rid of Sportacus, but by that point, the genie was so sick of him he got rid of Robbie instead!
 * After the first season, Blackadder got a major upgrade and became the snarky, Genre Savvy Only Sane Man that everyone knows and loves. This didn't stop him being handed a major Idiot Ball in the Series 2 episode "Bells", where he cannot figure out that "Bob", his manservant, is really a girl. (She doesn't make any effort to disguise her face or voice—it is obvious to every viewer from the moment Bob appears onscreen.) They have a rather sweet courtship anyway—which in itself was an Out-of-Character Moment for him.
 * This is particularly notable as even the writers seemed to regret it—they brought "Bob" back in Series 4 episode "Major Star" and this time Blackadder recognizes her real sex right away, and doesn't even attempt have a relationship with her. Everybody else is still fooled, but this fits perfectly with their characterization and Blackadder's status as the Only Sane Man. To be fair, Blackadder II was set during Shakespearean times when this was a recognised trope (even Baldrick in a dress managed to attract both Percy and Flasheart).
 * The Twilight Zone has many, especially the episodes with time travel. Some examples:
 * In "Walking Distance", Martin Sloan finds himself in his own past where he encounters his mom and dad and a younger version of himself. Instead of playing it cool, he acts like an idiot, scaring his mom and his dad. When he encounters the younger version of himself, he chases him, then later finds him and does the same thing again. Instead of offering some sage advice to his younger self, he gives himself a broken leg, which causes him to limp the rest of his life.
 * In "Escape Clause", Walter Bedeker is given immortality and is unable to feel pain. Instead of setting out to have a long and happy life, he defrauds several businesses and confesses to killing his wife, which he didn't do. In court, he works to get himself convicted so he could try out the electric chair, but is then given life in prison instead, although it's not explained what he would have done after going to the electric chair. It is at this point that he uses the "Escape Clause" which causes his own death rather than face life in prison. At this point, he has apparently forgotten that in addition to being ageless, he is also invulnerable. How easy would it then be to escape from prison if he doesn't have to fear injury or death? He could wait for an opportunity and make a break for the barbed wire or electrified fence and just climb over it. What are guard dogs or gunshots to someone who is invulnerable? In the very least, he could wait it out.
 * Also, if he really wanted to test death by electrocution, why go through this elaborate scheme to get himself sentenced to the electric chair when he could simply go find a high-tension power line and lick it?
 * In Community episodes Physical Education Señor Chang comments on this when everybody, including Annie, forgets to check the front cover of a schoolbook to see who owned it last. (She blames Britta's pronunciation of the word "bagel" as "baggel", saying it was distracting.)
 * The final storyline of Kamen Rider Blade dealt with trying to stop the Joker from winning the Battle Fight and causing The End of the World as We Know It
 * There are many specific examples for Smallville, most of which are listed under Idiot Plot. There is, however, one very general one: Any time someone is spying on Clark, expect him to suddenly start talking about how his only weakness is meteor rocks. Not kryptonite, meteor rocks. That way the Monster of the Week knows what he's talking about, and can use it against him.
 * When Chloe went out of her way to tell Tess that red kryptonite, for lack of a better phrase, makes Clark evil. Chloe is lucky that not long after Tess underwent a Heel Face Turn, because who knows what she could've done with information like that.
 * Suits: Is it possible for the Wunderkind lawyer, who remembers everything he reads and passed the bar (twice) without actually going to law school, to be able file a simple patent without assistance from his suave mentor or the sexy paralegal? Short answer: no.
 * This has happened a lot in Survivor, but one example is the Ometepe tribe in Redemption Island. Both teams were put with two of the biggest Creator's Pets in the show's history. Both of them are credited with knowing the game inside and out. The Zapatera knew that if any of them wanted to win, Russell had to go ASAP. (Unless your name was Stephanie Valencia.) Unfortunately, most of the Ometepe seemed to think that they could win against Rob and never once seemed to think about tossing him; the ones that did know were gone quick. Once again, Rob manages to be placed on the Buffoon tribe... and the stupidest tribe to ever play.
 * Except that he didn't have a problem with their buffoonery.
 * Warehouse 13 seems to be relying upon this for it's plots more and more. You would think that agents who have been tracking down mystical artifacts for three years, seeing everything from earth-tremour causing walking sticks, to density manipulating spandax underwear, to a machine that can bronze people in such away that can be revived with no problems, that whenever shit doesn't make sense, they'd realize it's an artifact that caused and start trying to think of something that could do it, or looking on the computers. What does Pete do? Immediately thinks it's some wicked plot by the baddie du jour, rather than yet another artifact mishap which he seems to attract like moths to an open flame.
 * In Scrubs, one episode in season 6 has Turk hurt his hands due to playing with a ceiling fan. That on its own wouldn't be too bad, except multiple episodes beforehand (even one in the same season) had Turk stress that his hands were incredibly important since he was a surgeon and that he couldn't risk damaging them. At one point, he gets pissed that JD tried to ambush him with a tennis ball. The writers made Turk an idiot with that ceiling fan in order to allow the plot to happen.
 * In the Sanctuary episode "Metamorphosis", Henry has Will pull a dangerous stunt (that does not end well) in order to change a light bulb on a chandelier that is out of reach. Nevermind that Henry is a technical genius, or that he has lived inside the Sanctuary for most of his life and should therefore know about the switch that lowers the chandelier. Even a simple folding ladder would have worked.
 * Lois Lane is known for plot-driven stupidity involving her constantly missing the increasingly obvious clues about the other vertices of her love triangle, but it gets particularly bad by the end of season 2 of Lois and Clark:

"Lois: Clark, you were in the middle of telling me something! Clark: Was I? Lois: Yes! You said, "Lois, I'm Super---" Clark: Lois, I'm super late for my appointment."
 * The phone call leads to Clark having to rush off to do Superman things, so he puts off the revelation, claiming he has a barber's appointment he'd forgotten (seriously).


 * The main character from Merlin kick-starts an episode's plot by conjuring the smoke of a camp-fire into the image of a galloping horse. A woman sees it, tells King Uther, and a witch-hunt begins. Merlin spends the remainer of the episode lamenting just how stupid he was.
 * The Flash episode "The Present": Team Flash has managed to work out that Savitar's existence is made possible by a magic rock, and can be contained by putting the rock in a box which negates the rock's powers. Through some mental manipulation, Cisco is convinced to open the box, releasing Savitar. Barry goes to try and stop Cisco, and gets into it with Savitar, which doesn't go well for him because Savitar is leagues beyond Barry and Garrick in the speed department, even more so than Zoom or Reverse Flash was. The idiot ball comes into play when HR convinces Wally to get into the fray with his newly gained super speed. The simplest solution to this problem would be to tell Wally to run down to the room where Cisco is, take the box from him, and close it – this ends the immediate Savitar problem without a single punch thrown. Instead, HR tells Wally to use some of the things he picked up in training, to tackle a monster who has already repeatedly manhandled two veteran speedsters, and at cruising speed is as far beyond Barry's speed as Barry is beyond normal human speed. This goes about as well as you would expect, resulting in unnecessary tension and suspense when Wally is almost killed.
 * She-Hulk: Attorney at Law has an episode where the main character must defend against a Frivolous Lawsuit claiming ownership of "She-Hulk". Putting aside the pro se problems, it should be ridiculously easy to establish prior commercial use since it's literally her job to be "She-Hulk" in advertisement for her firm. This is never brought up, and instead she has to drag in random men she met and identified herself as "She-Hulk" to.