Grilling the Newbie

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Even cute mutes get grilled.


We've seen it every time someone new and mysterious appears, whether it's a New Transfer Student or Naïve Newcomer is given the third degree by the entire class or team. In some cases, there may be references to Noodle Incidents, Noodle Implements, or a Dark Secret.


Examples of Grilling the Newbie include:


Anime and Manga

Literature

  • In The Well of Lost plots, Thursday gets grilled by many characters in the unpublished book Caversham Heights (where she's hiding out from Goliath and Lavosier during her advancing pregnancy) when they find out she's an Outlander. Some of them don't believe she is an Outlander when she admits not knowing things (like "the purpose of alphabet soup"), so she has them leave off their speech descriptors and successfully identifies several speakers in order.

Live Action TV

  • Charlie's Angels: New girl Tiffany is grilled by Kelly & Kris when they learn that she's actually met Charlie.
  • Farscape: Jool and Sikozu got this treatment as newcomers. Neither of them were particularly forthcoming. Crais got this treatment when he deserted, too.
  • On How I Met Your Mother, the gang does this to poor Victoria about her love life, with the questions thinly disguised as being part of a Truth or Dare style board game.

Western Animation

  • In Finding Nemo the other fish in the tank ask Nemo endlessly about the Ocean.

Bubbles: "The old big blue, eh? What's it like?
Nemo: "It's...big and blue."
Bubbles: "I knew it!"