Idiot Ball/Live-Action TV: Difference between revisions

** 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, [[Lampshade Hanging|"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.

** 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.

* 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.

* ''[[Saturday Night Live|Celebrity Jeopardy]]'', where ''every'' contestant is holding the Idiot Ball except [[Magnificent Bastard|Sean Connery]].

* Lampshaded at the end of a ''[[Malcolm in the Middle]]'' episode:

* 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". {{spoiler|It later turns out it was Barney the whole time, who gave Ted's name to prove that the line "Ted Mosby, architect" makes girls want you. If only either of the girls had thought to ask any of these people what Ted looks like or what he was wearing... I guess hearing "blonde" or "in a suit" would have killed the entire episode's plot in five minutes.}}

** 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.

* ''[[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 {{spoiler|a) first went to Holtz instead of, how you say, ''one of his own goddamned friends'' and b) beat the everliving crap out of Lorne when Lorne got a partial reading of him while Wesley was singing instead of continuing to sing, letting Lorne carry on reading him and figuring out just ''why'' Wesley was abducting Connor}} is an abiding mystery, the answers of which are known only to ''Angel'''s writers.

** 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. {{spoiler|Col. Young's plan is to suck the air out of the gate room after the Lucian Alliance gates through; the problem is that Rush-in-Telford's-body shows up with them. Now despite the fact that he just drained the air out of the cabin where he was holding Telford in Rush's body, and then revived him, he chooses to not drain the air out of the gate room altogether.}}

** 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 {{spoiler|"Someone to Watch Over Me", when he mistakes Boomer for Athena to the point of sleeping with her, after he's already noticed something's up with her, has been living with Athena for four years, and their deep, true love being an important plot point}}.

** Kara Thrace also has a few of these, although the absolute king of this trope has got to be Dr. Gaius Baltar.

** Subverted in the episode "Savant" in which the crucial witness in a brutal assault is {{spoiler|a little girl who can recognize any voice she's heard. She manages to identify the boy who put her mom in a coma when she hears his voice as he's walking by to collect his dad, who was previously the main suspect.}}

* Peter from ''[[Fringe]]'' is meant to be a genius, with an insanely high IQ and perception {{spoiler|enough to realize that he's from another universe. He's also known Olivia for over 2 years now.}} At the end of last season, he and Olivia finally admitted their feelings, to some extent anyway. {{spoiler|Then the two Olivias, the one from the parallel world and the one from our world, switched, and he somehow hasn't noticed even though a) he's noticed how different she is, b) he's surrounded by cases of imposters from Over There, and c) he's spending so much time with her that they've slept together.}} Even Peter's actor admits he's gotten the Idiot Ball this season. When a reckoning came around, {{spoiler|Olivia chewed him out for it, and their relationship was somewhat rocky thereafter, until they finally go together.}}

** 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?|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.

** When Chloe went out of her way to tell [[Dark Action Girl|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.

** 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 [[What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?|ambush him with a tennis ball]]. The writers made Turk an idiot with that ceiling fan in order to allow the plot to happen.

* [[Lois Lane]] is known for plot-driven stupidity involving her constantly missing the [[Paper-Thin Disguise|increasingly obvious clues]] about [[Loves My Alter Ego|the other vertices of her love triangle]], but it gets particularly bad by the end of season 2 of ''[[Lois and Clark]]'':

{{quote|'''Clark:''' Lois, I'm Super--- ''[phone rings]''}}

* The main character from ''[[Merlin (TV series)|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 (TV 2014)|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.

 

{{reflist}}