Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: The Hero tortures someone for information.

  • Straight: Alice knows Bob has information on where the nuke is, and when he refuses to talk, she tortures him.
  • Exaggerated: Alice knows that Bob knows where the nuke is, and when Bob refuses to talk, she starts dismembering him.
    • Alice knows Bob has downloaded some music illegally. When Bob refuses to talk, she tortures him.
  • Justified: Alice needs to get the info somehow, and Bob often suffers from Minor Injury Overreactions.
    • Bob isn't the only person with the info, and Alice is able to convince him that if she isn't able to get the information from him, she could get it from the others - honor among thieves and all that. This makes the perceived loss of his death seem less worrisome as far as Alice is concerned.
  • Inverted: Alice and Bob are staging an elaborate gambit to get Charlie to unintentionally give them the information they're after. Alice physically attacks Bob to make him say things that Charlie think are real, but are not.
  • Subverted: Alice pretends to prepare to torture Bob, as a means of psychological battering, so he'll tell her where the nuke is.
  • Double Subverted: ...Then tortures him anyway.
    • Since torture won't work on Bob, Alice starts torturing Carol, Bob's partner in crime and love interest. After a few rounds with her, Bob starts telling everything.
  • Parodied: Alice tortures Bob to get him to tell her where the peanut butter is.
  • Deconstructed: The information Bob gave Alice about the location of the nuke, proves to be false, causing millions to lose their lives, and Alice to go to jail for torturing someone, while the people who set up the nuke go free due to a lack of evidence.
  • Reconstructed: Alice doesn't trust Bob when he lies to her and uses torture to make Bob himself prevent the nuke from exploding, leaving him with no other choice than defusing it if he wants to live.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice is alone, but that doesn't keep her from using some rather bipolar form of Good Cop, Bad Cop interrogation technique on Bob, interrupting torture to apologize and beg him to tell her the truth. Also, Bob gets the chance to torture Alice.
  • Averted: Alice interrogates Bob, but torture never comes up.
  • Enforced: "We have an hour for the show, we need to let the hero get at the information as fast as possible. Let's have him torture some mook for it, since that'll be faster."
  • Lampshaded: "Oh, I feel for Bob. You just know some horrible shit is going to happen to him."
  • Invoked: Bob immediately spills his guts because he already knows Alice is going to pull out the knives if he doesn't.
  • Exploited: Bob pretends to crack under the torture, then feeds Alice some very bad information that'll probably get her killed.
  • Defied: Alice is about to start the torture, but a higher authority reminds her that she's being watched by the authorities/her employers.
  • Discussed: "You do not want to be captured by Alice. She does horrible things to people like us if we don't talk."
  • Conversed: "If you don't start talking, I'll take out the knives. Things get much less entertaining when I take out the knives."
  • Played for Laughs: Gene Hunt Interrogation Technique.

Okay, okay, I'll talk. The nuke is back at Jack Bauer Interr-Augh.

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