Mind Screw/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Mind Screws in Live-Action TV include:

  • The Prisoner ended with such a colossal mind screw that fans reputedly harassed series star Patrick McGoohan for months demanding his explanation of the series. How bad was it? Well, any really, really bad Mind Screw will get compared to Neon Genesis Evangelion, right? Okay, so now realize The Prisoner is what Neon Genesis Evangelion gets compared to!
    • The remake's website seems to be gleefully continuing this tradition.
  • Twin Peaks could be considered a mind screw. Alternately, it was just weird.
  • Reality TV example: Criss Angel. Much like the name of the trope itself, it is also watered down version of the term best used to describe his feats.
  • Every last damn thing about the Battlestar Galactica season 3 finale. "There's too much confusion", indeed.
  • Lost. They can fill the rest of this page with arguments back and forth about whether or not Lost is "really" that much of a Mind Screw, but, in all honesty, this trope is pretty much the show's whole reason for being. Either Lost is a Mind Screw, or else this either isn't a trope or Lost isn't a show. I'll leave it up to you to decide which. Like Lost does. Some examples from the show include its dream sequences and some particularly odd bits surrounding a cabin. One trippy episode was even set to be directed by Darren Aronofsky.
  • Life On Mars, is weird as all get-out, especially the final episode but still straightforward. Word of God says it was all in his head/he died. Individual interpretations may vary.
    • The sequel series Ashes to Ashes takes the Mind Screw one stage further at the end of S2 when Alex wakes up from her coma she starts seeing images of 1982 communicating with her saying she is in a coma there.
      • Ashes to Ashes has finally resolved the mindscrew in its finale: they're in a copper's purgatory, and they were all dead all along.
    • Or on the other side of the pond, he's an astronaut from the year 2035 and the 125 precinct is really a manned voyage to Mars... nice Title Drop BTW
      • or is it? gene hunt's shoe steps out of the lander at the last second or two of the show.
  • Reichenbach Falls. A BBC Four one-off drama based on an idea by Ian Rankin. DCI Jim Buchan is an Edinburgh policeman whose personality and cases are similar to those of Rankin's Inspector Rebus (the Rebus novels sometimes tend towards mildly Mind Screwy in any case). He resents his former friend Jack Harvey (a pen-name used by Rankin) who is a famous crime novelist, and occasionally argues with the ghost of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (hence the title). He gradually becomes aware that he's a fictional character created by Harvey, and the author is planning to Drop A Bridge On Him (again, hence the title). He therefore decides, at the launch of Harvey's new book, that he's going to kill the author first. After that it gets weird...
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer does this in the final episode of the fourth season. The second-last episode is the climactic battle against that season's Big Bad; the actual final one is some kind of shared dream/hallucination involving a guy with cheese on his head. (Joss Whedon said that when he set out to write it he realized after a bit he was attempting a forty-minute tone poem.)
    • The mind screw aspect comes from the fact that it's possibly the most realistic dream sequence ever in terms of the bizarre scene transitions and staging—all four segments of the dream sequence are presented as one coherent scene, locals change nearly at random, characters appear and disappear, damn near everyone speaks in non sequiturs, and all plotlines and the characters in them are subject to change at random (with the exception of the First Slayer trying to take advantage of Your Mind Makes It Real to assassinate the Scoobies.) However, everything in that episode turns out to be Foreshadowing (except for the cheese man) so the episode becomes less mind-screwy in retrospect.
    • Buffy the Vampire Slayer also has an episode in season 6 in which Buffy is poisoned by a hallucinogen-producing demon and is torn between two realities: being a Slayer and being an insane girl in an asylum, with parents who love her and are trying to make her sane again with the help of a psychiatrist. But then, when the episode ends, it does so with an image of Buffy in her normal-crazy-girl reality, not as Slayer Girl, leaving you with the impression that the entire show, including the later seasons, are all a product of an insane girl's overactive imagination. Joss Whedon said he considers the series to be actually happening, but put that in just for fun, and if people want they can consider the whole series to be the delusions of Buffy.
    • Which would also make the entire Angel series part of that hallucination, too. At least it's not as bad as that Tommy Westphall crap...
    • There's also the scenes in Buffy's mind in Weight of The World, featuring lots of symbolism, doppelgangers, repetition, and Buffy's Issues.
    • The First Evil likes to pretend it is other people in order to make it's chosen targets do it's bidding, go insane, commit suicide, ect. In season seven it liked to imitate Buffy. We are usually shown when this is the case but there are times where she acts so out of character it raises the possibility that the audience are not actually watching Buffy, but The First.
      • Which has led to quite a bit of fan speculation. The final shot of Buffy in season seven is not really Buffy, but The First. The final shot of her in season six is actually the Buffybot. Buffy, of course, sacrificed her life to save the world at the end of season five, only to be brought Back from the Dead.
  • The Angel episode "Awakening" ends with a Mind Screw. The entire Indiana Jones-inspired segment where Angel saves the day and ends up with Cordelia is all a fantasy in his head as his soul is removed.
    • Even bigger is the reveal that the entire series has been one big Xanatos Roulette to bring forth Jasmine. According to Jasmine.
  • The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes "Far Beyond the Stars" and "Shadows and Symbols" heavily imply that the events of the entire series may have simply been the imaginings of a mentally unstable African-American pulp-fiction writer in the 1950s. "Shadows and Symbols" does, however, state that at least the latter one was a "false vision" the Pah-Wraiths attempted to use to trick Sisko.
    • It has been said in the series companion book that there was discussion for the final scene of the final episode to be Benny Russell holding the series script standing in a studio lot (presumably at Paramount)... either implying that all of Star Trek is All Just a Dream in-universe... or implying that all of Star Trek is a real vision of the future sent by the Prophets (holy...!).
    • In something of a similiar vein, one early draft of the episode "Little Green Men" (in which Quark goes back in time and causes the 1940s Roswell incident) featured a quick segment of a Lt. Roddenberry being inspired by the episode events to write a science fiction story...
  • Elsewhere in the Trek franchise, Next Generation, Voyager, and Enterprise had their share of these episodes—and most can be traced back to one inveterate Mind Screwer. Brannon Braga absolutely loves stories like this, and Schrödinger's Butterfly in particular. The results are mixed: Braga's Mind Screws include some of the best and worst episodes of these shows.
    • One of the greatest Mind Screws in TNG is the episode "Remember Me." To put it simply:

Dr. Crusher: Here's a question you shouldn't be able to answer. What is the nature of the universe?
Computer: The universe is a spheroid region 705 meters in diameter.

    • "Frame of Mind" is a Mind Screw for Commander Riker, up until the very end.
    • "Parallels" is this way for the first three acts or so, until it's proven that Worf is shifting through increasingly divergent parallel universes.
    • Another Deep Space Nine episode that does this is "Rapture." Because they never really explain whether the visions were actually an important message from the Prophets, and Sisko would have been fine without the surgery, or if they really were hallucinations from the accident and the surgery was necessary.
      • The visions were important. They foreshadow the Dominion annexing Cardassia and forcing the Federation to leave Bajor.
  • Though Firefly is notable for being extremely straightforward in most respects, the scenes in the episode "Objects in Space" involving River's hallucinations can be considered a mild Mind Screw. It gets worse in the Big Damn Movie, where River's hallucinations become much more pronounced and vivid.
    • On his commentary track for "Objects In Space," Whedon explains that the entire episode is his take on existentialism
  • Even Supernatural got in on the act with Dean's fantasy world in What Is And What Should Never Be. Would that sweet little four year old in the pilot have turned out to be a Jerkass if it wasn't for emotional abuse, neglect, a tight leash and a massive martyr complex or does he just think that little of himself? Does he think that Sam's a wuss, Mary's perfect and his soulmate is pretty much death or were they all part of him? But whatever way you look at it, it's still a profoundly disturbing Tear Jerker that sets up the It Got Worse events of the finale nicely.
    • They did it again with Mystery Spot. Was it all just a dream? Did Dean actually die and go to hell? The people that were killed (by Sam and the Trickster), do they remain dead? And the fact that Dean's "We can't be martyrs anymore" speech (which has so many things wrong with it that I don't know where to begin) in No Rest For The Wicked is almost an exact copy of the Trickster's speech just carries the Mind Screw further.
  • Classic Doctor Who managed its Mind Screw with the middle four episodes of Trial of a Time Lord (it being called Mindwarp should have been a clue). The final two episodes of the arc attempted to clear up the Mind Screw elements. Due to a number of reasons, especially Executive Meddling and Author Existence Failure, it failed miserably.
    • The final season of Classic Who is notorious for this sort of thing, mostly due to editing-room decisions made to shoehorn the stories into the X-episode serial format. 'Ghost Light' is especially full of it - even the DVD-issued Special Edition is best tackled with a notebook and pen.
    • And then there's "Midnight". The audience never learns who, what or how the monster was, why it took over Skye and wanted to kill the Doctor, if there even was a monster or just a bunch of terribly conjunctive mishaps... the only thing we can be sure of is Humans Are the Real Monsters. And it's one of the best episodes of the show.
    • From the Expanded Universe: The Blue Angel. Parallel universes. Space warthog Valkyries. The Doctor giving birth to a winged baby from his leg. Claims that the Doctor's mother was a mermaid. Giant space owls. A Star Trek parody starship called the Nepotist. One character is an elephant (a green one, no less!), another gets turned into a giant squid for no adequately explained reason. Parallel universe Dalek-analogues who are humanoids made out of glass. Twenty questions that manage to be clever, patronising, and headache-inducing all at once...yeah, it seems to be a product of an acid trip during a Classic Who marathon.
    • Also, the Troughton story "The Mind Robber". Episode one was written in a hurry with no budget (hence the 'void' set and the robot costume re-used from a version of RUR. The weird dream-like setting of episode 1 coupled with the metafictional setting of the rest of the story and the disappearance of one of the characters at the end gave the impression that episodes 2-5 were all a dream.
    • "Castrovalva" is set on a planet that is a figment of Adric's imagination and towards the end turns into a complete perversion of logic and geometry.
    • The sequences set inside the Matrix in The Deadly Assassin and, again, the last seventh of Trial of a Time Lord
    • Some of the TARDIS' stranger attempts to warn the travellers where they're going in The Edge of Destruction.
    • Also in the new series, there is the episode: "Amy's Choice". It turns out that both options are really dreams and that neither one is reality.
    • The Eleventh Doctor is a walking mind-screw, because of the Cracks in Time story-arc. It makes sense if you interpret the Pandorica to be a Freudian superego; however, the Fifth Series ends with a two-part Finale with a convoluted plot that does not explain the origin of the TARDIS explosion at all; without this question answered, the plot makes no sense.
      • Thankfully, Moffat has stated that it was supposed to be this way, as the arc isn't done yet. The Silence arc will carry over into Series Six, and will explain the cracks, the voice, River Song, and the ducks.
    • At the end of Day of the Moon, the little girl starts to regenerate.
    • We discover, in The Almost People, that for the whole of season six, Amy has been a Ganger.
    • River Song, Amy and Rory's child, grew up back in time with the child versions of her own parents. More mindfuckeringly, River (original name Melody) was named after Amy and Rory's childhood friend Mels, who is, of course, Melody. She is named after herself.
    • In "The Wedding of River Song," the entirety of time is taking place at the same time because River prevented the Doctor's unpreventable death. Which means the Doctor has to recruit the shape-shifting Teselecta (which he never would have met had he not tried to avert his death) to avoid his death to ensure his death in the eyes of the universe by having the Teselecta "die" in his stead. Meaning he has to cause his death to avoid his death to cause his death to avoid his death to cause his death...
  • Sarah's dream sequences in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
  • St. Elsewhere: The Tommy Westphall Universe hypothesis. It is best just to ignore it, it gets even deeper when you consider the ending to Newhart, its connection to "The Bob Newhart Show and that it crossed over directly with St. Elsewhere.
    • You can't ignore it, they have charts!
  • Quite a few Monty Python's Flying Circus sketches, and all the Deranged Animations. Not due to an over-reliance on symbolism, but rather ignoring everything except the Rule of Funny.
    • "Tonight, on It's the Mind, we examine the strange phenomenon of Déjà vu..."
      • ...lemon curry?
  • There's a great Japanese show called Uchu Keiji Shaider. You can bet it will contain something like mind-controlling dolls,or people doing a demonic dance or some really odd-looking chroma key!
  • Carnivale: Considering it was heavily influenced by Twin Peaks, this is unsurprising.
  • Heroes relies on this to an extent. Much of the symbolism (the "symbol", cockroaches, etc.), the religious subtext, and the obvious puberty / Have You Tried Not Being a Monster? themes that generally pop up in this genre. And that's not even getting into the Season 3 finale...
  • During the taping of one of his comedy specials, comedian Howie Mandel once executed a Mind Screw on a person from one of the front rows who got up to go to the restroom. As soon as the poor unfortunate was out of earshot, Mandel had the audience in the vicinity of his seat rearrange themselves, and then continued with his act. When the audience member returned and stood, confused, in the aisle trying to find his seat again, Mandel stopped his act to "help" him for several minutes while the audience went wild, before revealing the gag and letting everyone go back to their original seats.
    • Additionally, comedian Mark Watson will frequently extol the virtues of randomly chasing people, and will do so if people get up. If he fails to catch them, he will Mind Screw them by sitting in their seat, waiting for them to return.
  • Fringe. The name says it all.
    • Especially when the Alternate Universe aspect really kicks in at the end of the second season.
  • "Failed Pilot" Virtuality, which I can only describe as 2001 meets Serial Experiments Lain meets Big Brother IN SPACE (with some Ghost in the Shell and eXistenZ for flavor) from the producers of Battlestar Galactica. The Mind Screwiness is made worse by the fact that it's an unfinished pilot. Breaking it down:
    • 2001: The crew is trapped on a very long journey with a possibly unreliable AI. Hypersleep is averted because the ship is propelled through space by carefully exploding small nukes, which everyone needs to be awake for.
    • Brother: In order to help with funding (I think, I missed the first 30 mins), the ship has become a Big Brother-style house, complete with Confession Cam booth.
    • Lain: When the captain is killed by an inexplicably malfunctioning airlock, a crew member mysteriously finds his VR goggles in her quarters. She goes into his last simulation, and discovers that the captain's consciousness may have survived.
    • Ghost: One of the crew members is raped while inside her own simulation, and it appears that another crew member knows the assailant, a program(?) posing as a gynecologist. However, why would they need a simulation of a gynecologist?
    • Existenz: The captain flexes his hand as though he's still in a simulation when the VR developer/psychologist asks him if he's certain of reality, and, again, why would they need a simulation of a gynecologist?
      • To answer the question about the simulation of a gynecologist, Alice is using her VR module to imagine the pregnancy she's not allowed to have being aboard the ship. Maybe. We conspicuously never see her break character or take off the module. And there are a lot of unncessarily details: magazines, waiting room, that make her seem less in control of the program. In essense, it's a question that may never be answered.
  • We Are Klang is generally surreal, but balanced with 'realistic' comedy. Alien, the last episode of series one, however, is essentially a sci-fi/fantasy hybrid and ends on a borderline Gainax Ending.
  • Once Upon a Time, (June the 11th, 1934, to be more precise,) in Sweden, a child was born. This wasn't especially uncommon in itself, but it just so happened that this child was named Staffan Westerberg... One day, when he was 41 years, 2 months and 22 days old, (in other words, it was now September the 1st, 1975,) Staffan became the producer and show host of what was (supposedly) a children's show, Vilse i Pannkakan, Lost in the Pancake. This show featured finger puppets that Staffan played with, all of them with Meaningful Names, like the titular main character, Lost. It also included, amongst many other things, a Corrupt Corporate Executive potato, a Hobo, a firefighter who gets it together with a motorized angel and, naturally, a moose; all living on the titular pancake. Oh, and the show was actually An Aesop about society and politics... These days, Staffan Westerberg is singlehandedly blamed for the psychological problems of the entire 70's generation.
  • Farscape has "Won't Get Fooled Again": Crichton is suddenly on Earth again, having apparently crashed his module and never gone through the wormhole...except he starts to see his crew mates around, acting extremely out of character, and no one seems to notice that they're, well, aliens. It just gets weirder from there, involving Rygel in bondage, D'Argo as a Camp Gay, repeated recurrences of Crichton's dead mother, Crais as a high-heels wearing police officer, and Scorpius trying to get Crichton to pay attention to him. It's eventually revealed that Crichton was kidnapped by a Scarran who's been frying his brain in order to get the information Scorpius wants out of his head. Also, there are two Scorpius in the illusion, because one of them is... something else.
    • You can just stop at Farscape. The series as a whole dipped into this so often that Crichton himself lampshaded it in a late episode when he realized their minds were being toyed with by the alien of the week.
  • The Stargate episode "Forever In A Day" happens inside Daniel Jackson's head. His wife (Sha're) is sending him a message by slightly twisting Amonets's (the goa'uld who has take her host) usage of her kara kesh (torture device). The episode starts Sha're 'telling' Daniel Teal'c was going to kill her, and then a few seconds later (which seems like months to Daniel) Teal'c actually kills her. Having already gotten over it (with help from Sha're) Daniel manages to begin to forgive Teal'c almost instantly. He admits Teal'c did the right thing, which he now knows Sha're would have asked Teal'c to do.
  • The end of one episode of The Colbert Report had Stephen read a story from his book "Colbert Report Bedtime Stories." It gets complicated, to say the least. It can be viewed here.
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