I Knew It / Live-Action TV

Examples of I Knew It! relating to live-action TV.

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• Pretty much everyone who knew Marvel comics assumed that the blue aliens that were the source of the Project TAHITI corpse and alien city on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. were the Kree. It's in the middle of Season 2 and the episode "Ye Who Enter Here" when it's explicitly confirmed.
• As soon as Katherine Mcnamara appeared on Arrow people were guessing that she was Oliver's daughter even deducing things that both her character and Oliver had the same alcoholic drink of choice.
• Early in Babylon 5, fandom quickly came to the conclusion that Sinclair was really Valen. By the time of The Reveal in Season 3's "War Without End", nobody is surprised. And there is some evidence that, in the original B5 storyline, this wasn't supposed to be revealed until the last episode of the show.
• The final Cylon model in Battlestar Galactica has turned out to be one of the first people we all suspected of being one — despite events in between that seemed, at the time, to make this impossible.
• When previews for the first season of Bomb Girls began airing, fans guessed that James would be killed in battle given that the show is a World War II drama, even if there was no indication right away he was in the military. No prizes for guessing what happened at the beginning of the second season.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer the concept that the Slayer's power is demonic in origin — and that she may, in fact, have a demon living inside of her that she is feeding off—is almost as old as the series itself. When it was finally revealed in Season 7, it wasn't much of a shock.
• Chuck: When Orion is first introduced, the episode ends with his apparent death. Fan theories began circulating that A: Orion wasn't really dead, and B: He was actually Chuck's father. A few episodes later, these theories were confirmed.
• In-universe example on Corner Gas. Davis proposed a very unusual theory about Battlestar Galactica (1978) and how all humans on Earth could have descended from the citizens on the Galactica. Guess how the remake ended.
• Daredevil (2015):
  • When it was announced Wilson Bethel would join the cast of season 3, many fans quickly suspected he would be playing Bullseye, since unlike the casting announcements for Jay Ali as Ray Nadeem or Joanne Whalley as Sister Maggie, Bethel's casting announcement didn't describe his character's name, just only calling him an "FBI agent". They were sorta right: Bethel is Bullseye, but he only ever is referred to by his legal name Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter (which in the comics was merely one of the character's many aliases).
  • Many fans had suspected Sister Maggie would be appearing in season 3 ever since the end shot of The Defenders (2017) of Matt in a convent and a nun calling for her. A number of fans also correctly predicted that they'd pull from the comics the fact that she's his mother, and give her post-partum depression she had in the Mark Waid run.
• Dexter:
  • The Season One serial killer is Dexter's brother. Rather obvious after he shows how much he knew about Dex.
  • It's also not hard to predict that the Ice Truck Killer is the prosthesis doctor since it's the kind of thing that would be way too ironic for the show to pass up.
  • From Season 6, the revelation that Gellar was Dead All Along was predicted by a majority of fans early on.
• Doctor Who:
  • In his recap of the second-to-last episode of the first season of NuWho, Jacob of Television Without Pity incorporated a lengthy rant on Gnosticism and the parallels thereto in the revived series. He concluded from this analysis that, among other things, the season finale would have to involve the Doctor as the Devil battling a "fake bastard God" and being saved by a female character ("I hope it's the TARDIS, but it's probably Rose") as the incarnation of the goddess of wisdom. In his recap of the actual finale, he doesn't so much gloat as express relief that he doesn't look insane.
  • The return of the Master in the new series. Granted, this got more and more obvious as the show went on, but some fans had this figured out from the trailer. Others had this worked out even before that based on what DVD box sets of the classic series the BBC was releasing. (The box set in question being the "New Beginnings" trilogy, which returned the Master to recurring character status in the original series.) Others rejected this theory because they felt that The BBC wouldn't be "that obvious".
  • In possibly the most extreme example, the possible connection between Jack Harkness and the Face of Boe was predicted ahead of time.
  • Many already knew that Rassilon was a shady character, and he is even a villain in Big Finish. Thus, it isn't too surprising that he is the main villain in "The End of Time".
  • There was a theory that in "Flesh and Stone", the reason that the Doctor was wearing the jacket that he had just lost wasn't because of continuity errors, but because he was actually the Doctor from the future who had come back in time to talk to Amy. Those who subscribed to this theory were entirely correct.
  • Quite a few fans predicted that River Song was Amy and Rory's daughter. They were right.
  • And on the subject of River, it was widely suggested that the "good man" that River killed would turn out to be the Doctor himself — it was. He survived.
  • How many jokes were there about the Statue of Liberty being a Weeping Angel before "The Angels Take Manhattan"? A lot. How horrified was everyone that the jokes were right? Very.
  • A few fans successfully guessed the revelation regarding Clara in "The Name of the Doctor": that the modern London Clara is the original and somehow ends up splintered across time to save the Doctor's life countless times.
  • After he first appeared in "The Name of the Doctor", fans speculated that the War Doctor was a previously unknown incarnation of the Doctor from between his eighth and ninth incarnations. The minisode "The Night of the Doctor" proved this to be true.
  • A number of Whovians said this at the end of Series 8, regarding The Reveal that Missy was short for "Mistress", and that she was a female incarnation of the Master. Although the easily guessable revelation may have been deliberately used as a distraction to stimulate speculation and make the real surprise of the finale (Danny's death) more of a shock.
  • The official synopsis of post-Series 9 Christmas Episode "The Husbands of River Song" triggered predictions/fears that it would reveal the circumstances of the Doctor and River Song's last night together, and it did. However, the episode ended on a twist no one saw coming: said night on Darillium lasts 24 years in Earth/human time!
  • "World Enough and Time":
    • Some fans figured Moffat would kill off Bill because he was about to leave the show and would likely sweep the chessboard clean for Chris Chibnall. That, and they know what to expect with Moffat by this point, and it made sense he would have one last crack at killing off a beloved character... though from there other fans correctly guessed that there would be more to Bill's fate than the Cliffhanger teased!
    • Because of the fake-out regeneration in "The Lie of the Land", when the Doctor appeared to be dying in the opening sequence, a lot of people expected another tease of a regeneration, only for real this time.
  • "The Doctor Falls":
    • Quite a few fans predicted that Bill would be rescued from her fate by Heather from "The Pilot" given the latter character's established shapeshifting and time-and-space travelling abilities and the fact that just killing off a companion for good just isn't in the revival's wheelhouse. Eagle-eyed viewers even caught a hint of Foreshadowing in the previous episode when she appeared in the window Bill was glancing out of!
    • After David Bradley's return was spoiled by newspapers, many fans correctly guessed he would appear as the First Doctor — after his turn as William Hartnell in An Adventure in Space and Time — in the final scene.
  • "Twice Upon a Time": Long before the special aired, most fans guessed that the Captain, who was not named in the publicity, was somehow related to the Brigadier. The reveal of his name near the end confirmed him as a member of the Lethbridge-Stewart family.
  • "Resolution": Despite the advertising going to considerable lengths (until Christmas Day, anyway) in avoiding the revelation of who or what "the most dangerous creature in the universe" was, that description was enough for many to figure out just who the Doctor was talking about.
• Dollhouse: Half the viewers who saw the episode where Victor is imprinted with Dominic's mind immediately pounced on his use of the word "whiskey" in the presence of Dr. Saunders. Guess who turned out to be a former Active?
• Elementary:
  • "Risk Management": Many fans had already called Irene Adler being alive because they Never Found the Body.
  • "The Woman": Irene really being Moriarty had also been called by some fans, although it probably blindsided most of the audience. Moriarty being a woman had been called by quite a large number.
• Firefly's comic spin-offs eventually validated the theory that Book was an operative, although it's really not that far a leap after his role in Serenity, and that Zoe was pregnant with Wash's baby.
  • If you pay attention it's peppered with small hints that Jayne has a thing for Kaylee. The audio commentary for the episode "Serenity" confirms this.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Even before the show made it to television, several of the kookier fan theories for A Song of Ice and Fire proposed that time travel would eventually play some sort of role in the plot. In particular, many fans explored the idea that Bran Stark's newfound psychic powers could give him the power to glimpse into the past and possibly even influence the past by warging into people. This was eventually confirmed in Season 6, where Bran finally does use his astral projection abilities to get a look at some key events in his father's youth. It's also revealed that Hodor's mental deficiencies are the result of Bran possessing him while looking into the past, causing him to suffer a massive seizure and prompting a My God, What Have I Done? reaction from a stunned Bran.
  • The Season 6 finale gives us a big one: Jon Snow is not Ned Stark’s son, he is his nephew. Lyanna Stark, Ned Stark's sister, is Jon's mother and the promise Ned made to Lyanna was to keep Jon’s identity secret. Ned spends the rest of his life protecting Jon and raising him as his own son, dying with this secret to protect Jon from the wrath of Robert Baratheon. The other half of the theory, that Rhaegar Targaryen is Jon’s biological father, was subsequently confirmed by official supplemental material. This had been the subject of fan speculation literally since A Game of Thrones came out. ^note  And in fact, knowing the identity of Jon’s true mother was the piece of information that convinced the series' author, George R.R. Martin, to give series showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss the job of adapting his books into a television series. It’s a Moment of Awesome for them that they managed to keep this a secret for as long as they did, burning on the inside as they must have been to reveal it. Note that Jon not being Ned’s biological son had already been all but confirmed years earlier by Word of Saint Paul, as Sean Bean had let it slip in an interview, while Alfie Allen teased that Jon's parentage involved a Luke Skywalker-like plot. Luke was raised by his uncle, unaware of his origins.
  • Several fans guessed many years in advance that the series would eventually introduce at least one ice dragon to contrast the more traditional fire-breathing dragons—partly based on the fact that George R. R. Martin previously wrote a children's fantasy novel called The Ice Dragon, and partly on the fact that there was a constellation called "The Ice Dragon" in the books. This is confirmed in the final scene of "Beyond the Wall", where Viserion is slain by the Night King and subsequently resurrected as a White Walker.
  • Season 7 confirms the widespread theory that the mysterious figure "The Prince That Was Promised" isn't necessarily guaranteed to be male. Many fans had suspected this for a while, partly because the phrase was translated from High Valyrian (meaning that "Prince" easily could have been translated from a more vague term like "Ruler" or "Monarch"), and partly because so many fans believed that Daenerys was the Prince. Missandei confirms their suspicions in "Stormborn": the High Valyrian equivalent of "Prince" is gender-neutral, meaning that a more accurate translation would be "The Prince or Princess That Was Promised".
• In Glee the user GenialTheParadox guessed that David Karofsky was gay and in love with Kurt two months before "Never Been Kissed" aired.
• Heroes Season 3 actually made canonical two of the most off-the-wall fan theories there were: Sylar being Peter's brother, and the Big Bad being Arthur Petrelli.
  • They also seem to be playing with the "Sylar is Peter" theory from season 1 before Sylar's identity was revealed, by giving Peter Sylar's homicidal urges.
  • And then there was an I Knew It! against the above I Knew It!: Sylar isn't the third Petrelli brother; Angela just Sylar this in order to manipulate him using his mommy issues, and then Arthur tweaked the lie a little to turn Sylar around to his side.
  • From Volume Four: Micah is Rebel
  • Volume Five: Sylar is good now! To be fair, Volume Five being titled "Redemption" at the beginning made this kind of a "No duh!"
• The New Year's Eve 1971 telecast of The Hollywood Squares had a self-contained "I knew it." A contestant chose Charley Weaver, whose question was "Every night before he went to bed, George Washington would always put his false teeth into something. What?" Charley began to chuckle, and host Peter Marshall knew what he was in for. Peter re-read the question, and Charley's response: "Martha!" Peter just quipped "I knew it! I knew it!" as the audience roared with laughter.
• In early seasons of House, a good percentage of the fanbase thought that House had been abused as a child. While nobody thought that it would be the psychological abuse of ice baths and being made to sleep outside (most of them thought it would end up as either sexual abuse or physical), "One Day, One Room" proved them right.
• In How I Met Your Mother, many fans guessed that Barney's bride was Robin, despite the multiple Red Herrings.
  • Also, the final reveal: that the Mother was dead and the whole story was a way for Ted to ask his kids if it was ok to move on, to "Aunt" Robin. The kids were all for it since the Mother had been dead for 6 years and they "love Aunt Robin."
  • Those who believed that the fake-out with the stripper in Season 1 meant the Mother's real name was Tracy was indeed correct.
  • The theory that the alternate ending was Tracy living and it cutting to the end after the initial meet between her and Ted at the Farhampton train station proved to be absolutely 100% true too.
• Kamen Rider Wizard fans were able to predict pretty quickly that the apparent Big Bad Wiseman and the mysterious White Wizard who set Haruto down the path to becoming Wizard were one and the same; the real twist was Wiseman/WW's true identity and his reason for enacting the Sabbath that kicked off the events of the series.
• Several contingents of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes (2008) fans were very happy with the finale because it confirmed a TON of Epileptic Trees:
  • The theory that Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory? Confirmed.
  • The theory that Sam and Alex - and everyone else - have been Dead All Along? Confirmed.
  • The theory that Gene Hunt is the ghostly copper that's been haunting Alex during season 3? Confirmed.
  • The theory that Nelson was more than he appeared? Confirmed. He's even an equivalent of Saint Peter, the gatekeeper to the afterlife.
  • The theory that Keats was something supernatural, either the Angel of Death or the Devil himself? Confirmed, he's Satan himself.
  • The theory that Gene didn't kill Sam, he helped him cross over to the afterlife? Confirmed, though Gene doesn't remember his duties as the self-appointed psychopomp of Dead Copper's Purgatory.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Many fans predicted the big plot-twist revelations of the Season 1 finale: that Halbrand was Sauron in disguise and that the Stranger is implied to be Gandalf.
• Lost, despite being the Trope Namer for Epileptic Trees, has some of this. Fans knew from the first moment Locke used to be paralyzed (to simply name one of the earliest). Though, among all the Wild Mass Guessing probably everything was expected by someone in the fandom.
  • You knew all those fans who said they were in purgatory? They were correct, they just had the season wrong.
• Lost in Space (2018):
  • Despite Netflix's best efforts to hide it, when Russell Hornsby was announced as being cast for the third season, most guessed that he was playing Judy's biological father, Grant Kelly, which turned out to be right.
  • Additionally, despite her supposed Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the second season, many suspected that Parker Posey's June Harris ("Dr. Smith") character had faked her death and was still around. When it came time to seriously promote the third season, Netflix didn't even bother to hide this one, both putting her at the end of the trailer ("I thought you were supposed to be dead.") and releasing publicity images of her character. Additionally, she appears almost right at the beginning of the first episode.
• Emma and Sutton's mother is Rebecca on The Lying Game.
• The Middle: Those who predicted both that the love of Axl Heck's life was going to be Lexie Brooks, Sue's roommate and that April was a Romantic False Lead and placeholder proved to be right on both accounts.
• Mr. Robot: as far back as Episode 2 or 3, there were TONS of fans claiming that Mr. Robot was actually a hallucination since he conspicuously didn't interact with anyone besides Elliot. As if the showrunners had predicted this, they had attempted to trick the viewers by having Mr. Robot speak to other people, only to reveal in the finale that yes, Mr. Robot isn't real and Elliot was the one having those conversations.
  • Totally averted by the reveal that Darlene is Elliot's sister. Effectively masked by the 'obvious' hallucination twist about Mr Robot, viewers simply assumed Darlene is his hacker friend Manic Pixie Dream Girl "Veronica" compared to Angela as his Just Friends, girl next door "Betty".
• Neighbours: Kate and Declan. They'd been making eyes at each other since Bridget's funeral!
• In Once Upon a Time, many were theorising Mr. Gold/Rumplestiltskin still remembered everything. They were right, of course.
  • They were also right about Bae being Neal Cassady.
  • Similarly many fans guessed by the end of the first season that Cora and Regina were the mother and baby from the original Rumple fairy tale.
• Power Rangers:
  • After the first few episodes of Power Rangers S.P.D., one member of a popular Power Rangers forum declared that the Red Ranger of the SPD A-Squad was, in fact, a woman. After hearing the voice of the Red Ranger, the forum member deduced from his experience with sound engineering that the voice was that of a woman which had been electronically adjusted to make it sound like a guy. Nobody believed him, because there had never been a female Red Ranger in the history of Power Rangers (or Super Sentai^note although Sentai would later get it's first official female Red Ranger roughly 4 years later). Eight months and thirty episodes later, the helmet comes off and... the Red Ranger is a woman! Said forum member celebrates by creating a new thread dedicated to his own awesomeness, mocking the people who didn't believe him and filling the thread with flashing GIFs declaring "I WAS RIGHT". Good game, sir. Of course, there was also the fact she was revealed to be evil... Oh wait, some even guessed that as well.
    • Of amusing note is that he later put his "I WAS RIGHT" line on a homemade t-shirt and got the cast to sign it. The show's executive producer was reportedly flabbergasted that he had guessed correctly that early.
  • Most fans called the "Dillon's missing sister" subplot in Power Rangers RPM because it played out just like a subplot from Power Rangers in Space years before: the resident villainess is the missing sister, having forgotten her former life.
  • In the lead-up to Power Rangers Cosmic Fury: savvy fans were quick to notice a.) behind-the-scenes photos of Ollie show him wearing darker shades of blue than usual, b.) unlike the rest of the cast, he isn't smiling in the opening credits sequence, c.) Lord Zedd briefly put him under mind control last season, and Zedd's being hyped as the main villain now, and d.) with David Yost returning to play Billy, two Blue Rangers with triceratops powers may render each other redundant. Sure enough, Ollie getting re-brainwashed by Zedd is the First-Episode Twist.
• There were quite a few entries on the Pretty Little Liars page about several plot twists in the show before they were released, including Mona being A, and Spencer and Toby joining the A team.
• During the first Sherlock series finale, someone on the Kink Meme requested a fic in which Jim from IT turned out to be Moriarty. Minutes later, we're at the pool, and out steps "Jim Moriarty. Hi-i!"
• In November 2014 Cracked ran a photoplasty contest entitled "How 22 Famous Movie & TV Franchises Would End (If They Had The Balls)". The second place entry showed Jax Teller from Sons of Anarchy about to crash into a truck. Sure enough, only a month later, the series finale ended with Jax committing suicide by riding directly into the path of a truck.
  • Fridge Brilliance comes into play here. Who would claim that the series doesn't have balls?
• Riverdale:
  • Early on in the second season, after the Black Hood was seemingly killed, many fans theorized that the one who died was a decoy, with the real one still at large. He was.
  • Shortly into season four, several episodes concluded with ominous flash-forwards in time to Jughead's apparent death. Fans immediately began theorizing it was somehow faked, and sure enough, he turned out just fine.
• Star Trek: Discovery:
  • After "Choose Your Pain" aired, viewers quickly started circulating the theory that Ash Tyler (Discovery's second security chief and Love Interest to main character Michael Burnham) was really the recurring Klingon albino Voq in disguise. Actor Shazad Latif was initially announced as playing a Klingon and appears in the credits from the pilot, but his character Tyler doesn't turn up until episode 5, where he and Captain Lorca escape a Klingon prison ship commanded by Voq's fellow clan member L'Rell. Several viewers spotted similarities between Voq's and Tyler's mannerisms, as well as citing the thinness of the IMDB profile of Javid Iqbal (Voq) as evidence that Iqbal is not a real person. Not helped by Trolling Creator antics from Jason Isaacs (Lorca), such as him bursting into an interview where Latif was asked about the theory and saying that everything Latif says is BS (almost exact words). And then the mid-season premiere "Despite Yourself" aired and confirmed the theory.
  • Another fairly common theory throughout was that Gabriel Lorca, captain of the USS Discovery, was actually from the mirror universe. This was due to his un-Starfleet like behavior in general as well as certain other things that just didn't add up. Then "Vaulting Ambition" aired and, yeah, he was indeed from the mirror universe and has been running a long game all along to get back there and stage a coup against the mirror universe Emperor.
  • The "Terra Firma"" two-parter introduced Carl, a Pungeon Master guarding a time portal that looked like an ordinary door. The fan theory that proved correct was that he was actually the Guardian of Forever.
• While it was pretty obvious from the beginning, the Supernatural Fanon that Child!Dean acted like a mother (or tried to be a replacement for Mary, if you want to go that even more screwed-up route) to both Sam and his dad was only stated outright in My Time of Dying. He took care both of them when he shouldn't have had to, tried to break up their fights (often getting completely ignored in the process) and never complained, not once.
  • Speculation for season four included many crazy theories about how Dean would escape hell, like this insane idea that an angel was going to rescue him and recruit him to do God's work and... wait, what? Really?
  • Fans who thought Mary doomed her family and made a deal/huge mistake to screw Sam over from birth? You all get a cookie.
  • The Supernatural WMG predicted that Dean was the vessel for Michael and Sam was the vessel for Lucifer—both confirmed within the first three episodes of season 5.
  • Ezekiel not actually being Ezekiel but another angel who lied about his identity was correctly guessed after his very first appearance.
  • Some Supernatural fans actually call this being Kripked. The Super-wiki even calls this trivia by this name and links to its own page for Jossed.
  • A similar dialogue to the Galaxy Quest example occurs between Chuck (the guy who writes the "Supernatural" books in-universe, who had thought they were just fiction that came to him) and Becky, his #1 fan/fanfic writer.
    Becky: Yes, I'm a fan, but I really don't appreciate being mocked. I know that "Supernatural" is just a book, okay? I know the difference between fantasy and reality.
    Chuck: Becky, it's all real.
    Becky: I knew it!
  • For the Season 13 finale, it was confirmed that Jensen Ackles would be playing someone possessing Dean, leading the fandom to speculate heavily that he would be playing Michael, who would be pulled out of Lucifer's Cage, and whom Dean is the true vessel for. Subverted; Dean ended up being possessed by Michael's counterpart from an alternate universe, but he did acknowledge himself as being Michael's true vessel.
  • Since his introduction, fans have believed that Castiel was secretly in love with Dean. Guess what became canon two episodes before the finale?
• There were theories about Mel being part Cirronian going around long before it was confirmed on Tracker (2001).
• White Collar usually does a very good job throwing in an unexpected twist for every midseason and season finale. But in the fourth season, nobody was surprised when Sam turned out to be not Sam at all but Neal's father instead. Not quite as obvious but a couple of fans also called that The season would end with Peter getting arrested. Due to heavy foreshadowing, everyone expected something to happen to Elizabeth in the midseason finale of season three, too, simply because Peter reassured her that everything would be okay just one episode earlier.

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