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Mind Screw
alt title(s): Mind Goink; Mind Fuck
"I wanted to have controversy, argument, fights, discussions, people in anger waving fists in my face, saying how dare you and why don't you do more that we can understand. I was delighted with that reaction; I think it's a very good one, and that was the intention of the exercise."
- Patrick McGoohan on the last episode of The Prisoner

The Mind Screw is basically a show that relies so heavily on symbolism that the immediate response afterwards is "What the heck was that?!?!"

These shows practically beg for fans to invent their own improbable theories about Epileptic Trees and such.

While some fans can make arguments over what the symbolism means, and what everything represents, many mind screws will pad themselves with meaningless sequences to make the audience work even harder. Arguments over which sequences are significant are common. Don't expect the writer to be very helpful. And if the show has supplemental materials, don't expect them to be much help either. The more decipherable symbolism tends to focus on the perceptions people have of one another. And puberty.

Also known as...well, something that rhymes with "Mind Chuck."

Not to be confused with Mind Rape, no matter how the audience feels, nor with the Mind Game Ship. Compare with the Gainax Ending and The Usual Suspects Ending. When trying to get the creators to explain just what the heck is going on, expect some form of Shrug Of God.
Examples:

Anime
  • NEON. GENESIS. EVANGELION. Don't even start on how much controversy this provoked.
    • Hilariously, the actual explanation for the events is simple: SEELE used prophecies left behind by a Precursor race to attempt to fuse two different magic technological Terraforming agents (also left behind by said Precursor race) and turn humanity into... something. A Hive Mind? A dreaming unconsciousness? A god? Something anyway. The method just happened to be via psychoanalysis. Seriously. Well... um... simple enough.
    • Just to give the reader an idea, many of the examples on this page use plot elements as metaphors for eschatology; NGE uses eschatological imagery and parallels as a metaphor for... um... hmm. Definitely something to do with mothers.
  • Space Runaway Ideon, to whom NGE is a Spiritual Successor, gets a special mention for being the earliest anime of this kind.
  • Serial Experiments Lain. 'nuff said.
  • FLCL. It may take you two or three viewings to understand just the plot.
    • Wait, there's a plot? When did this happen?
    • This Troper didn't have any trouble understand FLCL with one viewing. Does this mean I'm insane?
    • Nah, some mind screws are only screwy if you think Naruto is deep thinking. With FLCL, the Ruleof Cool distracts most from the plot.
  • On those two notes, pretty much anything by Gainax will have at least some traces of Mind Screw...even Petite Princess Yucie
  • Angels Egg, an animated "tone poem" that was seminal for this sort of work in anime.
  • The Big O.
  • Sousei no Aquarion. This might be considered a parody of Super Robot series, along with all the New Age ideas that Shoji Kawamori decided to inject.
  • Revolutionary Girl Utena. Utena's director Ikuhara has expressed particular, almost sadistic, delight in the despair fans have shown over figuring things out. Some of his more famous replies to fans have been "Miki keeps timing things because his watch contains the secret of the universe" and "The reason Utena turns into a car in the movie is because I really wanted to turn a cute girl into a car."
  • Perfect Blue
  • Paranoia Agent
  • Dead Leaves takes this to Beyond The Impossible levels. It begins with a guy who looks like Canti from FLCL and a girl with a weird eye marking waking up naked in the middle of nowhere, and ends with a super-intelligent (?) baby coming out of the girl's panties with Guns Akimbo, putting enough dakka in the air to kill a bull elephant, and flying off into space to kill a giant worm. I Am Not Making This Up. Retro, the Canti Expy, frequently comments along the lines of "This is so screwed up."
  • Boogiepop Phantom
  • The anime of Full Metal Alchemist is fairly straightforward. The manga, on the other hand, is heading at a steady clip towards being pure concentrated "What the hell?".
  • The hentai/horror anime Urotsukidoji (Legend of the Overfiend), the Naughty Tentacles Trope Maker, does this to the point of incoherence.
  • Saikano, which seems to use the end of the world as a metaphor for a failed high school relationship.
  • Texhnolyze is another big recent example, with a lot of symbolism that will require several viewings in order to fully understand everything.
    • As a matter of fact, this is rather expected, since Texhnolyze has a lot of the original staff from Serial Experiments Lain.
  • The ending of Akira is considered by many to be an example of this.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh GX: looks like a mundane Gaming Anime - slowly turned into something full of so many bizarre and creepy twists and turns, you can never confidently assume you fully know what is going on.
  • Paprika
  • Ghost In The Shell: The first season of Stand Alone Complex ended the Laughing Man case with the knowledge that, we caught the Laughing Man, but we're not sure we caught the right guy. But he really is the right guy. We just don't know. We even offered him a job with Section 9, but he decided to stay in the Library of Congress.
    • 2nd GiG ends on a very similar note. Did Kuze really die, or did he just upload his mind into the web before he got sniped? What did "I'll go on ahead" really mean? It goes on in circles.
    • And then there's the original manga by Shirow Masamune himself. The major ends up fusing with the puppeteer. Is the end result a cross between the two? Predominantly Major? Mostly Puppeteer? Male? Female? Something completely different? The only answer we get is "The Net is vast."
    • Don't even start on the second manga series. 1.5 is surprisingly reasonable. Even answers what happened to the Major a lot more clearly.
  • Ergo Proxy: Lain with shotguns. Full of mind-screw situations - especially when Proxy One starts playing mind-games with Vincent Law, his host and when the identity of Real herself comes into doubt later on. The group also has other weird experiences, like an episode focusing on the characters taking part in a game-show, and an episode where Pino explores a disney-like theater complete with anthropomorphic animals. When compared to the rest of the tone of the series, it's no wonder most of the cast are near-crazed by the end.
  • Brain Powerd. Okay, so there's a monster that employs people to help it absorb all life energy on earth so it can fly into space, and it produces robots with cockpits in their crotches, except that there are other crotch-piloted robots fighting against them, and all the robots are built from giant killer Lego disks. The robots may or may not be metaphors for children, and somehow every episode is about incredibly screwed-up family issues, except the ones where they toss around the word "organic" way too much. Um... Yeah, no idea. And that's just the premise. The last several episodes are a downward spiral of nonstop epic WTF-just-happened-itude.
  • Ghost Hound
  • Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle. So ambiguous and convoluted at times that official translators admit in the notes that they're basically making a guess and winging it. Unofficial translators do not say such in the notes only because that takes up space better filled by actively and profusely cursing at CLAMP.
  • Geno Cyber, though it's hard to comprehend the plot when you're too busy vomiting every five seconds and crapping your pants in terror.
    • The main reason why it's a mindfuck is because there's a totally unexplained Time Skip between the first and second arcs, compounded by the fact that the first arc has No Ending.
  • Suzumiya Haruhi. The Anachronic Order will mess you up, since you cannot relate half of the stuff being said. Furthermore, it gets hard to follow in the 4th novel Disappearance and it's continuance in another novel, where time traveling is combined with alternate universes. It may take you 2 times to read just to understand how they actually managed to solve it. The 9th (current) novel features two realities, for no apparent reason, in which different stuff happens. and ends with a Cliff Hanger, so we still don't know what's going on.
  • Even though ef: A Tale Of Memories can be quite screwy, it's mostly due to its presentation, since the love stories are in themselves actually pretty straightforward. Most of the surreal moments stem from the imagery surrounding Chihiro's memory condition, which can be very heart-breaking.
  • Earth Maiden Arjuna. On one hand, the general theme of letting the earth be and saving the environment from unnatural influences is pretty clear. On the other hand, the details of the plot are rather surreal, to say nothing of the presentation...
  • Chaos;Head is one right from the beginning. The viewer is forced to pay attention to everything that goes on, not knowing if it's simply a delusion or possibly real. Even when things get cleared up, there's still another layer of mystery beneath that.

Literature
  • Alice In Wonderland
  • The Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson (which actually contains something called "Operation Mindfuck"), and ended with the main character realizing that it's all a book and that nothing is real However, when he tells his friends about this, they either reject it as untrue, or dismiss it as unimportant. Also its sort-of-sequel, the Schroedingers Cat Trilogy.
    • This is lampshade-hung at the end of the trilogy, at which point the main character breaks the fourth wall to criticize the authors for placing too much importance on symbolism, and not enough on writing a satisfying conclusion.
    • Also its sort-of-prequel, Masks of the Illuminati, which is relatively conventional until the last chapter, at which point sanity is thrown out the window.
  • Any dream sequence in A Song Of Ice And Fire. Besides these there is the House of the Undying.
  • Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves ranks with the most convoluted in any medium. You might not understand what happened in the book, but you might have trouble with poorly-lit areas afterwards.
  • While its symbolism is clear, the novel The Man Who Was Thursday has a definite Mind Screw ending, as the last two chapters change it from a suspense novel with some philosophical undertones to an allegory of the Sabbath.
  • Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren actually begins and ends with schizophrenic word salad.
  • Pretty much anything written by T.S. Eliot. Especially The Waste Land.
    • Possibly an even worse example is Four Quartets. All together now:
      What we call the beginning is often the end
      And to make and end is to make a beginning.
      The end is where we start from.
    • Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats is quite straightforward. So why did Andrew Lloyd Webber decide to throw in a fragment from Four Quartets as "The Moment Of Happiness"?
    • Once the magic words are explained, though, it all falls into place. In the case of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock the words were "impotent" and "whorehouse."
  • Steven Brust's novel Orca ends with two of these in a row. First, we discover that Kiera the Thief, who actually narrates a lot of the book, is really Sethra Lavode, vampire, sorceress, and all-around Bad Ass. Then, in the last sentence of the epilogue, Kiera lets slip that she's been hiding another secret all through the book: Vlad has a son. The all-around effect is that since everyone's been hiding things from each other and it's clearly established that the characters are telling stories after the fact, both Kiera and Vlad may be hiding things from us, too. Of course, Brust has something of a history of this; halfway through the first book in the series, Jhereg, we find out that Vlad is the reincarnation of the founder of house Jhereg.
  • The Brothers Karamazov is billed as a murder mystery and courtroom drama. Yet, characters make key revelations towards its conclusion (especially in Book Eleven, which features a conversation with a demon that might not be there) that qualify it as a Mind Screw. With everyone playing mindgames against each other for different reasons, peeling through the layers at the end and dissecting the motivations and the symbolism just blows one's mind.
  • Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. There's a plot in there somewhere, amongst all the sex, drugs, violence, bizarre philosophy, and Dead Baby Comedy, but this editor is damned if he can get far enough into the book to find it.
  • The book of Revelation in The Bible, making this Older Than Feudalism. Revelation has so much symbolism that interpretations of it range from "it all already happened in the first century" to "some has already happened" to "it'll all happen sometime in the future". Interpretations on who the "Beast" is ranges from the Roman Emperor Nero to the Pope to Ronald Reagan.
  • Don't forget Thomas Pynchon's V, which has possibly one of the 10 densest plots in any medium.
    • And don't even try to start Gravity's Rainbow...
  • The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers. A series of vaguely connected short stories about decadent artists living in an alternate version of the The Roaring Twenties, linked by a mind-destroying play script whose plot we never learn, but we keep getting little excerpts. Filled with Unreliable Narrators, Ax Crazies, Cosmic Horror, and falconry. By the end of the book, it makes no sense, but is absolutely terrifying.
  • The very end of Pontoon by Garrison Keillor, starting just after Raoul dies and continuing for the last five or six pages.
  • The whole of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov is written by Charles Kinbote. Or was it? Maybe it was written by John Shade using Charles Kinbote as a narrative device to tell two mixed stories of a daughter's suicide and a king's romantic retreat from his country in turmoil. Maybe Charles Kinbote is real but also insane, and wrote the whole thing from mountainous seclusion, planning to end his life shortly thereafter. Or perhaps the whole book was written by one minor character who is mentioned twice in the entire novel. It's all there in the book; who wrote it all and for what is up for grabs though.
  • William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Does Addie's monologue imply the existence of an afterlife? Is Darl a psychic, or just a psycho? And WTF was up with all the Bananas? There's even an entire chapter which consists of a character declaring his dead mother to be a fish.
    • To add to the Faulkner list, The Sound And The Fury. Does Benji serve any purpose besides narrating the first part of the novel? What the heck is up with the last chapter? And don't get me started on Quentin.
      • The fish thing is explained in the book. Which Quentin? And Benji is there so we don't guess something is up at first with the two Quentins. (Yes, this troper is a fan, why do you ask?)
  • Jorge Luis Borges drifts around between a bunch of genres, but spends a considerable amount of time in Mind Screw. One such story - entitled Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - is about the narrator finding an article in an encyclopedia about Uqbar, a country that doesn't exist, which in turn has literature about Tlön, a world that doesn't exist - but by the end of the story, the real world has started to fade away, leaving only Tlön. I think.
  • Happens a lot in Gravitys Rainbow, especially what exactly happens to Slothrop, the chapter set in Hell, Slothrops' sodium pentathol dreams, and the ending where the final V2 rocket kills you, the reader
  • Pretty much anything by Carlton Mellick III, titles include Razorwire Pubic Hair and Satan Burger, which are pretty much what the titles would lead you to expect.
  • Trying to dissect Only Revolutions, eh? Well, break out the LSD and textual criticism cognoscenti, let's get this party on! (Note it's by Mark Z. Danielewski.)
  • God's Debris by Scott Adams consists entirely of a dialogue between a delivery man and a crazy guy he has a package for. Apparently, the book was laced with hypnotic suggestions and, in the forward, asks you to identify the single fault in the crazy guy's logic. The sequel, the Religion Wars, on the other hand, provides more comfortable mind screws in the form of a Xanatos Roulette, Memetic Mutation, and What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic, as well as having an actual plot.
  • The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series is another example. Although it is convenient that you can start reading any of the books at any point in the story, put it down and walk away, and come back a year later. Nothing will make sense, but that's okay, because nothing makes sense in that series anyway.
  • The closing chapter of Robert Sheckley's Mindswap hits this trope full on. The hero ends up trapped in the "Twisted World" but believes himself to have successfully returned home. In this troper's humble opinion, Sheckley simply didn't know how to finish the story and went for a rave-up ending.
  • Just about anything by Philip K. Dick, but especially apt is The Unteleported Man, in which the protagonist makes the journey through a strangely one-way teleporter to the planet Whale's Mouth. Soon afterward, he's hit by an LSD dart, and the world dissolves into Mind Screw for the rest of the novel.
  • Garth Nix's series "Keeper of the Keys". This troper can't tell if it's veiled Christianity, a metaphor for bureaucracy, or just weird.
    • "The Keys to the Kingdom" is actually the correct title, and the story's actually pretty straightforward (at least initially) if you don't start trying to read symbolism into it. If you do ... well, let's just say that Garth Nix pretty much took a whole heap of disparate material - from Greek Myth, Christianity, folklore, nursery tales and classical poetry to name a few sources - and put it in a blender. It's an inextricable morass of disparate bits and pieces - which is what your brain will probably end up like if you start trying to actually fathom a deeper meaning behind it all.
  • [[Finnegans Wake]], by James Joyce, is the ultimate embodiment of this trope. The plot is covered in about a tenth of the chapters in the book. The rest tell a series of unconnected vignettes, describe minor characters in excessive detail, give allegories for the main plot, and teach you geometry. One chapter was described by Joyce as "A chattering dialogue across a river by two washerwomen who, as night falls, become a tree and stone." Some chapters feature random doodles in the margins. The first sentence is the ending part of the last sentence, making the book circular. Finally, it's written in a combination of a phonetic Irish accent, random puns that you need a doctorate in ancient mythology to understand, and general stream of consciousness. In short, it makes no sense. Which to this troper, is awesome.

Film
  • 2001: A Space Odyssey. The book, on the other hand, is considerably more comprehensible.
    • A popular urban legend (Later confirmed by Arthur C. Clarke himself) goes that, after the premiere, Rock Hudson stormed out of the theater, yelling "What the hell was that all about?"
    • The movie was such a mind screw that the film adaptation of 2010: The Year We Made Contact was largely devoted to trying to explain what the hell had happened in the last movie. You may not have heard of this sequel. There's an excellent reason for that.
    • The prologue and ending of the original book of 2001 are significantly longer than their movie equivalents for the same reason. There was a lot of 'splaining to do.
  • The 2004 film Casshern had no explanation for the ending or for the various Deus Ex Machina moments that appeared throughout the film. For example, giant metal bolts of lightning that: Started the plot, transported the hero right to the point he needed to be with no question from anyone, and conveniently provided the final chamber with a giant hole in the wall.
  • The beginning of The City of Lost Children. Most, not all of it, make sense by the end.
  • Cube intentionally offers no real explanations to what the titular Cube is and why the characters were placed in it.
    • The sequels, however, make things worse with their attempts to actually explain things somewhat, as none of the three films are made by the same people and can't seem to agree on essential points - Hypercube being the worst offender in this area.
  • The Matrix. The sequels have a mild case of it, anyway; in the first movie, Morpheus took the time to explain what was going on.
    • The "Animatrix", a collection of short anime films based off the trilogy, easily qualify as Mind Screw material.
  • David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. Or, to an even greater degree, Eraserhead, pictured at the top of the page.
    • Mr. Lynch is so well known for his Mind Screws, that he had to title his one non-maddening movie The Straight Story. And it's still kind of weird.
  • Waking Life
  • Primer, due to Time Travel rather than symbolism.
  • The Fountain.
  • Donnie Darko, to the extent that members of the cast can't agree on whether there is a legitimate Time Travel story, or just a handful of psychedelic delusions.
    • Director Richard Kelly's second film, Southland Tales, somehow manages to be even more violently insane than his first. It was supposed to be part of a massive multimedia experience (that never really panned out), but it would take a damn lot of graphic novels to explain what on God's green Earth was happening at any point during that movie.
  • The Butterfly Effect is a sort-of mindscrew. Is he traveling through time? Moving across alternate universes and adapting to the memories of the version of himself in the new universe? Is he just totally nuts and then one day finally gets the help he needs? Is the end really just another delusion? These last two possibilities are subverted in the DVD release alternate ending in which he goes back to when he was in his mother's womb and commits suicide with his own umbilical chord before even being born.
  • Cloverfield. The ambiguous nature of the monster's origin and reason for going medieval on Manhattan has been seen as one of the biggest problems with the film, mainly by critics and audience members who just didn't get it (then again, the fact that the director, producer and cast all have differing views of these points may go a lot to say just how much was planned).
    • On the other hand, does the motivation of a giant monster really matter?
  • After a certain point in the film version of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the opening shot is redone, starting off a long medley featuring the three central characters merging into one and walking naked down an alleyway.
    • Um, It's just the one character after a very strange emotional journey, but this troper agrees that Hedwig approaches the Mind Screw territory several times.
  • David Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch is a lot less disgusting than the book it's named after (it actually borrows from a large part of the works of William S. Burroughs), but only slightly less confusing.
    • Pretty much all of Luis Bunuel's movies are like this.
    • Speaking of Cronenberg films, eXistenZ is Philip K Dick-like in the mind screw department. It features a VR game within a VR game within a VR game within a VR game (... yah), the characters openly question whether they're still in the game at every level (and for bonus points, compare real-life to VR), switch sides multiple times, and reference things that happened at other levels.
  • The movie π (Pi) has a paranoid mathemathical genius, numerology, conspiracies, neurological headaches, and the protagonist taking A Drill to his head to escape all this crap. To top it off, it's in black and white.
  • What the <BLEEP> do we know is a major, major offender of this one. If you can make some sense out of the cryptic, convoluted Technobabble about Quantum Mechanics, Religion, Life, the Universe and Everything, you'll see how this movie easily beats Serial Experiments Lain in terms of head-trippiness, even though even The Other Wiki agrees it's all just quantum mysticism mixed with the ideas of some new age school. According to Intuitor, it also completely messed up Quantum Physics, horrible research, biases and scientific inaccuracies destroyed any hope of correct science.
  • Jean-Luc Godard's film Weekend.
  • Guy Ritchie's Revolver. It involves a formula that supposedly allows the main character to win any game, a blood disease that disappears for no apparent reason, a crime lord apparently being the same person as the voices in everybody's heads... Yeah.
  • Zardoz, quite possibly the only film to begin with a giant stone head coming out of the sky, declaring the penis to be evil, and throwing a bunch of guns out of its mouth. The movie just gets weirder from there.
  • Jim Henson (yes, THAT Jim Henson) made a overly symbolic (and Oscar-nominated) short film called Time Piece. Scenes include a caveman in an office, Jim Henson's head on a serving tray, and the only dialogue in the movie is Jim himself saying "help" about 3 or 4 times.
    • He also made a humorous but bewildering teleplay called The Cube (no relation to the Canadian film and its sequels). It's about a man trapped in a cube shaped room. He has no idea where he is or how he got there. Other people can enter and leave freely, but he cannot. People change into other people, objects appear and disapear, bizarre philosophical interpretations of his situation are suggested and dismissed, and when he gets cut he bleeds strawberry jam. Is he dead? Insane? Part of some twisted psychological experiment? Or is he really just a character in a television program? In a way this film deconstructs this trope, as an overabundance of explanations are provided by other characters, though which (if any) is the truth is never revealed.
  • This troper once saw a French movie called Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?, which had some pretty trippy scenes in it, namely the one where the prince fantasizes about flying through the sky with the title character. Given the sixties' special effects, this scene is very weird.
  • Videodrome
  • Give My Regards To Broad Street has some Mind Screwing - partly from symbolism, partly because of Dream Sequences started and ended with very little warning.
  • The Oscar-winning French/Canadian/Belgian animated movie Belleville Rendezvous.
  • This troper remembered that upon seeing There Will Be Blood for the first time, he remarked, "What the fuck was that movie about?". He still doesn't know, though Daniel Day Lewis was excellent as usual.
  • The ending of The Ninth Gate caused everybody this troper knows to make that sound Scooby-Doo makes when he's confused.
  • Repo Man for sure, but played for laughs.
  • Last Year in Marienbad, considered one of the most famous mind screws in French cinema. The film has no discernible plot other than apparently two people who may or may not have had a affair a year ago in a place called Marienbad meet each other again at some sort of elite social gathering. Other than that, it plays out like some sort dream over loosely connected scenes. This troper still has no idea what exactly it was about, but the cinematography was beautiful.
  • Barton Fink. Granted, nothing the Coen brothers have done is completely straightforward, but when John Goodman is on a shotgun rampage through a burning hotel screaming "look at me," and no, it does not make sense in context, you start to wonder what you've gotten yourself into.
  • The collected works of Mr. Charlie Kaufman.
  • Jacob's Ladder is a Mind Screw from start to finish.
  • Watch the Argentinian film Hombre Mirando al Sudeste (Man Looking Southeast) and try to decide which of the explanations is true. You'll be lying in bed thinking about it, seriously, as it's just that freakin' bizarre, and ends unanswered.
  • After it runs out of material and stops being a comedy, Art School Confidential wants desperately to be a Mind Screw, it tries so hard! But somewhere along the line someone missed the point of what a Mind Screw actually is and the movie doesn't even really bother to actually try to confuse you with anything, because it's so proud of how it's got a grown up plot about a guy who commits murders and makes paintings out of them, only he dies and someone else gets arrested for it, instead of some silly story about art students.

Live Action TV
  • 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? Any really, really bad Mind Screw will get compared to Evangelion. The Prisoner, on the other hand, is what 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's Mindfreak. 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.
    • Probably the result of Executive Meddling demanding more stand alone episodes. This troper skipped Season 3 straight into Season 4 except for the last four episodes and barely noticed.
    • Then again, every, oh say, 5th episode, devolves into this. Not to mention the shows general plot...
  • Used frequently on Lost. However, what most people don't realize is that the most perplexing ones are usually revealed by the end of the same episode, and hardly ever cross into later episodes, or even seasons. Also, many of these twists play with the viewers' expectations, even based on previous twists. Examples:
    • In the early season 1 episode "Walkabout", part of the past of main character John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) is revealed through flashbacks. However, it is not revealed until the last flashback scene of the episode that Locke had been confined to a wheelchair for four years, which is helped by the fact that he regained the use of his legs following the crash of Oceanic Flight 815, which started the show's main narrative, thus having shown no hints of his previous condition until this episode.
    • The opening scene of the season 2 premiere appears to be taking place in a sunny apartment, causing the viewer to wonder if this is a flashback, and for which character. However, just before the opening title sequence, it turns out that this scene is actually taking place inside the "hatch" on the island that has been blown open in the season 1 finale.
    • The season 2 episode "Dave" suggests that all the events of the entire show might have actually taken place inside the mind of Hurley, a main character who had previously been an inmate in a mental ward. However, Word Of God says that this will definitely not be the ultimate resolution for the show, because it's considered a "bad idea" outside a "what if" one-off story. Still, in a case of Executive Meddling, ABC rejected the original draft for this episode, fearing that it was offering a solution for the show as a whole rather early in the game. It's unknown what changes, if any, have been made to the plot to address ABC's concerns.
    • The opening scene of the season 3 premiere repeats the concept of the previous season premiere, this time supposedly taking place in a small suburbian neighborhood, only to be revealed at the end of the scene to be taking place in the secret home village of the mysterious "Others", with Oceanic Flight 815 breaking apart right above their heads.
    • The opening scene for the season 3 episode "Not in Portland" inverts that, this time by showing a scene with Juliet (a member of the "Others") sitting on a beach, then entering a worn-out building and meeting Ethan, another member of the "Others", thereby implying that the scene was taking place on the island. Instead, it turns out the scene is actually taking place in Miami, before Juliet was recruited by the "Others".
    • The first flashback for Locke in the season 3 episode "The Man from Tallahassee" again plays with viewers expectations, this time by implying that Locke is already confined to a wheelchair by this point. However, the scene eventually ends with him standing up and walking away, and it's not until the last flashback of the episode that he actually ends up in a wheelchair.
    • The first flashback scene for the character of Nikki in the controversial season 3 episode "Exposé" is eventually revealed to be part "Exposé", a Show Within A Show Nikki was guest-starring on (starring Billy Dee Williams, played by himself in the Lost episode). The original idea for the episode was to have all Nikki flashbacks be part of the fictional show, and only reveal their true nature by the end of the episode. However, those plans for Nikki's story were cut short due to negative fan backlash towards her character.
    • The season 3 finale features a number of flashback scenes with a really devastated, bearded Jack. Only at the end of the two-hour episode it turns out that all the "flashbacks" in this episode were actually flash-forwards, and the Jack shown in those scenes actually made it off the island, as did Kate, whom he meets at the end.
    • The season 4 episode "Ji Yeon" apparently features flash-forwards for the Korean couple Jin and Sun, who seem to have made it off the island, with Sun delivering her baby by the end of the episode. Only then it turns out that all the "flash-forward" scenes for Jin, who was never shown together with his wife in this episode's flashes, were actually flashbacks, and Jin is considered dead in Sun's flash-forwards.
  • The series finale of The Sopranos had a Fade To Black midway through the final scene.
  • Life On Mars, especially the final episode.
    • Life on Mars is actually pretty straightforward (weird as all get-out, but straightforward), and Wordof God says it was all in his head/he died. Individual interpretations may vary.
  • 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 hallucination involving a guy with cheese on his head.
    • Buffy The Vampire Slayer also has an episode 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.
    • It would have been nice if he had done that a few seasons earlier.
  • 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 it 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, which would have been the Mind Screw to end all Mind Screws.
  • 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.
  • 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 tearjerker 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 sequence of Trial of a Time Lord (it being called Mindwarp should have been a clue), the ending of the serial tried to clear it up. It failed.
  • Sarah's dream sequences in The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Videogames
  • The Lost videogame Via Domus, true to the TV show it's based on, features a major mind screw at the end. Throughout the game, the main character, Elliott Maslow (a survivor of Oceanic Flight 815 who has never been seen on the show), who is suffering from amnesia, has been trying to retrieve his lost memories. It turns out that Elliot used to be a journalist who ratted out his girlfriend Lisa, also a journalist, and took a photo of her being shot in the head by the guy the two were after. On the island, he is repeatedly haunted by visions of Lisa, eventually making him regret his selfish ways. The game ends with Elliott leaving the island on a sailboat, only to witness Oceanic Flight 815, the very plane he had crashed with, break apart above his head. Suddenly Elliott wakes up on the beach (instead of in the jungle, like he did in the beginning of the game) amidst the burning wreckage, when suddenly Lisa comes running towards him, relieved that both of them survived the crash. It should be pointed out that this ending was explicitly suggested by Damon Lindelof, one of the show's executive producers/main writers, and the concept of time travel had already been established on the show by the time the game came out.
    • Fans of the show are torn whether this ending is really bad, or one of the few things that are actually good about the otherwise critically panned game.
  • Anything made by developer Goichi Suda (b.k.a. "Suda51").
    • Killer7 and, to a somewhat lesser extent, No More Heroes. If you claim to fully understand what the heck is going on in Killer7, you are dead wrong.
    • The plot of Contact is largely ambiguous and open to interpretation, especially the Professor's and Mint's motives. The ending is pretty confusing as well, and probably creates more problems than really solves any; there's a divide amongst those who've played the game as to whether it was really unique or just anticlimactic.
    • None of those games, though, have anything on the truly demented Michigan.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2. Nobody had tried using postmodernism to question the links between character, player, and designer in a game before. It's going to be a long, long time before anyone tries it again.
  • At the beginning of Sanitarium, you wake up in a mental hospital with no memory and bandages wrapped around your face. Flashbacks appear sporadically as you play through the game and alternate between roaming the grounds of the hospital and going into bizarre settings where you actually seem to be other people, to the point where it's unclear what's real and what's delusion. Turns out that it's all delusion - more specifically, it's a big dream you had while you were in a coma after your car wrecked because your evil business partner cut your brake lines. However, the symbolism of the settings and actions during the dream is still of great note.
  • The original Silent Hill game screws with the player by taking things a step further than simply having a confusing plot: the game has no third-person narrative; it's played entirely through the point of view of the Player Character. Because he's kept in the dark over what's going on, the player is never let in on things either. It isn't until Silent Hill 3 that the full story is finally revealed.
  • The ending of Neo Quest II. Watch and be confused.
  • Final Fantasy VIII doesn't bother trying to explain its Stable Time Loop until the end credits, never explains who Ultimecia is or what her motives were, or what time compression is, or....
    • Ultimecia does give an indicator as to what her motivations are during the speech to the crowd toward the end of the first disc, and they do explain that time compression is powerful magic intended to compress all of time and space to a single point, allowing Ultimecia to remake reality as she sees fit.
  • The plot of the fourth ending of Drakengard defies explanation. That goes for the fifth ending as well.
  • Shadow Of Destiny is a more mild example than some on this page, but nevertheless tends towards this. The game is designed so that you have to play all of the Multiple Endings to know what's going on, but at least two of said endings directly contradict each other; the ones that DO let details slip don't explain what they mean; certain details are revealed and then re-revealed as something completely different; and the only character who knows what's going on refuses to enlighten the rest of the cast. Lampshade hung when one character admits that The Reveal she's just given you is based on things she's been told and that "not all of it may be true".
    • Its Spiritual Successor, Time Hollow, falls squarely under this too. Don't expect to understand the real motivation behind anything or anyone until the epilogue, and even then it's a bit iffy.
  • The Kingdom Hearts series. The protagonist really can't be blamed for not being entirely sure what's going on most of the time given how much is unexplained, explained by characters who are mistaken, unsure, or just plain cracked, or just completely out of left field. Admittedly, some of it gets explained one or two sequels down the road, but this tends to be accompanied by a fresh set of questions about how, exactly, things like timing and cosmology actually work. It probably wasn't intentional, however.
  • Any scene involving the G-Man from Half-Life would qualify as a Mind Screw. Aside from the fact that no one knows anything about his motives, abilities, or even species, any encounter with him is bound to have him very vaguely describing his interdimensional dealings in a business-like tone(speaking of "offers", "investments", and "appraisals"), all while constantly projecting scenes from the past and future(sometimes a mix of both) into the player's vision. Also at some point through all of this, the player has a high chance of being teleported, or having their perception of time slowed down or even stopped until the G-Man leaves. Even when not directly interacting with the player, the G-Man is fond of suddenly appearing and disappearing in distant areas that are found to be dangerous, dead-ends, or simply unreachable.
    • At the end of Half Life 2, Episode 2 Eli Vance declares his intentions of telling you all about the G-Man. He is immediatelly interrupted before he can say anything important, and then killed in the next scene. Did anyone not see that coming?
  • Earthbound: Children with giant heads attacking wildlife everywhere, possessed street signs, a glowing neon Dark World of backwards talking shadows, talking dogs, an afterlife that looks like a Grateful Dead album cover, and let's not mention the final boss...
  • The ending of Final Fantasy Legend AKA Sa Ga 1. You've been climbing up a tower that leads to various worlds. You fight the apparent Big Bad. And then you walk through the door that leads to the top of the tower... only to walk into a trapdoor leading to what appears to be the very first world, at which point you can enter the tower after using the various orbs you acquired up to this point; the door to "paradise" opens, and... you're in a featureless white room. Wandering around leads you to The Creator of the World, who says you've won "the game"; you promptly decide to fight him. You see a door behind him that he wanted you to go through, but decide to go home instead. The Gameboy equivalent of Neon Genesis Evangelion, that ending was.
    • This also seems to be the plot behind the Architect and Neo's little conversation near the end of Matrix Reloaded.
  • SD Snatcher is probably the closest to examining the innards of Hideo Kojima's brain most people would like to come. The plot's perfectly straightforward (if a bit odd) until about halfway through, where it begins a slow downwards slide - starting from Gillian being forced to pretend to be Solid Snake in order to clear his name after killing a priest and ending with Snatchers in fursuits and clown suits colonising a ripoff of Disneyland (hidden behind a painting) because it looks like the Kremlin. Actually, no, it's probably when the master Snatcher manifests out of a pool of liquid skin.
  • Don't Eat the Mushroom.
    • Don't forget Carousel. MAH BRAAAIN. To play these two, though, you'll need to download Knytt Stories, a fun platforming game you can make levels for.
  • Second Sight's last few levels, though not as bad as most of the entries on this page, was still rather mind-screwy. Mutant kids eating the Big Bad! The present is the future! The past is the present! Jayne's dead! Jayne's alive!
  • The Xbox Live Arcade Game Braid has a highly confusing story to go along with it's tricky time-manipulating gameplay. Absolutely everything is metaphorical. What appears to be a simple tale about rescuing a princess turns out to be a complex story of a man's obsession, and the atomic bomb, or something...

Western Animation
  • Twelve Ounce Mouse
  • Parodied in Perfect Hair Forever: "I wish these hot dogs and cats were not symbolic of anything, and this was all just a dumb anime mindf***!"
  • Transformers: Beast Machines was more of a Heavy Mind Petting, but it was still pretty clouded with symbolism, and the fact that it could be deciphered tended to raise another problem when the message didn't go over well.
  • Three words: "Everybody Loves Hypnotoad".
  • The final episode of Teen Titans was really more of a No Ending, but it was such an over-the-top and inexplicable No Ending that it has to be mentioned here. It has been stated in interviews that the show's staff wasn't too keen on explaining things in the story; what transpired here can be best described as that policy's logical conclusion.
    • It should be noted, though, that the sort of question Glen Murakami wasn’t keen on answering were things about the characters’ non-suited lives, and the “how did villain X get out of the Cardboard Prison last time?” sort of things that he considered unimportant, a distraction from the main plot. This was the only episode in which nothing was made sense of. (Well, Beast Boy does move on after the Terra incident - which we’d thought him over three seasons ago. The rest is pure randomness.)
  • Xavier: Renegade Angel is basically one massive, nonsensical mind screw after another, until the whole thing resembles a 3D-animated acid trip Gone Horribly Wrong.
  • The episode of Totally Spies, "Deja Cruise". To make a long story short, it was like the girls' dreams were having dreams. After watching the episode, this troper joked that the WOOHP contract has this clause on it: "CAUTION: Prolonged employment at this occupation may cause you to lose the ability to differentiate between fantasy and reality."
  • ReBoot had an episode that only makes sense when you realize it is an homage to The Prisoner, oddly enough. The end of the episode revealed it was All Just A Dream, but the Mind Screw elements make more sense because of that, and Matrix received some Character Development bordering on a World Of Cardboard Speech.

Comic Book
  • Anything, anything Grant Morrison writes.
  • The point in which The Maxx jumps from trippy to actual Mind Screw may vary from person to person. Some may say it's when the villain turns out to be a giant psychopatic self-help fueled banana slug; other may say it's just right before the revelation of why Julie's Outback was created(that part with the Hooly); or maybe when Sarah comes back from Disney Death as an Is...

Web Comics