Tomato In The Mirror - Television Tropes & Idioms

The Trope Namer (of sorts) is The Big O, to the point of main character Roger Smith actually crying out "I'm one of the tomatoes!" Yeah, it sounded dumb, but it was a shocking twist. But it gets weirder still near the end, when he discovers this may not be the case, and he may have existed before Paradigm...
Goku, of course, in the Dragonball series. He finds out from his long-lost brother Raditz at the beginning of DBZ that he is an alien (Saiyan) sent to kill all humans on Earth. He forgot his purpose and mellowed out after he fell off a cliff and hit his head as a child.
Rah Xephon is practically riddled with examples (along with Luke I Am Your Father revelations). Not only is Ayato himself a half-human, half-Mulian, but no fewer than two other characters discover the shocking truth about their own origins along the way; one of them was previously mind-wiped to make her forget them.
This is the entire premise of Zegapain. Kyo believes that he is playing a video game in which he pilots a giant robot fighting against aliens trying to wipe out the computers that hold the brain patterns of the remnants of humanity, only to discover the "game" is the real world, and he is merely data in one of those computers.
In GUNNM Daisuke Ido is driven into a Heroic BSOD when he discovers that he has no brain. It was removed and replaced with a microchip at the age of 19, as with all citizens of Tiphares, in order to make him less likely to violate the law.
- Desty Nova learnt the same thing about himself at some point before his introduction. It is not known if the truth drove him insane, or if his insanity helped him deal with the truth. Seeing as he was the only person who doesn't seem to care about their shared condition, it was likely the latter.
- Much later on,in the sequel manga Last Order, Alita gets her own TITM - twice. The first is when she learns that her past self, before her amnesia, was directly responsible for a catastrophe that resulted in the death of millions and the transformation of the entire Solar System into a Crapsack World. The second is when her brain, her last remaining piece of humanity,is revealed to have been removed at the start of the series and placed in a box she's been unknowingly carrying about for the past three volumes. She's told this just as it's exchanged for her friend's,resulting in a literal breakdown of her nanomachine body.
Sola has a Wham Episode where Yorito realizes that he's a clone made of paper, as a replacement for the original who died centuries before, by his paper-manipulating sister.
Shakugan No Shana gets this out of the way with Yuji in the first episode — as Shana bluntly explains to him, the real Sakai Yuji was erased from reality and eaten by a Rinne. All that he is is a temporary placeholder, meant to ease the strain on existence caused by the erasing of the orginal, and once his power of existence runs out, he'll cease to exist as well and reality will arrange itself so that Sakai Yuji will never have existed in the first place.
Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni has a borderline example: It turns out that Keiichi's foray In The Mouth Of Madness in the first arc was him being crazy and not a case of Town With A Dark Secret — but Keiichi only learns this in an alternate timeline when he gets a glean of his own actions from outside of his own mind at the time.
- Though in his defense, it's not like the town doesn't have a dark secret...
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle falls under this with Syaron finds out he's a clone when the real one shows up.
- Played with again in XXX Holic when Yuuko reveals Watanuki is a clone of Syaoran... of sorts.
Taikoubou from the Houshin Engi manga later finds out that he's actually the other half of Ou Eki, and when they combine, they form one of the "First People", Fukki.
In the first season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, Fate Testarossa finds out that she is in fact a Replacement Goldfish clone of Precia's dead daughter Alicia, prompting a Heroic BSOD.
Rave Master: Elie is Resha Valentine.
Gundam 00: Anew Returner is an Innovator whose memories of her true identity were wiped out so she could become Ribbons's Manchurian Agent
Kiddy Grade: One set of Eclair and Lumiere's has a slightly subverted version of this, as they realize something is Not Quite Right first, before realizing they were clones and breaking free of Alv's Mind Control.
Sorcerer Stabber Orphen: Esperanza Reika thought her little sister Lycoris was dead and had been revived by her Creepy Child boss, Escalenna. It turns out Esperanza was the one who has truly died.
Gate Keepers One of their teachers was an Invader, and he didn't know it.
Double-Subverted in Gravion: Leele discovers that she's apparently one of the Zeravire that's been attacking the Earth. In the episode afterwards, it's Hand Waveed that her memories were mixed up from contact with one of the Zeravire. But as it turns out, she is a Zeravire. Sort of. She is in fact the niece of the alien scientist who created them, and shares the surname Zeravire.

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The plot of the much hated Spider-Man Clone Saga was going to originally resolve itself in this way, with the "clone" Ben Parker finding out that he was the original, while the "original" Peter Parker, whom comic book fans had been reading about since the original clone story in the '70s, would be revealed to actually have been the clone all along. And then Marvel Comics chickened out...
- This is basically the plot of the last Spirou And Fantasio comic by Tome and Jenry, Machine Qui Rêve.
The JLA's initial way of dealing with the White Martian threat was to hypnotize them into thinking that they are mere humans. This leads to an issue where Batman declares that several members of the JLA need to track down a great threat to the world: Bruce Wayne. Turns out that one of the brainwashed martians was working for Wayne as an assistant. After being involved in a plane wreck it loses its memories again and decides (from papers it had) that it is Wayne and takes his form (making it a double example of this trope: a martian who is forced to think it is human who then winds up thinking it is an entirely different human).
The Reveal of Elijah Snow as the mysterious Fourth Man in Planetary.
In Rising Stars, Poet asks Clarence Mack what he knows about the murders of the other Specials. Clarence discusses his own theories and uses his ability to enter the minds of others to show Poet his findings, when he realizes that he saw exactly who the killer was, and was murdered only moments later for it. And that, while he was unaware of it until just now, he's only having this conversation because another Special who is a medium summoned his ghost.
A number of Skrulls believing themselves to be Marvel heroes have a bit of an identity crisis meeting their human counterparts during the Secret Invasion Crisis Crossover.
In an early issue of The Sensational She-Hulk, our titular green goddess wakes up to see her headless body being used to provide a new mode of transportation for Chondu the Mystic's head. It turned out to be a robot body, though. They couldn't find a saw that was able to cut She-Hulk's hair, let alone through her neck.

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The Twist Ending of The Sixth Sense is a relatively subtle example of the trope; the main character has no idea that anything is odd about him, as people's reactions to his words and actions seem entirely plausible, until he realizes that they only appeared to have been interacting with him in the way he expected them to.
The Sixth Day, where the "cloned" Arnie turns out to be the original.
Though the movie Mulholland Drive doesn't make it explicit, it's probably the most believable explanation for David Lynch's Mind Screw. Note how Naomi Watts's blonde and Laura Elena Harring's brunette have different names in the last segment of the movie — names given previously to other characters.
- The Word of God has verified this explanation, and has additionally stated that the movie itself screws this up when it has Naomi Watts and Laura Elena Harring never sharing the screen except in a single shot.
The Twist Ending of the Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters featured this trope in the form of an Unreliable Narrator, with the combination of Real After All adding to the ending's confusing nature.
The Faux Horror Film Session 9 did this in the form of The Killer In Me.
Nicely done in The Others. Grace Stewart finds herself in the midst of a haunting, only it turns out she and her family are the ghosts; the "spooks" they've been seeing are actually the living family who've come to see about buying the house. Particularly unsettling is the publicity clip where the creepy old woman talks to Grace in her daughter Anne's voice — when one realizes Anne is actually possessing the woman, a medium hired by the living family.
In Angel Heart, Mickey Rourke's character, a private detective, turns out to be the very man he's been hired to track down.
In Salvage, Claire Parker seems to be living a Groundhog Day-esque nightmare where she keeps getting stalked and killed by serial killer Duke Desmond, only to wake up back at work as if nothing had happened. After a non-fatal attack, she learns from the police that Desmond can't be stalking her, since he's been dead for some time. She decides maybe it's his ghost that's tormenting her, and seeks advice on how to deal with that. The first place she visits just happens to be Desmond's former church, where the janitor reassures her that Desmond can't hurt her, as he's in hell. Not reassured, she goes to his old home, and then the library, where she finds a newspaper article showing that she and her boyfriend were his last victims. Eventually, Desmond appears in her house to kill her yet again, and now she's finally told the whole truth — she isn't Claire. She's Duke Desmond, whose punishment is to keep reliving his murder of Claire, from her perspective.
Fight Club is a masterful example, as Edward Norton's unnamed narrator befriends and starts Fight Club with Brad Pitt's Tyler Durden, anarchist and soap salesman. As Durden begins to raise an army of committed nihilistic followers, the narrator becomes less and less comfortable with the direction of the movement. After Tyler Durden disappears at the kickoff of a coordinated act of domestic terrorism, the narrator hunts desperately for him, only to be told that he is himself Tyler Durden. The revelation changes the tone of previous conversations in the film, notably the inception of Fight Club — what was a brawl between the narrator and Durden that attracted other participants becomes the narrator/Durden beating himself up, rousing the curiosity of others. And Durden's intense sexual relationship with Marla Singer coupled with the narrator's open contempt for her; what were the actions and reactions of two separate characters take on a different light when you know the characters are the same person, and Marla's confusion and hurt at the narrator's scorn makes more sense. In the end, the narrator shoots himself through the cheek, "killing" Durden by demonstrating he was willing to kill himself.
- This troper prefers the ending to the book, in which in which the narrator doesn't cop out, ACTUALLY tries to kill himself, and winds up in a coma instead.
He didn't wind up in a coma; he actually died, and the book ended with him confronting God Himself, talks with him, and comes to the suitably nihilistic conclusion that people are neither unique snowflakes nor shit—they just are. Also shown, members of Project Mayhem still around, visiting his grave, keeping him updated on their plants.
- Interestingly enough, The Author of the book provided some commentary for the movie version, and claimed he liked how the movie ended better than how he ended the book. [[ Seriously.]]
- This works particularly well with his interactions with Marla. She seems to be inconsistent and somewhat crazy until you realize the twist. Then her actions largely make sense.
Subverted, and possibly double-subverted in The Thing. For a while, it really looks like Mac is The Thing. And then he's revealed not to be. But in the final scene, it's starting to look like he could be. If so, he hasn't been for long, though.
The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari. Once you understand that Francis is a nut, and Cesare and Caligari aren't even their real names, everything makes a lot more sense. Including the art style.
- In the original ending everything was to be taken at face value. The producers suggested a change because they suspected the Weimar censors wouldn't allow a movie that implied an authority figure could be evil.
Dead And Buried. The sheriff of a small town discovers that several strangers passing through town and many of the townspeople, including his own wife, have been murdered and turned into zombies by the town's mortician. At the end he confronts the mortician and learns that he himself suffered the same fate sometime earlier.
- Not only that, but it's implied that he's investigated the killings dozens of times before, his memories being wiped each time he learns the truth, because the mortician enjoys playing mental chess games with the sheriff.
Jacob's Ladder. In a deleted scene, Jacob finds out that Jezzie was actually himself, when he unmasks the shroud she's enveloped in.
The Neverending Story. When confronting his "true self" in a mirror, Atreyu sees Bastian, the boy reading the book, as his reflection.
Impostor. Gary Sinese's character is, in fact, the robo-bomb he's been trying to prove he isn't for the entire movie. His wife is one, too.
Literally in the Bittersweet Ending of Mirrors. Ben leaves the Mayflower building after having defeated the demon, but none of the emergency workers seem to notice him despite his injuries. It turns out that he is trapped in the mirror world.
The Jim Henson made-for-TV Mind Screw film The Cube. Strawberry jam
In The Nines, it turns out the protagonist is a God In Human Form, one supporting character is a human trying to keep him Locked Out Of The Loop, and the other is a fellow God In Human Form who wants him to re-Ascend To A Higher Plane Of Existence.
Depending on the version of Bladerunner you watch, either Deckard or just Rachel is a/are replicant(s), and going to snuff it fairly soon, or live happily ever after.
The ending of Hellraiser: Inferno reveals that the being known as the Engineer that Detective Joseph Thorne was after is in fact the embodiment of his own dark urges; when Joseph confronts the Engineer the thing even peels away its blank face to reveal Joseph's underneath.
The advertisements for Terminator: Salvation imply that therein a freedom fighter finds out that 'he' is an uploaded mind running on Terminator hardware.
In Takashi Shimizu's Reincarnation, the story begins with a college professor filming himself as he brutally kills a hotel full of innocent people, including his own children, because of his obsession with reincarnation. Thirty-five years later, some creep decides to make a movie about it, and sets out to cast the killer and his victims. So what? So plenty. He literally succeeds, managing to cast the reincarnation of everyone involved in the massacre. The main character realizes she ties into all this, but doesn't find out how until the end of the movie, when she sees her true self in her reflection. One of the scariest movies this troper has ever seen!

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One of the earliest examples is HP Lovecraft's "The Outsider", a first person point-of-view story that follows a mysterious lonely individual who cannot remember coming in contact with people. When he escapes his tower, he scares off the first people he sees and spots his reflection, revealing him to be — ta-dah! — a ghoul.
- Lovecraft did this one again in the novella The Shadow over Innsmouth, which ends with the protagonist discovering that he is one of the Half Human Hybrids that are the titular Town With A Dark Secret's dark secret.
- And again in his story "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family".
"Imposter," a short Science Fiction story by Philip K Dick. Dick used it frequently as both a device and a premise. Perhaps the best-known example is is the film Blade Runner, very loosely based on his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Arguably, this is also the premise of A Scanner Darkly, although in this case the twist is identical with the character arc.
J. G. Ballard was also fond of this device, and employed it in his 1960 story "Zone of Terror."
Goosebumps, "A Shocker On Shock Street": A kid whose father is a horror movie director is menaced by horrible things; turns out he's the robot star, and the whole thing was part of the movie.
- Goosebumps was fond of this one. You also have the girl who suspects ghosts only to find out that she's the ghost, teenagers who discover that they're vampires, and people who think an invisible dude is a monster when in fact they're a bunch of bizarre aliens.
- Let's not forget the time when it was Halloween, and their best friends turned out to be pumpkin-headed monsters that had been causing the local mystery murders...
- Or the girl who's convinced the guy framing her for various incidents of mischief is a monster, only to have her parents invite said monster home to eat him because he's infringed on their hunting territory.
- Or the summer camp where kids are disappearing and being killed off, only to have it turn out to be a training simulation for the teenaged main character, whose first assignment requires him to travel to Earth.
In the novel John Dies at the End, while dealing with a conspiracy involving agents of a parallel universe, the protagonist/narrator David discovers self-incriminating evidence and catches a glance of what appears to be a dead body in his tool shed. He can't remember a half-hour or so of his day, while his gun is missing a single bullet. He also finds out about a young woman, Amy, who went missing around the same time. He immediately suspects he murdered her during a bout of temporary insanity, but while following clues, he discovers that she's alive and well, but can't remember anything from when she went missing. He later learns that those conspiratorial agents are in fact perfect clones that have replaced other people in the city. Over the course of a few days, he uncovers some very unsettling information, protects Amy from the forces of darkness, falls in love with her, travels to the parallel universe with his best friend John, and cripples the organization behind the invasion. When he finally takes a good look inside his tool shed, he discovers a corpse that looks exactly like himself. Assuming that this corpse was an intended replacement that he shot in self defense and blocked it out, he goes to reveal the identifying mark of the clones on the bottom of the body's foot. When the mark isn't where he expected to find it, Dave checks his own foot and learns that he is the clone, and personally killed the original Dave. At first, he's suicidal with guilt, but since he is completely indistinguishable from the real Dave in every way (aside from the mark on his foot that regular people can't see) and anything that would have controlled him is now dead, John and Amy manage to convince him to go on living his life as if nothing had happened. Except for his friend John occasionally calling him "Monster Dave" as a joke.
- It seems to me as if the movie "The Broken" owes much of what is interesting about it to this book. Too bad they couldn't come up with an alternate universe for the mirror people to have come from which had some (at least implied) depth. Instead, the complete lack of motives or personality makes them anything but scary and simply absurd. It's a shame; derivative isn't always a disadvantage, but this one suffered critical ending failure.
Done twice in the Crucible trilogy by Sara Douglass. First, the protagonist goes out to return the demons to Hell — only to find out that both his wife and best friend (and soon-to-be-king) are demons. Then, when the antagonist role shifts to the angels, he discovers he is an angel too, and thus doomed to send all mankind into eternal slavery. Poor Tom.
Subverted in Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions wherein a man of declining mental health becomes convinced that failed Sci-Fi writer Kilgore Trout's short story really is a letter from God revealing his Tomato In The Mirror status.
Sabella by Tanith Lee ends with the reveal that she and the main male character are both native Martian copies of human children who died in a certain underground cave.
Kill the Dead, also by Tanith Lee, ends with the reveal that ghost-killer Parl Dro is, himself, a ghost.
Done excellently in the Dragon Lance short story "The Best." It is done in first person, with the narrator being a noble who's hired the four best dragonslayers in the land to kill a dragon who's been terrorizing the countryside. At the end of the story, they reach the dragon's lair, and it's revealed that the narrator actually is the dragon in a magical disguise, and he's gathered them all together to take them all out at once, so he can sleep in peace. And it works.
Thursday Next uses this trope in First Among Sequels, when Thursday1-4 is impersonating Thursday the second time, the first person narrator actually switches to Thursday1-4, so even the audience is fooled...until she starts thinking about her villainous plot again.
I Am Legend. The book, obviously. In fact, this is the entire reason for the name of the book.
- Although more than being a tomato all along, it's more the dictionary changing while he wasn't looking.
Lord Dunsany's short story "The Return", in which the narrator—who promises a real ghost story—only discovers at the end that he is the ghost. (Also broadcast as a radio play.)
The short story The Copy by Paul Jennings features a copy machine (which creates a mirror-image replica of objects put into it) which a boy uses to copy himself so he can beat down a bully, but becomes jealous of his copy and kills him. Afterwards, his mother remarks that it's odd - his mole used to be on the other cheek, and he's writing with his left hand instead of his right...
One of the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novels featured an Eighth Doctor companion, Fitz Kreiner, realise he's an android duplicate of himself. Whereupon he explodes.
This is the plot of the DS9 relaunch novel Fearful Symmetry, told first from Captain Kira's perspective, then from that of her double, Iliana Ghemor, a Cardassian sleeper agent altered to look like Kira and remember being her. In the novel, Ghemor is the tomato; in the DS 9 episode it was a sequel to, the tomato was not Kira.
Alastair Reynolds does this a lot in the Revelation Space novels. Chasm City offers a particularly convoluted example: Our lovable hero Tanner is actually the war criminal Cahuella, after stealing Tanner's identity and buying into his own cover. Cahuella experiences flashbacks of the life and times of the near-mythological psychopath Sky Haussmann, and believes them to be the result of the indoctrinal virus he is infected with. Actually, he is Sky Haussman.

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Are You Afraid Of The Dark: "The Tale Of The Thirteenth Floor''. The adopted Karin is invited to The Little Shop That Wasnt There Yesterday on the thirteenth floor of the apartment building. The employees are soon revealed to actually be aliens with three fingers and no faces(Nightmare Fuel), and seem to be trying to abduct her. After she and Billy escape, and the ship leaves, Olga reveals to Karin through the TV that the aliens left her there ten years ago and were trying to rescue her. Billy then looks at her and sees that she has shapeshifted back into a faceless alien as well.
- And in "The Tale of the Dream Girl", a boy can't figure out why he's ignored by everyone around him except his sister and a girl only he can see after he finds her ring. He eventually finds out that not only is the girl a ghost because she was hit by a train, he's a ghost too because she was his girlfriend and he failed to save her.
  - That's called Dead All Along.
Bizarrely enough, the Mind Screw ending of The Prisoner implies that this is the entire premise of the series.
- In the episode The Schizoid Man, Number Six seems to have been mistaken for an agent trained to impersonate him. Evidence mounts that in fact he is the impostor, and has forgotten his own identity. But in the end, the trope is subverted as he realizes that's what they want him to think.
Stargate SG-1 did it at least twice:
- "Tin Man" (season 1): The SG-1 team seems to have been transferred into robot bodies by a lonely alien maintenance man. In the end, they find out that they weren't transferred, they were copied, with the originals still alive.
- "Fragile Balance" (season 7): Jack O'Neill wakes up after an alien abduction to find himself in a body 30 years younger... and slowly dying. After convincing his colleagues of his identity and tracking down his abductor, he finds (of course) that he is actually a genetically damaged clone of the original O'Neill (still with the alien).
Stargate Atlantis likes it even more:
- In "Michael" (season 2), Lieutenant Michael Kenmore awakens in Atlantis' infirmary, unable to remember who he is. After being informed of who he is and that he barely survived terrible injuries from a raid deep in enemy territory, he is let out and undergoes psychiatric therapy (including periodic drug injections) for the strange nightmares he keeps having. He eventually discovers secret observation videos of himself in the infirmary, and is horrified to discover that he is actually a Wraith that was transformed into a human using an experimental genetic drug and then brainwashed.
- In "This Mortal Coil" (season 4), Sheppard, McKay, Ronon, Teyla, and, later, Dr. Weir find that they are replicator-made copies of themselves, and that the version of Atlantis they are in is also a copy.
  - They come to take it remarkably well, especially McKay. Mostly because of McKay's insight in the situation.
- In "The Kindred" (season 4), Carson Beckett is found by the Team. The only problem: he's supposed to be dead. But he insists and is sure, that he is the real Beckett. Turns out he is a clone.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine, "Whispers": We follow Miles O'Brien in flashback form as he seems to combat a station-wide conspiracy; turns out he's actually a clone, sent by one of the alien factions undergoing negotiations on the station, programmed to assassinate the leaders of the other faction. O'Brien seems particularly vulnerable to these types of plots; he seems to be Deep Space Nine's Butt Monkey.
The Twilight Zone, "After Hours": A woman's shopping trip to a department store goes awry, as the people she talks to seem to transform into mannequins. In the end, we find out that she's one of the mannequins, who take turns going out into the world as a human for a month at a time. Also used in the '80s remake.
The new Battlestar Galactica has done this with five characters. Boomer spends the first season wrestling with the slow realization that she's the Tomato In The Mirror. Moreover, as of the Season Three finale, Tory Foster, Galen Tyrol, Sam Anders, and Saul Tigh are "triggered", and realise they're Cylons.
- Boomer literally has a bad experience with her locker mirror, on which someone has written the word CYLON in big yellow letters.
- Ellen is lucky, because she gets to almost instantly remember her past and be at peace with herself when she resurrects.
  - Only in the Crapsack World that is Galactica can you call being fatally poisoned by your husband "lucky".
In one episode of Quantum Leap, Sam finds himself in the body of someone in a mansion where everyone thinks there's a vampire on the loose. After clearing up the situation, he finally gets around to looking in a mirror... and doesn't reflect. Literal Tomato "in the Mirror."
- This was hinted in the end of the previous episode, where we see the character Sam switched with actually had vampire fangs (and was a cameo by none other than Christopher Lee).
  - This troper would like some proof of the Lee cameo, as Christopher Lee has become notoriously hostile to being linked with vampires in recent years.
  - Debunked: the cameo in question was actually portrayed by Robert Mac Kenzie, not Christopher Lee.
The climax of the recent Doctor Who episode "Utopia" revolves round the revelation that the kindly human Professor Yana is, unbeknownst to him, the Tomato in the Mirror, a 'sleeper' personality and biological disguise created by the Doctor's archenemy the Master, previously thought dead. His original personality and biology is contained, thanks to some Applied Phlebotinum, in a pocket watch, and released when Yana is tempted into opening the watch.
- Before this we have the Doctor himself turned into a human Professor in 1913, through use of this pocket-watch-device. Of course the viewer knows who he really is, but the Doctor doesn't and once he finds out he's pretty shocked and doesn't want to go back.
- Not to mention the little girl in "Silence in the Library."
- In The Next Doctor The Doctor finds another person who claims to be the Doctor. This other Doctor is investigating the place of a guy who died. It turns out, the new "Doctor" is the guy that supposedly died just had info about the Doctor overwritten over his mind.
Star Trek Voyager did this with "Course: Oblivion", where the entire crew realized that they're imperfect duplicates. (About halfway through the episode, which is rare for this trope. Usually it's a twist ending, not a twist middle.) Several episodes earlier, a semi-sentient planet-spanning not-quite-lifeform on a hostile planet they visited to refill on Phlebotinum had replicated Voyager in its entirety, right down to the last bulkhead and Red Shirt. The "real" Voyager crew never knew about their clones; they started disintegrating, found out that it was due to their distance from their origin, and failed to get back before disintegrating completely, dissipating just before they could contact Voyager.
- And if you want even more detail, the phlebotinum in question is just deuterium, something you can find in heavy water. Yes, it's living, shapeshifting deuterium.
In Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, a villain gives the Humongous Mecha a virus, and it's spread to the base... and then to the Red Ranger, Mack, (aka iMack) who turns out to be an android.
- Another example, this time in Power Rangers Turbo: Justin notes that the other Rangers are acting odd, and finds out that they are really robots. At the end of the episode, it's revealed that Justin himself was a robot, who was programmed so that he didn't know he was a robot, and that the real Ranger team built them to help Zordon on Eltar. Lot of good that did...
The Torchwood episode "Sleeper" has a seemingly human woman with a seemingly happy life (complete with job and husband) find out that she's actually an alien who will be "triggered" to wage a campaign of terror on Earth.
In an episode of Sliders, the world is populated by almost entirely by androids, and one human scientist who attempts to create an android with the transplanted memories of Quinn. It turns out that the scientist actually died, and his memories have been transplanted into an android version of himself, without him actually knowing that.
Same thing happened in the Original Star Trek episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" with Nurse Chapel's lost boyfriend.
The core premise of Invasion. Set in a small Florida coastal town, several characters return from unremembered experiences in the water feeling not quite themselves. At first they appear to have been altered by mysterious glowing creatures, who may or may not be aliens, in the water. But it's soon revealed that they are in fact altered copies, and their originals were killed in the duplication process. Since they have the same memories, emotions, and personality as their originals, it raises the issue of whether and why they should be considered a different person at all. Each of them, and their 'unaltered' friends and family, answers the question a little differently.
Angel: in "Spin the Bottle", everyone's memory is wiped back to age 17. Wesley, who at that age was head of his class at vampire-hunting school, reckons it's a test: they've been locked in this abandoned building with a vampire, whom they must identify and kill. Angel (who at that age was a living human), in a private moment, looks at a mirror ...
Supernatural: In "Road Kill", the Monster Of The Week doesn't know she actually is dead (and thus, a spirit hunting a stretch of highway) until the end of the episode.
- 'Haunting', not hunting. Sam and Dean only mention one other person, besides the spirit in question, who died as a direct result of her actions. And that's only because they both died in a car crash she caused - the other guy was a pedestrian who was very much aware that they were both dead, and that she was responsible for it. The victim they mention the old man-spirit torturing every year, on the anniversary of the crash? Is always her. The boys only get involved because of reports of a terrified woman being chased across the road every year, causing 15 other crashes, most of them also fatal.
Red Dwarf: This trope is played with in the episode Out of Time, when Lister is apparently revealed to be a Ridiculously Human Robot. He is floored by the revelation, but gets no sympathy from Kryten, who points out that his emotions are only artificial. However, the moment the crew escapes the unreality pocket through which they were traveling at the time, he becomes human again. (In fact, as the other reality was false, he had never been anything but human.)

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Red Vs Blue Reconstruction: Episode 16 revealed that Church is the Alpha AI.

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"Devil Town" seems to be about this trope—'I didn't know they were vampires / It turns out I was a vampire myself...' That is, unless it's actually about something else entirely over some people's heads.

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The Firesign Theatre, in their audio production I Think We're All Bozos On This Bus, uses this device ingeniously. One must listen carefully (or have seen a spoiler) to realize that the character "Clem" who finishes the story is not the one who started it, but rather a holographic clone created by the original Clem and then dismissed into cyberspace.
In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio titled The Natural History of Fear, the main characters appear to have had their memories erased to blend in and hide inside a fascist Big Brother city, but we later learn the Doctor and his companions simply passed through, and donated their memories to be diluted into the populace, who needed them to evolve from their stagnant unchanging fascist city, and the "main" characters we are following are a much different species simply having residue memories of the main characters.

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This is a huge element of the fetches in Changeling: the Lost. They believe themselves to be ordinary humans, but they have the ability to see things others can't — that is, the people on the street who look like monsters. At some point, the fetch usually finds out that it's not a real person; it's a copy made by one of The Fair Folk to serve as a replacement for the human they took to Faerie to serve as their plaything. Those "monsters" they're seeing? They're the people who managed to escape from Faerie in the first place. And a lot of them aren't big fans of something fake living their life...

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The last level of Braid has Tim running a deadly gauntlet, with the Princess following above, disabling traps and opening doors. He reaches the end and rewinds time, revealing the truth: she was setting traps and closing doors, trying to keep him away.
In the true route in Ever 17, the amnesiac Kid looks himself in a mirror and realizes that he is not the same Kid seen in Takeshi's perspective. In fact, he isn't even the Kid he sees in the mirror. He is the reader.
In the original Japanese version of Street Fighter 2010 (not the American localization that claims the protagonist is Ken Masters), Kevin Striker is one of the very parasites he was sent to destroy. It was all part of Dr. Joseph's master plan to use him to conquer the universe...which promptly fails when Kevin kills him.
Subverted in Mega Man Zero 3. Zero doesn't care that he's the clone. Zero doesn't care about how the Ax Crazy Omnicidal Maniac Final Boss is the original Zero driven insane. All he sees is an enemy who needs to be taken down.
- Clone Zero is the real Zero, his "heart and soul" transferred to the clone body. Omega, original body or not, is one entirely different person.
Mega Man X: The heart is what counts. Not the body...
- This is echoed in Mega Man ZX Advent. Grey has spent enough time fighting for his life against Maverick Mechaniloids, Pseudoroids, five other Mega Men, and both Prometheus and Pandora that when he finally learned that he is actually Master Albert's backup body and Model A a recording of his data and powers, he stopped giving a damn about who he originally was. That one of the Mega Men in question was Aile certainly helped him stop caring about his predetermined identity.
In Final Fantasy X, Tidus discovers that he and his civilization don't really exist. They did exist at one point, but they were obliterated in a war with Bevelle. Now they're just all part of a dream being generated by the survivors of that civilization, which are now a gestalt of magical naked people trapped in a mountainside. No. Really.
In Kingdom Hearts II, Roxas starts seeing mysterious people that no one else seems to notice. He eventually discovers that the Twilight Town he's been living in is a fabrication, and that he himself is a "Nobody" of the main character, Sora.
In Final Fantasy VII, Cloud, the protagonist, suffers from freaky headaches and weird disjointed flashbacks. It then transpires that he is a clone of the villain, Sephiroth, and has been acting under Sephiroth's Mind Control for the game so far. Even more confusingly, when he recovers from his Heroic BSOD, he realizes he was never a clone to begin with (what he really is is quite complicated, but it involves the way the Super Soldiers are created, and how The Virus contains the genetic memories of those infected). When he regains his true memories, he finally develops into a fully fledged person.
In Knights Of The Old Republic, the protagonist is revealed to be the "late" Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Revan.
A little over halfway through Bioshock, the protagonist learns he's a genetically altered assassin, created from Andrew Ryan's DNA, and smuggled out of Rapture as a pawn in mobster Fontaine's complicated scheme to kill Ryan and take over the city.
The short interactive fiction 9:05 revolves around this concept.
City Of Villains has a story arc where the player character uncovers clues that they are in fact robotic duplicates made by Nemesis. Subverted by the final mission, which explicitly states that the player character is the original, but the contact who sent them on the missions is the robotic duplicate (with the real one alive but captive).
Legacy Of Kain character Raziel's story is basically a long string of this. Over the course of the three games he appears in, he starts off as a re-resurrected vampire, only to find out that the vampires are a world-destroying evil that he must personally weed out. Then, it is revealed to him that he used to be a high-ranking Sarafan vampire hunter before he was a vampire. In part II, time travel hijinks lead to the discovery that the original vampires weren't so bad at all. Then he finds the last survivor of the original, ancient vampire race, the only one who can give him the answers he seeks, brutally and mercilessly slaughtered... by Raziel's own, past Sarafan self. Whom Raziel later KILLS along with his fellow Sarafan, indirectly preparing his own vampiric resurrection as well as his brethren's. As if this wasn't enough, just moments later, he comes to the startling realization that the symbiotic, semi-sentient, insane wraith blade that he's been carrying for two games is the future version of his own soul. Finally, he learns that he is the foretold messiah of the vampire race. No, wait — he's the messiah of the Hylden, whom he thought he's supposed to kill. No, wait, he's both at once. Turns out that the prophecies weren't all that clear on this.
- Even before that, there was Kain's dilemma: Originally lead to believe that by killing the mythic Circle of Nine he could be released from his vampyric unlife, he eventually learns that he is, in fact, one of its members, the reincarnated guardian of the Pillar of Balance, and his liberation from vampirism may only come in death.
Subverted in Deus Ex, in which protagonist JC Denton is informed that both he and his "brother" are actually artificial life forms. Rather than reacting with shock, angst, or an unconvincing identity crisis, JC calmly takes the revelation into stride, and even remarks that he had considered the possibility in the past. His artificially constructed memories of the past, that is.
- One of the few discrepancies in Deus Ex is JC's history. In one version he was cloned and artificially aged, being about six months to a year old during the game. In the other, he was genetically engineered but was raised in Switzerland. Both of these versions are supported by information from characters who knew The Truth in the form of email archives, statements, and physical evidence within The Conspiracy. In the final area, JC first guns down the man who killed his father, then sees his cloning tank, and the one that is growing his younger sibling, Alex D.
In Team Dark's ending in Sonic Heroes, Rouge discovers hundreds upon hundreds of copies of Shadow in tubes identical to the one he was in at the start of the game. It matters little, though — once he's over the shock, he decides that original or not, he's still the Shadow the Hedgehog. This is followed up on in one of the multiple endings of Shadow The Hedgehog, with Eggman admitting that Shadow is one of the copies. He gets over it instantly, kills Eggman and takes over the world.
- In the canon ending of Shadow The Hedgehog, Eggman tells Shadow he is the original, and he found him after he fell to earth and put him into a capsule to let him heal.
The World Ends With You pulls this twice: first you find out everyone playing the Reapers' Game is dead and trying for a new chance at life, and then it turns out that Shiki traded her appearance to play the game, and always appeared as her friend Eri.
- '' Don't forget Joshua. He killed you. No he didn't, Sho did. No wait, yes, he killed you so that you could be his proxy for the game. And he's God.
In Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, the show within a game Address Unknown ends like this: The protagonist, John Mirra, who spent the entire show looking for the murderers of his family, realizes that he himself was the killer after he sees the killer's face staring back at him in a bathroom mirror. This, incidentally, may mean the whole purpose of the show was to set up a truly terrible pun: the main character is named John Mirra, and he solves the mystery in the bathroom (as in, the john) by looking into the mirror...yeah...
- Hey, I hadn't seen it, now you've spoiled it! Thanks a lot!
In Xenogears when Fei finds out that his father is really the new body of Grafh, and also Wiseman is his father as well
- Not only that, but he also discovers that he is the omnicidalmaniac ID, while his current amnesiac personality was artificially made after he committed a genocide. Then he discovers or should we say remember that he became crazy because his mother was Miang and made a lot of gruesome and painful experiments on him Then, we learn that Grafh and Fei are actually the same person, in two different bodies, and that 500 years ago, he was the lover of the game's world equivalant of the pope who made a HeroicSacrifice for him, causing Lacan (Fei's name at the time) to become the immortal Grahf while his original personality kept reincarnating. If this was not enough, Fei later learns that he is the ancestor of every inhabitant of the world, which he was not supposed to be, that free will exists thanks to him, and that he created his soul mate 10.000 years ago as a child because he felt a need of protection while he was linked to The Wave Existence, which gave him the power to wish his feelings into reality, and that all of it makes him basically the TheAntichrist, except that here, the Antichrist is the ''good'' guy . Fei is not a case of tomato in the mirror, he is The tomato, the mirror, the frame of the mirror, the room in which the tomato and the mirror are, and the architect of all of this actually wants to be killed by him
  - This troper understood it as Fei had not lived for 10,000 years, rather his soul reincarnated repeatedly.
In Wild ARMs 1, the character Rudy has his arm severed and when his friends try to heal him they discover that he is not human, but an artificial life form created as a weapon, and his body is biologically similar to the demons they are fighting.
- Something similar happens to Jet of Wild ARMs 3 when he finds out he is not actually Dr. Enduro's son, but actually an Arificial Human created to interface with the Yggdrasil System.
In Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Dracula is Killed Off For Real before the start of the game. Its main villain claims to be Dracula's reincarnation. He's not, the mysterious power possessed by the main character, Soma Cruz is Dracula's power, and Soma is Dracula reincarnated. Cue Enemy Within.
Metal Gear Solid: You Should Know This Already, but Solid Snake goes into Shadow Moses Island to rescue two hostages, and stop terrorist leader Liquid Snake from launching a nuclear strike. The hostages he's meant to rescue keep having heart attacks, and Meryl claims he looks just like Liquid. Snake then discovers that both he and Liquid are clones of Big Boss, and that he's been used as a vector for the FOXDIE assassination virus.
- If anything, Raiden in Sons of Liberty is an even bigger tomato than Snake. A former Child Soldier who ends up suppressing his traumatic memories, he goes through all kinds of virtual reality training reenactments of Snake's best missions, and his mission in the Big Shell was modelled right off of the Shadow Moses mission. His relationship to the game's Big Bad, Solidus Snake, closely resembles the one between Solid Snake and Big Boss, and the entire mission was meant to be an experiment to transform Raiden into the spitting image of Solid Snake himself as well as a social experiment in giving The Patriots control over all digital information. To say that Raiden was a Xanatos Sucker by this point would be a grand understatement.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl: You were Strelok all along
Ys Book I and II: Feena first appears in Book I as a ordinary-looking girl locked up in the Shrine dungeon, and seems to have lost her memory. In Book II, right before the final boss, she is revealed to be one of the twin goddesses of Ys. During the ending cutscene, she tells Adol to "remember the girl in me".
Snatcher pulls this off rather beautifully. So, Gillian Seed is a Deckard expy working for an organization hunting down replicant, I mean Snatchers, robots that look like humans. Also, you and your wife has amnesia and can't remember anything about your past. Well, it's quite obvious that You and your wife are amnesiac Snatchers Except... Actually, neither of you are. You invented the Snatchers 50 years ago and were cryogenically stored. Hideo Kojima is so good a writer even the Genre Savvy are left in surprise. There are about 5 other Tomato Surprises that are subverted to hell and back in the very same game too.
In Folklore, your two protagonists are an amnesiac Mysterious Waif named Ellen and an Intrepid Reporter named Keats. Ellen naturally gets freaked out at first by the supernatural discoveries she makes, while Keats strangely takes it all in stride, presumably because he just wants to know the truth. Their being drawn to the same location and chain of events appears to be related only by the person who called them. In reality, Keats is a Halflife, ghost-like beings that the player has interacted with the entire game. He looks human because Ellen and Livane created him from a drawing Ellen (then known as Cecilia) drew of her terminally ill friend Herve by guessing how he would have looked as an adult. He's a reporter only because Herve wanted to be one, and the magazine he writes for (which Herve was a fan of) went out of business in the late 80s and the "office" the player saw Keats in at the beginning of the game is in fact another realm in the Netherworld. And of course, he's part of the story because the whole chain of events 17 years ago is what created him.
Tales Of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World features Emil, a cowardly teen who is given the ability to channel incredible power from the dormant spirit Ratatosk in order to protect Marta, who seeks to awaken the spirit himself from the core she carries and restore his power. Over the course of the game, Emil's recollection of certain major events is spotty, and many people in his hometown of Palmacosta, from which he left six months prior, know his name but don't recognize his face, much to his annoyance. Eventually it comes to light that Emil has not been channeling Ratatosk's power; he himself is Ratatosk, and the moments when he gains power to fight are him using his true abilities. Contrary to everyone's belief, Ratatosk had been awake for months, but was incredibly weak. In order to hide his true identity as he recovered, he created a fake persona using the appearance of a boy he'd killed named Aster. The fake was designed to quickly fill in the gaps of its memory; during the mass murder in Palmacosta six months prior, a women named Lana, blinded by her injuries, mistook Ratatosk for her son, Emil, and so the false persona came to believe it was Emil. No one in Palmacosta recognizes him because while there was once an Emil Castagnier there, this one looks completely different. The real Emil is implied to be dead, murdered at the same time as his parents. Furthermore, the core Marta has is a fake, designed to make her a target for those who seek to kill Ratatosk before he regains his full power.
In Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, The Sumaru City in which Maya and company live in is one big mirror, the denizens of the city (except Tatsuya) are pretty much tomatoes. In the "real world" (what Joker calls "the Other Side"), Maya was killed with the Lance of Longinus in Innocent Sin. Stricken with grief over her death, Tatsuya and his friends demanded Philemon to do something about it. Philemon agrees to bring her back, but in the alternate world where EP takes place, but with a price—everyone must forget Maya and the friendship they shared. Everyone gives up their memory, but during the process Tatsuya out and out refused to forget Maya and through sheer force of will he ends up in EP's Sumaru with all his memories intact, causing a paradox. The Maya in this world runs across him and feels a strange deja vu vibe from him, as well as pain in her side, where she had been stabbed in Innocent Sin.
Ihe Cybran Campaign of Supreme Commander. Dr. Brackman, creator of the Symbionts, calls all Symbionts "his children" and refers to the player as "my boy". The debriefing at the end of the campaign reveals that He's being literal about the son thing - you are his clone.
Tales Of The Abyss gives us Luke fon Fabre, a spoiled rich kid who's been shut-in at his mansion for seven years until the start of the story due to a kidnapping incident which shocked him into losing his memory. He soon goes on to find out that he's supposed to be the the world's savior, and continues to give everyone grief about how special he is. Cue the traditional Tales series megatwist, where he discovers that he's suddenly become a mass murderer, his beloved sword instructor set him up, all his friends are tired of his crap and to top it all off, he's the clone of the REAL Luke fon Fabre, who's been spending the last seven years trying to stop Van by working on the inside.
Star Ocean 3: The entire universe that Fayt and everyone else lives in is...an MMORPG created for the amusement of 4D beings, called the Eternal Sphere. And the creator of the game has decreed that all the "bad" data must be deleted as he felt that the Eternal Sphere's inhabitants have grown to be too sentient, with technology that almost matches that of the "real" 4D dimension.
Tomato-In-The-Mirror reveals have pretty much become a staple of Silent Hill games since Silent Hill 2, in which James realizes that he mercy-killed his wife.
Fatal Frame 2 has an example of this. The player is led to believe that Mayu is being driven by the town's local Ax Crazy ghost to kill twin sister, playable character Mio in order to complete an gruesome ritual that (among other things) requires an elder twin to kill his/her younger sibling. The game goes out of its way to show Mayu as a possessed, malevolent force. In the penultimate chapter of the game, it is revealed that the town has an odd legend about twin birth order — instead of older/younger they have inferior/superior, respectively, and the superior twin always allows the inferior to be born first. Now Mio, and the player by proxy, is the probable murderer.
In Super Robot Wars: Endless Frontier it's revealed that Haken Browning is W00 a genetically engineered human made by a project which tried to create the perfect soldiers. They later figured out it would be much easier to just make really human robots, and he was never released from his incubator thing.
Baten Kaitos Origins plays this in a really interesting and powerful manner: you're the tomato. Yes, you, the player...well, in a sense. That strange world that Sagi keeps getting sent to, where a bunch of people keep calling him Marno? That's you. You're actually playing the role of Marno's spirit, not a nameless Guardian Spirit...oh, and by the way, Marno is one-fifth of the Eldritch Abomination Malpercio. Yup, you're part of the dark god that helped ravage the world a millennium ago and is the final boss of the first, chronologically-second, Baten Kaitos. Don't you feel special?

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Batman The Animated Series, "His Silicon Soul": A robot duplicate of Batman goes through this trope before his programming activates; the plan of the AI that created it is only foiled because the duplicate was a pacifist Tin Man.
- Its successor, The Batman, has Batman and Robin trying to distribute the cure for a madman's Zombie Apocalypse drug. Turns out they were the ones under the effects of a drug that gives you wild hallucinations about everyone else being a zombie, and that same hallucinogen was what they were about to spread through the entire city.
Still in the DCAU: Superman The Animated Series: Bizarro is full of Fake Memories that have him convinced he's Superman. He even convincingly looked and acted like the real Superman, at least initially...
Ben 10 Alien Force has a duo (ex-trio) of alien hunters that think they were mutated by DN Aliens, and hate all aliens. At the end of the episode, they are told that the reason they look like aliens is because They. Are. Part alien. NO. Really?
- Also Tyler in the episode "Inside Man", turning out to be a DN Alien who still is fighting it and trying to be human.
At the cliffhanger end of the Season Two finale of Transformers Animated, Sari looks down at her injured elbow to see circuitry poking out, and her adoptive dad, robotics genius Isaac Sumdac, responds "We need to talk." In the next season, it's revealed that Sari was a Cybertronian Protoform Isaac somehow came across, and sampled his DNA to create her form.
Parodied in Family Guy when Mayor West, upon being struck in the face with a brick, touches the wound, then stares at the blood on his hand, dramatically realizing, "Oh my God! I'm a tomato!"
Used in an episode of Legion of Superheroes. Superman relizes that he is actually the shape-shifting Ron-Karr, tricked into believing that he is Superman in order to be put to use as a spy.
Used twice in Futurama;
- One of the "Scary Door" gags has a mad scientist who has combined the evilest of Earth's animals' DNA and poured it into a machine, to create a pure evil creature. a door on the machine opens, and a nude man, complete with Censor Smoke, walks out and says; "It turns out it's man."
- In the episode "The Honking", Bender is run over by a "were-car" while staying at a mansion he inherited from his uncle. When people back in New New York are getting run over, Bender believes the were-car followed him, until it turns out Bender became a were-car himself.

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A mundane version of this occurs in DMFA, when Dan realizes why he doesn't trust Abel.

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This is a Twist Ending Trope. Expect your tomatoes to be spoiled!