Mind Rape / Live-Action TV

Subpages:

• Doctor Who

Psychic Assaults

• Andor: Dr. Gorst has the recorded dying throes of a species the Empire wiped out who were able to mentally attack their killers with the sound of their screams. He uses this to torture and mentally break prisoners for the Empire.
• Angel: In the first season finale, Cordelia has all the human suffering going on across the entire planet shoved into her mind. She winds up in a non-responsive helplessly-in-pain state in the hospital for most of the episode. When she gets better, it's caused her personality to change for the better. Cordelia had been self-absorbed and shallow, though not nearly as much as she used to be, having already undergone positive Character Development before this point.
• In the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode "Tale of the Renegade Virus", the virus attempts to take over Simon's brain via plugging himself into his hand. The scene is disturbingly reminiscent of rape.
• Babylon 5:
  • "Dust to Dust", G'Kar takes a drug called "dust" which allows the user to gain telepathic powers for a few hours. He uses it to invade Londo's mind and go through his memories, tormenting him about them in the process. He physically beats him up beforehand in order to subdue him, which emphasizes the similarity to actual rape. However, before G'Kar's mind-rape session is over, Kosh visits him (first as a vision of his father, then as a sort of Narn angel), and G'Kar undergoes a key change of heart. Although he is sentenced to 60 days in jail for his assault on Londo, he welcomes it, and writes a holy book.
  • Also inverted in the same episode. One Dust user is found huddled on the floor screaming that the mountain was falling on him - his Mind Rape victim was a geologist who had some very vivid memories of being caught in a rockslide on Mars.
  • According to Lyta Alexander, somewhere on Beta Colony there is a man in an institution who spends his days and nights screaming at things only he can see, things planted in his mind by the Psi Corps as punishment for murdering telepaths. He has to be restrained 24 hours a day lest he tear out his own eyes.
  • The Shadows routinely created servants by irrecoverably altering their personalities. For example, Anna Sheridan.
  • On the same token, Bester shows no qualms about mentally manipulating people to his ends. He plays Garibaldi for a puppet. After extracting him from Shadow control, he proceeds to subtly alter his personality without his knowledge. That's not the Mind Rape, though. That comes later, after he releases all the hidden memories of the incident, leaving Garibaldi to realize that he'd just betrayed his own captain and was probably going to get hell for it. On top of it, a couple of mental suggestions keep him from just shooting Bester in the head. To a guy like Garibaldi, it is mental torture of a subtle but excruciating degree. Just rectifying recent events took a lot of convincing, and it would be nearly 20 years before Garibaldi finally got payback by personally busting Bester.
  • In "Atonement", Delenn was rather brutally forced to relive some of her memories of the Earth-Minbari war. She had already been living with them for a long time, however, and was thus not broken.
  • In "Passing Through Gethsemane", a mindwiped former Serial Killer is forced to relive some of his old memories of what he'd done via the interference of a Centauri telepath. Significantly, this interference is supplemented with more mundane techniques, including what looks like bloody writing on the wall (later revealed to be a 23rd-century form of disappearing ink) and recordings of voices (ostensibly of his victims).
  • Also in "Passing Through Gethsemane", Lyta in turn mind-rapes the Centauri telepath in order to determine who hired him to remove the mindwipe from the killer, who was living his remaining life peacefully as a monk with no memories of his former life. She earlier threatened Londo with mind-rape, after Londo threatened to turn her in to Psi Corps if she didn't divulge what she knew about the Vorlons.
• In the Black Mirror episode "Playtest", this is what effectively happens to the protagonist. The story is about a dopey American flâneur trying out an experimental video game that directly alters his brain activity. The game starts out with cheap Jump Scares but eventually graduates up to unbridled Psychological Horror as it turns his deepest personal fears on him, namely, the very understandable fear of contracting Alzheimer's and losing his memories and his mind, or watching it happen to a loved one. It turns out in the ending that he died abruptly from the game crashing a split-second into the experiment in reality, and the events of the episode were all made up in his head as his brain was fried.
• In The Boys (2019), the psychic superhero Mindstorm puts Butcher in a coma and forces him to relive his brother's suicide, until The Heart Hughie convinces him to release him.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Glory, the Big Bad of season 5, pulls people's sanity straight out of their skull and feeds on it, leaving them as gibbering messes. Tara eventually ends up as one of her victims.
  • Later, Willow erases Tara's memories of their arguments while they're in a relationship, repeatedly. Tara is especially upset because she remembers Glory's prior violation of her mind. She is likely also not happy with Willow taking advantage of this mind rape magic to literally rape her.
  • Not to mention Rack from "Wrecked", who basically uses Willow (and others) as some sort of telepathic crack whore. Both Rack and Willow make orgasm faces when he transfers power into her, and then tells her that she "tastes like strawberries".
• Justin Crowe's main power in Carnivàle seems to be Mind Rape. At first, he just uses it to make people face their past sins, induce a terrible guilt upon them and make them aware that he saw it too. But in the second season he really takes it to a whole other level: he has his sister, Iris procure for him a constant stream of pretty, young maidservants. He seduces them using his authority as religious and political leader of New Canaan, and has so much demonically tinged sex with them that he breaks their minds completely. We never actually see him commit these rapes, but we see Iris cleaning up the aftermath.
• A Fury in Charmed (1998) can cause any evildoer to hear the screams of his past victims.
• The Chuck episode "Chuck vs. the Bullet Train" ends with Sarah having her memories erased. All of them since before the show began, if not beyond. It causes agonizing emotional and physical pain, and the montage is extremely disturbing, especially for such a lighthearted show.
• Dollhouse:
  • The Attic. There's a reason you don't want to get sent there.
  • Heck, the entire freakin' Dollhouse. It's just that they can make you like it.
• Farscape:
  • The Aurora Chair is designed to segment the layers of prisoners' minds in order to extract their memories, and judging from the all the screams of agony, the process is anything but pleasant.
  • Scarran interrogations, which involve liberal use of both Mind Rape and Mind Screw to drive its victims completely insane. In "Prayer", Scorpius actually refers to Scarran interrogations as "mind rape".
  • Zhaan finds herself on the receiving end of this in "Rhapsody in Blue" when Tahleen decides she isn't interested in being taught how to control her violent impulses and simply rips the information out of Zhaan's mind — during the telepathic equivalent of sex, no less.
  • The Nebari "Mental Cleansing" process involves this. In "Durka Returns", Chiana is being escorted back to Nebari Prime so she can undergo the process, but she makes it clear to the rest of the cast that she'd rather die than go through it. In "A Clockwork Nebari", the crew of Moya are subjected to a temporary version that turns them into emotionless pawns until the drugs used are cleared from their system. Crichton's Not-So-Imaginary Friend reverses the process for him while Rygel's high metabolism burns through it almost immediately.
  • Stark, capable of transmitting memories when unmasked, attempts to pull a Mind Rape on Jool when her whining grows too much for his already frayed nerves; he's interrupted before he can get his mask off, but the statement "I will show you something that will make you cry forever!" confirms enough.
  • Done to Stark in "The Peacekeeper Wars: Part 1" when John, Aeryn, and Sikozu forcibly remove his mask and make him absorb an alien's knowledge while he screams and tries to refuse. Stark, who has never been exactly sane, goes even crazier than usual for a while after this.
• Firefly: Besides the torture detailed in the next folder, River also undergoes this whenever she makes contact with the mind of a Reaver. In "Bushwhacked", a man tortured by the Reavers simply wakes up and she starts screaming at the mental contact. Later on, in the movie, while Serenity is passing through the Reaver fleet, her face is locked in absolute horror as she is surrounded by the Reavers, and at the end of the movie, she is rendered catatonic and helpless by their presence as they assault the crew. Then she flips to the opposite mode and becomes an unstoppable killing machine. (The door closes on her, leaving River with the Reavers. When the door opens again, River is standing there, soaked in blood, gripping an axe and a grappling hook, with what's left of the Reavers in pieces around her. Then the Alliance troops show up...) She also gets mind-raped by an entire planet when she is on Miranda, and the vast numbers of people who should have been alive but aren't sends her into a screaming mental breakdown. Being The Empath sucks sometimes.
• Fringe:
  • Season three has Olivia repeatedly injected with a serum that overwrites her own memories with those of her alternate universe counterpart. It's quite disturbing watching the new memories slowly take over.
  • Season five gives us Captain Windmark, who mind-rapes people in pretty much every episode he's been in.
• This is Dreamer's M.O. on The Gifted (2017). At least she sometimes feels guilty about it.
• In the Grimm episodes "Thanks for the Memories" and "Octopus Head", Timothy Perkal a.k.a. Lawrence Anderson a.k.a. the Gedächtnis Esser steals his victims' memories by inserting his tentacles into their brains through the backs of their skulls. The victims are usually left suffering from severe dementia.
• Heroes:
  • Maury and Matt Parkman are actually capable of Mind Rape and both father and son have the power to force some poor SOB into a living nightmare which puts their body in a coma and their mind in... well, their worst nightmare. Maury gets the tables turned on him in a season two episode and gets trapped in his own mind by Matt.
  • There is also Sylar, who just thrives on the physical imagery of this when he forcibly violates people brains to steal their powers. His attack on the regenerating teen girl Claire Bennett particularly stands out. Made even worse by the fact that he seems to have a twisted sort of respect for her because of her ability — she's "extra special" or something.
  • Noah Bennett and the Haitian interrogate an old company man by threatening to delete all of his happy memories — including those of his dead daughter.
    Noah: It will be like she never existed.
  • Noah Bennett had a Crowning Moment of Revenge when he confronted the injured boy who had tried to rape Claire earlier in the season. The Haitian does the actual mind-raping, but Bennett's line is chilling.
    Noah: Hollow him out. Take everything.
  • Of course, all of this seems like a tumble in the hay when compared to the season 3 finale. Bennet, Angela and Matt, after finding Nathan Petrelli killed by Sylar, decide to save Nathan in a rather... unusual way... Since Sylar had absorbed pretty much all of Nathan's memories, personality habits, and so forth (since he was planning on taking his place in order to become President), Matt uses this against him. He uses his telepathy to force Sylar to completely forget that he was ever Gabriel Gray or Sylar, and forced all of Nathan's personality to the forefront. This effectively erases Sylar forever and resurrects Nathan's personality within Sylar's body (which is a perfect physical and genetic match to Nathan's due to the shape-shifting power which he had absorbed). This is effectively the culmination of Sylar's identity crisis in earlier episodes, and the ultimate comeuppance for the villain's constant ability theft and Mind Rape: having it all backfire and be used against him. The preview for next seasons also introduces plenty more possibilities for Mind Rape since it appears Sylar (or his hunger, at the very least) is Not Quite Dead. It makes you wonder why they didn't just use Claire's blood to just revive the fallen senator; Noah was brought back using that method, so it should have occurred to him. Perhaps they have different blood types.
  • Sylar being Sylar, of course, his real personality seems to have lodged inside Matt's psyche, and now Sylar is mind-raping Matt right back, turning his own power against him and taking over his body at the worst possible times. In a nasty case of Pay Evil unto Evil, Matt locks Sylar in his own worst nightmare — a world where he is completely and utterly alone. Each hour that passes in the real world is a year in the nightmare. Nice touch, Mr. Nice Guy.
• Jessica Jones (2015): Kilgrave can make anyone do what he says, and he tends to use the power to hurt people. Sometimes it's short and violent and sometimes he uses it to make someone do something unpleasant for hours at a time. In the first episode Hope has been forbidden to move, so she soils herself and she also freaks out when Jessica picks her up and carries her away from the hotel room. In Jessica's case, about a year before the series began, she had been under his control for months, only breaking out when he finally forced her to murder Luke Cage's wife, which shocked her out of it. She described how a part of her was waiting every minute for a chance to break free and escape.
• D'avin Jaqobis on Killjoys believes he's a victim of this because he murdered his entire squad but can't remember why because of neural blockers placed in his brain. He is later told by the scientist who developed the process that he killed his men in the midst of a psychotic break, and he requested that she remove the memories, as he found them unbearable. She's lying, of course — her process turned him into an unstoppable killing machine. D'av's partner Dutch offers the scientist the choice of being killed or wiped. She chooses to be killed, but Dutch has her wiped anyway.
• In The Listener, Charlie thinks Toby's telepathy is this, until he saves her from an actual rapist.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Sauron submits Galadriel to this in the season one finale, taking her through a traumatising vision sequence, firstly posing as her beloved older brother Finrod (while looking at her like no brother should ever look at his sister), then proposing marriage to her in the most manipulative way possible while showing her a reflected image of them together as the king and queen of Middle-earth. When she rejects him, he finishes up by showing his terrifying true colors, screaming at her in Voice of the Legion and then making her believe that she's drowning in the ocean — just like the first time she met Halbrand — and she may have actually drowned if it wasn't for Elrond pulling her out of the water.
• Motherland: Fort Salem: While tracking down Nicte in "Delusional", Abigail and Raelle experience different magical hallucinations as a result of a spell that are horrifying. Raelle has to experience her mother killing her father and then her, while Abigail's involves her conjuring a storm that goes out of control to kill her mother along with other people. Worse, they start to harm others and themselves as a result of these hallucinations until they escape it. The other soldiers with them didn't manage to, and killed themselves unwittingly. Scylla admits this was the same spell she used to cause a mass suicide in the first episode, which indicates the people hallucinated something innocuous that made them walk off ledges.
• Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation: In "East Meets West Part 2", this is how Venus takes down the Shredder once and for all. She explains, "I held up a mirror and gave the spirit of his youth a chance to face the creature he had become. I didn't destroy the Shredder, Oroku Saki did."
• October Faction: Alice inflicts this on Fred and Deloris, making both of them feel all the pain they caused to supernatural beings across the years.
• In Season 5 of Once Upon a Time, when Killian Jones has dark magic forced inside him to save his life, he is forced to relive some of his worst memories, as an effort of the dark magic to lure him in. He's screaming as this happens, and by the end of it he looks disoriented, numb and almost crazy.
• Power Rangers:
  • In Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, Mesogog always does this to Zeltrax and Elsa (and at one point his own son) so they don't betray him, though it seems to only cause tremendous pain, with no sign of emotion or memory manipulation.
  • In Power Rangers Mystic Force, an emerging Sealed Evil in a Can causes Daggeron to experience his own death. (It happens, but a little differently than the flash-forward. He gets better.)
    • Daggeron isn't the only one this happens to; Koragg subjects Red Ranger Nick to this as well, starting in the episode Whispering Voices. He primarily uses it to contact Nick any time he wants to fight any member of the Mystic Force team.
• In The Prisoner (1967), Number Six is subjected to this form of torture in almost half of all the series' episodes. Perhaps the most notable examples are "The Schizoid Man", in which he is brainwashed into believing that he is actually a Village operative assigned to impersonate Number Six, and "Once Upon a Time", in which he is mentally regressed to childhood.
• Roswell: Half the plots after Tess is introduced have her mindwarping some person or other, to the extent that she ends up killing Alex by mindwarping him one too many times to get the translation to the Royal book.
• Smallville:
  • Brainiac's favourite trick. He put both Lana and Chloe in comas that comes with excruciating agony.
  • In "Blank", Chloe gets a painful but thankfully short one from Mr Grady.
  • In "Commencement", Jor-El basically mind-rapes Lionel into become his "oracle".
  • In "Identity", Chloe does this to the freak of the week. She is possessed by Brainiac.
• Stargate-verse:
  • Stargate SG-1:
    • In "Unnatural Selection", the human-form Replicators interrogate prisoners by shoving their hands into the heads of the team (though as Fifth shows, they don't strictly have to), creating dreamlike worlds from which they can extract the required information.
    • Done more directly by Fifth to Samantha Carter in "New Order, Part 1" after escaping incarceration. His insertion of his hand into the front of her brain is shown as particularly akin to forced penetration, and we are shown glimpses of the horrific imagery she is subjected to. She keeps screaming the entire time his hand is in her brain. He even moves his hand through her head during the torment, finally removing his hand from the back of her brain. By the end, she is in tears, begging him to stop. He later says that he "tortured [her] for so long" because he was angry about her betrayal.
  • This happens to the major characters in Stargate Atlantis, too.
    • We only get to see what Sheppard is forced to experience (a scenario that ends with his suicide by Heroic Sacrifice), but it's heavily implied that what the others went through was even worse.
      Sheppard: What did they do to you?
      McKay: Torture, in ways too hideous and... intimate... to recount.
    • This also happens to Rodney, Woolsey and Sheppard in Season 5 involving an alien parasite. It's later revealed that the parasite isn't evil and the characters are controlling their own hallucinations. Turns into Fridge Horror when Woolsey imagines a beautiful woman falling in love with him and Rodney recreates a friend who tells him he's brilliant, but Sheppard hallucinates Koyla kidnapping him, taunting him, and brutally torturing him for hours on end (including cutting off his hand). It reflects horrifyingly what his state of mind was.
      John: Are you saying I tortured myself?
      Koyla: You torture yourself every day, John.
• Stargirl (2020): With just his mind, Brainwave can cause intense pain to people. This can go to the point of them dying from a stroke if he wishes.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • Mirror Spock's forced Mind Probe on McCoy in the episode "Mirror, Mirror" comes across this way for some viewers. It doesn't help that McCoy appears almost catatonic afterwards, although of course he's fine by the end of the episode.
    • Spock himself is mind-raped by a Klingon apparatus in "Errand of Mercy". Again, it's made worse by just how passive he is in the scene following. And considering that Vulcans value their minds above their bodies... The Klingon commander's dialogue in the scene beforehand is even stuffed full of Double Entendre.
    • Used by the Platonians in the episode "Plato's Stepchildren", with the most blatant example being Parmen forcing Spock to laugh and cry.
    • At the end of the episode "Requiem for Methuselah", Spock arguably does this to Kirk. Kirk expresses the desire to forget the love interest of the episode when things end badly, but Kirk is asleep when Spock mind melds with Kirk to make him forget.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • The series deals with this trope two times and actually stresses the physical sexual elements. It happens both times (the latter in a movie) to the half-Betazoid Counselor (and telepath) Troi, the first time using corrupting a memory of her having sex with her then-boyfriend Riker into a bizarre rape scene with Riker substituted with the rapist telepath. Commander Riker and Doctor Beverly Crusher were also subjected to the mental rape by the same perpetrator in "Violations", in their case by forcing them to relive particularly painful memories with the rapist standing in for different people at different points.
    • In "The Battle", a Ferengi gives Picard back the repaired Stargazer (Picard's first command) and then uses his Mind Rape device to force Picard to relive his victory over a Ferengi ship, causing him to attack the Enterprise.
    • In "The Best of Both Worlds", Picard is assimilated by the Borg. Apart from being forced to share his mind with trillions of other Borg, his head is also mined for the very strategies that the Federation has painstakingly devised to fight them, allowing them to crush the fleet at Wolf 359. In interviews, the writers directly likened it to rape, and it's not unwarranted; in "Family", Picard breaks down as he describes how he tried to resist and couldn't. How badly he was affected didn't fully show until Star Trek: First Contact, when it becomes clear that the experience has left him with a near-insane level of rage against the Borg.
    • In "The Mind's Eye", Romulans feed Geordi horrific images through his neural implants (which normally would connect to his VISOR) in order to brainwash him into becoming their Manchurian Agent.
  • In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Hard Time", Chief O'Brien is implanted with the memories of a 20-year prison term, in the course of which he kills his cell mate Ee'char, who after years together had become his best friend, over a scrap of food. Needless to say, this is an "O'Brien Must Suffer" episode.
  • Star Trek: Voyager does this a number of times, without the Anvilicious rape analogy. "Persistence of Vision" is "Violations" (above) on a shipwide scale, and the culprit responsible has nearly put the entire crew into a catatonic stupor by the time the last one or two members standing are able to stop him. Then there's "Repression", in which a Maquis fanatic back home sends subliminal messages to Tuvok, which make him forcibly mind-meld with every ex-Maquis on the ship and start a takeover. Then there are the dream aliens in "Waking Moments", then there are the Hirogen making the crew think that they're part of the simulated World War II they'd created as they 'hunt' them in "The Killing Game", then there's the Lotus-Eater Machine in "Bliss", then there's the beacon that makes people hallucinate participating in genocide in "Memorial", then there are the aliens who brainwash the crew into working in their factory in "Workforce", and on and on and on. Honorable mention for the friendly Negative Space Wedgie inhabitants whose means of communication nearly drive Chakotay nuts in "The Fight". This crew's brains get baked so many times that it's surprising that they know up from down by the time the series ends.
  • T'Pol is subjected to this in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Fusion" by mind-meld with a Vulcan renegade. It gives her Vulcan AIDS. When the episode aired on Sky One, it was followed by an "If any of the issues in this episode have affected you..." message with the number for an AIDS helpline. The fact that mated Vulcan couples create a permanent mind-meld makes this, and all other instances of forced bondage, literally mind rape.
• Stranger Things: One of the most common effects of the monsters. The Mind Flayer does this to Will in Season 1, as Season 2 uncomfortably reveals, and Billy in Season 3. Billy then does something very similar to Heather, who then assists him in doing it to her own parents.
• In Supernatural, this happens to Castiel when another angel named Naomi brainwashes him.
• Taken:
  • In "Jacob and Jesse", Jacob Clarke possesses the ability to show a person all of their memories and all of their fears. He first uses it on a bully named Travis as his physical weakness means that he has no other way to defend himself. After Owen Crawford kidnaps him in the hope of using him to power the alien ship, Jacob subjects him to the same treatment. The experience traumatizes Owen, haunting him for the rest of his life. In "Acid Tests", it is revealed that he saw his own death from a stroke on May 4, 1970 as a result of Jacob's psychic powers and that he was always so contemptuous of his son Eric as he knew that he would be with him when he died.
  • Also in "Acid Tests", anyone who directly looks at Lester sees all of their memories and all of their fears. This is not due to any conscious effort on Lester's part, as is the case with Jacob, but because he is completely unable to control his abilities. When he tries to save Lester from a fire, Sam Crawford accidentally looks at him. As a result, they are unable to escape, and both burn to death in the fire.
  • In "John", Mary Crawford asks the image of her grandfather Owen what he saw when he was mind raped by Jacob. Owen then tells her to look at him and she sees all of her memories and all of her fears as the real Owen did in 1959. Mary later tells Dr. Wakeman that she also saw how everything with Allie and the aliens will end.
• Teen Wolf:
  • In "Pack Mentality", Peter uses his power over newly bitten Scott, to make him sleepwalk to the school, and help him attack one of his targets, a busdriver who'd been part of covering up that the Hale fire was arson. He imposes images in Scott's mind, leading Scott to dream that he himself had attacked and mauled his girlfriend, Allison.
  • In "Night School", Peter Hale forces his claws into Scott's mind, and brings out his darker instincts, making it so that not only would Scott kill his friends, Stiles, Allison, Lydia and Jackson, but making Scott want to do it. Which to Scott was the worst part. It's only through luck and sheer force of will, that Scott is able to reject the Alpha's influence on him.
  • In "Co-Captain", Peter, aided by his nephew Derek, corners Scott in the empty locker rooms, while Scott is only wearing a towel. He then puts his claws in Scott's neck, and forces him to live through not just the Hale fire, Peter's own time in a coma, and Peter's murder of Laura Hale, and Kate Argent's accomplices. This leads Scott with quite reasonable issues with fire afterwards.
  • It is said later on in s3 that if this claw ritual is performed wrong, that it could paralyze or kill the subject.
  • In several episodes of s2, the deceased Peter Hale makes appearances to Lydia in the form of hallucinations and dreams. Word of God has said this was the result of Lydia's banshee ability and Peter biting her to implant memories of himself in her. This allows Peter to mentally control her into helping him ressurect himself. Afterwards he mocks her on how with a little bit of therapy she'll be just fine.
  • In "Motel California", the Darach adds wolfsbane to the Coach's whistle, poisoning all four werewolves on the school bus to start hallucinating. Leading three of them, Scott, Ethan and Boyd, to try and kill themelves, and forcing Isaac to relive his memories of being locked up in the freezer. The worst part is that though using a torch brings Ethan and Boyd out of their suicidal mood, with Scott, even after he himself lights a torch that should have dissipated the influence of the wolfsbane, he's still suicidal, even while perfectly aware of what he's doing. Showing that his depression is real. It's only Stiles putting himself in danger, that brings Scott out of it enough to be saved.
  • The entire nogitsune arc in s3B, in regards to the Nogitsune's possession of Stiles.
  • The nogitsune setting up situations for Scott to take up people's pain, including one officer's death, and then stabbing him, and absorbing all the pain took in while twisting things to let Scott know he was playing with him all along.
  • In "A Promise to the Death", and "Smoke and Mirrors", Peter has Kate kidnap Scott and Kira, where Kate then turns Scott into a Berserker, subduing his mind and first making him stab Kira before sending him after his own pack. The way Kate dresses Scott up and puts the Berserker mask on Scott's head has a particular sexual feel to it, especially with Scott begging Kate not to do so and screaming as she puts it on him.
  • The Dread Doctors from Season 5 twist the pack's minds, messing with their memories, making both them and the other chimeras they created forget what the Dread Doctors had done with them. The way they made Tracy murder her father and her therapist in her sleep was particularly horrifying.
• In the Torchwood episode "Adam", said Adam implants fake memories into the team by touching them. Using this to make Tosh believe they're a couple and sleep with her was bad enough, but when Ianto is onto him, Adam gleefully implants him with memories of brutally murdering women for pleasure, all the while saying he "forgot what a rush it is, feeding in the bad stuff". Ianto screams and thrashes in pain, gasps for air, cries, tries to back away, and then pleads "No... Please..." He is, understandably, horribly traumatized by this (thank goodness for hypnosis and amnesia pills). He finally completely believes he is a murderer, enough to fool the best lie-detector they have. As if the rape analogy isn't obvious enough here, Adam holds Ianto down and kisses him while he does all of this.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • In "Deaths-Head Revisited", the former SS officer Gunter Lütze who had escaped to South America came back to Germany to visit the concentration camp he was in charge of during World War II. He encounters the ghost of Becker, a man he killed 17 years earlier. Becker terrorizes the German with Mind Rape of what it was like to get shot, burned, hanged, etc. When the police find Lütze, he is delirious beyond help.
  • In "It's a Good Life", Aunt Amy was the only person who could exercise any control over Anthony Fremont, until she offended him by singing in his presence and his mind "snapped" at her. She's left as a shell of her former self, smiling vacantly and no longer watching how she acts or what she says around Anthony.
• In The Vampire Diaries, the vampires can control human minds, which sometimes leads to this.
• WandaVision: In an outburst of grief over not being able to bury her lover, Wanda ends up creating a giant sitcom reality encompassing the town of Westview, New Jersey. Every citizen has their personality overridden by a new personality and is forced to act along in her fantasies while being crushed under formless grief.

"Mundane" Torture

• During the occupation of New Caprica at the beginning of season three of Battlestar Galactica (2003), Leoben Conoy puts an interesting twist on this trope. He gives Starbuck a perfectly normal, stable, well-ordered life — inside a jail cell. He also uses the opportunity to bring up as many images of Starbuck's abusive mother as he can manage. Oh yeah, and there's also the fact that he can resurrect himself every time Starbuck kills him.
• Being Human (UK) has a Sylar-worthy example with Owen, Annie's ex-boyfriend and her murderer. First, he does this as he's comforting his current girlfriend, who's freaked-out because a ghost was talking to her, trying to warn her about him. Second, he denies the very existence of Annie whilst he's looking her straight in the eye with a shit-eating grin: "I don't see... anything". Then he twists the knife by admitting that he was cheating on Annie when she was still alive. Evil. She ends up in a Heroic BSoD till her roommate George pulls her out of it. Annie later uses a more supernatural example to turn the tables, telling Owen "a secret only the dead know" that causes him to break down entirely.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In the past, Angelus drove Drusilla completely insane by torturing and killing her entire family before siring her. He had other victims as well, many others, in the old days, and it's implied he did physical rape as well. When he is reawakened in the 21st century, he uses major psychological war on Buffy, Giles, and generally anybody who happens to be around. The Master aptly describes him as "the most vicious animal I have ever known" Even Spike is afraid of him, for all the mocking he gives Angel's ensouled persona.
  • In "Becoming, Part 2", Angelus was on the verge of killing Giles, who has withstood extensive torture without revealing his knowledge of the ritual on how to destroy the world. Spike suggested that Dru play a game; she agrees, and reads Giles' mind to discover his weakness. She finally cajoles the information she wants out of Giles by hypnotizing him, so that she appears as Jenny, his dead girlfriend, in his eyes.
  • Angelus borders on Trope Codifier for "mundane" mind rape:
    • Alongside Darla, lures Vampire Hunter Daniel Holtz to an empty cabin, while Holtz is away, Angelus rapes Holtz's wife, kills his baby son, and turns his daughter into a vampire.
    • Stalks and harasses Waif Prophet Drusilla, making her believe her powers are "evil", kills her entire family and then massacres the convent she seeks refuge on.
    • Stalks Buffy and her friends, sires a friend as a "token of his love", murders Giles' love and leaves her on his bed, after setting up his apartment for a romantic night.
    • Just to mess with Angel Investigations, pulls a Iago to Gunn's Othello, with Fred as Desdemona and Wesley as Cassio.
  • The First's taunting and manipulation of Angel in "Amends". He winds up so bad-off he tries to kill himself. Hell, this is pretty much all the First does itself — and It does it well. Another example: what it does to Spike in the early part of season 7. Eep. It succeeds with Chloe, the potential Slayer, and tries to do so as well with Willow.
• The MO of the Serial Killer "John Smith" from the Cold Case episode "The Road". He'd imprison women in an underground chamber, where months of isolation and psychological torture would essentially kill them on the inside, leaving them catatonic. Before sealing them in completely, he'd offer them a no strings attached chance to escape, but none of his victims ever took it.
  John Smith: Once hope is gone... dying is just a formality.
• In Criminal Minds, the serial killer Mr. Scratch uses a drug cocktail to force his victims to experience disturbing hallucinations, while also leaving them highly suggestible to his command. He then makes them kill their loved ones under the guise of fighting back against the hallucination tormenting them, causing them to have a mental breakdown when they realise the truth of what they've done. At the end of his titular episode, Hotch finds himself alone with Mr. Scratch, who forces Hotch through the same horrific ordeal. First he makes a woman slit her own throat in front of Hotch, then he gasses and beats Hotch into unconsciousness. When Hotch wakes up, Mr. Scratch makes him experience his worst fear as a hallucination — that being his team getting shot to death in front of him — and then tries to command Hotch to kill said team members himself when they storm in to rescue him. Hotch is able to resist the command and Mr. Scratch is arrested, but the end of the episode shows that Hotch — usually the pinnacle of stoicism — is greatly shaken by the ordeal and questioning what was real and what was only a hallucination.
• The Daily Show: In one of his earlier (2007) appearances, John Oliver accused Stewart of "mind-f#cking" him.
• Firefly:
  • This is pretty much the background for River Tam; she was tricked into going to a government-run facility known as "the Academy" where she spent three years having her brain cut apart and transformed into a psychic killing machine. Once she was rescued, she was reduced to a babbling, incoherent and at times violent little girl who spends plenty of time crying or shaking helplessly in corners... until she's triggered, at which point she unleashes the Waif-Fu to end all Waif-Fu.
  • The Reavers will often convert their victims into second-hand Reavers by forcing them to watch the horrific tortures they inflict on other captives. This pushes them to a point where the only way they can survive facing that kind of madness is to become part of it.
• Game of Thrones: Ramsay Bolton enjoys getting into his victims' heads and then breaking them completely.
• In the Goosebumps (1995) episode "Chillogy, Part 3: Escape from Karlsville", Todd enters Karlsville and is later kidnapped by Karl and strapped to a table to be turned to a plastic figure since Karlsville is a model town. Karl begins taunting Todd with the thought of being turned to plastic by doing such things as asking him if he's afraid or what color he wants to be turned. Just before Todd is saved by Jessica and Matthew, Karl begins to chuckle as he tells Todd the whole process will hurt. Todd than begins to scream for Karl to stop and yell for someone to help.
• The Hawaii Five-O episode "A Bullet for McGarrett" features two women hypnotized by an evil college professor to become assassins. Interestingly, the evil college professor was himself brainwashed during the Korean War, by a character played by the same actor who played the evil hypnotist in the original film adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
  • Merrit Rook attempts to put Elliot Stabler through this in one episode. It fails, by the way.
  • More than one interrogation session feels a lot like this. A good example is Elliot and Dr. Phoenix browbeating and pressuring a stressed and terrified little girl into revealing who molested her, to the point that she falsely accuses her coach to just. have. them. stop. harassing. her, which ruins the man's life and almost invalidates the whole case. Another is Olivia bullying a mentally ill witness into putting a temporary stop to his medical treatment to have him clear his memories enough to testify in a difficult case, which also ties with Olivia's terror of mentally ill people; he does so, but he's so fucked up by her abusive behavior and the side-effects that he commits suicide immediately afterwards.
• In Mahou Sentai Magiranger, the Hades God Cyclops, a Cold Sniper extraordinare, engages in a surprisingly mundane version of this trope; he targets the rangers one by one, stringing them along into thinking they've evaded him only to take one down, eventually causing one of two remaining rangers to experience a nervous breakdown. Cyclops exults in this, declaring that there's nothing greater than the sight of a broken mind.
• Mr. Robot:
  • After being brainwashed by Whiterose, Angela begins to turn her back against Elliot. For the majority of season 3, she starts to mind rape him for Stage 2 by exploiting his mental illness and working with Mr.Robot. She doesn't even feel any remorse for using him as she makes Whiterose's plan more important for her.
  • The same thing happens with Dom in the season 3 finale after she gets kidnapped. Irving kills the FBI mole Santiago and mind rapes Dom to become a Dark Army mole and take his place by making her imagine Santiago as one of her family members as he continues to butcher him until she agrees.
• In those episodes of The Prisoner (1967) where Number Six is not subjected to the other sort of mind rape, he will often be subjected to this sort instead. In "Hammer Into Anvil", however, he turns the tables, putting the new Number Two through it instead.
• In Teen Wolf, Kate just loves to do this to Derek.
• Implied in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles when Derek is captured in the future and taken to the basement of an old house. We're not shown what happens while he is in that room, but when he comes out, he's visibly shaking, exhausted, and horrified. Whatever it was, it was apparently relates to Cameron; when he sees her later in the resistance base, he immediately draws his weapon and tries to destroy her, and after travelling back in time, he immediately recognizes her on sight and draws a weapon on her.

---