Room Full Of Crazy / Live-Action TV

• In American Gothic (1995), after learning that Sheriff Buck is the Devil Incarnate from none other than his own mother, Dr. Crower becomes so obsessed with him that he starts acting like a crazed stalker. When Gail, Ben, and Dr. Peele becomes suspicious of his personality changes and investigate his house, they discover a room straight out of this trope - no rambling writing scrawled on the walls (except Buck's name, over and over), but plenty of photos, newspaper clippings, and an enlarged headshot of the sheriff with a red bullseye marked around it. Despite the predictable cliché quality of the moment, it still managed to be rather chilling.
• Angel:
  • Fred spends her first few months back on Earth as an agoraphobic hermit who covers the walls of her room with her mathematical formulae until she is able to finally come out of her shell, symbolized by her painting the walls. This is a hold over from her spending five years hiding out in a cave in a demonic dimension, where the only thing she could write on while trying to figure out how to get home were the cave walls.
  • Lampshaded later when she momentarily writes formulas on the glass window of her office:
    Angel: Oh, this is never good.
    Fred: No, er, I just ran out of blackboard...
  • In "Sacrifice", it is revealed that before the goddess Jasmine came to Earth, she was being revered in other dimensions and her previous followers are obsessed with bringing her back. In the sewers, Wesley is dragged away by one of the Spider Monsters into its lair and discovers that the demon has been creating an elaborate summoning mandala out of flesh and blood of its victims along one wall, using blood magic because "She is older than words".
  • In "Somnambulist", Angel also encountered a vampire he'd sired who performed the same set of murders over and over again and considered himself an artist. Angel mocked his endeavors and guessed that he even had the clichéd wall covered in photos of his victims. He did.
  • A milder example: when Lindsey first got his Evil Hand, he wrote "kill kill kill" all over sheets of paper during a meeting.
  • Wesley's office in Season 5 after Illyra takes infects and kills Fred, Gunn has this little convo with Lorne:
    Gunn: Strange times. Have you talked to Wes?
    Lorne: Well, we've exchanged words. I wouldn't exactly call it talking. He's still reeling since Our Lady of the Blue Bummer arrived.
    Gunn: Yeah, I was just in his office, and —
    Lorne: Oh God don't go in there! That's where he keeps his full-strength crazy!
    Gunn: (chuckles) Yeah. Caught a whiff of that.
• Babylon 5:
  • Thirdspace - Lyta covers her walls with "There is Danger, Remember", over and over again.
  • We also glimpse a smaller-scale version from President Clark after his suicide: A sheet of paper with "The Ascension of the Ordinary Man" written over and over, and letters circled to spell out SCORCHED EARTH.
• Battlestar Galactica:
  • While captain of the Demetrius, Kara Thrace paints her visions of the signposts to Earth on the walls of her cabin. This does not help reassure her crew that she knows what the frak she's doing.
  • The terrorist leader in "Sacrifice" is first seen in her cabin muttering to herself as she types up their manifesto. The walls are covered in newsletters and pictures of Sharon Valeri.
• Bizaardvark - The girls learn that Loony Fan Belissa has escaped from military school, and will likely be coming after their newest obsessive fan, Principal Karen.
  Frankie: Why do you think that?
  Sergeant Brenner: (on the phone) We have personnel trained in the art of rogue behaviour. Also... (cut to the wall) she wrote it all over the wall.
• Bones:
  • Upon seeing one of these, FBI agent Booth sighs "I hate the serial killer wall of death."
  • There's also Gormogon's lair, which manages to be creepy without having a single Madness Mantra.
• From the Season 3 episode "Helpless" of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy runs into a room full of pictures of her mother taken by a really crazy vampire.
• Burden of Truth: Billy finds out his brother Shane keeps one of these in Season 2, with walls that are plastered with diagrams and papers detailing a vast alleged conspiracy by the Mafia.
• In Burn Notice, the episode "Signals and Codes", Spencer Witawski does this in his living room with newspaper articles.
  Sam Axe: Y'know, sometimes I forget things when I leave them on the ceiling.
• Castle: Walls of Crazy appear numerous times in the series. Sometimes they are red herrings, though.
  • Seen in the first episode. The room is covered in covers from Castle's books, drawings of the death scenes, and pictures of the victims and Castle himself. The owner and maintainer of the Room Of Crazy was crazy but didn't actually commit the crime.
  • In "Ghosts", the person with a Wall of Crazy is a writer. The wall organizes her background research.
  • Appears again in "Boom!" The serial killer stalking Beckett has one of these creepy rooms. This guy certainly is guilty.
  • Discussed in "Inventing the Girl", and for good reason: the "stalker" wasn't really a stalker at all. When Genre Savvy Castle notices this, he even says, "Where's the big creepy wall of Jenna?"
  • Beckett's home murder board, where she obsessively tries to solve her mother's case, isn't precisely a Room Full of Crazy, but the authors used the similar imagery to suggest that Beckett's obsession isn't entirely sane, either — something Beckett herself readily admits.
  • Appears again in the "Pandora/Linchpin" two-parter, where a genius (and slightly eccentric) economics professor discovers a possible catalyst for world war 3.
• While not using words, one Serial Killer in Cold Case did this to his room by covering the walls with stylized trees in order to recreate a childhood crime. He claimed his mother was raped in the woods, but it was actually he who was raped after his own mother betrayed him to the rapist.
• Nearly every UnSub (Unknown Subject) on Criminal Minds.
  • In one episode dealing with a OCD Unsub upon entering her room to find the walls plastered with hand copied religious material Morgan quips, "OCD? I'm thinking more OMG."
  • And then there was the hacker Unsub who had a Hacker Cave full of monitors for the various potential victims he was spying on through their webcams (Yes, we know.). And he still managed to do his day job as tech support.
  • Then there's the unsub's video editing room in "The Big Wheel", where he watches videos of his murders and a video of his father killing his mother over and over.
• CSI: NY:
  • "Jamalot" features a killer who writes the last chapter of a novel across a victim's entire body. It is later discovered that the original author had written the same chapter all over the walls of a room in his house.
  • In "The Ride In," a man building an ark in his backyard has written quotations from the Bible, the Koran and Nostradamus covering the walls of his living room.
  • Though not crazy, when Mac gets deep into a case, he likes to use his office's glass walls to write notes all over. The most notable example is the season 6 opener, where he's puzzling over who shot up the bar and injured Danny in the season 5 finale. It's so bad Stella asks him what's going on.
• In Dexter, we see a tragic version of this with Lumen, who had been gang-raped by 5 men for a month. When Dexter enters her motel room, he sees a wall covered with newspaper clippings about rapes and a map with pinpoints all over it. He also realizes that she is sleeping in her closet, as it is the only place she feels safe.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Silurians": Exposure to the Silurians seems to cause this in certain people — they begin obsessively drawing lizard-people and dinosaurs on the walls in whatever they can find, referred to in-story as "cave paintings". The Doctor finds a man in his hospital room drawing lizard-people in marker pen on the wall, which leads him to believe dinosaurs aren't the only things involved — and later, one of the UNIT potholers starts carving the drawings into the side of the cave he's stuck in with a stone. When in this state, when people are interrupted, they seem to panic and attempt to strangle whoever did it. The story leaves it unclear how and why this condition is induced (the novelisation says it's a genetically-inherited "race memory").
  • "The Leisure Hive": The artificially aged Fourth Doctor starts obsessively writing equations and various graffiti ("Beware of the Dog") on his own TARDIS with a white pencil.
  • "The Doctor Dances": There's the scene where the Doctor, Rose, and Jack find the Child's room in the hospital, which is covered entirely with drawings of domestic scenes — a boy and his mum.
  • "Fear Her": Chloe Webber's room is papered with drawings she made after getting possessed by an alien called an Isolus. Notably, in a flashback to before the trouble began, there are far less drawings on the walls.
  • The drawings and dolls in Amelia Pond's bedroom shown in several episodes ("The Eleventh Hour", "Flesh and Stone", "The Pandorica Opens") attest to her obsession with the "Raggedy Doctor".
  • "The Beast Below": Liz Ten keeps a large number of glasses of water on the floor in her room as a constant reminder that something is wrong with her kingdom.
  • "Day of the Moon": Amy and Canton enter an Orphanage of Fear that has variations of "Leave" and "Get Out" scrawled all over the walls. As added Nightmare Fuel, whoever wrote these messages likely addressed them to himself. The characters also draw tally marks on their own skin to reflect visions of the Silence, who are forgotten whenever they are not being observed.
  • "The Doctor's Wife": (The illusion of an) aged-Rory really doesn't take Amy leaving him again well, scrawling "Hate Amy Kill Amy Die Amy" on the walls of a hallway in the TARDIS.
  • The Twelfth Doctor has scrawling on things in chalk as one of his quirks, which is the reason why he keeps a blackboard in the TARDIS. This would-be endearing trait becomes particularly disturbing in "Deep Breath", when a nasty bout of regeneration sickness lands him on his hands and knees, having covered the entire room with disordered mathematical equations.
  • In "Rosa", the Thirteenth Doctor starts using a motel room wall as The Big Board. Graham objects to the vandalism as she isn't Banksy, only for the Doctor to respond: "Or am I?"
  • In "The Haunting of Villa Diodati": Percy Bysshe Shelley absorbs the knowledge of the Cyberium, and tries to rid his mind of the information by scrawling it over everything in the room, to no avail.
• Dollhouse: Obsessed detective Paul Ballard creates one of these for the Dollhouse. In the 13th episode, an insane Topher has a different version, having taken one of the sleeping pods and stacked his books and personal items around it. He's also writing on the side of the pod.
• Dragnet: In the 1967 episode "The Big Explosion" the Neo-Nazi Donald Chapman's apartment is stuffed full of weapons, Nazi memorabilia, white supremacist propaganda, and very powerful explosives.
• Elementary:
  • Scathingly lampshaded by Sherlock Holmes in the episode "The Deductionist":
  Holmes: Wall of newspaper clippings ... journal filled with his innermost inanities ... souvenirs from the women he murdered ... Ennis seems resolved to leave no cliché unturned.
  • This is doubly hilarious because Sherlock already has, as Joan Watson terms it, his very own "Moriarty wall of crazy" covered in stuff potentially related to his aforementioned nemesis.
• Crichton does this at one point late in Farscape with wormhole equations, as his brain is finally starting to dismantle the "firewalls" to the knowledge placed in his head by the Ancients and he requires a lot of space. He also starts writing on his own skin. In an earlier episode, he does ask for paper at first, but of course the rest of the crew have no idea what paper is.
• The Flash (2014),
  • In The Stinger of "Crazy for You", two sanitation workers stumble upon a section of Central City's sewers with the word "Grodd" scratched many times on the wall. Those two workers meet an untimely death when Grodd himself shows up, in full Killer Gorilla mode.
  • In "Running to Stand Still" in season 2, the Trickster has created an impressive Wall of Crazy dedicated to the Flash since their last encounter. It's mostly drawings, but in honour of the holidays he's made a paper chain of little lightning bolts.
  • Happens in the first episode of the fourth season when Barry is brought back from the Speed Force. He isn't quite himself and keeps saying random phrases, some of which are from the past and the future, and also keeps writing strange symbols all over the walls. He gets better and has no recollection of it, but it still serves as Foreshadowing for things to come.
• FlashForward (2009)
  • The series began by showing, in a flashforward (are you surprised?), the main character's huge map of clues and pictures related to the incident, which he ends up replicating in the present just because that's what he saw in the future.
  • Nicole Kirby's mom spends a lot of time gluing pennies to the wall in one of the rooms of her house. The pennies are all from the year Nicole was born.
• The mass-murder cult in The Following is obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe, so it's no surprise Poe's poems are typical wall décor in at least one room of their hideouts. "The Raven" is a favorite.
• Forever: Henry put one together over the course of 1985 while trying to track down Abigail. Abe threw it all out to snap Henry out of his Heroic BSoD. Except, Abe didn't throw it out: he moved all the material to a storage locker to try to track down Abigail himself while keeping Henry from wallowing in self-pity.
• Fringe did this with a mathematical equation. For a fun twist, they added a kid obsessed with a tune that was the musical counterpart to the mathematical progression of the equation.
• Game of Thrones: Selyse Baratheon has one, featuring all of her stillborn sons preserved in jars, no less!
• In the episode "Love Never Dies" of Ghost Whisperer, there are two examples of this. One is the written variant all over the walls (and any ornament attached to the walls) in red in the apartment of the deceased, and the second is the paper-scraps variety full of pictures all over the office of a related party.
• In Happy Town the newly appointed Sheriff discovers a crazy wall in the basement of a friend who has been trying to track down The Magic Man.
• In Harper's Island, Sheriff Charlie Mills has an attic dedicated to information about Serial Killer John Wakefield, the man who murdered his wife 7 years earlier before being shot and falling over a cliff, mainly because the Sheriff knows that Wakefield is still alive. It's full of boards covered in newspapers clippings and photographs and boxes of police files, and creeps the hell out of protagonist Abby Mills when she finds it.
• In the third-season Hawaii Five-0 episode "He Welo ʻOihana", when McGarrett realizes his mother is not alone in the house, he walks in on two of her older male friends planning the caper that will happen later in the episode—with blueprints, notes and pictures all over the walls.
• Serial Killer Sylar's graffiti in his apartment on Heroes begs for forgiveness. Also, Future!Hiro's string "map" of cause-and-effect in Isaac's apartment.
• One of the funniest examples appeared in I'm Alan Partridge. Alan is visiting the house of his "biggest fan" Jed Maxwell, and while looking for the bathroom walks into a pitch-black room. He switches on the light to reveal that every wall plastered with pictures of his face, and there's even a dummy of himself sitting in the centre of the room. Things get worse when Jed appears, takes off his shirt to reveal a huge tattoo of Alan's face on his chest, then tries to take him prisoner. What makes this even funnier is that Alan, accompanied by a couple of writers he's trying to impress, has been trying to pretend that this is his house. And even tries to pretend that the room is his. ("I am such a big head!") It backfires; the writers think he's crazy and, when they make a break for it, leave him there.
• Inspector Morse: At least two examples, one (dedicated to the proposition that all women are harlots) created by the Reverend Geoffrey Boyd, and the other (dedicated to an obsession with Morse himself) created by Hugo DeVries.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: In "Sweet Dee Has a Heart Attack", Charlie makes part of the mail-room into an elaborate chart of the supposed "Pepe Silvia" conspiracy.
• John Doe keeps a room like this in his apartment. It's full of all the hints to his identity.
• In the Kate Modern episode "The List", Gavin covers the wall of his bedroom with pictures of all the people he hates, many of them with black scribbles over their eyes.
• Law & Order,
  • In "Atonement". Briscoe and Curtis get a warrant to search the apartment of a suspect in a supermodel's murder... and find it covered with photos of the dead woman.
  • Another episode featured a woman with very well-controlled Schizophrenia who appeared perfectly normal until you brought up texting while driving ("Satan sends messages about who to kill to his minions to their cell phones while they're in the car, duh!"). Naturally, she had a whole Apartment Full Of Crazy.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit subverted this in one episode when a suspect's Room Full of Crazy turned out to be completely right about a set of otherwise random crimes being connected. Following up on his key theory led to the detectives cracking the case.
• When one of the thieves of Leverage had to play a conspiracy theorist they replicated a Room Full Of Crazy with every conspiracy they could think of.
• The main character in Life, Detective Charlie Crews, has a secret room filled with photos of people who figure in the conspiracy that murdered his partner and sent him to prison for 12 years. The cops get a warrant and nearly find it, but Charlie's roommate Ted secretly cleans it up by the time they arrive.
• In Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, when getting acquainted with infomercials and Home Shopping Network, Louis meets fitness entrepreneur Win Paris who jots down his business ideas and motivational phrases on the walls of his apartment and any other available surface, including a bible.
• Diamondback on Luke Cage (2016) manages to fit an entire room full of crazy in a pocket-sized form. He carries a Bible wherever he goes, and when he lets a character look at it, turns out every single page is absolutely filled with annotations, highlights, circled passages etc., filling up every bit of white space of roughly 1,281 pages.
• Luther:
  • A satanist killer abducts a woman from her home and leaves the corridor leading from the front door covered in words written in blood such as DO NOT FEAR THE ABYSS, I AM THE ABYSS. Likely a deliberate use of the trope to add to his reputation and creep people out.
  • In the Season 2 finale, the numbers in a notebook turn out to be The Book Cipher used to communicate between two killers. This gives Luther an Oh, Crap! moment when the suspect's room turns out to be stacked full of books.
• Medium:
  • An episode has Alison mildly possessed by a ghost and, rather, than taking notes, she writes "It was ME" over and over on a notepad without realizing what she's doing.
  • Another incident with a note pad happened when she was drawn into the case of a Zodiac Killer-expy and wrote an entire letter in the killer's code. Things got worse after the code "bled" into the real world.
• In Misfits, Superhoodie's flat is a mixture of this, Creepy Cleanliness, and Stalker Shrine. It's immaculate, with huge clocks counting down to who-knows-what and pictures of the Misfits covering the walls.
• In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode convering Mitchell, Gypsy, while trying to figure out a way to get Joel off the ship to safety, sketches the Ripper doodles onto a chalkboard. They aren't much help.
• In the first-season episode "Sub Rosa" of NCIS, the Animal Wrongs Group villain has one of the damage that submarines are supposedly doing to marine life. It even includes a screensaver of a whale destroying a sub.
• In NCIS: New Orleans, Dwayne "King" Pride has one in his private room when obsessively looking for Mad Midnight Bomber Baitfish. It was referred to as "the wall of crazy you got going on upstairs".
• NUMB3RS: Charlie is prone to Room Full of Crazy break outs of Math equations at the best of times, but in the episode Uncertainty Principle, he goes off the deep end when he into a fit of depression and attempts to solve an apparently unsolvable math problem.
  • The particular problem, P vs. NP, is not necessarily unsolvable (in the sense that no independence proof has been given showing that neither it nor its negation contradicts arithmetic), but it is actually one of the most famously unsolved problems. In short, it asks if every problem whose solution can be verified in polynomial time (some finite polynomial in 'x' (the size of the set of data) independent of what 'x' happens to be) can also be solved in (a probably much larger) polynomial time.
  • There's his serial-killer theory in the fifth season, where he fills his office with papers hanging from strings to try and track one killer he believes to behind over thirty murders. They even bring in a conspiracy nut to help him! He's right, of course.
• Prison Break:
  • Michael's apartment is the sane version of this, but he later built a version of this, making patterns with his blood and parts of clothes when in solitary confinement in order to get sent to the mental ward to recover a missing piece of his plans.
  • Seeing all of the marks on the wall made by the thumbtacks Alexander Mahone, the FBI agent put in charge of capturing the escapees, realizes the depth of Michael's plan to get Lincoln out of Fox River. Mahone would later recreate Michael's plans on his basement wall in an attempt to get one step ahead of Michael and catch him. Mahone's was much of a Room Full of Crazy situation as he became obsessed with catching Michael.
  • Michael would use a wall plan again in the fourth season, this time his plan was to find the person who killed Sara.
• Profiler, a show about federal agents going after serial killers, alluded to this trope by using a typeface in the titles that looked like crudely scrawled handwriting, making this Credits Full of Crazy.
• In Rookie Blue, Nick finds one of these in Marlo's basement, starring a suspect from a previous episode. Meanwhile, said suspect has gone on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge that nearly costs three officers their lives. I wonder why?
• Scandal: David has this to see why Olivia is helping Quinn. So far he's figured out Quinn was framed for the bombing, as Olivia uses her powers for good instead of evil.
• The title sequence to A Series of Unfortunate Events features one of these, which belongs to the show's narrator.
• In episode 2.2 of Sherlock the last couple of minutes setting up for finale "The Reichenbach Fall" show Moriarty in a cell with SHERLOCK SHERLOCK SHERLOCK scrawled across the walls.
• Mr. Oswald Bates in Shooting The Past leaves one of these at his failed suicide attempt, along with a cryptic hint that somewhere in this mess is the vital evidence. He's written a key word over and over on bits of paper and cardboard. It's deliberate; inspired by his native flair for the dramatic rather than any mental illness on his part, although arguably everyone who works for the Fallon Collection is slightly off their rockers.
• In the fourth season of Skins, Effy is suffering from psychotic depression (incidentally, a case of the writers giving Effy a real mental illness instead of a simple case of Sanity Slippage) and covers her wall in morbid collages, including newspaper clippings about deaths.
• On Smallville, Lionel Luthor writes all over his cell walls in Kryptonian glyphs during his crazy/possessed period. Chloe's various Walls of Weird are a somewhat more innocuous variant.
• Dr. Rush in Stargate Universe makes one in his dream world as he tries to unlock the Destiny's controls while interfacing with the ship computer. Later he's shown to have set up a real one in a corridor of the ship.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: Averted in the episode "Eye of the Beholder." After Lt. Daniel Kwan commits suicide due to a telepathic echo in a nacelle control room, Counselor Troi and Lt. Worf are assigned to investigate the suicide. The pair start by visiting Kwan's quarters, which they both expect to be a mess but find it tidy and ship-shape.
  • In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Far Beyond the Stars" Sisko hallucinates himself as a science fiction writer in the '50s who dreamed up the events of the show and has a nervous breakdown when, because of his race, he can't get it published. He returns to the real world at the end of the episode, but at a pivotal moment in the later episode, "Shadows and Symbols," Sisko is about to open a box which can change the course of the war with the Dominion, of his life, and of a literal Holy War between Gods (or Sufficiently Advanced Aliens). He then blacks out to a Room Full of Crazy, and all the events of the entire series up to that moment are written all over the walls. The doctor comes in and tells him to stop writing on the walls: this "Deep Space Nine" thing is just a fantasy, and he's never going to get better until he gives up and paints over his writings. He then knocks out the doctor, writes "he opens the box" on the wall, and finds himself back in the real world, doing just that. The fake world of Benny Russell in the '50s pops up a few other times in the series, and the writers were considering having the last scene be Benny on a Hollywood set, holding a script titled "Deep Space Nine".
  • Cmdr. Tuvok does this to a certain extent in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Endgame". He has an unnamed neurological illness (a degeneration of the neural peptides) that causes him to write obsessively in addition to being extremely light-sensitive and paranoid.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise. Played with in "Borderland", where Arik Soong's prison cell is lined with his equations neatly written out on paper. He may be a Mad Scientist, but his thinking is entirely rational.
    Soong: I apologise for the clutter. I'm not allowed traditional recording devices.
    Archer: You programmed a PADD to unlock every security door in the building.
  • Spock does this in the Star Trek: Discovery episode "If Memory Serves" by writing all over the floors and walls of the cell he's held in on Starbase 5.
• The Byers house from Stranger Things transforms into one of these in both seasons. Played with, as while other people doubt Joyce's sanity because of it (especially in the first season) and her own history of anxiety doesn't help, it manages to serve its purpose both times.
  • Season one has Joyce fill the entire house with an absurd amount of lights - from standing lamps to Christmas lights - to make contact with Will in the Upside-Down. One of the walls is dedicated to one specific set of Christmas lights, each light corresponding to a letter of the alphabet, allowing Will to talk to her. It becomes a Running Gag of ever new visitors raising their eyebrows at the sight.
  • In season two, Will draws a map of the Mind Flayer's tunnels that run under Hawkins. However, the full map is so large that it takes up the entire house, covering the floor, walls and furniture and drawn on anything that so much as resembles paper.
• Supernatural
  • When tracking down a Doppleganger, the Winchester brothers meet a guy who is convinced one previous Doppleganger case was a robot, and was obsessed with catching it.
  • In another episode Sam cannot remember who he is, and has this reaction to seeing The Big Board in his hotel room.
• Season 2 of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles had a basement with names, numbers and dates written on the walls, in blood.
• Torchwood did this in the episode "Adrift", though it was more to show Gwen's obsession than to imply that anyone was insane.
• Treadstone. John Bentley discovers a room in Budapest where he tortured fellow CIA operatives as a brainwashed Soviet agent, and sees his own name written over and over on the walls. He then finds tapes of himself doing the torturing with no apparent memory of who he was, implying this trope was due to his real personality trying to resurface.
• The Walking Dead,
  • In the third season Morgan's home is full of notes to himself about booby traps. And the death of his son.
  • Also in the third season, in keeping with his more subtle villainy, the Governor keeps his room full of crazy hidden. He has his zombie daughter locked in a closet, another closet full of zombie heads in jars, and a notebook. The notebook used to be full of detailed, intelligent, and genuinely caring plans for his followers. After the death of his daughter, it's just page after page of tally marks counting the days since it happened.
• When Claudia Donovan of Warehouse 13 is first introduced, she had recently checked into a mental hospital, and the walls of her room are covered in scraps and the like, trying to locate her presumed-dead brother. Of course, he isn't actually dead.
• The X-Files:
  • In "Conduit", a teenage girl is missing, possibly abducted by aliens. Her younger brother is spending an awful lot of time writing lots and lots of 1's and 0's on ordinary writing paper. It looks like binary code - specifically, data transmissions from Top Secret spy satellites. But when the papers are arranged in the proper order, the ones and zeros also form a portrait of the boy's missing sister.
  • In "Grotesque", Mulder investigates a particularly difficult case and he sinks deep into its ugliness and madness. At one point, the walls of his apartment are completely covered with gargoyle sketches.
  • In "Jose Chung's ''From Outer Space''," a crazy Conspiracy Theorist who wants to be abducted has a wall covered with newspaper clippings and there are alien figures and pictures all over the place. It kind of mirrors Mulder's office, which is more of a Big Board.

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