Spotting The Thread / Live-Action TV

Spotting the Thread in Live-Action TV.

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• Alex Rider (2020): A recurring theme.
  • The official explanation for Ian Rider's death was that he was speeding and killed instantly in a crash because he wasn't wearing a seatbelt, both of which Alex knows he would never do.
  • When Blunt visits Parker Roscoe, the young man attributes a Hitler quote to his father. Blunt was a friend of Michael Roscoe's and knows he would never quote Hitler, tipping Blunt off to the Evil Plan that Parker has been replaced by a clone.
• On the CW drama All American, Asher is one of the usual rich kids of the Beverly Hills school who's talked into throwing a huge party at his mansion. The usually laid-back Asher seems intent on making sure there's not a huge mess and no one touches the expensive car. The car ends up being pushed onto the road where it gets damaged. As everyone leaves, inner-city transfer student Spence comes to Asher, who looks as if his world has ended and relates how he knows the reason Asher is so upset. "There ain't no pictures of your family anywhere in this house. You're always forgetting your wallet. And you let everyone else pay for this party. Ain't that hard to spot someone with no money, man." Asher confesses he was rich but his father lost it all in a bad deal and the mansion belongs to some friend they're staying with.
• All My Children
  • Janet pretended to be her sister Natalie. Not only did Natalie's fiance Trevor already suspect this after sleeping with Janet, but Janet said something that Trevor had heard her say previously.
  • Janet also hired an actor to play Will, Dixie's dead brother, with the intent of terrorizing Dixie. Dixie feared she was going off the deep end until another character mentioned a run-in with "Will". Suspicious, Dixie went to the cemetery (where "Will" had supposedly been haunting her) and when "Will" appeared, began interrogating him about a nursery rhyme from their childhood. Of course, he couldn't answer. To top it off, when he tried to run, he was confronted by her husband, thus proving himself to be made of flesh and blood rather than a ghost.
• Arrow
  • Thea's boyfriend takes her to a suburban vacation, Thea falling asleep during the ride. She feels something is off when the skies are so bright and clear and the suburb immaculate. However, she soon realizes that the background sounds end up looping with birds chirping and a dog barking in a perfect sequence over and over. It leads her to discover that the "suburb" is an underground chamber set up by HIVE for survivors of the nuclear war they plan to set off.
  • Damien Darhk quickly deduces the Secret Identity of the Green Arrow once he becomes aware that John Diggle is a member of Team Arrow, given that he's Oliver Queen's pesonal bodyguard, and the Secret Identity of Speedy (Oliver's sister) and the Black Canary (Oliver's ex-fiancee) isn't hard to work out from that.
• Invoked on the Canadian crime drama Bad Blood as Valentina, the wife of a Montreal mob boss, is being forced to cooporate with the Feds. She covers for a meeting with her handler by telling her husband she's going for a manicure. When the meeting is done, the handler reminds Valentina to get an actual manicure as "the details always matter."
• Batman (1966): When the police chief wipes his forehead with the wrong hand, this tips off Batman that it's actually the villain False Face in a Latex Perfection mask.
• Blackadder II:
  • Prince Ludwig, master of disguise, tries to sneak into Queen Elizabeth's fancy dress party disguised as Nursie in a cow costume, because Nursie always goes to fancy dress parties as a cow. But he forgot one little thing (or in this case didn't know about it): Nursie is insane and her cow costume looks nothing like a cow. His disguise was too good.
  • An earlier episode had Blackadder and company trying to impersonate a man who they prematurely executed for a last meeting with his wife, and needing to preempt various threads that she fortunately mentions just before meeting him; they almost stumble at the fact that Blackadder pretends to be missing more arm than the man actually lost, but covers it up by claiming to have gotten in a fight with another prisoner. At the end of the episode, he has to do the same thing with the Queen (who happens to be talking about how unexpected it was that the man was a traitor, considering his various debilities...).
  • ''Blackadder Goes Forth". Similarly, Blackadder manages to discover an undercover German agent firstly when George tells him that she had been helping him with the German grammar in a letter to his uncle in Munich, and then later confirms it when she fails to spot that out of Oxford, Cambridge and Hull; one of them is NOT a great university. (As an in-joke, Rowan Atkinson, who plays Blackadder, attended Oxford, whereas Stephen Fry, who plays Melchett, attended Cambridge, and the two universities have a long-standing rivalry).
    General Melchett: Quite right, Oxford is a complete dump.
• On Better Call Saul:
  • Mike is convinced that Henry, a member of a support group, is lying about having a late wife just so he can hang with the group. When friend Anita is dubious, Mike talks of how Henry's tales of meeting wife Judy differ slightly. One story had them sharing their first kiss under the lights of a night game in Wrigley Field in the early '80s. But, as Mike points out, Wrigley Field didn't get lights until 1988. He bets Anita "ten bucks says his next story is different." Sure enough, at the next meeting, Henry tells a story which differs from the one Anita heard before.
  • Saul has to retrieve 7.1 million in cartel cash at the Mexican border to pay off Lalo's bail (with the 0.1 million being his payment). However, he's ambushed by a gang of cartel thugs, and he only makes it out with his life due to help from Mike, who had been trailing him on orders from Gus. However, Saul's car has its alternator damaged in the shootout and the two are forced to walk back to civilization on foot in the scorching desert carrying the heavy bags of weapons and money. Saul comes up with a story about his car breaking down on the road to explain why the trip took so long so neither Lalo, or Saul's wife Kim, will know there was a shootout, and so that they won't ask too many questions or know of Mike's involvement. However, Kim realizes the story doesn't add up when she discovers a sentimental thermos Saul carried back with him has an obvious bullet hole in it, and Lalo comes to a similar conclusion when he finds Saul's abandoned car in the desert while being driven to Mexico and it's full of bullet holes.
  • Mike comes in to check on the security cameras keeping track of the construction team hired to build the superlab in complete secrecy (they aren't even allowed to look outside without supervision). He notices an extremely minor discrepancy: there's three dead pixels on one of the cameras that weren't there before. One of the security guards mentions how the camera flashed for twenty seconds last night, and so did one another camera, the one monitoring the upstairs storage closet. Mike realizes something is amiss, and asks the guard to check on the cameras outside the warehouse, and, sure enough, the camera monitoring the roof ladder behind the warehouse has some dead pixels too. At that point he realizes one of the construction workers made a break for it, using a laser pointer to blind the cameras during his escape (causing the dead pixels).
  • Gus gets confirmation over the phone that the mercenaries he hired had a successful kill on Lalo, but when he also hears all the mercenaries were found dead on the site the next day, he gets more than a little suspicious that the mission wasn't quite as successful as the evidence suggests, even though Lalo's scorched body, with matching dental records, was supposedly found at the scene. His paranoia is completely founded: Lalo turned the tables on the mercenaries, and had the last survivor make a false kill confirmation before killing him too, and then killed a civilian lookalike whom he had spent years paying for dental work on, burned his body, and dragged it into his house to act as a decoy. Gus' suspicion turns into a personal confirmation when he meets with Lalo's uncle Hector, a cartel don who values family over all, and he is not saddened at all by the supposed violent death of a beloved nephew.
    Gus: The mercenaries... are dead to a man. And yet, their mission was a success?
• Happens a lot on The Blacklist as either Liz or Red see something is wrong thanks to a small detail. For example, one episode has Red wake up in Paris hospital, unable to walk with a French inspector telling him he was in a bad accident and that the only way Red is extradited to the U.S. is if he gives up information on Katerina. Red manages to pick the phone of an orderly to find his main screen image has him at a Washington Nationals baseball game. Red then takes a close look at the buildings outside the window and, having been to Paris numerous times, is able to see the skyline is completely wrong for where the hospital is supposed to be. This lets him figure out he's in Annapolis and isn't even paralyzed as this is all a setup to get information out of him.
• Breaking Bad:
  • In the episode "Gray Matter", Walt's former friend and coworker Elliot offers Walt a job at Gray Matter Technologies, the company that Walt helped Elliot and his wife Gretchen start up, but Walt sold his share right before the company became a massive runaway success. Walt is confused and hesitant over the offer until Elliot mentions the company's excellent health insurance, at which point he realizes his wife Skyler told Elliot about his lung cancer. Walt is angered due to the fact he absolutely hates any form of pity or charity, immediately turning down the job offer and Elliot's secondary offer of just outright paying his expensive cancer treatment in full, much to Skyler's frustration.
  • A story arc in the first season involves Walt keeping a violent rival drug dealer, Krazy-8, imprisoned in Jesse's basement for days while he works up the nerve to kill him. One day, Walt passes out from his lung cancer while bringing Krazy-8 food, dropping and breaking the ceramic plate he was carrying. When he comes to a little later, he cleans up the mess, fixes Krazy-8 another meal, then the two get to talking about their lives over beers and start to bond. Sensing Walt's reluctance to kill him, Krazy-8 assures him that he only wants to go home and promises that, if Walt just lets him go, he won't try to take revenge on him and his family later. Walt is convinced and goes upstairs to get the key for Krazy-8's shackle to free him... but before heading back down, he gets a sudden Gut Feeling, fishes the broken plate shards out of the trash can and re-assembles them on the kitchen table to find that a large, shank-shaped piece is missing. Devastated, Walt is forced to conclude that Krazy-8 took it while he was unconscious and, despite his reassurances, has been planning to kill him with it the second he's released, finally giving him the resolve to kill him.
  • In the last season, Walt, Jesse, and Mike have restarted cooking meth, but have hit a snag regarding the methylamine needed to make it. Their supplier, the incredibly paranoid Lydia, discovers a GPS tracker planted on the barrel of methylamine she picked out for Jesse, suggesting the DEA is on to them. Mike examines the photo Jesse took of the tracker, and wonders aloud why the DEA would put a tracker on the bottom of the barrel, where it would be easily seen, instead of in the barrel? Just from that, Mike then quickly deduces that Lydia herself put the tracker there so she would have an excuse to break her deal with Mike. It's subverted, as the next episode reveals that the Houston branch of the DEA actually was ridiculously incompetent enough to put trackers on the outside of the barrels.
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine:
  • In one episode, both Charles and Rosa apply to rent the apartment of an elderly woman who passed away and go to great lengths to butter up the landlord. When he rents to someone else, they start wondering if he has a reason not to rent to cops, because on paper they are very desirable tenants, and find that the woman was poisoned because her apartment was rent-controlled and the landlord wanted to jack up the price.
  • In the Season 5 Episode 99, Jake realizes that Holt has been sabotaging their trip back to New York after a cop mentions that he got a call about a criminal using a "bovine transport unit" to traffick drugs. Jake figures out that it was Holt who called in the tip because anyone else would have just called it a "cattle car." Once Jake figures that out, he comes to the conclusion that every other misfortune that befell them on their trip was also Holt's doing.
  • Holt brings in his old friend, brilliant detective Dillman who prides himself on a Sherlock Scan that accuses Jake of a prank in the station. Jake reveals that Dillman was fired from the San Francisco PD because of his arrogant attitude. Jake relates he figured it out when Dillman talked about using a special database for information as routine...unaware no police force has used that system in five years. Even Holt realizes there's no way a supposedly brilliant cop like Dillman could make such a mistake.
• Castle's eponymous character is rather good at this, considering his eye for detail thanks to approaching every investigation as a novel plot.
  • Right from the pilot, he recognizes that several crime scenes copied out of his books have details that aren't quite right (the wrong color dress, the wrong species of flower), and since the supposed perpetrator was literally obsessed with him, he would have been incapable of getting the details wrong. Though he then misses the thread (which Beckett easily catches) that the real perpetrator is too ready with an alibi, when he should have had to at least ask for dates.
  • The episode "Once Upon a Crime" has a literal example. A series of murders occur with the women dressed as fairy tale characters and left in public places with the costume bows tied in a certain way. They rescue one woman (Meghan Markle) who was in the same position. However, Beckett and Castle realize the woman's bow was tied in the wrong way and at the wrong angle...as she did it to herself. Which means she's the killer and tried to make herself look like a victim to throw the cops off.
• Car 54, Where Are You?: In "Here We Go Again", a TV Producer asks Muldoon for information regarding one of his father's more famous arrests. The main duo's research on the case leads them to discover the bank robbers made a rather obvious mistake: disguising themselves as policemen wearing summer uniforms on the day the real cops changed to winter uniforms. When Muldoon informs the now elderly mastermind of this, he promptly decides to put the band back together and pull off the heist correctly this time. They actually make it into the vault, but are all too weak to pick up the gold bars. The gang decides to bail, making their exit wearing police uniforms that are the correct season... but almost forty years out of date. Suffice to say Toody and Muldoon immediately make them, but the episode ends before the chase ensues.
• Cheers: An early episode has Carla tells Diane that Sam is the father of her oldest child, and swears her to secrecy. The next day, Diane comes into work and blabs in less than five minutes. But it's Coach of all people who notes something wrong with the story - Carla's oldest child Anthony was born two years before Carla started working at Cheers. Carla told Diane a lie as a Secret Test of Character, to see if she'd keep a secret, and Diane blew it.
• In Chernobyl, plant managers Bryukhanov and Fomin tell Moscow that the accident at Chernobyl was just a hydrogen tank failure and it's only giving off 3.6 roentgen, which they pass off as "mild" radiation release. The Politiburo believes this but call in Valery Legasov anyway for expert input just in case, not expecting him to be needed. Legasov reads the initial report, sees a line buried several pages in about a firefighter whose hand was severely burned after handling a chunk of "smooth black mineral." This is all he needs to realize that the firefighter was handling graphite, which means the accident was anything but minor because graphite is only found in the core and if it's lying on the ground in chunks, something catastrophic must have happened. He also clocks the 3.6 roentgen figure as the maximum on a personal dosimeter, meaning that this is simply the highest number they are capable of reporting, not the actual amount. (Also, 3.6 roentgen would still be enough to justify an evacuation until that much radiation is contained.)
• In one episode of CSI, the characters are looking for the serial killer nicknamed "Dr. Jeckyll" in a hospital. In the security room, they watch footage of a section where they believe the killer has been. They see a doctor entering a door and using a pass-card to do so, and think nothing of it until the hospital's employee watching with them reveals that he knows the doctor who owns that pass-card, a short, African-American woman who happens to currently be on vacation — and the "doctor" using her card is a tall, white man.
• Common on The Closer as Brenda is an expert in picking up the minor little detail needed to crack a case. In one episode, the murder of a doctor has Brenda talking to a suspect who boasts of how the man's treatments have her cancer in remission. Another suspect is an arrogant cancer doctor who tells Brenda something is wrong as he knows first-hand what a person who underwent serious chemotherapy looks like and the woman shows none of the signs (like the tiny detail her hair is real, not a wig). This leads to the discovery the "treatments" were faked and the woman, along with scores of other patients, still has cancer.
• Cobra Kai: Chozen joins Cobra Kai as an instructor. His skills impress Terry Silver, who invites him to dinner. After dinner they have drinks, and he gives a traditional Okinawan toast despite claiming to be from Kyoto, which leads Silver to discover that he's in cahoots with Daniel.
• Days of Our Lives' Hope was replaced by the evil princess Gina, but her son and husband suspected this immediately, as Gina's demeanor was icy and cruel, in stark contrast to Hope's.
• Deception (2018)
  • The pilot has superstar magician Cameron Black telling the FBI a plane did not actually explode, citing how an explosion in such an enclosed hanger should have caused far more damage and the details of how it was literally driven away.
  • Another episode has a mysterious woman providing illusions to crooks for escapes/thefts/other crimes. Cameron is able to see these tricks (a few of which he's used) and helps the FBI in figuring them out. That mysterious woman (who set up Cameron's twin brother for manslaughter) calls him and Kay to taunt them on "the game is just beginning" and they have no idea where to look for her.
    Cameron: You're in the international terminal at Frankfurt. (woman looks around in shock) I've spent the last year flying around the world, I know every airport has its own acoustics. And Frankfurt pipes in muzak constantly like they're afraid people will forget Beethoven is from Germany. Did you look over your shoulder just now?
  • FBI agent Kay Daniels proves she's good at this too. When a banker for a crime cartel shows up to make a deal, she realizes his suit is Brooks Brothers, not the fancy European suits the man wears and figures out it's Cameron in disguise.
  • A bomber puts explosives inside a museum room and demands a ransom or he'd blow it up with a young worker. Cameron manages to rescue her with Kay going over the remains of the paintings in the explosion. A major art fan who's been to this museum several times, Kay realizes that the brush strokes in one of the remains isn't right and has it tested to find out the paintings were fakes and the whole thing was a distraction for a theft.
  • Investigating the death of a radio host who ranted on conspiracies, the team are trying to find clues in his apartment. Cameron surprises them by pulling the guy's microwave off the wall to reveal a hidden safe. He relates the guy had once ranted on microwaves being part of a government plot so owning one himself was odd.
• On The Defenders (2017), Jessica Jones is going over records for a property going back to the early 19th century. Her attention is caught by how all the deeds and checks and such were signed by a woman. As she compares the signatures, Jessica is rocked to see that, while the names change, the handwriting is identical...meaning it's been the same woman all this time. She then sees that the handwriting matches that of Alexandra and thus, as impossible as it seems, Alexandra has been maintaining this property for two hundred years.
• Desperate Housewives: Subverted when Porter Scavo is accused of a crime. He gets his twin brother Preston to take his place at the court hearing while Porter skips town. The ruse fools the lawyer and the court — but not the boys' parents, who recognize Preston instantly from ten feet away. They are his parents, after all.
• The Deuce: Intrepid Reporter Sandra dresses up like a prostitute to write a story about prostitution around the Deuce. After she gets picked up by a paddywagon, patrolman Chris spots that she's an impostor by the fact that her shoes are too expensive.
• Doctor Who:
  • "New Earth": the Doctor dismisses Cassandra-possessed Rose's explanation of her atrocious Cockney accent as "just larking about," and chalks up her kissing him out of nowhere to him retaining his charm post-regeneration, but he knows something's been done to her as soon as she reacts to the diseased clone-people with disgust rather than compassion.
  • "The Girl in the Fireplace": After she meets the king for the first time, Reinette notices someone standing in the corner of the room who has been standing still and staying quiet for an unnaturally long time, and demands they show themselves. It turns out to be one of the clockwork droids.
  • "The Sontaran Stratagem": UNIT, the Doctor, and Martha Jones spend time investigating the mysterious ATMOS company, which manufactures carbon-neutralizing car filters. But all of their high-tech gadgets and interrogation techniques fail to impress Donna, who immediately spots some actual evidence that proves something is up—namely, an empty binder in the personnel files. She explains that, as a long time "temp" (someone who fills in for office workers when they're ill), she can instantly tell when paperwork is out of sorts. In this case, the binder is supposed to contain a record of employee sick leave...and since it's empty, it proves that no one at ATMOS has ever fallen ill or missed a single day of work.
  • "The Beast Below": Elizabeth X says she has been ruling Starship UK for ten years. However, as the Doctor points out, her antique porcelain facemask perfectly fits her face, and hence it stays on all the time. She's actually been ruling for over two hundred years, having her memory periodically erased.
  • Attempted in "Amy's Choice". The TARDIS team are being flipped between two realities, and they need to work out which one is too fantastic to be real — but Rory and Amy point out that this is difficult but when you're in a time machine that's bigger on the inside with a bowtie-wearing alien. Not to mention the fact that both realities are fake — only the Doctor realizes the Dream Lord has already given that fact away.
  • "Asylum of the Daleks": What at first looks like a case of Skewed Priorities is actually this. Oswin Oswald was supposedly able to keep the Asylum's security system from turning her into a Dalek herself, and has been fending off the Daleks in her escape pod and making soufflés for a year. The Doctor realizes that she couldn't have, since soufflés require perishable ingredients like milk, which Oswin would have no access to while trapped in her escape pod. It turns out Oswin did not escape being made a Dalek, but was able to keep her own mind. All the scenes with her in the escape pod? It's her Battle in the Center of the Mind against Dalek conditioning.
  • "The Day of the Doctor": The Doctor(s) forces peace talks (to prevent detonation of a nuclear bomb) between three UNIT members and three shapeshifting aliens copying them by making everyone forget which is the original and which is the duplicate. One of the humans is asthmatic. Her duplicate inherited the asthma, but not the inhaler, causing both to realize who's who. They keep quiet to allow the peace talks to continue, revealing that the Doctor's plan had worked.
    • They continue the ruse later on in order to ensure peace between the humans and the Zygons. When one of them is killed by Missy, the other one is devastated, since they've grown so close they may as well have been sisters (maybe even closer than the human one's real sister). The Doctor (and the fans, of course) keeps trying to guess whether the survivor is human or Zygon, but she's too smart to slip up. Eventually, another Zygon takes on her appearance in order to continue the tradition. This means that either the human-Zygon pair is restored, or there are now two Zygons pretending to be the dead human.
  • "Spyfall": After boarding Barton's plane, the Doctor realizes that there's something fishy about "O", the former MI6 agent she and her companions have been working with, because he said that he's bad at sprinting. But the files on O that the Doctor's read described him as a champion sprinter...he's actually the Master, having murdered the real O on his first day at MI6 and stolen his identity. The Doctor never met the real O. The best part is the look on his face as he's struggling to come up with an excuse... only to clearly go "screw it, this is as good a time for a reveal as any."
    The Master: Got me.
  • "Orphan 55": When Hyph3n attempts to prevent the Doctor from entering a "linen cupboard", the Doctor stops her by pointing out that the door's lock is far too complicated for it to actually be holding linen (the door actually leads to the security room).
• Dynasty (2017):
  • Fallon is suspicious when her long-absent mother Alexis returns and inherits the family estate. Alexis talks of how she's spent the last decade in Europe but Fallon is convinced she has an ulterior motive. Fallon goes to Alexis' chauffeur for information with the man cagy. Fallon suddenly notes that the windows on his car are a bit dirty and, having grown up rich all her life, knows there's no way a professional chauffeur would allow that to happen. She starts to press him on which hotel he picked up Alexis from, naming a few. When he cites the last one, Fallon snaps that hotel doesn't exist in Atlanta and he's just an Uber driver. This leads Fallon to the discovery that Alexis is dead broke and been living in a trailer outside Atlanta.
  • Alexis is sued by a woman who claims her radio show advice pushed the woman into a car accident that broke her shoulder and leg. Alexis and Fallon meet the woman but it escalates into Alexis accidentally kicking her. They're about to leave only for Fallon to take a look at the woman's doormat. They return to point out how the woman tried to defend herself with her "broken" arm in a sling. Also, the mud tracks on her mat match a high-heeled shoe which she shouldn't be able to wear with a boot cast. The woman confesses she was faking her injuries to get money in a settlement.
• Naturally, Elementary has Sherlock Holmes able to spot the one little detail that undoes the entire mystery.
  • Watson soon joins him in being just as adept finding the minor clues to prove the truth. In fact, thanks to her expertise as a surgeon, Watson can often spot a medical condition clue before Holmes does. Also, as Sherlock isn't as up to date with American sports or pop culture, Watson can see something he missed on a case (for example, how a supposed gambling operation is really a front for smuggling as they're making bets on a "Boston vs Milwaukee game" when no teams of either city play each other in three months).
  • A rare case of neither of them spotting it when they investigate the murder of a doctor who was a "Doomsday prepper" and invested several thousand dollars in a supposed high-priced bunker. Investigating it, Holmes and Watson quickly find out it's a scam to rob rich people. They meet a man who turns out to be a reporter about to expose the scam himself. He reveals he'd been doing a story on it and soon realized something was up as there was absolutely no paper trail for the hundreds of gallons of fuel and numerous supplies such a place would require.
• The Enemy Within uses this a few times.
  • When Erika warns Keaton that new team member Anna is a mole for terrorist mastermind Tal, Keaton is wary. However (as he tells his team), he's convinced when he goes to Anna's apartment, which she claims to have lived in for two years and sees barely any personal items around.
  • Anna figures out Keaton is onto her as he notes how he tends to clench his fists whenever telling a lie or hearing her tell one.
  • On a trip to the CIA, Erika's expert eye is able to tell how certain agents who only work on matters of South America are in the office with U.S. agents and realizes they're sharing intel on Tal up to something in Cuba.
• Happens in an episode of Family Matters. When a criminal's brother attempts to kill Steve, he disguises himself as Carl's partner hoping to gain access to the hotel room he and Steve are hiding out in. Carl says "see you later", the man says "okay"...and Carl immediately knows what's going on because his partner would have said "not if I see you first".
• Famous In Love:
  • Nina Devon tells son Rainer that his father was a stuntman she had a fling with and died before he was born. In reality, Rainer is the product of an affair Nina had with producer turned studio chief Alan Mills who is also unaware of the truth. On a trip to China, Alan is surprised to find Rainer suffers from the same motion sickness he gets and had once had a drinking habit. When Rainer wants to do a stunt, Alan says he's only 20 but Rainer says he's really 23 and Nina just "aged me down" for his acting career. He mentions his father meeting his mom on a movie, Alan not remembering his "dad" but clearly how he and Nina were involved at the time. It pushes him to get a DNA test and confront Nina.
  • Later in the series, Rainer talks to a stuntman who knew his "dad" and reveals the man was actually gay. This leads Rainer to make the same conclusions as Alan to figure out the truth.
• Fringe:
  • Averted when Olivia and her alternate universe versions exchange places. Their friends and colleagues begin to suspect something is amiss but don't figure it out on their own before other factors reveal the ruse.
  • Olivia has been given most of the memories of her alternate and made to think that she was the alternate. Her slip-ups in the façade actually save her live at one point as following correct procedure would have gotten her killed. Others attribute her strange behavior to the injuries she supposedly received in an explosion. Her last slip-up is telling a girl that she is FBI in the middle of a gunfight as she rescues her. No attention is drawn to it until the girl asks at the end what the FBI is, in front of her boss who tells her that it hasn't existed in their world for years.
  • The alternate Olivia actually has to fake things based only on files and a very thorough briefing. She masks her slip ups as "trying new things". Peter starts getting suspicious, but is distracted by them becoming a couple. Liv is a wee bit miffed when she gets back.
• Game of Thrones: It's implied that Tywin Lannister first suspects that Arya Stark, temporarily acting as his cupbearer, is actually a highborn girl when she displays surprising literacy for the supposed daughter of a stonemason. However, the one he calls her out on is that she enunciates 'my lord' when addressing him, while most common girls would say 'milord'.
• General Hospital, Mac was replaced by a double who imitated him a little too perfectly. Plus, the imprisoned Mac fed the double false information about his love life, resulting in him ignoring a fiancee he had previously been very loving towards while making advances (which he thought were welcome, but came off as sleazy, thanks to the other woman's lack of interest in him) to another woman. It was then that his friends wised up to what was going on.
• Ghosts (UK): The Captain points out in "Part of the Family" that a photograph could not have been taken in Cornwall because it has a World War 2 fortification in the background that he knows is in a different location. The ghosts take a closer look at the photograph and discover more problems with it. This proves that Lucy is lying about being Alison's half-sister.
• In the pilot episode of Good Girls, Annie's cover is blown during the robbery because the manager/her boss recognizes her distinctive lower back tattoo, which she could have covered up with a longer shirt. He's not at all a nice person, and this leads to complications.
• The Good Place. In the first season finale, Eleanor figures out that she's actually in the Bad Place upon realizing that all the aggravation she and the other humans caused each other was a deliberate attempt to make them all torture each other. When Michael wipes the humans memories, reboots the neighborhood, and modifies it to keep the humans from figuring out the truth, Eleanor pull this off again. He tries again literally hundreds of more times, but fails every single time. During one reboot, some relatively minor details manage to tip off Jason, who is as dumb as a brick.
• In Harper's Island, Abby realizes the identity of the murderer, Henry Dunn, when he claims not to have seen his friend Sully, when Abby knows that the coast guard spoke to both men at the same time. It's a bit late by then.
• Hawaii Five-0:
  • In "Wehe 'ana", Danny is protecting a coma patient who's suddenly become the target of criminals. When a nurse comes in to "check on Mr. Makino" — who the rest of the staff only knew as "John Doe" — Danny knows she's a hitwoman.
  • When a hitman targets his family, Grover turns to an old FBI contact. He brings them to a remote island with two agents from the local field office to help. As they drive, Grover suddenly spins the car around to take off. He tells his startled wife that the two "agents" haven't spent a day in Hawaii in their lives as they show no tan lines at all. Meaning they're mobsters and Grover's "friend" just set them up.
  • Steve and Danny help their old former MI-6 ally Langford in keeping an eye on a flighty British heiress whose mother is an old friend of Langford's. When the girl goes missing, the trio go after him with Langford very intense threatening people to find the girl. They rescue her from a white slavery ring to return her to her grateful Duke and Duchess parents. As they walk off, Danny dryly asks if the girl knows Langford is her real father. While Steve is shocked by that, Danny (a father himself) brings up Langford's behavior and knows that only a dad would go to such lengths. He also brings up how the girl has exactly the same sneaky style Langford did and Langford didn't look happy about the girl hugging her "father." Langford admits it's true but prefers the girl not know.
• Highlander:
  • Duncan and friend Charlie are trying to find out who sent some mercenaries after them. They track down one of Charlie's old Army buddies only to find him dead with a needle in his arm, seemingly overdosed on drugs. But Charlie tells Mac this was staged as the guy was so terrified of needles that he couldn't even handle a flu shot.
  • Immortal Kalas goes after Duncan by striking at his friends. He forges the signature of Duncan's doctor girlfriend Anne which leads to two patients going into medical arrests and one dying. As Anne is about to be fired, Duncan interrupts the meeting to have her sign her name three times, noting how each one has some minute differences in the style. He then brings up how each of the three signatures on the orders is exactly the same, which is humanly impossible. The board accepts that Anne was set up to keep her job.
  • In the spin-off The Raven, Immortal thief Amanda and partner Nick recover a stolen painting for a museum. But when they see it on display, Amanda says it's a fake. When Nick points out it has the artist's signature, Amanda reveals that's the problem: she just happened to have been having a fling with the artist a century earlier when he was painting it, he was too drunk to wrap it up before his patron's deadline so Amanda forged the signature for him. The forger just copied the artist's signature perfectly but Amanda recognizes her own handwriting.
• Hogan's Heroes:
  • In one episode, the POWs suspected that a German spy has been placed among them. The suspect, who passed the usual questions about American society and such, told them that he didn't speak any German. They staged a fake fire while the man is sleeping, and as the suspect is waking to the confusion, Kinch, who spoke fluent German, told him to go out of the window, which was located across the room. When the suspect immediately went there and started to try to get out, the men knew he was a spy.
  • Another episode had a spy inserted by Major Hochstetter that averted most of the blunders that other infiltrators in the series usually commit: he knew the correct codephrase, didn't fall for any bluffs, was up to date on minute details of Americana, had an impeccable cover story and had trained himself not to respond to German. He's given away during a visit by Hochstetter to Stalag 13, when Hogan notices one of the Major's goons snap to attention as the spy walked past him, something no SS man would ever do for an Allied POW regardless of rank, and realized that the grunt must've recognized the spy as an SS officer and instinctively straightened up in his presence.
• In Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger, the team is confronted by another Sae/GaoWhite after they retrieve an egg, the only difference being that one Sae was wearing her Belle Tiger jacket and the other wasn't. The two girls tussle and Sae loses her G-Phone, which Kakeru/GaoRed grabs. and both Saes attempt to get the device back. The rest of the team and Tetomu are confused and uncertain who's who. However, Kakeru spots some flowers on the ground and decides to pick the jacketed Sae. She steps on them and Kakeru calls her out as the fake, but they discover the other one had also stepped on a flower! However, when the other quickly panics and goes to fix it up, the jacketed one reveals her true colors.
• Joe Pickett: In season two, Missy is the one to point out hownthere is a teenage girl's pink backpack in a guys' weekend hunting trip photo the victims took, leading to the realization that the victims were rapists.
• Played straight and then subverted in an episode of Kenny vs. Spenny. In the "Who Can Be Obese Longer?" competition Kenny uses extensive prosthetic makeup to make himself look like a fat person. What this lets him do is remove the extra weight they're forced to wear without Spenny noticing. After a while Kenny comes home and Spenny notices something: Kenny lost the top of his index finger as a child, yet Kenny in the fat suit has it. Spenny concludes that Kenny is faking and uses some spy equipment to see that Kenny is in his room playing video games without his weights on. Spenny confronts "Kenny" and takes off his weight. Then the subversion kicks in: Kenny had a prosthetic finger applied when he was getting the fat makeup put on because he knew Spenny would notice it. Kenny revealed himself to be the real deal and to still be wearing the weights (he put them back on) and won the competition. The "Kenny" in his room was someone made up to look like him.
• On Killjoys, Zeph may be rather quirky but does have a knack for this.
  • Zeph is among other RAC recruits taking part in a mission where a deadly toxin starts affecting everyone. She manages to blow out an airlock as she's figured out this was all part of a simulation. She explains that the toxin seemed to affect everyone equally when the varying body chemistries and sizes should have made differences. She also noted the lack of sweat on D'avin and how he didn't seem too concerned when Dutch was facing death.
  • In season 5, everyone has had their memories wiped and put in new lives. Despite this, Zeph is able to sense something is wrong as this supposedly semi-arid moon rains exactly twice a day like clockwork. This leads her to figure out the entire place is an artificial world whose environment is collapsing.
• Law & Order occasionally has the lawyers look at the defense counsel's witness list, and realize that expected witnesses are missing. Upon talking to said not-witnesses, they usually find something that would've sunk the defense's case. And it does. The detectives occasionally pick up on stuff like this too.
  • An episode of SVU had the detectives realizing that their murder victim was in fact alive and masquerading as her own twin after running her dental records; the shape of the jaw and teeth are structurally identical to the supposed victim, but there were no signs of the extensive dental work the victim had undergone or of the damage that necessitated it. Her husband never suspected, but when questioned by the detectives, realizes that three years prior (when the victim presumably disappeared) that his "wife" suddenly stopped going to church whereas she had previously gone every day and claimed to have misplaced her crucifix, which had in fact been buried with the victim.
  • In one episode of SVU, two girls who helped their Alpha Bitch clique leader murder their friend are trying to claim they only went along because they were afraid of her. The argument is convincing and Novak is worried the jury might buy it, until one of the girls makes a comment on the stand about being chosen to lure the victim out of her house because it was her birthday. Novak then realizes the girl just said her birthday was the victim's date of death, in January, but she's wearing a class ring with a sapphire, the birthstone for September. What's more, the victim had had a September birthday, and also had a sapphire class ring that was never found. Novak absolutely hammers the girl on it (if she was only a forced participant, why would she steal off the body?) until the two defendants start turning on each other to protect themselves. Both are found guilty.
  • Another episode of SVU is about a music teacher who happens to have a popular kids show, where he discovers who is talented enough to compete for a music deal. It establishes that he is a gay man, and is accused of molesting little boys when one in his class comes forward, along with his friend, and both claiming his favorite molesting spot is the boy's bathroom at school or his music room. Soon, many other boys come forward and it looks like a big scandal is happening. The teacher is fired from both his jobs, some of his family disowns him and he is charged for multiple underage rapes. However, Detective Rollins has doubts from the beginning based on a gut feeling. Sure enough, when she is able to talk to the boy alone in the bathroom at his house, she discovers that the same description he used for the school bathroom is the same one at his house. Rollins gets Benson who was interviewing his older sister, and the two soon discover that the boy was lying all along and his older sister and her friend put him up to it as part of a revenge scheme, because the music teacher rejected them years ago from the competition. The charges against the music teacher are cleared, but his reputation is still ruined, and the prosecutor refuses to charge the girls responsible with committing any crimes.
• Legend of the Seeker: Richard realizes something is wrong when Darken Rahl, in the guise of his former flame Anna, says something she would not have known in "Home".
• Leverage:
  • In "The Second David Job", Eliot poses as an antiques expert and takes Nate's ex-wife out for coffee while the rest of the gang watch from inside a van. His ex-wife appears to buy it until she looks at one of Eliot's buttons and points out that she bought that exact camera for Nate on his birthday. Cut to her walking up to Nate's van and demanding an explanation. (She screwed with Nate's head a little bit first. Justifiably.)
  • In another episode, Nate figures out that his long-time rival Sterling is the real father of a girl when he keeps insisting on correcting anyone who calls her stepfather her "father". In addition, the girl is a master chess player and claims her dad taught her, except her stepfather is awful at chess.
• The marshals on Longmire may seem some "backward hicks" but are very sharp and on the ball to figure out clues.
  • The team are hunting what appeared to be a man killed after shooting himself up with drugs and then mauled by a bear. During the hunt, Vic is accidentally shot with a tranquilizer dart. But at the hospital, she points out to Walt and Branch how her dart wound is just like the victim's, meaning he was also hit with a dart and the entire attack was actually a carefully staged murder.
• On M*A*S*H, one of B.J.'s pranks involves setting Winchester and Margaret at each other's throats, offering "helpful" advice to both sides. But he makes the mistake of using the same bit of overly-flowery language with both of them, and then Margaret repeats it while battling with Winchester.
• Mayfair Witches: Rowan's realization there's more to her past than it seems is when she tries to call the agency her mother claimed handled her "closed adoption" only to learn it hadn't opened until four years after she was born.
• Midsomer Murders: In "Murder of innocence", Grady Felton's cellmate had surgery to make himself look exactly like Felton should do, but he couldn't change his fingerprints and those fingerprints were still on the police database with his original name. This is what allows Barnaby to figure out that the Felton they'd been watching was an imposter.
• Attempted in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Season 2 episode "The Wannabe Ranger"; Primator, a monster able to perfectly disguise himself as any of the Rangers in- or out-of-uniform, copies the Yellow Ranger Trini while the eam are performing their individual Super Sentai Stances. Red Ranger Jason says that if they both attack him, he'll be able to Spot the Impostor by the way they fight; subverted in that the real Trini declines to do so out of friendship, while Primator-as-Trini just jumps at him.
• Occurs occasionally in Mission: Impossible, as the plans often involve some sort of deception. Of course, it often turns out that the team left loose threads to be spotted on purpose, to trick their opponents into thinking that they know what's going on. The episode "The Mind of Stefan Miklos" has the whole point of their plan be that Miklos spots the threads and draws a conclusion based on it. The hilarious part is the conclusion Miklos draws is the conclusion they want; their bug transmits Miklos admiring the brilliance of the man who came up with the scheme—and pitying him for failing.
• Monarch: Legacy of Monsters:
  • ** Duvall notices that from the way in which May swept her apartment, she knows how to disappear, cluing her in that May isn't who she says she is and that she's disappeared herself before.
  • Cate works out that the hidden data in Hiroshi's office isn't hidden behind a concealing canvas, but rather is the canvas this time, since she saw him working on the squirly patterns before.
  • Tim pieces together where the map that May and the Randas took was by noting how, despite the skyline view of Hiroshi's office, his chair is turned away from the window towards the blank wall. He then notices the positioning of the thumb-tacs in the blank space on the wall where the map was, and he deduces that each cluster where the tacs are most focused corresponds to Hiroshi pinpointing a Monarch outpost on a world map.
• Monk: This happens in pretty much every episode; the culprit is usually obvious, frequently shown committing the murder in the Cold Open. The problem is that even if Monk catches on at the start—which he frequently does—the police can't do anything without evidence. And Monk's unequaled observation skills usually let him notice the one thing that everyone else missed. For one example, in the episode "Mr. Monk and the Bully", it turns out the murder suspect was framed by his wife's identical twin sister, who was impersonating her. Monk was tipped off by the fact that the wife and her impostor pronounced "aunt" differently, as they were raised in different regions.
• In the first season finale of Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2024), John confronts their nosy neighbor, finding photos of their house and thinking he's an enemy agent. Turns out the guy works for Southbey's and is trying to figure out how it's possible a brownstone with a garage and pool worth over two million dollars could not only be owned by two data software engineers but be built without any city records or approval.
• In the Mini Series "The Murder Of Mary Phagan", Jim Conley, a janitor at the factory where the young girl worked, testifies that he assisted her accused killer Leo Frank in disposing of Phagan's body after Frank had supposedly killed her upstairs in his office. To that end, he claimed to have thrown her parasol down the elevator shaft, then he and Frank carried the body down in the elevator to the basement. Sometime later, after Frank's conviction, having developed doubts about his guilt, Slaton brings Conley, along with the prosecutor and the police who originally investigated, back to the crime scene and confronts him with the fact that the parasol was found intact. If what he had testified was true, it would have been crushed. Either no one noticed this glaring inconsistency, or worse yet, chose to ignore it so as to convict Frank. ^note  Yes, Conley was the real killer.
• The Mysteries of Laura has the team investigating the murder of a fertility doctor. Laura and her ex-husband Jake go undercover as a couple where the doctor shows an ultrasound of Laura pregnant. As the two aren't together (and Laura hasn't been with a man in months), they know it's a fake and figure the clinic is scamming women by making them think they're pregnant, charging them for expensive treatments, then a drug that replicates a miscarriage. Eventually, Laura finds the killer to have been a husband whose wife had undergone several of these fake "pregnancies". He reveals he figured it out as he's a film editor and on the third go-around, realized the "ultrasound" was the exact same footage as the previous two times.
• As expected from the source material, Nancy Drew (2019) has the title detective figuring out mysteries from the smallest clues such as how a Reverand was behind a hostage situation as she heard the church bells ringing in the background of a threatening message.
• NCIS: Tony pulls this off in Season 12 with a man impersonating an Air Marshal with the last name "Biers". When the man reacts in confusion to a lame joke about his name, Tony reasons that a real person with that surname would have heard such a joke his whole life, and therefore would have responded with annoyance, instead. Through facial recognition, they are able to determine that while the man bears an uncanny resemblance to the Air Marshal's file photo, he's not the same man. Because of this, a simple trip to pick his father up at the airport ends with Tony (and Bishop and her husband, who were going on vacation) getting involved in preventing an assassination.
• NCIS: Los Angeles: Callen poses as a Chechen Islamic terrorist to infiltrate a planned attack, the team having intercepted the real terrorist at the airport. The leader of the cell knew Callen's cover ID as a child, and realizes the con when Callen signs his martyrdom note with his right hand: the real one was a lefty.
• Nicky, Ricky, Dicky, and Dawn In "The Quadfather", Nicky realizes his father is actually the title character (a beaver dressed in a suit) after hearing him sneeze.
• Nirvana in Fire:
  • Jingyan notes Mei Changsu's habit of rubbing at things when he's thinking — just like Lin Shu used to...
  • Consort Jing discovers Mei Changsu's true identity after finding a veiled reference to his mother's name in a book he wrote notes in.
  • Mei Changsu draws Jingyan's sword in a discussion and uses it to point out troop movements, unconsciously repeating a familiar gesture from their past which Jingyan recognizes.
  • Another one for Consort Jing — she realizes her maid was part of the enemy's plot to cause mistrust between Jingyan and Mei Changsu when the maid makes sure to tell the story of Mei Changsu's supposed capture of her to the prince. They couldn't leave such a crucial part of the plot (making sure Jingyan heard the story told their way) to some unrelated person.
• A guest character on NUMB3RS who had been involved in a crime is being used as part of a sting operation to catch the drug dealer who masterminded the operation. When the dealer's guard reacts violently to him reaching for a flash drive in his pocket, the very nervous informant incredulously asks if the dealer thinks he'd try to pull anything given what happened to his partner, who was murdered by the dealer. Unfortunately, the partner's death wasn't public knowledge, so the drug dealer quickly realizes the only place he could have gotten that information was by having talked to law enforcement. Luckily, the FBI is on hand to prevent the informant from being killed.
• The Peripheral (2022): Flynne becomes convinced that 2099 London isn't just a sim after she sees that Peripheral!Burton had a robotic endoskeleton — if she genuinely was playing a simulation designed to be as realistic as possible, why wouldn't her avatar just have normal human anatomy?
• Power Rangers Ninja Steel: In "Galvanax Attacks", when Victor and Monty (disguised as the series' mooks) head onto the Galaxy Warriors stage to use Cosmo Royale's machine and escape, they inadvertently give away their true identities by speaking... and by Monty's digestive issues:
  Cosmo: "Wait a second. Kudabots can't talk!"
  Monty: (passes gas)
  Cosmo: "Oh, gross! And they definitely can't fart!" (knocks off their masks)
• Princess Agents: Yuwen Yue claims his grandfather is dead. Yan Xun is the only person who notices Yuwen Yue isn't nearly grief-stricken enough for someone whose grandfather was murdered. Sure enough, it turns out the grandfather was Faking the Dead.
• Raised by Wolves (2020): Caleb and Mary are masquerading as Marcus and Sue, members of the Mithraic religion and culture. Ambrose grows suspicious of them when Sue doesn't recognize a very common Mithraic nursery rhyme.
• Red Dwarf: TWO examples in the season 6 opener "Psirens"; the first being when a psiren masquerading as Kryten refers to Lister as "Dave" instead of "Mr. Lister", and the second when a psiren masquerading as Lister gives himself away by playing the guitar as well as Lister thinks he does
• In "Radio Harry" from Resident Alien, Liv Baker realizes that her memories have been tampered with when Sheriff Mike brings back a dress she had dry-cleaned that she doesn't remember having dropped off. She thinks that she's been abducted by aliens. She's about half-right - Harry didn't abduct her as such, but he did implant False Memories in her.
• On the sci-fi series Salvation, Darius finds his professor, Harris, missing with his home trashed and the man's glasses (a one-of-a-kind pair from his grandfather) left behind. Later, Harris returns, revealing he was on the run from some mysterious foe. He and Darius are joined in a scientific effort to stop a deadly asteroid from hitting Earth. Taken by some agents, Darius realizes he recognizes the driver as a man chasing him outside of Harris' home. It then hits Darius that Harris is wearing the exact same glasses from his home. And the only way he could go back to his house when he was supposedly hunted is if he was working with the "attackers" all along.
• The Rookie:
  • The pilot episode has cops John and Talia investigating a lead at a gym. The owner claims nothing is going on and they can search the place. A former construction worker, John notes that in the hundreds of houses he's been in and helped build, he's never seen anyone put a circuit breaker next to a water pipe. He opens the "breaker" up to show a hidden cache of drugs and money.
  • Later in the series, when Nolan spots a piece of tape over a doorbell camera while working with Detective Nick Armstrong, Armstrong notes that 75% of detectives would have missed that, encouraging Nolan’s own ambition to make detective.
  • The team is figuring out who is the killer among a pack of rich kids. Looking over social media posts of the group on vacation in Europe, it hits them that for a guy with a lot of luggage, one member only seems to wear one of two outfits in every photo. They realize he's a Mock Millionaire who committed the crime when the victim figured out his scam.
• A season one episode of Sanctuary involved an abnormal that uses mind manipulation to impersonate people before killing them. It impersonates Will and almost kills Magnus, until Magnus asks for coffee, having previously told the real Will that she hated the beverage, and the fake Will simply says "sure".
• In Seventeen Moments of Spring, Stirlitz and his radio operator Kathe are Russian Deep Cover Agents inside Nazi Germany. Kathe is nine months pregnant. Stirlitz is worried that she'll start screaming out in Russian when she's in labor. Sure enough, she does. The German nurses call the Gestapo.
• In the Sleepy Hollow episode “Bad Blood”, once Ichabod enters Purgatory, he encounters a reality where he still has a good relationship with with his father and hasn’t defected to the colonist side. However, his father tells him that the British had won the Battle of Yorktown. Ichabod replies that in reality the British had lost the battle. It turned out that reality presented to him is false.
• On She Spies, Jack returns from vacation to give the girls an assignment which is a trap. They see Jack bouncing between his usual bumbling nervous self and a smooth womanizer trying to kill them. D.D. realizes what's going on when she sees a photo from Jack's "vacation" where he was on a resort on the east side of Puerto Rico. Problem being, the background shows the sun setting over the ocean, which is the west. Thus, the "vacation" was all in Jack's mind as he was brainwashed with an alternate identity of a killer.
• Special Ops: Lioness: How the last Lioness' cover gets blown when her mark spots a tattoo of a cross under her armpit while bathing. During the debrief, Joe says that the undercover claimed that she had no tattoos. The CIA Deputy Director tells her to "check every inch" of the next recruit to ensure that there are no tattoos, not merely take her word for it.
• Subverted in an episode of Stargate SG-1 where the team finds themselves in a Cold War-era military base and are mistaken for spies. When an interrogator asks in Russian if they're spies, Daniel, the (American) linguist, replies "Nyet"...
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • Played straight in "Datalore", when Lore tries to pass himself off as Data and slips up by mentioning his "off switch". Data had previously sworn Dr. Crusher to secrecy over it. Other smaller things, such as his use of contractions (whereas Data does not) tipped them off to the charade.
    • "Future Imperfect" has a double example. First, Riker is in a simulation designed to make him think that it's 16 years in the future, and he's a widowed single father serving as the new Captain of the Enterprise. Things seem off, but he isn't able to prove that it's a simulation until he sees a picture of his dead "wife" Min Riker. Turns out that "Min" is actually "Minuet", an artificially created woman from a holodeck simulation in the season 1 episode "11001001"; the aliens scanned his mind for memories of a woman that he loved, but didn't bother to verify whether she was a real person. After that, the deception is "revealed" to be a Romulan simulation. But then, a young boy imprisoned by the Romulans (who previously appeared as Riker's "son" Jean-Luc) refers to their Romulan captor, Tomalak, as an "Ambassador"; he's actually a commander, and only appeared as an ambassador in the simulation—which the boy couldn't possibly have known. It turns out that the Romulan prison is also a simulation, and the boy was responsible for the simulations all along; he's a lonely, orphaned alien who wanted to convince Riker to spend time with him. In the end, Riker takes him back to the Enterprise so he doesn't have to be alone anymore.
    • In "Ship in a Bottle", a Holodeck Malfunction that causes handedness to flip serves as the crucial clue to figuring out what Moriarty is up to.
    • In "Inheritance", when Data meets his "mother", Dr. Julianna Tainer, the scientist who co-built him, he is pleased. When a cave-in occurs, Julianna is revealed to actually be an android (the real Julianna died years before and her husband uploaded her brain patterns into an android without her knowledge), which Data knew. He tells Riker his attention was caught by Julianna doing complicated math equations on the spot. He then saw that her blinking was the same pattern as Data's own, a formula that made their blinking seem random. The final piece was Data hearing Julianna rehearse for a musical performance then replicate the piece in perfect note and pitch, which was humanly impossible.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • In "Duet", the first clue for Major Kira that the Cardassian war criminal Gul Darhe'el is not who he says he is comes when he mentions the name of Kira's former resistance cell. Kira doesn't think anything of it at first, but Odo finds it incredibly suspicious that Darhe'el, whose duties did not involve fighting the resistance, would know (let alone remember) such a specific piece of trivia. He claims to have seen her name in reports he read in his spare time, which Kira probably would have bought, but the brief doubt had driven them to seek out other evidence that further unraveled the man's story (most notably, Gul Darhe'el had never contracted the rare disease that had drawn Kira's attention to this traveler in the first place). It turns out he's actually Aamin Marritza (the "false" identity he'd been traveling under initially), a file clerk who worked under Darhe'el; Marritza was posing as his former superior with the intention of being caught, put on trial for Darhe'el's crimes, and executed in an attempt to appease his own conscience and force his own people to admit what they did to the Bajorans.
    • Subverted in "Armageddon Game". Keiko O'Brien becomes suspicious of the recording provided of her husband Miles' death, as the time stamp shows it's late in the day and computer analysis shows that the cup he's drinking from (shortly before an explosion) contains coffee, and she knows her husband never drinks coffee in the afternoon as it keeps him awake at night. Sure enough, the video has been faked, and her husband is rescued. He finally makes it back home, and soon after orders a cup of coffee...in the afternoon. She was Right for the Wrong Reasons all along.
    • "Inquisition" has Bashir in a series of events that make it look like he's unknowingly betraying the Federation to the Dominion. Just when it looks like all his friends are convinced that the accusations are true, O'Brien swiftly moves his arm out of Bashir's grasp and Bashir knows that he dislocated his shoulder the previous morning. That makes him realize that everything around him is just a holodeck simulation.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: In "Latent Image", the Doctor is running the crew's annual check-ups when, during Harry's physical, he sees surgical scars only he would have been able to do. However, he can't recall such surgery, so he does some searching and he discovers that the memories about the surgery were erased as this was part of an incident that led to a Logic Bomb afterwards: Harry and another crewmember, Ahni Jetal, were injured on an away mission and he was forced to choose between saving the two. Normally, his programming would have him choose whoever was more injured, but because both had the same chances of survival, he picked Harry because he was his friend, reasoning that did not mesh with his programming. Initially, Janeway defends her decision, saying that she did this to save the Doctor, but Seven points out how the Doctor has significantly grown beyond his original programming and thus deserves the power to deal with those memories like any person would, so they restore them and he's able to make peace with himself.
  • Star Trek: Picard: In "The Impossible Box", Hugh is quick to note that Picard would not suddenly come to the Artifact after all these years for whatever official purpose he claimed, then promises to help however he can.
• Stranger Things: Hopper immediately realizes the people at the lab are hiding something when they show him exterior shots of the lab from the night after Will disappeared, because the video shows a calm night, but it was torrentially raining.
• In Supernatural, how did Kevin figure out that demons were impersonating the Winchester brothers? The demons were being nice to him.
• Tehran: Kamali was seen reviewing surveillance tapes of the women's restroom and noted that the Jordanian Airline stewardess (who happens to be Zhila) uses her right hand. He finds out that the switch was made since Tamar was seen in the stewardess uniform using her left hand.
• In Terriers, Hank and Britt have uncovered what appears to be a toxicology report indicating a development site is filled with very high levels of toxic chemicals. They manage to leak it to the press and force the site to be shut down. It's Hank's schizophrenic sister Steph who matter-of-factly states the report is a fake as the chemical levels are too high and it's impossible those compounds could mingle naturally. This reveals that the developers wanted the site shut down to hide what they were really doing.
• Obviously, Veronica Mars has the teenage detective spotting clues to figure things out. She often relates how she was onto something early on, just needed to prove her theory correct.
  • In one episode, trying to figure out who stole money from a poker game of rich kids, Veronica stops by one suspect, finding his dad answering the door. When she relates how the kid stole the money, the others are baffled as he lives in the biggest house in town and dropped off by limo at school every day. Veronica says she found it odd the dad was home in the middle of the day in a huge mansion but then figured out that it's because he wasn't the rich guy, he was the butler/driver and the kid has been playing up being rich this whole time.
  • In the season 2 finale, Jackie, shown to be the rich daughter of a baseball star, tells boyfriend Wallace she's going to attend school in Paris. When we see Jackie later, she's working at her mom's diner in Brooklyn as it turns out that she was just the product of a one-night stand and her father only recently acknowledged she was even alive. She's surprised when Veronica calls her there, knowing all along that Jackie was raised by her hard-working single mom. Veronica states she figured it out when Jackie did a stint at the Java Hutt as she took to waitressing far too easily for an East Side debutante who'd never had a job before. Veronica also knew Jackie's GPA was nowhere near high enough to attend a preppy Paris school and she needs to stop Wallace before he flies to France looking for her.
• The Walking Dead (2010): Daryl figures out that it isn't really his brother Merle talking to him because he still has both his hands.
  • In the Season 4 mid-season finale, the main characters' home at the Prison is attacked and they are forced to scatter. In the season's final episode, "A", Rick, Carl, Daryl, and Michonne arrive at Terminus, the same sanctuary Glenn and company reached in an earlier episode. However, Rick notices a few items from their old home being worn or used by the residents. The Prison's guard body armor, a backpack the characters took off a dead hitchhiker earlier in the season, and Daryl's poncho are amongst the items that Glenn and Maggie retrieved before bolting, as the viewers (but not Rick) know. But while those three items might possibly be explained away, and could have been scavenged by Prison residents that Rick didn't know well, the most damning piece of evidence is Hershel's pocket watch being worn by a Terminus resident. Since only a member of his adoptive family would have understood its sentimental value and taken it from the Prison, this clues him in to the fact that something bad has happened to one of them.
• On Warehouse 13, in Season 1's "Duped", Pete says that Alice's impersonation of Myka failed when she kissed him. The real Myka would never have done so. However, that was a lie to ensure that she didn't find out that the rest of the Warehouse staff had figured it out. The real instance of this trope was when Leena used the Farnsworth to call the fake Myka and ask about her pet ferret. Alice gives herself away when she says that she hadn't named it, which Artie and Leena both knew to be false.
• Zoe on Wild Card shows a good eye for this. In the second episode, she figures out a woman is posing as her dead sister by how "she knows things she shouldn't know and doesn't know things she should." For example, "Marilyn" doesn't know her comic book collection is quite valuable yet somehow can easily settle into her sister's home quite fast (she doesn't even have to look before knowing where to find a pen and which day the trash is collected), not to mention all her "sister's" clothes fit her perfectly. There's also the fact that her "sister's" dog acts as if he's been living with this stranger for years, leading the team to unravel the woman's insurance claim scam.
• The Wire:
  • Stringer Bell figures the police are listening to the payphones in the courtyard after a raid that could have only been traced to talk on those phones.
  • When Omar and Stringer negotiate an end to their hostility, Stringer is Properly Paranoid about being monitored and says he doesn't know anyone named Barksdale and when asked about money, accepts Omar's demand, which Omar in turn immediately knows is a sign that they plan to ambush him.
  • Frank Sobotka figures out he's being surveiled after he finds out his cell phone hadn't been deactivated despite months of unpaid bills.
  • Marlo figures out the girl he met at a club was a Honey Trap because she is extremely agreeable to his demands when arranging a date. He sends Snoop to watch the restaurant they are meant to meet at, and Snoop spots a familiar guy buying four sandwhiches and drinks, and taking them back to a nearby SUV with darkened windows, with the girl making a signal to the car while arriving sealing their suspicions. Chris proceeds to do a Gangland Driveby with a shotgun on the SUV.

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