The Cuckoolander Was Right / Live-Action TV

The Cuckoolander Was Right in Live-Action TV.

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• Accused: Possibly the case with paranoid schizophrenic Stephen at the end of "Stephen's Story", where it appears that his stepmother really was poisoning his father and brother. However, it's left ambiguous whether this is another of his delusions or not.
• The American Horror Story: Asylum episode "I Am Anne Frank" features a deranged Briarcliff patient who claims to be Anne Frank, insisting that she was wrongly reported as dead at Auschwitz, but kept her identity secret so that she could serve as a symbol of the innocents slaughtered by Hitler. As soon as she sees Dr. Arden, she goes berserk and claims that he was one of the Nazi doctors who experimented on Jewish prisoners in the camps. It turns out that she's lying about being Anne Frank — but she's 100% right about Dr. Arden's Nazi past.
• Babylon 5:
  • G'Kar definitely had his cuckoolander moments...and almost everyone ignored his warnings about the return of certain eldritch abominations until it was nearly too late. The ones who didn't ignore him were already planning for it and feigned ignorance while letting his world burn to maintain the ruse.
• The Hybrids in Battlestar Galactica. They're prophets, but most of them, most of the time, are so cryptic and vague that except for one instance no one has any idea what they mean (the phrase "harbinger of death" kind of stands out). But in hindsight, everything they said was accurate or at least relevant.
• An episode of the The Big Bang Theory has Sheldon crazily demand that Penny get rid of a chair she found on the street and paid a homeless man to carry up the stairs because he's convinced it must be filthy. He gets Amy to talk to her, but she confesses to Penny that even she thinks he's paranoid. Then they realize there's something in the chair. As they run screaming out of the apartment and down the stairs, they agree not to tell Sheldon he was right.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Spike retained some of himself even when he went crazy after getting his soul back and getting Mind Screwed by the Big Bad of Season 7, so much so that, in the episode "Same Time, Same Place", he's the only one to figure out that Willow can't see or interact with the rest of the Scoobies and vice-versa. Of course that was only because he was interacting with them at the same time, and noticed they couldn't see or interact with each other.
  • Drusilla babbles insanely, thinks she can see the stars right through her ceiling, and worries about her dolly Miss Edith. All of her ramblings turn out to be psychic predictions, meaning she's a Mad Oracle. This trope is slightly played with when we find out she started out perfectly sane and psychic, and was tortured into insanity. She's always been right, but she hasn't always been a Cuckoolander.
  • In Earshot, Xander falls between this and Dumbass Has a Point when he jokes that the person Buffy telepathically overheard planning mass murder was probably the lunch lady and her terrible cafeteria food. He eventually discovers he's right while sneaking into the kitchen to steal jello.
• Spencer from Burn Notice. He's schizophrenic and sees messages encoded in beams of light, but he's also smart enough to see the pattern between the actions of his boss and the deaths of American spies. On the other hand, the conclusion he draws from this is that his boss is a space alien...
• Community:
  • Abed's vast knowledge of television is generally accurate given that he's in, well, a television show, and every once in a while he falls into this trope. In the third season, while in therapy, he occasionally comments that the dean's been replaced by a "doppeldeaner". Which is a statement that the audience knows full well to be true, although the characters take some convincing.
  • If it's even possible, there's a kind of inversion in the first season. Shirley adamantly believes that the accuracy of Abed's films mean that he can predict the future. When confronted with this, Abed denies any prophetic abilities, a belief he starts to doubt when his films continue to come true regardless of the absurdity.
• Doctor Who:
  • One of the Doctor's defining character traits. He is definitely a mad man with a box...and he knows exactly what he's doing. Lampshaded by River Song in "Flesh and Stone":
    Octavian: [about the Doctor] You trust this man?
    River Song: I absolutely trust him.
    Octavian: He's not some kind of madman, then?
    River Song: [beat] I absolutely trust him.
  • Dalek Caan flies unprotected into the Time Vortex to bring back Davros. He emerges from this experience completely insane, but with the gift of prophecy. The Supreme Dalek prefers to ignore his ravings, but Davros knows he speaks the truth. Sure enough, he predicts that one of the Doctor's companions will soon die, and Donna essentially does because the Doctor must wipe her mind. It also turns out that some of the episode's events happened because Caan was manipulating them to destroy the Daleks. An alternate interpretation is that rather than Donna (who though she loses her memory doesn't actually die), the one Caan was refering to was Davros himself. As the Dalek mothership explodes around them, the Doctor ushers all of his companions into the TARDIS to escape, including extending an invitation to Davros, offering to save him. Davros refuses, and stays to go down with the ship, and it is at this moment that Caan laughs maniacally and repeats the prophecy that "one will still die". The Doctor's invitation to Davros could be seen as promoting Davros to companion, albeit briefly, and thus Davros' death fulfils the prophecy.
• River from Firefly, although in her case, she's messed up because she was kidnapped by the government and tortured in order to refine her latent psychic powers. A specific and very clear example:
  River: They weren't cows inside. They were waiting to be, but they forgot. Now they see sky, and they remember what they are.
  Mal: Is it bad that what she said made perfect sense to me?
• Early in Season 2 of Galavant, Ditzy Manchild Richard does an offscreen trade and swaps a huge, famous gem for a dragon...or so he's told. He's actually traded the gem for a type of reptile known as a bearded dragon. Throughout the season, Richard continues to insist that Tad Cooper, as he named the creature, truly is a dragon, and gives it multiple attempts to do things like breathe fire, only for it to act like a normal lizard. The stinger at the very end of the shows that Tad Cooper really is a dragon, and shows Richard proudly feeding the grown dragon sheep.
• Good Omens (2019): Shadwell harangues passersby to join his "Witchfinder Army" with the stereotypical sandwich board so they can hunt down and kill witches. Not only is he right that witches exist (although the ones we see aren't evil) but demons and far more do too.
• The Good Place:
  • Michael in the first episode states that all religions were about 5% right about the afterlife, except for Doug Forcett, a stoner kid who one day got extremely high on mushrooms and in that state, was asked by his friend what he thinks happens after they die. Doug started a monologue that startled every being in the afterlife by being 92% correct, this made him an afterlife celebrity and Michael keeps a portrait of him on his wall.
  • Jason, in spite of being The Ditz, points out in the last episode of Season 1 that he was (mostly) right with his earlier suggestion to Eleanor that they were on a prank show.
• Carrie Mathison in Homeland is bipolar, although she controls it with medication; this, incidentally, is not played for laughs at all. She is nevertheless the only one who figures out that Brody is working for Abu Nazir, and figures out what Nazir's plot is. It's during a manic phase that she figures out a timeline of Nazir's activities that is the key to deciphering the larger plot.
• In a way, Sarah from House of Anubis. While she isn't really a cuckoolander, many people do believe she is crazy including the main characters themselves, but everything she says is usually a clue to the mystery in some way. This is because she grew up with the mystery herself, as her parents were the ones who hid the treasure and the two main villains turned on her for the truth. She also happened to be the original Chosen One.
• iCarly: In "iBelieve in Bigfoot", Spencer constantly states he saw a Beavecoon, which is half beaver, half raccoon, which the rest of the gang dismiss of. Near the end however, the Beavecoon turns out to indeed exist, but no one sees it, not even Spencer himself.
• Kamen Rider Double has Shotaro Hidari, half of the eponymous hero. Unlike Philip, Double's other half, Shotaro has no superpowers as a normal human. One of his cases required him to find his client's cat. Reasoning that the best way to find somebody is to think like they do, Shotaro decided to wander around pretending to be a cat (meowing, batting at invisible string, etc) until he found the real one. He succeeded.
• In Kenan & Kel, there's an episode which the main characters find a map in the Rigby's basement that shows a hidden room with a word written on it. Kenan reads it "safe", but Kel thinks it is "sofa", which Kenan soon discards, as nobody would have a reason to hide a sofa. In the end of the episode, Kenan, Kel and Chris break the wall to the hidden room and... there's really a sofa inside it.
• In The King of Queens, one of Carrie's many grievances with her Cuckoolander father Arthur Spooner is that he blew what would have been her college fund on acquiring the rights to the life story of singer Lou Rawls. Arthur is adamant, in the late 1990's, that this money was not wasted and the tale will one day be told. Carrie is skeptical. Come 2009 and what happens... biographies and a motion picture on the life of Lou Rawls are released. Carrie may yet see her college fund...
• In Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Goren and Nichols' methods, bizarre though they are, are often very effective in solving their cases.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
  • "Coerced", a schizophrenic man rants (after the judge decides to institutionalize him for treatment) that someone was murdered in his last home. The detectives realize that since he was medicated at the time it might be true and investigate. It turns out that the home killed a woman in the room next to his through negligence and then, when they realized he could implicate them, withheld his medication so he'd start acting "crazy" and no one would believe him (making them responsible for the man's actions, since those actions were based on his unmedicated mental state).
  • In "Manhattan Vigil", an auxiliary cop with clear mental health issues tells SVU that their kidnapping case fits into a pattern of missing child cases that he'd identified. When Rollins examines his evidence, she realizes that while not all of the cases he thought were connected actually are, he had identified a legitimate pattern that was present in three of the cases, and he also turns out to be right that the active case SVU is working is linked to the pattern.
• An early episode of Lost involves Claire freaking out because she thinks someone's trying to abduct her and hurt her unborn baby. She's had a bunch of weird nightmares she's convinced are true, despite not being plausible even by Lost standards, and Jack thinks this is just another delusion. Turns out, there are other people on the island and one has been abducting her for medical tests.
• The title character of Merlin (2008), constantly. A bit of a subversion in that he's not really a Cloudcuckoolander, but since nearly everyone else believes he is, this happens nearly Once an Episode. Arthur eventually catches on to this and starts consulting Merlin on everything.
• Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: In an ironic inversion of the parent MonsterVerse movies' norm of Monarch being the Cuckoolanders in this equation, in this series, Monarch are the ones who do the ignoring towards Lee Shaw. After Shaw came back in 1982 from a twenty-year disappearance on a subterranean mission gone wrong, still at the exact same age he was when he left, rambling about how he'd seen conclusive proof of an entire Hollow World populated by Titans; Monarch, including Shaw's own honorary nephew Hiroshi at first, refused to believe it, writing him off as insane, and they forcibly retired him to a Monarch observation site disguised as a retirement home. Shaw spent 33 years in the Monarch retirement home trying to convince Monarch that they weren't prepared for the Titans' emergence, but he went ignored... until 2014 came, proving him right, and then Monarch still didn't do anything as far as he was concerned, breaking his faith in the organization that he originally helped to build.
• Tyler from My Hero (2000), a Talkative Loon and Conspiracy Theorist who is nonetheless the only person to recognise George Sunday as Thermoman.
• The Office (US)
  • The entire gang struggle to remember the security guard's name, only certain that it begins with the letter E. "Edgar?" "Elliot"? "Edward"? Resident Cuckoolander Creed interjects that his name is Hank, and Creed, of course, is correct.
  • In one episode, Dwight discovers he registered poorly in customer surveys and insists to everyone that the scores were tampered with to sabotage him. Everyone treats it as one of his usual delusions, but then Jim finds out he also did poorly and begins to investigate the issue. He eventually discovers that Kelly sabotaged his and Dwight's reviews because she was mad at them for not attending one of her parties. When he reveals this to Dwight, he is ecstatic about being right.
• NUMB3RS: Larry Fleindhart is somewhat perpetually this. You don't get to be a PhD without having some intelligence, after all. Somewhat subverted in that the team is aware of this and usually listens to him right off the bat (though it sometimes takes a little while for them to figure out what he's trying to tell them, since he doesn't always say it straight out).
  • Played straight in "Calculated Risk". One of the suspects in the murder of a whistleblowing CFO is a former employee of her company, and he spends most of the interrogation going on an apparently inane rant about the company. They write him off as soon as his alibi clears, but then later, as more evidence surfaces:
    Megan: Did [the suspect] say these people weren't real?
    Don: He said we would never find them. What, do you think he figured it out?
    Megan: I don't know, but he's right!
  • Played with in a later episode. A conspiracy theorist claims that a public figure and his charitable organization aren't on the up-and-up. He turns out to be right, but the implication is that it's pretty much luck and chance; given how many people he thinks are doing something illicit, one of them was bound to end up being actually sleazy.^note He was also right only in the broadest possible sense; the actual crime that was committed bears virtually no resemblance to his theories. The trope is even Lampshaded by Robin.
    Robin: On the other hand, McGill may not be so crazy. (Beat) Okay, he's crazy, but that doesn't mean that he's wrong.
• Our Miss Brooks: Miss Brooks's wacky landlady, Mrs. Davis, often gives good advice. In The Movie Grand Finale she plays a critical role in Miss Brooks' finally marrying Mr. Boynton and living Happily Ever After.
• Power Rangers:
  • Bridge in Power Rangers S.P.D. is weird, but usually on the ball. There's his initial warnings about A-Squad in the beginning; or his complete avoidance of Dru in "Idol", which were brushed off at the time. Guess which characters had a Face–Heel Turn later. Plus his dreams in "Idol" and "Robotpalooza;" considered nuts and irrelevant at the time, later proven thematically relevant and literally accurate, respectively.
  • When Bridge reappeared in Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, he explained how he became the Red Ranger since we last saw him. As weird as it sounds, viewers who watched SPD will know it's entirely accurate:
    Bridge: Well, long story short, our mentor, who's uh, well, who's a dog, got promoted to head of SPD which used to be run by a bird, but he retired and went down to Miami and then Sky got promoted and then I got promoted, and that's why I'm the Red Ranger! Or rather, will be.
    Dax: Makes sense to me!
• Occasionally, a contestant on QI will quip a completely bizarre answer to a question for laughs... only to be awarded points. They're usually just as surprised by this. Examples include when Jack Dee blurted out that the original geishas were all men, and when Johnny Vegas correctly joked that the purpose of corn flakes was to prevent masturbation.
• Shortly after the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult, who believed that poisoning themselves would result in their souls being picked up by a passing spacecraft, Saturday Night Live did a cold open sketch (no longer on NBC's website, likely for being considered too insensitive) where Ted Koppell (played by Darrell Hammond) interivewed, live via satellite, the cult's leader, Marshall Applewhite (Will Ferrell) and his followers from the alien spacecraft (though he admitted that he regretted the castration part of his cult, which turned out to be unnecessary).
• In the Seinfeld episode "The Fusilli Jerry," Kramer ends up with a pair of vanity plates that say "ASSMAN" due to a mixup at the motor bureau. When his friends speculate about the kind of person who would have ordered the plates, Kramer theorizes that it's a proctologist, responding to their incredulity by explaining that proctologists have great senses of humor. Naturally, he's right on the money.
• In Silicon Valley, crazy aggro billionaire Russ Hanneman sees lanky nerd Jared and shouts "This guy fucks! Am I right? ‘Cause I’m looking at the rest of you guys, and this is the guy in the house doing all the fucking. Am I right? You know I’m right. This guy fucks." It just seems like Russ shouting catchphrases as random, but the rest of Pied Piper finds out later that Jared is the goddamn mack.
• In Sleepy Hollow, Agent Reynolds suffers a supernatural insect bite that causes rage and extreme paranoia. Once he recovers, Abby is relieved that he doesn't remember anything from when he was under the bite's influence because his paranoia led him to correctly believe that Abby is hiding Ichabod's true identity and Jenny and Joe's connection to the Nevins case.
• Zora from Sonny with a Chance reacts to Dakota by turning around, widening her eyes and hissing in as demonic a voice she can muster. "Eeevilll". She turns out to be right.
• Frequently happens with Joyce in Stranger Things, who has a knack for latching onto odd occurrences (her Christmas lights are flashing), having some bizarre explanation for that (her missing son is communicating with her), and being completely right (he really is). Comes to a head in Season 3, when she suspects something big is going on in Hawkins based entirely on refrigerator magnets not working anymore and during the investigation uncovers a Soviet experiment into interdimensional travel; the electromagnetic field it created demagnetized the fridge magnets.
• Taxi:
  • One episode shows Jim to have an ability to predict things. Alex, rational thinker that he is, dismisses it, but Louie, who considers Jim a total bum, believes that's his one talent, and warns Alex to heed an ominous premonition where he'll be mistaken for a woman and will dance the can-can in a green sweater.
  • In another episode, Jim has a young TV Programming Exec in his cab who tells him about some upcoming new shows. Jim gets a "feeling" about how they will preform, which is exactly opposite to what the exec's data believes they will. The next day the man comes to the garage frantically looking for Jim because everything he predicted turned out right, and he spends the rest of the episode pumping Jim for more "feelings" to schedule shows.
• In 'Til Death, where white guy Eddie sticks up for his Token Black Friend Kenny when he claims he's been racially discriminated against, but Eddie is soon convinced Kenny is just overreacting when he hears the other side and the remainder of the episode is about him trying to convince his friend he's oversensitive. In the tag, however, it's revealed that it was racism after all.
• The Log Lady from Twin Peaks issued dire warnings that turned out to be completely accurate.
• Victorious:
  • In "Prom Wrecker", Cat wasn't lying when she says she asked a guy named Tug to be her date to the prom, but it isn't until Robbie bails on her that Tug actually shows up.
  • Also in "The Blonde Squad", Cat befriends a boy while wearing a blonde wig for Beck's movie but worries he won't like the real her. Turns out she was right all along, and he breaks up with her after the wig comes off as he's only into blondes.
• The Warehouse 13 Episode '13.1' had Hugo Miller, who the agents need to tell them the code to stop an AI he invented. He thinks Pete is Ulysses S Grant and wants to be paid in bicycles, when they agree to this he draws them a picture of a cat. It turns out his cat's name was Albert and that's the code to shut off the computer.
• This is almost a Running Gag on The X-Files. No matter what crazy theory Mulder comes up with to explain aspects of a case or what logical theory Scully comes up with, Mulder is often right.

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