Tomato In The Mirror / Live-Action TV

People who don't know the truth about themselves in live-action TV.

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• One episode of 3rd Rock from the Sun has Harry suffer a blow to the head, resulting in amnesia. The result is that he becomes alarmed that his family are aliens without realizing he is one as well. Crosses over into Dramatic Irony.
• 12 Monkeys: In Season 4, Team Splinter learn of a story told by the Primaries which describes the true nature of their conflict, about a demon which drove a serpent insane and made it go in circles, which can only be stopped if the demon is destroyed. They realize that "the serpent" is Time and the "circles" are the Stable Time Loops which causality has been twisted into by the existence of time travel, and naturally assume that the "demon" must be the Witness. However, just before the Grand Finale, they learn that the "demon" is actually Cole, the first successful time traveller (whose existence made it possible for everyone else) who is also the result of a time loop himself.
• In the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "Human Interest Story", a reporter interviews a man who has begun having delusions that he used to be a Martian. It turns out, he is a Martian, and is merely one of thousands of invaders. Fortunately, the reporter is also one, and he's able to silence him before he can blow their cover.
  • It's actually an adaptation of a short story by Fredric Brown, though the resolution there was nonviolent (the reporter, without blowing his own cover, simply convinces the other guy that acting out of character for his host will be to no one's benefit).
• Angel: In "Spin the Bottle", the whole Angel Investigations gang have their memories - but not their bodies - wiped back to age 17 by a spell gone awry. Wesley, who at that age was head of his class at vampire-hunting school, reckons incorrectly that it's all a test: he and some random civilians have been magically made older and locked by the Watchers Council in this abandoned hotel (the Hyperion, Angel Investigations HQ) with a vampire, whom they must identify and kill.^NoteThe Tales of the Slayers/Vampires comics and the Buffy episode "Helpless" show that the Watchers do indeed carry out tests like this, besides the aging part. Angel, who at age 17 was a living 18th century human boy named Liam and thus doesn't know he's a vampire, in a private moment, looks at a mirror...
• Are You Afraid of the Dark?:
  • "The Tale Of The Thirteenth Floor''. The adopted Karin is invited to The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday on the 13th floor of the apartment building. The employees are soon revealed to actually be aliens with three fingers and no faces, and seem to be trying to abduct her. After she and Billy escape, and the ship leaves, Olga reveals to Karin through the TV that the aliens left her there ten years ago and were trying to rescue her. Billy then looks at her and sees that she has shapeshifted back into a faceless alien as well.
  • "The Tale of the Dream Girl". Johnny, after putting on a girl's ring, is being pursued romantically by the ghost of the ring's owner. The girl in question has a backstory and death similar to that of the song Teen Angel, where she ran back into a car that's dead on the train tracks to get her ring when the train hit. Johnny eventually realizes that he was in the car with her (and her boyfriend). He ran back to pull her away but he didn't make it and died with her. This is why his sister is the only person who can see him and why his mother ignores him, why their boss looks guilty after NOT needing a mechanic due to Johnny's work and why his sister gives him a funny look when he tells her no he can't calm down, how would she act if she saw a ghost.
  • Another girl wanted know about the story of a ghost car that appeared every year at the corner of the cemetery. Her two new friends helped figure out microfilm and learn the sad story of the young man wanting to meet his date who was tragically lost. Now the girl knows the story she can reveal she is the ghost the car is waiting for and goes to meet the driver.
• The Arrested Development episode "Marta Complex" has Gob overhear a phone conversation Marta has with her mother where she says she no longer loves Gob and is in love with "Hermano". Gob asks Michael to find Hermano for him. At the end of the episode, Michael discovers that Hermano is Spanish for "brother". Marta was telling her mother that she was in love with Michael, Gob's brother.
• Arrowverse:
  • Arrow:
    • The identity of Sara's killer in Season 3. Roy/Arsenal has been having bad dreams ever since that night; in the dreams, he kills Sara by throwing three arrows into her chest. Since Roy was injected a while back with a super-serum whose cure was experimental, there seems a possibility that the dreams are real. It turns out they aren't. In season 2, whilst under the effects of said super-serum, Roy blacked out and killed a cop. Those suppressed memories are resurfacing and mixing with his feelings of grief for Sara.
    • Played straighter with the reveal of who actually killed Sara - it was Thea, drugged by Malcolm Merlyn. She's horrified and furious to discover what he made her do.
    • Played with again in season 5. The villain Prometheus has decided to play massive mind games with all of Team Arrow, starting with convincing Quentin Lance that he is Prometheus. Due to Quentin's previous animosity towards Oliver (both his daughters got involved with Oliver and both died and came back to life, and Oliver has ignored/twisted the law for years), plus his relapse into alcoholism, we almost believe it. Until he goes straight to Thea and tells her what's been happening, and she sets him straight.
    • Prometheus then tries to make Oliver into the villain by showing him his past brutality with a recreated crime scene. Oliver in season 1 had no problems killing anyone that got in his way. At this particular scene, he left a trail of largely unnecessary bodies about a mile long. The topper is when Prometheus dresses up his hostage (Felicity's current boyfriend and a good man) in his costume and sends him out for Oliver to kill. The fact that Oliver didn't realize the trick in time makes it all the more worse.
  • The Flash (2014):
    • Julian Albert Desmond is horrified to learn that he is the villain Doctor Alchemy. It turns out it is not a split personality, but the other villain Savitar possessing him while he is asleep or unconscious.
    • Eva McCulloch coldly reveals to Sam Scudder that the real Sam is dead and he was just one of her mirror duplicates all along before shattering him. Ironically, Eva later learns that she herself is a mirror duplicate and the real Eva is dead.
  • Supergirl (2015): Samantha Arias seemed to be a completely average single mother raising her daughter Ruby. Then she starts developing powers like super strength and durability. She meets her own mother, who explains that she found her as a baby in a spaceship. When she goes on a journey and forms the Fortress of Sanctuary, the Fortress' AI tells her she is a genetically engineered being from Krypton, but her Teen Pregnancy with Ruby delayed her development, which is why her powers are only emerging now instead of in her teens like it normally goes with Kryptonians. She becomes excited, thinking she can become a great hero like Supergirl, but the AI informs her she was designed to be Supergirl's enemy and then burn the world of man down. Horrified, Samantha tries to reject it, but the AI forces her to revert to her "true" self, Reign, the Worldkiller. Eventually, Samantha manages to kill her Reign personality, at the cost of her powers.
  • Legends of Tomorrow: Ava Sharpe had no idea she was a clone from the year 2213 and even fainted in horror when she saw all the copies of her. Turns out Rip Hunter created her in a lab, gave her Fake Memories about her past, and deleted all evidence of her creation so that she never finds out the truth.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003) has done this with five characters. Boomer spends the first season wrestling with the slow realization that she's the Tomato in the Mirror, a Cylon Manchurian Agent. Moreover, as of the Season Three finale, Tory Foster, Galen Tyrol, Sam Anders and Saul Tigh are "triggered", and realise they're Cylons as well.
  • Boomer literally has a bad experience with her locker mirror, on which someone (herself? - even her Cylon personality isn't sure) has written the word CYLON in big yellow letters.
  • Starbuck goes through her own version of this trope after finding her own dead body and crashed Viper, which is problematic on multiple levels because the Cylons are able to resurrect into new bodies through Brain Uploading but it's known that there are only twelve human-form models and they've all already been revealed by that point. Turns out she's just a literal angel.
  • And in the series finale, Head-Baltar and Head-Six explain in the final scene set hundreds of thousands of years later that Mitochondrial Eve is actually Hera (the human/Cylon hybrid infant that both sides have been desperately trying to protect or kill) thus making Us the descendants of three species: the Cylons, the Colonial humans and the Earth humans. WE ARE THE TOMATOES!
• Being Human (US), Sally Malick is first hunted by a ghost calling himself the Reaper, who claims that it is his duty to destroy ghosts who, like Sally, have stayed on earth too long or who have become destructive in some way. Then the Reaper starts trying to recruit Sally to become a Reaper, and then starts destroying innocent ghosts, increasingly seeming like a psychopathic serial killer. Yet, for some reason, everyone seems to be blaming Sally for the killings, even though she is desperately trying to stop the Reaper. Until the reveal that she is the Reaper.
• Black Mirror
  • In the episode "White Bear", the reason why Victoria is unable to remember who she is and what is going on around her is because the White Bear employees are keeping her in an Amnesia Loop, psychologically breaking her down through a Trauma Conga Line again and again. The reason why this is happening is because the little girl she saw in a photograph she thought was her daughter was actually her and her boyfriend's victim, and she recorded the six year-old's torture and death at her boyfriend's hands.
  • In the climax of "Joan is Awful", we learn that the Joan we've been following (played by Annie Murphy) and her celebrity sidekick Salma Hayek are told that they're not the real Joan and Salma Hayek, nor is their world real: it is the first level of the Joan is Awful simulation, where Joan discovers a famous actress is playing her on a TV show. Protagonist Joan and Salma Hayek destroys the quantum computer making it all possible, and in the end we see the real Joan and Annie Murphy (whose role Salma Hayek was simulating in the program) becoming friends.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The Buffybot, in her premier in the episode "Intervention". Not only did she think that the real Buffy looked like her, but so did everyone else. Also parodied, in that the Buffybot is quite overtly a heavily Flanderized version of Buffy herself; Buffy is, not entirely surprisingly or unreasonably, a bit pissed that her friends were completely unable to tell the difference. Especially since "s/he's a robot" as an immediate explanation for the Monster of the Week was almost a Running Gag for the season up to that point — and everyone pegged April as a robot just a few episodes earlier.
  • Dawn's among the last to learn that she's a magical Key transformed by monks into an Artificial Human with Fake Memories and is really only six months old.
  • A long sequence in "The Replacement" follows "real" Xander watching another Xander doing various errands and "hypnotizing" people. This convinces the "real" Xander (and the viewers) that the other Xander is the Monster of the Week, Toth, who blasted Xander with some kind of magical staff earlier and so could plausibly have taken on his form. Eventually, "real" Xander discovers that he is Xander's weaker points and the other Xander is Xander's stronger points; they were separated by the demon's staff attack. The coin he's using to "hypnotize" is merely a nickel he found squashed by a train that he plays with in idle moments.
• Played for laughs in Chappelle's Show, which had a sketch featuring a rabid member of the KKK who's blind so he doesn't realize that he's black.
• Charmed (1998): A group of mysterious beasts attack magical creatures during the ultra-rare second blue moon in a year. The Charmed Ones set up a trap to catch them... only to wake up and find themselves in the trap. Turns out the blue moon turned them into those beasts. It Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
• Dark Matter (2015): In the first episode, the crew awaken from stasis on their ship with total Identity Amnesia and name themselves One through Six as a placeholder in the order they woke up. Following their pre-programmed course to a mining colony, they learn that the settlers are in conflict with the corrupt MegaCorp Ferrous Corporation and have heard that brutal mercenaries called "the Raza" (known to Leave No Survivors, leading to them being spoken of with much fear and wild rumors about their nature) have been hired by Ferrous as deniable enforcers to wipe them out so the company can take their land and the valuable nearby asteroid belt. The crew's best working theory is that they themselves are the people the colonists say have been sent by a man named Hrothgar to help them fight the Raza off, since their cargo hold is full of weapons and their team Nice Guy One found a pendant like Hrothgar's in his quarters. Meanwhile, the ship's android finishes recovering some of the wiped computer files about its crew. They are the mercenaries, and their ship is named the Raza. Each of them is guilty of at minimum Murder and Assault and then a grab bag of other crimes. They boosted the weapons from Hrothgar's people and killed them, taking the pendant as well. As you might expect, this leads to lots of Amnesiac Dissonance, especially for One, Two and Six (while Five is an apparently innocent teenage girl who's not in the files to begin with).
• Doctor Who:
  • "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood": The Doctor turns himself into a human teacher in 1913, through use of a device called a Chameleon Arch, which looks like a pocket watch. Of course the viewer knows who he really is, but the Doctor doesn't and once he finds out he's pretty shocked and doesn't want to go back.
  • The climax of "Utopia" revolves round the revelation that the kindly human Professor Yana is, unbeknownst to him, the Tomato in the Mirror, a "sleeper" personality and biological disguise created by the Doctor's archenemy the Master, previously thought dead. His original personality and biology is contained in a Chameleon Arch pocket watch, and released when Yana is tempted into opening the watch.
  • "Turn Left": The time-beetle on Donna's back counts, considering that while the audience knew about it, Donna didn't, and anyone who stared at her back, knowing something invisible was there, was instantly met with Donna telling them off for acting so strange, only for her to find out there was something (horrifying, too) there.
  • "The Next Doctor": The Doctor finds another person who claims to be the Doctor, whom he takes to be a future version of himself. This other Doctor is investigating a series of deaths beginning with the disappearance of one man. It turns out the new "Doctor" is that vanished man — he'd had info about the Doctor overwritten over his mind accidentally through making contact with a Dalek information vault plus the trauma of just having seen his wife killed and son abducted by Cybermen.
  • "Victory of the Daleks": Professor Edwin Bracewell believes he is an Allied scientist who created a new form of unmanned weapon. He is actually an android, powered by what is effectively a bomb, created by the Daleks as part of their cover.
    Bracewell: But I created you!
    Dalek: No. We created you!
  • "The Pandorica Opens":
    • Rory and the Roman Legion, who are actually Autons.
    • At the end of the episode, the Doctor discovers that an alliance of all his historical opponents has joined forces to fight and imprison what they consider to be the most dangerous, monstrous and terrifying being to ever exist: him.
  • "The Almost People": Amy is in fact a Ganger avatar, with the real Amy in a medical-looking tube thing and about to give birth.
  • "Asylum of the Daleks": Oswin Oswald helps the Doctor from her crashed escape pod. When he finally reaches her, it turns out the Daleks had captured and converted her into a Dalek long ago. Her human body and escape pod were a delusion she used to forget what had happened.
  • "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" has a subversion in Tricky, who is told by his superiors that he's an android. After he is proven to feel pain, the Doctor knows he is not only human, but the superiors' youngest brother. The brothers told him he was a robot after a traumatic injury from which he gained amnesia and cybernetic prostheses, so that they could gaslight him and get away with abusing him.
  • Intentionally invoked by the 10th, 11th and War Doctors in "The Day of the Doctor". The Doctors use a memory erasure beam to force the members of UNIT present and the shapeshifting Zygon invaders impersonating them to forget if they're human or Zygon. This forces them to create a treaty that's totally fair to both sides, including peaceful settlement of the Zygons on Earth, because none of them (with the exception of the two Osgoods, who keep quiet) know which they'll be turn out to be when they get their memories back.
  • "Extremis": Over the course of the episode, the Doctor, Bill and Nardole discover they aren't the real deal, but in fact simulants in a computer simulation created by the villainous Prophets of Truth in preparation for invading Earth. The simulated Doctor manages to send a warning to the real Doctor before the Prophets can shut him down.
  • "The Doctor Falls": Bill, whom we last saw converted into a Cyberman, appears to be back to her old face, with only the chest unit that she's gotten used to after ten years still remaining. Yet she's left out in a barn, and everyone acts afraid of her. It isn't until she literally sees herself in a mirror that we see she's still a Cyberman physically, and we've only seen her as human because we're seeing her point of view.
  • "Fugitive of the Judoon": Ruth Clayton is not a normal human woman. She's a Time Lord under the effects of a Chameleon Arch. And not just any Time Lord, but an incarnation of the Doctor — an incarnation whom Thirteen doesn't recognise, and who doesn't recognise her either.
  • "The Timeless Children": It turns out that the Doctor is not actually a normal Time Lord, or even originally from Gallifrey. She was actually found as a child by a Negative Space Wedgie untold eons ago by the first Gallifreyan space traveller, and it is from her that every other Time Lord that has ever existed derives the ability to regenerate. As a result, she has vast swathes of past lives that have been erased from her memory (the above-mentioned Ruth being one of them) before becoming the First Doctor we know.
• Dollhouse: Given that this series's premise involves human beings re-programmed with artificial personalities and Fake Memories to serve various clients' needs, it's set up for this trope:
  • In the episode "Omega" we find out that Dr Claire Saunders is actually a former Doll, Whiskey, who was re-purposed after Alpha scarred her face and killed the original Dr Saunders (an avuncular old man) in the incident where he went rogue.
  • Later, after seeing Senator Daniel Perrin campaigning against the Rossum Corporation and investigating the rumored existence of the Dollhouse, we find that Perrin's wife is his handler, and he himself is a Doll. The whole purpose of his zealous investigation into Rossum's mind-wiping activities was so that he could discover "evidence" exonerating them at the end and place them above suspicion.
  • Played for Laughs in a scene where Sierra (played by Dichen Lachman who is ethnic Tibetan on her mother's side), programmed as a snobby Brit as part of some client's kink, doesn't want to get her treatment from Ivy because "I'm not comfortable with, uh, orientals."
• In the final episode of the short-lived series Do No Harm, Jason, who has spent the entire series trying to rid himself of his dubiously moral second persona, Ian (supposedly his long-dead twin brother) learns that, in fact, young Ian killed young Jason. HE is the double, invented by Ian. Worse, he learns this just as the doctor he thinks will be destroying Ian, but who has actually double-crossed him, injects him/Ian with a chip that will eliminate him forever. Cue "Goodbye Jason" and the end of the series.
• Don't Look Deeper: The whole plot is prompted by Aisha discovering she's really an android, with no idea beforehand this was the case, after damaging herself when drunk.
• The Fear Itself episode "New Year's Day". A young woman wakes up during a Zombie Apocalypse and tries to get to her friend's apartment. At episode's end, it's revealed she committed suicide the previous night and is now one of the zombies.
• In The Haunting Hour episode "My Imaginary Friend", a preteen boy named Shawn is being influenced by a Jerkass bad boy named Travis who tries to help him become popular. Unfortunately, he does so by continually getting Shawn into trouble. Shawn's older brother David is very worried by this, particularly since Travis is Shawn's Imaginary Friend. Things go from bad to worse when Travis becomes visible to David and tries to kill him as he keeps getting in the way of his and Shawn's "fun." Shawn prevents Travis from killing David by imagining Travis away but he is hurt by a lifting hook in the process. When he regains consciousness, his dad presents him with a get well card from his classmates and he realises that he has many more friends than he thought. David tells Shawn that this means that he no longer needs his imaginary friends. Shawn agrees with this and it is revealed that David is likewise a figment of Shawn's imagination, something which David didn't know. In spite of his pleas that he does not want to go, he vanishes out of existence.
• In The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Eleanor "Nell" Crain is among the worst-affected of her siblings by her childhood from living in the titular haunted Hill House, with one particular spirit that she calls the "Bent-Neck Lady" showing up in her nightmares, and then appearing in front of her multiple times after the death of her husband. In an attempt to gain closure and stop the haunting, she drives back to Hill House to prove to herself that the spirit only came from an unrelated corpse. This turns out to be an elaborate lure from the Hill House spirits, particularly from her dead mother, who tricks her into hanging herself from a staircase bannister. Through a montage of moments where Nell was haunted, it's revealed that Nell was the Bent-Neck Lady. She understandably does not take the news well as she dies.
• The core premise of Invasion. Set in a small Florida coastal town, several characters return from unremembered experiences in the water feeling not quite themselves. At first they appear to have been altered by mysterious glowing creatures, who may or may not be aliens, in the water. But it's soon revealed that they are in fact altered copies, and their originals were killed in the duplication process. Since they have the same memories, emotions, and personality as their originals, it raises the issue of whether and why they should be considered a different person at all. Each of them, and their 'unaltered' friends and family, answers the question a little differently. Sadly, the series was canceled after one season, so this was never resolved.
• In The Invisible Man, the episode "The Other Invisible Man" opens with the Official (head of the low-funded agency employing the titular character) is attacked by a man who secreted quicksilver (the chemical responsible for turning people invisible via a gland implanted in their bodies), but Darien Fawkes, the active Invisible Man, affirms it wasn't him, prompting the Official's assistant Eberts to mention the idea that the attacker was Simon Cole, the original subject of the I-Man project, who was apparently trapped in his invisible state. Darien realises that he can see Simon when he turns his eyes invisible, but when the Official regains consciousness, he reveals that there is only one gland; the Official killed a crazed Simon in self-defence and Darien is essentially "possessed" by aspects of Simon's personality and memory that were imprinted on the gland, with his sightings of Simon just a hallucinatory side-effect.
• Weirdly inverted by The Muppets in the "Secrets of the Muppets" episode of The Jim Henson Hour. You'd think the revelation that they are only puppets would shock the Muppets, but in fact they already know about it, and just find it intensely creepy (they avoid looking down and call anyone who uses "the P word" a traitor). But at the end they look and realize "There's nothing but floor down there!". Apparently they are real, which turns the rest of the episode into a bit of a Mind Screw.
• Kamen Rider loves this trope. If the monsters in the show have human guises (or in the case of one show, were humans), a likely way to go about this is revealing one of the main character to one of them. Examples include:
  • Takumi can use Faiz Rider Gear because he is the Wolf Orphenoch.
  • Hajime is the Joker Undead.
  • Tsurugi is the Scorpion Worm.
  • Tsukasa is the Great Leader of Dai-Shocker.
  • Emu not only has Game Disease, but is also Patient Zero for the epidemic.
  • Sento and Ryuuga are human Smash. Sento also has a different flavor in the revelation that he is Takumi Katsuragi, founder of Faust and creator of all its technology.
  • The Igarashi Siblings are the decendants of Giff and basically half-demons.
  • Neon's father had her created using a DGP wish as a Replacement Goldfish for his dead daughter, Akari.
• In the Grand Finale of Mr. Robot, Elliot learns that he's not actually Elliot Alderson, he's another of Elliot's alternate personalities who became dominant shortly before the events of the series began.
• In Night Visions, in an episode named "My So-Called Life and Death", a girl discovers she and her family died and are now ghosts.
• In an episode of Once Upon a Time we follow the story of Red Riding Hood, whose grandmother is trying desperately to keep her from seeing her boyfriend at night. Red becomes convinced that he is the Big Bad Wolf that is terrorizing the town, when it is actually Red herself that's the werewolf, inherited from her mother, and Granny was trying to save the boyfriend's life.
• The Outer Limits (1995):
  • "Birthright": A senator gets into a car crash and gets caught up in an alien plot to poison the atmosphere so humans will die and aliens take over. It turns out he was one of the aliens, who got amnesia from the crash so that only his implanted human memories remained.
  • Several other episodes where people find out they are really robots, clones, etc.
• Power Rangers:
  • In Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, a villain gives the Humongous Mecha a virus, and it's spread to the base... and then to the Red Ranger, Mack, who turns out to be an android.
  • In Power Rangers Turbo: Justin notes that the other Rangers are acting odd, and finds out that they are really robots. At the end of the episode, it's revealed that Justin himself was a robot, who was programmed so that he didn't know he was a robot, and that the real Ranger team built them to help Zordon on Eltar. Lot of good that did...
  • At the end of the Power Rangers Dino Fury episode "The Invasion", Amelia's supposed grandfather Pop-Pop tells her that her long-lost parents were Rafkonians. She accepts that she's not human in the next episode, where she reads his mind, which causes her antennae to appear.
• The Prisoner (1967):
  • In the episode "The Schizoid Man", Number Six seems to have been mistaken for an agent trained to impersonate him. Evidence mounts that in fact he is the impostor, and has forgotten his own identity. But in the end, the trope is subverted as he realizes that's what they want him to think.
  • Bizarrely enough, the Mind Screw ending of "Fall Out" implies that this is the entire premise of the series.
• QI gave us this gem of an exchange:
  Emma Thompson: You know the word "luvvie"?
  Stephen Fry: Yeah?
  Emma: What do you all feel about it?
  Stephen: [sigh] I mean, I'm not going to get as upset as some actors do — some actors say, "We do a bloody hard job of work, we're serious people, you know, it's a coal face, doing a play! How dare they call us luvvies!" I think that's a bit overdone. On the other hand, it's a bit tedious when the Daily Mail says "luvvie couple XYZ", or something....
  Emma: Do you know what the first citation of it is in the OED?
  Stephen: No.
  Emma: It's you.
  [cue My God, What Have I Done? reaction from Stephen]
• In one episode of Quantum Leap, Sam finds himself in the body of someone in a mansion where everyone thinks there's a vampire on the loose. He, of course, thinks this absurd. After clearing up the situation, he finally gets around to looking in a mirror... and doesn't reflect. Literal Tomato "in the Mirror". This was hinted in the end of the previous episode, where we see the character Sam switched with actually had vampire fangs (played by Robert MacKenzie, who bears a close resemblance to Christopher Lee).
• Quark. Captain Quark has two beautiful Bridge Bunnies whom he'd love to have sex with, but one of them is a clone which is taboo. Unfortunately being an identical clone, the clone also believes she's the original, so whenever Quark asks which is the clone they both point at each other and say, "She is!"
• Red Dwarf:
  • This trope is played with in the episode "Out of Time", when Lister is apparently revealed to be a Ridiculously Human Robot. He is floored by the revelation, but gets no sympathy from Kryten, who points out that his emotions are only artificial. However, the moment the crew escapes the unreality pocket through which they were traveling at the time, he becomes human again. (In fact, as the other reality was false, he had never been anything but human.)
  • Rimmer in various episodes. In "The Inquisitor", a copy of himself provides a Reason I Suck Speech; in "Terrorform", it's through a speech delivered by a living version of his self-loathing; and in "Rimmerworld", he is marooned on a planet with only his clones for company.
• The Rising: In Episode 1, at first Neve believes her mom's just ignoring her when she comes home. Then after Katie does the same thing, she realizes gradually she's dead, a ghost they can't see or hear. It takes Neve a long time to figure out what's up, since at first it seems like she's still alive in every other respect besides this.
• Sabrina the Teenage Witch: Sabrina once got herself and her mortal friends stuck in a murder mystery train, with the only way out being to solve the murder of her boyfriend-at-the-time Josh. Unfortunately, each of her friends has been overwritten by a character that had motive and means to kill Josh's character, which puts her at a bind... until Salem gets on the train, and eliminates each suspect one by one, until he deduces that Sabrina's character poisoned Josh's before the train ride started.
  Sabrina: IT'S TRUE! IT'S TRUE! I'M THE MURDERER, I KILLED JOSH! Wow, I totally didn't see that one coming.
• In an episode of Sliders, the world is populated almost entirely by androids, and one human scientist who attempts to create an android with the transplanted memories of Quinn. It turns out that the scientist actually died, and his memories have been transplanted into an android version of himself, without him actually knowing that.
• Stargate:
  • Stargate SG-1 did it at least three times:
    • "Tin Man": The SG-1 team seems to have been transferred into robot bodies by a lonely alien maintenance man. In the end, they find out that they weren't transferred, they were copied, with the originals still alive.
    • "Fragile Balance": Jack O'Neill wakes up after an alien abduction to find himself in a body 30 years younger... and slowly dying. After convincing his colleagues of his identity and tracking down his abductor, Loki, he finds that he is actually a genetically damaged clone of the original O'Neill (still with Loki). After being freed, O'Neill convinces Thor to fix the clone's genes so that he can live his own life (and go to high school).
  • Stargate Atlantis likes it even more:
    • In "Michael", 'Lieutenant Michael Kenmore' awakens in Atlantis's infirmary, unable to remember who he is. After being informed of who he is and that he barely survived terrible injuries from a raid deep in enemy territory, he is let out and undergoes psychiatric therapy (including periodic drug injections) for the strange nightmares he keeps having. He eventually discovers secret observation videos of himself in the infirmary, and is horrified to discover that he is actually a vampiric Wraith that was transformed into a human using an experimental genetic drug, which also wipes the recipient's memories.
    • In "This Mortal Coil", Sheppard, McKay, Ronon, Teyla, and later Dr. Weir find that they are copies of themselves created by the Asurans, and that the version of Atlantis they are in is also a copy. They come to take it remarkably well, especially McKay. Mostly because of McKay's insight into the situation.
    • In "The Kindred", Carson Beckett is finally found and rescued by the team. The only problem: they witnessed him die in a crisis in Atlantis, so they weren't even looking for him. But he insists and is sure that he is the real Beckett. Turns out he is a clone with the original's memories. Ironically, it was the above Michael who created him.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • "Whispers": We follow Miles O'Brien in flashback form as he seems to combat a station-wide conspiracy to sabotage peace talks amongst two alien factions; turns out the O'Brien we're watching was actually a "replicant", sent by one of the alien factions and programmed to assassinate the leaders of the other faction. The rest of the crew were acting suspiciously because they knew about the switch and were waiting for the replicant O'Brien to attempt his mission, but the replicant was so perfect that he/it ended up acting just as the real one would.
  • In the episode "Second Skin", Kira is kidnapped by the Cardassian Obsidian Order as part of an anti-dissident setup and told she is actually Iliana Ghemor, a spy, who was implanted with false memories so even she would believe her cover story, sent to infiltrate the Bajoran resistance. Subverted in that she is not Iliana Ghemor, but Iliana is a real person, who really did have false memories implanted so she could infiltrate the Bajoran resistance. It's all part of a trap to reveal that Iliana's father is part of the dissident movement as he decides to smuggle her off Cardassia when Kira refuses to believe it. (As the elder Ghemor points out, they had to use an imposter because the real Iliana would have regained her memories and cooperated with the Order, leaving no reason for him to reveal himself.)
    • The writers actually considered having Kira turn out to have been Iliana all along without knowing it, or at least being left in uncertainty about the question, but it was decided that this would cause too much of a Continuity Snarl.
• Star Trek: Discovery: Towards the end of Season 1, Starfleet lieutenant and former prisoner of war Ash Tyler discovers he's actually the Klingon Voq, surgically altered to look human and programmed with the original Ash Tyler's memories and personality.
• Star Trek: Enterprise: In "Similitude", Trip is seriously injured and becomes comatose. In order to obtain the neurological material needed to save his life, Phlox grows a mimetic symbiote injected with his DNA that becomes an exact, albeit fast-growing, duplicate of Trip, memories and all, whom the crew names Sim. While the audience knows what's happening, Sim doesn't, leading to a growing suspicion of the discrepancy between his false and real memories and eventually a dramatic discovery of the real Trip's comatose body.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • Defied in "Inheritance". Juliana Tainer is programmed to shut down in the event that she discovers that she's actually an android. A program in Dr Soong's image gives Data the choice of either letting her continue to believe she's human or telling her the truth when he reactivates her; Data chooses the former.
  • Happens to a damaged, amnesiac Data in the episode "Thine Own Self" when Data takes up a life in a pre-industrial village. The reveal is obviously not a shock to the audience, but a big one to Data.
  • The episode "Eye of the Beholder" plays with this trope in all sorts of ways. It turned out that an empath who had died during Enterprise's construction had left a sort of 'psychic residue' which had imposed the dead man's memories on empathic crew members unfortunate enough to wander into its proximity (it had caused one such crewman to commit suicide). Troi at one point actually screams in horror when she doesn't recognize her own reflection.
• Star Trek: The Original Series:
  • Happens in the episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" with Nurse Chapel's lost boyfriend. In this case, the boyfriend knew all along that he's an android body containing the human's memories. What he doesn't realize until the end is that he's not "the same person", as demonstrated by his amoral and insane actions over the course of the episode.
  • Also happens to Kirk in "The Paradise Syndrome".
    "Behold the god who bleeds!"
  • And with Rayna in "Requiem for Methuselah".
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • In "Concerning Flight", Voyager gets attacked by Space Pirates who steal various pieces of their technology, including the ship's Leonardo da Vinci holoprogram and the Doctor's mobile emitter. When they track down the pirates, they discover Leonardo, who thinks he's been brought to "America". But while escaping, he gets hit by one of their weapons and is perturbed when he sees he isn't hurt, expressing extreme discomfort and fear with what he recognizes as sorcery, again an aspect of his program limitations. Eventually, Janeway grounds him with an analogy — if he was a bird, he would not understand the greater world of art, politics and philosophy. So to there are wonders which even Leonardo da Vinci cannot comprehend.
  • In "Course: Oblivion", the entire crew realized that they were in fact not the real Voyager crew. Several episodes earlier, a semi-sentient, planet-spanning, not-quite-lifeform on an inhospitable planet they visited to refill on deuterium had replicated the entire crew. Unbeknownst to the original crew, they eventually copied the entire ship, too, right down to the last bulkhead. They forgot they were copies and made warp drive modifications that were harmful to themselves, so they raced back to Voyager hoping to get more genetic samples to save themselves. They failed to get back before disintegrating completely, dissipating just before they could contact Voyager.
  • Played for Laughs when the holographic Doctor is singing a duet on the holodeck. The holographic diva starts complaining about his tempo. "It's like singing with a computer!"
• Supernatural:
  • In "Roadkill", the Monster of the Week doesn't know she actually is dead (and thus, a spirit haunting a stretch of highway) until the end of the episode.
  • The Monster of the Week in "Heart" has no memory of her transformations into a werewolf, so she doesn't truly realize what she is until Sam traps her in her apartment and she awakens to see how she's torn the place up.
  • In "I Know What You Did Last Summer", Sam and Dean meet Anna, who is an escaped mental patient who has accurate visions of the impending apocalypse. She reveals she can hear the angels talk to each other as well. Under hypnosis, she remembers she's a Fallen Angel.
  • In Season 7, Dean tracks down a faith healer he thinks he can help Sam, only to discover that the faith healer, calling himself Emmanuel, is a Not Quite Dead Castiel. Emmanuel knows he has healing powers but has no idea he's an angel until Meg tells him to his face. He only remembers his true identity when he starts smiting demons.
• In the Super Sentai parody short "Rolling Bomber Special", Shingo Katori of SMAP fame plays the Unlucky Everydude who keeps getting attacked by the (fortunately very ineffective) Super Sentai "Freshmen", who think he's the destroyer of worlds they've been hunting all this while. It's not till he's 'activated', via the Freshmen getting their ultimate attack to work properly, and xenomorphic-like limbs start ripping out of his body that he realizes they were right.
• The Torchwood episode "Sleeper" has a seemingly human woman with a seemingly happy life (complete with job and husband) find out that she's actually an alien who will be "triggered" to wage a campaign of terror on Earth.
• Treadstone: One of the main characters is Intrepid Reporter Tara Coleman. It's only in the penultimate episode that it's revealed that she is one of the cicadas whose story she is investigating.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • "The Hitch-Hiker": A young woman who is driving across the US keeps seeing and being frightened by a strange-looking hitchhiker. Near the end of her journey, she discovers that she actually died in a car accident near the beginning of her journey and the hitchhiker is Death who wants to take her to the afterlife. At the end of the episode, she looks in the mirror and sees the hitchhiker, rather than her own reflection.
  • "The After Hours": Marcia White's shopping trip to a department store goes awry, as the people she talks to seem to transform into mannequins. In the end, we find out that she is a mannequin, whose month posing as a human is up; the others were concerned because she was late getting back. Also used in the '80s remake.
  • "The Lateness of the Hour": A young woman is frustrated by her parents, who have become completely dependent on their robotic servants and who forbid her to leave the house. She eventually convinces her parents to dismantle the robots and then declares her intention to go out into the world. It's then that she discovers that she's just another of their robots, which causes her to have a massive Freak Out. The episode ends with her being reprogrammed to be their maid with seemingly no memory of her previous role.
  • "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" is also an example. A clown, a hobo, a dancer, a bagpiper and a major wake in a prison with smooth walls and an open top. They speculate for a long time about where they could be and at one point the major calls the place "Hell" but at the end it is revealed that they're all toys that are to be donated to the less fortunate children during the Christmas season. Their prison is a donation bin.
  • "Four O'Clock": A self-righteous man goes around telling anyone who will listen that at precisely four o'clock he will, by sheer force of will, cause every evil person on the planet Earth to shrink to two feet tall. Four o'clock rolls around and the man finds himself shrunk to a height of two feet tall, much to his chagrin. This implies that he has in fact succeeded in causing every evil person on Earth to shrink...
  • "In His Image": After murdering a woman on the subway platform, Alan Talbot returns to his hometown with his fiancée, but discovers that nothing is the way he remembers it. Then he discovers that he is really a robot created 8 days prior, and all his memories were a fiction of his creator Walter Ryder, who wanted to build a more perfect version of himself.
• The Twilight Zone (2019): In "Among the Untrodden", Irene was just an imaginary friend of Madison's.
• An episode of The X-Files about the Mandela Effect opens with a scene from an apparently non-existent Twilight Zone episode (which eventually turns out to be a knock-off show called The Dusky Realm) in which a man in a diner says there are Martians everywhere, but nobody seems to notice them, and says to the guy behind the counter that there's one standing at the window. The server tells him it's not a window, it's a mirror. Then it gets weird.
• In WandaVision, the Vision is one of the main characters, despite having been killed by Thanos at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. How he returned to life isn't revealed for most of the series, and he seems unable to remember his life as an Avenger or anything that happened to him before he and Wanda moved to Westview. In Episode 8, the audience learns that the Vision we've been following for most of the series is actually an artificial construct Wanda created from nothing by using Chaos Magic, while the real Vision is still dead and in the custody of the S.W.O.R.D. organization.

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