This is your one and only warning: Your screen will be filled with dramatized stories of scientific research and experiments some people might find controversial and disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.
Ask yourself: does progress always come at a price? Are some experiments too risky or just wrong? A little curiosity can't hurt anyone...can it?
Such is the premise of Science Channel's Dark Matters: Twisted but True. Hosted by actor John Noble of Fringe and The Lord of the Rings fame, the show takes the viewer inside the laboratory to profile strange science and expose some of history's most bizarre experiments. This show uses narration and reenactments to portray the stories in this show.
Tropes Include:
- And I Must Scream: The story of the "voodoo zombie" victims in "How to Make a Zombie". The victims are paralyzed in order to appear dead but buried alive whiel fully conscious. After that their souls are enslaved by the zombie maker and made to do hard labor.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: Some of the stories are pretty much the very definition of this trope.
- Body Horror: One story told of a man who had a hole in his stomach after being shot, but the hole did not close, so he had to eat by putting a plug in the hole. The doctor working on him sees this as a window of opportunity to see how the stomach works, much to the man's discomfort.
- Brown Note: One segment covers the story of the song, "Gloomy Sunday" and how it supposedly drove people to suicide.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance:
- Despite Leon Theremin being a famous musician and inventor in America, he was blacklisted for marrying a black woman.
- Mary Mallon refuses to believe and didn't understand that she was responsible for a Typhoid outbreak due to being an Asymptomatic carrier and not washing her hands after going to the toilet, on the grounds she wasn't displaying any Typhoid symptoms despite the fact all of the households she worked at ended up having Typhoid.
- Hedy Lamarr was a brilliant scientist who invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum tech that would help the Allies during World War 2 but her ideas were dismiss due to her gender.
- Dr. Joseph Goldberger tried to disprove the thought that pellagra was caused by disease instead of inferior dietary changes by eating the feces, urine, semen, spit, sweat and blood of pellagra victims and didn't get the disease. Unfortunately, people in the south refused to listen to the words of a Northerner (let alone a Jewish New Yorker) so they stuck with the thought that pellagra is a contagious disease for years until over a decade after Goldberger's death.
- Dirty Commies: Some experiments were conducted by the Soviet Union such as the failed human/ape hybrid soldier project. And then there's the story of the "lost Cosmonauts".
- Easy Amnesia: Poor Henry Moliason. After he had a brain surgery for his seizures, it resulted in him remembering nothing but his twenty-seven years of memories; although his working memory and procedural memory were intact, he could not commit new events to his explicit memory.
- Evil Hand: The story of Alien Hand Syndrome, which is caused by damage to the corpus callosum, especially through split-brain surgery, previously used to end life-threatening epileptic seizures.
- Frankenstein Monster: Dr. Giovanni Aldini's experiments with electricity became the inspiration for Mary Shelly's novel.
- For Science!: What did you expect from a show whose main topic is about experiments either Gone Horribly Right or Gone Horribly Wrong?
- Gone Horribly Right: Sometimes, this is what happens to experiments when done under the right conditions. One of these cases was the bat bombs made during World War II. The idea was to use live bats to carry bombs to Japanese buildings and have them explode when they took roost. Unfortunately, when it came time to be tested, the bats took roost in the US training facility, setting the place on fire when the bombs went off. On the plus side, no one was hurt and it did prove the weapon worked. On the downside, the bat bombs were never used in the field as the atomic bomb beat it to the punch.
- Other times it can also lead to...
- Gone Horribly Wrong: One of these cases was nicknamed the Monster Study, a stuttering experiment performed on 22 orphan children in Davenport, Iowa in 1939. It was conducted by Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa. Graduate student Mary Tudor conducted the experiment under Johnson's supervision. Half of the children received positive speech therapy, praising the fluency of their speech, and the other half, negative speech therapy, belittling the children for speech imperfections. Many of the normal speaking orphan children who received negative therapy in the experiment suffered negative psychological effects, and some retained speech problems for the rest of their lives.
- Grave Robbing: Body snatchers, also called resurrectionists, would steal corpses from graveyards and sell them to scientists for anatomy class. People went through many great lengths to keep their dead loved ones out of grave robbers' hands such as putting the corpses in caged coffins. And then came William Burke and William Hare. Instead of waiting for people to die, they murdered them and sold them to Dr. Robert Knox, who didn't ask how they died as long as he got them.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Pillipp Lenard, a pioneering Nazi scientist, had Albert Einstein exiled from Europe after he started a campaign to discredit him, calling his Theory of Relativity "nothing but a Jewish fraud". Come World War II, Einstein would help America win the war.
- Jekyll & Hyde: When Dr. Horace Wells, a pioneer of anesthesia, started experimenting chloroform on himself, he went crazy and accidentally disfigured two prostitutes with a bottle of sulfuric acid. Supposedly, this is one of the inspirations for Robert Lewis Stevenson's novel.
- Large Ham: A lot of the reenactments can be laughable.
- Mad Scientist: Sometimes this tropes is subverted. Other times, it's averted.
- Playground Song: After the Burke and Hare incident, Dr. Robert Knox was forever haunted by a song children sang in the streets, "Up the close and doon the stair, But and ben' wi' Burke and Hare. Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief, Knox the boy that buys the beef."
- Space Is Noisy: The story of Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia. They were a pair of brothers and amateur radio buffs who claim to have made recordings of failed Soviet space missions in the 1960s. The recordings include an SOS morse code from an out of control space capsule, a Cosmonaut's dying breath and heartbeat and a female Cosmonaut burning up upon reentry.
- Those Wacky Nazis: Some experiments were conducted by the Nazis, or were stolen from them.
- Unwitting Pawn: Eunice Rivers, help the white doctors continue the Tuskegee syphilis experiment for forty years despite penicillin was made and available for the public, since she didn't have medical knowledge and trusted their words that the experiment was for the greater good. Even after her death, the survivors of the experiment never blame her since she continue to help them even when they were sick and dying.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Wendell Johnson tries to justify the Monster Study to Mary Tudor, who becomes worried the study is doing more harm to the orphans, by claiming by proving that stuttering was man-made and not genetic, they could help and cure more children with stuttering in the future. Despite this, Johnson does nothing to help with the orphans after the study is over, leaving them with serious self-esteem issues for the rest of their lives.
- Would Hurt a Child: There's a reason why it's called The Monster Study.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: The story of the N Rays.
