Weirdness Magnet / Live-Action TV

Weirdness Magnets on live-action TV.

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• There's a specific variant which happens in any series featuring a supernatural detective. For some reason every time they get a case, the case will be related to the supernatural—for instance, nobody walks in the door with a normal missing person's case, the missing person will have turned into a werewolf or have been sacrificed to a demon. This is despite the fact that the person with the case doesn't know that their own case is supernatural, let alone that the detective is supernatural and is the only one who knows how to handle it. Shows which do this include Angel, Blood Ties (2007), Moonlight, and The Dresden Files; it's hard to think of a supernatural detective series which doesn't.
  • And the tradition continues with Grimm. Every case Nick has had since the pilot has had a Wesen involved. Lampshaded a few times: One episode has Nick's partner Hank remark that their cases are becoming weirder and weirder and the next has a coroner remark that Nick and Hank get all of the most interesting cases. Justified in that Nick's boss knows that Nick is a Grimm and is keeping an eye on him, although it's not always obvious at first that Wesen are involved. Also, more and more Wesen are finding out about there being a new Grimm in town and are curious about him.
  • Although you could claim that they do get normal cases, they just aren't the ones we see. After all, we only see them for a small part of their lives, a show might detail one or two days a week for six months out of the year, not every day of their lives.
    • And the shows listed usually have the characters at least refer to more mundane cases, if not show them as tiny side-stories; Dresden, for examples, mentions at one point that he's usually just asked to find things.
  • Angel is actually a more interesting one, at least early on. In the beginning, Angel makes it clear to Cordy any time she brings up a non-paranormal client that they don't do that sort of thing. On the other, when Angel Investigations is contracted in season 2 to spy on a woman using alien abduction to hide cheating (and quite obviously so) the only reason Angel seems to have a problem with it is his Darla obsession.
    • Doyle's visions are a way of getting around this; one case they investigate appears to involve an ordinary police matter, but it's quickly pointed out the Powers That Be wouldn't have sent Doyle a vision unless the supernatural was involved.
    • However, the third episode starts with Angel saving a client who is an ordinary woman from her ordinary abusive ex-boyfriend.
  • Justified in Blood Ties (2007), as Vicki's demon tattoos cause supernatural things to be unconsciously drawn to her.
  • Averted in Forever Knight, as many of Nick's cases as a homicide detective are completely mundane. Things he gets up to off-duty, on the other hand....
  • Subverted in The X-Files, as the entire point of that department is to investigate supernatural phenomenon. However, this trope does crop up a few times, as even when Mulder and Scully are called in to work normal cases, they always end up having a supernatural element to them. In "Arcadia," Mulder and Scully are assigned to investigate a missing persons case in a gated community, and Mulder even complains that it's a normal case. It, of course, ends up having a supernatural perpetrator. Inverted in "Irresistible," when Mulder and Scully travel to investigate what is thought to be aliens digging up and mutilating corpses, and it instead turns out to be a very creepy human serial killer. It's implied that they do sometimes work normal cases, but in general, these are cases that Mulder thought were supernatural and turned out to be wrong.
  • Played straight in Haven, where every case Nathan and Audrey work has a Troubled person as the perpetrator. In season one, there's an offhand mention to a call they got earlier in the day that involved normal, if hilarious, small town shenanigans, but this is gone pretty quickly.
• The Barrier: What follows is the first three days covered by the series from Álex's perspective. When the family arrives in Madrid, his niece is taken away by the authorities because his brother doesn't have a job. His bother ends up working for minister because his mother-in-law used to date said minister. When Álex brings the authorities proof that his brother is employed, they are strangely reluctant to give his niece back. His recently deceased sister in-law's twin sister gets in trouble with the authorities, and now he has to pretend she's the sister his brother married. He almost gets killed by a fake member of La Résistance and ends needing to bring information to the real resistance, whose members get suspicious of him because he promised to not name his contact. Then he gets cleared because a person he has previously crossed paths with is part of the real resistance, as well.
• Invoked literally in Strange Days at Blake Holesy High: the eponymous private school is nicknamed "Black Hole High" by the students because there's a black hole in the science office that is the source of all the weirdness. There's very little that happens at the school that doesn't somehow involve the wormhole. Somewhat ironically, the science office has a sub-floor of palladium, which is non-magnetic.
• Buffyverse:
  • Buffy: Xander Harris attracts the attention of demonic females. In one episode, Willow accidentally curses him to attract vicious demons all the time. He probably comes closest to fulfilling this trope when he is recruited by Zombie Bank Robbers as a wheelman. Lampshaded in the season 7 episode "First Date" when Willow receives a text message from Xander. It's coded in such a way that it could mean either "I'm getting lucky; don't call me for a while" or "help, a demon's eating my head". Playing the odds, the Scooby Gang saves Xander from being a sacrifice for the Hellmouth just in time.
  • The Hellmouth Sunnydale is built on is the main driver for the show's plot. Everything in the show happens either because of the Hellmouth itself or because of something that happened because of the Hellmouth.
  • Buffy herself, as the Slayer, is an explicit weirdness magnet, because of all the Big Bads that come to Sunnydale specifically to kill her—such as Dracula, whom it is explicitly stated came to challenge her. The origin comic stated that Buffy, as the Slayer, is a "creature of destiny". Fate will ensure that she always ends up where she needs to be. This means that all Slayers have this trope in the job description.
  • Cordelia became the magnet in Angel, getting impregnated twice. The third time was tragic. She possibly caught the condition of being a weirdness magnet from living in Sunnydale.
• Castle: Castle and Beckett tend to gravitate toward more unusual cases. Lampshaded at the end of "Room 147" where Beckett comments, "It's okay, Castle, you know I like the weird ones."
• The study group in Community, and Greendale as a whole, are definitely this. While they do study, it's usually off-screen, and almost every day in the school year will contain something odd happening to them. The Dean lampshades this in the Season 3 episode Pillows And Blankets.

  Dean: Do people go to classes?

• The entire cast of Dead Last ended up as Weirdness Magnets after finding a medallion that let them see ghosts.
• Dharma & Greg: Dharma was definitely one; out-of-the-ordinary folk just seemed to naturally gravitate to her.
• Doctor Who:
  • They may be a time-travelling alien from an old and powerful race, but even by those standards, the Doctor manages to get caught up in cosmic trouble with absurd frequency. Even if they just pop out for a bit of air on a street corner in Cardiff, you can bet an intergalactic conspiracy will be brewing within spitting distance. By extension, the entire planet Earth may be considered one for the series; a disproportionally large number of Evil Alien Schemes happen to involve the blue marble and a disproportionately large number of alien craft happen to crash-land here, and, for that matter, London in the series' "present" in particular.
  • A nice lampshading was done on this in "Battlefield", where the modern-day version of UNIT regarded the Seventh Doctor as a troublemaker, since wherever he turned up, all hell broke loose. (On the other hand, part of Andrew Cartmel's plan in the last days of the classic series was an attempt to avert this, in keeping with the Seventh Doctor's Chessmaster status. When he showed up just as some strangeness was getting underway, it was because he planned it that way.)
    • In the original series, the Brigadier explained that the invention of space travel, along with radio and television, had caused the planet to radiate a vast number of signals, and that the near-constant alien invasions stemmed from aliens responding to all the signals.
  • Somewhat averted in the new series, where a couple of times the Doctor mentions those visits to planets that did not involve crazy adventures. However, one short trip gives a good half a season of adventures.
  • The Tenth Doctor liked to describe himself as a "traveller", roaming the universe just for a bit of fun. On one occasion another character gave him an incredulous look, and he sheepishly added, "It never seems to quite work out that way."
  • Possibly justified (or maybe just hand-waved) in "The Beast Below", when the Doctor says, "It's a big day every day. I've got a time machine. I just skip the little ones."
  • Possibly averted in "The Doctor's Wife", when the TARDIS tells him it does not always take him where he wants to go, but instead has always taken him where he needs to be.
  • In two separate stories ("Aliens of London" and "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances"), London's Albion Hospital wound up receiving a mysterious, alien-connected patient: a modified pig and the first of the gas-mask zombies.
• Short-lived series Eerie, Indiana—clearly related to the book series cited above—depicted a town that attracted Weird the way Sunnydale attracted Evil.
• In Farscape, Leviathan starships, especially Moya and her son Talyn, attract alien predators, guests with malicious intent, social outcasts and criminals, Energy Beings, shapeshifters, Starfish Aliens and extradimensional entities. Less fantastically, they also attract trouble in general. One of the other Leviathans encountered in the series was being consumed by the Xarai, cloned minions of a dangerous escaped, insane criminal cyborg named Kaarvok who "twinned" his captives and fed on them until they degenerated into living zombies. Another Leviathan had gone insane after watching all her children be captured by the Peacekeepers, and began attacking other Leviathans to deny them the opportunity to bury their dead in the Leviathan Sacred Space. Finally, Talyn, Moya's son, was modified before birth by the Peacekeepers, making him a hybrid gunship, whereas all other Leviathans were unarmed and could only perform defensive maneuvers. Leviathans are a race of Weirdness Magnet broken Woobies.
  • John Crichton. Full stop.
• Firefly: The good ship Serenity seems to have attracted a very strange and curious crew, including an exceptional pilot, a virtual savant of an engineer, a priest who is definitely no stranger to violence, a genius doctor, and a psychic assassin.
• Friends: Phoebe was usually the source or the focus of surreal happenings.
• Oliver Wendell Douglas in Green Acres. Everyone in Hooterville (or Hootersville, if you use Mrs. Douglas's pronunciation) was weird and seemed to understand each other. Oliver was the only one who was "normal".
• Hannibal: The protagonist, Will Graham, has an empathy disorder that helps him understand serial killers, making him one of the best and most talented profilers the FBI has. It also drives him crazy and attracts an absurd number of serial killers to him. Hannibal Lecter is obsessed with him, Matthew Brown stalks, protects and kills for him, Abel Gideon speaks to him about his identity crisis, Georgia Madchen and him emotionally bond, etc. Will's life is so dark and macabre that you'd think he was the missing member of The Addams Family.
• Duncan MacLeod is this to the police and regular reporter in Highlander. They notice all the weird things where Duncan’s name comes up.
• Carl Kolchak from Kolchak: The Night Stalker. He can't help but run into various monsters.
• Lost: The Island has a habit of attracting strange and often insane people.
  • In the fifth season, Sawyer complains that he spent three years in peace, only for chaos to return along with some of his fellow survivors.
  • Partially explained in the sixth season when Jacob reveals he brought people to the island whose old lives were bad/tragic enough that they might not want to leave, given what they'd be going back to.
• Married... with Children: Even in the strange world that we see around the Bundys, Al always seemed to attract the oddest things to him.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Daredevil (2015): Nelson and Murdock have a habit of getting caught up in the activities of the criminals in Hell's Kitchen. Karen Page in particular has a case of this. Over the course of the last four episodes of season 2, she's shot at twice, witnesses three gory murders, and is taken hostage by the Hand. When Brett Mahoney first sees her after Matt rescues her from the Hand, he asks her, "Is there any shitstorm you're not a part of?"
  • The Defenders (2017): Throughout the four Netflix shows, Claire Temple finds herself running into each and every one of the four Defenders. By the time she runs into Danny Rand, she's incredibly nonplussed to learn he has superpowers.
    Danny Rand: I am the Iron Fist.
    Claire Temple: What the hell does that mean?
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Team Coulson have a habit to end in the middle of very weird missions, to the point that, despite his annoyance, Mack lampshaded that being in space was the only thing that they have done yet.
• Phyrne Fisher in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries seems to end up having a personal connection with people who are involved with the many crimes in Melbourne. And more often than not, she happens to be near the scene of crime, leading her to start investigating and subsequently causing no small amount of annoyance for Detective Inspector Jack, at least initially, until he warms up to her.
• Used, then lampshaded, then subverted in Monk. In the episode "Mr. Monk Gets Cabin Fever", Natalie observes that everywhere Monk goes, people get murdered, supposing he's followed by some karmic cloud of disaster. By the end of the episode, she changes her mind about him: he's not an example for murder, he's cosmically drawn to where murders occur so he can solve them.
  • Natalie's one to talk here. Before her daughter Julie even gets her driver's license, she was involved one way or another in at least six homicide investigations and one museum heist. In at least two novels, Julie provides a crucial clue for Monk to solve a homicide.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus once did a whole episode about such a man ("Michael Ellis").
  • Mr. Pither ("The Cycling Tour") also qualifies.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: Pearl Forrester during the Hamlet experiment namedrops the Trope when after poisoning Fortinbras; she looks at the camera and mutters exasperately, "Is it me? Am I a magnet for these idiots?!"^note It's worth noting she runs around a nigh-omnipotent being and a talking ape.
• The Orville: It's heavily based on Star Trek, so this trope (and a rude sense of humor, courtesy of Seth MacFarlane) is definitely in play. Given a couple of brilliant lampshades in Season 2. One is where the new security chief gets a partial list of some of the ship's misadventures.
  Talla: I mean, this has to be the most insane thing that's ever happened on this ship.
  Lamarr: One time I almost died 'cause I humped a statue.
  Gordon: Isaac once cut my leg off.
  Lamarr: The captain and commander? They got put in a zoo.
  Gordon: And Bortus almost crashed the ship 'cause of porn.
  Talia: ...I see.
• Anyone who has the misfortune to be a friend of the Power Rangers tends to get any and all excess weirdness dumped on them. Toby from Power Rangers Mystic Force was kidnapped by demons at least twice. They promptly put him back when they realized that A) he didn't know anything important and B) he was incredibly annoying. However, the embodiment of this trope in many Power Rangers series are none other than Bulk and Skull. No matter the Evil Plan, no matter where in Angel Grove the attack is taking place, odds are Bulk and Skull will happen to be nearby when things go down. Their interactions with monsters occurred so often that Lord Zedd knew them by name. This trope was eventually lampshaded in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers Season 3:
  Lt. Stone: I find it very odd that you two are the only ones in Angel Grove outside of the Power Rangers to face off with a different monster every week!
  Skull: Lt. Stone, it's true. Every time we turn around, well (sputters), there they are.
• The Twist kids in Round the Twist, whose experiences range from regularly running into ghosts to having their remote control blessed/cursed with the ability to affect the real world like a TV. Happens to be the precursor for similar shows such as The Zack Files. Possibly the Ur-Example of this type of kids' program.
• Lampshaded in The Sarah Jane Adventures story "Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith". Ruby White refers to the area where Sarah Jane lives as "The Ealing Triangle", citing Truman the astrologer, the Bubbleshock factory, rhinos in police cars, and alien plant life as just some of the weird things which had taken place in the area.
• Blair Sandburg in The Sentinel is called a "trouble magnet". This is flanderized in fanfiction to the point where one writer hypothesizes that it is the nature of Guides to send out a subconscious telepathic beacon to attract criminals, creeps, crazies, and other nasties for his Sentinel to deal with.
• After ticking off a Scottish god thingie, Harris Pembleton in the Canadian kids' TV show Seriously Weird is cursed (in the god's own words, to "become a magnet for all that is weird") for strange things to happen to him. This is a show with episode titles like "When Gods Get Angry", "When Yoghurt Attacks", and "When Fairies Get Mad".
  • A Greek god thingie with a Scots accent. Yes, it's that kind of program. One in which the lead automatically goes straight to Deadpan Snarker without even two seconds of "hey, that was odd" (in the pilot episode, food is hurled out of the fridge at him; he makes a smart remark to his brother). One in which his first actual success in going out with the Alpha Bitch leads to one of his friends nearly being hurled around to the other side of the earth.
• Sherlock: Sherlock, John and Mary are attracted to weirdness. "His Last Vow" points out that John's attracted to dangerous people and situations. John didn't expect this-and the main leads had no clue that Mary was an assassin from the CIA. Oh, and Sherlock, of course, is an eccentric but brilliant detective and finds John and Mary interesting, since Sherlock was interested in the fact that his friend was a soldier and that Mary is-well-you know-an assassin. She's still as loyal to John as Sherlock is, though. Still, once you consider what happened in all of the episodes, all three of them are attracted to weirdness, and can't avoid it. Heck, they can't seem to even avoid dangerous people or situations.
• Smallville takes this to ridiculous levels with the few main characters, especially Lana. During the earlier seasons, Kryptonite infection helped created a lot of freaks of the week. These meteor freaks would then almost invariably gain a fixation on Lana or Chloe and end up trying to kill them, only for Clark to save the day. Ian in "Dichotic" tops this by trying to kill them both at the same time.
  • "Accelerate": Lana's dead childhood friend is cloned and now is an Enfant Terrible with Super-Speed.
  • Season four: Lana happens to have an ancient French witch as an ancestor and is possessed by her.
  • "Thirst": Lana is turned into a vampire.
  • Season six: Chloe is also shown to be meteor-infected.
  • Lampshaded once by the sheriff when the police find the Kent house surrounded by a forcefield.
    Officer: What the hell is this, Sheriff?
    Sheriff: [sighs] Another day in Smallville.
• Fi (and, later, Annie) always seems to stumble onto something strange no matter where the family music tour takes her in the aptly-named show So Weird.
• Star Trek:
  • The various crews of the franchise seem to come across an inordinate number of rare phenomena. This was lampshaded in Q-Squared, with a scientist researching temporal phenomena explaining that she specifically requested transport by the Enterprise (even calling in favors) because it encounters more Negative Space Wedgies in a year than most ships encounter in their lifetimes. In that same book, most of the anomalies are explained as creations of Trelane, but why the Enterprise itself keeps running into them, no answers are forthcoming:
    Trelane: It's a massive sort of kismet, I suppose.
  • In addition, Picard is in awe of the sheer volume of weirdness encountered by Kirk's Enterprise:
    If there's one thing Kirk and his crew seemed incapable of doing, it's having a normal day...
  • It seems that all starships Enterprise share this. In Star Trek: Generations, the Enterprise-B had been commissioned for roughly four minutes before running afoul of her very first Negative Space Wedgie.
  • Lt. Barclay. Period.
    • And he is very much aware of it. When Picard jokingly suggests that reality as they know it may just be a fiction being played out on some kind of machine, Barclay waits until he is alone, and checks to make sure it isn't.
  • Regarding temporal anomalies this is lampshaded and partially justified in a book about the department of temporal investigations: once you run into one, it becomes more probable that others will form in your proximity^note or in places where you'll eventually be, temporal anomalies naturally involve time travel so verb tense is confusing here. Only the first Negative Space Wedgie is unusual; after that, it'd be odd to not encounter more.
  • It makes a certain amount of sense for each crew. Kirk's Enterprise was exploring the fringes of explored space and engaged in a Cold War with the Klingons and the Romulans. Picard's Enterprise and crew were designed to undertake every possible role, from diplomacy to combat to exploration to scientific studies, with their orders reflecting this; also, being the flagship, they had no set jobs so were often the most available to go investigate when something weird came up. Deep Space 9 was not only situated in a hotbed of Cardassian, Bajoran and Federation politics, it was also guarding the only known stable wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant, served as the front line in several wars and was right next to the meddlesome Bajoran Prophets. Voyager was alone in the Delta Quadrant, with little to no knowledge of what lay ahead.
  • Obliquely lampshaded by a one-shot character, Dr. Elizabeth Lense, in DS9: "Explorers". Based on her description of the USS Lexington's interstellar charting mission, the job is apparently quite boring most of the time if you aren't a member of a main cast.
  • After the USS Voyager (and Harry Kim in particular) having survived a particularly bizarre situation, Captain Janeway made the following statement:
    Janeway: Mr. Kim, we're Starfleet officers. Weird is part of the job.
• Short-lived mid-'90s Fox show Strange Luck was based around this trope. The main character goes fishing? A briefcase full of money and a dead body plunge from the sky. He worked as a freelance photographer, because all he had to do to make a living was get up and pick up a camera.
• Stranger Things: A news report seen at the end of the third season states that various conspiracy theories have started treating the town of Hawkins as such, due to the events of the series starting pile up.
• The Winchester brothers from Supernatural, half due to them actively seeking out weird stuff to kill and half due to both of them being destined by birth to be major players in the Apocalypse.
• Played with in Teen Wolf. Beacon Hills definitely draws some interesting people to it. Stiles often laments his tendency to be a human form of this as well.
• Every season of True Blood introduces at least one new, hitherto unmentioned, species of mythological being. As of season 4, it is getting to the point where almost the entire population of the podunk town Bon Temps is supernatural in some respect.
• In Warehouse 13, the warehouse that the primary protagonists work in (and the artifacts therein) is always causing some sort of trouble in weird and unexpected ways that keep the plot moving. For example, the Warehouse was designed to be a pocket dimension, and when it senses it needs more storage capacity, it tries to expand itself; in one of the episodes this causes a great deal of mayhem because it becomes stuck, preventing it from expanding and causing the whole place to shake and discharge electricity as the protagonists try to figure out what's going on. At times the Warehouse seems to be almost sentient, with a personality and agenda of its own, having absorbed some of the strange powers imbued in the supernatural items stored inside of it.
• The four main characters of The Young Ones have been visited by demons, bank robbers, murderers, Well-Intentioned Extremist Christians, the Easter Bunny in July, an African vampire/bus driver, and medieval peasants. They rarely care about or pay any attention to these occurrences.
• The Canadian kids' series The Zack Files was about the titular Zack and his friends, who chronicled all the weirdness that would inexplicably happen to him.
  • Not only is the audience expected to accept that weird stuff just happens to Zack, he even has his own theory to explain it—"maybe it's life that's weird, and I'm just the first person to notice it".
  • It gets to the point where Zack just assumes that anything happening to him is due to the ambient weirdness of his life, rather than anything more sensible. Case in point: assuming that his bank account not decreasing when he takes money out is the first time general bizarritude is working in his favor, rather than being, say, a computer error.
    • Acting on this assumption, if recalled correctly, caused his conscience to go on strike.

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