History GambitRoulette / LiveActionTV

** The plan of the Silence over series 5 and 6 is a mostly coherent, but really amazingly convoluted, so YMMV if this is a gambit rather than a roulette. [[spoiler:It ultimately fails spectacularly thanks to a paradox built into the plan causing the very events it tried to prevent.]]

** Styggron in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS13E4TheAndroidInvasion "The Android Invasion"]] has a plan for invading the Earth, and it's probably the worst one ever. He starts by creating a near-exact duplicate of a little English village and filling it with robot duplicates as a "training simulation", only he also creates a killer virus that can wipe out everyone on Earth with a single drop. He locates the lost astronaut Crayford and convinces him to turn against Earth by telling him he's put him back together after an explosion, telling him that his left eye was lost and giving him an eyepatch, despite Crayford never have being injured and still having an eye under his patch (uh...). When the Doctor and Sarah arrive (consider that they are [[OutsideContextProblem Outside Context Heroes]] whose arrival is completely unpredictable), they run into space-suited guards Styggron has positioned there, who lock the Doctor up in the prison Styggron built in the town he didn't expect anyone to visit. He manages to capture the Doctor, ties him to a memorial with plastic ivy and tries to blow him up, attempts to kill him with an AgonyBeam body scanner that allows him to produce a duplicate Doctor, and attempts to poison Sarah with prison water, but also creates an android Sarah to help the Doctor and tell him useful information (specifically, she tells him about the android duplicates, something he hadn't figured out at that point). The Doctor suggests that Styggron is feeding him information to find out how smart he is, but it's never made clear why. Maybe he was trying to lure the Doctor into facing his android double on Earth... but why? It's entirely possible Styggron doesn't even understand his own plot and was more interested in having fun playing model villages with his androids.
** Inverted — kind of — throughout the Seventh Doctor's tenure. The Seventh Doctor seems to sashay through story after story knowing exactly how to tweak every adversary's nose to ensure their destruction, often by their own hands, and never bothers to explain himself, either to poor Ace or the audience. What complicates matters further is that Fenric, one of the last adversaries he faces, claims to have been pulling a similar Roulette on the Doctor ever since he met Ace... Furthermore, many of the Seventh Doctor's Roulettes tend to come perilously close to crashing down around him as one of his adversaries complicates things by doing something he never expected, resulting in a fair bit of frantic running around trying to get everything back on track. Supposedly the reveal would have been that the Seventh Doctor was playing the ''Film/BillAndTedsExcellentAdventure'' game. His future self was setting things up so his past self would succeed... which meant that he couldn't cheat his way out of having to play XanatosSpeedChess, since his future self would remember his past self's difficulties and be unable to prevent them. It's hinted at vaguely in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS26E4Survival "Survival"]] and blatantly in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS26E1Battlefield "Battlefield"]], but the series ended before it became explicit.
** Parodied neatly in UsefulNotes/ComicRelief spoof "[[Recap/DoctorWhoTheCurseOfFatalDeath The Curse of Fatal Death]]". The joke here is that the unexpected roulettes become so expected that it is funny when they stop happening. The basic idea is that both the Doctor and the Master are using their own time machine to bribe an architect to set a trap, or UNSET a trap.
** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS29E10Blink "Blink"]] subverts it: From Sally's perspective, the Doctor's plan to stop the Angels relies on insane guesswork, but by the time it's over you can clearly see how he pulled it off. After all, [[StableTimeLoop he has a record of the entire incident given to him by Sally herself]]. It's [[TimeyWimeyBall timey-wimey]], you know.
** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E12TheStolenEarth "The Stolen Earth"]]/[[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E13JourneysEnd "Journey's End"]]: [[spoiler:Dalek Caan's]] scheme to [[spoiler:wipe out all the Daleks]] by letting them [[spoiler:create a new Dalek Empire and then ''try'' to destroy reality]] has been in the works for ages. [[spoiler:It helps that he's turned MadOracle.]]
** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E17E18TheEndOfTime "The End of Time"]]: [[spoiler:Rassilon's]] plan to escape [[spoiler:the Time War]] has encompassed [[spoiler:the Master's ''entire life'' since he was eight years old]].
** The plan of the Silence over series 5 and 6 is a really amazingly convoluted one. Much of the plan is coherent. YMMV if this is a gambit rather than a roulette. [[spoiler:It ultimately fails spectacularly thanks to a paradox built into the plan causing the very events it tried to prevent.]]
** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS32E8LetsKillHitler "Let's Kill Hitler"]] has one of these when, in a brilliant montage of spur-of-the-moment strategies, foreplanning, and lucky gambles, the Doctor manages to empty River/Melody's gun while she's not looking, replace her backup weapon with a banana and (barely) dodge her attempts at seducing him.
** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS38E10TheTimelessChildren "The Timeless Children"]]: Most notably the Master leaving the five-centimeter [[spoiler:shrunken Lone Cyberman]] in the middle of the hall of one of hundreds of similar floors on a massive spaceship, all so the Doctor can find it…after she breaks out of a mind prison in your custody on the planet below.

* ''Series/FlashForward2009'': D. Gibbons is running a massive Gambit Roulette. It becomes particularly obvious when the heroes find a hidden base in Somalia and discover a 17-year-old videocassette of D. Gibbons where he addresses them by name. Then again, he's a literal {{Chessmaster}}, and he has a lot of experience with seeing flashforwards of the future.

* ''Series/BabylonFive'': In the fourth season, Psi Cop Alfred Bester used subtle mind manipulation to make Michael Garibaldi his unwitting agent. Over time he subtly "nudged" Garibaldi's personality in the ways he wanted, heightening Garibaldi's natural suspicion, and turning him into a ManchurianAgent of a sort. As this happened, and (in many cases) as a result of the manipulation, Garibaldi took several steps that [[LampshadeHanging Bester himself admitted he hadn't--and couldn't have--anticipated]], such as Garibaldi's resignation from the command crew of Babylon 5. All of which played straight into Bester's hand. Making the entire "plan" of Bester's a hybrid of Gambit Roulette and XanatosSpeedChess.

** Inverted — kind of — throughout the Seventh Doctor's tenure. The Seventh Doctor seems to sashay through story after story knowing exactly how to tweak every adversary's nose to ensure their destruction, often by their own hands, and never bothers to explain himself, either to poor Ace or the audience. What complicates matters further is that Fenric, one of the last adversaries he faces, claims to have been pulling a similar Roulette on the Doctor ever since he met Ace... Furthermore, many of the Seventh Doctor's Roulettes tend to come perilously close to crashing down around him as one of his adversaries complicates things by doing something he never expected, resulting in a fair bit of frantic running around trying to get everything back on track. Supposedly the reveal would have been that the Seventh Doctor was playing the ''Film/BillAndTedsExcellentAdventure'' game. His future self was setting things up so his past self would succeed... which meant that he couldn't cheat his way out of having to play GambitSpeedChess, since his future self would remember his past self's difficulties and be unable to prevent them. It's hinted at vaguely in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS26E4Survival "Survival"]] and blatantly in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS26E1Battlefield "Battlefield"]], but the series ended before it became explicit.

** Walter White's goal is to convince Jesse Pinkman to work with him in order to eliminate Gus Fring, whom Jesse has formed an uneasy alliance with. The plan goes as follows: [[spoiler:Jesse keeps a vial of poison hidden inside a packet of cigarettes. Walter arranges for Walter and Jesse's lawyer, Saul Goodman, to have his bodyguard frisk Jesse and steal the vial of poison. Walter then secretly poisons Jesse's girlfriend's son, Brock, with a different, non-lethal poison (presumably because EvenEvilHasStandards or to avoid getting Jesse in too much trouble with the authorities), in hopes that Jesse will come to the conclusion that Brock had been poisoned and come confront him, whereupon Walter would convince him that Brock had been poisoned by Gus in an effort to turn Jesse against Walt, since he's a ManipulativeBastard and it would be expected from him.]] Could be considered a BatmanGambit, except the plan relies completely on Jesse not going to the authorities and getting arrested (which almost happens when Jesse tells his girlfriend the name of the poison and gets arrested later), not to mention the possibility that the HotBlooded Jesse would not be convinced by his arguments and kill him. Of course, this plan [[spoiler: backfires ''spectacularly'' against Walt when Jesse finds out the truth of his own volition and forces a confession out of Saul.]]

** Walter White's goal is to convince Jesse Pinkman to work with him in order to eliminate Gus Fring, whom Jesse has formed an uneasy alliance with. The plan goes as follows: [[spoiler:Jesse keeps a vial of poison hidden inside a packet of cigarettes. Walter arranges for Walter and Jesse's lawyer, Saul Goodman, to have his bodyguard frisk Jesse and steal the vial of poison. Walter then secretly poisons Jesse's girlfriend's son, Brock, with a different, non-lethal poison, in hopes that Jesse will come to the conclusion that Walter stole the poison from him and poisoned Brock with, and thereafter attempt to kill Walter. When Jesse is threatening to kill Walter, Walter convinces him that Brock was really poisoned by Gus in an effort to turn Jesse against Walt.]] Could be considered a BatmanGambit, except that it relies on Jesse reaching a very improbable conclusion in an OutOfCharacter manner. Of course, this plan later [[spoiler: backfires ''spectacularly'' against Walt, but until that moment it all went without a hitch.]]

** In "Plateau", the villain Milo gained [[ThePlan super plan making powers]] by taking a drug. He orchestrated peoples' deaths by setting a pen on the ground and creating a chain reaction ending in a traffic accident. In the last season it was revealed that the observers are crazy good at these, but that's justified by time travel or by the fact that time isn't even linear for them. They can see ''all points of time at once.''

''[both fume; Tyler's a dead man walking]]''

** An interesting justified version happened in the first episode, where the murder victim used Gambit Roulette to lay out a trail of clues to help the police identify her killer. Yes, it was a roulette, but considering that she had to concoct and execute this plan within the last hour or so of her life while under the watchful eyes of her killer, it makes sense that it wasn't planned out better.
** A lot of Moriarty's plans depend on this. The second series finale is the best example, with many elements apparently coming down to luck, and absolutely ''hinging'' on the police being incredibly stupid.

** Sherlock manages this in ''"The Lying Detective"'', which relies on an old drug addiction coming back and a whole array of {{Batman Gambit}}s in which everyone had to react as he anticipated within a span of ''two weeks'', all to catch a [[VillainWithGoodPublicity serial killer with good publicity]]. If that's not improbable, even Sherlock doesn't know ''what'' is.
** This trope is taken to absurd levels in ''"The Final Problem"'' as we learn about the master plan of [[spoiler:Eurus]].
*** [[spoiler:Her plan to destroy Sherlock is critically dependent on help from Moriarty. In order to meet Jim, Eurus needs to convince Mycroft to arrange a meeting for the two [[EvilGenius evil geniuses]]. This part of the plan requires Mycroft, who is phenomenally smart and is deeply caring about Sherlock, to act very dumb for no good reason and to allow an unsupervised meeting between two extremely dangerously psychotic and intelligent criminals, ''[[CardCarryingVillain who are not hiding their intentions to harm his brother]]''. If Mycroft refused, she would've lost her only chance to do anything outside her prison cell for the rest of her life. This highly improbable scenario works in the actual episode because plot needs to move.]]
*** [[spoiler:Ironically, one of the largest gambles and risks for her plan was highly unpredictable and unreliable [[PsychopathicManchild Moriarty]] himself. In ''"The Reichenbach Fall"'' Moriarty went full force against Sherlock and was willing to see his nemesis die, which, for obvious reasons, could cancel out plan of Eurus entirely. She also needed ''Moriarty'' to [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness die]] himself and get out of the picture with absolutely no guarantees that any of these events would happen as predicted. In fact, Moriarty seemed content with continuing his games with "ordinary" people. Her whole plan hinged on highly specific outcomes, typical of any GambitRoulette plans, while for Moriarty postmortem game was just an entertaining ''alternative'' option in his grandiose XanatosGambit.]]
*** [[spoiler:Eurus had to be able to somehow discretely and completely [[CompellingVoice brainwash]] all the prison staff without Mycroft or any other top government agent noticing; ''hope'' that Sherlock survives dismantling Moriarty’s network; ''hope'' that he survives a terror attack plot; ''hope'' that his confrontation with extremely dangerous [[TheChessmaster Magnussen]] would not end with Sherlock being destroyed; [[HollywoodHacking hack]] the telecommunication system of Great Britain to distribute Moriarty’s message ''[[ClockKing at the perfectly calculated time]]'' without anyone noticing; leave prison; reconstruct Musgrave estate without Mycroft noticing; seduce John “the Family Man” Watson and ''hope again'' that Sherlock would not see through her disguise as Culverton Smith’s daughter. In each instance chance of failure was as high as it gets with her plan critically requiring British authorities, as well as her supergenius brothers, to be extremely incompetent for no reason whatsoever.]]
*** [[spoiler:In ''"The Final Problem"'' itself her plan required Sherlock, John and Mycroft to [[NoOneShouldSurviveThat survive a grenade explosion at close range]] and infiltrate the [[TheAlcatraz highest security island prison]] with a ''very'' high chance of someone being killed or arrested in the process. In the prison, her whole plan hinges entirely on Sherlock, master of SherlockScan, not noticing the ''lack of glass''. Later trials absolutely required her brothers to suddenly get [[TheWorfEffect dumbed down]] and play by her rules without any [[IndyPloy improvisations]] or [[TakeAThirdOption creative solutions]] or even recognizing Eurus as a little girl impersonator. Of course her initial plan does fall apart the moment Sherlock just ignores her rules.]]

* ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'': Happens in "The Most Toys". Collector Kivas Fajo wants to add Lt. Data to his collection. To succesfully kidnap Data and fake his accidental death, he poisons the water supply of a Federation colony with Tricyanate, making it look like a natural disaster. Because the only antidote, Hitridium, is extremely unstable, he's the only merchant in the region selling the GreenRocks needed to solve this catastrophe. Said green rocks cannot be beamed, thus they must be be shuttled over because they are highly volatile, resulting in a good cover-up for any accidental explosion of the shuttle. His plan, however, hinged on the fact that Picard would send Data on the simple job of ferrying things back and forth, and this is nothing the collector has any control over. Furthermore, Data is not even the crew's best pilot (that honor goes to Riker), and being a high ranking member of the crew, he could very well not have been available to do this ferrying job. Furthermore, the Enterprise has HUNDREDS of crewmembers Picard can choose from. Thankfully, it seems fate threw him a bone and Picard decided to pick Data for the job that day. In a subversion, however, this Roulette didn't work out. The crew was able to tell upon reversing the poisoning that it was sabotage and not a natural disaster, and immediately began to wonder just how long the odds were that Fajo would conveniently have the GreenRocks needed for the mission (and just enough'' Green Rocks). One look into Fajo's personal history and hobbies later, the crew had fingered him for Data's abduction.
* ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'': In "Dark Frontier", the Borg Queen essentially says that she orchestrated 7 of 9 being taken in by Voyager and integrated into the crew, so that she could later coerce her into returning to the Collective. This required the following - Voyager to attempt to ally themselves with the Borg, then ask for a representative, then for the cube to be destroyed, allowing 7 to get onto Voyager and then, despite the Borg stabbing Voyager in the back, 7 surviving and being taken into the Voyager crew. In the GrandFinale this implausible plot is further used to explain why Voyager could always miraculously escape the Borg, as Seven of Nine is the Queen's "favourite".

* ''Series/PowerRangersRPM'': [[BigBad Venjix]], despite his [[NoNonsenseNemesis usual ruthlessness]], still follows the [[MonsterOfTheWeek usual]] [[MakeMyMonsterGrow plans]] other villains in the franchise employ, to the point of blasting General Crunch when [[DumbassHasAPoint Crunch brings up]] [[LampshadeHanging some of the usual pitfalls]]. [[spoiler:It turns out all of these plans were in fact to distract the Rangers and their allies from realizing ''half the population of Corinth'' [[ManchurianAgent were in fact his cyborg sleeper agents]], enabling the easy takeover of the city. The only reason the Rangers knew was thanks to [[EnigmaticMinion General Kilobyte]] activating one ahead of time. Even after this, Venjix's real goal is to infiltrate the "universal bio-electric field" (what they call the Morphing Grid here) and he succeeds -- only for the Rangers and Dr. K to upload a counter-virus and then ''[[DeathFromAbove drop a building on Venjix's head]]''. Even then, it's hinted he's NotQuiteDead, [[SequelHook lurking within Scott's morpher]]... and indeed, [[Series/PowerRangersBeastMorphers he was reincarnated in another universe as Evox and managed to once again infiltrate the Morphing Grid to gain its' power, eliminate the Grid Battleforce and then the rest of their Earth. Fortunately, the Beast Morpher Rangers manage to infect Evox/Venjix with human DNA, which weakens him and allows them to finish him off for good.]]

*** [[spoiler:Her plan to destroy Sherlock is critically dependent on help from Moriarty. In order to meet Jim, Eurus needs to convince Mycroft to arrange a meeting for the two [[EvilGenius evil geniuses]]. This part of the plan requires Mycroft, who is phenomenally smart and is deeply caring about Sherlock, to [[PlotInducedStupidity act very dumb]] for no good reason and to allow an unsupervised meeting between two extremely dangerously psychotic and intelligent criminals, ''[[CardCarryingVillain who are not hiding their intentions to harm his brother]]''. If Mycroft refused, she would've lost her only chance to do anything outside her prison cell for the rest of her life. This highly improbable scenario works in the actual episode because plot needs to move.]]

** [[FanNickname Flocke]] predicts that Widmore would rig the plane to explode so he could take the explosives and put them in Jack's bag, and that Sawyer would prevent Flocke from getting on the submarine, AND that the people trapped on the submarine would attempt to disarm the bomb (since Flocke himself apparently can't directly kill these particular characters). Plus, they only find the bomb because Kate is shot getting onto the submarine, so he would have been screwed if they managed to do it with no casualties. The plan did not end up panning out perfectly, though.

*** [[spoiler:In ''"The Final Problem"'' itself her plan required Sherlock, John and Mycroft to [[NoOneShouldSurviveThat survive a grenade explosion at close range]] and infiltrate the [[TheAlcatraz highest security island prison]] with a ''very'' high chance of someone being killed or arrested in the process. In the prison, her whole plan hinges entirely on Sherlock, master of SherlockScan, not noticing the ''lack of glass''. Later trials absolutely required her brothers to suddenly get [[TheWorfEffect dumbed down]] and play by her rules without any [[IndyPloy improvisations]] or [[TakeAThirdOption creative solutions]] or even recognizing Eurus as little girl impersonator. Of course her initial plan does fall apart the moment Sherlock just ignores her rules.]]

** Walter White's goal is to convince Jesse Pinkman to work with him in order to eliminate Gus Fring, whom Jesse has formed an uneasy alliance with. The plan goes as follows: [[spoiler:Jesse keeps a vial of poison hidden inside a packet of cigarettes. Walter arranges for Walter and Jesse's lawyer, Saul Goodman, to have his bodyguard frisk Jesse and steal the vial of poison. Walter then secretly poisons Jesse's girlfriend's son, Brock, with a different, non-lethal poison, in hopes that Jesse will come to the conclusion that Walter stole the poison from him and poisoned Brock with, and thereafter attempt to kill Walter. When Jesse is threatening to kill Walter, Walter convinces him that Brock was really poisoned by Gus in an effort to turn Jesse against Walt.]] Could be considered a BatmanGambit, except that it relies on Jesse reaching a very improbable conclusion in an OutOfCharacter manner.