Mushroom Samba / Live-Action TV

• While in the Deadly Swamp in The 10th Kingdom, Virginia and Tony consume magic mushrooms (and drink swamp water, which is apparently some form of alcohol). What makes this especially amusing is its literalism: while the mushrooms don't actually dance, they do sway in time to the music and sing their consuming victims to sleep (to Procul Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale" no less!). Cue Dream Sequence. But although the mushrooms seem hell-bent on their own suicidal destruction, this is subverted by the fact that it's all a ploy by the sentient man-eating swamp to shroud its victims in vines so they can be crushed, suffocated, and eventually consumed in turn.
• The 100: Season 1's "Day Trip" involves the 100 preserving food for the winter. One of the foods is a type of nut, which they snack on while preserving. They find out pretty quickly it causes intense hallucinations. It's both Played for Laughs and Played for Drama, as Jasper hallucinates Grounders but is convinced that a random stick Octavia finds makes him invisible to them, while Bellamy has a full on Heroic BSoD when the nuts cause him to hallucinate Chancellor Jaha, whom he'd been convinced to shoot in a failed attempt at a mutiny just before landing, and is sure he killed.
  Monty: I think I ate a pine cone. (Beat) Because it told me to.
• 1000 Ways to Die features more than a few ways to die by way of mind-altering drugs.
  • One particular death features a dope who eats mushrooms, trips balls, tries to join a furry orgy in the wilderness, and gets Eaten Alive by an angry bear.
  • Another has some folks doing acid, with one of them trying to jump into a pool, only to break her spine on account of the pool having no water in it.
  • Another one features a Russell Brand-esque drug smuggler soaking his tie-dyed T-shirt in his own homemade LSD with the equivalent of 2 million times the normal dose. At the airport, the smuggler gets nervous and begins sweating, causing him to absorb all of the LSD onto his skin, making him hallucinate wildly before dying of a fatal heart attack, stroke and massive hyperthermia caused by the overdose.
• 30 Rock
  • On the 100th episode, a gas leak causes Jack to hallucinate alternate versions of himself.
  • Inverted in the Live Episode, where the different look and the Laugh Track are explained by Jack's lack of alcohol.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: In the episode "Fear and Loathing on the Planet of Kitson", Daisy, Simmons, and Davis eat some alien food that turns out to have psychedelic affects on humans. Among other things, Simmons has a hallucination of a tiny dancing Fitz in a monkey costume.
• In a memorable episode of Barney Miller, the detectives suffer interesting effects from munching a batch of hashish-laced brownies made by Wojo's current girlfriend.
  Fish: The best I've felt in years and it's illegal!
• When Monica from The Big Leap is feeling creatively blocked, she's directed to a stagehand who deals these. The result is her acting extremely kind to everyone (which scares them more than her usual nasty demeanour). She also claims to get visions from Tchaikovsky himself, eventually realizing how to rebuild the play from the ground up in order to make it work with the cast she has.
• An episode of Black Box has Dr. Black recommend a terminal cancer patient take a substance that's basically 'shrooms. She has a friend of hers who is studying the substance's effects on cancer patients give her a sample. Planning to return the rest to the researcher, she puts the unmarked bag in her purse. Her fiancé is making coffee, discovers the bag, assumes it's cinnamon or something, and puts it into both of the cups. Just as Black is asked to explain to a girl why pot is bad, she herself starts seeing things (more than usual, given her own psychological condition). Her fiancé starts seeing live animals in her fridge.
• In the Breaking Bad episode "Mandala", Jesse has his first shoot of heroin, and is seen levitating off of his bed as he gets high. All while The Platters' "Enchanted" plays in the background. (Aaron Paul, the guy who portrays Jesse, was lifted up in a rig and filmed.)
• Broad City: Abbi and Ilana take shrooms, and go for a walk, which is animated in a colorful and trippy sequence, until Ilana's phone rings and she is asked to deliver Macaroons to her boss's party.
• Played for drama in Burn Notice in the season 7 episode "Psychological Warfare", where Michael is given a hallucinogen to encourage him to come clean about elements of his past. It works, but not well enough to blow his cover.
• In The Closer episode "Smells Like Murder", Brenda's niece Charlie bakes a pan of special brownies, which Brenda later discovers. Brenda eats at least three, oblivious of their cannabis content. Hilarity Ensues. When Fritz finds out, he is not amused, and tells Charlie to start packing her bags.
• Pierce descends into one complete with mocking animated skeletons in Community episode "Introduction to Statistics".
  • After breaking both legs in a trampoline accident, Pierce becomes addicted to pain pills, popping them way after he's healed, and talking with a six-inch tall Andy Dick dressed like a pilot.
  • While Pierce is painting Annie's apartment, the window ventilating the room shuts and the fumes get him hallucinating he's playing the piano flanked by two hula dancers, and he ends up making snow angels in the paint.
  • Britta once shows up to the study room with frizzed hair full of various small items, ruined day-old makeup, and presumably a banana in her pants, and nonchalantly asks the group how long peyote lasts.
• In the Coupling episode "Jane and the Truth Snake" Jane takes two paracetamol in a failed suicide bid, not having grasped the concept of an overdose. The pills actually aren't paracetamol but something she was given at a party, and Hilarity Ensues as her excessively straight-talking alter ego takes control in the form of a talking snake puppet.
• Usually hallucinations in Criminal Minds are not this trope as they are the result of organic mental illness, but "Mr. Scratch" played it straight and horrifyingly; its killer drugged his victims to make them have terrifying hallucinations (as they all shared a background and fear that he knew about) and end up hurting their own families. He also induces this in Hotch himself, showing that the BAU leader's greatest fear is being unable to save his team.
• Invoked verbally but averted in CSI season 12, in response to DB Russell's personal mushroom garden in his office. They are *not* hallucinogenic, but he's gotten at least one joke about it already.
  Russell: Who killed Cock Robin? I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow. Who saw him die? I, said the fly, with my little eye...
  Brass: Those 'shrooms in your office aren't medicinal, are they?
  • However, a hallucination-caused death happened at least once, it was the guy who got drunk on datura during a party in the desert and ended up dead and naked afterward.
• In Dagvaktin, hallucinogenic mushrooms accidentally get mixed up with real mushrooms in the hotel staff's vegetable soup, with character-appropriate results. Georg dons a colander and builds a zealously-defended fortress out of food boxes, pot plants and cutlery; Gugga grabs her shotgun and goes hunting for imaginary crows in the guests' bedrooms, and Daníel strips naked and smothers himself in jam, insisting that 'wearing the jam takes away all my fears'.
• Deadly Class:
  • Early in the pilot, Marcus takes a puff of a joint someone dropped, only to realize too late that it was laced with PCP, resulting in him being accosted by a hallucination of Ronald Reagan. Then he bumps into a Day of the Dead parade, just to freak him out even more.
  • In the episode "Saudade", during a trip to Las Vegas, the main group buys some acid off of a hippie. Marcus, assuming that the hippie's selling them fake drugs (having previously wasted his money on exactly that from another hippie), spitefully takes seven doses. He ends up so stoned that for starters, he ends up curled up under a car ranting about digital mountains. Later, it hits a crescendo with him having a fully-animated, nonsensical Vision Quest, and while things die down a bit after that, he still spends the rest of the episode hallucinating things.
• Desperate Housewives. In "The Game" (Season 4, Episode 3, October 14, 2007), Lynette gets stoned on pot brownies she is eating to deal with the effects of her chemotherapy, but all she does is watch SpongeBob SquarePants with her kids, which she's apparently never seen before.
  "It's a sponge, and he talks. That's funny."
• Being no stranger to comedic situations with extinct animals, the documentary Dinosaur Revolution had a Shunosaurus eating a few magic mushrooms. Then Hilarity Ensues when aa pair of Sinraptor chase him. He ends up killing one and the other one runs away.
• In Doc Martin Series 5, after noticing bouts of hyperactive behaviour, Martin fires his new receptionist for taking drugs. He later finds out that the "energy pills" her grandfather had given her were actually 70-year-old metamphetamines from his WWII ration kit. Both assumed they were safe because it had the Government stamp on, after all... the Government wouldn't give out something that was bad for you.
• Doctor Who: The plot of "Amy's Choice" happens because some "psychic pollen" gets stuck in the TARDIS' time rotor and heats up, inducing a dream state that the Doctor, Amy and Rory are subsequently trapped in.
• The Dollhouse episode "Echoes" features the entire cast on one big tripout. The highlight of the whole thing is Topher desperately trying to stay lucid while explaining the situation to their dolls in the field on the phone, while in the background Adelle is jumping on a trampoline and shouts "Say hi for me!" just before he hangs up.
  Adelle: I find lentils completely incomprehensible!
  • It also provides the source of I Am Very British, also by Adelle.
  "I don't say hahd 'r's!"
• Dragnet had its share, naturally. Mostly LSD-related, since it was the '60s.
• In Due South:
  Fraser Sr.: I'm dead. I don't dream. So I don't know what this sensation is that I've got. Although it's very similar to when Walter Singlefoot laced my tea with knik-knik, then seemed to turn into a twelve-foot alligator before my very eyes.
• The Farscape episode "Taking The Stone" features Crichton eating one out of a cluster of four magic mushrooms in exchange for a confession from the episode's villain: the twist is that while three of the mushrooms produce a dizzying high, one of them is lethal. Crichton manages to pick one of the safe mushrooms, thankfully, and spends the next minute doing a three stooges impersonation before passing out.
• In the Firefly episode "The Train Job", Jayne has one of these when he's drugged. We don't get to see his point of view, but his hallucinations apparently involve people being "bendy" and little angels flying around, which he unsuccessfully tries to catch before finally thudding to the deck.
• In Flight of the Conchords, Bret, after much fiddling around, accidentally takes a drug, leading to the lighthearted and whimsical "Prince of Parties" musical number.
• In The Forgotten's "Train Jane", when Walter gets shot, the combination of panic and pain meds make him say wacky things.
  Walter: Tell Candice I love her too, okay? But not in the creepy way. And tell Maxine, her blonde hair's like a lighthouse in the darkness, a love lighthouse.
  (the doctor informs him that she's going to leave the bullet where it is for now)
  Walter: No, no!! You gotta take it out, it's evidence! If you're not gonna, I will! Someone get me a scalpel, stat! I saw this on Animal Planet!
• People getting stoned on Fringe is fairly common, but the episode "Lysergic Acid Diethylamide" ^note that's the scientific name for LSD, kids! has some brilliant moments where Peter and Broyles start tripping. They're even funnier when compared to Walter and Bellivia, who take their LSD (don't worry, it's for Mad Science) and don't react at all.
• The George Lopez Show features a drink involving a worm at the bottom of the glass. Drinking the worm induces an instant Dream Sequence episode.
• Glee:
  • The kids' performances in "Vitmanin D" along with a good chunk of Finn's performance after Terri gets him started on the stuff.
  • In "The Substitute", Will hallucinates the entire Glee Club as toddlers when he catches the first cold of the semester. Later, he has an over-the-top dream sequence with him and Mike dancing to "Make Em' Laugh".
  • Also, Blaine, Ryder and Sue's performances while high from a gas leak in "Puppet Master".
• In some of the early episodes of The Goodies, Bill Oddie's hallucinations are crucial plot points. They are induced by
  Graeme: LEMON SHERBERT?

  Whenever the sherbert comes up, it's often mentioned that his grandmother sends him it. It's also described as "Not dangerous, but it turns him on".

• Played for Drama in the season 3 episode of Halt and Catch Fire "And She Was", it was implied that Donna has taken edible mushrooms while housesitting for Diane Gould and sitting on the grass she apologizes to Cameron for her dishonesty, Cameron accepts her apology, only to reveal that Donna was hallucinating.
• House:
  • House uses LSD to beat off a self-induced migraine (which is another story). "I'm seeing sounds!"
  • And Wilson, when House loads his coffee with sppppppeeeeeeed to see if Wilson was on anti-depressants.
  • On another episode, House uses psychedelic mushrooms to treat a particularly obnoxious teenager's cluster headaches... he mellows out some. (Cue Iron Butterfly and swirling colors.)
  • In season 8, Dr. Chi Park inadvertently ate some LSD-laced ice cream, seeing Chase as a rabbit, Adams as a sexy wolf, Taub as "either a tooth fairy or Rainbow Brite", and House as...well...House.
• How I Met Your Mother has a habit of replacing joints with sandwiches. Justified by the show's Framing Device: Future Ted is supposed to be telling the story to his kids, and so the bit with the drugs is replaced with something more G-rated. In "Tick Tick Tick" Ted and Marshall get high on "sandwiches" that might have been laced with "hard meats," with their B-plot being them wandering a concert arena to look for nachos. From their point of view, they spend hours making full laps around and being stalked by a creepy guy with a guitar. Near the end of the episode, the viewer is shown what really happened through security camera footage: it only lasted two minutes, they walked in small circles instead of around the entire building, and the Creepy Guitar Guy was just a life-sized stand of a man holding a guitar.
• In the Law & Order: SVU episode "Wet", Olivia is accidentally dosed by standing over a pot of boiling mushrooms in a suspect's lab. This results in her ranting like a paranoid wacko and passing out. It becomes a Chekhov's Gun when Elliott fakes a samba of his own as a stalling tactic in court.
  Olivia: I'm not the one who stabbed the Captain with a pickle!
• Legends of Tomorrow:
  • "Zari": Nate cooks up a hallucinogenic tea to aid Amaya on a Vision Quest to learn how to control her powers, and takes some himself to make sure it's safe. While for her it works perfectly, he just ends up high as a kite — to start with, his vision and motor skills are degraded, then he starts hearing things, it nearly gets him killed when he wants to touch Sara's face, and by the end of the trip he's spouting gibberish.
    Nate: Quiet, the marshmallows are talking!
  • In "The Virgin Gary", most of the team gets sprayed by the musk of a unicorn, which ends up having this effect on them. Nate sees Mick as his estranged father, Mick sees Nate as a giant version of his dead pet rat Axl, Zari starts talking nonsensically about being able to see love everywhere, and Roy makes out with a tree he thinks is Nora Darhk.
• One of the final episodes of Lexx, appropriately titled "Trip", half the crew consumed some mind-altering berry-like things that had been left as a gift, which led to some interesting hallucinations.
• Life on Mars has a sequence in the second season where Sam is accidentally given an overdose causing him to experience several hallucinations and a memorable Dream Sequence where he and Gene are stop motion characters in children's show Camberwick Green. The best bit was probably Gene "beating up a nonce."
• Mad Men, doing its 1960s setting right, has now had two of these: In season 5, Roger took LSD with his wife and some friends, and had hallucinations that included hearing an orchestra when he opened a liquor bottle, seeing Don in the mirror while Roger's hair was two colors, and witnessing the 1919 World Series from his bathtub. Said hallucinations proved eye-opening in that they made it clear his marriage to Jane was over. Season 6 had an even more blatant example with "The Crash", where the entire office took some kind of uppers. Though there were clear some hallucinations (like Don's flashbacks), much of the episode was left ambiguous as to what was really happening and what the characters were imagining. (The crippled Ken Cosgrove suddenly dancing out of nowhere?)
• Midsomer Murders: In "Faithful unto Death", straight-laced Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby tries some (special) brownies while interviewing a possible witness and subsequently comes over all giggly and walks along the top of an ornamental wall, all the while attracting confused looks from his Sergeant and the Coroner.
• Elliot of Mr. Robot gets a long one in the third episode after taking some unidentified drug, featuring numerous scenes full of Foreshadowing and small metal keys.
• Mrs. America: Alice gets very drunk and possibly high due to a pot brownie, wandering around in the women's conference half-aware in a hallucinatory daze visiting the many different places set up there (a self-defense class, a liberal Catholic service, musical session etc.).
• The Muppets Mayhem: In the episode "Track 5: Break On Through", Nora and almost all the members of the Electric Mayhem (except for Zoot, who doesn't eat sugar) eat marshmallows that they don't realize expired in June 1992. This turns the marshmallows into a G-Rated Drug that causes them to have strong hallucinations, most of which relate to their hidden insecurities.
• Murdoch Mysteries: One alcoholic drink served in a flask at the Alice in Wonderland costume party was drugged. Unfortunately, Detective Murdoch drinks it and Intoxication Ensues. He becomes belligerent which is very much out of his character. Later he experiences unsettling visions of falling down a hole, being too big to enter a door or the grinning Cheshire cat watching him. It turned out it was just a prank, not originally pulled on the Detective, but the consequences were very serious. Detective Murdoch was suspected of murder and he had to sacrifice a lot, both professionally and personally, to make things right.
• In an episode of My Name Is Earl, Randy eats hippy face lotion and begins to see everything in claymation.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: Parodied in "Future War". Pearl Forrester decides to test LSD on the robots, and they hook them up to screens so we can see what they see. Servo sees everyone as monsters, but cheerfully says they always look like that to him. The only thing that's different for Crow is that the Milky Way bar Mike was holding suddenly turns into a Snickers, which causes him to freak out. Crow is also surprised to learn that Mike isn't a clown.
• One Life to Live played it in a way rarely seen in fiction; as Cole was going through withdrawal, he hallucinated his family and friends berating him for what a horrible person he was and how he ruined their lives. Basically the Intervention From Hell.
• In Pushing Daisies, Aunt Lily takes an overdose of homeopathic mood enhancers and starts hallucinating.
• In Person of Interest Finch, of all people, has one when a POI slips him some wine laced with Ecstasy.
• Red Dwarf features an after-the-fact example in the past bits of "Stasis Leak": past Rimmer is convinced that his future self's holographic head sticking out of the table and the captain in a chicken costume^note He was on his way to a party. are continuations of the hallucinogenic fit he'd had a little earlier when Lister fed him some "freaky fungus."
• Riverdale: In "The Pincushion Man", Jughead gets psychedelic visions from eating maple mushrooms to break his writer's block for his story, leading to him going missing. Betty and Tabitha^note Pop Tate's granddaughter also experience this in the next episode after they were drugged by Jughead's ex-girlfriend who sold him the mushrooms.
• Route 66 has an episode where Tod gets a drugged drink at a party by mistake. As is typical of the show, it's not played at all for comedy.
• In "Blind Man's Bluff", an episode from the second season of The Sentinel, Blair eats a slice of pizza which, unbeknownst to him, is laced with "Golden". A short time later he's wielding a gun in the police garage, and...well...
  Blair: You don't see them? They're coming through, through the walls and the floor, man.
  Jim: Who are?
  Blair: The Golden fire people. You don't see them, man? They're made out of fire and they're burnt. You think they're ashes, but they're alive, man. And we gotta send them back!
• In a Saturday Night Live music video sketch, Regina King plays a cop trying to negotiate a hostage situation while under the influence of marijuana-infused gummi bears found at a crime scene. She sees two giant singing gummi bears telling her about volcano people who "have all the answers", Marge Simpson (who turns into the devil), and the sun, who the cop is told is the Teletubbies baby as an adult.
• In Shameless (US), Lip and Kev have great success selling marijuana in a college dorm but then Kev's supplier sells him synthetic marijuana which was laced with some unknown chemicals. Soon they have a room full of college students freaking out and having hallucinations. They manage to mostly contain it except for one guy who jumped out a window and broke his leg.
• In the Granada Television TV adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes), the stories nearly always stayed very faithful to the original works. In "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot," Holmes deduces that several people have been murdered with an exotic poison unknown to British science. In order to be sure that the suspicious substance recovered from the scene of the crime is indeed the mysterious poison, he deliberately exposes himself to what he believes to be a small dose... According to the original story, terrifying hallucinations ensue. In the TV version, the hallucinations shown are actually not particularly terrifying, but Holmes is presumably experiencing far worse ones.
• Six Feet Under. David stows the E tablets he received from his club-hopping boyfriend in an aspirin bottle in the family kitchen. Ruth goes camping and packs the aspirin in her first aid kit. After getting a headache she does some serious wandering around in the woods. (See also Intoxication Ensues for other repercussions.)
• Star Trek: Voyager has a variation when the Doctor programs himself with the ability to daydream, which soon gets out of control and causes him to switch rapidly between various fantasies. The most amusing parts are the other characters using the holodeck to see his daydreams themselves and as they simply watch his reactions to the different scenarios he's entering and leaving.
• Played for drama in Star Trek: Discovery when Tilly, Stamets and Reno get dosed with hallucinogenic mycelial spores, resulting in the latter two marveling at each other's auras and the dust on each other's faces tasting like psilocybin before Stamets realizes what's going on and has Reno slap him to make him focus long enough to inject both of them with an antidote. It's only once they both snap out of it that they realize Tilly is missing, having been taken into the mycelial network while they were tripping.
• At the end of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode "Those Old Scientists" (crossover episode with Star Trek: Lower Decks), the final scene is set on the Enterprise but is animated in the style of Lower Decks. While it initially seems to be just for the benefit of the viewers, it eventually turns out that the characters themselves are seeing it too after drinking Orion delaq.
• Most episodes of That '70s Show have either implied or obvious cannabis use. One Samba moment happens when Eric goes upstairs to make toast and runs into his father, Red; while they talk, the wall in the background is moving. Also, Red once accidentally eats a "special brownie" made by the kids. Hilarity Ensues.
  • Kitty voluntarily smokes a joint in the bathroom, and sees Red and Hyde's bodies morph.
• In one episode of the short-lived Comedy Central show That's My Bush!, W accidentally takes two hits of Ecstasy, mistaking them for aspirin. Hilarity Ensues.
• In an episode of This Is Us Randall drinks a mushroom milkshake and hallucinates having a heart to heart with Jack.
• Two and a Half Men: Charlie smokes pharmaceutical weed and sees hallucinations of various ex-girlfriends.
• Done in Victorious when discussing how Trina got into Hollywood Arts. Turns out Sikowitz had drunk some bad Sri Lankan coconut milk he had gotten from a cousin (he had forgotten it got delivered at his back door and didn't pick it up for three weeks). As all the other judges were busy with other matters, he was the only one around. So when Trina started singing he was hallucinating her wearing wacky costumes and everything in technicolor. Sikowitz believed it was part of her performance and passed her audition.
• In Vikings, this takes a very dark turn when, after a battle, Rollo ingests some mushrooms and starts seeing things. He hacks off the leg of a Saxon prisoner because from where he was sitting the leg looked 'strange'.
• In Workaholics, the main characters do drugs fairly often, but in the episode "Business Trip" the guys (with the exception of Ders) do acid, along with Alice, Karl, and a potential TelAmeriCorp client. Adam gets a bum tab, but Blake and Adam both freak out-Blake sees a worm alien monster trying to attack him, and Alice mistakes a chair for being Spanish and also hallucinates eating a hotel reception desk like it's Jell-O.
• Xena: Warrior Princess, "Altared States": Gabrielle eats some laced bread meant for Ikus. Hilarity Ensues.
• The X-Files:
  • In "Never Again", Scully starts tripping after getting a tattoo with ergot-laced ink. It's not played for humor at all, as the guy who convinces her to get the tattoo has heard his talking to him for weeks, and it's driven him to kill his downstairs neighbor.
  • In "Field Trip", Mulder and Scully investigate the skeletons of two hikers found in a field. It turns out that the field is covered in mushrooms that trap those who step on them in vivid hallucinations while a Blob Monster under the field goes to work on digesting them.
  • Mulder goes on one in the 2016 miniseries episode "Babylon".
• In Yellowjackets's "Doomcoming", one of the girls gathers mushrooms with the intent of poisoning her crush (again!) but she leaves them unattended on the kitchen table, and the mushrooms end up in the stew. All but one end up tripping balls.
• In an episode of Yes, Dear, Greg suffers from this in his desperation for nasal spray.