Weirdness Censor / Live-Action TV

Weirdness Censors in live-action TV.

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• Bewitched: Abner is generally not in the mood to snoop on his neighbors, even if they're supposedly doing something strange.
• An episode of The Blacklist involves a man who suffered severe head trauma decades ago and wakes up every day believing it's the day of the incident. But unlike 50 First Dates, he doesn't need to be shielded from what he'd perceive as anachronisms; he simply filters them out and they go to his "mental spam folder".
• Buffyverse:
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "Sunnydale Syndrome" (this trope's alternate name) is ascribed to the residents of Sunnydale, California, a town where people live in comical denial of the vampires, werewolves and other supernatural forces that roam its streets. This does see occasional Lampshade Hanging: people on the sly mention all the "mysterious" deaths, and musician Aimee Mann says she hates playing vampire towns. A particularly large lampshade is hung at the end of season three, where the graduating class of Sunnydale High gives Buffy an award as "Class Protector", while admitting they don't usually acknowledge there's anything to be protected from. This indicates that they probably know that something's going on with their town, and something odd as well, but they don't suspect supernatural forces to be involved. In season 6, a typical Sunnydale Times headline reads "Mayhem Caused: Monsters Certainly Not Involved, Officials Say". Then again, Snyder mentions lying about vampires attacking the high school in season 2, telling journalists it was a gang on PCP — which the chief of police says is the usual story.
    Giles: People have a tendency to rationalize what they can and forget what they can't.
    • Early on it's strongly hinted that several things are affecting Sunnydale: the Weirdness Censor, a Mayor-led conspiracy that covers up anything overtly supernatural (that includes the police and other municipal authorities like the High School Principal) and the Hellmouth itself, which has a direct effect on anything living 'on' it. It's shown that even the dreams of a coma patient can be amplified and manifested by the Hellmouth's magical effect, and it is stated that the Hellmouth draws demons and vampires like moths to a light even if they don't realise it. Many people (usually outsiders) get the feeling that Sunnydale is a little... wrong, but have no idea what it is. By the end of Season 7 the entire population flees the town, but this seems to be the result of fear and panic rather than anything defined. This is further muddied by the fact that everyone leaves - even the normal supernatural residents, suggesting the entire population (normal or not) has been affected.
    • The weirdness censor is broken globally in season 8, when Harmony is photographed biting Andy Dick and vampires, demons, Slayers, and magic are brought to light.
  • This continues in Angel, most notably in S1's "victim of the week" stories. Unfortunately, starting from those same eps, we see half of the LA underworld, a major law firm, numerous small businesses, churches, every street gang etc all know about the supernatural; that'd be narrative convenience for you. It gets really silly when S4 sees bizarre manifestations, a rain of fire, the sun being blotted out for days, vampires swarming the city, and finally the whole city (and soon surrounding county) being brainwashed & ruled by a supernatural entity, and seemingly thousands of deaths - a number of those deaths being very public massacres. Nobody seems to remember in S5, or notice outside of LA (the government and army know about demons, where are they?)
    • In Angel: After the Fall, the masquerade gets broken for all of LA when its sent to a Hell dimension. It is put back on Earth via time reversion to the moment it was taken, undoing all deaths and damages, but everyone retains their memories. So some people want to dismiss it all as a delusion, but most know better. And one particular devil named Eddie Hope isn't letting people who committed atrocities in Hell have the luxury of engaging their inner Weirdness Censor.
    • By Angel & Faith, however, the weirdness censor seems to have been re-enabled, with Angel mentioning that the residents of LA no longer remember their time in Hell. This, like everything, could likely be due to the intervention of Wolfram & Hart.
• One episode of CSI referenced "The Invisible Gorilla", one of the most well-known experiments in the history of modern psychology, as an explanation for why a group of bystanders just stood there and ignored a horrible crime happening in their presence: they are concentrating so hard on one thing that they miss everything else around them. The experiment happens thusly: a test group watches a video that featured six people, three in white shirts, three in black shirts, passing a basketball back and forth. The test group was instructed to carefully count the number of passes made from one person to another. Afterward, the test group was asked, "Did you notice the gorilla?" Turns out that at one point in the video, a man in a gorilla costume walks into the middle of the basketball players, thumps its chest a few times, then walks off-stage. In total, the gorilla is onscreen for nearly nine seconds, and no one ever spots it (even those people who go into the experiment knowing there is going to be a gorilla tend to not spot it at all).
• On Doctor Who, this is used to cover the fact that the Doctor's adventures frequently take them to large, populated areas that would probably notice an alien invasion, for example. Lampshaded on a couple of occasions:
  • Due to more lax continuity in the 60s and 70s, there were several stories with attacks in public: "The War Machines", "The Invasion", "Spearhead from Space", "The Ambassadors of Death", "Invasion of the Dinosaurs", et cetera, in which everybody notices. The show just never mentioned it at all in later episodes or made a big deal of the Sudden Revelation (as New Who tends to do), and just carried on as if nobody had noticed without drawing attention. This is also related to the fact that the UNIT-era episodes were originally supposed to be set 20 Minutes into the Future... until they weren't.
  • In "Remembrance of the Daleks", Ace mentions that she would know if there had been an alien invasion in her recent history. The Seventh Doctor informs her that there have been several alien invasions in her recent history that she hadn't known about.
  • In "Silver Nemesis", a 7th Doctor story, an Elizabethan lady and her manservant use a magic circle to travel forward in time about 400 years. They appear, screaming, amidst green and blue flames, in the middle of the tea room that her stately home has now become. Not one of the customers even notices their arrival, let alone remarks upon it.
  • Mid-90s Doctor Who Expanded Universe book Who Killed Kennedy (ho ho), following a journalist during the Third Doctor days, had it that people did notice (some of) the weirdness — which was viewed as brutal terrorist attacks and disastrous failures by the government, leading to the (real life) collapse of the Harold Wilson government. This did involve casually retconning away stuff like the War Machines being a public, reported threat, but oh well...
  • In the new series, there have been several large events that no government can, and therefore doesn't, try to cover up. It's a running joke that London evacuates at Christmas now because they're expecting trouble. And in the fourth series it was a running joke that Donna missed all these events and didn't believe they actually happened. Of course, her eyes were opened when she travelled with the Doctor... ("Except that thing about the Titanic flying over London, I mean, that had to be a hoax.")
  • "Aliens of London"/"World War Three": After the Slitheen's plot has been foiled, despite incontrovertible proof of alien life, the newspapers are publishing stories wondering if the whole ordeal was a hoax. The Doctor offers an explanation for this: "You're thick."
  • "Boom Town": The Doctor tells Mickey that people don't notice the TARDIS parked in the middle of 2006 Cardiff, despite the anachronistic look of a 1960s police box, because of this. Torchwood has the spot the TARDIS was in retain its effect permanently. "The Sound of Drums" later retcons this (or adjusts the explanation) to say that the TARDIS has plot-specific Applied Phlebotinum, a perception filter, that causes people to quite intentionally not notice, "like when you fancy someone, but they don't even know you're there."
    • A possible example of this is in "Death in Heaven", where Clara bids farewell to the Doctor and the TARDIS dematerializes with its very distinctive sound, yet despite all this taking place in a public plaza with people walking by, Clara is the only one to notice.
    • "The Christmas Invasion" inverts it, when Mickey hears the sound of the TARDIS from blocks away.
  • In "The Runaway Bride", an entire church full of people watches as Donna vanishes from her own wedding in a flash of light, screaming piteously all the while. They conclude that it must be some sort of stage magic trick she cooked up for attention.
  • "Smith and Jones": According to Annelise, the Royal Hope Hospital was never transported to the Moon, and the people inside were claiming so because they were drugged. This is coming from a woman who Francine Jones points out couldn't handle watching Quiz Mania, let alone the actual news.
  • "The Sontaran Strategem": This time, regarding a Sontaran teleporter in the office of the headmaster of a "genius school". Justified in that everyone would assume it was just another weird device invented by one of the genius students. Unless, like the Doctor, they'd seen one before.
  • Subverted in "Victory of the Daleks"; Amy doesn't remember a thing about the Daleks invading in "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End"... and the Doctor is extremely disturbed, because everyone should remember something like that. In the grand tradition of the franchise, the later attempts to explain this end up turning the Whoniverse timeline into a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.
  • "The Vampires of Venice" has a very weird example of this. The titular vampires are actually piscine aliens using a perception filter to disguise themselves as humans. The vampire part is that, when the machine is working, they look like humans with fangs and no reflections. According to the Doctor, this is because the disguise doesn't change their image in a mirror, and so, when a person sees the reflection of a scary fish monster for the first time, they don't know what to make of it, so their mind gets rid of the image. At the same time, he claims that we can see their fangs because our survival instincts are powerful enough to override the disguise, which is actually sort of reverse weirdness censor.
• Father Ted:
  • "Speed 3": Father Dougal McGuire averts this when he moonlights as a temporary short-notice milkman. He sits in bed thinking about the day he's just had when a look of horror comes across his face. Considering his day involved his milk-float having a bomb planted on it by his predecessor, he has every right to look back with horror. However it was his weirdness censor finally failing with regard to his temporary patrons:
    Fr. Dougal:THOSE WOMEN WERE IN THE NIP‼
  • "Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse": From his previous experience, Dougal gave Ted an idea on how to kick their boss up the arse and get away with it. The plan relied on the Bishop's weirdness censor kicking in: Kick him up the arse and act like nothing had happened, because such a thing couldn't possibly happen. Like Dougal, the weirdness censor failed within twenty-four hours after the event. Although Ted still managed to convince him that he'd imagined the whole thing - until he saw the 10 foot high photograph of Ted kicking him that Ted had commissioned the last night after his celebratory drinking.
• The Flash (1990) TV show had episodes where the Flash met Dr. Desmond Powell, an African-American doctor who had, in the Central City of the 1950s, operated as "the mystery man" Nightshade. More in line with the Shadow, the Nightshade, not a metahuman, ended up dismissed by most people as just a rumor, since the police hushed up his activities. (The show admitted that some of this attitude at least initially also applied to the Flash, but since the Flash had actual metahuman powers, he could not "lurk in the shadows" for very long.)
  • A running gag in The Flash was that police officer Bellows was constantly seeing the Flash in action but his more cynical partner Murphy always missed it, so that Murphy thought Bellows was delusional and dismissed the Flash as an urban legend.
• One of the things Glee fans most frequently complain about when it comes to Mr. Schue is that he seems to be actively making an effort not to notice his students being bullied, so that he won't have to deal with it. He clearly knows that they are being bullied, because he mentions it sometimes, but whenever he's actually present while it's happening he never seems to notice.
• In Stephen King's It miniseries, despite the fact that Derry has had far, far more child deaths, arsons, psychotic breaks, and industrial accidents than is healthy for a small town, no one notices it's out of the ordinary because It does something to the townspeople. It gets to the point where the characters wonder if It has become part of Derry, or if Derry's just always been an extension of It. Given that, in the book at least, It's destruction is immediately followed by Derry falling apart (literally!), the latter seems more likely.
• Lie to Me:
  • An episode has the Lightman Group discredit a witness by revealing (to her as well) that she has the Real Life condition called change blindness, meaning she ignores anything that has changed around her while she wasn't looking. They do this by having her watch a short video and focus on certain aspects of it. They then quietly substitute the people questioning her. When the witness turns back, she just treats them as if they were sitting there the whole time.
  • An example more related to "weirdness" is in "Beat the Devil", where the team is asked to authenticate a UFO sighting. Thirty-minute-mark, they find video they can't disprove. Fifty-minute-mark, the Air Force shows up with an obvious Gas Leak Cover-Up, which leads Loker to give a lot of viewers got a reason to be X-Philes again; not only does the Air Force have absolutely no idea what it was, they don't care what it was - they just want the witness silenced or discredited by any means necessary because they don't want to admit that.
    Loker: The air force is never going to admit to a violation of U.S. air space, not by a Russian MIG or by a UFO, you and I know that.
• The Lost Room had a subculture of collectors, hobbyists, organizations and criminals looking for some conspicuously destructive objects that shunned the laws of physics, thermodynamics and entropy while consuming / destroying the lives of most people who came across them. Despite having been tracked, coveted and recklessly experimented with for 40 years, the Police (including our hero) seem to have no way of anticipating or dealing with them. Moreover, these quirky little atom-age MacGuffins subtly influenced the laws of probability to get closer to one another, making them even easier to track. Either some unseen government power tries to keep all those pesky cases of Spontaneous Combustion out of the news with a hypnotic roll of toilet paper, or organizations like "The Order" and "The Legion" are just too damn nerdy for most people to take seriously.
• The people of Camelot in Merlin never seem to realize that the king's manservant, the title character, has eyes that glow gold and that he mumbles nonsense to himself. What's strange about this? Camelot is an Anti-Magical Faction that prides itself on its ability to catch and execute magic-users. Merlin enjoys lampshading this to their faces without them having any idea what's going on.
  Arthur: [during a dice game, after he throws a bad roll] You just coughed. You're putting me off.
  Merlin: There is just no fooling you, is there? [proceeds to use magic to weigh the dice and win]
• The Middleman has a paranoia-inducing and Lampshaded explanation of the Weirdness Censor;
  The Middleman: What makes more sense: that a gas main exploded, or that a monster trashed a science lab? If I hadn't planted your lighter, some other pink-skinned Normal would have come up with a rational explanation. People want to believe that reality's normal. The ones who don't are freaks, and nobody believes them anyway.
• The Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch "The Dull Life of a City Stockbroker" features a very boring stockbroker going about his business, not noticing things like the fact that the bus on which he is traveling is full of terrorists shooting everyone, or that the newsagent where he purchases a paper is staffed by a topless woman.
• The same technique is used by Anthony Bourdain on the Washington, D.C. episode of No Reservations, when a spy guest demonstrates how spies in the Cold War hid things in drop-off points. In one particular instance, Bourdain feigns public urination to keep eyes off of him as he hides a "tip" in a discreet spot.
• In one episode of The Office (US), the opening scene features the rest of the crew trying to figure out exactly where Stanley's ends, trying such things as bringing a pony into the office, impersonating each other, reporting sales statistics from the company's Jupiter branch, and covering his computer monitor with a box.
• Occurs in virtually every series of Power Rangers where no one seems quite able to make the connection between those 3 (or 5 or sometimes 6) extremely fit martial arts obsessed kids who all dress in a single colour and are always running off, and the equally mono-coloured Power Rangers who show up moments later.
  • Lampshaded in the Dino Thunder series when Tommy gains the Black Ranger powers; he tells his students he has to go shopping as there is a distinct lack of black in his wardrobe. True to form, he spends the rest of the season wearing lots of black. And in Jungle Fury, mentor RJ wears various clothing until he becomes the purple-colored fourth ranger, at which point all he wears besides his chef-related clothing is an outfit with a purple shirt. This happens with every Sixth Ranger arrival, and you'd think it'd get really conspicuous when a person who wore a variety of colors suddenly starts wearing one color - the same color as that new Ranger - when he begins hanging with that group of colorcoded teens.
  • Lightspeed Rescue also had one episode where a receptionist told a little girl "now dear, there's no such thing as monsters". In a series where Power Rangers are known public figures without secret identities. Yeeeeeahhh.
  • Dustin in Ninja Storm was the only Ranger of that season to believe that Rangers were more than something out of a comic book when the situation was first explained to the new team.
  • Humanity has gotten savvier since then - just how much they know and what team they were familiar with is usually not elaborated upon, but new teams tend to at least have some idea of what a Ranger is. When amnesiac Dillon of Power Rangers RPM asked what a Power Ranger was, his turning out to actually not know was a going-to-commercial-worthy revelation, and we came back with Ziggy asking him where he'd been. Power Rangers Mystic Force civilian Toby asked the teens to prove they were Rangers, saying "why don't you morph?" meaning that he even knows how Rangers suit up from the few-and-far-between Ranger teams that don't hide their identities. So it only took them fourteen years or so of constant monster attacks and spandex tights-wearing heroes for mankind to realize that these things happen.
  • This is then reversed in Power Rangers Megaforce, where the teen protagonists have never heard of Rangers before and are amazed by an alien invasion, despite two decades of both. Darn kids never pay any attention to current events. Though with how that series repeatedly pushed the continuity reset button, for all we know they just IGNORED all of that.
  • Power Rangers Ninja Steel seems to acknowledge that Rangers exist. However, the characters still awkwardly "invent" some long-established terminology - like "Megazord", the first time their Combining Mecha merge. This is in addition to the reverse, where they just sort of accept every new weird thing as it comes once they get used to their powers.
• Inverted in Quantum Leap, in that small children, crazy people, the dying, and animals (all of whom lack a weirdness censor) can see the hologram Al, who is invisible and inaudible to everyone else but Sam. Children and crazy people can also see Sam for who he really is; Sam leaped once as the mother of a little girl, who could tell he wasn't her mother, but Sam turned the difficulty by asking her to play a "pretend game".
  • This was in part due to Real Life Writes the Plot, since you couldn't really tell animals and small children to ignore Dean Stockwell.
  • There was also a psychic who saw the real Sam (but not Al).
  • Plus the time where the "future" part of Yet Another Christmas Carol is made possible by the Scrooge stand-in having a remarkably similar brain chemistry to Sam (as the hologram was set up to be visible specifically to him).
• In Lars Von Trier's Danish miniseries Riget which takes place in a haunted hospital, the head of administration Moesgaard seem completely oblivious to all the strange things that happen. For example, when one of the doctors come back from the dead (more or less), Moesgaard's first comment is an annoyed "Why am I always misinformed?". Then he just reintroduces the resurrected doctor to the staff as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened, and quickly changes the subject. In another scene, he walks in on Rigmor who is holding a gun, and she accidentally points it at him three times without him noticing it.
• Weird things happened in Smallville Once per Episode. It took at least several years for Chloe to convince people that meteor rocks cause mutations. These two lines sum it up nicely.
  Officer: [sees forcefield] What the hell is this, Sheriff?
  Sheriff: [sighs] Just another day in Smallville.
• The TV series Special Unit 2 claimed that most people just naturally "tune out" Links, and only the few who notice them can join the Unit. This is Handwaved, not as a special power of Links, but just that people don't like to acknowledge the unusual. Given some of the events of the series, they should have gone with the first explanation, as you'd have to be Too Dumb to Live to ignore swarms of ravaging monsters.
• Stargate SG-1: In "Wormhole X-Treme!", a gigantic alien mothership descends out of the clouds in plain sight of an entire TV crew, but they all seem to believe it's just a practical effect for the show.
• Star Trek has an actual Weirdness Censor built into their holodecks so that the holographic people ignore any discussions or unusual sights that don't fit within the context of whatever is being simulated. In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Spirit Folk", the Voyager crew leave the Fair Haven simulation running too long and the townsfolk start to become aware of the weirdness of their new visitors from the crew.
• Supergirl (2015): "Myriad" sees Cat Grant make it all the way to her office without noticing everyone in the city has been mind-controlled by Non, though this could simply be a symptom of her epic level of self-absorption.
• The doctors and police officers of the various small towns in Supernatural that Sam and Dean travel to seem remarkably good at explaining away the strange and oftentimes gory deaths that take place in their towns. For example, how can any sane person possibly explain a man's heart literally bursting out of his chest like those of cartoon characters, or people dying randomly in various fairy-tale inspired accidents, or people simply bursting for no apparent reason whatsoever?
  • Lampshaded by the main characters in the Season 9 premiere when the world explains every angel being banished from heaven and falling to earth as an enormous, world-wide meteor shower.
• In Teen Wolf this is pervasive. Scott and Stiles have werewolf-related conversations in school while surrounded by classmates and faculty on a regular basis. Violent incidents are routinely written off as being the result of mountain lion attacks. The police station gets shot up by werewolf hunters and it does not seem to attract attention from beyond the town. The news media, as well as any kind of state or federal law enforcement, is seemingly non-existent in the Teen Wolf universe.
  • No one notices Scott breaking a locker off it's hinges in the middle of the hallway.
  • Coach flat-out states that he does not want to know why Stiles has chains (to bind Scott during the full moon) in his locker.
  • Also, nobody seems to notice that Scott leaves frantically, right after the game in the second episode, both times. Right after he injures Jackson (which they also pay no mind to, except really Lydia), and right after he wins the game for them (except Stiles and Allison).
  • Scott bashing his head into the wall, repeatedly, during school, anyone?
  • New werewolf Isaac Lahey leaves visible claw marks across the locker doors without anyone commenting on it.
  • As of the Season 3 finale, its implied that people know about what's going on, but for some reason, just don't do anything about it.
    Ethan: So you knew [about him being a werewolf]?
    Danny: Dude, it's Beacon Hills.
  • This gets painfully inverted in the second half of season six, when the supernatural occurrences have piled up to the point the entire town is fed up with them and gets recruited as amateur hunters by a vengeful Gerard Argent and his cronies, hunting down indiscriminately any supernatural being, regardless of their alignment or willingness to hurt anyone. Being played like a fiddle by the true Final Boss, who exacerbates all those years of fear and mystery to feed on the resulting violence, doesn't help.
• In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Cameron, John, and Sarah time travel and arrive naked in the middle of the highway. The drivers either gawk or yell, "Hey streakers, get off the road!" They don't seem to notice that the trio appeared out of thin air and destroyed part of the road. Later, the incident goes on the news, and all they mention is, "Three streakers disrupted traffic today."
• The amnesia pill used by Captain Jack Harkness in Torchwood allows the titular Oddly Small Organization to erase recent memories, although it is not always permanent (certain clues can re-awaken the memories). On the other hand, they don't even bother a cover-up when lives are at stake. The people either seem to think it was all some sort of mass hypnosis or just accept it and move on, as shown by an old lady calmly pointing Torchwood towards a fish-person that was running away before muttering "bloody Torchwood."
• In Twin Peaks no one seems to mind weird things such as Nadine's supernatural strength.
  • In The Return, Nobody is capable of recognizing Dougie Jones' odd behavior. His wife Janey-E suspects him of having had a stroke but after the doctor confirmed his well-being she puts up with him being a Blank Slate like everyone else does.
• WandaVision: Part of the horror is that no-one in Westview seems to notice just how weird things are. For example, no-one comments on the man called Vision (first name, The). He seems to notice how strange things are, like how the company he works at doesn't really do anything, but gets shrugged off or interrupted whenever he tries bringing it up. Then episode 3 suggests the neighbors have noticed how weird things are, they're just too terrified about what Wanda might do to say anything. When Vision tries confronting Wanda about it, reality skips a beat.
• Used liberally in War of the Worlds (1988). The population at large believe that the 1938 invasion (as described in the radio broadcast) was a hoax, and have suffered a form of mass amnesia about the events of the 1953 film. This continues into the second season, albeit differently: several characters (including a military general and a main character) are killed off, and the army refuses to assist the surviving main characters in any way, even though said deceased characters had ties to a secret government project concerning extraterrestrial invaders.
• The Hosts of Westworld are programmed to ignore anything outside of their roles in the park, such as a picture of the real world or evidence that they are machines. "It doesn't look like anything to me"^note Following a more subtle "What door?" becomes a major Wham Line for one character in particular.
• While not magic or Sci-Fi, on Wiseguy high ranking figures in organized crime never seemed to notice that within a few months of Vinnie Terranova joining an organization, the whole operation comes crashing down.
• In Wizards of Waverly Place, this is to the point where the characters can just cast spells in front of everyone.
• Taken to extremes in the surrealist BBC Three Sketch Show The Wrong Door when no-one seems to find a woman dating an Albertosaurus odd at all, merely commenting on his age. Even when he eats one of their friends in front of them no one bats an eyelid.
• In Young Dracula most of the breathers fail to notice the oddity that seems to surround the Dracula family. Subverted when Vlad finally says the word "vampire" to Mr. Branaugh he realizes immediately what's been in front of his face the entire time.
• Played up in The Young Ones episode "Boring" for comedic effect, and most people suffer from this most of the time.

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