"Incidentally, professional interrogators for police and other investigative agencies are trained never to answer questions. Ever." That's not true. I once asked an interrogator "So, what happens next?" and he truthfully answered, "Well, what's probably going to happen next is criminal prosecution."
plz add to the "live action tv examples" the NCIS episode 6x25 "Aliyah.
NCIS agent Tony Dinozzo is in Mossad custody being interrogated by the Director of Mossad (also his love interest's father for bonus points) for the murder of a Mossad agent (who was also the then-boyfriend of his love interest for even more points). Not only does Dinozzo keep things together, he turns the tables on his interrogator and gets the Director to admit to ordering the Mossad Agent Tony killed to Washington D.C. in the first place - simultaneously exonerating himself, and solving an assassination case back in D.C.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4hvkCKaep0
This page definitely needs cleanup. Far too many of the examples are not interrogations, and should be under Break Them by Talking.
[[VisualPun "µ."]]
Does the lecturer really need to be captured or cornered to deliver a Hannibal Lecture? Maybe it's Trope Decay, but I'm pretty sure I've seen a lot of examples that ignore this.
Rhymes with "Protracted." Hide / Show Replies
In Watchmen, Ozymandias, though neither captured nor cornered - quite the opposite in fact - gives a very long and detailed Hannibal Lecture which proves, to his own satisfaction, that everything he did was justified. Then, when Dr. Manhattan unexpectedly turns out not to be dead after all, he tops that by pressing a button on a TV remote and instantly proving that everything he has just said was true. At which point everybody except Rorschach give up and agree with him. They even kill Rorschach themselves to keep the secret safe.
Just for the record, we had a TRS discussion about this (where I wanted to change the definition), and it concluded that the definition should keep on only applying to interrogations where the one being interrogated does this. There are still plenty of wrong examples here — anyone noticing them is welcome to move them to Break Them by Talking (some are duplicated in both already), which is the same thing but without any mention of who's doing it in what circumstances.
Fun example: the "Stupid! Stupid!" speech given by Eros, the "bad guy" (?) in Plan Nine From Outer Space. The gist of it is that human beings need to be dominated by a superior race because their history proves that they are inherently aggressive, and the arms race will inevitably culminate in the discovery and use of the Solaronite Bomb, a weapon so destructive it will start a chain reaction which will eventually blow up the entire Universe!
So his entire motive in trying to invade the Earth with an unstoppably awesome army of 3 zombies is to protect his own people, and all other sentient beings, from those irresponsible semi-evolved monkeys who don't know what they're doing.
The hero responds to this by taking offense at being called stupid and punching him in the face, which somehow sets fire to the flying saucer and eventually causes it to explode. Is this a happy ending, or did Eros maybe have a point?
Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: A different defintion seems widespread
, started by VVK on Jun 20th 2011 at 3:05:07 PM
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman