moon_custafer | I Was Faking It to the Fourth Wall

As usual, I’m too lazy to look through TV Tropes to see if they have this one, since they almost certainly would give it a different name than the one I came up with.

This is where there’s a plot twist in the final quarter of a story that reveals a character was faking symptoms, or their entire persona, all along; thing is, for this to come as a surprise to the audience, the character had to keep up the charade even in scenes where *no other character was present.* I guess it’s possible to argue they were method-acting, or being cautious in case someone was eavesdropping, but it always feels like a bit of a cheat to me; note that this quibble does not apply when you can re-watch those scenes and realize with hindsight that their actions, expressions, etc, have a different meaning than the one you originally thought they had; those are awesome.

Spoiler-y examples: there’s a Tintin story where a professor seems genuinely shocked as a trapdoor opens beneath Tintin, even though (I think) he’s already been replaced by his evil twin; possibly he wasn’t warned at what point his colleagues were going to try to kill the boy reporter.

An episode of House where he supposedly has cancer, only it turns out he’s faking it to get painkillers: I don’t recall the exact details, but there’s a scene where he’s checking lab results that no one in the hospital but himself is going to see, and gives no sign they’re not genuine.