In an episode of NCIS, the female lead played by Sasha Alexander had had a close call on a rooftop, almost getting shot or something, but the bad guy was dispatched and they were standing around at the end talking and laughing in relief. Suddenly, she gets a bullet between the eyes from a second bad guy sniper.
I hadn’t heard anything about the actress leaving the show, which is often a spoiler for an upcoming main character death, and the ‘fakeout / relief / laying down the boom’ scene was a well played WTF moment.
Thought of another one. In the second episode of the BBC series Spooks, two of the agents are captured by right-wing extremists, who bring them to a commercial kitchen. In order to get the senior one to talk, one of the extremists forces first the hand and then the head of the junior agent into a deep fat fryer, and then kills her. We didn’t see anything, of course, but the implication was gruesome enough.
There was an episode of Mad Men, where Megan was going to quit her job at the agency and was taken out to lunch by her co-workers. Later, Don pressed the elevator button, and the door opened - to find the elevator shaft empty. The elevator car was visible down below, not moving. That scene only lasted a minute or two, but it was in near silence and struck me as very eerie and foreboding. Haunting.
You’re so forking right…fork…fork…why can’t I say “fork”?
In hindsight, it seems I should have guessed.
Also, I gained a lot of respect for Danson as an actor at the reveal; his facial transformation from good-natured angel into demon was superb.
I think the most shocking scene in an episode of Mad Men was in “Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency” where
the new PP&L operations manager, Guy, gets his foot cut off by a secretary riding a lawn mower in the office, spoiling all of the plans of the new owners to change the Sterling Cooper management.
It also gives Roger Sterling one of his most droll lines of the series after being informed that Guy might lose his foot: “Right when he got it in the door.”
Hill Street Blues was on the air like forty years ago, so it’s possible that one or two people here don’t remember what happened in the ending of the pilot episode.
P.S. The end of the episode of “All in the Family” in which the Jewish activist who had been helping the Bunkers was murdered by a car bomb was pretty shocking.
Similar to the first episode of The Shield. the cops we’ve followed all episode as he arranges to investigate the dirty cops gets executed by those same dirty cops, making it look like he was killed by a drug gang. Cue a completely different type of story for the whole series from what we’d expected to be watching.
(I was too busy thinking about empty elevator shafts to remember that one)