The Cube (TV series)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Come for the X, Stay for the Y: What makes the show so exciting is how it's produced — liberal use of camera effects, slow-motion shots, etc.
  • Moment of Awesome: A contestant plays Contact for £50K - essentially a "steady hands" game where you have to guide a ring along a long metal rod without it touching - and nails it on his first try, giving him 5 lives and both Lifelines available for the £100K game.
    • Same for its other appearance as the very last game in Series 1, whose contestant had three lives for £20k. Goes down to the last life after two poor attempts. Out of nowhere, he somehow manages to clear all three metres and win.
    • Series 3 add a new moment to the list: a contestant has three lives and a Trial Run to play Hit Rate for £50k (a game in which the player has to hit five pads on a curved table within half a second). He uses his Trial Run and gets a time of 0.588. He commits, to the shock of pretty much everyone in the studio. His first two attempts get him down to a time of 0.513. Cue the entire audience behind him cheering him on, as his very last life gets him a time of 0.494, winning the game (and £50,000) by just six thousandths of a second.
  • Surprise Difficulty: Doing simple-looking stunts inside a glass box is much harder than it sounds.
  • It's Easy, So It Sucks: Counter to the above, some people think the show's premise is stupid, particularly for trying to give the impression that something easy is somehow more difficult when you're in a glass box with coloured lighting. Radio host Chris Moyles has probably led the charge on this:

"I'm watching a man count inside a box." "It's just counting! But it's counting, IN THE CUUUUUUUBE!"

  • That One Level: Elevation, Barrier, and Pinpoint are all notorious for sapping away most (if not all) lives of the contestants who played them. Typically when this game is won, Cylinder is next — a game so ridiculously simple it suggests the Cube's trying to bait the player into going on.
    • Series 2 adds Side-Track. Like Pinpoint, the contestant has to hold onto a metal pole which will inevitably cause fatigue to set in and make the game harder on subsequent tries, whereas other games are likely to become easier after each try because you know what you're doing and how/where you messed up.
    • Descent (bounce a ball off two pillars and into a bucket) is rapidly becoming the single most feared game on the show. Hard not to get intimidated after watching a player fail it despite having eight lives when he got there.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: While this is supposed to be a game show, and not the flippin Matrix, we got Orbital Shots, slow-motion views, Bullet Time, the list goes on!
  • What an Idiot!: Zoe, who used eight of her nine lives on her first game Time Split (stop a timer on exactly 5.0 seconds). She proceeded to use Simplify after her fifth failure (either undershooting or overshooting the mark by mere tenths of a second), which changed the timer to count in increments of .2 seconds. After finally winning that, she proceeded to fail on Stabilise. The fact she had a bizarre fascination with wigs didn't help matters, either.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Cube_(TV_series)/YMMV?oldid=1886247"