So last night my wife and I were watching the most recent episode of The Americans, which we’d DVR’d. No spoilers here—all I’ll say was that during a relatively quiet scene in a kitchen, one of the characters picks up an orange and starts rolling it around on the counter, and I looked at my wife and said, “Uh oh.”

“What?” she asked.

“He’s got an orange,” I said. “When you see a character in movies or on TV with an orange, it’s a sign that some bad shit is about to go down.”

She was slightly incredulous, so this morning I turned to the internet to back me up. It turns out that I wasn’t quite as right I thought I was—the evidence is a little thin. But nonetheless, filmmakers and, lately, TV auteurs do have a history of using the presence of oranges to signal impending danger.

It all started with The Godfather, where the presence of oranges foreshadows imminent violence or death. There’s (SPOILERS) a bowl of oranges around the table of a Hollywood producer who will later find a horse head in his bed; Vito shops for oranges before an assassination attempt; Sonny blazes past a billboard for Florida oranges before being gunned to death; and Vito puts an orange in his mouth moments before he drops dead in the garden.

Apparently it was a mistake; production designer Dean Tavoularis allegedly used the oranges for an occasional splash of color in what was otherwise a darkly shot film. But the connection was made, even if accidentally, and since then other filmmakers have paid homage to Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece and ratcheted up dread in their own films by putting the fruit in key scenes of their own movies.

Well, sort of. As I said, the evidence seems to be a little thin. There’s an orange scene, apparently, in Point Break; another in Requiem for a Dream. The fact that Tony ate an orange in the season finale of The Sopranos may help to clear up the mystery of that final shot—but Matthew Weiner, ever the provocateur, seems to have used the iconic citrus fruit in Mad Men to put viewers on a false trail to death when a more symbolic death was what he had in mind.

Then of course there’s Children of Men, in which a character begins peeling an orange in a fairly calm scene—just before all hell breaks loose. I’ll take any excuse I can get to post that scene; it’s one of the all-time greats. (Warning: it’s also kind of intense.)

Oh, and The Americans? The episode ended with the revelation that the character playing with that orange was in grave danger.

Vindicated!

Can you think of other movies or TV shows where the eating of an orange presages death or destruction? Put them in the comments!