The Mystic Seer

Don keeps feeding pennies and yes-or-no questions to a novelty fortune machine, interpreting vague answers as authoritative predictions. He nearly gives it control of the couple's choices; another couple remains trapped in town by the same dependence.

A user transfers agency to an opaque system whose ambiguous outputs feel uncannily accurate, then changes behavior in ways that manufacture dependence.

The episode leaves room for the machine to be genuinely supernatural, so overreliance—not necessarily prediction error—is the main analogy.