For a while this week, Stephen Conroy was relishing his role as the great inquisitor.
That was until he channelled Colonel Nathan R. Jessup.
Or, if you believe cabinet minister Malcolm Turnbull, Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda one day and Colonel Walter E. Kurtz the next.
The many faces of Labor's fourth most senior figure were on show as important and not-so-important bureaucrats, as well as the military's top brass, fronted Senate estimates hearings at Parliament House.
To the uninitiated, the triannual inquisition can either be a stupefying experience - bordering on nonsensical - or an excruciation for those involved.
Reputations have been made and destroyed in Senate estimates.
Bronwyn Bishop won early fame for the way she grilled ministers and bureaucrats during the Hawke-Keating years.
Her fearsome approach even had some thinking she was Australia's version of Britain's Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher.
Labor elders John Faulkner and Robert Ray were no less tenacious, using tag-team tactics in their relentless pursuit of the Howard government.
Conroy, in opposition and government, has always been Labor's bovver boy. He loves a fight with anyone, but especially with those inside his own party.
And being a bovver boy, he finds trouble.
More than any other person in Labor, he was responsible for the internal destruction of the Gillard government in 2013.
He sulked on the backbench of the second Rudd government before his career was resurrected as defence spokesman in the Bill Shorten opposition.
But, as his colleagues attest, Conroy is not a happy man - embittered, they say, by Labor's defeat at the September election.
The man who once declared he had "unfettered legal power" over telecommunications regulation, including the ability to request Australian telcos "wear red underpants on their head", has been conspicuous by his absence from the political hurly-burly.
His beloved jewel, the national broadband network, is being pared back by the Abbott government, and the deficiencies of its introduction have been ruthlessly and joyously exposed by Turnbull.
Ziggy Switkowski felt the full fury of Conroy's frustration and scorn when the man Turnbull appointed to run NBN Co fronted estimates.
Conroy accused the former Telstra chief of lying, being misleading and acting in contempt of the Senate.
So relentless was Conroy's questioning and gibes, the hearing had to be adjourned twice.
In the lower house, Turnbull had a field day with the performance, likening the former communications minister to Lt Onoda, the Japanese soldier who, refusing to believe the war was over, famously fought on for 28 more years.
Will it take the same time before Conroy, clutching his "dog-eared bundle of reckless forecasts", finally surrenders to the truth, Turnbull asked in question time.
"That he presided over the most wasteful infrastructure debacle in our history?"
Conroy might have been bowed, but he was not beaten.
He marched into a second estimates hearing to confront Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell, the commander of Operation Sovereign Borders.
There he quizzed the general about the seemingly-obsessive secrecy that surrounds the "war" on people smugglers.
Conroy, not unreasonably, wanted to know whether it was a military operation and, if it wasn't, why it was necessary to impose the sort of censorship governments use in time of real war.
Campbell, who has earned a reputation for being less forthcoming than the government about Operation Sovereign Borders, batted away the inquires.
Then came the Col Jessup moment.
"Can't we handle the truth?" Conroy said, mimicking the fictional and unhinged US Marine commander of Guantanamo Bay in the 1992 film A Few Good Men.
"It kind of sounds like a movie, senator," Campbell responded.
It was a movie and we are living it, Conroy told the general.
It got worse. Conroy, dissatisfied with Campbell's response about the need for operational security on the basis it might damage international relationships, accused the general of being engaged in a political cover-up.
"It is time to call a spade a spade," he said as government senators demanded an apology.
The general, himself, took "extreme offence".
Conroy, under pressure, withdrew the accusation but refused to apologise.
Turnbull couldn't resist the free hit, this time likening Conroy to another fictional movie character, Col Kurtz, the main antagonist of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now.
"We remember the last scenes of that movie, as his temple fortress, his jungle fortress, is being smashed by bombs, fire everywhere, columns falling, walls collapsing and what does he say?" Turnbull asked MPs.
"He says: `I had immense plans, I had immense plans. I was on the verge of greatness'."
But the real summary of Conroy's performance was, of course, the most famous line in that movie, Turnbull said.
"The horror, the horror."
Even Labor MPs laughed at that line.
