At the million dollar level, you can answer the question but if you feel you can't, you can opt to eat worms. No wait, you're serious. How about having a "designated hitter" in the audience, it could be the person in the relationship seat or one of the fastest finger players or even an individual in the audience who is chosen at random and can get some winnings if they can help out.
Hmmm, the
Major Ingram's Folly Lifeline, that one might work. The logo could be a profile of a person coughing. Of course you have to make sure it's only used once ;-)
I've been putting some thought into this and here are a couple that I came up with (feel free to change the stupid names):
Safety Net: Since there is so much to lose, and I can't imagine a reasonable person risking $630,000 to get to $1.25 million if they are only 99% sure, this would allow a person to say, "Ok, I'm pretty sure of this answer, but I will use the safety net." If they are wrong, the $640k they have goes down one level ($320k). If they are right, they move up to $1.25m, but no longer have a safety net, so a wrong answer takes them down to $10k.
I think they'll need some version of this or a moveable milestone, otherwise no one would be foolish enough to go past $640k (levels of foolishness/heights reached may vary. Check your local listings. Void where prohibited.)
This or That: A variation of the 50:50 where you select two answers and the computer will eliminate one incorrect answer. This way, if you have narrowed it down to two answers, rather than have the 50:50 knock out the two that you already eliminated, the player gets to knock out one of the answers that they want knocked out. This doesn't guarantee that the remaining answer is correct (you might still be wrong).
However, this lifeline would have to have restrictions. If you used it and then decided to use the regular 50:50, the regular one would knock out one more incorrect answer, leaving one wrong and the correct one. I can't decide if this should be usable after using the regular 50:50 (thereby leaving the correct answer). You get the answer, but burn 2 lifelines in the process.
That's it for now.