Gone Horribly Right / Live-Action TV

Times where a plan Goes Horribly Right in Live-Action TV series.

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• 24: In the finale of Season 1, the Big Bad and the Dragon decide to have The Mole tell Jack his daughter is dead. They think this will make Jack attack them in a blind rage, making him easier to kill. He attacks in a rage all right, by driving a truck into the warehouse, wielding Guns Akimbo, killing Mooks right and left. The Dragon is unceremoniously gunned down in the process, before Jack empties his clip into the surrendering Big Bad.
• Almost Human: Dorian is an older model of cyborg that was designed to mimic human behavior as convincingly as possible. It was decommissioned because it defeated the purpose of cyborgs by being prone to unpredictable mood swings, just like humans.
• The Andy Griffith Show: Andy left Barney as the sheriff for one afternoon, telling him to just keep the peace. Andy was surprised to find the town was too peaceful and quiet when he returned. Barney had arrested every person in town.
• Angel Season 2: Corrupt Corporate Executive Holland Manners goes out of his way with a plan to corrupt Angel, first bringing his sire Darla Back from the Dead as a human, and then hiring Psychopathic Womanchild Drusilla to turn Darla back into a vampire right after Angel just went through hell and back to save her and convince her to live out her life as a human, while pinning Angel down and forcing him to watch Drusilla do so. Subsequently, he arranges a wine tasting, only for Drusilla and Darla to crash the party with the intent to slaughter him and the rest of the Wolfram & Hart employees there as revenge for being used as pawns. When Angel shows up, Manners begs him to save them, but Angel instead throws an Ironic Echo at him, locks the doors, and lets Drusilla and Darla do as they please. He definitely succeeded in corrupting Angel, all right.
• On Are You Afraid of the Dark?, an imprisoned bank robber named One-Eyed Jack falls prey to this one in The Tale of Prisoners Past. He hatched an ingenious plan to escape by chiseling a tunnel out of his cell into an air shaft, but got stuck in the shaft. Unfortunately he did such a good job covering his tracks that nobody could find his tunnel, and so he was never found: he ended up starving to death in the bowels of the prison while going down in history as the only prisoner to ever successfully escape.
• In the Venezuelan series A todo corazón, in an attempt to get the classes suspended, El Gato and Máximo sneak into the principal's office and pretend there's a fire in the school to get everyone out. The chaos that ensues causes Professor Aguirre to have a heart attack that sends him to the hospital. Not to mention it paves the way for Chacín to take over the school.
• Babylon 5:
  • "Infection" features an unstoppable Super-Soldier that was created by a fallen civilization, and set to destroy those who weren't "pure" enough, because their planet was frequently invaded by alien aggressors. Apparently, the criteria were set by religious and ideological fanatics, and proved to be so strict that nobody fit them, not even their own species.
  • In the future, as shown in "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars", the evil Earth secessionists decided they wanted some extremely accurate sentient holograms to help them convincingly smear the founders of the Interstellar Alliance. Unfortunately for them, the extremely accurate Garibaldi hacked the computer and broadcast the whole recording to the non-secessionist humans, including the part where the secessionists would blitzkrieg their civilian populations. And just to top it off, he also transmitted the secessionist base's location.
    • Unfortunately, as the non-secessionists strike at the secessionists' military bases, the secessionists manage to retaliate. Centuries later, humans are still recovering from the Great Burn with the help of the Rangers.
  • Londo Mollari and Lord Refa schemed to start a war with the Narn, eliminate their rivals, and put their own chosen man on the Centauri Imperial Throne. They succeeded so well that Londo later had to assassinate their "own chosen man" after he turned out to be a murderous psychopath.
  • Every deal with Mr. Morden turns out this way. Vir's deal is a subversion, in that it went horribly right for Morden instead of Vir.
• In Backstage Kit has a secret identity as DJ Diamonhead whose tracks folks love. Given the confidence in herself, Kit decides to submit her work to get into a big music school. She soon finds herself brought before the board and facing expulsion for her "blatant plagiarism" of a well-known music genius.
• Battlestar Galactica: The Cylons, believing that love is the key to sexual reproduction, set up Helo with a copy of his Galactica crewmate Boomer (a Cylon sleeper agent in reality). Not only is the experiment a success, but as Caprica-Boomer has fallen in love with Helo, she helps him to escape to Galactica and defects to the humans, bringing valuable information about the Cylons and denying the Cylons access to her child (although the child would change hand a few times between the humans and the Cylons). Eventually she becomes an officer on the Galactica, and plays a pivotal role in rescuing the humans from New Caprica. The final battle between Galactica and Cavil's Cylons is a human mission to rescue her daughter, which ends in the destruction of Cavil's Cylon forces. Her daughter would become the Mitochondrial Eve, the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of all living human beings.
• In Batwoman, series antagonist Alice spends the first season trying to convince Kate/Batwoman that she's no longer Kate's sister Beth after spending over a decade being warped by her abductors, but due to Alice's inability to understand Kate, by the time Kate accepts that Alice isn't Beth she's also abandoned the idea that she wants to rebuild their relationship, as opposed to Alice's hope that Kate would join her.
• In Being Human Hal wanted to turn Cutler into a better vampire (a monster by the standards of most people) and he succeeded after killing Cutler's wife (who Cutler had refused to kill) and tricking Cutler into drinking her blood. It works, but Hal switches sides and, over fifty years later, Hal meets Cutler again. Cutler pulls the same trick Hal pulled on him all those years ago.
• Breaking Bad: Walter White expected to be able to cook up a few batches of methamphetamine, sell it, use the proceeds to pay for his medical bills and still wind up with a little something left over to leave his family. It turns out there aren't a lot of buyers who have the capacity to deal with multiple-kilogram quantities of USP-grade methamphetamine, and you generally wind up dealing with Very Bad People. He's also forced to come up with some way of explaining plausibly just where all this money is coming from. His wife, who is an accountant, is aghast when she finds out how much there is and at how long it's going to take to believably launder it through an apparently legitimate business.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a few examples:
  • Though it's a pretty thin line here between right and wrong, the creation of Adam in Season 4 as a super-strong, human/demon/cyborg. He acted like a human/demon/cyborg. Adam claimed late in the season that everything he'd done, including recreating at least one Initiative soldier as a lesser version of himself and bringing demon forces together under his leadership, was what his creator Professor Walsh had intended, except that she thought she'd be alive to witness it. And presumably that the process would be under her control.
  • In Season 6, Giles' plan is to have the magic he was lent be absorbed, because it will give the wielder a connection to all humanity, hopefully snapping Willow out of her Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Willow absorbs it and feels all humanity's pain, and either because the world just sucks too much or because she's not in a mood to focus on the positives, promptly decides to end their suffering...permanently. Subverted, as it turns out that this was in fact part of Giles' plan all along, and it was the magic Willow absorbed that enabled Xander to talk Willow down and get through to her before she could go through with it.
  • Also discussed earlier in Season 6, after their attempt to bring Buffy back from the dead goes exactly as planned...resulting in Buffy being ripped out of heaven, waking up in a coffin 6 feet under ground, and having to dig her way out of her own grave.
  • Earlier, in Season 5, Tara cast a spell to prevent the other Scoobies from seeing demons because her father tricked her into believing she was half-demon and inherently evil, which might not have been so bad on their own... but around that same time, Glory forcibly recruited a pack of Lei-Ach demons to kill Buffy. Thanks to Tara's invisibility spell, they easily enter the Magic Box and nearly kill the gang, but Tara, realizing that the spell had gone awry, immediately breaks it, rendering the demons visible again, which allows Buffy to easily defeat them.
• In Burn Notice, Michael has Madeline befriend a woman in order to trick her into handing over files that Michael needs. It's downplayed in the sense that the plan works perfectly, but Madeline's attempt at friendship works too well, and their friendship is doomed once the mark finds out Madeline has betrayed her. Michael breaks into the office and steals more files to cover for the disappearance of the files he needed in order to hide the woman's involvement, but this doesn't fix things with Madeline.
• The Chaser's War On Everything had the APEC stunt. Basically, the intention was to approach the motel where the delegates were staying, and be stopped at the outermost fence line cordoning off the motel from the public. They went out of their way to make sure the guards knew their motorcade was a fake (fake passes, runners beside the main motorcade car, etc). They approached the first gate... and got in. Gate two yielded the same results, and they finally found themselves inside the main motel area, so they decided to turn around. But, The Chaser being The Chaser, they decided to let Chas (who was dressed as Osama bin Laden) out of the car. Then the guards realised, and arrested the entire lot. (Julian Morrow actually called the trope by name after he walked out of the court room.)
• Cheers: In the final season, Frasier suggests Woody run for election in the city council partly as a joke, to prove the voters of Boston are gullible, and to win a bet with Sam. Frasier only planned to get 10% of the electorate and no more. Thanks to the sitting councillor making a gaffe, and Woody's farm-boy innocence, he actually manages to win, much to Frasier's horror.
• In an episode of Chuck, Chuck and Sarah get conned and don't have enough authority to find the conwoman themselves. Chuck fakes a flash to get the general to go after her and accidentally links her to a notorious terrorist. The general puts ALL resources into finding her. Chuck and Sarah are forced to confess the truth... only for Chuck to get a REAL flash of the woman involved with a terrorist but the general doesn't believe them.
• On Cobra Kai, Kreese's plan to defeat Johnny and Daniel, involved bringing Terry Silver out of retirement, but what he didn't realize was that he awakened Silver's dormant psychotic side who was willing to do anything to win, including betraying Kreese himself.
• In 2006, Stephen Colbert reported that Hungary was holding an online naming poll for a new bridge, for which the then-leading entry was the "Chuck Norris Bridge". He then proceeded to suggest that his fans should stuff the ballot box with "Stephen Colbert Bridge". This trope took effect when the Hungarian officials were tipped off by the fact that "Stephen Colbert Bridge" had over 17 million votes — about 7 million more than the entire population of Hungary at the time.
• Control Z:
  • Because of the hacker, Gerry fought off and punched Luis very hard. Not only he did he get him hospitalized, but the severity of the injuries would later result in Luis's death, all because of a wrong choice Luis made to free himself from the school's extreme bullying.
  • Raúl, unmasked as the hacker, succeeds in leaking the students' secrets, wanting to give Sofía a world without secrets and lies. However, his actions resulted in massive fights, broken friendships and Luis's death.
• On Corner Gas, Lacey adds a new sandwich called the Ruby Club to her menu, and browbeats a few of the other characters into trying it. They find it delicious, and spread the word around town. Eventually, the Ruby Club is the only thing that anyone ever wants to order, and Lacey is just plain sick of making literally nothing but Ruby Clubs all day. She also doesn't want to take it off the menu because she just had new menus printed and doesn't want to ruin them by using white-out to blank out the Ruby Club. Eventually she exploits the town's resistance to any sort of change by claiming that all Ruby Club purchases will help fund the new traffic light the mayor wants to add to the town, which immediately gets the townsfolk to stop ordering it (despite still considering it delicious) without her having to actually take it off the menu.
  Brent: People hate your sandwich? That's great!
  Lacey: [happily] No, people love my sandwich. They hate me.
• On Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Nate is rocked when his father hires Bert, a nutcase who's never practiced law, has a history of mental illness, does insane and racist rants online and literally lived in a sewer and makes him a silent partner in the branch of the firm. It turns out Nathaniel Sr. knows how Bert is unfit for any role and just hired him as a way to inspire his son to finally get himself on track. However, when they try to fire Bert, he points out that he still is the majority owner of the branch and has the power to even rename the entire branch "Mountaintop." In other words, by trying to inspire his son to take charge, Nathaniel Sr. has allowed an unfit lunatic to take over the firm he loves.
• Criminal Minds: A Serial Killer of the week ("Magnificent Light", Season 8, Episode 9) was a man who had grown up with Synthesthesia that made him see words in colors and he believed that certain colors meant people were lying to him or were evil. This had driven him to the point he had become hostile at work and had to be fired, which made him suicidal up until he met a self-help guru. The guru's talks were, obviously, of releasing someone's inner abilities and so on. The "gone horribly right" part is that this made the man decide that he was a superhero and had to make the world better by hunting down and killing the people that his Synthesthesia had labeled as "evil"... with the self-help guru as a very unwilling "sidekick".
• CSI: One murder victim was a scam artist that had made a living out of creating fake cults (that replicated such odd ones like "Heaven's Gate") and taking money for donations out of their members and their families before convincing them to perform a mass suicide, that he then faked with mild sleeping pills (the cultists just woke up a couple of hours later with a headache, and him far gone with all of the money. The cults rarely got denounced because of the embarrassment). The "horribly right" part of this trope is when he then tried to perform the same swindle on Las Vegas and one of his disciples got so entranced by his teachings that, when she found him doing some checks on his getaway vehicle before the false mass suicide, she killed him and went to get some real poison for the event (and then chickened out at the last second because, deciding to be the last to take it, she had to see all the other cultists endure their painful death throes).
• CSI: NY: "Clean Sweep": A cage fighter is so afraid of a stalker harming his family that when his friend, a homeless veteran, dies after an accident, he decides to set the body on fire and fake his own death. The fighter is eventually found, but he burned the body so thoroughly that there's no proof the homeless vet wasn't murdered, and the DA considers charging him. His fate is left up in the air.
• Dark Desire: Lys's plan to spite Darío is to ruin his engagement with Julieta by sending her the sex video of him and Alma. The plan works as Julieta is understandably furious at Darío. However, it takes a turn for the worse as Darío, in a fit of rage, throws his fianceé off the roof to her death when she attempts to call the police on him.
• Doctor Who:
  • "Planet of the Spiders": The Great One meant to give herself infinite power. It did that — and overloaded her with the arachnid equivalent of Red Rings of Doom. Thus perished the entire Eight Legs species (apart from the few who showed up in the short story "Return of the Spiders" and the audios "The Eight Truths"/"Worldwide Web").
  • "Genesis of the Daleks": Davros makes his Daleks into Omnicidal Maniac Super Soldiers — pitiless, racist, and arrogant, intent on exterminating everything and everyone that isn't a Dalek. He isn't a Dalek. Oops. He then proceeds to repeat this error in every following appearance.
  • This is a pretty standard result of the Fourth Doctor's meddling, because his main vice is being Too Clever by Half. Probably the best encapsulation of it is in "Shada", when he convinces a spaceship AI to do whatever he says using a long chain of intentionally faulty logic to convince her that he is dead and therefore is an ''ex''-enemy of the ship's master so it doesn't matter if the ship tells him anything. She agrees to this but decides that since he's dead, this means she can switch the oxygen off. He certainly would have died if his companion Chris hadn't intervened. Other excellent examples are how exploiting a Gallifreyan legal loophole to delay his execution resulted in him becoming Lord President of Gallifrey, a job he then had to weasel out of.
  • "The Doctor Dances": At the beginning, the Doctor gets the gas-mask zombies that have him, Rose and Jack surrounded to back off by treating them and their Creepy Child leader like a bad boy, and ordering him to "GO! TO! YOUR! ROOM!" This means that the Child gets back to the room at the hospital where he was treated while Our Heroes are in the room investigating it.
  • "The Girl in the Fireplace": The clockwork repair droids have the simple instruction. "Repair any damage the ship suffers" Unfortunately, the programmers hadn't read Asimov's Laws of Robotics, leading to this conversation.
    Doctor: What happened to the ship, then? There was a lot of damage.
    Droid: Ion storm. Eighty two percent systems failure.
    Doctor: That ship hasn't moved in over a year. What's taken you so long?
    Droid: We did not have the parts.
    Mickey: Always comes down to that, doesn't it? The parts.
    Doctor: What's happened to the crew? Where are they?
    Droid: We did not have the parts.
    Doctor: There should have been over fifty people on your ship. Where did they go?
    Droid: We did not have the parts.
    Doctor: Fifty people don't just disappear. Where-? Oh. You didn't have the parts, so you used the crew.
    Mickey: The crew?
    Rose: We found a camera with an eye in it, and there was a heart wired in to machinery.
    Doctor: It was just doing what it was programmed to. Repairing the ship any way it can, with whatever it could find. No one told it the crew weren't on the menu.
    • The droids also created time windows just so they can find Madame de Pompadour in 18th Century France and bring back her brain once she is as old as the ship, also named Madame de Pompadour, as they believe that when that happens, the ship and her brain, which the droids want to use as their central computer will be compatible.
  • "The Family of Blood":
    Son of Mine: He never raised his voice. That was the worst thing... the fury of the Time Lord... and then we discovered why. Why this Doctor, who had fought with gods and demons, why he had run away from us and hidden. He was being kind. He wrapped my father in unbreakable chains forged in the heart of a dwarf star. He tricked my mother into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, to be imprisoned there... forever. He still visits my sister, once a year, every year. I wonder if one day he might forgive her... but there she is. Can you see? He trapped her inside a mirror. Every mirror. If ever you look at your reflection and see something move behind you, just for a second, that's her. That's always her. As for me, I was suspended in time, and the Doctor put me to work standing over the fields of England, as their protector. We wanted to live forever. So the Doctor made sure that we did.
  • "The End of Time": Rassilon's "creation" of the Master backfires on him, because when he happens to mention his responsibility in front of the insane, temporarily superpowered villain he created, the Master promptly takes revenge on him, preventing Rassilon from escaping the Time War as had been his plan.
  • The Eleventh Doctor manages to do this twice in "A Christmas Carol". All he needs to do is get a cold-hearted old man to develop some humanity, so he will use a machine that responds to his brainwaves to save a crashing starship. Piece of cake when you have a time machine; he goes back to the man's childhood to give him better experiences, and even causes him to fall in love with a young woman. Problem is, the woman was dying, and now the old man is just as bitter and cruel, but now it's because of heartbreak. The Doctor does much better at his next attempt, showing the man's past self what he is destined to become, and finally bringing about a Heel–Face Turn... except that his personality has changed so much that the machine he needs to operate no longer recognizes him as the same person.
  • "Smile": The AI is programmed rather simply, its instructions are "make sure the colonists are kept happy and their needs met". Sounds reasonable enough. When a colonist dies of old age, the AI observes people gathering around and becoming sad, and then encountering others, causing the sadness to "spread". It wasn't programmed for this scenario, so it interprets it as well as it can within its directive. It thinks it is dealing with a contagious disease, and after all other methods of containment fail, decides to kill the "infected" to protect the rest. This is a great example of how computers don't have morals or emotions, they simply follow the instructions they have been given exactly, to the best of their ability. They are basically the ultimate Literal Genie.
  • "Extremis": The Prophets of Truth have created an extremely realistic simulation of Earth and its inhabitants in order to prepare for their planned invasion. The simulation's version of the Doctor, therefore, has both the technology and the will to warn the real Doctor about the threat they pose.
  • "Orphan 55": Bella came to Tranquillity Spa with the aim of revenge against her estranged mother Kane, which she hoped to accomplish by destroying the resort. Since the spa is secretly located on a Death World, she figures that bringing down the defences to allow the hostile natives in will help... only for problems to ensue when it turns out she severely underestimated the dangers of Orphan 55 and the Dregs. In addition, she also brought along a few bombs, and the smaller bomb ends up destroying the mainframe when it goes off, providing a further impediment to the survivors' escape — including Bella herself.
  • Part of UNIT's job is to keep quiet from the public the near-constant alien attacks and threats that occur on Earth on an almost weekly basis. In "Resolution", it turns out UNIT's funding has been suspended because it's hard to justify a huge budget to the government and public to protect from dangers they don't believe exist.
• Dollhouse:
  • "Instinct": Topher alters Echo's biochemistry to give her a strong maternal feeling for the baby she's been imprinted to believe is hers. Turns out it worked so well that Echo wants to protect the baby even after she's wiped—to the point of breaking into the father's house with a knife.
    Topher: In hindsight, triggering lactation may have been a bridge too far...
  • A rare example of this happening to a villain, in "Omega": Alpha's plan to turn Echo into a composite was a textbook case of Gone Horribly Right. Every imprint Echo ever had was in her brain. However, he was crazy to believe that Composite!Echo would become his ally, especially since most of her imprints were good people. Composite!Echo's first act was to hit Alpha with a pipe.
• On Famous In Love, Alexis is tired of the reality TV show that is costing her friends and affecting her acting career. So she decides to fake a mental breakdown, pretending to shave her head and then breaking into a house that's owned by a family who knows her friend Sloane (who helps in the scheme). This puts her in a mental ward where her agent shows up to rant the show has been canceled. Alexis figures she can just check herself out until she's informed that she's under a 72-hour hold until a doctor can examine her. Meaning it will be on record that she spent the weekend in a mental ward which will affect her career majorly.
• One of the major plot drivers in later seasons of Farscape is the race between the Peacekeepers and Scarrans to acquire wormhole technology, in order to build a weapon. Crichton has knowledge of this technology locked away in his brain, making him a prime target for both sides. By the end of the series, he's so fed up with this constant pursuit that he gives them exactly what they want: he builds and activates a wormhole weapon, and threatens to destroy the entire universe with it unless they agree to a truce. Naturally, he gets asked What the Hell, Hero? and delivers a devastating rebuttal that he did exactly as everyone wanted him to do.
  "What... did you ask me to do, Sparky? 'Crichton, please make the wormhole so we can all have peace. Crichton, you gotta make the wormhole, we all want peace! Crichton, make the damn wormhole, we gotta have peace!' HOW MANY TIMES DID YOU SAY THAT, SPARKY?!"
• Frasier:
  • Frasier tries to get Mr. Martin to stop being a corporate stooge and rehire Kenny. It works, but Mr. Martin gets other ideas as well.
    Mr. Martin: I'm going to march right in there and tell them that we're doing it my way! No more talk.
    Frasier: Exactly, action!
    Mr. Martin: No, no more talk radio. From this moment on, the station is all Latino music, all the time.
    Frasier: I beg your pardon?
  • To elaborate: Kenny was rehired but Frasier and most of his coworkers were fired.
  • In another episode, when he has to go to a Catholic charity as part of his apology about Seattle's climate (It Makes Sense in Context), he changes one of his jokes so he wouldn't end up repeating a regularly done tasteless joke due to a nun's comments. It worked. Unfortunately, he also ended up unintentionally telling an even less tasteful joke relating to a priest and fishermen when Seattle's archbishop was lost at sea.
• Friends: In "The One Where Chandler Takes A Bath", Monica teaches Chandler how to love bubble baths but it backfires when Chandler becomes addicted to them.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Dany struggles to convince Drogo to conquer the Seven Kingdoms for their son, but when Drogo finally agrees he basically plans to Rape, Pillage, and Burn the entire continent and Dany's later aversion to the same tactics used merely to pay for transport show that she has no taste for Dothraki warfare. Turns out a little differently once Dany actually makes it to Westeros, though — apparently losing most of your advisors and friends and then having the last one executed in front of your eyes makes one go on a pillaging and burning spree that would make your late husband proud.
  • Cersei does everything in her power to ensure Joffrey sits on the Iron Throne. Needless to say, most of Westeros has her to thank for the reign of King Joffrey.
  • Because she's a short-term strategist who doesn't think out the long-term consequences of her plans, Cersei's victories usually end up as this. For example, if you take down your enemies by giving military and political power to a group of religious fanatics, you'd better be sure said religious fanatics actually like you. And if you plan to murder said religious fanatics/order and your hated daughter-in-law, then you should probably think about what that strategy is going to do to your romantically besotted and religiously devout son. At the moment, Cersei is ruling as queen, but she's ruling without wealth and over a people who loathed her before she razed their most holy icon to the ground and murdered their beloved religious leader along with their beloved former queen.
  • The masters of Astapor created the Unsullied to be the best soldiers in the world and utterly loyal to whoever owns them. Then, Daenerys takes control of them and turns them on their former masters.
  • The Maesters of the Citadel protect Westeros from harmful knowledge, even if that knowledge could have been useful such as the cure for greyscale.
• In The George Lopez Show, George and Angie try to teach Max a lesson about how hard it is to make money and where he will end up working if he doesn't improve his grades by getting him a job in the factory. Unfortunately, he appreciates the experience so much that he decides he wants to drop out and work there. At first, George didn't want to stop him because he knows that Max has trouble in school, but he then has a Flash Forward of a 50-year-old Max having no options after the factory lays him off.
• An early episode of The Goodies had Graeme improving the formula for a sleeping aid called "Snooze". This new formula soon got all of Britain in a deep sleep.
• In an episode of Good Luck Charlie:, PJ uses Charlie to pick up girls at the mall. Unfortunately, it works so well that the girl he lands only becomes interested in Charlie.
• The Handmaid's Tale has Serena working to overthrow the U.S. and establish a new government under the belief women are better off working at home. She actually manages to help pull it off, with women unable to read, write, hold jobs and be totally subservient to their husbands. It's only then it hits Serena that she has to follow the same laws and go from a bold writer to just sitting around the house, unable to even read a book and totally answering to men who treat her like garbage.
• Hannibal: Jack Crawford hired decorated trainee Miriam Lass to find the Chesapeake Ripper. She does. And ends up held in captivity, having one arm removed, and brainwashed by him.
• Heroes: At the start of Season 3, Mohinder injects himself with a serum to give him powers like the other heroes. He does indeed get powers similar to Spider-Man. Unfortunately, he then starts sticking people in webs. Also in "Villains" the company wanted to get Sylar to kill again so they could analyze his ability. They got him to kill again but they also turned him into a murderous psychopath that ended up killing several of their agents.
• The Hexer: Geralt was first from the new batch of witchers, designed to be just a little more human. It worked too well, making him ostracized by fellow witchers and still not human enough to fit into regular society.
• In one episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Waitress finally gets Charlie to stop stalking her, only for the plan to completely backfire when a series of horrible events^note that Charlie may or may not have planned all along ends up putting her in the hospital. Turns out Charlie's constant interference was the one thing keeping her from harm, and by the end of the episode she begrudgingly asks him to start stalking her again.
• In an episode of Jeeves and Wooster, Bertie needs Gussie Fink-Nottle to work up the courage to propose to Madeline Bassett, because if he doesn't Bertie will be honour-bound to marry her instead. Bertie decides the best way to do this is to get the usually teetotal Gussie tipsy and so slips half a bottle of gin into his orange juice. For once the plan seemingly goes off without a hitch, but he later discovers that Jeeves also spiked Gussie's juice, and Gussie himself took a fortifying swig of whisky. This results in an absolutely soused Gussie giving the graduation speech at a local prep school with no verbal filter whatsoever, expressing all the grievances against the world he's usually too meek to mention.
• Until 2003, Jeopardy! champions could win up to 5 games before being retired. Starting in the 2003-04 season, the producers instituted a "sky's the limit" rule, where champions could go on and on winning until being defeated. Towards the season's end, Ken Jennings came along and went on a 74-game winning streak that lasted into the next season. Of course, given that Jennings' incredible winning streak was great for ratings, paying him $2,520,700 in prize money was probably well worth it, especially since there's no difference in paying that cash to one person or 30 over the course of a season.
  • Some have also theorized that this also happened to Jennings himself, who grew tired of his constant victories. But, as Jennings pointed out in a Reddit thread, "Have you ever quit a job where you were making like $75K an hour?"
• The events of Jericho (2006), depending on your point of view. Namely, John Smith's plan to severely weaken Jennings & Rall and its hooks in the US government.
• The Law & Order episode "Born Bad" has a lawyer argue that her young client had the cards stacked against him, as he has a genetic predisposition towards violence. Unfortunately, the trial doesn't end as she was expecting — her argument is so convincing that the kid buys it, and pleads out for the maximum sentence.
• Kamen Rider had an episode where the Monster of the Week attacks a bus and tests a poisonous gas that reduces people to skeletons. The gas proves so effective the monster dies from it.
• Kamen Rider Zi-O This happens not once, but twice. The Big Bad of the series along with the Big Bad of The Movie Over Quarterz. In the series, Big Bad Swartz wants to steal the powers of Sougo Tokiwa. To this end, he masterminds one horrific event after another to force him down the path of his future self to become Oma Zi-O. In the end, he succeeds, only to quickly realize how big of a mistake he made when he discovers that the power is far beyond his capabilities to handle. Needless to say, he doesn't live long enough to regret it.
  • Then comes the Big Bad of The Movie, the original SOUGO who attempted to create an alternate version of himself to distract the multiverse so that he could go on with his plans. To say that this worked too well would be a MASSIVE UNDERSTATEMENT. As he ended up creating a version of himself that was VASTLY superior to him in every way. To the point that even a mere portion of his power was capable of stomping him into the ground, and that's after he had absorbed the powers of his minions.
• In one episode of Kenan & Kel, Kenan, Kel, and plenty of others are accidentally locked in the freezer room due to Kel's stupidity. In order to make the room more warm, Kel turns up the thermostat to make it warmer. They get their wish, but it ends up becoming too warm due to Kel inadvertently breaking the thermostat.
• LazyTown: In "Ziggy's Alien", Robbie's alien disguise works too well and almost gets him sent to outer space.
• One of the most frequent ways the Leverage team runs into trouble.
  • The team does such a great job of making everyone believe that their mark is a true psychic in "The Future Job" that he's kidnapped by some criminals who want the mark's help finding a lost bank heist stash.
  • Hardison convinces the Russians in "The Iceman Job" that he's an expert diamond thief — which becomes a problem when they kidnap him and force him to steal a diamond.
  • In "The Underground Job", the mine owner is accidentally convinced to fire his workers, shut down his mine, and blow it up — which is a problem since they're trying to help the workers keep their jobs.
  • Shows up as early as "The Nigerian Job" — they did everything perfectly, it just turns out that they did it to a good guy.
  • In "The Miracle Job", they try to dissuade a real estate developer from shutting down a church and turning the area into a mall by faking a miracle — which convinces the developer to buy the church anyways and set up a Bible-themed entertainment and shopping center instead.
  • In "The Three Days of the Hunter Job", Sophia wanted to scare Monica Hunter into doing a false news story. She was so scared and driven that she dragged Hardison into breaking into an Army base.
  • In "The Blue Line Job", the team go after a hockey team owner embezzling from his franchise by making him think the World Hockey League is planning a franchise and trick him into investing. However, the "evidence" they provide is so convincing the guy realizes that rather than compete with a "real" team or expose his books to investigators, he'll just declare bankruptcy and close the team down, putting the players, staff and arena workers out of jobs. Lampshaded by Sophie chewing out Hardison on making the fake evidence and website look so good and he fires back "I'm sorry, is it my job to make our covers look bad?"
  • A downplayed example in "The Juror No. 6 Job" is when Hardison creates a fake identity for Parker so convincing it gets called for jury duty. Though it ends up being a good thing.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Galadriel's plans to obtain an army from Numenor and install Halbrand as king of the Southlands go smoothly, except for one thing, Halbrand is Sauron in disguise and plans to take over Middle-earth.
• Madam Secretary has a general deciding to test a new system and his crew by creating a realistic computer simulation of a massive Russian nuclear attack. When a glitch causes the simulation to be played by accident, everyone thinks it's for real and nearly causes World War III before the general is able to show up and stop it in time.
• In Malcolm in the Middle, Malcolm tries to have Dewey fail the IQ Test because he doesn't want Dewey to end up suffering the same bad experience he did as a Krelboyne student. It worked all right, unfortunately, because he let Reese come up with the answers for Dewey to give, it resulted in him being placed with the Buseys, the class equivalent of an insane asylum.
  • Another episode, Hal takes up coaching Dewey's soccer team after an embarrassing loss. He decides to tie in coaching by telling the kids they're like superheroes. For a while it works, until they go up against the same team. To get the boys motivated he tells them they're responsible for every bad thing that happens in their lives. Unfortunately, as soon as the game starts, Dewey's team assaults the opponents from rubbing their face into the chalk lines to dragging them across the field in the goalie net.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Daredevil:
    • Matt Murdock wanted to inspire others to stand against crime with his vigilante activities. Early in season 2, after escaping being shot at while protecting a witness, Karen speculates to Matt that his second identity was what inspired Frank Castle to do just that, though in Frank's case this involves killing every last gang member he can find in retaliation for the murders of his family. Matt is unsettled by Karen's implications.
      Matt Murdock: You think uh, you think he's crazy?
      Karen Page: The Punisher? No. I think he was inevitable.
      Matt Murdock: Inevitable? How so?
      Karen Page: Maybe... maybe we created him. All of us. The moment that we let Daredevil or the Devil of Hell's Kitchen or whatever it is-
      Matt Murdock: There is no connection.
      Karen Page: Actually I think it's a pretty straight line, Matt. Daredevil practiced vigilante justice in our backyard, and we applaud for it. I know that I did! And we—we never stopped to think that maybe his actions could open the door for men like this. Men... men with guns. Men who think that the law belongs to them.
      Matt Murdock: Then there's a difference.
      Karen Page: Well I don't see it. Not anymore.
      Matt Murdock: Yeah. Daredevil never killed anyone.
      Karen Page: Not that we know of. [sits down] There's something about this city that makes good people want to SHOOT their way out of bad situations!
      Matt Murdock: You think this... Punisher could be a good person?
      Karen Page: No! N-No I'm just saying [shrugs] he could be any one of us.
    • The fate of Samantha Reyes, the District Attorney for Manhattan. From a certain point of view, the sting operation she set up to capture the Blacksmith did eventually (and indirectly) lead to the guy's defeat. Just not remotely in the way she would have wanted and at the cost of her own life. To elaborate: the disastrous operation caused Frank Castle's family to get killed in the crossfire, pushing Frank to become the Punisher and hunt down all those responsible for their deaths. For added irony, while Reyes is murdered by the Blacksmith to silence her, Frank ends up unwittingly avenging her death by killing the Blacksmith at the end.
  • Luke Cage (2016): Willis "Diamondback" Stryker's attempts to ruin his half-brother Carl Lucas over perceived parental favoritism result in Carl becoming the bulletproof Luke Cage.
    Luke Cage: You ruined my life.
    Willis "Diamondback" Stryker: I gave you wings! [voice breaking] I sent you to hell, and you come back with superpowers! [inhales deeply] Ain't that a bitch?
  • Jessica Jones (2015):
    • Kilgrave was born with a degenerative brain disease. The attempts to cure him were painful, even torturous, but they succeeded. They also gave him his godawful powers.
    • Trish mocks and belittles Kilgrave on her radio show in an attempt to get under his skin and draw him out. This succeeds... by provoking Kilgrave into sending Will Simpson to kill her, an attack which she barely survives.
  • Iron Fist (2017): Danny Rand's devotion to becoming the Iron Fist made him a prime candidate for the position. One of the final trials to do so, the relinquishing of his previous identity came easily to him as a result. As an unforeseen consequence, it also reminded him of his old life, causing him to return to New York to find himself.
• Monsters: In "Stressed Environment", scientists work on increasing the intelligence of rats. They find out it worked when the rats become smart enough to break out of confinement and start killing them by using tools and taking advantage of the environment.
• In the first episode of the 1970s drama Nanny the lead character, Barbara, gets her first job looking after a troubled little boy. She's shocked to find that his rich parents aren't just neglectful, they actually sacked the nanny who raised the boy from birth because she asked for a pay raise (then they told their son she had died). Barbara manages to persuade the parents to do better by their son... so they do what's genuinely the best thing they can think of, and rehire his old nanny, putting Barbara out of a job.
• In NCIS, Operation Frankenstein was a project that was to create an ultimate assassination unit that won't question or hesitate in assassinating his targets. It worked all right. Unfortunately, one of the byproducts of the project, Lt. Cobbs, aka the Port-to-Port killer, decided to do assassinations that weren't sanctioned by his bosses at all, and is thinking his creators would make a nice addition to his body count.
  • In the 14th season, Abby works with a think tank to do a "test" of security by coming up with a daring way to use balloons to release sarin gas inside a crowded arena. One member wants revenge on the warlord who killed his family (in attendance at the arena) so switches the empty air with real sarin gas. While he's caught, Abby realizes that the "playbook" of such fake attacks is on the black market and she and her team have provided any terrorist with a perfect blueprint for attacks.
• The New Addams Family: When Morticia became a decorator, she expected to express her creativity by doing a different thing at each house she visited. However, she did such great work at her first customer's home that her next potential customers insist she does the same thing at their homes.
• On Parks and Recreation, Leslie and Ben have a Secret Relationship in the last few episodes of Season 3. In "The Bubble", Ben has a budget meeting with Leslie's mom Marlene, the head of the Department of Education. Ben ends up being so flustered that he messes up the meeting and causes her to ask the city for more money. Leslie gives Ben tips on how to make the meeting go better, such as her mom's likes and dislikes. This ends up working too well and Marlene hits on Ben.
• Power Rangers:
  • Played With in a Season 2 episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers ("Beauty and the Beast"). Goldar kidnaps Kimberly in attempt to turn her into a new queen for Lord Zedd. The spell doesn't work, but Kimberly fakes it by imitating Rita. And a very good imitation it is:
    Kimberly: Oh, you NUMBSKULLS! YOU'RE GIVING ME A HEADAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACHE!
    Goldar: Maybe this was a bad idea. For once, my spell worked too well!
  • In Power Rangers in Space, Dark Specter has Astronema brainwashed to be pure evil so she won't betray him for her brother, the Red Ranger. She immediately starts trying to destroy him so she can take his place. One of her plans to do so also falls victim to this; Astronema creates the Psycho Rangers so she can take out both the Power Rangers and Dark Specter. The Psycho Rangers become so obsessed with killing their counterparts that they begin to disobey Astronema's orders. This gets them defeated the first time around, but then they come Back from the Dead, twice, to finish business.
• After a few years of contestants without winning $1,000,000 on The Price Is Right's Million-Dollar Spectaculars, the Drew Carey hosted-episodes changed the format. Instead of the grand prize being won by spinning $1.00 twice in the Showcase Showdown, this changed to the contestant having to win a designated $1,000,000-pricing game or coming within $1,000 (later $500) of their Showcase. The show did not count on three contestants becoming millionaires under these revised rules.
• Primeval:
  • Philip Burton designs a system that will automatically lock down the ARC should any of the creatures get free. The only way to unlock it is by using his fingerprints and eye scans. Later, the Lockdown System is accidentally activated by Rex with Philip trapped in another room... good thing Connor can hack into anything.
  • This has ramifications in the next episode, when Burton decides to kill off all the creatures kept in the ARC, as they are inherently unsafe (even the friendly Rex). Luckily, Lester (being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold) blackmails Burton into backing off.
• The Prisoner (1967): In the episode "Checkmate" Number 6 thinks he's worked out a perfect method for telling prisoners from warders, and uses it to plan an escape attempt. Unfortunately the plan fails because one of his accomplices applies the technique to Number 6 himself and concludes that he must be a warder.
• Reba:
  • Despite Terry, whom Barbra Jean tries to set Reba to go out with, being unsuccessful to woo Reba, the two became really good friends the moment Terry starts telling her the ironic story of how his ex-wife ran off with a dumb blond, which immediately makes both have fun and laugh at their exes. Barbra Jean tries real hard to be part of the conversation while ignoring all the jokes being hurled her way.
  • During the episode "Go Far", after some encouragement from Van, Jake, who's usually portrayed to be not very proficient in most sports, turns out to be an excellent tackle football player. So good, in fact, that he gets banned from playing for a year because he hurt too many boys.
• The Rookie (2018): During the custody battle for her daughter, Nyla discovered that her husband Donovan's new fiancée (who he was planning to move to San Francisco with) was a former escort. Her colleagues encouraged her to use that information as part of the current case as her ex kept using her own past in undercover work against her so she was simply levelling the playing field. When that information was presented, Donovan outright called off the engagement as he hadn't known about that part of his fiancée's past and didn't want to be with someone else who would lie to him, ensuring that Nyla's daughter wouldn't move but going far beyond what she had wanted to achieve.
• In The Rookie: Feds, Carter decided the best way not to get hazed or in trouble in the FBI was to keep his head down, not make waves and avoid trouble. When Carter vies for a promotion, he learns that because he's kept so quiet and not stood out, his superiors don't realize just how gifted an agent he really is, so Carter is stuck in his current place.
• On Runaways (2017), Leslie is convinced by Jonah to start the Church of Gibborim which she thinks helps others prepare for a "new life" to come. When she discovers that Jonah was an alien using her all these years as part of his plan to escape Earth, Leslie realizes she's wasted her life on a fraud and tries to close the Church down. Too late, Leslie realizes that she's done so well convincing the Church followers that this means something that they refuse to accept the idea it was all a lie and even try to "save" Leslie by subjecting her to the reconditioning process she created.
• Sanctuary: The Five wanted to expand science's borders. Well... they did.
• Some of the episode plots in Saved by the Bell: The New Class end up this way. Below are some examples:
  • In the episode "Squash It". When Screech and Mr. Belding make the announcement for the annual school carnival, in which the winners, being the ones to sell the most tickets for their respective section of said carnival, get to share a fancy dinner and tickets to see Whitney Houston, Brian tricks the students in charge of the dunk tank into bailing out so that he and Rachel take over, with Brian being the target, with the motive on Brian's part being that he intends to win the prizes in order to impress Rachel with said dinner and tickets. When he and Rachel realize that they won't get many sales due to Brian being too nice, Brian adapts a Jerkass facade that helps to increase the ticket sales, eventually guaranteeing that he and Rachel win the prizes. The problem? Brian's ruse works so well that the entire student population sans the other main characters turns against him, resulting in him getting dunked so many times that he develops a fever by the end of the carnival and must stay home to recover, while Rachel shares the prizes with her boyfriend from college instead.
  • In "Tommy the Tenor", Megan, Rachel, and Lindsay join the Glee Club after Mr. Belding introduces the handsome new music teacher. When the girls realize that they all harbor a crush on said teacher, each of them secretly and separately buys a gag product from a student selling them and uses them later on the other girls before and during a Glee Club rehearsal. It wouldn't have been too disastrous, except for the facts that A) Mr. Belding and the school board director are also present during said rehearsal, and B) one of the gag products gets unwittingly passed around and used by most other Glee Club members as well, so that the Glee Club performance ends up much worse for it. Mr. Belding calls the girls out on it after the fact.
  • Screech and Eric run into this problem in "Unequal Opportunity" when they try to help Mr. Belding run a yogurt vendor.
    • At first, they make the yogurt sugar-free and fat-free, only to end up with bland-tasting products, as evidenced when others taste-test it.
    Screech: It has absolutely no fat, absolutely no sugar—
    Ryan: —Absolutely no taste.
    • To counter the tasteless flaw, they then add a lot of sugar into the machine, but, as Mr. Belding points out, they now can't sell the product at the risk of false advertising.^note  They eventually bypass the problem by advertising the products on taste while claiming the deliciousness of the yogurt will make all the sugar-induced weight gain Worth It.
  • In the episode "Mind Games":
    • Mr. Belding, fed up with Screech's shaky organizational skills, has him attend an efficiency seminar. It works and Screech becomes more organized in his role... until he becomes obsessed with efficiency, prompting Mr. Belding to get Screech to dial back.
    Mr. Belding: I've created a monster.
    • Belding ends up using this as he claims Screech has done such a great job that there's no need for him to keep working for Belding and "fires" him. The idea of leaving Bayside is enough to shock Screech back to his old self.
• Seinfeld: In "The Switch", Jerry plots with George to get Girl of the Week Sandy to break up with him so that he can date her roommate, Laura, instead. George convinces him to suggest a ménage à trois, which would disgust Sandy while simultaneously flattering Laura and clear the way for him to ask her out. However, both are open to the ménage, and Jerry has to back out because he's not ready to "become an orgy guy".
• Sesame Street:
  • In a 90's episode, Mr. Handford tells Telly that you can try new foods easily by putting them into a sandwich, which leads Telly to try and make the very first sandwich with everything on it.
  • In an episode from 2000, Alan finds himself in the same spot as Mr. Handford did. After hanging a sign that says "Hooper's Store: Where you can have whatever you want just the way you want it." Telly orders a grilled cheese sandwich but makes requests that are progressively more ridiculous for how his lunch should be served. After he enjoys his lunch, Alan takes down the sign admitting that hanging it was a mistake because it worked a little too well at getting Telly to have a specifically catered lunch.
• Shameless (US): Kevin grows a few marijuana plants in his basement, mostly for personal consumption. When he decides to put a little more effort and care into this, he ends up with a basement full of high quality marijuana plants, worth thousands of dollars. This means that if caught he will end up in federal prison on major trafficking charges. He knows that he will never get away with this so he destroys most of his crop.
• In Sister, Sister, Tia and Tamera, fearing that Lisa and Ray after dating would eventually end up having a divorce so bad that would result in the twins being separated again, tried to ruin their planned date to prevent this possibility by implying that the respective parents are seeing other people. It worked. Unfortunately, it worked far too well as it came very close to having Lisa and Tia move out of Ray and Tamera's house.
• On a somewhat related note to the series above, here's one from Smart Guy, but Played for Laughs: In "Gotta Dance". When T.J. gets a performing tap-dancing spot, he considers quitting upon realizing he can't master tap dancing as easily as he can with most academic subjects he's taken on. Floyd insists that T.J. sticks with it, in an attempt to teach T.J. the value of dedication. The problem? Floyd only intends for T.J. to stick with tap dancing until his recital ends, whereas T.J. ends up dedicating himself to tap dancing AFTER said recital, meaning that, not only has Floyd lost his safest retirement safety net options (he states at the start of the episode that he was counting on T.J. to have a high-paying job to make Floyd's retirement-age life easier — in face, if anything, Floyd may have to support T.J. a LOT longer now), he also has to continue to put up with the sounds of tap dancing which, as indicated during T.J.'s rehearsal montage, Floyd could barely tolerate, much less enjoy. Floyd is understandably disgruntled by how things unfold.
• Stargate Atlantis: The Atlantis expedition discovers that the Asuran Replicators were originally built as a weapon against the Wraith, before the Ancients decided the Asurans were too dangerous to use anymore. Rodney discovers that the Asurans still have the programming in them to attack the Wraith, it's just been disabled. By reactivating it, he causes the entire Asuran civilization to go to war against the Wraith, dealing heavy damage. At first it works perfectly. Then it continues working perfectly when the Asurans come up with a new strategy to kill the Wraith: exterminate the Wraith's food supply (ie, humanity). Oops. This eventually leads to Atlantis teaming up with the Wraith to destroy the Asurans before they commit genocide on the entire Pegasus Galaxy.
  • Also, there is the original Ancient's plan. Travel to new galaxy and seed life on as many planets as they could find there. One of these worlds, though, happened to be the environment of the Iratus Bug. Through close contact with humans the bugs gained human characteristics, turning them into the Wraith which chased the Ancients out of the galaxy and culled the human worlds ever since. So, they set out to create life and succeeded in creating the species that defeated them.
• Star Trek has many examples:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • Khan and his followers from "Space Seed". They were only the products of 20th century eugenics, created to be the ultimate representation of the human race^note a legion of Napoleons and Alexander the Greats as Kirk explained and to establish a new world order by conquering the rest of humanity. The only flub was that they were all ambitious and simultaneously wanted the God-Emperor slot, which resulted in their fighting one another and therefore allowing "normal" humanity to rally against them.
    • In "A Taste of Armageddon", computerized warfare has enabled two neighboring planets to carry on for centuries in an unending conflict that causes no biohazards, no damage to infrastructure, and hardly even any economic inconvenience... just a few hundred million painless deaths every year.
    • In "The Changeling", Nomad upgrades the Enterprise's engines to travel to speeds of over warp 10. Unfortunately, such speeds are beyond the ship's never-exceed speed, causing it to start breaking down. Kirk convinces it to reverse the engine upgrades.
    • Following the events of "Mirror, Mirror", the alternate Spock rises in command and eventually manages to reform the violent Terran Empire into a more peaceful one. Unfortunately, this makes them an easy target for the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance.
    • "The Doomsday Machine": An ancient civilization built a war-ending weapon that was invulnerable, warp-capable, and refueled itself from the rubble of planets it destroyed. An unguessable time later, it was still reliably destroying planets.
    • A meta-example: William Windom thought the episode "seemed kind of silly, with the planet eater and the spaceships" and overacted the part, delivering a memorable performance and effectively conveying Decker's traumatized state.
    • In the TNG novels Vendetta, they deal with a second version of the Doomsday Machine and discover that it (and the TOS-era one) wasn't actually a case of Gone Horribly Right, it was functioning exactly as intended, which made it all that much scarier. Its original goal was to eradicate the Borg, regardless of the cost incurred while getting to that goal.
    • Several episodes feature computer-controlled civilizations where the ancient computer is still doing a bang-up job of keeping its people fed, happy and shut up in a bottle.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • Ishara Yar tells Riker that this is what ultimately destroyed the society on Turkana IV. When the factional fighting started getting out of hand, the government decided to grant police authority to the two most powerful factions in hopes that they could quell the violence. It worked to stop the original conflict, but, she explains, after a few months, they "decided they didn't need the government anymore". She doesn't elaborate but the implications are clear.
    • In "The Arsenal of Freedom", the crew encounters an automated merchant that sold intelligent, adaptable war machines that came in two sizes: anti-personnel and anti-ship. When one was destroyed, the information from that battle was used to automatically build a better one to come at the assailants next. No one appeared to be alive on the planet's surface, leading to the suspicion the machines did their job too well.^note Funny thing is, it was all just a demonstration of the weapon's effectiveness. All the people on the planet had to do is agree to buy, thus putting an end to the demonstration.
    • In "Elementary, Dear Data", to provide Data with a challenge for a Sherlock Holmes mystery, Le Forge asks the ship's computer to create an opponent that could outwit even Data. This results in Moriarty, Holmes's archnemesis created as a holodeck character, inadvertently gaining sentience and the ability to act independently, allowing him to manipulate the holodeck simulation to try and free himself. This accident, in turn, later served as the basis for more advanced AI such as the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager.
    • In "The Hunted", the Angosians (a Proud Scholar Race) turned several of their young men into Super Soldiers so they could fight in a war. They won the war — and then the Angosians lost control of them.
    • In "Tapestry", Picard wishes he'd played it safe in his youth, so he replays a couple days of the beginning of his career (with Q's "help"). This changes the present so he's only a junior lieutenant, because he never took risks.
    • In the episode "Evolution", Wesley's school project involved putting two nanites together to see what would happen. Result: He created a new species that started to consume the Enterprise, jeopardizing a science mission.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • "Civil Defense" has the crew trigger an emergency program which set up auto-defenses to stop Bajorans taking over the station. Said program had not been informed that the Cardassians later handed the station over to Bajor and Starfleet peacefully. Dukat then shows up to "help" (i.e. gloat a whole bunch and offer to deactivate the defenses in exchange for an unreasonable demand), only to find his commanders had also built in failsafes to stop him aiding the Bajorans... or from abandoning his post in the event of a successful Bajoran takeover.
    • "In the Pale Moonlight": Sisko starts a personal log and describes his attempt to bring the Romulans into the Dominion War as a Federation ally. We spend the whole episode waiting to see how it had Gone Horribly Wrong, only to find that it worked — but the plan became such a game of Xanatos Speed Chess that in the end, it required fabricating evidence, bribing criminals, lying to enemies and allies alike, and eventually killing three innocent men (the senator and his two aides — Garak and Sisko apparently completely forgot that the latter two were on the shuttle after finding out that the plan succeeded) and one guilty one (the criminal who forged the evidence for them).
    • Two episodes in the series demonstrate this as a reason why genetic enhancements are banned in the Federation with a quartet of Augments known as the Jack Pack. All four had undergone genetic alterations to make them super-geniuses, but those very alterations also gave them extreme personalities that leave them unable to function in society: Jack is a violent sociopath, Lauren has an insatiable sex drive, Patrick has the personality of a preschooler, and Sarina's brain processes information so quickly that her senses can't keep up, leaving her practically catatonic. In the first episode featuring them, "Statistical Probabilities", they're allowed to analyze the Dominion War and come up with any suggestions... and they determine that the Dominion winning the war is inevitable and that the Federation should surrender immediately; when that option is rejected, they try to give the classified information they were given for their analysis to the Dominion.
  • Star Trek: Voyager:
    • "Prototype": Two races at war built robots, and programmed the bots to allow nothing to keep them from fighting each other. Then the races decided that actually, they'd like to end the war and try peace. Both civilizations were wiped out by their own robots.
    • "Scientific Method": Invisible aliens board Voyager and perform medical experiments on the crew, one of which is to ramp up Captain Janeway's dopamine levels to push her to the edge of her sanity. It works so well that she decides to fly Voyager into a binary pulsar in a desperate attempt to get rid of them (which succeeds).
  • Star Trek: Discovery: Section 31 created the AI Control and gave it the directive to protect all sentient life by any means necessary. Unfortunately, it came to the conclusion that protecting all sentient life is impossible as long as other life exists. So Control decides to attempt to become sentient and then kill all other life in the galaxy.
• Happens a few times on Suits as the lawyers will often see some tactics work too well in some cases.
  • The entire plot of the show is that Mike never went to Harvard but his genius at law gets Harvey to hire him as an associate and work for a major law firm. For five seasons, Mike does a terrific job winning case after case...which means that when he's finally exposed in Season 5, every case he won is up for appeal and the firm is sued for letting a fake lawyer work for them.
  • Louis is hanging around Harvey's office with a major tech mogul calls, assuming he's Harvey and wants to have a lunch. Donna tells Louis he can't do it but Louis decides to live up being "Harvey for a day." He says it won't matter as the firm already has a contract with one of the mogul's main competitors so Louis can simply explain to the man that bringing him on is a conflict of interest. The next day, Louis has to break it to a horrified Donna that he did such a great job acting like Harvey and making a pitch that when he brought up the deal, the mogul simply bought out the other company so there would be no conflict. Naturally, Harvey isn't thrilled hearing all this.
• At the end of Supernatural's Season 6, Castiel's actions throughout the season (working with Crowley, betraying and killing friends, and breaking Sam's mind as a distraction all so he can gain the power from purgatory's souls) do give him the power to prevent the apocalypse from being restarted. In Season 7, it turns out that this power leads him to declare himself the new god, smite all angels who sided against him and humans he disapproves of, and has the side effect of unleashing unkillable monsters on the world.
• Tales from the Crypt:
  • In "Television Terror", a TV show host decides to enter an Haunted House that has been rumored to harbor sinister paranormal activities in order to boost his show ratings, dismissing the warning of a psychic, who refuses to enter the house, that the spirits within the house are bad news. He realizes that Evil Is Not a Toy only after discovering his camera man being the latest victim of the ghosts inside the house, with himself falling victim not long afterwards — the episode ends with him being disemboweled and hung right outside the house in question, broadcast on live TV. The show ratings get a big boost, all right, but he won't be able to capitalize from it.
  • The episode "The Trap" has a man working to fake his murder with his coroner brother so he can cash in on his $500,000 life insurance policy. He gets plastic surgery to change his features, heads to an island, expecting his wife to join him with the rest of the money, but she doesn't. As his small amount of cash runs out, he heads home to find her now married to his brother and living off his settlement. When the man tries to get them arrested for insurance fraud, he realizes too late that he did such a good job faking his death that he can't prove he's still alive. In fact, the police are convinced that the only way he could know these details is if he's the killer, and the man thus ends up arrested, tried, convicted and sent to the electric chair for his own murder!
• In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Skynet ends up making the same mistake that its human creators did. It turns out that its ultimate Terminator, the T-1001, was intelligent and independent enough to turn on its creator without being reprogrammed by the Resistance. Whether it actually cares one way or the other about the survival of humanity is an open question (it retains all the usual Terminator ruthlessness and doesn't hesitate to murder innocent people just because they got in the way), but it's willing to ally with humans against their common enemy. It even goes so far as to hijack one of Skynet's time machines to arrange for the development of a counter-Skynet AI program in the past.
• Top Gear's first American road trip has the "Get the others shot or arrested" challenge, where the presenters paint offensive slogans on each others' vehicles ("NASCAR Sucks", "Man-Love Rules OK", etc.) before driving through Alabama. They end up running in terror from a group of angry rednecks when they stop for gas.
• True Blood: In season 4, the recently appointed King Bill attempts to get revenge on Eric for breaking up his relationship with Sookie by sending Eric to a meeting of Wiccans who are believed to be practicing necromancy. While Bill claims he's doing this to protect vampires (since necromancy can be used to control/enslave them), the reality is Bill wants Eric to be compromised (i.e. have a spell cast on him) so he can have a reason to have Eric executed. Needless to say, Eric ends up going to the meeting and gets a spell placed on him that erases all of his memories and gives Bill the opportunity he wanted. However, what Bill didn't count on is that said witch (Marnie) who cast the spell did so in a panic and ended up summoning a 400 year old Vengeful Ghost named Antonia who wants to exterminate vampires from the face of the Earth. When Antonia fully possesses Marnie's body with her permission, she begins a campaign against Bill and his kingdom. By the end of it, 4 out of 5 of Bill's sheriffs are dead, the Festival of Tolerance (which was a PR occasion to celebrate peaceful relationships between vampires and humans) ends in disaster, a bunch of other vampires and humans either are killed or get seriously injured, and Bill ends up on the run from the Authority because they blame him for the entire fiasco. The irony is Bill doesn't even execute Eric despite having the opportunity to do so, which means he brought this entire mess on himself for nothing.
• During Season 3 of The Wire, East Baltimore drug kingpin, Proposition Joe, sees up and coming Marlo Stanfield as a threat, but doesn't want to go to war with him because Marlo's men outnumber his and they're more ruthless. So he decides to try to convince Stanfield to join the Co-op, a group of drug dealers from all over Baltimore who work together to keep the peace and get rich. After Marlo refuses, Joe has him setup to get robbed by Omar Little. Because of this, and the police becoming aware of his crew, Marlo agrees to join the Co-op, but this turns out to be a huge mistake for Joe. Marlo begins undermining the Co-op. He finds out who Joe's suppliers for the drugs are and win them to his side. And he gets Joe's selfish nephew Cheese to turn against him, which results in Marlo killing him, disbanding the Co-op, and becoming the head crime boss in the streets.
• Wizards of Waverly Place:
  • In "Positive Alex", Alex uses a magical marker to make herself more positive to be a better cheerleader and impress her crush. It ends up making her so positive that not only does everyone get sick of her (including her crush) but also gets the cheerleading squad banned from cheering when she cheers for the other team. Thankfully, the marker washes off.
  • In "Halloween", the Russos are under the threat of having their haunted house privileges revoked due to their track record of disappointing stunts, so they try to find a way to make this year's house scary. Alex gets the idea to bring Mantooth, an imaginary character from Justin's nightmares, into the real world to spruce it up. But at the demonstration, Mantooth pulls of a very scary Nightmare Face, causing everyone to run out of the place and the Russos to get banned from making another haunted house ever again.
    Theresa: Wait a minute! You wanted scary, we gave you scary!
    Mr. Evans: Yes, kids want to be scared, not scarred for life!
  • In "All About You-Niverse," Alex tries to avoid a punishment by entering a Magic Mirror to an alternate world where everything she says is accepted as gospel truth. At first she's happy to be the center of attention, but she soon discovers that everyone is taking her words literally, to their own detriment. Things get worse when Mirror!Harper, following Alex's commands, shatters the magic mirror, leaving Alex potentially trapped in the You-niverse forever.
• Wonder Woman: In "The Man Who Wouldn't Tell", Alan (Gary Burghoff) discovers the missing ingredient to make a new kind of explosive work. And thus is promptly kidnapped, shot at, and chased down by two different companies who want the formula for themselves.
• The World of Kanako: The narrator wants to become like Ogata, and Kanako promises him to help him. The problem is that the narrator completely fails to see that Ogata was bullied and embarrassed until he chose death. When the narrator is beaten up, drugged and handed over to the prostitution ring, he very well became like Ogata, but not to his advantage to say the least.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: When Xena is stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, Joxer's big idea is to declare themselves the enemy of two rival families to get them to work together. Xena only goes along after all the other obvious ideas fail. The plan works and the two families settle their differences. And then they promptly kill Xena, Gabrielle and Joxer in a Rain of Arrows. The loop continues and Xena thanks Joxer by throwing her chakram into his chest.

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