Pay Evil Unto Evil / Live-Action TV

Paying evil unto evil in live-action TV.

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• 24:
  • If they're someone who's royally pissed him off or killed somebody close to him and there's no longer any need to keep them alive, Jack Bauer has absolutely no problem taking vengeance into his own hands. One particularly stand-out moment occurs in the final season where he's torturing the man who earlier killed Renee Walker, and the bastard refuses to break, even bragging about the murder. When Jack learns that the guy swallowed something that has some potentially crucial information he could use on it, Jack proceeds to cut the guy's stomach open and empty it to obtain what he swallowed. Even though what Jack's doing is horrible, for a total prick like this one can't help but at least smirk a little.
  • In the Live Another Day miniseries, there are two excellent moments of outright executing Big Bads who were no longer needed. Not in combat, not to stop them from killing someone else — if you're the kind of person who feels the need to shoot missiles into the middle of London to avenge your (equally horrible terrorist) husband, Jack Bauer sees no problem with sending you through a window to your messy demise.
• In the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "A Hen in the Wolf House", Simmons plants her S.H.I.E.L.D. message pad in her HYDRA partner's desk, to avoid being outed as a spy, leading to said partner being dragged off for interrogation. While he was friendly to Simmons, he's still a member of HYDRA who thought the idea of HYDRA using a weapon to kill millions of innocent people was "pretty cool".
• Angel had a terrific example in Season 2. After coming across his archenemies from Wolfram & Hart being held hostage by Darla and Drusilla, Angel stands contemplative for a moment. Wolfram & Hart is an evil organisation with absolutely no qualms about murdering innocent people, who set Darla and Drusilla loose in the first place. Rather than save them, Angel locks the door and lets the vampires go to work. The formerly unflappable Holland Manners is terrified and begs, "People are going to die," to which Angel responds, "And yet somehow I just can't seem to care."
• This is more or less the plot of the first season of Arrow. Oliver Queen is trying to atone for his father's crimes by "crossing names off his list", and he's not afraid to kill in the process. Also invoked with "The Undertaking"; during the episode of the same name, the conspiracy group Tempest are shown in flashbacks psyching themselves up to go along with the plan to level the Glades and kill or drive off the low-income people living there by reminding themselves of the tragedies they have suffered at the hands of Glades residents, so as to convince themselves that, in terms of conventional philanthropy, It Is Beyond Saving. One member's daughter was gang-raped and left paralyzed when she made the mistake of visiting a nightclub in the area. The Big Bad of the first season, Malcolm Merlyn/Dark Archer, lost his wife because she was shot by a mugger on her way home from the free clinic she ran there and none of the people who saw her lying in the street bleeding out could be bothered to help in any way.
• Deconstructed in The Blacklist. One of the villains of the week is a serial killer called the Deer Hunter who tracks down and murders abusive husbands and boyfriends. The Deer Hunter claims that she's doing this, as well as helping the abused women, but Liz calls her out and rips apart her whole Hannibal Lecture, pointing out that the real reason she's killing is simple bloodlust and desire for dominance, with the abusive men thing just being an excuse to help her sleep at night. The fact that the Deer Hunter killed one of the innocent women she was "protecting" in retribution for going to the police pretty clearly shows this statement to be correct.
  • Played straight earlier in the season, episode 7 of season 2, with Samar Navabi's execution of the Scimitar, a well-known terrorist and murderer who only a few hours previous had kidnapped two of her teammates and, later, a completely innocent woman, after he taunted Navabi that she wasn't going to kill him.
• The Boys (2019):
  • Hughie's motivation throughout the story, to pay A-Train back for killing the girl he loved whatever the cost.
  • Butcher's motivation too. He hates Homelander with a fiery passion.
  • Mother's Milk's original motivation during Season 3. Soldier Boy recklessly killed his family during a fight.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Few mourned, and many cheered, when Dark Willow flayed Warren Mears alive. Those that refrained from cheering did so not out of sympathy for Warren, but concern for Willow (except for those who thought Willow had already crossed the Moral Event Horizon by repeatedly mind-raping and raping Tara).
  • After Spike gets his Restraining Bolt, Buffy enjoys herself taunting him over his 'impotence' and beating him up for fun and information (until Spike declares he's fallen in love with her, and Buffy comes to the belated realisation that doing this to a Combat Sadomasochist is a sexual come-on).
• Michael of the TV show Burn Notice helps the victims of evil by assisting them in gaining protection against their oppressors. Sometimes, his methods involve conning and/or leading to the arrest of the villain, but often, his plots end with the death of the villain through his machinations/at his hands.
• Chicago P.D. invokes the trope, with Voight and Al acknowledging privately that they have murdered at least one perp rather than arresting him. Averted in episode two when Voight plans to murder the drug lord who kidnapped Antonio's son. Played in full with the man who murders Voight's son. Other members of the unit have also become more physical than regulations allow, usually to elicit information on a case.
• Sabrina Spellman from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina uses her magic more often to punish those who do evil. So far, most of her opponents were bullies.
• CSI: Miami: Occasionally, Horatio Caine gives a little bit more "justice" than the law allows. In "To Kill A Predator", he gives a savage beating to a child predator for "Resisting Arrest" (when he was doing nothing but standing there). And in "Wheels Up", it's implied he does the same to an abusive boyfriend of the victim of the week; while the guy didn't kill her, a byproduct of that abuse (a healing fragment of a previous broken rib) is what ultimately killed her.
• CSI: NY:
  • Stage Magician Luke Blade in season 3 brutally went after those he felt had betrayed him, killing them in the manner of some of his tricks including sawing in half and burning alive. Two of his staff had quit and his adoptive mother had given him up when she became pregnant...out of fear that his fetal alcohol syndrome would cause him to harm her baby.
  • Serial arsonist Leonard Brooks in season 9 turned to more creative murderous ways in his second episode. He rigged an elevator to roast his mother to death for abusing him as a child; killed his adoptive brother by sneaking a chemical into his food that burned him to death from the inside out for failing to rescue him and beating him at their mother's request; finally, he went after his foster sister for failing to alert anyone as well...even though she was only 7 years old at the time.
• The Devil Judge: This is the main character's preferred way of dealing with corrupt politicians and criminals.
  • He causes a man that was involved in the church fire that killed his brother to trip from a building and leaves him to die after taking back his brother's watch from him.
  • Yo-han gets revenge on the kids who bullied him in school by putting the belongings of the wealthy kids in the bag of the poor ones, making the whole class end up fighting one another, much to his amusement.
• Dexter: Dexter Morgan is a serial murderer who only kills other murderers. He identifies himself as a monster though.
• Doctor Who: The Doctor has been implied to have done this on occasion (to the point where he disowned an entire incarnation who he believed did it).
  • Against the Family of Blood — who have taken over the bodies of innocent people and at best induced And I Must Scream on them, at worst killed them before inhabiting their bodies — the audience is shown through the very somber and withdrawn monologue of the brother — a 180° turn from his self-assured and victorious tone a moment ago — what the Doctor did to them, including dropping the mother into the event horizon of a collapsing dwarf star, trapping the sister in every mirror ever, and setting the brother, frozen in time, to watch over England's fields for all eternity.
  • In "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" he leaves Solomon on his ship to be blown apart by missiles because Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil and so is genocide.
  • In "Face the Raven", when he is betrayed and faced with the imminent death of his companion, the Doctor threatens to do this to the immortal Ashildr and a street of alien refugees (some of whom are innocents, all hiding from mankind) using a mixture of enemy races and paramilitary forces. Only a plea from his soon-to-be-lost best friend stops him from carrying through with it.
    The Doctor: I'll bring UNIT, I'll bring the Zygons, give me a minute, I'll bring the Daleks and the Cybermen. You will save Clara, and you will do it now or I will rain hell on you for the rest of time.
    • The Doctor is subsequently forced to undergo Cold-Blooded Torture in a lonely, gigantic torture chamber in "Heaven Sent". In the Season Finale "Hell Bent" he has escaped, but he is also now an insane Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds. When he confronts the party who captured and tormented him (Rassilon, leader of the Doctor's own people) he shocks everyone by bloodlessly overthrowing him and banishing him and his underlings from Gallifrey to wherever they can find a home... if any such place exists at that point in time. Other characters who know him well accuse him of this trope and Disproportionate Retribution, with a side helping of No Sympathy for Grudgeholders.
  • "Spyfall": The Doctor gets the Master out of her way in Nazi-occupied Paris by using the fact that he'd gone so low as to disguise himself as a German officer against him, framing the disguise as a Double Agent so she can steal his TARDIS. Comes with a side order of hypocrisy, as she calls him out for working with Nazis before she does this.
• Happens a few times in Farscape, though they're usually forced into it by the bad guys. One example: In order to save D'Argo's son (and 9,999 other slaves), our heroes plan to rob a bank, justifying their actions by saying it's a "shadow depository", i.e., where bad guys hide the stuff they steal.
• Arno in Fear the Walking Dead has it coming, but Daniel takes the effort to make him suffer before he dies because It's Personal.
• Firefly:
  • The entire series is one big example. The main characters spend the entire first season robbing almost anybody, so long as that person is The Government, corporate supporters of the government, slavers, or anybody else not approved of by the main characters.
  • Mal probably puts it best in "The Train Job" when he decides not to do the job he was hired to do and wants to return the money to his employer:
    Mal: We're not thieves. [Beat] Okay, we are thieves. Point is, we're not taking what's his.
  • A mild version of this happens in the opening of "Shindig" when Mal pickpockets the cash off a smug, proud, self-admitted slave dealer during a game of pool. The slave dealer isn't supposed to notice until he goes for his next round of drinks, but it turns out he's a very good drinker, and that leads to...
• Forever: Though Henry's actions at the end of "The Last Death of Henry Morgan" may also be seen as Cruel Mercy, necessary to protect the world from Adam, it has a big helping of this, especially clear when we see the little smile Henry gives just after talking with Adam's doctor about his Locked-In Syndrome; it's pretty clear he's thinking of Abigail's death and everything else Adam put him through, and sees this as just punishment for Adam.
• A French Village: The Milice were so vicious that most resistance fighters have no desire to hold fair trials of them. Most are just shot upon capture without a trial at all, with the rest given a show trial and then shot. It's noted that the Milice did both these things commonly themselves.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Mirri Maz Duur, having been asked by Daenerys to save her Dothraki husband Khal Drogo's life with her Blood Magic, instead performs a ritual that leaves him a Soulless Shell and kills the Khal's unborn son in Daenerys's womb. Mirri is a slave to Daenerys because Khal Drogo's warriors had massacred Mirri's village for plunder and amusement, during which she herself had been raped by three of the Khal's men before she was "rescued". And his son was prophesied to be even worse; "The Stallion That Mounts The World", the Khal who would spread the Dothraki's Rape, Pillage, and Burn reign from Essos to Westeros.
    Mirri Maz Duur: He would have been the Stallion who Mounts the World. Now he will burn no cities. Now he will trample no nations into dust.
  • Ramsay Bolton gets the ever-loving shit beat out of him by Jon Snow for murdering Jon's younger brother Rickon, raping his younger sister Sansa, and for all the sheer, utter hell and torture Ramsay has inflicted. Jon only calms down when he sees his sister Sansa, whose presence prompts Jon not to go too far — for both his sake and so Sansa can provide a Karmic Death to Ramsay, which she does by feeding Ramsay to his own dogs.
  • After witnessing evil men getting away with committing some of the worst atrocities in the series, Arya starts taking justice into her own hands. She clearly becomes a darker character every time she kills, but it's compensated for by the fact that most of them deserve it.
    • She makes a start on avenging Robb's murder in "Mhysa" by flat-out wrecking a Frey camp with Sandor and personally stabbing to death the Frey soldier responsible for desecrating her brother's corpse. This marks the first time she kills a person since the first season and her first deliberate kill of an adult.
    • Later, she earns two more adult kills in "Two Swords": Polliver, the Clegane footman who killed Lommy and stole her sword, and one of his men. She kills the former in the exact same way as his most prominent victim, down to repeating his words during the deed. Later, in "Mockingbird", she murders Rorge, the prisoner who'd threatened to "fuck her bloody", without a second's hesitation, once he adds himself to her list.
    • In the Season 5 finale, she finally avenges Syrio (and Sansa, unknowingly) by brutally murdering Meryn Trant, who is revealed to be a paedophile who gets off on beating little girls.
    • In Season 6, she gets revenge on Walder Frey for his part in the brutal massacre of her mother and one of her older brothers, Robb. She kills two of Walder Frey's sons and has them baked into a pie, which she feeds to an unknowing Walder — before Arya reveals to a horrified Walder that his sons are in the pie and she finishes him by slitting his throat. The first scene of Season 7 has her pose as Walder and throw a feast for all the Freys, then wipe out the entire house with poisoned wine. It should be noted that Arya made a point of telling all the exclusively female servers and the young female guests there that they were not to be allowed any wine, thereby sparing innocents.
  • When Joffrey Baratheon and Tywin Lannister are murdered in cold blood, their killers clearly cross a moral line, but their victims are such Jerk Asses that it's hard not to cheer them on. Particularly the latter case, whose murderer, Tyrion, his own son, had finally retaliated after years of parental abuse and being sentenced to execution by him from which he had just escaped.
  • Downplayed. When Robin Arryn throws a fit and destroys Sansa's snow replica of Winterfell, she slaps him so hard she knocks him to the ground. Although Sansa might have been the one who escalated the altercation, to begin with, Littlefinger blithely remarks afterward that Robin had it coming his entire life.
  • Brienne does this, further evidencing the darker take on her character in comparison to that in the books, in which she had never killed a man before. She seems to have no issue doing this when a trio of rapist Stark soldiers confront her and Jaime on the way to King's Landing, absolutely wrecking two of them before killing the ringleader by driving her sword through his crotch, making a point of killing him as slowly and painfully as possible.
    Brienne: Two quick deaths. (castration)
  • Jaime Lannister gained infamy as the Kingslayer for stabbing Mad King Aerys, whom he was sworn to defend, in the back. No tears were shed over the pyromaniac's demise.
  • Daenerys Targaryen is a firm believer in this:
    • When Daenerys and her army march on the slaver city of Meereen, the city's Masters taunt her by crucifying a slave child at every milepost for one hundred and sixty-three miles. When she takes the city, a deathly calm Daenerys orders one hundred and sixty-three Masters to be crucified in the streets. However, it later turns out that at least one of the people she crucified had opposed the child-killings, which she regrets.
    • She rounds up the heads of Meereen's most noble houses in "Kill the Boy"... then has one of them burned alive and torn to shreds by her dragons, while the other noblemen are forced to watch. She doesn't even care who is innocent by that point... But then again, were any of them?
    • The Lannisters rob and loot the Reach of its wealth and food, and brazenly take out her allies. So she responds by more or less massacring their army with the Dothraki and Drogon, charbroiling most of the soldiers.
    • Daenerys's love of this trope takes a turn for the irony in the series finale. After a series of traumatic events, Daenerys's long-tested sanity finally breaks and she goes on the rampage on the back of her dragon, destroying most of the city of King's Landing and massacring its surrendered population. Afterward, her former advisor Tyrion Lannister talks to Jon Snow about her behavior. Tyrion lampshades that part of Daenerys's willingness to do what she did was because of her fervent belief both in this trope and in the fact that she is the hero, in her mind — and she won't stop killing until she realizes her perfect world. Tyrion urges a reluctant Jon that despite his love for Daenerys, he must kill Daenerys to save everyone else from her reign of terror. Jon pleads with Daenerys not to continue with the destruction but Daenerys justifies it as necessary and firmly believes it is the only way to build a better world. Consequently, Jon fatally stabs her to end her madness before she can cause even more death and destruction.
• In the controversial House episode "The Tyrant", House and his team have to treat General Dibala, the dictator of a fictional African country, after he was struck with a mysterious ailment while in New York for a UN meeting. After he gleefully describes how he's going to kick off a genocide when he gets back home, Chase kills him by deliberately misdiagnosing him and prescribing a treatment he knows will be fatal.
• The main characters of Hustle only con the corrupt and the greedy. In one episode, they even call off a con when it becomes clear their supposedly evil target is reforming. (That said, they still don't intentionally engage in any action that will physically hurt anyone, evil or not.)
• iCarly: In "iReunite With Missy", Missy broke Sam's cellphone on purpose and offered to buy her a new one. When Missy wins the 6-month cruise, given up by Freddie to get rid of Missy, Carly asks Sam how Missy could still compensate for her phone. Sam then reveals that she stole Missy's phone.
• Jeremiah: At the start of season 2, Lee Chen tricks the Valhalla Sector into thinking that Typhoid Mary Meghan survived the Big Death because of a vaccine that immunized her to it and then manipulated them into locking themselves inside their bunker with Meghan. They spend the next several days dying in agony after Meghan shakes hands with everyone important she can find before they realize she is infecting them, paying them back for taking Markus prisoner and causing the Big Death in the first place.
• Detective Chester Lake of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has a long-time grudge against a fellow police officer whom he knew was guilty of the rape of two illegal immigrants, but he could never prove it. When they're finally able to take him to trial, the jury is deadlocked and he walks. Chester goes and murders the man himself and puts up no fight when taken in.
  • In a later season episode, an accused pedophile is taken to court, but acquitted. Outraged, Detective Amaro loses his temper and beats the man into a coma after stalking him throughout the day. After the man wakes up in the hospital, him and his wife plan to sue the NYPD for police brutality and it looks like they will win and Detective Amaro will get fired. Until Detective Rollins, sets up a faux underage sex website online, using photos that were obtained during past arrest of pedophiles and makes it easy for the man to access. Once he does, proving he really is a pedophile, Rollins confronts him and threats to expose him if he goes through with the lawsuit. Amaro keeps his job, but his career starts to slowly tank from that point onward until he eventually leaves SVU.
• Leverage and its Sequel Series Leverage: Redemption are about a team of anti-heroic Con Artists who turn their skills against Corrupt Corporate Executives and other powerful villains who prey on ordinary people with impunity, often framing those executives for various crimes and/or stealing their money.
• Mayfair Witches: After one of the witch hunters, Keith, murders Tessa before Rowan can save her she finally invokes Lasher to hunt him down. Keith hides in a shed which Lasher sets on fire with his mind, using the same means planned to kill Tessa originally as a witch.
• Million Yen Women: After two of the women get killed, one of the remaining women cooperates with the former employee of one of the victims to take down the killer.
• In Mission: Impossible, this is the ethos of the Impossible Missions Force. As series creator Bruce Geller once said, "In Mission, we do all the things the heavies do, but we've made them the good guys." Patrick J. White sums it up in his series history The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier:
  Mission: Impossible matter-of-factly offered the premise that the United States government sponsored a group of saboteurs who were answerable to no one. In the course of their duties, the IMF could — and did — lie, cheat, steal, falsify media, hold persons illegally, falsely incriminate, destroy the property of innocent people, kidnap, plot (though never personally execute) assassinations, and break any civil and criminal rule that stood in their way. Individual rights were ignored... The IMF framed and entrapped opponents with no qualms, regrets, or remorse. If they couldn't nail [a villain] for something he did, they'd see to it he was punished for something he didn't do or something they made him do.
• Moon Knight (2022): Khonshu, the God of the Moon, is a brutal executioner who considers true justice to be destroying evil. This puts him ahead of the Ammit cultists, who think that it's better to destroy evil before it happens. Meaning that they will kill anyone whose goddess judges will be evil, at some point, past or future. Everyone who is not a cultist agrees that despite Khonshu's many flaws, at least he only targets people who have actually committed crimes.
• Mouse (2021): Ba-reum decides to do this when he realises he has to kill someone. So he chooses rapists like Deok-soo and Jae-shik to be his victims.
• In Once Upon a Time, Snow White (of all people) pulls off this trope. Her wicked stepmother's even more evil mother Cora admitted to killing Snow's mom by magic, threw Snow's old nanny to her death right in front of her For The Lulz, and cheerfully admits her whole goal is to obtain the dagger of the Dark One so she would become a completely invincible force of power. Regina (the stepmother) has made Snow's life (and everyone else's) life a living hell for the last 30 years. So, when she casts a death curse on Cora's heart (she stores it separately) and tricks Regina into putting it back...Well, it's a little hard not to be both horrified at Snow's actions, but also believe the parties she paid evil unto richly deserved it.
• NCIS: New Orleans: Through months of investigation, Dwayne Pride has found out that the mayor of New Orleans, Douglas Hamilton, has hired terrorists to destroy one of the levies to flood a low-income area, potentially killing at least 2000 people, so the land can be developed as a shipyard, and has murdered a Congresswoman to keep her state from getting the contract instead. Dwayne Pride solves this problem by shooting Hamilton in the leg, kidnapping him, and handcuffing him to scaffolding in a church that's smack dab in the middle of the neighborhood that's about to be destroyed, promising to come back and free him if he can manage to stop the levy being blown up. Lucky for Hamilton, Pride's good at his job.
• Peacemaker (2022): One Puppeteer Parasite picked Agent Murn for a Meat Puppet because he was "the worst person I could find". However, even though the man's memories horrify the parasite, it still feels guilty for depriving him of the chance to become a better person.
• Person of Interest: In a flashback in "The Devil's Share", Detective Fusco, a reformed Dirty Cop who now works with the heroes, got his Start of Darkness when he gunned down a drug dealer in cold blood. Said drug dealer had previously killed an off-duty rookie.
  • The same episode ends with Simmons, the Big Bad who murdered Carter after she upended his whole corrupt organisation, arrested and in a hospital because the protagonists ultimately decided to do what Carter would have wanted instead of seeking revenge for her death. But who is this, waiting in the shadows of the hospital room when Simmons wakes up? Why, it's Elias, the mafia don whose life Carter saved last season. And here's his henchman Scarface, with a garotte.
  • Ex-assassins Reese and Shaw also somewhat fit this belief; though they generally try and avoid lethal force, they aren't exactly bothered when they do.
• Power Rangers: It's hard to believe that Bulk and Skull were bullies after all the humiliation given to them constantly for about the five original seasons. The good guys never used their powers explicitly other than dodge attacks, but they did laugh at them a lot in the freeze shot that ended episodes. They were pretty bad in the first season (both in the sense of not being nice, but also just not good at being bullies), but later on they got better.
• Jarod on The Pretender is fond of this, often putting villains in the same situation they did to someone else. Note that he puts them into a less lethal/physically harmful version of what they've done to one of their victims—- they just don't know it. In Jared's case, it's much more about inflicting psychological damage on them as they believe they're about to suffer the same fate as someone they've wronged before being taken in by the authorities.
• Revenge (2011) sees Emily Thorne bankrupting, humiliating, burning down the homes of, and otherwise disgracing the various crooks who framed her father for terrorism.
• The Rise of Phoenixes: Yu Luo sold one of her maids to the House of Lan Xiang just because she got upset. Zi Yan repays her by switching her birth-card with one that says she'll bring misfortune to her husband, causing the cancellation of her arranged marriage to Ning Yi. When he talks about it later Zi Yan describes it as "enforcing justice on behalf of the heavens".
• RoboCop: Prime Directives in part details Murphy's backstory before his transfer to Metro West and becoming a cyborg in RoboCop (1987). Before his transfer and meeting Lewis, Murphy was partners with a man named John Cable at Metro South, a partnership that ended when a call to deal with a dog causes them to chance upon The Motor City Mangler, a cannibalistic Serial Killer who targets young women. The cause for the partnership ending? After the Mangler took him hostage and tried to kill both him and Murphy, Cable grabbed his gun—and proceeded to shoot the Mangler dead.
• Romper Stomper: Antifasc have this view with regards to far-rightists, assaulting them in hopes of destroying their whole movement.
• At some points in Sabrina the Teenage Witch, it can be argued that Libby was the victim of bullying from Sabrina instead of the other way around. After all, being a Reality Warper gives you an unfair advantage. However, Sabrina seemed to mature past this - most of her later morally questionable uses of magic against Libby were based on trying to redress wrongs or make Libby a better person, instead of simply hurting Libby. Sometimes she even used it to do something nice for Libby, even knowing that Libby would most likely never know about it and certainly wouldn't return the favor if she did. (For example, in "Sabrina Claus", she has to take over for Santa Claus and her gift to Libby is to use magic to make Libby's Annoying Younger Sibling be nice to her. Possibly still morally questionable, depending on how you feel about magically influencing the free will of a child.)
• Sherlock: The titular detective realizes that he has no other choice but to kill Magnusson for both John and Mary, but especially John since Magnusson knew he was a pressure point for him, and that he genuinely cared for him.
• Sledge Hammer! is a Cowboy Cop who doesn't hesitate to use the violent criminal scum's own violent criminal methods against them... to the consternation of Captain Trunk.
• Smallville:
  • Davis Bloome was more or less forced into this; he has a choice between killing a couple of criminals every so often and doing nothing (which allows his Superpowered Evil Side to take over and massacre a bunch of innocents).
  • In "Sacrifice", Zod gets a small one when he throws Waller about twenty feet but Clark stops him from killing her. Although the fans rooted for Zod on this one.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • Done deliberately by a particularly Genre Savvy Benjamin Sisko when he's chasing down the traitorous Starfleet officer Eddington in "For the Uniform". After Eddington poisons a Cardassian settled-planet with a chemical only dangerous to Cardassians, thus forcing them to evacuate, Sisko, invoking Les Misérables since Eddington had called him Inspector Javert, forces Eddington to make a Heroic Sacrifice by doing the same thing to a human-settled planet occupied by the Maquis and threatening to keep doing it unless Eddington surrendered.
  • Garak once tries to commit genocide on the Founders' home world by gaining access to Defiant's weapons systems. Had he succeeded, he may have averted the war altogether.
  • Section 31 got even further and infected the Founders with an incurable disease. Had they succeeded, there wouldn't be a single Founder left. This is par for the course for them as they swore to "Combat the enemies of the Federation in a ways that the Federation is unwilling to do".
  • Though portrayed sympathetically, the show does not dispute that Kira (and the Bajoran Resistance in general) resorted to terrorism against the Cardassians during the occupation. Murder, bombings, and other acts of random violence were common, and they weren't choosy about their targets. Though Kira isn't proud of her violent past, neither does she apologize for it.
• Deconstructed in the penultimate episode of Season 10 of Supernatural, Dean massacres the Styne Family (or rather, their American Branch) in revenge for Charlie's death, but it's made clear that Dean is one step away from crossing the Moral Event Horizon as a result of how merciless and ruthless he was.
• In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, most of the unarmed noncombatants murdered by Cameron or Derek — for being witnesses, liabilities, building apocalyptic genocidal computer networks, etc. — are assholes or petty criminals of one form or another. Presumably, this was the only way they could put a show about Well Intentioned Extremists on broadcast TV without turning them into full-fledged Villain Protagonists.
• True Detective: In the Season 4 finale, a group of Iñupiaq women figure out who murdered one of their own, Annie Kowtok (the researchers at the Tsalal research station). They don't trust the police, so take justice in their own hands. They abduct the culprits and abandon them at a remote location to freeze to death.
• Pretty much the mission statement of the characters of The Unit who are regularly depicted carrying out assassinations and murders against terrorists or anyone supporting them. Perhaps spotlighted by one episode in which one of the team suffers a crisis of conscience only to finally decide he actually enjoyed killing people, an attitude his superior officer states is actually necessary to do what they do.
• While Mr. Chapel of Vengeance Unlimited doesn't kill, he can completely ruin the life of some of his "victims", including two that he had branded as insane. Chapel often doesn't go out of his way to get people killed, it's a result of the show's formula. If people survived his scams it would quickly get around that he's not who he says he is. There are also times when he really is trying to make sure they die, though.
• The Walking Dead (2010): Try to rape Carl in front of Rick and you are going to die painfully, he'll make sure to make it very painfully.
• Omar Little of The Wire is a renowned stick-up man who only robs from people involved in the drug trade. The police pretty much turn a blind eye to this.

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