Oubliettes and other Sealed Rooms in the Middle of Nowhere in Live-Action TV series.
- In The Adventures of Superman episode "The Defeat of Superman," the villains of the week shut Lois, Jimmy, and Superman into a basement room in their former hideout. The door is steel-plated and the villains threw a Kryptonite stick into the room, preventing Superman from breaking them out.
- Angel:
- The season three finale "Tomorrow" has Angel sealed into a metal coffin and dumped into the Pacific Ocean. The following season opens with him going mad from blood-thirst and isolation.
- A fifth season episode of saw Angel, as branch director of evil law firm Wolfram & Hart, lock a resurrected murderous doctor into a tiny closet where he can't move, can't scream, and can't blink for all eternity.Eve: "If there's anything Wolfram & Hart excels at, it's keeping their unmentionables unmentioned."
- And via Flashback in the first season episode "Rm w/a Vu" where Dennis Pearson's mother walled him up to keep him from running off with his girlfriend. She was planning to let him out after a while, but had a heart attack and died just after finishing the wall.
- Blake's 7:
- In the seminal episode "Rumours of Death", Avon teleports himself and a notorious torturer into an underground cavern with absolutely no surface access, and, after getting the information he needs, leaves him there. He's "merciful" enough to leave the man a gun. This is how the episode begins.
- In "Gold", Servalan abandons an underling who tried to double-cross her on a desolate planet. However, she apparently decides to just shoot him instead, as the last we see is her driving away from his corpse.Keiller: I don't suppose I'll get paid now, will I, Servalan?
Servalan: What use would money be to you... here?
Keiller: But you... you're not goin' to... Servalan, nobody lives here! There's no shelter, no food. Let me... you're not going to leave me here alone?
- Bones: Dr. Brennan and Hodgins are captured by the serial killer "The Gravedigger," knocked out, locked in a car, and buried four feet underground in the middle of an abandoned coal field.
- This was standard practice for this particular villain, as the name suggests. Not so much a serial killer as a serial kidnapper BTW — early victims' locations were revealed after a ransom was paid, allowing for last-minute rescues — but the Gravedigger does eventually get pissed enough to do this to people for revenge too.
- This is used twice in The Bridge (2011) once for Mette and the young children, locked in a shack in the middle of nowhere with a live grenade and the other was August trapped in a coffin-shaped box behind a fake wall.
- The MO of a serial killer in Cold Case was to hold his victims captive and psychologically torture them until they lost the will to live, then completely seal them in and let them starve to death.
- A vengeful serial killer on CSI buried Nick Stokes alive in a plexiglas box, with a video feed to a website so his colleagues could watch him suffer. When the residents of the fire ant nest he's buried next to begin finding the cracks in the box...
- Doctor Who:
- In "Planet of the Daleks", Dalek scientists are Trapped in Containment when a bioweapon is released by a prisoner. While they've been immunized, they can't open the door because the bioweapon will kill every other Dalek in the area."WE CANNOT LEAVE HERE. NO-ONE CAN ENTER. WE CAN NEVER LEAVE HERE! NEVER, NEVER, NEVER!"
- At the end of "The Pandorica Opens", the Legion of Doom locks the Doctor into a box. The next episode starts out by showing the Bill & Ted scheme by which he arranges his escape.
- At the end of "The Vanquishers", Inston-Vee Vinder and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart force the Grand Serpent to enter a portal door at gunpoint, then seal it behind him. He finds himself standing on a tiny asteroid, with no planets visible for light years in any direction. It's Laser-Guided Karma for how the Grand Serpent had Vinder reassigned as the sole occupant of a tiny space station in retaliation for trying to expose his crimes.
- In "Planet of the Daleks", Dalek scientists are Trapped in Containment when a bioweapon is released by a prisoner. While they've been immunized, they can't open the door because the bioweapon will kill every other Dalek in the area.
- Game of Thrones: Dany seals up Xaro Xhoan Daxos (with Doreah) in his own vault as revenge for betraying her.
- Heroes:
- This was Hiro's way of dealing with Adam, after their little disagreement in feudal Japan. So he cannot kill him nor hurt him in any way? Good thing he can still teleport him to any time and place he wants! For example, inside his supposedly empty tomb.
- The show does it again, but this time Peter and Sylar are trapped inside Sylar's own head with only each other to annoy.
- On an episode of Highlander: The Series, an old foe of Duncan's who had been left to rot in an insane asylum locked him in a decommissioned ship's brig, with the intention of letting him out after he'd been there for an equal term. Duncan being immortal, this wasn't quite a deathtrap, but it would have been very, very unpleasant.
- One episode had an immortal marooned on a tiny barren island, where he starved to death — over and over again — until somebody finally found him. (Unlike in the films, immortals in the series couldn't walk underwater without drowning over and over, or staying seemingly dead until brought to the surface, so that wouldn't have worked well.)
- In one episode of NUMB3RS a reporter is abducted to keep her from running a story that would torpedo a property developer's scheme. The kidnapper doesn't want to kill her, so he decides to keep her prisoner in a cabin on an otherwise bare tract of rural land until a bid goes through, after which it will be too late for the story to stop him. Charlie, with the team's help, parses this out and is able to rescue her.
- Prey: One of the heroes is put in cell in the middle of a blank room during the Cliffhanger show finale. It'd have to have a Conclusion in Another Medium, although The Invisible Man gives it a Shout-Out when the actor who had played the prisoner was let free.
- Sapphire and Steel. At the end of their sixth Assignment the title characters are suckered into a room that's sent into another dimension with no way back. The twist is that since they can't be killed (at least by conventional means) they'll probably be stuck there with just each other for company forever.
- Supernatural: Ma'lak boxes can serve as this. They're coffinlike enclosures warded so that even near-omnipotent beings will be locked in forever. Dean makes plans to have himself locked in one and dropped to the bottom of the ocean when he's possessed by Apocalypse!Michael. Jack solves his problem by killing Michael. Later, when Sam and Dean decide he's too dangerous and must be sealed away forever, he blows his way out of the Ma'lak box within seconds.
- The X-Files: The episode "Apocrypha" involves a Body Surfing alien lifeform that manifests as a sentient black oil. The alien's final host body belongs to the traitorous Alex Krycek, who gets the unpleasant task of returning the creature to its ship — which happens to be stored twenty floors underground in an abandoned missile silo. The episode ends with a shot of Krycek screaming in terror as he pounds on the now-sealed steel door of the silo. In true X-Files fashion, however, Krycek returns the following season without a scratch on him (with a Hand Wave explanation for how he escaped the silo).
