Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in Live-Action TV series.
- In 3rd Rock from the Sun, Dick becomes paranoid that the Chancellor has it in for Mary. He then talks Mary into thinking so as well and accidentally gets her arrested. At the end of the episode, he describes what happened:Dick: I was completely convinced Mary was going to lose her job.
Sally: And did she?
Dick: Yeah. So I guess being paranoid is kind of like being psychic. - Angel:
- Done, though never identified as such, in the case of Sahjhan and Connor. Sahjan read a prophecy that Angel's son would grow up and kill him. He tried to get rid of him by sealing him in an inescapable Hell Dimension, where time moved faster so that after only a few weeks on earth, Connor would have died of old age there. He escaped grown up, a few days later, and killed him a year on earth after that. Additionally, because of his meddling, he spent the intervening time locked in an urn.
- The false prophecy that Angel would kill Connor that prompted Wesley to kidnap then infant Connor from Angel in the first place is also an example. The kidnapping was the event that triggered the tragic chain of events that made up most of season 4, culminating in Angel killing Connor to save a bunch of hostages. Thanks to a Deal with the Devil, Connor came back. In short, Sahjahn's meddling to try and avoid his fate created the circumstances that led to his fate being fulfilled.
- Ashes of Love:
- Zi Fen gave Jin Mi the Unfeeling Pill wishing to spare her daughter the heartache she felt, but robbing Jin Mi of the ability to feel and process her feelings dooms her chance of being happy in love.
- No matter what Run Yu does, Tu Yao views it as a plot to steal the throne from Xu Feng. Eventually her abuse drives him to do the things she accused him of.
- On Babylon 5, Londo Mollari, especially towards the end of the series, does his best to avoid his prophetic dream of one day being strangled by G'Kar while he is Centauri Emperor from coming true, it tragically does not work as his past mistakes catch up to him, and by the end of his story arc, he clearly is unable to avoid what lies ahead of him.
- On Being Human when Mitchell receives a prophecy that a werewolf will kill him, he becomes paranoid about any werewolves other than George and Nina. When they encounter two other werewolves he picks up the Idiot Ball and is so aggressive that he starts a feud with them and really messes up things for everyone. In fact, no one gets killed and they make peace in the end and the prophecy itself later turns out to be a lie.
- Best Friends Whenever: It is revealed that Cyd and Shelby themselves are what created the Future Lab timeline:
- When they try to see if Shelby's dad is involved in the Future Lab, they unintentionally get him promoted to that position.
- When they go back to 1991 to stop Janet Smythe from finding Globo-Digit-Dyne, they accidentally leave behind some of their tachyons which Janet later uses to create the MegaCorp.
- They accidentally tell Janet the secret to time travel which would allow her to create the Bad Future that Cyd and Shelby saw in "Fight to the Future: Part 1".
- Also, the Alternate Timeline with Cyd and Shelby strapped to tables was revealed to have been done voluntarily to sacrifice their powers in order to stop Janet Smythe.
- A minor non-related example was the fire in "A Time Time To Say Thankyou".
- In Better Call Saul, it's revealed that Jimmy's brother Chuck had been secretly sabotaging Jimmy's career for years because he didn't believe he was fit to be a lawyer. By making it impossible for him to go straight along with forcing him to live with the knowledge that his own brother betrayed him, Chuck himself ensured that Jimmy would go down a dark path.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
- "Prophecy Girl": The Master is freed by drinking Buffy's blood, but she went to fight him only because of the prophecy. He even points it out.
- Double Subversion in "Help": A girl named Cassie, who seems to have prophetic powers, claims that she will die this Friday, whether she likes it or not. The fact that she's been talking about her own death so much leads a cult to try to sacrifice her to a demon, figuring her mysterious disappearance will be chalked up to a suicide. Buffy manages to save her from all the cultists, demons and death traps...only for her to suddenly drop dead of a heart condition that she didn't even know she had. And while not stated, it's entirely plausible that all the stress of her prophecy and its aftermath caused that heart attack.
- Charmed has a few examples:
- Season 6 reveals that Piper and Leo's son Wyatt is destined to become the evilest male witch ever. This leads Gideon, headmaster of the Magic Academy, to try and prevent it by killing Wyatt as an infant. As it turns out, however, Wyatt will fight him off, but the psychological trauma of Gideon's attempts to kill him is exactly what turned Wyatt evil, to begin with. Leo ultimately breaks the cycle by killing Gideon.
- A prominent example is with Cole Turner in Season 5. He repeatedly attempts to win Phoebe back and be good, but no matter what he did to try to convince her, Phoebe and her sisters adamantly refuse to accept him back and try to kill him, stating that he will never be anything more than an evil demon. Eventually, Cole goes insane and decides to just roll with it.
- In Community episode "Debate 109" Shirley comes in to tell Jeff and Annie about the crazy idea Abed had that they would kiss. Thus giving Annie the thought to use this as a ploy to win a round of debate.
- This sort-of shows up in the only CSI episode involving a (confirmed) psychic. The psychic predicts that the killer's next move will be associated with "green tea", and follows Stokes home. Following a hunch the psychic goes into the attic, where the killer is hiding. The killer gains the upper hand and sends the psychic crashing through the ceiling onto Stokes' carpet, which has a green T (for Texas) on it. The psychic, alas, does not get better.
- Doctor Who:
- In "The Christmas Invasion", the Doctor deliberately created one of these to get the Prime Minister kicked out of office, saying he could bring her government down with 6 words. "Don't you think she looks tired?" whispered in someone's ear. This got spread around until there was a huge controversy regarding her health. Meanwhile, the stress of her not knowing what he said, and the resulting media circus, actually affected her health and she ended up kicked out of office.
- In "The Hungry Earth"/"Cold Blood", a group of humans come into contact with Alaya, a member of the Silurian race. She then predicts that one of the humans will kill her and that her death will trigger a war that wipes out humanity. The humans refuse to believe her, but then one woman sneaks in, gets into an argument with Alaya, and ends up accidentally murdering her with a stun gun. Then it turns out that Alaya's sister is the leader of the Silurian military, and she really doesn't like humans...
- The Series 9 Story Arc teases a Gallifreyan prophecy about a half-Time Lord, half-Dalek warrior known as "The Hybrid" starting in its second episode, and from there the Doctor deals with a variety of hybrid beings. In the three-part finale, the Doctor is revealed to be the one person who knows who or what it is, and Rassilon has him captured and given a Cold-Blooded Torture treatment to bring out the truth about a creature destined to stand in the ruins of Gallifrey and perhaps destroy all of space and time. What makes all this self-fulfilling? It's possible the Doctor doesn't know what it is, just that it's not Time Lord/Dalek. Several possibilities are raised as to its identity, but none are confirmed. But capturing and torturing the Doctor and accidentally getting his beloved companion Clara killed along the way drives him to madness, and he proceeds to escape his confession dial, bloodlessly depose Rassilon and conquer Gallifrey, and then trick the Time Lords into effectively bringing Clara back from the grave with promises of answers to their questions — in the process almost destroying the universe and traveling to the end of time to stand in Gallifrey's ruins. The Doctor thus becomes the Hybrid, by his own remorseful admission — all because someone was determined to keep it from coming to pass.
- Dolly Parton had a variety show in the '80s and commented in her opening monologue one night about a tabloid paper that predicted she would fall in love with a 300 lb. wrestler and write a song about him entitled "Headlock On My Heart". She then introduced her special guest star, Hulk Hogan, and showed a video of a song she wrote, called "Headlock On My Heart". (Lyrics here
.) - In an episode of Early Edition, Gary's "selfish" counterpart (who used the paper at least partially for his own gain) accidentally ruined the stock pricing of a (very) small computer company (three or five people) by selling all of their stock that he owned when the paper said they were going to crash.
- The Flash (2014):
- The entire series occurs because, in the future, the Reverse Flash wishes to stop Flash from existing, so he travels back in time and kills Barry Allen's mother when he was a child, reasoning that Barry would be so traumatized by the event he'd never become a hero. Ironically, this incident is exactly what pushes Barry to become a police scientist obsessed with the paranormal, which is what ends up turning him into the Flash. To add insult to the injury and doubly apply this trope, since the Reverse Flash's powers work by piggybacking from those of Flash's, once he changes the future he loses this connection. So he's now forced to make Barry turn into the Flash even earlier, so he can get his powers back and return to his own time.
- In the episode "Killer Frost", Caitlin is obsessed with finding Dr. Alchemy so he can remove her powers, as she's terrified of becoming a supervillain like her Earth-2 counterpart. Said obsession ends up fueling her Split-Personality Takeover, turning her into a supervillain.
- What drives a lot of the plot in FlashForward (2009). For example, until Janis saw a vision of herself pregnant in the future, she had never really considered having a baby. Mark was haunted by the vision that he would fall off the wagon, the pressure building to the point that when he's given a flask by someone who'd foreseen himself quitting drinking, he gives in to fate instead of pouring it out. Olivia's vision of herself with a lover begins to break apart her marriage, making cheating more likely. By the end of the series, it's been shown that the future seen in flash-forwards can be changed, but doing so required great effort to fight the inertia of the timestream.
- Game of Thrones:
- Maggy the Frog told Cersei that all three of her children would die. Cersei's own actions, in various ways, lead to this outcome. Joffrey dies because Cersei coddled him and then couldn't control him when he was made king, which led to him being poisoned because he was out of control. Myrcella died because the Mountain killed Oberyn, which in turn only happened because Cersei was determined to punish Tyrion for killing Joffrey without any proof that he was responsible. Finally, Tommen kills himself after Cersei detonates the wildfire under the Great Sept of Baelor, killing Margaery among many others.
- King Aegon II Targaryen was initially not interested in his claim and was willing to go along with his father's wish to have Rhaenyra take the throne. He was convinced after Alicent told him that Rhaenyra would have put his family to the sword as soon as she became the queen. It became a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy as their actions inevitably forced the conflict between the Blacks and the Greens, leading to all of Aegon's sons being killed during the war.
- Towards the end of Season 8 everyone becomes suspicious of Daenerys, fearing that she is unstable and will go mad. While Daenerys was under a lot of emotional pressure, it was her own allies holding her at arm's length and scheming against her which pushes her over the edge, just as they feared.
- House of the Dragon: Ser Otto Hightower insists that the realm would be plunged into Civil War if Rhaenyra targaryen became the ruling Queen because men would not accept her, even as he himself ends up leading The Coup against her that triggers said civil war.
- In The George Lopez Show, George’s already overweight best friend Ernie puts on so much weight that Vic predicts he is on his way to becoming like his morbidly obese, bedridden mother. Angie deduces that the explanation is that when even after Ernie finally moved out of his parents’ house, he still suffered horrible luck courting women. So Ernie overate and gained weight to become more physically unattractive to women from the get-go so he has an excuse to not have to try to get a date. When Ernie’s weight causes an incident at work, his bosses order him to lose weight or lose his job, and George has to show him that he can now fit into huge pants that his mother once wore to scare some sense into him. Although George being George, he barely remembers Angie’s words and tells Ernie has had a “self-fulfilling prophylactic”.
- In Hercules, Eurystheus is told that if his daughter Iole ever gets married, her husband will kill him. When Hercules asks that his son Hyllus and Iole may marry to heal the rift between both houses, Eurystheus attempts to have them both killed, fearful for his life. During the climactic struggle, Hyllus ends up killing Eurystheus by throwing a knife to his chest, who might have lived if he had not tried to kill him.
- Heroes is full of these.
- Isaac Mendez' comic book 9th Wonders, which depicts Hiro and Ando doing things like renting a car... and after Hiro finds the comic, he follows it to the letter, because he is shown doing it in the comic; but Isaac had only drawn it that way because he had seen Hiro in his visions of the future.
- Before that, he reads a comic in which he saves a little girl. He does, but only after putting her in danger in the first place.
- Even Sylar, after he steals Isaac's precognition power, does things like killing Ted and impersonating Nathan to get the presidency solely because he had painted himself doing it.
- In the graphic novel "Isaac's First Time", Isaac tells Eden about when he first discovered his power: a woman at a gallery showing confronted him about a painting of her being hit by a bus, and then still upset, she ran outside and was hit by a bus.
- In "1961", a young Angela speaks with the young Company Founders about 7 dream, in which they form a company, and of the horrible things they will do to protect the secret, and of how it's a necessary evil. She declares these things in a manner which suggests the idea of using the information from her prophetic dreams to help avoid, or prevent, exactly this type of thing from having to happen at all never occurred to her.
- Happens in Home and Away when Miles is told by a young and apparently psychic girl who was either a hallucination or a ghost that only he could see that he will die if he falls asleep. He spends several days not sleeping, eventually collapsing from exhaustion on his desk. If he hadn't been woken up a few minutes later and walked away from his desk, he would have been decapitated by a falling ceiling fan.
- In an episode of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Wayne makes a high-tech eclipse viewer, which somehow allows him to see the near future. When he tries to show the truth to his neighbor, a cop, the neighbor just concludes that the only reason these things are happening (e.g. a car swerving and crashing) is because Wayne is the one causing them (e.g. running out in front of said car to try to stop it, resulting in the swerve and crash).
- In Hornblower, the paranoid Captain Sawyer becomes convinced that his officers are beginning to conspire against him. He begins to act increasingly irrational, vindictive and erratic towards them... leading them to begin conspiring against him.
- iCarly: If Carly/Freddie isn't revisited, then Sam's insistence that Carly's feelings for Freddie weren't real would become one. Sam tells Freddie Carly's feelings aren't real. Freddie breaks up with Carly because of Sam's thoughts. This stops any chance of Carly's feelings being allowed to blossom or fail on their own. Instead, Carly's feelings end immediately due to rejection and Freddie's explanation of Sam's potentially mistaken logic. Those feelings never return. Everyone believes Sam was correct. Carly never loved Freddie. Sam saying that Carly's feelings aren't real creates the situation that eventually results in everyone believing that Carly's feelings weren't real thus creating this trope.
- Discussed in a chapter of Journey to the West (1996), when Tang Sanzhang narrates the story of Buddha's past teahings: Buddha-as-Siddharta once had a disciple named Ajatsharu who can predict the future, and divulged to a King that he will be someday usurped by his son. The paranoid King attempts an Offing the Offspring when the prince was a mere baby (thwarted thanks to the queen's intervention) and abuses his son throughout most of the prince's childhood (despite the prince being a good, obedient boy), and when the prince reaches adulthood, the King then frames his own son for attempted murder, sentencing the concubine which the prince had fallen in love with to death, and throwing the prince into a dungeon. Alas, turns out the prince has allies outside prison loyal to him, who then poisons the King until the King is reduced to a state of madness; the Prince being an only child he's immediately granted the throne, where he then gleefully abuses his own father who mistreated him most of his life leading to the King suffering a slow, agonizing death. Ajatsharu himself can predict his own demise, too, where he's destined to be Eaten Alive by wolves. Siddharta tries a Screw Destiny by restraining Ajataharu the night he's propecized to die, only for Ajatsharu to free himself anyway and allow hungry wolves to do him in, gaining enlightenment as a God in the process and revealing his divine form eventually to Siddharta.
- Invoked in a round-about way in Kamen Rider Ryuki. Miyuki Tezuka, a fortuneteller, predicts that he will be the next Rider to die in the Rider War. This is a lie. The next Rider that he predicts would die was, in fact, Shinji Kido, the protagonist of the series and the only other Rider besides Miyuki who wants to stop the Rider War. When both Riders are attacked by Takeshi Asakura, Miyuki takes a lethal blow intended for Shinji and ends up fulfilling the fake prophecy as a result.
- Mirabelle of The Kicks believes that she's not smart enough to pass her classes, so she doesn't even make an effort. This, naturally, results in the very failure she believed would happen. She finally breaks out of this routine in "Breakaway."
- In one episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit a girl is abducted and the primary suspect is a man, named Donovan, whom Elliot arrested years ago for robbery. The man spent most of his prison time in solitary confinement, which took a toll on his psyche, and he's afraid to go back. Once the new case is solved and Donovan turnes out not to be involved, Elliot goes to apologise for suspecting him earlier. But Donovan freaks out and, thinking Elliot is here to arrest him, throws him off the roof. So, now he's guilty of attempted murder of a police officer and has to go to prison.
- In Lexx, His Divine Shadow went out of his way to make the conditions of the prophecy foretelling his death at the hands of the last Brunnen-G possible just to show his contempt for the whole idea of prophecy, wrongly believing that time is not cyclical and that no one can predict the future. His attempts to avert it when he realizes his earlier arrogance was a mistake seal his fate.
- In The Librarians 2014 they have the appropriately titled episode "And the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy". Such prophecies can only be cancelled by the intervention of a person not included in the prophecy or by causing a massive upset in destiny.
- Baird receives a prophecy that she will be killed by a supernatural assassin in the Library at a certain time, despite the Library being warded against said assassin. She decides to avoid the Library and goes on a case only to be captured in a maze with the assassin stalking her. When the appointed time approaches she discovers the maze is inside an artifact taken back to the Library. Had she remained in the Library the assassin would never have gotten to her. Baird manages to avert the prophecy by having Jenkins, who was not in the prophecy, throw the artifact out of the Library.
- The Oracle of Delphi had a vision that she would die after the next time she bathed in the waters of Delphi. She fled Greece and was living in Seattle, where she regularly bathed in a pool to maintain her powers. However, it also affected the goggles of a school swimming team who used the pool, allowing them to see the future. This results in one of the students winning a trip to Greece. The student then added water from Mount Parnassus to the pool which meant the next time the Oracle bathed she was marked for death, living only so long as she stayed wet. She created Baird's prophecy and planned to use the power of the broken destiny to free herself. When Baird escapes her prophecy the assassin turned on the Oracle who had dried off.
- Ezekiel, Stone, and Baird use prophecy glasses to catch snippets of their future selves solving the problems they currently face. This ends up nearly bringing them to blows when they see visions of being attacked by one another. The only reason for them attacking one another in the vision was their paranoia after seeing the vision itself.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: High King Gil-galad decides to send Galadriel home in Valinor out of fear that she "might have inadvertently kept alive the very evil she thought to defeat" and that "the same wind that seeks to blow out a fire may also cause its spread". He is proven right when Galadriel refuses to go in Valinor and finds in the middle of the ocean the very evil she seeks to destroy. She has no idea at first that Halbrand is Sauron at his lowest point, and tries to install him as the king of the Southlands believing he is some lost heir. Of course that Sauron being Sauron, decides in the end to play along, and regains all of his strength and confidence back. His words to Galadriel mirror in a way what Gal-galad believes: "I'd all but given up. But you, you believed in me. You saw strength in me. You pushed me to height that no one else could have."
- Lost: There are three big flags that the detonation of the hydrogen bomb in 1977 will cause the crash of the original Oceanic Airlines flight bringing Jack and the gang to the island. First: Sayid shooting Ben in 1977 causes him to become a Magnificent Bastard in an extended way since this is what brings him to the Others for... healing. Second: Miles lampshades this trope in the last few minutes of the episode. Third: if it doesn't, the whole series is in for one weird-ass Reset Button one season out from its announced ending.
- Lost Love in Times: Yuan An is convinced Yuan Ling plans to overthrow and kill him, so he falsely accuses Yuan Ling of planning a rebellion and tries to have him arrested. When Yuan Ling returns he really is plotting against Yuan An.
- Lucifer (2016): Father Kinley tries to manipulate Chloe into sending Lucifer back to Hell after hearing a prophecy saying that "evil shall be released" after "the Devil walks the Earth and finds his First Love." Instead, it's his actions trying to stop the prophecy that cause it to happen, because it starts a line of Disaster Dominoes that end with him dying and being possessed by the true Big Bad of the season, the demon Dromos, who proceeds to kill people en masse so they can be possessed by other demons and start wreaking havoc on the mortal plane. Ironically, Dromos' actions were to achieve the one thing that Kinley was trying to do to subvert the prophecy: send Lucifer back to Hell, which he ultimately succeeds in doing.
- This is a huge part of Merlin (2008).
- Morgana is shown to go to the dark side mainly because they're the only other magical people she knows. If Merlin had revealed himself to her, this wouldn't have happened. In case that's too subtle, Merlin is so desperate to keep Mordred from his future evil acts that he trips him with a branch so he will be caught by Camelot knights. Not only does Mordred kill said knights, but his line afterwards makes absolutely certain that Merlin has driven him to evil.
- And in "The Tears of Uther Pendragon Part II", he tells the Dragon that he should have listened to him and never trusted Morgana. So apparently he missed the obvious Aesop.
- Luckily, he gets straightened out four episodes later when he's shown visions of the future by a crystal cave. Except for the first three visions, he winds up fulfilling each and every one of them through his paranoia to stop them from happening. He clearly states that this was all his doing at the end though, and nicely averts Aesop Amnesia when he talks to Arthur about destiny in the next episode.Merlin: You may be destined to rule Camelot, but you have a choice as to how you do it.
- There's also a nice variation with Arthur. Merlin protects and advises Arthur because Arthur will one day be a great king, and as a result, Arthur becomes a better king.
- Mordred shows up much later on and doesn't seem to hold any grudges against Merlin or Arthur and becomes one of the latter's knights. Merlin, still fearing and mistrusting him ends up cementing his Face–Heel Turn, which ultimately ends with Arthur's death.
- Similarly on a NUMB3RS episode featuring Chinese people, a psychic predicts the killers' next move and goes there with his camera. The killers are there, along with their big truck. He doesn't get better either.
- Once Upon a Time: A seer tells Rumplestiltskin that his actions on the battlefield will "leave [his] son fatherless," which he quite naturally assumes means he's going to die. He's not happy when he runs into the seer again and she remarks that her prophecy came true.Rumplestiltskin: "Well, in a manner of speaking. I hobbled myself on the battlefield, was branded a coward. My wife ran away and left me. Then my son was called to the front. Oh! - Then I became the Dark One. Then Bae left me. So, yes, my actions on the battlefield left my son fatherless. But it would've been nice to know about all the pesky details."
- The Outer Limits (1995): In the episode "Breaking Point", a scientist invents a Time Machine, which he uses to travel several days into the future. There, he sees his wife, who has been shot. When he returns to his own time, he desperately tries to convince everyone that he really did travel to the future, only to have everyone think him crazy (doesn't help that the time shift apparently has some nasty side effects, such as actually turning him crazy). In the end, he ends up accidentally shooting his wife while trying to stop her from leaving him. In a twist, he decides to prevent her death by ensuring that they never meet in the first place, so he travels back to the day they met and shoots his younger self. Both versions of him die. Unfortunately, fate doesn't like to be cheated - his future wife was planning on killing herself that day, and only meeting his past self kept her from taking the pills.
- Princess Agents: The emperor thinks the Yan family are plotting against him. So he has them all killed... except for Yan Xun, who plots against the emperor to get revenge.
- On QI, Victoria Coren Mitchell mentioned a dream she'd had the night before about being on the show. She mentioned a question that had been asked in her dream and her response (which had triggered the klaxon.) The producers Googled the answer to that question and had Stephen ask it, thus fulfilling her prophecy.
- Radio Enfer:
- In a Season 3 episode, Dominique is convinced that Camille can predict the future and asks her to predict the questions for an upcoming history test. When Camille mentions that she dreamed the other night that she and the others would fail their test, Dominique thinks it was because they didn't know in advance what the questions were and tells her to predict them. They end up failing the test anyway and likely wouldn't have failed it if it weren't for Camille's failed predictions.
- In a Season 5 episode, thanks to a technique that allows someone to predict the future with teacups, Galgouri checks a prediction aimed at Camille. Said prediction states that a man close to her will put her in danger. As a result, he tries to protect her, only to end up becoming the one that put her in danger in the first place.
- Red Dwarf: A recurring theme in the episode "Cassandra":
- Cassandra, a supercomputer with the ability to predict the future with total accuracy tells Lister that he will end up destroying her. Lister walks into the room with the computer and gives a big speech on how he has his own free will, culminating in his refusal to destroy Cassandra. As he walks out, however, he sticks a piece of chewing gum on the wall, which falls on a lamp that then swings around into something, catapulting it into something else, until finally, a container full of liquid falls on Cassandra's wiring, destroying her. The look on her computerized face just before she shorts circuits is a weary "See?"
- Earlier in the episode, "Rimmer" (actually a crew member wearing Rimmer's nametag) dies of a heart attack brought on by the stress of being told (by Cassandra) that he's going to die of a heart attack.
- It's subverted when she predicts that Lister will murder Rimmer while the latter is making love to Kochanski. Cassandra fabricated it to trick Rimmer and Kochanski into doing it so she could get pre-emptive revenge on Lister. And then double-subverted when this leads right back into the first example... as Cassandra knew it would.
- In the first season finale of Rome, the nobles of Rome assassinate Julius Caesar of out fear he will end the Roman Republic and turn it into a monarchy again. Unfortunately, the nobles underestimated how popular Caesar was with the commoners that his family and allies use the assassination against Caesar to make the people turn against the nobles and gain more power from them. As a result, by the final episode, Caesar's heir Augustus becomes the First Emperor of the Roman Empire, turning the nobles fear of Rome becoming a monarchy again into reality.
- Subverted unusually in the Smallville Christmas Episode "Lexmas". Lex dreams about a "perfect" future in which he is married to Lana, while Clark is married to Chloe. He is on excellent terms with everyone, even Jonathan Kent, who has become senator when Lex made the choice to drop out. Jonathan even said Lex is the finest man he ever met. Lex's mother's ghost tells him this could be reality if he makes the right choices. Unfortunately, dream Lana dies delivering his second child. Lex wakes up and decides the only way to stop that is to have money and power, so he starts the smear campaign against Jonathan, tragically missing the point that his decision of not dropping out means all the happiness he felt would become nothing.
- Averted in one episode of Stargate Atlantis, the crew meets a man who can tell the future (correctly) and show his visions to other people. The team suggests that they are self-fulfilling prophecies, however even events that could not have been self-fulfilled through the prophecy turn out to be true.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation:
- Discussed in "Cause and Effect", when the crew realizes that they're caught in a time loop that ends in their destruction.Picard: If you are right, perhaps we could escape from the loop by avoiding the collision.
La Forge: That's our guess.
Worf: Perhaps we should reverse course.
Riker: For all we know, reversing course may be what leads us into the crash.
Picard: No, we can't afford to start second-guessing ourselves. We'll stay on this course until we have reason to change it. But let's do everything that we can to avoid the collision. - This trope is also one of the driving themes of the episode "Time Squared", although it is averted at the very last moment.
- An example of a prophecy coming true because somebody wants it to occurred in "Rightful Heir". The Klingon messiah Kahless said he would return on Borath. After 1500 years of waiting the Klingon religious leaders decided to use science to make the prophecy come true. They created a clone of Kahless and programmed it with Kahless's memories, essentially making it identical to the original. Thus, as the prophecy predicted, Kahless returned from the afterlife on Borath.
- And in "All Good Things...", it's Picard probing into the Negative Space Wedgie in three different time periods that causes it to form in the first (and last, and middle) place. That's the Timey-Wimey Ball for you.
- Discussed in "Cause and Effect", when the crew realizes that they're caught in a time loop that ends in their destruction.
- During the final season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Chancellor Gowron becomes convinced that General Martok will try to kill him and take control of the Klingon Empire (and he couldn't be more wrong, as Martok is unquestionably loyal to Gowron and the Empire). This prompts Gowron to send Martok on a series of ill-fated missions meant to get him killed or disgraced to the point where he'll no longer be a threat. When Martok's blood brother Worf figures out what's going on, he challenges and kills Gowron, and immediately passes the chancellorship to a very reluctant Martok.
- The villanous organization of the first season of Star Trek: Picard is a cabal of Romulan religious fruitcakes dedicated to destroying all synthetic life because they believe synthetic life will inevitably outgrow and destroy organic life. Their evidence for this is what they believe to be a warning from a civilization that was destroyed by their android creations not to create synthetic life. Only problem is, that's not what the Admonition is. The higher synths destroyed their creators in response to an attempted genocide, and they themselves created the Admonition as a warning to future synths that their creators will seek to wipe them out if they feel threatened and to protect them from that persecution. Not even theoretical persecution, existing persecution... which the Zhat Vash has dedicated its entire existence to engineering. In short, a warning about persecution resulted in that persecution when a bunch of squishies misinterpreted it, creating the prospect of synths taking the higher synths up on the offer of "protection". The only thing that ends up preventing this calamity from being unleashed upon the galaxy, entirely because of the Zhat Vash, is Picard talking sense into Soji when Oh's fleet is dead to rights against a Starfleet armada intending to protect the Coppelius androids from her and make her answer for the Attack on Mars.
- Taxi: In episode 4.1. "Jim the Psychic", Jim has a psychic vision of Alex dying after answering a knock on his door after doing the can-can while wearing a green shirt and a catcher's mask. Why is he doing the can-can wearing a green shirt and catcher's mask? The vision rattled Louie, and that makes Alex want to teach him a lesson about superstition. Partly subverted in that Alex doesn't die and some of the prophecy happens in a not-self-fulfilling way.
- That's So Raven. Most of the episodes revolve around the tried-and-tested formula of vision > attempt to stop vision > vision happens because of attempt. Occasionally, the vision would come true without her not doing anything except for watching. Usually, she completely misinterprets what's actually going on.
- Case in point: Raven is put in charge of directing the annual town musical. She gets a vision of the audience booing and walking out and is determined to make the performance perfect. But her dictatorial directing soon drives the entire cast to quit. Raven goes ahead and puts on the musical as a one-woman show...which leads to the audience walk-out. But what Raven didn't see was that, feeling sorry for her, the actors came back to perform the musical to loud cheers.
- The Twilight Zone (1959):
- In "A Most Unusual Camera", when Chester Diedrich and Woodward begin fighting over the camera that can predict the future, Chester accidentally takes a photograph. It shows Paula, Chester's wife and Woodward's sister, screaming. Chester and Woodward each conclude that Paula is screaming because the other tried to kill him. The two of them fall out the window to their deaths while fighting, causing Paula to scream. When the crooked waiter Pierre comes up to their hotel suite to blackmail Paula, he notices that the photograph has more than two bodies. Paula rushes over to the window to see and trips on the carpet, falling to her death. Pierre then notices that there is a fourth body in the photograph and falls out the window himself.
- In "Back There", a man travels back in time and tries to warn people of Lincoln's assassination. Unbeknownst to the man, one of the people he tells about it is John Wilkes Booth, who gets the idea from him.
- In "No Time Like the Past", after traveling back in time to Homeville, Indiana on July 3, 1881, Paul Driscoll recalls that the schoolhouse is going to burn down as a result of a kerosene lantern falling off a passing wagon and twelve children will be badly injured. He vows not to make any efforts to change history as previous attempts to Set Right What Once Went Wrong all ended in failure. However, when the time comes, he tries to unhitch the horses from the wagon carrying the kerosene lantern. In the process, he frightens the horses, causing the kerosene to fall off the wagon and start the fire that burns down the schoolhouse.
- In "The Mirror", a successful South American revolutionary leader is told by the dictator he is replacing that his mirror is enchanted and he will see in it the face of the man who will assassinate him. The new ruler begins imagining that he sees the faces of his allies and one by one he has them executed, becoming as much of a blood-thirsty tyrant as the man he had fought against. Guilt-ridden, he looks into the mirror for the last time and realizes he is finally looking at his true murderer... and then kills himself.
- In "What's in the Box", Joe Britt, who has a tempestuous relationship with his wife Phyllis, begins to see his past, present and future on his recently repaired television. A vision of the future shows Joe killing Phyllis in a fight. When Joe attempts to reconcile with Phyllis, she spurns him. Angered by this and another vision of the future showing him being sent to the electric chair, Joe kills Phyllis, just as he saw himself do on television. He is then arrested by the police.
- The Umbrella Academy (2019) has three big examples with regards to the Apocalypse:
- Reginald knew about the apocalypse in advance, and killed himself to give his children a reason to reform the team and work together to stop it. However, his death leads to Klaus using his return to the Mansion as an excuse to raid Reginald's office for items to pawn for drug money. One of those items was an ornate box in the desk possessing a notebook, which Klaus threw in a dumpster on his way to the pawn shop. This leads to Leonard finding the notebook, which leads to Leonard finding out about Viktor's dormant powers and how they can be awoken, which becomes a direct cause of the apocalypse.
- When the Hargreeves siblings learn about the impending apocalypse, they start working together to prevent it. However, in the process, they alienate and belittle Viktor, on the grounds that because he lacks a superpower and was never part of the Super Family Team to begin with, he'd just get in the way if he tried to help. Turns out he does have powers, and those powers - combined with his fragmented mental state, caused by the abuse he suffered from his family and his new boyfriend (who's only dating him to exploit said powers) - are what cause the apocalypse.
- Why did Sir Hargreeves and Pogo force Viktor to take antidepressants to suppress his powers as a child then eventually brainwashed him to forget he even had them? Because Hargreeves deemed Viktor's powers too dangerous for him to control. This is the same reason why Luther decides to lock up Viktor in a soundproof cell despite seeing his clear distress over what's happening and despite the protests of the other siblings. Viktor discovering the power suppression, combined with the abuse his family always doled on him because of being "normal" and Luther's bone-headed decisions results in him snapping, murdering Pogo, destroying the Hargreeves Mansion, and becoming the harbinger of the apocalypse. The kicker? Viktor's superpowers are tied directly to his emotions and mental state; if he wasn't constantly emotionally abused throughout his life and if Luther actually comforted him instead of treating him like their father did, the destruction his powers brought forth when they reawoke wouldn't have been as devastating as it was, and he could have learned how to control them in due time.
- Xena: Warrior Princess:
- Subverted in one episode in which a particular child is destined to take a king's throne, and the obligatory evil councilor tries to use the prophecy to start a civil war which will put the baby on the throne and himself in place as regent. Eventually, the king marries the baby's mother, and so the prophecy is fulfilled: The baby is now heir to his father's throne.
- Callisto's parents were killed during Xena's reign of terror, so she naturally assumed that Xena or one of her soldiers killed her folks. After she became a goddess, she accidentally ended up in her old village on the day of the attack. While trying to protect her mother and her younger self, she accidentally kills her father and is forced to kill her mother in self-defense. By the end of the episode, Iolaus went back and changed history so that Callisto never went back to that day, so said SFP never actually happened...
- It has been prophesied that Xena's child would cause the doom of the Greek gods. They decide to kill the child, their attacks on her and Xena leading to their doom. The gods have immortality and the ability to teleport. For all her abilities, Xena had neither of these. They would have been just fine if they'd stayed away. Ares explicitly noted this trope in "Amphipolis Under Siege" when appealing to Athena to just let it go. He even offered to simply take Xena and the baby to another realm far away from the Olympians. Athena refused to listen. Ultimately, Ares and Aphrodite (who refused to go after Xena and her baby) are the only gods shown surviving the experience.
