Tear Jerker / H₂O: Just Add Water

• "Young Love": Rikki saves Emma's younger brother from drowning, unaware she is a mermaid. Whenever he kept thinking about the time she saved his life, Elliot begins to develop a crush on Rikki and brings her gifts. When walking down the beach, Elliot bothers her by offering her a gift and trying to hold her hand, before Rikki finally gets fed up and berates him in a harsh way telling him he is not old enough for relationships. The kid is crushed as he throws the gift, a ceramic dolphin, out into the ocean and runs away.
• In the episode "Dangerous Waters", Cleo laments about her now-deceased fish Pluto and how much she loved him. Emma is kind enough to try and console her. No thanks to Rikki badmouthing him, making her feel a lot worse.
  • Rikki's attempts to make amends is first buying Cleo a new fish, in the hopes that she can name him Pluto II, not realising that Cleo only collects saltwater fish (and the one she bought is freshwater). And given the reveal in Season 2 that her family is very poor, she likely spent a lot of money on the gift that's now All for Nothing.
• "A Twist in the Tail" - when the girls believe that they're giving up their powers for good at the lunar eclipse. Right before they jump into the Moon Pool for what they think will be the last time, they reminisce about what they'll miss most.
  Emma: Funny. I thought this would last forever.
• While Miss Chatham mainly provides exposition and comic relief as a Scatter Brained Senior, some scenes do touch on the fact that she and her best friends were once close enough to share the secret together and had to give up their powers. She refers to the locket with a picture of the three of them as "my treasure". And when Emma rescues it for her and they see the picture, she asks where Julia and Gracie are now. Miss Chatham can only reply "gone".
  • Even her situation in "Shipwrecked" is quite sad. She lives on a boat and gets evicted for not paying her bills in time, and even collapses. Mercifully she's able to find a place in a retirement community thanks to Emma's mother, but it has to hurt to see your entire home and belongings sink to the bottom of the ocean.
  • She's especially saddened in "In Too Deep" when Julia's locket is seen in a jewellery shop. It seems as though she wasn't sure if Julia had died before, and Rikki has to confirm it was from a deceased estate.
• The episode "Hocus Pocus" has Cleo hoping she'll be able to grant her father a wish that will make him and their mother get back together. At the end of the episode, she learns that his wish wasn't for that and just has to ask why.
  Don: Your mum and I weren't happy together. But she is now. She's built a new life for herself. And you can go and see her any time you want. And to be honest with you, I'd love to have her back. But she'd still be unhappy."
  • As he speaks, you can see Kim quickly wipe a tear from her eye. She's not always a Bratty Half-Pint.
  • And when Lewis has to use the last wish to get rid of the fungus, Cleo laments that it would be better if they could use it to fix something else - meaning their relationship.
• "Sea Change" - Charlotte breaks Cleo so badly that she swims out into a shark breeding ground. The parallels are obvious - she wants to commit suicide out of despair. Her tearful voice message to Lewis about how he "really let me down" is also quite sad.
  • And the last time Don saw his daughter before she ran away, he yelled at her for not doing the dishes, and the audience knows Cleo wasn't avoiding it out of laziness but fear of exposure. Kim is even in tears when she suggests a picture they can use when getting people to search for her - "she looks really pretty in this one".
• And it's hard not to feel sorry for Charlotte when she's stripped of her powers forever, even if she absolutely deserved it.