Power causing insanity in live-action TV.
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: In Season Five, General Talbot infuses himself with gravitonium to save Coulson's team as a way of making amends. Jump a few episodes forward and he's gone from Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants to power himself up to protect the Earth from cosmic level threats, to an Ax-Crazy Drunk on the Dark Side lunatic threatening to crack the planet open like an egg.
- Angel: Season three's "Birthday" depicts an alternate reality in which Cordelia never joined Angel Investigations. Doyle passed his visions on to Angel prior to his Heroic Sacrifice, and Angel retreated into himself in his grief, with the visions only making things worse. Before long, Angel went completely insane from his own loneliness and his visions, to the extent that he would have visions of his victims. The worst of it all is that what Cordelia sees of that version of Angel, a babbling, incoherent mess who starts pounding his head on the wall while talking to her, is, according to that world's Wesley and Gunn, him on a good day.
- A major plot arc in Babylon 5 that was mostly abandoned (but still hinted at) with Andrea Thompson's departure was the Psi Corps' attempt to solve the frequent insanity that accompanied telekinetic powers.
- In the 2007 remake of the Bionic Woman, Sarah Corvus, Bionic Woman 1.0, goes crazy after getting her power.
- This is a recurring theme in the series Black Scorpion. If any character gains a Power from an accident, then insane laughter is sure to follow.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
- In "Earshot", Buffy is contaminated by a telepathic demon. This has only happened to one other person, and it caused him to go insane and live as a hermit. Buffy is heading the same way when the Scoobies undo the effects.
- Willow is apparently the most powerful witch in the world. By a lot. But she's also very vulnerable to going Drunk on the Dark Side, to the point that she once came within seconds of wiping out all life on Earth.
- Charmed:
- Any human who gains a power. They will be unable to handle it and eventually turn demonically insane. The comics explain this process in more detail. All witches carry a fragment of the source of all magic within them, which fuels both spellcasting and their individual powers. Normal humans lack this fragment, so giving them powers requires drawing energy from somewhere else, which ends up destroying their minds.
- As shown in "Primrose Empath", those who gain Empathy when they weren't supposed to (especially for demons who cannot handle emotion).
- A group of demons who purposely put powers into humans to drive them insane and wreck their lives exist. In "The Fifth Halliwheel", one such victim received the power to spray acid from her hands. Cole uses this on Paige to tip her over the edge and perform magically evil acts in front of her, thereby making her accusations less credible in the eyes of everyone else.
- According to "Oh My Goddess, Part 1", the Olympic Gods were just a bunch of humans given Godly powers by the Council of Elders to defeat the Titans. However, once the humans successfully stopped the threat they refused to give back the powers, climbed the biggest mountain they could find, and declares themselves Gods until they had to be cast down. When the Titans return, Leo (the only living councilman left) gives the powers of War, Love, and the Earth to the sisters who, in the second part, struggle not to succumb to the madness such powers naturally give.
- Doctor Who:
- "Journey's End": The Doctor's companion, Donna Noble, somehow gains every bit of knowledge and power that the Doctor has. The Doctor, unfortunately, is forced to give Donna a complete mind wipe of her entire knowledge of the Doctor/the TARDIS/the entire time she was on the show because being the Doctor Donna, as the Ood called her, will kill her. This circumstance means that the Doctor can never see Donna again, as she will remember everything and die. It's not going insane with power that would kill her, it's that humans are physically unequipped to handle a Time Lord mind. Donna was still physically human but with a Time Lord consciousness, and it was going to literally burn her brain out in very short order, certainly before she had time to go mad with power.
- A better example would be the Doctor himself. Despite having, essentially, the power of a god, he mostly averts this trope. Except that one time when he was pushed a bit too far, lost it spectacularly, and became, briefly, an example of this trope.
- An even better example is Rassilon in "The End of Time", who is willing to destroy all of time and space to win the war against the Daleks.
- Subverted with Davros, who was always completely insane, and gaining great power only gave him more opportunities to carry out his insane plans.
- In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, John Walker ends up taking a reproduced version of the Super Soldier serum following a series of humiliating defeats. However, Walker is a former soldier with a few hangups and possibly PTSD, thus when he takes the serum, it amplifies those feelings and leads to him killing a Flag-Smasher in cold blood in front of a crowd, disgracing him.
- An episode of Farscape had the crew getting their hands on a powerful weapon that attached itself to the user, powered by an addictive drug with all the properties of TV steroids, which they needed to use to get Rygel back. Predictably, D'Argo, Aeryn, and Crichton all had to use it at some point. Thankfully, it had a built-in off switch — if the wearer lost consciousness, the weapon detached itself.
- In The Greatest American Hero, Ralph (who lost the manual to his supersuit) meets a filthy rich old man who kept his manual and knew everything the suit could do. The guy used his suit to become rich and crush his enemies like bugs, and the aliens finally took the suit away. The old man thinks it's a good thing Ralph doesn't have the manual. At the end of the story, the old man gives the Lord Acton page quote and says, "I wonder if he had a suit too."
- Heroes has Sylar, who went from a bookish watchmaker to a psychopathic serial killer after he began to acquire superpowers. Gaining those powers involves killing people and stealing their brains, so it's kind of a chicken-or-the-egg matter with him.
- Season 3 episode 4 shows that his original power was what made him go crazy. When Peter mimics this power, the first thing he does with it (well, the first thing after figuring out how to fix the Sylar watch) is to "figure out" what President Nathan Petrelli is up to... so he cuts open his skull. As of Season 3 episode 24 (second to last episode of Volume 4) Sylar's latest power acquisition of physical shapeshifting by absorbing other people's DNA combined with psychometry, the ability to touch objects or people and "read" their history by picking up emotions and visions of past scenes has finally driven him completely bonkers, full blown Norman Bates-style crazy. It takes a lot to creep out Sylar, but he finally managed to do it to himself.
- The leader of The Company claims that mental illness is a side effect of the mind trying to cope with possessing superpowers, but it's likely he was simply lying to convince Niki to work for him. Plus, HRG says after they capture Sylar that all the changes to his DNA have made Sylar more and more insane.
- Mohinder became more aggressive and developed a compulsion to abduct people and store them in cocoons after injecting himself with his Super Serum.
- Subverted pretty well in Season 3 with Scott, the Marine chosen to get the super soldier injection (a variant of the same serum referenced above with Mohinder). After he finishes twitching and panting, Scott glares at his benefactors, demonstrates his new super strength by throwing a chair hard enough to embed it into the wall... then smiles and nonchalantly remarks that he feels good. He spends his brief remaining screen time behaving quite sensibly until Knox sneaks up behind him and 360's his head.
- Volume Five Big Bad Samuel Sullivan has been revealed to be this way. His power level is directly proportional to how many evolved humans are present. The more supers are around him, the more powerful he becomes. He's even been described as an ego-maniac who doesn't hold the lives of the normal folk as having any worth, and he'll happily off anyone who stands in his way or hurts any member of his "family".
- Rufus Zeno from House of Anubis was actually the protector of Sarah Frobisher-Smythe, The Chosen One before Nina came along, but he was corrupted by his power, making him crazy and hungry for more power.
- The 2000 The Invisible Man series starring Vincent Ventresca had the invisibility caused by a synthetic gland that excreted a light-bending substance, a secondary side effect of which (after a long enough period of time) was insanity, until the counteragent was administered - though this was only a plot focus once or twice. The primary side-effects were unpleasant enough that the invisible man usually got the counteragent before the secondary side-effects kicked in. This was due to sabotage on the part of one of the creators of the gland. He intended to use the counteragent to control whoever possessed the gland. Given that they explain Quicksilver Madness as being related to frontal lobe dysfunction, and the frontal lobes are involved in suppressing impulses, the main character presumably wants to be violent but is controlling himself. If they'd done the procedure on someone else, he'd probably have just had Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!. The main character refers to this condition several times as "the walking id".
- In Millennium (1996), Frank and Laura's unique perceptions of reality lead to mental breakdowns. Frank initially seems to have recovered from his; by the third season, however, he's again fraying at the edges.
- In the third season of Roswell, Michael the sidekick ends up becoming the back-up king after the real king's (temporary) death and promptly goes crazy and tries to kill his supposedly-destined wife's human husband.
- In The Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austin adapted to his bionic replacements very well, remaining well-integrated and with his reasonably decent moral sense intact. Not everyone else who was given/forced to take bionics did as well. Jaimee Summers was plagued with amnesia and mental troubles, and another bionic man went the "crazy with power" route as well. The implication was that power didn't necessarily go with madness... but it easily could.
- A lot of the meteor freaks in Smallville end up going insane and evil. Granted, some of the characters already have a screw (or several) loose before becoming meteor freaks (e.g. Tina Greer, Greg Arkin), but some only went nuts after getting powers. Sean Kelvin for example — before getting powers he was just a jerk, after he got powers he became a Serial Killer. Even the non-killing meteor freaks aren't always all right in the head (e.g. Cyrus Krupp). Also, when normal people get Kryptonian powers, they tend to go nuts (e.g. Jeremiah Holdsclaw, Lana Lang, Eric Summers). Not all meteor freaks and normal-humans-with-Kryptonian-powers go nuts (Chloe Sullivan for the meteor freaks, Jonathan Kent and Lois Lane for the humans-with-Kryptonian-powers), just most of them.
- Stargate SG-1:
- This trope is applied to partly explain the evil megalomania of the show's main enemies, the Goa'uld: it's a side effect of revitalizing themselves with their all-healing sarcophagi too many times. When in "Absolute Power" Daniel Jackson asks to be given just a small portion of knowledge from the Goa'uld's ancestral memories, he is quickly shown that that would make him go wonky too. (See also You Are Not Ready.)
- In an interesting twist, when O'Neill is exposed to "good" knowledge (twice), he also swiftly suffers mental breakdown; no evil megalomania, but his brain begins to fail from the strain of holding on to it all.
- There's also the armband episode, in which O'Neill, Jackson, and Carter get magic jewelry that makes them super-strong and fast. It's downplayed in that the "craziest" they ever get is impulsive and overconfident.
- Star Trek: Enterprise: In the Mirror Universe episode "In a Mirror, Darkly", Mirror Archer gets his hands on a Constitution-class heavy cruiser a hundred years in advance of his own. At first, he just wants to get credit for its seizure, and end a rebellion against the Terran Empire, but as he realizes the power he's got, Mirror Archer becomes more paranoid and power-hungry, eventually deciding to take over the Terran Empire.Mirror T'Pol: You heard the captain. He's delusional!
Mirror Phlox: It's not a delusion if the captain has the power to do what he says. And from what I've seen he certainly does. - Star Trek: The Next Generation:
- In the episode "Hide and Q", the focus of the story is Riker's temptation with omnipotence, and how unlimited power takes away his self-control and humanity, but fortunately Captain Picard helps him overcome the temptation to save lives and prevent natural disasters. Oh, he uses them to get rid of the space monkeys, so they didn't go to waste.
- A more subtle example in "Tin Man": A Betazoid whose telepathic abilities manifested shortly after birth (instead of at puberty as is usual) and are much stronger than normal. He's not crazy, just poorly adjusted and extremely stressed out. Humanoids stress him so badly that he's been hospitalized repeatedly for it. The nature of his telepathic abilities is such that he gets everything about a person immediately, leading to him treasuring the time he got to spend with Data, the only person he ever got to know like a normal person would.
- One of the oldest TV examples of this trope is the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before". As Gary Mitchell's god-like psionic powers increase, he becomes a callous megalomaniac, complete with Glowing Eyes of Doom. Dr. Elizabeth Dehner was able to restrain herself long enough to do a Heroic Sacrifice, perhaps because her training as a psychiatrist made her better able to psychoanalyze herself.
- In Supernatural, most of the people who are shown to have developed Psychic Powers like Sam go off the deep end. Doesn't help that they're designed with this in mind: When they go evil, they gain complete control over their powers, which makes it much easier for them to kill the sane ones.
- At the end of season six, after Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, Castiel boosts his powers with the millions of souls from purgatory, names himself the new God, and demands the boys bow down or be destroyed. Then he commences with the smiting.
- It seems to be a running thing with powerful angels in the show. The more power you have, the less you care about humans and see mankind as tiny ants to be stepped on (because the gap in power is so great). The Archangels for one, who are most powerful of all: Michael, Lucifer and Raphael are all heartless dicks, and Castiel became one after gaining so much power. Anyone else see a pattern here? (Yes, I'm pretty much ignoring Gabriel. But the guy spent decades on earth and had plenty of time to warm up to humans, unlike his three older brothers. And Castiel, who already liked humans despite the short time he spent on earth (compared to Gabriel), must have felt so high on Purgatory souls it screwed up with his mind. Also, Gabriel was pretending to be The Trickster/Loki in his first appearances and, yes, did some really crazy manipulative things to our heroes that would count as more than a little insane (even if he was trying to teach a message?). Inserting them into a TV land where they had to play along with the story? Having Sam experience Dean's death over and over again in a Groundhog Day Loop? A bit cuckoo and unnecessary.)
- Spoofed rather effectively on That Mitchell and Webb Look, with a sketch involving a man going insane with his power to levitate...biscuits.
- Played for Laughs in an episode of Would I Lie to You? where regular team captain Lee Mack was unable to attend the recording and Greg Davies stood in for him. When Davies decided to overrule both his teammates and say a story was a lie even though they both thought it was true, everyone acted as if he had gone mad with power. (The story was true.)David Mitchell: That's a very, very irresponsible use of power!
Greg: Yeah, well, Lee Mack's not here, this is my bench, and I tell you it's a lie!
Rob Brydon: Why? What about that was unconvincing?
Greg: It's irrelevant, I've made my decision!
