History WellIntentionedExtremist / LiveActionTV

* ''Series/{{The 100}}'': In Season 2, Cage just wants to make the people of Mount Weather immune to radiation so they can leave their underground bunker and live on the surface again. To make an anti-radiation treatment, though, he has to harvest the bone marrow of the 47 Ark children, killing them in the process.

* Adressed and [[{{Deconstruction}} deconstructed]] in ''Series/{{Andor}}'' with the [[GreaterScopeParagon progenitor]] of the LaResistance againist the Empire Luthen Rael. His goal of defeating TheEmpire is incredible noble, but Luthen himself is a HeWhoFightsMonsters ManipulativeBastard all too willingly to do the NecessarilyEvil and sacrifice his own people and fellow rebels like food on his plate in order to win. Except Luthen unlike other examples [[IAmAMonster is painfully aware of his montrous extremist nature]] and he doesn't pretend to be anything else, knowing full well he is never going to see that day of peace or thanked for his actions. Just see his speech to his ISB mole Lonni.
-->'''Lonni''': What do ''you'' sacrifice?
-->'''Luthen''': Calm. Kindness, kinship. Love. I've given up all chance at inner peace, I've made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there's only one conclusion: I'm damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they've set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is... what is my sacrifice? I'm condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else's future. ''I burn my life'', to make a sunrise that I know I'll never see. No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? '''''Everything!'''''

** [[spoiler:Angel himself becomes this in the [[ComicBook/BuffyTheVampireSlayer Buffy Season 8 comic.]]]] Everything he did as Twilight was apparently to prevent anything like the [[spoiler:Fall of Los Angeles]] from ever happening again.

* On the final season of ''Series/{{Elementary}}'', Holmes and Watson track a series of suspicious deaths to millionaire tech wizard Odin Reichenbach. To their shock, the man openly admits he's using his software to track the online activities of people who might be prone to committing acts of massive violence and then has them killed. In Odin's mind, he's removing threats and saving hundreds of lives. Holmes and Watson point out the obvious issue in that people will act on the internet in ways they never would in real life (Watson: "My mother has threatened to kill people over a bad Yelp review") and that he might just be killing pure innocents. Odin simply wants them to help him "refine" the process to remove reasonable doubt, utterly convinced that a few murders is worth saving countless victims of incidents that may never actually happen.

* ''Level Headed'': This show is an example of this trope. A little boy is so fed up by people littering at his school that he writes a report about it...before going on a murderous rampage, killing all the children and teachers, as well as a puppy that he sees taking a dump in the hallway. (It's interesting to note that this show was banned from viewing after the 2006 Cosboy Brothers school killing spree, due to a scene in the show that almost mirrored an incident from the real life spree almost word to word. A lawsuit was filed over the show for "Promoting the killing".)

* ''Series/{{Merlin|2008}}'':

** As of the third series - [[spoiler: Morgana and Morgause. They believe that Uther is evil and should be killed/removed from his throne due to his treatment of magic-users, something that a lot of viewers can get behind, but the way they go about it is...violent.]]
* ''Series/{{Missing 2012}}'': Rebecca Winstone. Seriously, you don't want to mess with her. She'll literally KILL you if you prevent her from finding her son! That's more in line with the KnightTemplarParent since W.I.E.s tend to try and see a bigger picture, but whatever.

* The best example from ''Series/{{OZ}}'' would be Kareem Said. He blew up a white-owned business in a black neighborhood as a protest against racism. During the course of the series, he slides back and forth between this and ItsAllAboutMe, as some of his crusades seem less about ending the racism than highlighting it (to the detriment of those he's trying to help).
** A number of the inmates ''claim'' to be this, but are really just interested in themselves. Adebisi, Schillinger, and Kirk are probably the best examples. Governor Devlin is the same, pretending to care about saving money for the state and the well being of the prisoners but really just wanting to get re-elected.

* ''Series/PersonOfInterest'': A few [[VictimOfTheWeek Victims Of The Week]] fall into this category, as does [[MyCountryRightOrWrong Control]]. In the second half of Season 4, [[TheCracker Root]] tumbles backwards into this after she had just managed to pull herself into a [[ThouShaltNotKill relatively moral code]] due to a SanitySlippage following [[spoiler: [[UncertainDoom Shaw's disappearance]]]]. Toyed with to Hell and back with [[MissionControl Finch]], who played it straight by building the Machine following September 11th, constantly violating the privacy of basically ''everyone in the United States'' to stop terrorist activity, but built it as a closed system so that it couldn't be abused by the government, specifically to avert this.

* ''{{Series/Salem}}'': Cotton Mather, arguably. He's brutal and overzealous in his effort to hunt down witches, but they do exist, while everything he says about them appears to be true. However, he's also being tricked by them into condemning innocents. For what it's worth, his partnership with John Alden is starting to point him in the right direction.

* ''Series/{{Seinfeld}}'': Kenny Bania. All he wants is to be Jerry's friend, but his behavior is just so obnoxious that Jerry can't stand him. Of course, to be fair, Jerry's [[{{Jerkass}} not exactly the easiest person to befriend anyway.]]
* ''Series/TheShadowLine'': Has [[spoiler:Counterpoint, a well intentioned GovernmentConspiracy. They're profiting from drug trafficking, but that profit is being used to fund police pensions rather than for personal gain.]]

** ComicBook/LexLuthor's main drive starts out as "protecting mankind from aliens and meteor freaks". Yes, Clark and [[spoiler:Chloe]] are probably on those two hitlists respectively, and you know where he ended up.

** Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries has several examples of this: One villainous leader put thousands of people to death in order to save thousands of other people. There's also the episode in which someone sets up a version of Nazi Germany on a particular planet, intending to capture only the good aspects of that culture and not the bad, only to have things go horribly wrong. In "The Cage," the aliens who kidnap Captain Pike are trying to help a disfigured woman by giving her a mate, and they think they are helping Captain Pike as well, but they release him after they realize that humans have an intense dislike of captivity.
** It's a common Villain motive that even the heroes are not immune to, especially on ''[[Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine Deep Space Nine]]'', with Sisko's actions in "For the Uniform" and "In the Pale Moonlight" (the latter has Sisko stating that the anonymous quote formerly at the top of the page was something his father used to say), as well as everything Luther Sloan and Section 31 do.
** Unusual in that the actions of Sisko during "In the Pale Moonlight" are likely a large part of what won the Dominion War, and the actions of Section 31 allowed it to end MUCH sooner, saving billions of lives. The episodes hit hard because, to protect {{the Federation}} and its people, they had to do things that they find abhorrent.
** {{Lampshade|Hanging}}d and played with in "For the Uniform" because Sisko chooses to ''deliberately'' invoke the trope in order to force Eddington, himself a WellIntentionedExtremist, to surrender.
** The Borg have shades of this too. At the most basic level their intentions are good: they want to bring order to chaos and improve the quality of life of all sentient beings. How they choose to go about it, however, is by forcibly attempting to assimilate everyone they meet into their HiveMind, which puts them in conflict with the Individualist, Freedom-loving Federation. In fact, individuality and free will seem to be completely alien concepts to them; they genuinely don't understand why someone ''wouldn't'' want to be assimilated.
*** The Federation itself frequently displays a similar attitude, though they usually aren't ''quite'' as extremist; including "freeing" Borg Drones by removing them from the Collective (regardless of what the drone wants, pre- or post-transformation). This depends on the writer and era, ranging all the way from "we cannot interfere even though what they're doing is a terrible atrocity in our eyes" (even when not interfering causes entire intelligent species to die out) to "we're the best guys with the best morals and ethics in the galaxy, everyone surely wants to be just like us". This trope logically has even more examples with many characters in the Mirror universe, though exactly who is well-intentioned and who's just a bastard isn't always easy to see.
** Garak in ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' does have standards. He is also quite utterly unapologetic about the rather horrifying things he has done (and does). Given who his father is (Enabran Tain, the head of the [[StateSec Obsidian Order]], as paranoid as they come), it's perfectly understandable.
** The Changelings built the Dominion and invaded the Alpha Quadrant because it was the only way they could impose their idea of true "order" on the Galaxy. Besides their continuing overreaction to ancient xenophobia and prejudice against them.
** In "Armageddon Game," Bashir and O'Brien aid the long-warring T'Lani and Kellerun species in destroying Harvesters, biological weapons. An attack on the lab forces the duo on the run, assuming one side is attacking the other. It turns out the treaty is intact; the leaders are actually conspiring to kill anyone who has seen the data on the Harvesters, believing that the only way to truly insure that knowledge will never be used is to make sure no one who's seen it is alive to use it. Bashir openly tells them there's no way he and O'Brien would ever use that data used but is told "we can't take the chance." The two sides are even willing to attack Sisko when he rescues the duo, risking possible war with the Federation in a twisted attempt to keep this "peace."

** ''Series/KamenRiderZeroOne'' centers around a supercomputer that spent its formative years being pumped full of all the information its creator could find about why HumansAreBastards, in order to spur it into becoming a robot supremacist driven by deeming humanity a threat to all other life on Earth. However, it's nearly immediately stopped and thrown to the bottom of a lake to rot for over a decade, with the result that when its remaining followers resurrect it, they find that MotiveDecay has set in ''hard'', and the now-insane computer is driven purely by hatred for everything and everyone but itself.

--> "We did it because the music industry is an evil corruptive hell hole that is destroy the public!"

** Also the Order of Byzantium from Season 5. Their main goal was to destroy the Key (which is now in the form of Buffy's younger sister Dawn) to stop Glory from using it and destroying the universe. Buffy was unwilling to entertain the notion of Dawn dying even though she had no alternate solution if her plan to keep Glory occupied until her window to use Dawn's blood was over failed. When it did fail, Buffy realized she could stop the apocalypse by dying herself instead because they shared blood. Notably, in a Season 7 episode Buffy admits to Giles that she's come to realize they were right at the time, and if she had to make a similar choice now and couldn't sacrifice herself in Dawn's place she ''would'' let her die to save the entire world.

** Also the Order of Byzantium from Season 5. Their main goal was to destroy the Key (which is now in the form of Buffy's younger sister Dawn) to stop Glory from using it and destroying the universe. Buffy was unwilling to entertain the notion of Dawn dying even though she had no alternate solution if her plan to keep Glory occupied until her window to use Dawn's blood was over failed. When it did fail, Buffy realized she could stop the apocalypse by dying herself because they shared blood. Notably, in a Season 7 episode Buffy admits to Giles that she's come to realize they were right at the time, and if she had to make a similar choice now and couldn't sacrifice herself in Dawn's place she ''would'' let her die to save the entire world.

** Also the Order of Byzantium from Season 5. Their main goal was to destroy the Key (which is now in the form of Buffy's younger sister Dawn) to stop Glory from using it and destroying the universe. Buffy was unwilling to entertain the notion of Dawn dying even though she had no alternate solution if her plan to keep Glory occupied until her window to use Dawn's blood was over failed. When it did fail, Buffy realized she could die herself instead because they shared blood. Notably, in a Season 7 episode Buffy admits to Giles that she's come to realize they were right at the time, and if she had to make a similar choice now and couldn't sacrifice herself in Dawn's place she ''would'' let her die to save the entire world.

** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS11E2InvasionOfTheDinosaurs "Invasion of the Dinosaurs"]]: Operation Golden Age. [[spoiler:Desperate to save the planet, people mean to move back time and RetGone everyone save their chosen few.]]

** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS1E8TheReignOfTerror "The Reign of Terror"]]: Maximilien Robespierre. TruthInTelevision.

** In Season 3, Faith loads up on weapons after learning of a BackFromTheDead, supposedly reformed Angel being in possession of a magical glove, scared of whom he might kill. When she finds Giles had been attacked she immediately thinks 'Angel' and defies everyone in a bid to kill him. Then there was the time she and Angel discovered demon blood that could heal and even turn vampires back into humans. Because of how obsessed he was with making amends Faith intended to force it into him, and was just about to do so when she learned it would have done a lot more harm.

*** When Watchers behave this way, they're almost always actually right. Had Giles not killed Ben, for instance, Glory would have been back and possibly killed the entire cast (PlotArmor would have prevented it, but the characters aren't supposed to know that they have PlotArmor).
** Also the Order of Byzantium from Season 5. Their main goal was to destroy the key to stop Glory from using it and destroying the universe. Notably, in a later season Buffy admits to Giles that she's come to realize they were right at the time, and if she had to make a similar choice now she ''would'' do it.
** The Mayor honestly thinks life under his rule post Ascension is for the best for everyone.
** Severin plans to use the TimeTravel powers he got from Illyria through MegaManning to go back in time and stop the Twilight crisis from ever happening, thus stopping the rise of zompires and the end of magic. The problem is, doing so would cause an instability in space-time that would rip reality itself apart.
** During Drusilla's brief bout of sanity circa Season 9, she uses a demon to remove mental trauma from anyone who asks; the downside is that they go insane as a result.
** The General thinks that the Slayer Organization really is a threat to world peace.
** What Genevieve thinks she is, planning to kill a "misguided" Buffy and install Slayers as leaders of a corrupt world.
** Faith loads up on weapons after learning of a BackFromTheDead, supposedly reformed Angel being in possession of a magical glove, scared of who he might kill. When she finds Giles had been attacked she immediately thinks 'Angel' and defies everyone in a bid to kill him. Then there was the time she and Angel discovered demon blood that could heal and even turn vampires back into humans. Because of how obsessed he was with making amends Faith intended to force it into him, and was just about to do so when she learned it would have done a lot more harm.
** Whistler's plan to restore magic, as well as the Twilight arc, would have and will kill billions, but he legitimately believes it's the only way to save the rest of the world.

** Gideon, the BigBad of Season 6. He believed that Wyatt, born of a Charmed One and Whitelighter, was too powerful a being to remain good, and, after learning about a future where Wyatt did indeed turn evil, was determined to prevent that from happening. What Gideon didn't realize, however, was that it was his pursuit of Wyatt for weeks in the Underworld is what caused the boy to turn evil eventually in that future. He [[JumpingOffTheSlipperySlope solidified this status]] in allowing innocents to be killed to cover his tracks, and even personally killing his friend and confidant Sigmund when he left to expose Gideon's plans to the sisters. He was willing to go so far as to work with his [[MirrorUniverse Evil Mirror opposite]], which just unbalanced the world even more.
** The Avatars also qualify. Their intention was to create a perfect, peaceful {{utopia|JustifiesTheMeans}}, but they were going to create it by means of basically brainwashing the entire human race to remove violent thoughts, and [[RetGone erasing from existence]] anyone who disturbed the peace.

* Adressed and [[{{Deconstruction}} deconstructed]] in ''Series/{{Andor}}'' with the [[GreaterScopeParagon progenitor]] of the LaResistance againist the Empire Luthen Rand. His goal of defeating TheEmpire is incredible noble, but Luthen himself is a HeWhoFightsMonsters ManipulativeBastard all too willingly to do the NecessarilyEvil and sacrifice his own people and fellow rebels like food on his plate in order to win. Except Luthen unlike other examples [[IAmAMonster is painfully aware of his montrous extremist nature]] and he doesn't pretend to be anything else, knowing full well he is never going to see that day of peace or thanked for his actions. Just see his speech to his ISB mole Lonni.

** Astra and Non were both this throughout the first season as they turned to terrorism because Krypton was dying and tried to TakeOverTheWorld on Earth with [[DoomsdayDevice Myriad]] because they knew humans would never willingly agree to their terms; however, [[spoilers:Non turns out to be a NotSoWellIntentionedExtremist when he reporgrammed Myriad to KillAllHumans out of spite instead after his wife's death.]]

* ''Series/Stargirl2020'': The Injustice Society of America, it turns out, doesn't want anything evil. Rather, their goal is to make a better America that works to stop climate change and has no homophobia or racism. However, they plan to do this through [[BrainwashingForTheGreaterGood brainwashing millions of people]], with a process that will inevitably kill 25 percent of those affected, plus they anticipate the possibility of war once the half of the country they've converted succeeds from the Union. The deaths of a sizable percentage of their victims as a side-effect, and the murder of the Justice Society superheroes who oppose them (as well as their families) are written off as acceptable losses.

* ''ExtraordinaryAttorneyWoo'': The defendant in "The Pied Piper" is a young man who kidnapped a school bus full of children... [[TheKindnapper and let them play games in a peaceful forest area for a few hours before bringing them back to the bus, safe and sound and very happy]]. He's the self-declared leader of the Children's Liberation Army, and his stated goal is to dismantle and disrupt the cram-school system that does great harm to children's health and well-being, and sucks the fun out of being a kid. He's undoubtedly a FriendToAllChildren and his criticisms of the system are completely valid, but his methods put him squarely in the AntiHero space.

* ''Series/TheLordOfTheRingsTheRingsOfPower'': Adar just wants to create a permanent home for the Orcs, so they can leave their underground bases and live on the surface again. To make this happen, though, he enslaved an killed many innocent people and terraformed the Southlands into Mordor.

* ''Series/MakoMermaidsAnH2OAdventure'': Erik's goal is to prove to mermaids that mermen don't deserve to be banished to land over their ancestor's crimes. He's convinced that there's a higher purpose to the Merman Chamber that will help him do this, and rejects everyone else's concerns that it's better off undisturbed. When everyone turns against him for continuing to insist on activating it, he resorts gaslighting, stealing, and [[PeoplePuppets bloodbending]] in order to get his way, [[spoiler:ultimately using the trident stone to drain Zac's magic and activate the chamber. When he does, he's unable to stop it from fulfilling its actual purpose of draining the Moon Pool and all the mermaids connected to it of their magic, becoming the exact kind of threat that all mermaids fear mermen are]].

** The Spree oppose witches being mass conscipted into the military, which they condemn as a kind of slavery, with a high death toll as witch soldiers fight {{muggles}} wars. However, they fight this by massacring {{muggles}} with their spells, [[WouldHurtAChild including children]].

* ''Series/Stargirl2020'': The ISA, it turns out, doesn't want anything evil. Rather, their goal is to make a better America that works to stop climate change and has no homophobia or racism. However, they plan to do this through brainwashing millions of people, with a process that will inevitably kill 25 percent of those affected; the deaths of a sizable percentage of their victims as a side-effect, and the murder of those who oppose them (as well as their families) are written off as acceptable losses.

** Season 4's BigBad, Damien Dahrk, takes it UpToEleven: his plan is called Genesis [[spoiler: and it involves taking control of the world's entire nuclear arsenal to destroy it except for his own safe haven, because according to him, the whole world is beyond saving and needs to be reset.]]

*** The Federation itself frequently displays a similar attitude, though they usually aren't ''quite'' as extremist; including "freeing" Borg Drones by removing them from the Collective (regardless of what the drone wants, pre- or post-transformation). This depends on the writer and era, ranging all the way from "we cannot interfere even though what they're doing is a terrible atrocity in our eyes" (even when not interfering causes entire intelligent species to die out) to "we're the best guys with the best morals and ethics in the galaxy, everyone surely wants to be just like us". This is of course [[UpToEleven Upped To Eleven]] with many characters in the Mirror universe, though exactly who is well-intentioned and who's just a bastard isn't always easy to see.