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Beyond The Impossible / Live-Action TV

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Beyond the Impossible in live-action TV. Only list examples that fit this description.


  • Arrow has Hollywood hacker Felicity Smoak, who is so good that at one point she supported Team Arrow from far away without internet connection.
    • Much later, during the Crisis on Infinite Earths, Barry Allen mutters that "this should be impossible now" when he encounters his film counterpart within the Speed Force. Specifically because at that point in time, the entire multiverse had been erased from existence.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Only one slayer can exist at a time; when one dies, the next awakens. That's what the Council decreed. The show skirts this trope with clinical death which creates two slayers, but doesn't fully play it straight until Willow decides to break the rule and wake up EVERY possible slayer.
  • Community: In "Regional Holiday Music", Mr. Radd somehow plays a piano without touching it.
  • Doctor Who:
    • The Doctor can scare the Daleks, who are supposed to be physically incapable of feeling any emotion except hatred, fear included.
    • "The Impossible Planet" is nicknamed that for a reason:
      • The Doctor can't read the mysterious writing in the planet's ruins, which means the TARDIS can't translate it. That should be impossible, which means the writing is "impossibly old".
      • The planet itself is hovering above a black hole, which the Doctor can't figure out either.
      • The Ood's telepathic field reaches "Basic 100", which is both impossible and should kill them, but they're still alive.
    • "Turn Left": After it had been made clear that it could never happen, Rose reappears in the same dimension as the Doctor. There's only one possible explanation: All reality is falling apart.
    • The Doctor also directly changes his past timeline in "The Big Bang", though as Rory puts it, "To be fair, the universe did blow up."
    • There are many things about Eleven's final companion, Clara, that are impossible, hence her nickname as "Impossible Girl". For instance being in more than one time and place at once, being killed in both, and showing up a third time. The way time travel works in Doctor Who should make it impossible for both Oswin and Clara to exist, and yet they do anyway. Figuring out how is a major arc in Series 7.
      • And the solution only lasts a couple of episodes. Then history gets rewritten and events crucial to the solution (viz. the Doctor's death at Trenzalore) never occur, making it impossible for Clara to become Impossible.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • According to Melisandre, resurrecting Beric six times should be impossible, even for a red priest.
    • While wargs are common beyond the Wall and there are legends of them further south, Jojen claims Bran is the first one in history to be able to warg a human being.
  • Hikonin Sentai Akibaranger stars showbiz sentai whose battles take place more or less in their heads. In episode #9, Nobuo transforms into Akiba Red for real through sheer Heroic Resolve. They later discover that their whole lives were a TV show.
  • How I Met Your Mother has an episode in which Barney Stinson references this trope literally, claiming to have transcended the impossible to a point where the impossible and the possible meet: The Possimpible.
  • Spencer's sculptures always burst in flames in iCarly. This would just be mere bad luck, if it wasn't for the fact that all of them are made of non-flammable material sitting at room temperature... or they are made with flammable materials, but only the non-flammable materials catch on fire. This is so bad that Spencer made a fire extinguisher spit out flames at one point.
  • The Incredible Hulk (1977) has its origins in this trope. David Banner is seeking a way to tap into whatever it is that allows humans to do impossible things like lift cars with their bare hands. He finds a correlation between incidents and high gamma radiation levels so he overdoses on them and gains the ability to grow and shed mass, in other words become the Hulk.
  • Las Vegas: Monica Mancuso flies off the roof of the casino when a gust of wind catches the "winged-style" dress she was wearing. She flies around for about five minutes before crashing into a shoe store more than a mile away. Characters spend the episode debating the impossibility of it, and buying shoes from the store.
  • Level Up: The weapon needed to kill Maldark is supposed to kill the heroes using it with its recoil. This information comes straight from the creator of Conquerer of All Worlds, Max himself. The heroes survive it and he is shocked.
  • Leverage: Redemption: The first episode has Parker breaking into eight different museums, stealing a masterpiece painting from each of them and swapping them with fakes in 24 hours.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Adar, a simple Orc managed to slain Sauron personally, a demigod and a powerful Maia. It's really just temporary, but nobody ever managed that blow in canon, expect for the Eru Iluvatar when He sank Numenor under the sea.
  • MythBusters deconstructs this trope. They demonstrate what is possible and what is not.
  • Odd Squad, both the universe of the show and the organization itself, has things that are full of impossibility, what with it being a World of Weirdness. However, there are exceptions that fall under this trope.
    • In the Cold Open of "Hold the Door", Olive and Otto help a woman find her missing snowman. Normally this would be fine...if the weather didn't appear to be warm. Not only did they manage to find him in a melted (but alive) state, they also managed to find him with all of his parts. And that's not even mentioning the woman telling them that she hasn't seen the snowman since she was 7, and is now elderly.
    • It's revealed in "Undercover Olive" that Kooky Clown — the real villainess, not Olive disguised as her — once made a frog kissing a giraffe while riding a unicorn as a gift for Fladam, with a single balloon.
    • While it may be justified since he's an odd villain, "Disorder in the Court" has both Odd Todd as a defendant and Odd Todd as a witness do a Secret Handshake. Initially they are seen as one person switching between two suits before being seen as two different people and performing the handshake as such. Even Oprah herself is confused, which says quite a lot.
    • In "Three's Company", Oprah mentions a case where Olympia and Otis put the moon back in its proper position. However, they do this using a ladder and with no space suits, unlike when they went into space in Odd Squad: The Movie, where they did have space suits on and were explicitly told that they didn't have any capability of breathing in space unless they were in an airtight area. Never mind the fact that not only is there a photo someone took of the event as it happened, but the moon is, quite obviously, as big as Olympia and Otis combined.
    • "Oscar the Couch" has Orchid somehow taking Otto's socks off of him and putting his glasses on his face without touching him once, much to his surprise. A similar thing happens in "Dr. O No", with New Dr. O changing Oona's undershirt to an "anti-caf" shirt and somehow slipping a freshly-made flatbread sandwich into her lab coat's pocket without touching her. This manages to scare her enough that she slowly backs out of New Dr. O's office and makes a break for it.
    • In "Happily Ever Odd", Coach O tells the story of how he created the sport of Donkeyball, which became wildly popular and managed to score him and his Donkeyball team interviews and advertising for products such as cereal boxes. The team also wins the world championship of the sport. However, what makes this impossible is that he does it in the span of a single day, leaving even Olympia and Oro confused.
    Olympia: Hooooold up! You did all of this today?
    Coach O: Yes. Eighth best day of my life. Mm, ninth.
    • "The Deposit Slip-Up" has Owen and the rest of the Security agents build a fake replica of Toronto that is meant to lure Symmetric Al to the vault, which lies in the bullpen of Precinct 13579's Headquarters. Of course, it manages to work, for the fact that Al never thinks to check his surroundings as he's walking to his destination.
    • In "Orla's Birthday", Opal and Orla meet a villain known as Tommy Takestuff, whose schtick is...well, taking things that don't belong to him. As Orla leaves to chase a villain that he makes up, Opal compliments him on making up the villain and convincing her partner, and he tells Opal that he feels bad for taking one of her gadgets, which was stored in her Hammerspace spine. She's so dumbfounded by the feat that she has to ask him how he did it before he interrupts and tells her to chase after Orla before he takes something else of hers.
    • "The B Team" reveals that Oprah, as the Big O, has 384 meetings that she has to attend to in the span of a day. Setting aside the fact that she appears to be in perfect health and isn't suffering from burnout or stress of any sort, it's quite impossible to attend that many meetings unless each of them lasts exactly a minute, which isn't mentioned in the episode.
  • Pawn Stars: Rick Harrison buys a car for Old Man's birthday and needs it to be restored. It's estimated that it would take 6 to 8 months to restore the car, and that's if Rick Dale the restorer didn't have any other jobs the entire time. Harrison needed it in three, and somehow, it was done in three, while Dales's shop worked on other projects.
  • Seinfeld: Parodied as part of Jerry's ridicule of Kramer's claim that Keith Herandez spat on him. He traces the imaginary path of the spittle which involves changing directions and pausing in mid air. "That is one magic loogie." The point being to illustrate how impossible it was for the event to happen in real life.
  • Star Trek:
    • The Warp speeds are a complicated matter.
      • Speeds above Warp 10 were possible, if unsafe, in ST:TOS but, by the time of TNG, the scale was redefined (see below) so that 10 was an unattainable limit (infinite speed). However, no matter how fast it becomes, it's still Traveling at the Speed of Plot and therefore not really changing at all.
      • Star Trek: Voyager in the episode in which the warp ten barrier is introduced.note  Tom Paris's shuttle reaches Warp 10 and exists at every point in the universe, but also causes the humans on board to evolve into salamander-like creatures. The episode has since been officially renounced by the writers, (though is still, by official definitions, canon).
      • There were two distinct warp scales used in Star Trek. The one that was used in original series was a cubic function (velocity = warp factor cubed x the speed of light) and had no upper limit. The one used from Star Trek: The Next Generation on is hyperbolic and made warp 10 equal to infinite velocity—even if you were traveling at warp factor 9.99999..., you would still be infinitely far from warp factor 10 in this scale. There was yet another warp scale used in All Good Things... and the future version of the Enterprise travels at Warp 13 on this new scale. Some of the Expanded Universe materials attempt to rationalize Warp numbers as being the most EFFICIENT speeds where there's a dip in the energy output needed to sustain the speed.
    • The characters of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are used to a Mirror Universe where they exist as brutal yet sexy version of themselves, but in the last mirror episode "The Emperor's New Cloak" Quark and Rom witness the death of Vic Fontaine — despite the fact that Vic is not a real person but a fictional holodeck character in their universe. After trying to puzzle this out for a while, they just give up.
  • Supernatural:
    • Everyone is limited to their own personal sphere of Heaven unless they are soulmates or their name is Ash who discovered a means to hack Heaven and walk between the difference spheres, for the express purpose of partying with famous figures from history.
    • The only thing that can kill an angel is another angel, but then without so much as saying anything about it, it becomes possible with one of their swords. This is justified because their swords are manifestations of their Grace, which is what gives them the power to kill each other.
  • Survivor: In a game filled with ever-changing rules, the one constant variable is that you cannot be voted out if you win immunity. Despite this, Erik from Micronesia managed this by giving up immunity (and being blindsided for his trouble).
  • Top Gear: Most of their Specials contain some instance of them doing the utterly impossible!
    • Their reaction to setting fire to a car-wash, which is made of "90% water".
    • Being the first humans in history to drive across the Makadikadi Salt Pans as well as to the North Pole!
  • Ultraman Z: The titular Ultra's Mid-Season Upgrade, Delta Rise Claw serves as this to combat Greeza, a being of non-existence and the walking embodiment of the void. The means of attaining said form is a bit convoluted, in a sequential order:
    • According to the Ultra himself, Greeza can be defeated with a power beyond logic, and the only idea he could think of is combining the powers of three Ultramen — two of them (Ultraman Zero and Ultraman Geed) who had a rivalry with the other (Ultraman Belial). Sadly, Z adds that a Belial medal doesn't exist, which leads to...
    • ...Haruki running into Juggler, having overheard the former's conversation with Z. Juggler proves them otherwise and made the formula possible when they raid Celebro's hideout and forced the latter to cough up the Belial medal. When Belial's medal make contact with Zero and Geed's, they evolve into the Rise Medals.
    • Forcing the Belial Atrocious medal through unprecedented determination is the icing on the cake, and voila! One should note that any [first] attempt of using a collectible containing Belial's powers results in a backlash on the user and must undergo in a certain emotional state to do so; such as in the case of Gai Kurenai, who gave in to his rage and anguish upon witnessing Tamayura's Heroic Sacrifice, allowed the Belial card to fully activate. Riku, on the other hand, is exempted from this rule considering he is Belial's offspring and the evil Ultra's genes coursing through his veins; allowing him to use Primitive and Royal Megamaster with no problem at all.
  • Xena: Warrior Princess
    • This show features numerous Gods, (of Greek, Norwegian, Turkish and Roman origins, among others) which are immortal. This is a universe where Immortal Life Is Cheap. For the first five seasons, it doesn't matter what you did to a god, they would not die. However, in the Season 5 finale, Xena gains the power to "kill the unkillable." In the span of 12-15 hours after gaining this power, Xena had killed Poseidon, Hephaestus, Deimos, Hades, Artemis and Athena, with no signs of slowing down.
    • Xena also features the title character being impregnated by the redeemed soul of her archenemy, Callisto. When she discovers she is pregnant, she expresses the impossiblility of the situation, by slamming the doctor into a wall.
      Xena: It's impossible! I cannot be pregnant. If you weren't such a quack, you would know that getting pregnant involves certain physical requirements that I haven't met in a long time! And I mean a very long time! No one, zilch, zippo. I am a love-free zone! Therefore it is utterly impossible that I be 'up the duff'. So what's your diagnosis now?!
      Healer: Mood swings.


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