Blue And Orange Morality / Live-Action TV

Blue-and-Orange Morality in Live-Action TV series.

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• The 100: In Season 3, we are introduced to A.L.I.E., an Artificial Intelligence whom Jaha is helping to shepherd the citizens of Arkadia to the "City of Light," a rumored promised land. To enter, a person must swallow a device that hardwires the brain into feeling absolutely no pain, physical or otherwise, wiping entire sections of memory and essentially turning people into drones for her. As an artificial intelligence, she has no human emotions or human understanding of right and wrong and is just following her core command, which is to "make life better for humanity." She takes drastic measures to accomplish this, including wiping out most of mankind before the events of the series to prevent a potential overpopulation problem. It is later revealed that her purpose for the City of Light was to "save humanity" from a coming nuclear deathwave that will irradiate the ground in six months' time. Taking away pain was an attempt to give people happy lives, and after the end came, their minds would have lived on in the city, but as a machine, she couldn't understand what exactly was wrong with the violent ways she went about getting people to enter.
• The Addams Family and The Munsters live this trope, particularly the Addamses.
  • A little more elaboration: the Addamses possess a clear taste for the grotesque and the macabre, and a distaste for the opposite. Their house is a sentient haunted house, they wear dark clothing, the children routinely torture each other for fun, and find monstrously hideous creatures to be adorable. On the flip-side, they react to cute and cheery things like songbirds, kittens and flowers to the point of physical revulsion. That said, they aren't really "evil", and in fact they're rather courteous (in a twisted sorta way) to outsiders, although they do consider us to be the strange ones. Ironically, despite their attitudes, they're also a remarkably functional and loving family; there's a reason Gomez and Morticia are so often seen as the embodiment of Happily Married. Modern fans like to describe them as not being inhuman, but rather "just really goth".
  • The Munsters, meanwhile, possessed a similar mentality. However, there was a key difference: the Addams Family were humans who acted like monsters, whereas the Munsters, as their name suggests, were clearly inhuman, but acted like normal people. It made for an interesting contrast.
• Angel
  • Witness the huge discussion on the Headscratchers page over what Jasmine's hypothetical "alignment" was. Sure, she brings total peace and happiness to the world, but she eats people (but usually no more than one or two a day, far fewer than would be killed by wars and crimes her presence would prevent), and people have no choice but to love and adore her. Can any human definition of "good" or "evil" really describe her? (That was rhetorical, by the way)
  • Present in an early episode, "Bachelor Party", with a family of Ano-Movic. Ano-Movic demons are a very peaceful race — formerly a violent race of nomadic demons, they blended into Western Society and gave up their more gruesome traditions. On the flip side, not all of their old customs have been abandoned — the family seen in the episode are shown discussing the wedding plans just as easily as they discuss the ritualistic eating of the former spouse's brains. While this sounds gruesome, to the Ano-Movics, it is a gesture of love — their belief is that by eating the brains of the old spouse of their wedded-to-be prior to the wedding, the new spouse will incorporate all of the love and affection from the previous relationship into their new marriage. The demon in the episode even asks for the former spouse's blessing, not realizing that said ex was unaware of their traditions (though it also doesn't stop him when he does find out), and seems genuinely confused and broken-hearted when his fiancee calls off the wedding over this.
  • Illyria demonstrates this to a large extent, and due to being in a human body she, partly against her will, starts to feel human emotions and assimilate human values. When Wesley betrays her she's perturbed at the fact that it bothers her, as "betrayal was a neutral word in my day. As unjudged a word as water or breeze". She spends quite a lot of time trying to figure out why mortals act as they do. She describes her world view quite well to Angel:
    "I didn't give you a chance. That you learn when you become a King. You learn to destroy everything that isn't utterly yours. All that matters is victory. That's how your reign persists. You are a slave to an insane construct. You are moral. A true ruler is as moral as a hurricane, empty but for the force of his gale. But you; trapped in the web of the Wolf, the Ram, the Hart. So much power here! And you quibble at its price. If you want to win a war, you must serve no master but your own ambition."
• Babylon 5:
  • A sideplot in "Geometry of Shadows" revolves around Ivanova trying to understand Drazi politics before the conflict between Purple and Green spirals out of control. Aside from colors, Purple and Green are wholly abstract concepts with no defining characteristics like ideology or regional identity. Drazi foreign policy is quite understandable by humans, though.
  • The Vorlons and Shadows initially appear to be Good is Not Nice and Always Chaotic Evil, respectively. But really they're Lawful Blue and Chaotic Orange, essentially using the younger races as arguments in a million years-old philosophy debate on the nature of Order Versus Chaos.
  • The Centauri consider sobriety to be a vice. It is explained that Centauri lives are dominated by the pursuit of duty, to Empire, House, Family and Self. Part of the duty to Self is the pursuit of pleasure. This way, self-care does not become swamped by duty, but is a duty which must be as zealously pursued as other duties. By pursuing sobriety, a Centauri is neglecting their duty to themselves, and therefore it is a vice.
• The Head Six and Head Baltar entities of Battlestar Galactica. Ron Moore says that their kind are the inspiration for stories of angels and stories of demons. It's not hard to believe.
• In The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon Cooper frequently comes off as rude, arrogant and completely lacking in empathy. It becomes clear, though, that he genuinely cares about his friends and loved ones. The problem is that his mind operates along uncompromising lines of fact and logic, to the point where normal politeness and emotional sensitivity are completely alien. He accepts social conventions when they're explained to him (often multiple times), but clearly doesn't understand the nuances. For example, he was told that he should give up his bed when guests are over, so when he stays with someone else, he takes their bed without asking. At the same time, when a friend has money problems, he'll hand them a wad of cash, not understanding why that would be a big deal.
• The witches on Chilling Adventures of Sabrina operate by a different morality to humans. For example, Zelda finds it perfectly acceptable to murder her sister Hilda whenever she's annoyed (she resurrects every time if she is buried in the family garden). Witches also celebrate the Feast of Feasts, in which the name of a random female witch is drawn and they are selected to be killed and eaten raw by the coven. It is considered a great honor to be selected by the Dark Lord as the "Queen of Feasts".
• Daredevil (2015): Stick, Matt Murdock's elderly mentor and the guy who trained him to fight, has a very strange sense of morality. For instance, in Stick's mind, befriending a nurse that can be both a medic and a Secret-Keeper is bad because relationships of any kind are weakness; but cotton sheets feeling like sandpaper is good because it keeps the sleeper tough. As Scott Glenn, who plays Stick, described his moral code in one interview:
  "[Stick's moral code is in] a weird grey area. It’s like Daredevil and Elektra are my kids and I essentially adopt them both, trained them to fight. The written problem I have with Daredevil is the one line he won’t cross –- taking human life. He’ll beat people up horrendously, put them in a hospital, do whatever he has to do but he won’t kill people. All I do is kill people. And working with the Chaste, I’m a blind assassin. I’m a Defender against the worst evil in the world and my only way of dealing with that is killing people. So it is a grey area kind of thing. I don’t think of myself as a bad person. But I don’t think of myself as a particularly good person either. And the way I work with that is that I’m a soldier in combat in a desperate war and that’s the way I have to behave."
• Dexter: Before the Code of Harry, it is unclear whether Dexter Morgan had much of a sense of morality in the first place due to the dominance of his urges. Even with the Code, he mainly concerns himself about whether he violates it not rather than feeling guilt about doing something wrong (i.e. his killing of Oscar Prado).
• Doctor Who:
  • The Doctor himself sometimes borders on this, thinking almost nothing of taking his friends to dangerous places all the time.
    • The Fourth Doctor is about as extreme as it gets due to the Bizarre Alien Psychology of that incarnation — he sees no problem with manipulating or bullying his friends for the greater good or even, occasionally, for fun, but finds the whole concept of exercising authority over others to be at best objectionable. Sometimes, if it looks like he's led allies to fend off a monster to the point where his allies can gain official power, he will stab them in the back to keep this from happening. The first thing he will offer any villain in a dispute is compromise and diplomacy, no matter how repugnant its ideas — of course, if the villain has no intention to change or betrays him, he will not feel any guilt about killing them.
    • In "The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar", it's shown that the Doctor considers his murderous archenemies the Master and Davros to be his friends, to the point that the Doctor still entrusted the Master with the Time Lord equivalent of a last will and testament. The Master/Missy also claims that, while the Doctor cares about his companions, he sees them like humans see their pets.
  • While the Daleks are mostly Scary Dogmatic Aliens with heavy Nazi overtones, it's noted in "Asylum in the Daleks" that they regard hatred as so fundamentally beautiful that they are unable to destroy especially pure examples of it, even when it's in their best interests to do so. It's implied that part of the reason they have not yet defeated the Doctor may be that they're too in awe of the hatred he has of them.
    • Similarly, to a Dalek, maintaining racial purity overrides everything else, including self-preservation and even killing. In "Victory of the Daleks", three Daleks immediately and willingly allow themselves to be killed by a new, "purer" strain of Dalek. In "Revolution of the Daleks", a new strain of Daleks built and cloned by humans manages to take over the Earth with little resistance. The response from Skaro is to come to Earth and kill them all for impurity, freeing the Earth, and ignoring the human population completely until the new Daleks are extinct.
    • In "Dalek", Henry van Statten assumes that the Dalek rampaging through his bunker can be reasoned with, but the Doctor points out that you can't negotiate with an Omnicidal Maniac who thinks anyone different should die.
    • The Expanded Universe anthology Twelve Angels Weeping notes that Daleks have a "psychotic honesty" to them: they never use stealth tactics, never encrypt their communications and rarely use tricks. On the other hand, the main character (a Time Lord fighting against the Daleks in the Last Great Time War) also grimly observes that psychological warfare tactics are utterly useless against them. Detonating a sun to destroy every Dalek ship in its solar system merely summoned more Daleks to take over the empty space.
  • The Cybermen at least started out as having a morality which felt alien to humans, thanks to their emotionless logic. In "The Tenth Planet", they intend to destroy Earth. When one human character screams out that they are killing people, the Cyberman merely points out how illogical her outburst is, as people die all over the world constantly, and the human does not display any distress over that. The Cybermen were not even actively malicious in the story. Their survival simply meant that Earth had to be destroyed, so they set about to do that. They even offered the nearby humans that they could continue their existence as Cybermen, which seemed like a perfectly reasonable proposal to the Cybermen themselves.
  • The Master, especially in his/her recent incarnation as "Missy". On the one hand, each incarnation gleefully delights in being called "insane", "twisted", or "evil". That being said, the Master's plans often fall under "Annoy the Doctor" as much as they do "Rule the Universe". "The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar" has Missy reveal that she views her rivalry with the Doctor as being akin to people texting one another. She also points out that her relationship with the Doctor is so ancient that it's impossible to compare them to the human concept of "romance".
  • Another example is the Sontarans. Their entire system of morality is based around the glory of battle. They love war, will start one for any reason, and see dying in battle as the most honourable possible death, thus they have no qualms about killing the enemy in battle. In fact, they will often joke and congratulate their enemies while they are doing well, including killing them all, and will greet people with such sweet nothings as "I hope one day to spill your intestines on the battlefield". But it is morally reprehensible to kill someone who isn't fit for battle while not at war with them; such killing is considered murder. This is really highlighted in "A Good Man Goes to War": one of the biggest punishments for a Sontaran is to become a field medic, because not only are you not fighting, but you're actively stopping people from being able to die a glorious death in battle.
  • The Silurians are a relatively complex example of this on various levels. Earth's first sentient inhabitants, the Silurians put themselves in suspended animation because they believed that Earth was facing some imminent environmental catastrophe, but for reasons ranging from misunderstanding the nature of the disaster to deliberate sabotage, they never woke up until humanity had evolved into its current state. The Doctor has often tried to argue for peace between humans and Silurians, but many Silurians persist in seeing humans as nothing but apes that have gotten above themselves, regarding humanity as vermin that must be cleared out so that they can re-occupy the planet rather than a race of equals.
  • The Eternals in "Enlightenment": they think nothing of kidnapping human seafarers to crew the ships in their race, and aren't too bothered by their deaths — after all they're outside of time and technically don't die, but "Ephemerals" (beings inside of time) live such short lives. All that matters to them is winning the race and the eventual prize, the "Enlightenment" of the title. They're not even bothered about sabotaging each other's efforts — it's not against the rules, technically, just not terribly sporting.
  • Anti-Villain Morgaine from "Battlefield" thinks nothing of slaughtering people who tick her off, but insists on paying for a round of drinks that her son ordered in a pub. She pays for them, by the way, by curing the barmaid's blindness. She also won't fight in graveyards as to not dishonour the dead. She also held a ceremony honouring said dead- dead people on a planet she cared nothing of- and informed the Brigadier (a leader of her current enemies) that there would be a truce for the duration of said ceremony. These dead fell in battle = They deserve honour.
  • The Judoon have a pretty strange concept of justice. In "Smith and Jones", they don't hesitate to pronounce and carry out a death sentence on a man for breaking a vase over a soldier's head, even though the soldier was fully armoured and completely unharmed, and when the hospital appears about to explode they depart without any effort to stop it. But when their leader takes an unusually long time verifying that Martha is human, he insists on giving her "compensation" in the form of a piece of paper in an alien language (it's never clear what it is), and when the hospital doesn't blow up, they send it back to Earth.
  • The nanobot Vardies from "Smile" were originally designed to make sure human colonists were happy, which typically meant they had enough water, oxygen and food. Unfortunately, the Vardies then decided to expand their definition of "happiness" out into complete and total contentment with everything, which backfired the moment somebody died for the first time. When their relatives were naturally grief-stricken, the Vardies, who had no concept of what "grief" was, much less that it was temporary, interpreted it as a disease that could be spread from person to person. Thus, you end up with a city where anyone who's not smiling and happy about everything has to be euthanized before they can spread it to anyone else.
• The Plokavians in Farscape. Because they all have perfect Photographic Memory, they consider subjectivity and personal colouring of experiences to be alien concepts; so, when each of Moya's crew gives a slightly different testimony of the destruction of a Plokavian merchant ship by Talyn, the judges accuse them of lying. Eventually, Crichton manages to placate them (for a time) by claiming that they were lying in defence of each other, a concept that the judges are more familiar with.
• The Observers from Fringe. It's almost certain that they have some system of logic and morality guiding their decisions, but since they basically exist outside of time and their perspective on events is almost as impossible to understand as their writing, working out what's going on in their pale and hairless heads is...well, something nobody human has managed to do with complete accuracy yet.
  • It has been shown that they feel morally obligated to "repair" the timeline when they inadvertently prevent a foreseen event from occurring. Although it remains to be seen whether that's a moral obligation or if they're just doing their job.
  • Their driving motivations so far appear to be ensuring that events happen as they were meant to happen, and "important" people are kept safe.
  • That's the Observer science team. The ones known in Season 5 as the Invaders are primarily concerned with preserving their own Vichy Earth.
• Game of Thrones:
  • The Ironborn's traditional lifestyle of raiding and pillaging is not just to gain wealth; the religion of the Drowned God - the primary faith of the Iron Islands - dictates that to perform these acts is a show of piety. The Ironborn take their religion very seriously, and raiders who acquire great wealth are revered among the people. On a more mundane level, the Ironborn also frown on traditional commerce; exchanging currency or goods to obtain anything is seen as weakness, and it's far more prestigious to take desired things as plunder.
  • If the story of the Rat Cook is to be believed, the New Gods are totally cool with murder in general, but if the murder profanes Sacred Hospitality they'll practically smite you.
    Meera: If the gods turned every killer into a giant white rat–
    Bran: It wasn't for murder that the gods cursed the Rat Cook, or for serving the King's son in a pie. He killed a guest beneath his roof. That's something the gods can't forgive.
• The Good Place:
  • The Good Place points scale has things like fandom of Red Hot Chilli Peppers and personalized license plates which have nothing to do with morality (likely intended as jokes)
  • The process that places people into the Good and Bad Places. Lincoln is the only President in the Good Place and even Florence Nightingale (barely) didn't do enough good in life to be sent to the Good Place. Also, artists seem to be rejected just as a matter of course.
    • This was later retconned (unless it was part of Michael's many lies to the group), as it was later revealed that nobody had gotten into the Good Place over the past 500 years (before America even existed).
  • How the Good Place itself operates. Swearing is forking impossible, but accessing porn is just fine. Though that appears to be a personal preference of the neighborhood, not a universal rule.
    • Later confirmed to be a universal rule when the group visits the ACTUAL Good Place
• Guy Court was a short lived spinoff of Guy Code where guests would go to mock trials to determine whether or not the defendant was in violation of Guy Code. Comedian Donell Rawlings gave the verdicts, and his conclusions were often odd.
  • One episode a guest complained about her boyfriend's taste in drinks. She was a beer drinker, but he preferred sugary cocktails. Rather than defend his choice to drink what he liked, Rawlings shamed him for it and declared he was in violation of Guy Code and should drink beer.
  • Another episode had a group of guys complain about their friend constantly sending them dick pics. Rawlings ruled it wasn't in violation and was a hilarious prank, basically condoning sexual harassment.
• In Hannibal, it's noted several times how distasteful Hannibal views rudeness, which is one of his primary motives for murder, and Hannibal evens seems offended by the accusation that he poisoned a dinner — he would never do that to the food. It is possible he was also referring to the accuser himself, considering his proclivities. His idea of the proper ways to befriend and then romantically court Will Graham are also rather... unconventional and disturbing, to say the least. Not that it doesn't work.
• In His Dark Materials, Lord Boreal and Mrs Coulter have noticeably different views when they visit "our" world. Coming from a world where the church essentially controls everything and women are not accorded equal rights, Boreal considers the other world as having less freedom than his own as he feels the other reality emphasises consumerism over faith. By contrast, Mrs Coulter is intrigued and frustrated when she meets Doctor Mary Malone and learns that women can be "scholars" in this reality, whereas Mrs Coulter, despite being a loyal servant of the church, was only allowed to publish her work if a man took credit for it.
• Kilgrave in Jessica Jones (2015). It's in David Tennant's opinion that Kilgrave has this because, let's face it, how can a man who has the power to make people do whatever he wants, perhaps even without meaning to, possibly be able to retain any normal sense of ethics? It could be that anyone might be warped and changed by this power, and would start to see the world differently from everybody else. That he was ten years old and had also been subjected to frequent and painful experimentation when he developed this power lends itself to this interpretation. As the most prevalent example, he seems honestly unable to see what the matter is with him raping women (using his ability), as he also gave them gifts, such as expensive clothes, or why they'd even object to this.
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: In all his actions, the gentleman with the thistle-down hair is absolutely convinced that his beloved humans enjoy his games as much as he does. The idea that they are consistently horrified by their slavery on his account is so far removed from his own frame of reference that they just can't convey the notion to him.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid has the Bugsters, who are effectively video game characters brought to the real world. As such, they have a very different set of values from normal people, valuing skill, challenging opponents and fulfilling their "role" above all else, and putting very little value on human life since they're so used to respawning with little to no consequence, which comes across as especially shocking to a cast primarily comprised of doctors. The series later gets unusually literal when the protagonist discovers one of the main villains to be his Enemy Without, and the one who's secretly been controlling one half of a form that was previously assumed to split him into two bodies, one orange and one blue. This leads to a fight between the two halves.
  • Kamen Rider Geats: Niramu, the producer of the Desire Grand Prix, uses maintaining the realism of the game as his only metric for morality. Players coming back from the dead goes against his ethics because death being impermanent cheapens the stakes, while a Game Master abusing his authority to try and eliminate a specific player or otherwise make the game unfair earns erasure on the spot. Niramu eventually finding out that the DGP's entire founding mythos is built on a mountain of lies is enough to spur him to turn against his superiors, who unfortunately don't share his strange ethics, or any ethics at all.
• Seems to be the case for Parker in Leverage - while most members of the team have 'unique' value systems (being career criminals), Parker in particular seems to believe that the act of stealing is an unqualified good; she is motivated mostly by a love of cash for its own sake even though she doesn't seem to spend the money, just hoard it. She is thrilled by a Christmas gift of non-sequential unmarked bills. She also stole the Hope diamond and then put it back, because she was bored. Especially in early seasons she doesn't seem to have much empathy for her victims or even the ability to recognize emotional states in herself or others. While not stated in the show, she may be autistic.
• Joanna on Mr. Robot seems to have this, if she can even be said to have morality. When she has someone killed for knowing too much, she specifically has him paralyzed and set down before he's shot, as she believes murder is only okay if the victim has time to realize why they're being killed.
• In My Cat from Hell, cat behaviorist Jackson Galaxy often ends up pointing out that frustrated humans try to apply their own senses of morality and behavior onto cats, who really don't have such concepts in the first place, so most of the time it's just the humans projecting their own issues. One such owner was convinced that her cat was deliberately peeing outside his litter box and called him a "spiteful urinator." Jackson's reaction says it all. Turns out the cat was doing it because he was declawed (something that Jackson and most cat experts will agree is a cruel thing to do in the first place since it's the equivalent of cutting off the tips of a human's fingers) and the litter they were using hurt his feet so much that he didn't feel comfortable going in the litter box, and as soon as they switched to another litter that didn't hurt him, it stopped.
• The Observers from Mystery Science Theater 3000 get a little of this, being brains in pans who have evolved beyond the need for physical bodies (even if their brains still need to be carried around by their former bodies). Though in truth it seems more like they're just jerks who pretend like they have their own moral code to justify being jerks. Brain Guy himself explains why he serves as a medic rather than a combatant during a battle as follows.
  "My species is a race of pacifists, we only believe in killing out of personal spite."
  • The Bots also have this. Thanks to Joel programming them with "occasional ribbing," it makes them believe it is okay for them to destroy Mike/Joel's prized possessions, but when someone messes with their things it's Serious Business.
  • The Nanites have a moral code that seems to run on Obstructive Bureaucracy. They refuse to repair a ship or even go to the bathroom without a work order, but happily destroy a planet when Mike asks them to "take care of [a] little problem".
• Pandora: The Zatarians are non-Human humanoid aliens who have their own morality, and are constantly telling Humans that "you do not understand my people at all" when they try to judge Zatarians by Human moral standards or predict Zatarian reactions to a situation.
• Person of Interest: Harold Finch, talking about The Machine and other artificial intelligences, observes that "our moral system will never be mirrored by theirs because of the very simple reason that they are not human."
• In the Red Dwarf series and novels, Cats have this compared to humans, which is played for laughs. To humans, Cat comes off as incredibly vain, shallow, easily-distracted, horny, impulsive and silly. To another Cat, he would be quite normal. Although the episode Waiting for God shows that the Cat people have a morality of their own. Because they regard Lister as their god, they consider it virtuous to be slobby like him, and so would regard Cat as immoral because he is cool. In other words, cool = bad and slobby = good in their morality.
  • It's a Discussed Trope in Series 2, Episode 3 "Thanks for the memory". Rimmer speculates they've made first contact with aliens, who communicate by breaking Lister and the Cat's legs and putting casts on them and making a jigsaw puzzle. He reasons that seeing as they're alien they're thinking alien and humans (and the cat) don't think like they do.
  • In the series episode "Rimmerworld", a world populated entirely by clones and Opposite Sex Clones of Rimmer ends up a fascistic society built around hypocrisy, manipulation, boot-licking, backstabbing, double-dealing, two-facedness and otherwise Jerkass mindsets. Lister, Cat and Kryten are promptly sentenced to death for not only being "hideously deformed", but for being brave, compassionate, loyal, honorable and charismatic, which are all high crimes on Rimmerworld.
• Space: Above and Beyond has the Silicates. These AIs originally served mankind until they were infected with the "take a chance" virus. Now they see everything in life as a gamble. This leads them to do things like killing an entire family on the result of a coin flip and playing a game of Blackjack to determine the fate of people they have captured and could kill immediately.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • The Ancients might be this trope after their ascension. Whenever we see living Ancients on this plane of existence, they are generally depicted as normal humans who were simply interested in science a lot, not the gigantic Jerkasses they are as ascended beings (see more on Neglectful Precursors).
  • In "Learning Curve", SG-1 encounters a technologically-advanced planet where the human civilization implants nanites into certain children at infancy that records all information they learn. When they come of age, these nanites are removed and distributed to the rest of the population, transferring their knowledge while reducing the children to a largely infantile state. SG-1 is horrified to discover that the children are essentially "having their brains sucked out" but the other civilization seems to have no issue with this.
• In Stargate Atlantis, it's stated more than once that the expedition's conflict with the Wraith has a tentative advantage in the Wraith are only hunting humans because they need to eat rather than because they sadistically want them dead; they are essentially the predators and are after humans as their "prey", with some Wraith willing to consider alternatives.
• Star Trek
  • Star Trek: The Original Series:
    • In "The Empath", aliens torture the Enterprise officers in order to awaken the title character's compassion.
    • The non-humanoid Excalbian race from "The Savage Curtain" view such concepts as "good" and "evil" as being so foreign that they decide to test them experimentally by staging a battle between representatives of the two.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • While Q is portrayed as being an adversary of humanity, he might embody this trope. In the episode "True Q", he even claims that his race has the right to decide whether humans live or die because of their superior morality, a characterization with which Picard disagrees, to put it mildly. However, Q is a particularly malicious member of his race. While the Q Continuum do fall under this trope, Q himself is particularly sadistic and condescending compared to the others, and isn't the best comparison for how his species thinks (the Continuum once kicked him out and turned him into a human for being an embarrassment). Nonetheless, it's not hard to make the case that every time Q shows up (in TNG, anyway), he does the human race a favor — even if it's a lesson or warning that costs lives. He really seems to like humanity, but is happy to make liking him back nearly impossible, which makes him perfect for this page. In the series finale, he actually saves humanity indirectly by dropping hints about what the Continuum is doing so that Picard can stop it. In an earlier episode in which he acts as their agent, he admits that the Q as a whole consider humans to be a possible future threat. In the extended canon novel Q&A, it is revealed that Q's tests had a point all along. A race known as Them have returned to decide the fate of the entire universe. It turns out They created our universe (the Q included) and, like many others they created before ours, They are now going to destroy it... because They are no longer entertained by it. The Q knew all along and had essentially given up. Q, however (yes, that one), had tested countless races and decided on Humans, Picard in particular, to prove the worth of keeping our universe around. It works. Picard convinces Them to let the universe remain... by laughing at the absurdity of the situation. All along Q had been teaching Picard to have a sense of humor about things that were out of his control just so he would have exactly this reaction when the time came. And then you begin to realize that the fans of Star Trek are essentially Them... what with the recent drastic decline in the franchise's popularity. EPIC!
    • Another example is the Klingon concept of honor, which doesn't track exactly to any human honor system. For instance, hiding in a debris field to ambush anyone who comes to rescue survivors is considered perfectly honorable, and you can officially strip someone of honor for political reasons. Worf is unusual in that his honor is a code of behavior understandable by humans, more like a Knight Errant than anything, but it confuses the hell out of other Klingons. Note that Worf's code of honor is technically the same as the other Klingons, the difference being that he stands by it while other Klingons often tend to interpret the "honorable" thing as being "whatever gains them glory." The other Klingons he encounters tend to believe that he will also do what serves himself first, then get surprised and offended when he declares that he will follow through with his promises and oaths. Fridge Brilliance to be found here: Worf was raised on a human colony (and later Earth). Even though he's well read in the facts of what constitute honourable and dishonourable acts for a Klingon, he has very little firsthand experience with the Klingon expression of it (where it's practically EXP), and instead expresses it like a human (a state of mind).
    • The Borg were a lot like this originally, being seemingly unfamiliar with morality as most species understand it. By the time First Contact rolled around, they were reframed as an empire of mindless zombies ruled by an actively malicious queen. This portrayal is what ended up sticking.
      Locutus: Why do you resist? We only wish to raise the quality of life.
    • The entity Nagilum in "Where Silence Has Lease" traps the Enterprise in a strange Negative Space Wedgie, kills a Red Shirt, and decides to kill a good portion of the rest of the crew to fully explore the concept of death. It seems to truly have no idea that the crew might not be wild about this idea.
    • "The Ensigns of Command" features aliens who are discussed as being this, with them even being able to be communicated with by more human-like species being remarkable. This having been said, while part of their mindset is claimed to be that they are exceedingly detailed with their treaties and sticklers for the letter of them, the one we see has a very human-like immediate "you can't do that!" reaction when Picard turns it right back at them (from the human perspective the Sheliak were acting as unreasonable, selfish assholes) and invokes a clause of the Federation-Sheliak treaty that creates a longer delay than the one he was asking for under the negotiation clause of the treaty.
    • In "Allegiance", Picard is whisked away to a strange prison with three strangers and replaced by a doppelganger on the Enterprise. When he figures out the experiment he and the others have been unwittingly participating in, his captors (a group of previously unknown aliens) reveal themselves and return him to his ship. They explain that they sought to understand command structures, which do not exist in their culture. When Picard tells them that what they've done is wrong, they claim not to understand the "primitive" concept of morality. However, it's made clear when Picard gives them a taste of their own medicine that he doesn't entirely buy their alleged Blue and Orange Morality, and that maybe they're just assholes.
    • In "Suddenly Human", the Enterprise crew discovers a human teenager amongst a group of stranded Talarian teenagers. They soon learn that he was the son of a Starfleet officer who died in a Talarian attack, the Talarian captain took him in as his son since according to Talarian tradition, he is allowed to claim the son of a slain enemy after he lost his own son in a Starfleet attack.
    • "Liaisons" has ambassadors from a race that lacks the concepts of antagonism, pleasure and love. One of them studies antagonism by being a jerk to Worf, one of them studies pleasure by pigging out, and one of them tries to learn about love by stranding Picard on a planet and taking the form of a human woman.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • "Captive Pursuit" is all about this trope. The first alien from the other side of the wormhole, who calls himself Tosk, makes friends with O'Brien and is revealed to be the prey of another species, and both that species and Tosk view the hunt involved to be ancient and honorable for all involved. Tosk even refuses asylum on DS9, even though he will be turned into a zoo exhibit for the rest of his days, the most dishonorable outcome of the hunt. O'Brien is especially troubled by this, and actually subverts the trope a bit by making a compromise between the two moralities: he frees Tosk so that he and his pursuers can have the hunt they desire, and so that Tosk has an opportunity to live the way he deems most honorable, all while allaying O'Brien's conscience about Tosk's fate.
    • The Cardassians, specifically their justice system, wherein the verdict is announced before the trial begins. The trial only happens to explain why and how the crime was accomplished and justify the initial verdict. The system is justified by the Cardassians' attention to detail and their perception that they cannot make a mistake (although it is proven wrong in Star Trek multiple times), in addition to taking pride in their ability to enact "swift justice". This extends to all aspects of Cardassian culture, with "Enigma" (mystery) novels always ending with everyone being guilty: the mystery lying in who is guilty of what. Starfleet people are shown to be unable to understand that system. Similarly, Cardassians don't understand human literature. For example, Garak considers Julius Caesar to be a poorly written farce because a leader should never trust anyone enough to be betrayed like that.
    • Garak is an example of this trope to other Cardassians in addition to humans. When told the tale of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf", he's utterly disgusted that a child's tale involves a child getting eaten by a wolf, but when he's told that the lesson is "If you always lie, no one will believe you", he concludes that Humans got the lesson wrong... it should be "never tell the same lie twice". We never know what he was exiled from Cardassia for, but it has something to do with a man who says he is his father, a deed that would seem noble to humans while serving in the Bajoran Occupation involving saving his friend, and failure to pay his taxes. To Garak, these are all equally true statements and falsehoods about his past, and you should believe every one of them, especially the lies. He even lies to get the local law enforcement involved in investigating his assassination.
    • The Ferengi have their own concept of right and wrong, which is closely related to what is profitable and what isn't. Their whole value system is related to profit and greed (which is seen as "the purest feeling"). In an early appearance, a Ferengi captain is arrested by his own crew for trying a murder Picard, but only because he spent a lot of money on the attempt and there was no profit in it. Similarly, they tend to avoid wars and slavery, because both are bad for business. Their society is horribly oppressive to women, but Quark manages to make improvements by pointing out that women are a huge potential untapped market that's being ignored.
    • In "Starship Down", the Karemma, a Proud Merchant Race from the Gamma Quadrant, are shown to have this dynamic with the Ferengi: Ferengi morality is centered around the pursuit of profit at any cost, up to and including lying, swindling, and cheating. The Karemma, on the other hand, believe in honest business: the prices they set for their goods are based on the value of the materials and the labor that goes into manufacture, nothing more and nothing less. They also scoff at the idea of gambling, with one Karemma stating that "Only a fool would risk what he has to chance", while Quark dismisses the Karemma's business practices as simply bartering. By the end of the episode, however, both races are shown to be alike in many other ways.
    • The Jem'Hadar are a Proud Warrior Race, but their sense of morality differs greatly from that of the Klingons and the Federation. The Jem'Hadar live by the maxim "Victory is life", and all that they do is in service to the Founders, for whom they show Undying Loyalty, going as far as to walk into certain death to appease them, murder Vorta handlers that would not act in what they think are the Founders' best interest, or even commit suicide if they allow one of their gods to die. For them, battle is simply a matter of course, in sharp contrast to the Klingons' Blood Knight tendencies and their love of glorifying their victories. In one episode where the Federation and Jem'Hadar are forced to contend with a mutual threat, a brawl breaks out between Worf and a Jem'Hadar Second. The Second is killed by his commander, the First, for insubordination, while Sisko only confines Worf to quarters while off-duty. Sisko calls out the First for killing his subordinate in cold blood, while the First argues that he was acting in the best interest of his team and eliminating a soldier that would only drag them down. The First, likewise, calls Sisko out on not killing Worf for his insubordination, to which Sisko argues that killing Worf would rob him of the chance to learn from his mistake and cost him the loyalty of his men.
    • The Prophets exhibit a lot of this, especially in Ben Sisko's backstory. They are Starfish Aliens to the extreme, Energy Beings that exist outside of normal space-time, and because they do not experience the passage of time, they have a lot of issues understanding the human experience. They possessed Ben Sisko's mother and ensured that she married his father and gave birth to Ben. Once you know what happens, there is a degree of Squick involved, because it amounted to rape in the end (although it wasn't Joseph's fault because he didn't know that his wife was being controlled and the relationship wasn't her desire). The Prophets never understood that there was anything wrong with what they did, and indeed the Prophet that possessed Ben's mother uses her appearance in his mind when communicating with him for the rest of the series.
  • Star Trek: Voyager:
    • The Mari from "Random Thoughts" are telepaths who prosecute thoughtcrime. However, they are in no way fascist (indeed, the laws have made the police almost obsolete and there are very few left), and the head constable is genuinely trying to do the right thing. While their laws are draconian and lead to the episode's problems, the fact that they have laws regulating thoughts is presented as a logical consequence of a telepathic society.
    • The Hirogen are a race of hunters, only they have no problem hunting sentient beings (and sometimes eating them) and do it as a way of life. Though they have a moral code about respecting difficult prey and are perfectly willing to hunt prey that doesn't have to be killed or can be revived, as long as they prove to be a challenge.
    • Seven of Nine, who joins the Voyager crew after being cut off from the Borg Collective, initially has a morality that is more based in cold pragmatism than her crewmates. For some time after being separated from the Borg and becoming an individual, she butts heads with Captain Janeway, believing her idealistic actions to be a major detriment, since the Borg considered such idealism to be irrelevant.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise:
    • An early episode has the crew being continually attacked by a mystery ship for no apparent reason. T'Pol points out that not every species out there necessarily behaves in a way that would make sense to humans. They never find out what the aliens' motivation is, but they do successfully test their new weapons on them.
    • Denobulans have some odd priorities by human standards: for example, Phlox won't treat a patient without their consent even for a lethal condition, but has no objection to sharing medical information or supplying drugs to crew members, and in "Dear Doctor" argues that it's okay to refuse to treat a genetic disease, even if it's rendering a species extinct, because something about "evolution". (Admittedly, it's downplayed in the episode with the last one, because Archer agrees with him, leading to Trek's chronologically first case of negligent genocide.)
  • Star Trek: Picard: What the Tal Shiar (the Romulan Secret Police) views as honourable behaviour is very different from ours.
    Rios: They are treacherous, violent, ruthless and subtle. Their concept of honour is rooted in their skill at deceit.
• Sometimes discussed in Supernatural. Because of the nature of their work, Sam and Dean occasionally run into Pagan gods and monsters who see nothing wrong in killing and eating people in order to survive. Also:
  • The demons themselves see themselves as the heroes of the story. They were formerly human souls who were tortured into abominations and most of them worship their creator Lucifer. Demons like Azazel, Meg, Lilith and Ruby commit multiple heinous acts but as Meg later explains to Sam and Dean, it's largely about loyalty to a cause and having a purpose.
  • The angels are even more complicated, as they are revealed to be a textbook example of Light Is Not Good. They were created purely to act as weapons of God and most will unthinkingly follow what they believe their father wants, even though he's long gone by the time they show up in the story, and never stop to question whether this is actually what he wants and if it's worth doing even if it is. They are wrathful, fanatical and cold, willing to destroy entire towns if it suits their purposes. Their stated goal is to bring about paradise on earth, but they are willing to kill billions of humans in the process. This is seen in Castiel, who eventually rebels against Heaven and joins Sam and Dean's side. However, multiple times, especially in Season 6, he's shown as not having the same moral compass as humans. He's still willing to kill innocents that stand in his way — or in Sam's case destroy his mind. Even much later in the series, Castiel will volunteer to kill an innocent so the humans Sam and Dean won't have to.
    • Angels are also different in some ways that are Played for Laughs. For example, most of them don't seem to understand when something is rude — such as stating what is, to them, a simple fact. At one point, Sam, shocked after Castiel immediately showed up to help them when Dean called after Sam had tried contacting him for months, asks if Cas likes Dean more. Cas simply tells him, "Dean and I do share a more profound bond", while seeming annoyed at the question.
• In Teen Wolf, Derek was born a werewolf, raised in a family of werewolves, and always does things the werewolf way. Unfortunately, this doesn't always align with anyone else's ideas of good and evil.
• Gosei Knight in Tensou Sentai Goseiger believes in protecting the Earth, much as the Gosei Angels do. However, their definition extends to all life forms on it, whereas his definition applies strictly to the Earth itself.
• Cameron of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has a very simple morality system that revolves around protecting John Connor. If it protects him, she'll usually do it, unless he overrides her (most of the time). If it threatens John Connor, however, she destroys it without hesitation, and regardless of whether John or anyone else objects. That's pretty much the beginning and the end of her concept of morality.
  • Worth noting is early in the first season, Cameron guns down a FBI informant in front of Sarah for warning the FBI about the Connors, and Sarah slaps her in response, telling her never to do that again. Cameron's response is to stare at her in absolute but emotionless confusion; after all, Cameron just did everything right by her programming, but Sarah's telling her she did the wrong thing.
  • Another example of this occurs later, when Cameron uses a man on the run from the mob to get information on who the Turk prototype computer was sold to. She promises to help the man, but the moment she has the information, she simply walks away and lets the mob hitmen kill him. For a human character, this would be an act of cruelty that — depending on the character — could catapult them over the Moral Event Horizon, but for Cameron, the audience knows that her morality system is extremely alien compared to a human's, and thus the result isn't as severe; the audience is just reminded that Cameron is still a machine assassin and still coldly and brutally logical about her mission.
    • Present-day John and Sarah invented the 'stop Skynet' mission, so they're able to define how that mission operates, including setting limits on killing people who might interfere with that mission. (This is compared to the 'protect John' mission, which they cannot interfere with... Cameron will do anything to protect him, period, regardless of what he wants.) However, John never ordered her to not put people in danger or to help them escape danger, just to not kill them.
  • At one point, when John is surprised that a Terminator isn't cruel for cruelty's sake, Cameron points out to him that terminators aren't cruel. This applies to both Cameron herself and "evil" terminators in general, who, while utterly ruthless, don't inflict pain just for the sake of inflicting pain. While they are willing to torture humans (not usually for interrogation, but for other purposes, like hurting someone's loved ones to draw them out of hiding), the moment they determine that this will not achieve their goals they stop and utilize other tactics.
• Sweet Tooth in Twisted Metal (2023) is a deranged, serial killing clown, but he'd rather be insulted to his face than lied to.
• The Vampire Diaries
  • Damon might have this; he's a vampire, the natural predator of humanity, and thus can be severely out of step with what Elena and co. consider acceptable behavior. Perhaps most notably, when Elena asked him to remove Jeremy's memory of Vicki's death and when he... went overboard, so to speak, he genuinely did not see why she was upset.
  • It's also been stated outright several times that vampires can "turn off" their humanity, like a switch: freeing them from negative or connective emotions like fear, love, or guilt. This explains a lot. Stefan leaves his humanity "on" all the time, Isobel leaves hers completely off most of the time. Damon's humanity is "off" at the start of the series, but he's turned it "on" somewhere around the end of Season 1. It is stated by 500-year-old Rose, however, that the ability to shut off their emotions fades with age.

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