Are You Afraid of the Dark? has the episode "The Tale of the Chameleon", featuring Tia and Tamera Mowry as the protagonist and her evil clone. The episode ends with the girl's friend being forced to decide which one is the real person - and incorrectly choosing the clone. The clone keeps her human body, while the girl is changed into a chameleon and left to drown at the bottom of a well.
"Black Mirror: Playtest" features a man participating in a Brain/Computer Interface test in order to generate a properly scary experience for a horror game. After experiencing his worst fears and two fakeouts involving him thinking he left the game, he's finally taken out and sent home, only to find his mother is showing symptoms of Alzheimer's, one of the many fears explored in the game. He breaks down in tears upon realizing this. You'd think it would end there, but it gets worse: He never started the game in the first place. The man died within 0.04 seconds of strapping himself in due to leaving his cellphone turned on. The staff notes he spent his last moments convulsing and calling out to his mother.
"Black Mirror: Shut Up and Dance" had some people who were manipulated into doing things (from simple delivery to a Duel to the Death) to prevent their secrets from being leaked online. After the main character successfully completes his final, bloody task, they still have the data released to humiliate them one last time. Interestingly, the episode also seems to aim this trope at the viewer. At first we're lead to believe that the teenager protagonist was an innocent kid who just happened to be recorded as he was masturbating. At the end it's revealed he's actually a paedophile who was caught watching child pornography.
Season 4 pulls this off again in a particularly cruel fashion with "Black Mirror: Crocodile". In a society where people's memories can be viewed by a device called an "adjuster," a woman starts a murder spree to erase all evidence of a crime she commited. As she's walking out of the house of the couple she recently killed, she comes across their infant son, and the implications are clear. At the ending of the episode, which confirms she has indeed killed a baby to get away scot-free, it's revealed that the kid was blind. Meaning he wouldn't have seen anything incriminating her in the first place. And to make everything even worse, she killed all those people in vain anyway, because it turns out that the technology works on the family's guinea pig and the police were able to use its memories to track her down. Wow.
One of the short stories featured on Crackanory had a man pass out drunk on his stag night only to wake up in an abandoned hospital and under attack by three zombies. At first he is running scared of the zombies and fears for his life but eventually realises he will eventually be killed by just running and must survive for his future wife's sake. Thus he manages to kill the zombies and escape the hospital. He leaves fully expecting a zombie apocalypse outside however he is met with laughter from his mates. It turned out that they had set the whole thing up as an elaborate stag night prank and the zombies were actually actors hired by them. As a result he was now facing a triple murder charge instead of a wedding. The ending implies he goes on to kill his mates too via the camera ominously focusing on his weapon.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation: In one episode, a baby is found suffocated inside his father's car while he was at work. He forgot to drop the baby before going to work...or did he? It turns both parents are carriers for the lethal, untreatable Tay-Sachs disease and that they had another baby who died from the disease; the new baby started showing symptoms of the disease despite seemingly being born healthy, so the parents arranged to leave him in the car because this would kill him faster and less painfully than languishing his last days from Tay-Sachs. At this point the parents are guilty of murder, locked up for it, and their family plans and reputations destroyed. Then it turns out that the symptoms the second baby had were not from Tay-Sachs, but from accidental and easily treatable poisoning, and the parents unwittingly killed a perfectly healthy child.
A staple of the short lived horror series Darkroom:
"Stay Tuned, We'll Be Right Back" - a man digs up a old radio that allows him to send messages back in time, saving his father from a fatal mission in World War II...and assuring an Axis victory.
"The Bogeyman Will Get You" - a teenage girl (played by a young Helen Hunt) becomes suspicious of her nighttime-hours keeping neighbor, believing he's a vampire. She confronts him about it, under the light of a full moon...
Deadtime Stories, while aimed at a slightly younger audience than even most kid horror, still features cruel twists in every episode. Some of them are very minor and are just "boo, something else scary happened" (e.g. a giant spider is killed, but suddenly a frog jumps out of the sink; a ghost stops haunting two kids because her doll was returned, but a new doll suddenly opens its eyes). Others imply the characters are still in major danger. However, the show tones down the scariness by implying that the stories are just stories being read by a babysitter to two kids.
"Journey's End" gives all but two of the protagonists a happy ending: The Doctor Did Not Get the Girl and loses his best friend, winding up alone again, and Donna's memory must be wiped to save her life, undoing all of her Character Development and self-confidence and causing her to lose even the memories of the best time of her life.
"The End of Time" has the Tenth Doctor trying to prevent a prophecy of his demise which will come at the hands of someone who will "knock four times". This seems to refer to the Master, who has a four-beat drumming sound (the heartbeat of a Time Lord) constantly in his head, and nearly ends all of creation when he uses it to resurrect the Time Lord race. After saving the day, Ten is overjoyed to have escaped his fate, only to hear four taps: his companion Wilfred has become trapped in a radiation venting chamber, and to save him, Ten must take his place, accept his fate, and regenerate into the Eleventh Doctor. Ten's reaction shows that he's fully aware it's this trope. Wilf offers to stay in the chamber instead, since he's an elderly man who doesn't have much life left anyway, but of course the Doctor would never kill an innocent man to save himself.
"The Angels Take Manhattan" ends with Amy and Rory defeating the Weeping Angels...but then another Weeping Angel appears and sends them back in time, separating them from the Doctor forever. While it was definitely this trope for the Doctor, the episode also makes it clear that it was Happily Ever After for them.
In a Farscape time travel episode, John & Co finally manage to Set Right What Once Went Wrong and return to the future. Unfortunately, the best alternate they managed to create still led to a group of peaceful women and children being horribly slaughtered, when they'd survived in the original timeline.
Fear Itself heavily favored the cruel twist ending route during its short run:
"The Sacrifice": A man manages to kill a vampire, freeing the last survivor of an isolated town whose inhabitants have been sacrificing their own happiness to keep the vampire at bay for centuries. Then at the last minute, it turns out that he was bitten. (This is perhaps foreshadowed, however, with the fight that shows the vampire's power to teleport and turn invisible — or, at the very least, move so fast that it might as well be — meaning that it could have bitten him at any time.)
"Spooked": A Rabid Cop confronts the childhood trauma that led him to be such a monster, and refuses to cross over the line to become an actual murderer, and, now aware and able to deal with the trauma of his past, swears to live a better life and do the right thing from now on. Then he's accidentally shot dead by his partner.
"Family Man": An accident somehow switches the souls of an auditor and family man and a fleeing serial killer called "The Family Man", trapping them in each other's bodies. The protagonist finds himself staring down the death penalty and a world that despises him, while his family is in the hands of a monster (who, while he claims he wants to look after "his" family, is clearly a ticking time bomb from his psychosis). When the protagonist finally escapes, he makes his way to his house and engages in mortal combat with the impostor. And then he's shot dead by a policeman. But wait...! The auditor finds himself back in his own body: the process is reversed. He's saved! And then...it turns out the impostor has already murdered the protagonist's wife and son and assaulted (and probably raped) his daughter. The daughter survives and fingers him as he breaks down in sheer horror and despair. He's escaped one level of hell only to plunge headlong into an even crueler one, and there's no escape from this. This ending was so infamous that one of the proposed names for this trope was "The Family Man Twist."
Which one "New Year's Day" falls under is really up to the individual viewer. The twist: Our heroine, who has been spending the entire day trying to survive a zombie apocalypse and get to her friends' apartment, while being followed by her zombified boyfriend, turns out to have been a zombie all along. When she and her boyfriend get to her friends' apartment, they eat them.
At least "Community" gives us a warning at the start with an In Medias Res scene of the protagonist running away in fear. However, this doesn't even come close to justifying (let alone explaining) his legs being cut off by his inexplicably brainwashed wife!
The Haunting Hour TV series has these endings in nearly all of their episodes.
The first example was in "The Dead Body", in which the main character strikes a deal with a new kid in school to help him prank a couple of bullies. Afterwards, the new kid insists that the main character "owes him". It turns out, the new kid is a ghost, and the main character is sent back in time to prevent his death. The main character does so...only to die in the ghost's place, and the now living ghost returns to the present to live out the main character's life.
In "The Girl In the Painting", we follow a girl named Becky, who dreams of living a better life than the one she lives now. Becky finds a mysterious painting with real characters living inside of it who want her to come to their world so she would live a better life like she dreamed of. Becky gets swept up in her dreams and enters the beautiful painted world. Then it turns out that the people inside of it wanted to use her to feed a monster inhabiting their world so they wouldn't get eaten themselves. The episode ends with Becky getting Eaten Alive and revealing that the titular girl inside the painting doesn't like her own world, questioning why Becky would want her life.
"My Old House" has a young girl named Alice moving away from her sentient house, who's also her only best friend since she has a fragile relationship with her parents. She soon runs away from her family to live with the living building forever so she can finally be happy, but she soon sees that her own parents are desperately searching for their missing girl, proving that they do indeed love her. Upon realizing the mistake she made and knowing that her romanticized life with her house won't be as fantastic as she thought it was, Alice finally parts ways with her living house peacefully. Unfortunately, it turns out that the house refuses to let her leave and murders her (possibly) by absorbing her body within its walls so she'll be a permanent part of it forever. Alice's parents never find their daughter and a new little girl moves into the house as the episode closes out with the House implying that it'll kill again.
"Lotsa Luck": After trying to prevent an evil leprechaun named Seamus from stealing his soul, Greg uses the last of his three wishes to wish that he never met the leprechaun, thinking that this'll undo all the damage. However, it's rendered moot because Seamus reveals that Greg's soul belongs to him anyway because his own great grandfather offered it to him as tribute so he could keep his own. The episode ends on Seamus lunging at Greg to rip his soul out by force.
Season three of Heroes ended such a note, with Angela's prophetic dream that Matt Parkman would save her son turning out to have a different meaning once they realize that Nathan is already dead. Then, to make things worse, the teaser for season four hints that their efforts to realize the prophecy through brainwashing Sylar into believing he's Nathan might not take.
Highlander: The Series: Tessa Noel was saved by Duncan from an evil Watcher, only to be gunned down in a random act of street violence not even five minutes later.
Hollyoaks had an episode where, after Jade Albright waits nervously for the results of a biopsy to see whether she has cancer, the test comes back negative. Jade celebrates her sixteenth birthday with everyone she cares about, gets together with her crush, and her foster family formally adopts her. Various problems of her friends and sister get resolved too. Everything's happy - and then it's revealed the entire episode was a daydream as Jade sits in a doctor's office, where she's just been told she does have cancer (and, therefore, that the resolutions for her loved ones were equally imaginary).
In "Saviors", after everything seems wrapped up, complete with music from Hugh Laurie, House hallucinates Amber telling him that he's not losing his mind.
In "Both Sides Now", House realizes that Cuddy helping him detox and then sleeping with him was another hallucination...and then both Amber and Kutner show up.
In "Fall from Grace", it turns out that the patient whom the team has saved is actually a cannibal and a Serial Killer. He fled the hospital before the FBI agents who just arrived could catch him.
How I Met Your Mother: The finale: After a whole season of build up, Robin and Barney are married, after 9 seasons Ted meets Tracy, he decides to stay in New York and the gang can stay together. Yay! Then Barney and Robin divorce, Barney goes back to his broken, playboy ways, Robin splits away from the gang abandoning a devastated Lily and Tracy dies leaving Ted a single dad. And after nine seasons of Will They or Won't They? and Ted finally learning to let go of his Robin obsession before it destroys his chances of finding happiness by himself...it turns out that the whole series was him trying to smooth-talk his children into giving him permission to go after Robin again. No wonder fans reacted so badly that they preferred the alternate ending, which omitted the twist.
In the Season 17 finale of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, unit sergeant Mike Dodds is shot on a domestic violence call. The injury is serious, but he comes through the surgery and even seems to be in relatively good spirits in the ICU afterward, and everything is leading up to a happy ending. A few scenes later, he suffers a fatal stroke due to blood clots from the injury. The Hope Spot really just makes it so much more wrenching.
"Exodus": The raft crew are found by a nearby boat. They've finally found rescue! Oh, wait. It turns out The Others are in fact REAL and "the boy" they were coming to take was Walt, not Aaron! Within the next few minutes, the raft is destroyed, Jin and Sawyer's fates are left unclear, Walt is taken, and Michael is left alone in the dark waters screaming for his son.
"Through The Looking Glass": The survivors have made contact with the approaching freighter, ten Others are dead and Charlie has avoided his predicted death. Then, one of the Others turns out to be Not Quite Dead, the freighter is revealed to have not been sent by who they think it was, Naomi is back-stabbed by Locke (literally!), and Charlie dies in a Heroic Sacrifice. On top of all that, the episode's Jack-centric flashbacks showing him broken and suicidal are actually flashforwards, showing that he does eventually do what he's been attempting for three seasons and escape from The Island...only for it to be a poisoned chalice and completely destroy his life. So much so that he manically attempts to return! To say that the final scene completely changed the show for good is an understatement.
It is mirrored in the series finale, Goodbye, Farewell, & Amen, when Charles trains a group of North Koreans to play beautiful music, only to see them killed on the truck ride to a POW camp.
Every story from Night Visions ended this way, but a few episodes deserve special mention because their protagonists aren't in any way evil, or even mean-spirited. There's no Laser-Guided Karma here, just the universe being really nasty:
"Now He's Coming Up the Stairs" had Luke Perry as a psychiatrist who could heal mentally ill people by absorbing their problems and neuroses onto himself. He uses his powers to help a child who, after being in a car accident with his mother, believes that the victim in the accident is after him; the boy constantly chants "Now he's coming through the woods, now he's coming through the yard, now he's coming in the house, now he's coming up the stairs." The psychiatrist takes on the boy's paranoia, which heals him, and even manages to fight off the delusion of the dead man attacking him and the family—except he doesn't. He's actually gone irreversibly insane and is trapped forever in his own head, repeating the "Now he's coming through the woods" mantra. The last shot is the psychiatrist rocking back and forth and reciting. The end.
"If a Tree Falls..." has three college students accidentally drowning in a car accident—but since no one saw them die, they're still alive. One of the kids has strong religious convictions and can't bear the pressure of keeping their secret, so he decides to free his body from the wreck and move on to Heaven. You might expect that he succeeds, with his friends eventually realizing he was right—but the exact opposite occurs: he accidentally releases his two colleagues' corpses, which sends them into the afterlife, but in doing so sends the car plummeting to the bottom of the lake where they crashed, where it can never be found by anyone. He's now trapped on Earth forever, functionally immortal and completely alone.
"Neighborhood Watch" is particularly effective, as it relies on realistic fears rather than supernatural elements. A close-knit community is sent a letter with a warning that the newest occupant of the neighborhood is a dangerous child molester. A father, seeking to defend his daughter, eventually kills the man, and the other neighbors back him up...and then a second letter arrives, telling everyone that the first letter was a mistake, and the murdered man was completely innocent.
"Harmony" has a drifter who wanders into a town where music and singing is outlawed due to fear it will attract a monster. The drifter and a like-minded mother and child try to convince the townspeople this is nonsense, but they form an angry mob and attack them. Against all odds, the drifter manages to sing "Amazing Grace", and nothing happens. The townspeople joyously start singing and celebrating him as a hero for banishing their superstitions... then the monster shows up and attacks them.
"A View Through The Window" has a farm surrounded by an impenetrable forcefield materialize in the desert. The military investigates, and finds that the farmers inside cannot see or hear them, while they can only see and not hear them. One soldier, depressed by the loss of his family, observes the farmers and begins to fall in love with a lovely woman amongst them, who seems to be as sad and lonely as he is. The soldier notices that the forcefield goes down for brief periods at a time. Eventually, when the forcefield goes down, the soldier jumps into the farm, wanting to be with the woman and deciding there is nothing left for him in his original world. The inhabitants immediately transform into hideous monsters and tear him to pieces. His horrified comrades try to save him, but the forcefield goes back up before they can. The monsters then start testing the forcefield, waiting for it to go down again so they can escape to the outside world.
"My So-Called Life and Death" focuses on a moody teenage girl who is stuck on vacation with her Dysfunctional Family, including her brattyPyromaniac little brother. The girl develops a crush on the handyman next door, but he doesn't seem to notice her at all (and, when she tries to touch him, passes right through her). She tries to tell her family that their neighbor is a ghost, but they insist there's no such thing as ghosts, and yell at her to stop ruining their vacation. Undeterred (and excited by the idea of romancing a ghost), the girl finally succeeds in making contact with the handyman...only for him to scream and run away in terror, because sheis a ghost. Her brother set fire to the family's vacation home one night, killing them all in their sleep; the handyman is the house's new owner, trying to repair the damage. The girl confronts her family, but they deny everything, with her mother angrily and fearfully demanding that she continue to uphold the charade that they're just a normal family on vacation. The episode ends with the girl sitting down to lunch with her family, and her mother cheerfully exclaiming that she hopes their vacation lasts forever — giving her daughter a hard look when she hesitates to agree. The entire family is trapped in a fantasy, unable to move on, because their matriarch can't face the reality of what's happened to them, or the role she played in it; what's worse, their daughter is stuck in the company of a family she not only can't stand, but now knows is responsible for her death.
Once Upon a Time: "The Queen is Dead": Snow and Charming spend the whole episode searching for Rumple's dagger before Regina and Cora find it. They do, but then Regina and Cora appear with Snow's maid, Johanna, captive, demanding they hand over the dagger or Regina will crush Johanna's heart. Snow gives them the dagger and Regina puts Johanna's heart back into her body, but then Cora throws Johanna out the window, killing her anyway. Is it any wonder why, in the very next episode, Snow finally retaliated and cursed Cora's heart and tricked Regina into putting it back in, thus killing her?
The Outer Limits (1995) was so fond of this ending that the viewer could assume any given episode would end this way — and be right more often than not. It was the original Trope Namer because of how often it was used. (In contrast, the original The Outer Limits (1963) had a higher proportion of bittersweet or even positive endings.) Some notable examples:
"Quality of Mercy": A captured space pilot comforts the girl he's imprisoned with when the aliens start turning her into one of them. To give her hope, he says there's a secret reserve force waiting to strike at the aliens. Just what she wanted to hear, because she was a spy, and they're changing her back into an alien.
"Birthright": The protagonist believes he has thwarted an alien invasion... only for the taxi driver to reveal himself as one of them and capture him. The infiltration was more widespread than he thought.
"The Voice of Reason": A man appears before a government committee to warn them about alien infiltrators. They dismiss him as a nut. Suspecting the official who opposes him the loudest is an infiltrator, the man shoots and kills him, hoping to expose his alien nature. The official was human and a complete muggle, and the man is arrested. And it turns out the protagonist had managed to convince him that aliens could be a legitimate threat and killed his ally. Nearly everyone else in the committee is an alien, and they silently thank the man for getting rid of that guy, allowing them to take full control and further their invasion plans. (And this was the Clip Show. Even the clip show has a nasty ending.)
"Mind Over Matter": A man creates an A.I. machine to reach into a female coma patient's mind to help wake her up. It's a living dream and he falls in love with her cute avatar in the dream. Occasionally during this therapy, they are attacked by a grimy evil looking version of the woman he believes is the A.I. attempting to take over. In the end he strangles the evil woman. The patient then dies because the cute avatar was the A.I. all along.
"First Anniversary": Two best friends are both married to kind, loving women who look like supermodels, so they think life is good. But one day, one of them goes nuts, claims that the women are monsters, then commits suicide. After the funeral, his friend is baffled, until he starts to feel revulsion whenever he's around the girls (when he tries to kiss his wife, he smells and tastes something nasty). He fears that he's losing his mind, until the girls feel they have no choice but to confess. They are really aliens that crash landed on Earth. Since they can't leave, they decided to blend in and live the rest of their lives peacefully as human women. The reason his friend called them monsters and that he's feeling disgusted by them is that prolonged contact with them causes the person to develop an immunity to their Glamour. His wife tries to persuade him that no matter what they look like, they are still the nice women they befriended and fell in love with. Sadly, when he becomes completely immune to the illusion, their true form is so hideous that he suffers a complete mental breakdown. The women move on and seduce two new guys, meaning the cycle will repeat itself roughly once a year.
"Straight and Narrow": An exclusive private school brainwashes its students for use as mercenaries, similar to the movie Disturbing Behavior, which it predates. The one student who is immune to the process manages to escape and tell authorities — who prove to be alumni and drag him back to undergo the procedure (now corrected to work on the likes of him) as the assassination he'd tried to prevent is successfully carried out.
"The Deprogrammers": A group of humans beat alien brainwashing and eventually manage to take down the villain — just as a rival alien had arranged, as it turns out. Once they've done his dirty work for him, they're turned into hisBrainwashed slaves.
The writers continued "Quality of Mercy" in "The Light Brigade" just to squash any hope the viewers had. Due to the aforementioned episode, the aliens begin winning the war. In a last-ditch effort, humanity tries to surprise attack the alien homeworld with a planet-killing WMD. The fleet is ambushed and the ship carrying the device is crippled, and everyone is killed immediately or knocked unconscious and given a fatal dose of radiation which will kill them soon. The hero manages to unmask a traitor, get to the destination and drop the bomb before his ship can be boarded. Unfortunately, the ship had been turned around whilst everyone was unconscious - the hero has just heroically ensured that the bomb was dropped on Earth!
"Tempests": In order to save a space colony, a man must figure out which of the two realities between which he's switching are real, the seemingly perfect one or the darker one. He makes the "right" choice - and we find out that both worlds are Lotus Eater Machines. His real situation is much worse: he's cocooned by giant spiders and slowly being eaten, and as a result of his failure everyone presumably dies.
"Dead Man's Switch": A fleet of alien spaceships are seen heading toward Earth. Knowing they might be evil, a Doomsday plan with a Dead Man's Switch is prepared, with five people in individual bunkers sharing the responsibility to prevent the doomsday plan from being enacted (should it become unnecessary) by regularly pressing a button to keep the doomsday device from turning on. The five people in the bunkers are gradually killed off in variety of ways. The brief hope for peace is extinguished when a second fleet of colonization ships is found, and the button pressers lose all contact. They die in their separate bunkers one by one until the last one remains. He finally decides to let it happen when he gets a message from his commander telling him they defeated the aliens with a new weapon. He stops the Doomsday Device at the last second and is told to keep pushing the button until they can disarm it. The last scene shows the aliens who used the commander as a puppet eating his brains over the glowing red ruins of DC.
"A Special Edition": A guy appears on a talk show to present evidence that the government is performing illegal cloning experiments. The government cuts off their signal and sends armed thugs into the studio. The guy, cast, and crew try to escape, but are eventually captured. A clone of the guy appears and gives a fraudulent report that "disproves" the guy's evidence. The clone mocks the protagonists, claiming that the masses are stupid sheep who believe anything they hear, so his fraudulent report is already making them forget the truth. The guy, cast, and crew are all shot to death by the clone.
"Hearts and Minds": A group of soldiers fight the good fight against bizarre invading insectoid beasts, only to find that the "medication" given to them by their leaders is making them see their actually human enemies as bugs. They lay down their weapons and try to talk to the enemies... who promptly kill them all, being under the influence of similar drugs and seeing our protagonists as monsters.
"Nightmare": A team for special mission is captured and interrogated on their mission to place a Doomsday Device on their foe's home planet. The aliens are interrogating them about the mission and the device and attempting to reverse engineer the device. The creator is one of the persons being interrogated, and in going over how the device is triggered activates it with an override to prevent it from being disarmed. At this point it's revealed it's all been an elaborate simulation to see how they would stand up under stress and they've been on Earth the entire time. Since they've trained so hard with the bomb, they had to use the real bomb with an inactive trigger to simulate it correctly. The creator noticed and fixed it as part of her manual override. Cue Earth-Shattering Kaboom. This example shows the contrast between the original series and the revival. "Nightmare" is a remake of an episode from the original series which had a similar plot with the "it was a simulation" twist at the end but didn't have the whole thing with the bomb.
"In Our Own Image": An android programmed to be a soldier who wants to live a life of peace escapes from the lab and gets a ride from a random lady he carjacks. She helps him escape and attempt to get the items he needs to remove his safeguards and be free. At the last second before he's truly free, she reveals she was one of his programmers and shuts him down. She wanted to see what he could do before she stopped him. Unfortunately for her and humanity, he had identified her beforehand, turns himself back on, kills her, and starts a robot uprising. This may also count as him giving a Karmic Twist Ending. If humanity is going to act like this, then he needs to teach them a lesson.
"Blank Slate": A man with amnesia is pursued by mysterious agents for the device he's carrying. A woman is caught up in the events and teams up with the man. While on the run, they slowly fall in love. Unfortunately, when his memories come back, it turns out that he was working with the bad guys before. Reverting to his original evil personality, he betrays the woman and returns the device.
"Ripper": In Victorian London, a man goes on the trail of notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper. He eventually discovers that the Ripper is actually an evil Body Surfing alien. While it is in the body of an old woman, he fights and stabs it, only for the alien to exit the body and escape. The police arrive and arrest the protagonist, assuming that he is the Ripper. The alien, in a new body, visits the protagonist in the asylum and promises to find his family and kill them before leaving.
"Breaking Point": A guy makes a time machine and travels a few days into the future but finds out his wife is dead. Horrified, he returns to the present and tries to protect and warn her. His wife refuses to believe his stories of time travel, and eventually, he loses his temper and accidentally kills her. Anguished, declaring himself a monster, he decides she would have been better off without him, so he travels back to the day they met and kills his past self before he met her, erasing himself from existence. It was all for nothing. In the new timeline, it turned out that his wife had been contemplating suicide and meeting him that fateful day had saved her.
"The Grid": A man on a road trip stops at another city and finds that an evil organization has installed the buildings with antennas that emit a mind-controlling signal as a sort of Take Over the World plot. Since the protagonist is immune, the brainwashed citizens are ordered to kill him. He escapes and returns to his hometown, intending to call the cops, only to find more antennas. His brainwashed wife shoots him.
"Gettysburg": A time traveler sends three young men at a Battle of Gettysburg reenactment back to the actual battle. One of the young men was a Southern fanatic who thought the South should have won and the battle was glorious. Being in the real battle under an insane commander dying of meningitis disabuses him of the notion. The time traveler sought to teach him that Aesop, because otherwise he would shoot the first black U.S. President in 2013 when the president spoke at Gettysburg due to his Southern sympathies. The time traveler, however, dropped his device and the insane commander accidentally activated it, causing him to be transported to the future where he then shoots the president while he attempts to shoot the Lincoln reenactor.
"FinalAppeal": A woman time travels to the future and is arrested because technology is banned. She goes on trial and tries to convince the leaders to bring technology back, because she has seen futures where humanity is screwed without technology. A second time traveler arrives with a nuclear bomb and threatens the leaders to keep technology banned, because he had seen futures where humanity ended up screwed over because of technology. After a long debate, the leaders decide to lift the ban and everyone seemingly convinces the second time traveler not to kill them and to return to his own time. He leaves... but leaves the bomb behind and it explodes, wiping out the city.
"A New Life": This episode's premise may remind some fans of Shyamalan's The Village (2004). Two married couples join a cult that resembles Puritanism, because their lives have become unfulfilling. The problem is, no one remembered how they reached the forest they were brought to, because the cult leader knocked everyone unconscious en route. At first, the protagonist seemed okay with his new life until the cult leader borrows his child and brands him. After the protagonist gets his son back, he panics and convinces his wife to flee from the village with him. Soon, they realize the forest's edge is blocked by a force field, and stay on the run, but their branded child was used as a tracking device. As a result, the couple was discovered by the cult leader and captured. For fleeing, the protagonist would be executed, so he helped convince his male friend (played by Jeremy Sisto) to help him escape and de-activate the force field. The plan goes well at first until the two of them find a teleporter. The protagonist volunteers to enter, while his friend protects his wife. After entering the teleporter, the protagonist was transported to a dark room with several robed people. The people in robes? Oh they're aliens. They also claim that the forest is inside a spaceship, they've already left Earth, and they plan to use religion to encourage people to breed for the next 500 years...which is when they'll reach their destination and use the humans as slave labor. Of course, the protagonist gets killed for knowing too much, though his partner met a grisly end. The cult leader burns him at the stake to urge people not to rebel. Even better? His wife watches him get roasted.
"The Surrogate": A woman becomes a surrogate to a family via a private medical facility. She joins a support group for surrogate mothers there and becomes suspicious. Standard Town with a Dark Secret plot, right? Suspecting her baby will be a monster or something else she contacts an FBI agent who at first thinks she's crazy. The actual babies are never seen, and the surrogate mothers don't like to talk about them afterwards. When the big day comes, the FBI agent busts in to stop the evil birth... only to discover the entire thing was a breeding operation for aliens. The alien's birth occurs when the alien growing in her womb eats all of her except her skin. And it's still hungry for more, ending with the FBI agent getting eaten too.
"The Human Factor": On the first ever colony on Ganymede, a robot suddenly rigs the reactor to blow up. The robot explains that since Humans Are the Real Monsters, its logical course of action is to destroy the colony and prevent humanity from expanding beyond Earth. The crew manages to deactivate the robot and save the reactor, though all but one die in the process. The survivor receives a message from Earth. World War III broke out, and nukes have wiped out a lot of the planet (including the survivor's family). A shuttle carrying the President and other officials is heading for Ganymede and will arrive in a few months. In despair, the survivor re-rigs the reactor to blow and turns the robot back on. He tells the robot it was right, then offers to play chess to pass the time until the colony is blown to kingdom come (though this one skirts Karmic Twist Ending a bit).
It turns into an outright cruel twist ending if you accept it as a true sequel to "Phobos Rising" instead of just another Clip Show episode attempt for Arc Welding unrelated episodes. Said previous episode had a true Karmic Twist Ending, as the Martian colonies destroyed each other thanks to rampant paranoia in the wake of a catastrophic event that ended up with the two factions declaring a truce, and just to twist the knife in further, the general giving the news to the sole survivors of each colony tells them that all of Earth is looking to Martian colonies as a symbol and example of cooperation and solidarity.
"Human Trials": A group of soldiers sign up for a top-secret mission. To "weed out the wimps", the soldiers are placed in virtual reality simulations (the kind where you can feel everything) of battles, natural disasters, etc. Those who die, crack, or give up in the simulations are eliminated and sent home. In the end, only one soldier makes it. After the round of congratulations, he eagerly asks what his mission is. He is then informed that there was no mission; For Science!, they were looking for someone really tough so that they could use him as a guinea pig to test the limits of human endurance and willpower. He is forcibly plugged back into virtual reality and subjected to nightmarish tortures as the technicians and military officials look on with Lack of Empathy.
Saturday Night Live: Played for Laughs in the "Japanese Game Show" sketch, where an American tourist (Chris Farley) mistakenly winds up on a Japanese game show where the host (Mike Myers) subjects the players (Alec Baldwin and Janeane Garofalo) to Yakuza-style punishments when they answer incorrectly. Farley makes it through to the final round by using random Japanese words. However, with the last question, he gets it wrong by a single syllable and is electrocuted as punishment.
"The Cutty Black Sow". A young boy's dying grandmother instructs him in a rite to ward off an evil Celtic demon that claims the souls of those who die on All Hallow's Eve. The boy obediently performs the rite, putting stones in a fire marked with the names of his family members. His Bratty Half-Pint little sister knocks the stone with his name out of the fire, which according to the myth, means that his soul will be taken by the Cutty Black Sow. The rest of the episode consists of him jumping at every sound and seeing a pair of yellow eyes through windows...until the end, where his parents come home from Grandma's funeral and his father comes up to tuck him into bed. Where's the twist? He embraces his father, relieved that it's over...and his father turns into the Cutty Black Sow. The boy is paralyzed with fear as the demon leans over him. Yeah, that's what you GET for trying to save your grandmother's soul, kid!
"Effect and Cause": An aging hippie with a broken leg and her boyfriend witness the world's chaotic nature coming to a head, with things spontaneously happening, appearing and disappearing at random. They're both amazed, but she is really excited to be seeing the nature of the very universe. So...what does the universe do? Spontaneously change around the furniture as she walks around, causing her to fall and land on her broken leg, spontaneously cause some events that make the cops come to her house, spontaneously turn on the gas on the stove, and cause the broken doorbell to cause a spark and blow up the house while she can't do anything but watch it all unfold. Pretty vindictive for random chaos.
"Three's a Crowd": A man believes that his wife and best friend are having an affair, leading him to eventually murder the both of them in a drunken rage. But just as he attempts getting rid of her body, he stumbles right into a surprise party that she and the friend had planned for him. And the reason? All to announce that they were going to be parents. So thanks to a misunderstanding, the man has now murdered his wife, his best friend, and his unborn child.
"Abra Cadaver": In revenge for a prank that ruined his career, surgeon Marty poisons his younger brother Carl and injects him with a drug before he dies. Carl's body is hung on a meat hook, drained of blood, and scalped in an anatomy demonstration... all while he's fully conscious, yet unable to move, speak, or feel anything. It's an elaborate prank staged by Marty to demonstrate how his drug preserves brain function after death. However, Carl suffers a heart attack in shock; Marty injects him with a larger dose. The drug works, but Carl is left helplessly witnessing his own real autopsy. The kicker? Contrary to Marty's previous claim, the sense of touch isn't the first to go — it's the last.
"The Bribe": A retired Fire Marshall named Martin is a widower who's doing the best he can for his daughter Hiley, trying to make sure she gets a good education and marries an good man. When Hiley tells him that she has to drop out of college due to budgetary constraints, he begrudgingly accepts a $60,000 bribe from a local strip club owner named Puck to pay for her tuition, on the condition that Puck leave Hiley alone, as Martin believes he's been taking nude pictures of her. Martin helps Hiley reconcile with her boyfriend Ron, and as she gets ready for a date, he gives her a golden bracelet that belonged to her late mother. Not wanting to have his reputation tarnished by his bribe, Martin corners Bic, an unstable pyromaniac/arsonist, who he coerces into setting fire to the strip club next Sunday, when it will be closed. Responding to the scene of the fire after the club burned down, Martin is shocked to discover that Puck had held a private party there and that he was the only survivor. The party was apparently for Hiley and Ron, and the severely burned Puck weakly hands over the bracelet Martin gave to Hiley. Heartbroken over having brought about the deaths of numerous people and his own daughter, Martin goes home and shoots himself in his daughter's bedroom. The next morning, the phone rings and the answering machine picks up. The caller is Hiley, alive and well, calling to apologize for not telling her dad that she had decided to elope, as well as to say that the family's money troubles are over. Her new husband is not Ron, but Bill, the strip club's manager and the one who took the naked photos of her. The two of them arranged for Martin to receive the photos anonymously, and for themselves to leave the party early in order to divert his suspicions. As the duo drive off, Hiley wonders where her bracelet is, but decides not to worry about it.
The Twilight Zone (1959): Perhaps the best illustration of the difference between a Karmic Twist Ending and a cruel-twist ending are two episodes with virtually the same plot: a man manages to apparently become the last man on Earth but cannot enjoy it. (In the second case the man finds he finally has time to read all the books he wants — until he breaks his glasses.) It's the same twist in both episodes, but in "The Mind and the Matter", the man is a Misanthrope Supreme who wills everyone else away, making his eventual fate karmic justice. In "Time Enough at Last", however, the man is a timid man who is ridiculed by his wife and boss for reading books, and who only survives a nuclear holocaust because he locked himself in a bank vault as the only way he could get some peace. In this case, the world screws him over just to be mean. Wikipedia claims that he was being punished for being antisocial, and for daring to think that humanity being wiped out had a positive side. Make of that what you will.
"A Little Peace and Quiet": A woman finds a pearl necklace that can stop time, like in the old TZ, but uses it to stop time immediately before Soviet missiles impact her town, leaving her with a choice of being permanently stuck in a frozen world or starting time again only to be vaporized.
"A Small Talent for War": An alien ambassador admonishes humanity for their primitive, war-like ways, and threatens annihilation if humans can't show greater potential. The UN achieves a treaty for world peace, but it turns out the aliens wanted greater potential for violence.
The very first episode featured a rebel-lite teenage girl destroyed by the above-mentioned sealed-off modern community with the obligatory nasty secret, and along the way helps her younger sibling become an accomplice to a fairly grisly act. There was no sci-fi in her fate, more Sopranos — and the sick twist is, in her depiction, she was no more a 'true' rebel than the oldsters in the original TZ's "Kick The Can" were really all that old. The would-be "rebel" many RL parents would be happy to get has some tattoos and some 'tude, and that's really about it.
In one episode, a woman is sent back in time to kill Adolf Hitler as a baby. She struggles with the reality of actually killing an infant, but in the end, jumps off a bridge with the child, killing them both. Little Adolf's nanny, unwilling to admit to her employers what happened, replaces him with another baby. The implication is that this whole action was part of our timeline, and the replacement baby was the actual Hitler from our history.
