Didnt Think This Through / Live-Action TV

People not thinking things through in live-action TV.

---

• A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon)

---

• In one episode of 30 Rock, Kenneth pitches an idea for a game show he had to Jack: a show like Deal or No Deal where the contestants must find out which briefcase has a million dollars in gold inside. While filming it, the contestants only need to look for which model is having difficulty holding her briefcase. The show is then quickly canned. Kenneth even lampshades it:
  "Ooooh, gold's real heavy, innit?"
• Many of the deaths in 1000 Ways to Die are a result of this.
  • One specific example is a drug dealer who came up with the brilliant idea to soak a T-shirt in LSD and simply wear it through airport security to smuggle it. What he failed to realize is that the acid soaked into him through his sweat and he ended up overdosing and frying his brain.
• In The Adventures of Timmy the Tooth episode "Molar Island", the Gingivitis Gang, Flossmore Valley's resident Bulk & Skull ^note to the Cavity Goon's Rita Repulsa or Lord Zedd., are depicted on Timmy's dream vacation at the titular island as the cannibalistic Gingivitis Tribe who steal the crown of Moral Island's King Tooth. When they capture Timmy and Brushbrush intended to cook and eat them, Timmy points out that stealing that Crown is causing the island to sink and they'll all sink with it. The Gingivitis Tribe agree to put aside their differences and help the other residents of Molar Island (Timmy's friends in the real world) return the Crown to the King, saving the island.
• All My Children: When Michael Cambias is found dead after being acquitted for his rape of Bianca, Bianca's sister Kendall, having been married to him, subsequently claims that she's pregnant with his child after marrying him (actually marrying Enchantment's chemist, Boyd Larraby, who masqueraded under Michael's identity to help make it seem like Kendall married Michael) before his death, in order to protect Bianca, who really was pregnant with her daughter Miranda after Michael raped her. Greenlee, due to being Locked Out of the Loop, believes that Kendall is just trying to steal the Cambias fortune and full control over Fusion Cosmetics, and when Kendall is put on trial for Michael's murder, she goes so far as to expose Kendall's Fake Pregnancy in open court by ripping her dress off in a fit of rage. Soon afterwards, she gets a serious What the Hell, Hero? from Ryan and her father Jack, who inform her that due to her actions, she's ensured that Kendall is the prime suspect in Michael's murder and may very well go to prison or worse for it, something Greenlee never considered beforehand. Greenlee immediately suffers a My God, What Have I Done? moment.
• In the 'Allo 'Allo! episode "The Jet Propelled Mother-In-Law", two plans to kill General von Klinferhoffen fail due to poor planning:
  • First, Alphonse tries killing him with poisoned wine. However, he ends up with the poisoned glass, so he's forced to spit it out, and the Germans do the same to their own wine, thinking it's the "fancy" way to taste wine.
  • Second, they try using an explosive shell hidden under Fanny's wheelchair. It's not meant to be a suicide bombing, so they connect the bomb to an alarm clock so Fanny can take cover when she hears the ringing, just before it blows up. However, they didn't take into account that Fanny can't hear anything without her ear trumpet, so she doesn't even notice the alarm (thankfully, the detonator fell out of the shell, so all that happens is the wheelchair getting propelled away at high speeds).
• In one episode of Aquí no hay quien viva, the entire neighborhood becomes hooked up on a telenovela, which they can watch thanks to Roberto helping them steal Lucía's cable, and Paco starts downloading it from the Internet. When Lucía learns about it and cuts off the cable, causing the neighbors to miss the final episode, Paco asks them for a lot of money and an emergency community meeting is held to pass a split contribution to pay him. Lucia is shocked by the neighbors' plan and immediately reveals to them that there is a major flaw in that plan, only to be completely ignored by them.
  Lucía: Don't you see that we could pay months of cable for everyone with that money?
  Mauri: Leave it, Lucía. It's the logical thing; they won't do it.
• Arrested Development: Gob comes up with a magic performance in "Key Decisions" where he is locked up in the same prison where his father is doing time and escapes. His plan is to swallow the key to the cell, pass it, and unlock the cell door. When it comes time to do so...
  Gob: Hey, Dad. Is there, like, a private bathroom I can use?
  George: Um... [taps the in-cell toilet with his foot] You're looking at it.
  Gob: No, no. I can't use that. I, uh, I need privacy. Yeah, I've always been that way.
  (George gives him an "I'm serious" look)
  Gob: Come on, dad! If I'm gonna pass this key, I can't do it in front of all these other guys!
  George: Well, we could ask them all to leave but, um, there's this thing. They've been locking the doors lately, so...
  Gob: I've made a huge mistake.
• In Avenue 5, Rev hops on the supply shuttle to drag Judd back to Earth and get some distance from the bad press on Earth. However, it's only once they're on the way that she realizes that there's only one passenger seat on the shuttle, meaning that she'll be stuck on Avenue 5.
• In Backstage, Kit has a Hannah Montana-esque Secret Identity called DJ Diamondmind whose tracks are renowned. She used her alter-ego's tracks to audition for Keaton School for the Arts; when this gets out, she finds herself accused of plagiarism and faces expulsion (it works out, but it's still a pretty big oversight).
• On Bar Rescue, this is the core reason the bar in question is in trouble. If you own the place, sinking your life savings into a small business and expecting it to be a moneymaker on its own is always going to lead to a rude awakening.
• Invoked on Batman (1966) when inventor Pat Pending boasts that his universal solvent will make him millions. His assistant points out the tiny fact that a universal solvent will go through any container and thus become impossible to use. Pending's reaction indicates this isn't the first time his assistant has pointed out the key flaw to his otherwise brilliant inventions.
• Better Call Saul:
  • Jimmy is trying to find plaintiffs for a case, so he advocates for a commercial. His boss Cliff likes the idea, but is absolutely furious when he discovers Jimmy went behind his back to produce the commercial and air it without consulting him first. Jimmy thought the commercial's huge success and low cost would lead to him being Easily Forgiven for the slight, but he did not understand that the commercial's success was not what his seniors cared about, it was the fact he knowingly undermined their authority and put the firm's reputation at stake for a single case. Cliff, who had been very kind and generous towards Jimmy prior, does give him a second chance after this whole fiasco, but with Jimmy placed on a much tighter leash (which Jimmy chafes at), complete with a minder monitoring all his actions and Jimmy being under what amounts to a workplace equivalent of house arrest. Kim is also punished by association for knowing of Jimmy's intention to air the commercial and not alerting her superiors, and not even the fact that Jimmy made her believe that he had full approval for the commercial saves her.
    • Jimmy almost immediately stumbles into another one of these, only to be saved at the last minute. He responds to the new limits on his freedom at work by drafting a resignation letter, only for his assistant (who as far as we know isn't even a lawyer), to point out that doing it so soon after he joined the firm would cause Jimmy to lose the very lucrative bonus he got when he signed on with the firm. Jimmy being brilliant at making short term gains while not thinking through the long term ramifications of his actions and being frustrated by the dry and stuffy confines of the legal world are very important themes in the show.
  • In the episode "Gloves Off", Nacho wants Mike to kill Tuco so that Tuco won't find out that Nacho's been doing illicit drug deals on the side and kill him (very likely, due to Tuco's Hair-Trigger Temper thanks to a constant meth high). Mike considers it, but eventually realizes it's a bad idea because Tuco's equally violent cartel family will start looking into who knocked off one of their own, making it even tougher for Nacho (and Mike by proxy) to keep themselves alive. Mike comes up with a ploy that sends Tuco to prison for a few years instead.
  • Double subverted. Nacho is a very intelligent drug lord who shows patience in his dealings, and is careful thinking things out. However, he quickly realizes his big mistake is assuming that everyone working for him can also see the big picture and won't, say, try to kill a rival without clearing it with Nacho first or bother covering up any of the evidence of their involvement. Nacho soon realizes most crooks are stupid and impulsive, and will likely not realize the consequences of just shooting a guy in the heat of the moment because they were pissed off.
• The Big Bang Theory shows Leonard trying to slip out to meet his then-girlfriend and getting Sheldon to cover for him. Given that Sheldon cannot do this convincingly, Leonard almost immediately wonders why he didn't think this through. (Specifically, if he knows that Sheldon can't lie convincingly, why didn't he just lie to Sheldon too?)
• An episode of Blake's 7 plays this for laughs with its justification: when Vila asks Tarrant if he can actually dock their tiny ship into the Liberator that they have just reclaimed from Servalan, the following exchange occurs. (Incidentally, it's just a throwaway gag, since the very next scene has them already back on the Liberator safely.)
  Tarrant: I hadn't really considered it.
  Vila: What?
  Tarrant: I thought we'd be dead by now.
• Boardwalk Empire: In Season 5, Nelson van Alden and a conspirator try to con their way into a Capone money counting operation to rob it. Their threadbare ploy breaks down before they can even get the door open. Nelson stoically comments that their plan was poorly thought through and then resorts to a desperate assault, with disastrous results.
• On Bones:
  • Jacob Broadsky was buying land in the name of other snipers. He failed to realize that buying land in Booth’s name would give Booth a free pass onto said land. Cue Oh, Crap! and Broadsky running since, as Booth points out, if it's Booth's land he can just shoot Broadsky as a trespasser.
  • No one realized that the last season’s villain Kovac, who was a paramedic, would have the means to track Brennan’s dad Max using his new pacemaker. It proves fatal for Max.
• Breaking Bad:
  • Saul notes that even though Walt was smart for putting in a phone call that painted Skyler as an unwilling accomplice to his criminal enterprise, his going on the run means that the authorities have to find someone else to go after: Skyler. When it gets out that Skyler was married to a drug lord, she will have an impossible time finding a job and providing for their kids. When Walt says he has millions of dollars to give them, Saul snaps that the Feds are now watching, and there's no way Walt can ever get that money to them without it being seized. By the stunned look on his face, it's obvious Walt is realizing for the first time how badly he's messed things up.
  • Granted, they were really desperate, but Walt's and Jesse's attempt to poison Tuco with ricin after he'd taken them to his hideout was never going to work. Walt himself mentions that ricin is a slow-acting poison. In fact, that property was the crux of their original plan — give it to Tuco during a regular business meeting, so that he would die in a few days from a seemingly natural cause, leaving them in the clear. But at that particular moment Tuco's associates were supposed to arrive in just a few hours to smuggle them all to Mexico, meaning that Tuco's death wouldn't have benefited them at all — on the contrary, other gangers would've most certainly made the connection and killed them on the spot (Tuco, at least, was planning to keep them alive as his meth cooks).
  • Walter himself doesn't plan his meth cooking sessions nearly as well as he should've, at least in the offset of his career. When they're about to leave for the middle of nowhere to cook for several days straight, he entrusts obtaining food and water supplies to his scatterbrained junkie partner, doesn't check that their RV/mobile meth lab is in working order (it isn't, and not for the first time), and doesn't arrange for a back up in case something goes wrong (it does). Neither does he plan for the possibility of the RV being busted by the police, so when it inevitably happens, has to frantically scramble around to destroy it.
• The Brittas Empire: Occurs in "Set In Concrete". Brittas, believing the building to have Sick Building Syndrome, orders everyone out. However, his feet have been put in a box of concrete and it's not until everyone leaves that he realises that he should have asked someone to wheel him out.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In the final episodes of Season 4, Spike schemes to break up the Scoobies by exploiting the existing tensions between the group, and then planting evidence to lure Buffy into a trap as part of Big Bad Adam's plan. However, after all is said and done, Adam points out that Spike gave Willow the evidence to decrypt (as she's the team member who knows how to hack), and Willow won't be speaking to Buffy now thanks to Spike's manipulations. Spike quickly goes out to fix his scheme. Amusingly enough, this exchange was added into the series after the writers themselves realized the error of Spike's plan only after the initial episode was already filmed.
  • Apparently, when she had Willow activate all Slayers worldwide in Season 7, it never occurred to Buffy at that moment that not all of the newly empowered Slayers would be willing to use their powers for good, with one Slayer in particular, Simone Doffler, becoming a terrorist and obsessed with killing her to become top dog, and another Slayer, Dana, having been driven Axe-Crazy thanks to a psychopath kidnapping and torturing her as a child. Although even if it had occurred to her, it would have been a The Needs of the Many situation with the First Evil having been on the verge of unleashing an apocalypse at the end of Season 7.
• One particularly tragic example happens in Castle in the episode 47 Seconds. A reporter and two other co-conspirators plant a bomb without any shrapnel in a hair-brained attempt to boost the reporters reputation so she'll get better stories. They never stop to think that A)They're doing this in the middle of a protest whose protestors have been doing this for several days straight. B) That so many people grouped together in one place for so many days in a row make an irresistible target for pickpockets and thieves and C) They have no way to stop the bomb from going off if the backpack which the bomb is in also contains the cell phone needed to tell the bomber not to set off the bomb and it gets lost, stolen or misplaced. The explosion kills 5 people, injures 3 others and destroys a career all in one go.
• Charmed (1998): When Chris asks Phoebe for help getting Piper and Leo back together in time for his conception (Chris is Piper and Leo's Kid from the Future), Phoebe points out that Chris is the one who separated Piper and Leo in the first place so that he could take Leo's place as the Charmed Ones' whitelighter to pursue his agenda of preventing his older brother Wyatt from turning evil in the future. Phoebe insists it's not her fault that Chris didn't think things through, though she does eventually agree to help him. Chris merely says he was too absorbed in saving the world to check the dates on the calendar, which isn't a very convincing excuse. Out-of-universe, this was the result of Real Life Writes the Plot - Chris had always been intended to be Piper and Leo's son, but wasn't going to be born so soon. Piper's actress became pregnant and her pregnancy was written into the show. invoked
• Control Z:
  • Luis falsely admitted to being the hacker in a futile attempt to stop Gerry, Darío and Ernesto from bullying him ever again. However, he never considered that Gerry, assuming this lie to be true, would go after him to misguidedly exact revenge and even the hacker worsening the whole ordeal by arranging a public fight between them.
  • Raúl's actions as the hacker came from a comment Sofía made to him about everything being easier if everyone just told the truth to each other and stopped pretending to live fake lives. However, in doing so, Raúl had never imagined that all of this would result in fights, broken friendships and Gerry's murderous rampage that resulted in Luis's death, which was also the catalyst of events that incited the Avenger to come about in the first place. In season 2, his argument with Sofía after allowing Gerry to escape clearly says it all.
• Cutthroat Kitchen: One chef might spend extravagantly in the first two rounds in order to sabotage the other three. If that chef survived until the last round, they usually wound up desperately short on cash and unable to fend off any sabotages by an opponent itching to even the score.
• Played for laughs on The Daily Show as John Oliver is supposed to talk on the NFL referee strike. Instead, it's Patrick Stewart who does a Shakespearan speech on it. Stewart explains that the other Daily Show correspondents are "on strike" and will be replaced by the likes of himself, Al Pacino, Glenn Close and other notable actors.
  Jon Stewart: I believe I’ve detected a bit of a rub in the strike strategy. You’re better than them. You are an infinitely superior substitute.
  • Sure enough, Oliver races on camera to explain the staff is already prepared to come back from the strike.
• Doctor Who:
  • "World War Three": The Slitheen get into 10 Downing Street and chase the Ninth Doctor, Rose, and Harriet Jones. The Doctor activates a defense mechanism that means there is 3 inches of thick metal between them and the Slitheen — or any way of escape.
    The Doctor: They'll never get in.
    Rose: And how do we get out?
    The Doctor: ...Ah.
    • Of course this is a better example of the trope considering there wasn't much other choice.
  • "Army of Ghosts": The Doctor's opinion regarding what Torchwood has done with the Breach.
    The Doctor: So you find the Breach, probe it, the Sphere comes through, 600 feet above London, bam! It leaves a hole in the fabric of reality. And that hole, do you think "Oh, should we leave it alone? Should we back off, should we play it safe?" Nah, you think "Let's make it BIGGER!"
  • "Partners in Crime": Miss Foster is convinced that, as the "nanny" of the baby Adipose she's breeding for her clients, she'll be welcomed with open arms by the First Family. Two problems: One, once the parents have the children, they no longer need a nanny. Two, more importantly, using a "level five" planet like Earth as a breeding ground is a strict violation of intergalactic law... and Miss Foster is the only evidence that links the children to Earth. Cue the Disney Villain Death.
  • "The Vampires of Venice": Rosanna doesn't consider that sending all of the girls she's transformed into her species to attack the Doctor and his companions puts them all at risk of being killed, despite the fact that they're the cornerstone of her plan to save her race. Her reaction when the Doctor tells her they're dead indicates she's realized this.
  • Series 9 finale "Hell Bent" has a justified example with the Doctor's Driven to Madness plan to save Clara from her already-happened death, which falls apart over 1) him basically hoping it doesn't destroy the universe and 2) Clara's own objections to it, especially when she realizes he'll take away her memories of their time together and leave her with an ordinary Earthly life.
  • "Rosa": The antagonist, Krasko, is trying to Make Wrong What Once Went Right by either preventing Rosa Parks from taking her famous bus ride, or ensuring there are few enough passengers on the bus that Rosa won't be asked to give up her seat. However, he doesn't seem to have considered that a) she could just take another bus, and b) since this is a deeply racist period of history, he could get her out of the way by framing her for a crime she didn't commit, instead of trying the most complicated solution possible. Of course some people have found Fridge Brilliance in this, in that it's mocking the general stupidity of white supremacists.
  • The 11th Doctor is left dumbfounded when his centuries of interventions across the universe lead to wars directed at him personally. River points out that "Doctor" means "warrior" in some cultures because of his influence.
• Emergency!: Appeared more than once, sometimes in a comic way, sometimes more serious.
  • In one comical example, a sculptor building a "modern art" sculpture out of trash crawled inside the sculpture to finish it. However, he forgot to leave a way for him to get back out. The Station 51 crew had to figure out how to extract him without destroying the sculpture.
  • In a more serious example, Gage and DeSoto were called to help a man who had a heart attack while being held hostage by bank robbers. Gage exploited this trope by convincing the robbers that they blew their whole plan when they called the paramedics to help the sick man, because it proved to the cops that they wouldn't follow through on their threats to kill the hostages.
  • One of the most tragic examples was a woman whose son was displaying early signs of polio. She at first insisted it had to be something else then said that she hadn't gotten him the vaccine because she thought it had been controlled to the point where it was impossible to contract the disease anymore.
• In the Enemy at the Door episode "Jealousy", a woman anonymously denounces her sister-in-law to the German police as a black marketeer, justifying it to herself as saving her brother from a woman who (in her opinion) doesn't deserve him. The Germans confiscate the entire family's papers as part of the investigation, discover an irregularity in the brother's birth certificate, and deport him. Any consolation the sister might have got from having at least succeeded in separating him from his wife is lost when the Germans decide at the last minute to deport his wife along with him.
• On Family Law: Rex and Lynn decide to prove how illegal a minister's "mass marriages" are by taking part in one themselves. While that wins them the case, the pair quickly realize that getting a quick annulment will mean exposing this was done just for the case. This means the bar association might determine what they did was fraud and disbar them both so they have to keep the sham up for a while.
  • Lynn also realizes too late that once her ex-husband learns she's married again, he no longer has to pay alimony.
• The Flash: Cisco, HR, and Julian hide from Caitlin/Killer Frost by locking themselves behind a containment door. Forgetting that she still has all her access codes, which she points out after opening the door.
• Several of the hot calls in Flashpoint start with someone running into a snag in a plan:
  • In "Never Kissed A Girl", a young parolee who was imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit goes to the courthouse to confront the prosecutor who railroaded him, but doesn't realize until it's too late that his ankle bracelet will trigger the courthouse metal detector. He freaks out and grabs a gun from a court officer.
  • In "Aisle 13", two teenagers who've just robbed a store find their planned escape route blocked. It's only then that they realize they didn't have a plan for that scenario.
  • Invoked by Parker in "The Perfect Family". Parker convinces a young birthmother who had abducted her son from his adoptive parents to surrender by pointing out that their impromptu plan didn't take into account that she had no idea how to care for an infant.
• One Viva Las Vegas! episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air has Will and Carlton going to gamble at a roulette table. Carlton is initially reluctant to bet anything to start, but after some prodding by Will he eventually makes a wager. Will goes to see what his cousin's been up to after the croupier declares no more bets:
  Carlton: I bet $5 on Red and $5 on Black.
  Will: You can't win anything that way.
  Carlton: (happy with his strategy) But I can't lose either.
  Will: Not unless it's—
  (ball drops into its slot)
  Croupier: Double-zero, Green.
• Friends:
  • In "The One Where Phoebe Hates PBS", One thing Phoebe does to prove that selfless good deeds exist is by having a bee sting her, to "make it appear tough in front of its bee friends." Joey points out that bees die after they sting.
  • In "The One With Christmas In Tulsa", Chandler finally gets tired of all the things he has to do for his company while working in Oklahoma, so he quits. When Rachel asks him what he's going to do now, he says the trope by name.
• Full House:
  • "I'm Not D.J.": With her other classmates having gotten their ears pierced, Stephanie wants hers pierced, as well, but Danny refuses to let her until she enters junior high like D.J. did. Stephanie gets Kimmy to do it, since her brother, Garth, works at a tattoo parlor and borrows the ear piercing gun for the job. After the fact, Stephanie doesn't anticipate the fact she has to leave the studs in her ears until they heal after six weeks, and within that time-span, she needs to prevent Danny from seeing them. Moreover, because of Kimmy being inexperienced at piercing, failing to follow the most important rules of always having to clean and disinfect the piercing gun before and after each use (having practiced using the gun on cold cuts) and making sure she and her subject are sanitary before the piercing process (washing her hands, wearing gloves and disinfecting the area where the piercing will be placed), Stephanie's ears become infected, and Michelle, even though she wasn't allowed to tell Danny, tells D.J. instead, at which point Stephanie fesses up to Danny of what happened.
  • "The Apartment": Instead of hiring a contractor to pave the backyard driveway, Jesse and Joey rent a cement mixer truck so they can do the job themselves and save money. They get the cement laid down without any problem, but they start at the street end of the driveway. Once they finish, they have to wait until all the cement has set before they can drive the truck out of the yard and return it. The cost of the extra rental time wipes out the savings from doing the job on their own.
  • "Up on the Roof": D.J. and Kimmy brainstorm of a senior prank that would surpass Jesse's prank of snatching Principal Robolard's Dodgy Toupee and using it as a makeshift flag. They eventually come up with the idea to have Robolard's classic 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible, which he had driven throughout his own high school years, hoisted onto the roof of their school, but they and the other students participating make two mistakes: 1): they didn't check the weather conditions and 2): the convertible top was down. When an approaching thunderstorm threatens to destroy the car's interior, they can't put the top back up since it's an automatic top and the keys are required to activate it, but Jesse is able to help them hotwire it to fix the problem, only for him to get caught by security.
• Good Omens (2019) has a Running Gag that the demon Crowley will do minor evil deeds that effect the entire area of London since it's more efficient than doing big ones one at a time... without considering he lives in London. It ends up biting him every single time, such as cutting off all mobile service just before he needs to make a call.
• The Good Place: The big twist in the first season is that they're actually in the Bad Place, being psychologically tortured by thinking they're in the Good Place. Eleanor in particular is The Cynic, who drives herself crazy due to having to live up to the impossible standards of all the good people around her. She spends much of her time trying to prove her friends aren't as good as they say they are, and failing. What Michael forgot was that she was right, most of the people in the neighborhood are demons pretending to be good. Eleanor figures this out in over eight hundred memory resets.
• Hammer House of Horror: The twist in the episode "The House That Bled to Death" is that everything that happened in the house, including the death of Sophie's cat, was planned by her own parents, William and Emma (to be fair to Emma, she didn't know how far William would go to make it convincing, which doesn't excuse her part in it) and the real estate agent to sell a book about the "haunting" and make a lot of money off the movie rights. What none of the conspirators considered is the effect that all this would have on Sophie herself, or that Sophie would read the book and find out about their plan. Is it any wonder that Sophie stabs her dad to death when she finds out the truth?
• Hannah Montana: Miley fails her driving test and doesn't want to wait for two weeks as required by DMV regulations before retaking the test, so she takes it as her alter ego. It doesn't occur to her that Miley can't use Hannah's license until she has to show it to a cop.
• Happy Days — Richie is antagonized by a bully — he asks Fonzie for advice, who tells him to stand up to the bully and he'll back down. Richie stands up to the bully — he doesn't back down. Richie asks what's gone wrong, and Fonzie adds that for this to work he needed to have beaten somebody up before and have a reputation — Richie hisses "That's a big thing to leave out!!"
• The "Enjoy the Ride" storyline in Hollyoaks has a tragic example of this. Jono and Ruby reunite after splitting up, but Jono is about to be deployed with the army. They decide to elope to Gretna Green so Ruby will be allowed to live with Jono at the barracks. Ruby's family panic when they discover she's gone but, as her foster dad points out, Ruby and Jono will not be able to get married even if they reach Gretna Green — they haven't given the appropriate notice to get a marriage licence. Ruby and Jono hadn't even thought about this, and steal a minibus to drive themselves and their friends to Gretna Green; which causes a crash that kills four people, including Jono.
• iCarly:
  • "iWant More Viewers" does this twice in a row:
    • Carly and Sam's idea for getting more viewers is making a banner, taking it down to Seattle Beat, and holding it up at the outside window for the whole city to see; they didn't know it rains frequently in Seattle, and the rain destroys the banner before anyone could see it.
    • Spencer and Freddie's idea is to construct a luminescent sign advertising iCarly.com on the highway for the drivers to notice; they didn't realize the sign is so bright it distracts the drivers and causes accidents.
  • In "iPromise Not to Tell" after Carly gets a B on her history report meaning she's going to get a B+ for the semester instead of her first straight As, Sam hacks into Principal Franklin's computer and changes her B to an A so she gets her wish. But since Carly doesn't accept forged grades, she has Freddie hack into the school's computer network so they get past the firewall at home and access the school's computer network there. Unfortunately, they didn't know the network is being monitored by the CSA, and Freddie's hacking caused a breech in the school network, causing the agents to track it all the way back to the Shays' apartment.
  • In "iLook Alike" when Spencer forbids Carly from attending an MMA fight where iCarly is supposed to interview the wrestler father of one of their fans, she, Sam, and Freddie set up a plan to sneak out and have lookalikes of them take their place with the door locked; Freddie fixes the elevator so it won't open on the iCarly studio floor, and they provide a series of voice clips to whatever Spencer might say to them. However, they didn't realize the doors contain a spare key on the upper ridge, which Spencer useds to unlock the door, exposing their plan.
• In the Season 3 finale of iZombie, Chase Graves gets hundreds, if not thousands of people in Seattle infected with the zombie virus, afterwards announcing their existence to the entire country, blackmailing the US government into supplying them the brains, lest hungry zombies spread out from Seattle. After a 3-4 month Time Skip and the start of Season 4, we find out that the government has walled off the city and is using the national guard to patrol outside the walls, thus cutting off Chase's access to brains and the rest of the country. In fact, Chase knows that the only thing that keeps the government from employing the Nuclear Option is the presence of humans in the city, hence the penalty of death for a zombie scratching or attacking a human. Openly lampshaded by people like Blaine noting that maybe Chase should have taken the possibility of the government not giving the walking dead equal rights before he went ahead and exposed zombies to the world.
• Jessica Jones: The parents of Kilgrave, Season 1's Big Bad, seemed to be set up as Abusive Parents, but "Sin Bin" reveals they had perfectly noble intentions... and a very severe lack of foresight. So their son has a genetic neurodegenerative disease that would turn him into a vegetable before 12, and they want to cure that disease. So far so good. But in order to do this, they used an experimental virus and performed extremely painful experiments on their son without telling him why or giving him anesthesia, and talking to him in an unloving voice when he inevitably screamed. It doesn't take being a scientist to realize how badly that plan can warp a child.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kuroto Dan in Kamen Rider Ex-Aid plans to create the ultimate video game, Kamen Rider Chronicle, and use it to end death as a concept. While he makes a number of foolish decisions regarding treating his subordinates like crap, he has multiple overlapping contingency plans to revive himself whenever he dies and come back progressively stronger each time. However, he has no contingency in mind for what would happen if someone else got control of the master copy of the finished Chronicle, which naturally happens.
  • In Kamen Rider Build, the titular Rider is on the run and hiding in an alleyway when two tiny dogs catches his attention. He tries getting them to stand still so he can take a picture, but they move around and as they run off, the civilians looking for him. Build can only utter “…damn, I’m dumb.”
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One has this as Jin's fatal flaw, even after his death and revival makes him more mature than his initial manchild persona. He schemes to defeat the Ark by luring it out from its invincible but immobile body with the promise of a powerful and mobile new body, planning to kill it after it makes the switch, but doesn't consider what will happen if he can't kill it.
  • In Kamen Rider Geats, Keiwa is in the position of being able to have his wish granted, wanting to revive everyone who died in the DGP, with the main goal of reviving his sister Sara and their parents. He makes his wish and gets a phone call from the now revived Sara, who is killed, along with their parents, 30 seconds later by a rampaging Rider. As it turns out, it's a major case of Be Careful What You Wish For as some of those people killed were not kind people.
• The Kicks episode "Breakaway" sees Devin being punished by her parents for sneaking out in the previous episode. They give her three punishments: Loss of her cell phone for two weeks, loss of her computer for two weeks, and loss of television privileges for two weeks. Thus, in order to do her homework, she needs to use her mother's computer in a room where she can be monitored. Only after this is enforced does anyone realize the problem: Since the living room is adjacent to the room where Devin is working, they aren't able to watch television either because it would distract her. Also her mother finds herself unable to use the computer when she needs to because Devin is using it.
• Kingdom (2019): At the beginning of Episode 3, a lord and his retainers attempt to escape from zombies by crawling under the crawlspace between the ground and a part of a building. Since these zombies are smart enough to crawl (and can move fast), it gets a bunch of them killed.
• Law & Order
  • In the episode "The Taxman Cometh", ADA Mike Cutter attempts to nullify the "adoption relationship" between a wealthy woman and her female lover, explaining that the relationship was seen as a marriage of the two, even though New York state law was against gay marriage at the time. It works, in that the Family Court judge did nullify the adoption... But it doesn't, in that the judge also enforces spousal privilege (i.e. lover legally couldn't testify). A Supreme Court judge did reverse the enforcement after the commercial break, Cutter's face prior to commercials really shows how little he thought this through.
  • This was set up by an earlier case of Cutter's boss running into the same issue. McCoy argued that the marriage law was invalid in order to get past spousal privilege in order to get one of a gay couple to testify against the other, only for the witness to refuse to testify, even facing a contempt citation, to protest McCoy's actions.
• On Law & Order: SVU, a cop helps the team catch a rape suspect. When they try to call the guy's unit for his statement, they find there's no cop by his name or record. It turns out the guy is a teenager who's dreamed of being a cop all his life, got his own uniform and thought that doing this would look great on his application to the police academy. Benson and Stabler can't believe this and tell the kid that impersonating an officer is a felony which will automatically disqualify the kid from ever being accepted into the academy. The look on his face shows the kid never even considered that minor detail.
  • In the episode "Babes", four teenage girls make a pact to get pregnant and have babies together, deciding that they're gonna be "the hottest MILFs on the block." Once their parents and the police find out, the girls have it spelled out to them exactly how much harder their lives will be as teen moms. They may not even be able to finish high school because now their lives will revolve around taking care of their babies (and that's assuming the school even lets them come back, since they're in Catholic school), let alone go to college or pursue any other dreams. They might have to get jobs to help pay for the babies if their parents won't help them (and considering that they don't have high school diplomas, the only jobs they'll probably be able to get are menial, low-paying ones like food service or retail). Giving birth in their teen years when their bodies aren't fully developed also poses health risks, not to mention that one of the girls' baby daddies suffered from schizophrenia, which puts their baby at increased risk of suffering from the same condition.
  • In the episode "Tangled", Max, the doctor husband of the intended victim, Peyton, hires his mistress's, neighbor, Vincent, to rape and kill his wife and stage an attack on him (including tying him up) so he can be with Lara (the mistress). What he doesn't take into account is that Vincent is obsessed with Lara and decides to kill Max while he's at it so that he can be with Lara. Oh, and Peyton survives, too.
• Leverage: The mark from "The Order 23 Job" tries to throw the team to the police at the end of the episode...after he had escaped federal custody to reclaim his stolen cash and tased a nurse (Parker in disguise), which means the cops couldn't care less and are just there to arrest him. Justified; the team's fake outbreak rattled him to the point he was too on edge to think anything through.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power:
  • Galadriel has a tendency to take the direct approach to problems without fully considering the consequences. An example is when she requests resources from Númenor and, when she doesn't get them, proceeds to disrespect Queen Regent Míriel and demand to speak to the king. The end result of this is her being jailed for sedition.
  • The Dweller, The Nomad and The Ascetic did not bother to check if the Stranger is an amnesiac Sauron or someone else. They realize too late that the person they were following is not Sauron.
• Maid: Alex and her very young daughter are forced to leave her abusive boyfriend in the middle of the night with just the clothes on her back. With no real plan and little support, Alex finds herself essentially winging many of her next steps as she's forced to adapt to the new unstable life she's been thrown in.
• Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure: Mimmi's first idea on how to De-power Evie is to use a Transmutation spell on her remotely. Not only does the spell do nothing about the actual enchantment on Evie, but the fact that Mimmi cast it remotely and with little warning nearly destroys The Masquerade when Evie transforms in the middle of the café while Mimmi remains in the grotto none the wiser to the chaos she's causing. Only some quick thinking on Zac and Cam's part saves Evie from being exposed as a mermaid to a bunch of teenagers with cellphone cameras. At the end of the episode Evie scolds Mimmi for only giving her a vague platitude before messing with her magically, and tells her that next time, any attempts to get rid of the mermaid enchantment will be done while they're both in the same room.
• In Chapter 11 of The Mandalorian, "The Heiress", Din Djarin teams up with Bo-Katan and her Nite Owls to attack an Imperial Gozanti freighter. At one point, they're trying to storm the cargo hold when the officer in charge there orders his Stormtroopers to seal the doors and then happily reports to the captain that the Mandalorians are trapped in the cargo control area. The look on the captain's face makes it clear that he's spotted the flaw in this idea before the exterior cargo doors open and the officer and his Stormtroopers are blown out of the ship.
  Officer: I think we have them trapped, sir.
  Captain: Trapped them where?
  Officer: In the cargo control area.
  [Beat]
  Captain: (sporting an expression that screams "Are you fucking serious?") Where?
  Officer: In the cargo control areAAAAAAAAAH!
  (The Officer and several Stormtroopers are jettisoned out of the cargo hold)
• In the Season 3 finale of The Man in the High Castle, the Nazis plan to use a dimensional portal to access other realities and invade. Juliana openly cites to Smith the key problem of sending a small incursion force into worlds of advanced technology where the Axis was already defeated.
  Juliana: He's just gonna roll tanks through the portal alongside the troops? With no idea what they'll find on the other side? If they even get to the other side? Or have none of you thought that through?
  • As it happens, Smith discovers that the plan is doomed as people can only cross into other realities where their counterparts are dead.
  • The leaders of the Black Communist Rebellion want to overthrow the Japanese in the Pacific States and establish a Marxist black-supremacist state in their place. As is pointed out to them at one point, none of them seem to have considered what the nuclear-armed superpower of Nazis right next door are likely to do in response to that.
• On Martial Law, Sammo is abducted by men who want to know why over $6 million is in his bank account. Sammo finds it was dropped off there by the secretary of a corrupt company. She explains to the team that the company was planning to bilk a town out of the $90 settlement it was awarded when a corporation dumped toxic wastes into the water supply. She decided to steal from her bosses and give it to the town but accidentally put it into other accounts. When Amy asked what she thought the honest townspeople were going to do when they were suddenly given $90 million in stolen money (which automatically made them accessories to theft), the woman admits she "hadn't thought that far ahead."
• In the Season 2 finale of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Abe finally has enough of his treatment by both Bell Labs and Columbia and quits both of them. He tells wife Rose, bragging about how great it felt to stand up for his beliefs and be his own man.
  Rose: Abe...the university owns our apartment.
  Abe: ...Yes...Yes...it does...
  • In Season 4, during a review of a terrible musical, Abe off-hand writes how, over thirty years earlier, he and friend Asher set fire to a federal building. It takes Asher's irate phone call for Abe to realize he just confessed to a federal crime and the FBI wants to talk to him...
• In the Season 2 M*A*S*H episode "Peace On Us", a psychiatrist has arrived at the camp to evaluate the personnel's mental state and determine whether the unit should be broken up. Colonel Blake correctly assumes that it's a result of gung-ho Majors Burns and Houlihan reporting the many instances of un-military antics to his superiors. He takes great delight in pointing out to them that if the unit is broken up, the two of them might be reassigned separately, and won't be able to "practice medicine" together anymore.
• Mock the Week: When Dara O'Brian is making fun of an ad campaign for antidandruff shampoo, Josh Widdicombe attempts to make a joke about Dara's baldness. It backfires.
  Josh: Some of us, Dara, are still worrying about dandruff.
  Dara: It's an unusual put-down, isn't it? 'Cause on the one hand, 'Zing, I'm bald.' But yet, on the other, you don't come out of it like a prince, do you?
  Josh: I'm not gonna lie to you, I didn't think it through.
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: One sketch has an inept extortionist who claims that he has set a bomb on an airliner and thinks he's got it all figured out... until the pilot tells him that he'll be killed in the explosion along with everyone else.
  "I'll tell you where it is for a pound."
• Happens to a lot of the killers on Motive. To be fair, half of the killings are spur of the moment or acts of passion and thus natural the killers don't realize the consequences until too late. But even those who had planned the murder out find the aftermath to be different than what they expected and how they were nowhere near as careful cleaning it up as they thought.
  • More than once, someone who tried to remove a rival for their romantic flame or what they thought was a favor to a friend learn the hard way that the would-be paramour doesn't return the feeling as expected.
• The Mr. Potato Head Show: Queenie was going to try to force Mr. Potato Head to let her sing on the show by stealing his detachable ears and holding them hostage. She didn't make her demands until after she detached the ears, and he couldn't hear her, though...
  Queenie: Man, I shoulda thought this plan through better!
• In the Murdoch Mysteries two-parter "The Long Goodbye", when Crabtree and Higgins are trying to think of a way of protesting Inspector Edwards' moral crusade without actually getting fired, Higgins suggests they could embarass Edwards by arresting the Board of Control for clay-pigeon shooting on a Sunday. Cut to them approaching the shoot, and Higgins suddenly realising that clay-pigeon shooters have guns. It's unlikely they'd use them on a constable, however outraged they might be, but still.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000
  • In the episode featuring Space Mutiny, Crow and Tom find, hijack, and wreck two hyper warp escape craft imitating the dogfight scenes in the movie. When Mike points out that "maybe we should have used them for escape purposes?!", it takes Crow and Tom a moment to realize they could have escaped from the Satellite of Love with them. When they point out there is a third escape craft, it is immediately destroyed by Gypsy crashlanding it.
  • In the episode featuring Eegah! Tom and Crow decide to freeze Crow to 0 Kelvin. When Joel finds out and panics, stating that doing so would cause a chain reaction to kill everyone, Tom mentions that their calculations said the same exact thing before realizing that, yes, it was a bad idea.
  • In the episode featuring Gunslinger, the Invention Exchange for that episode had Joel and the bots reveal brand new items based around the whiffle ball. Joel's is the "whiffle glass", which he realizes the flaw in that when he pours water in it and it spills out of the bottom.
  • In the episode featuring The Girl in Gold Boots, Crow and Tom attempts to mimic a scene in the movie by forcing Mike to pour beer on a prized item. First, Mike pours a can of beer into a fancy mug, but when Crow makes him pour it in something he prizes more, Mike pours it... on Crow.
• In an episode of MythBusters, Adam and Jamie are going over the various techniques people claim to sober a drunk person up. One of the perceived ways being exercise. So while Adam is running on a mini-treadmill, Jamie notes that he's beginning to wonder if the treadmill was such a good idea. Initially due to its size and portability, it seemed ideal as it could easily fit in the back of a car with little effort, but he was now noting how the treadmill has no railings, and Adam is drunk. No sooner had he said that, Adam wipes out on the treadmill.
  • From the same segment, the narrator says the green screen behind Adam was added (by Adam who, mind you, is drunk) so that Adam could have some "inspiration" for running. He subsequently points out that Adam can't actually see anything on the screen.^note Shows like Whose Line Is It Anyway? can add footage to a green screen and have it project live to monitors on-set. However, Adam's confusion makes it clear no one thought to set one up for him.
  Narrator: Some decisions really are best made sober.
• In the Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide episode "Lost and Found", Ned locks Moze in an outdoor enclosed space to keep her from stopping him from getting a pair of sneakers autographed by NBA player Carmelo Anthony that were in the lost and found, only to realize that he locked himself in with her, preventing his prospects of claiming the sneakers. Another happened in the episode "Revenge" when a new student joins the schools volleyball team and "accidentally" injures most of the best players, leaving the team with her, Moze and the benchwarmers. It's revealed that the new student is from a rival team, and wanted revenge on Polk's volleyball team for beating her team and keeping them out of the playoffs last year. She gloats that now her team will win since she plans to play badly and Polks team is only the benchwarmers. Only for Moze to point out that now that she's a part of Polks volleyball team, her old team no longer has its best player and now they don't stand a chance without her as the Polks' benchwarmers are still better than her old team. Not to mention, now she has to face the team she abandoned, and they aren't happy with her, It end with her running from volleyballs being thrown at her.
• On No Good Nick, the title character is a young con artist scamming a family into thinking she's a long-lost orphaned relative when she's really seeking revenge for how they aided in putting her father in jail. Many of her scams are very slick but Nick has the problem of not considering all the angles.
  • She steals expensive wine from a restaurant by swapping the labels with cheap wine. It's only then that she realizes the labels list the actual wine prices, so she ends up with bottles of blank wine with no commerical value.
  • She pulls a fake charity scam to get lots of cash via a "Go Fund Me" page. Too bad it didn't occur to her that, as a minor, she can't open a bank account without an adult co-signer in person so she can't actually use the money.
  • Nick hacks a bank manager's password and thus figures she can use it as her personal piggy bank. She quickly finds even a bank president doesn't have the authorization to just move money in and out of accounts without it being discovered so there's no way she can withdraw cash.
  • Nick's entire plan hit the biggest example of all: that this family, thinking she was a relative, would shower her with love and help and be so nice that Nick just doesn't have the heart to end up ripping them off.
• Novoland: Eagle Flag:
  • Lü Song sent his son to be fostered by a rival tribe and never made any attempt to contact him or reveal his true identity, then attacked the rival tribe and killed his son's adoptive father, then is surprised that his son is traumatised and wants nothing to do with him.
  • Jing Hong wants to arrange a diplomatic marriage between Asule and a princess of Xiatang. But Jing Hong's daughter refuses the marriage, so he makes Yu Ran, his niece-by-marriage who is otherwise unconnected to Xiatang, a princess just to marry her off to Asule. Neither Asule nor Yu Ran want this marriage. It never seems to occur to Jing Hong that he has just given Yu Ran an excellent reason to hate Xiatang, and that when Asule becomes emperor he will have the ability and certainly the motive to invade Xiatang.
• Odd Squad:
  • In "Flatastrophe", Otto decides to take advantage of Olive's flattened state, as well as her ability to make herself disappear by turning herself to the side, in order to ambush Fladam. However, he didn't factor in her inability to move as a result, causing the plan to fail.
  • In "Oscar the Couch", Oscar accidentally zaps himself with the Couch-inator gadget, and as he starts turning into a couch, he explains to Olive and Otto how to turn him back to normal with the aid of the Un-Couch-inator. The catch is that it's locked inside of a briefcase that requires a code to open, due to the fact that he fears the worst could happen if it fell into the wrong hands. Olive promptly chews him out.
    Olive: Maybe it would make more sense to lock up the gadget that turns you into the thing...instead of the gadget that fixes you!
  • Otto does this again in "There Might Be Dragons" when he lets his dragon egg hatch because he ran out of Soundcheck songs to sing to it (since singing is required to keep it from hatching). Oprah asks him why he didn't just sing it another song. He outright admits that the idea to do that didn't occur to him.
  • In the Season 1 finale "O is Not For Over", Odd Todd comes up with a plan to keep Olive at Precinct 13579 following her promotion to Odd Squad Director by creating an odd problem big enough for Oprah to enlist her help and force her to stay there. However, he fails to realize just how powerful Olive is (even more so with the combat training she's shown receiving), and also fails to realize that once the odd problem is solved, Oprah would most likely just send Olive to her new precinct, since she promoted her in the first place. His plan ends up failing regardless, thanks to Otto being a Fake Defector.
  • "Agent Orchid's Almost Half-Hour Talent Show" revolves around Olympia desperately wanting to be in the eponymous talent show after hearing that it will be broadcast to every single Odd Squad precinct in the world. She finally manages to secure a spot after much negotiating, but just before she gets onstage, Otis asks her what she plans on doing, and she realizes that she was so obsessed with trying to get on the show that she forgot to think about what she was going to perform. It only gets worse when she steps onstage and freezes up, only being able to give a small "Meep". Luckily, Otis bails her out by encouraging her to join him in a duet.
  • Another Oprah-related example occurs in the first part of the Season 2 finale, "Who is Agent Otis?". She tasks the X's with getting the notebook of The Stitcher because she's confident that they'll fail, and that if they do get it, they'll leave Precinct 13579 for good. Olympia getting the notebook instead does cause the plan to fall to shambles, but the plan had holes to begin with. For one, while we don't know if the X's are competent when out on the field solving a case or not, neither does Oprah. ^note If she does, then it's not revealed onscreen, although it's likely that she's hoping for Crippling Overspecialization to come into play just as it has for her agents in the past. However, from what we hear Xavier telling her about The Stitcher leaving town, they seem to have some sense of competency and aren't completely hopeless on the field. For another, it's unlikely that having a notebook full of villain information in their possession was going to sway the X's into leaving for good, as their goal is to find the culprit behind recent suspicious activity and the notebook doesn't appear to be the type of thing that would consist of information on crimes committed. Regardless, Olympia gives the notebook to the X's, which causes them to find out that Otis used to be a villain.
  • This is what caused the defeat of Brother Quack, Otis's adoptive father figure. His plan was to build a machine that would bring the Earth closer to the sun in order to permanently eliminate winters. However, what he doesn't realize is that doing that would kill all life on the planet, including him and his family. On the flip side of the coin, Otis does realize the danger of such a machine, and decides to betray his family and enlist the help of Odd Squad to stop them from carrying out the plan.
  • Ohlm was also defeated this way in the second half of the Season 2 finale, "Odds and Ends". Like Brother Quack, he fails to realize that the black hole he created would pull him in and kill him in addition to pulling in Oprah, Otis, Olympia and Oona — something that Oprah warns him of mere seconds before he pushes the button to activate it. Of course, everyone survives, but Ohlm becomes an Ungrateful Bastard and doesn't even bother to thank the Main 4 for saving his life because they're not dead and neither is the rest of Odd Squad. As a result, Oprah dumps him in the hands of his parents, who promptly ground him.
  • In "Odd Squad in the Shadows", North Carolina Ms. O tells the Mobile Unit that she brings every single one of her agents to her precinct's annual mini-golf tournament. She acknowledges that not leaving a few agents behind means that oddness runs rampant (which has ruined the last few tournaments), but instead of doing just that, she has the Mobile Unit look for and defeat oddness.
• On The Office (US), most of Michael Scott's schemes end up as this. For instance, it's shown that he once promised a group of third graders that he would pay for their entire college tuition. Ten years later, when it's time to pay up, Pam calls him out on this.
• The Orville:
  • In the second season finale, a time travel incident causes the Kelly of seven years earlier to know what will happen with her eventually cheating on Ed and causing their divorce. Back in her own time, Kelly decides to turn down a second date with Ed, thinking she's sparing him all the pain of their failed marriage. Kelly never considers that without that marriage, their lives take different paths with Ed never becoming captain of The Orville...which leads to a brand-new timeline where the Kaylon end up wiping out half of organic life in the galaxy.
  • A less serious example happens in the third season finale, where Isaac decides to invite his relatives to his and Claire's wedding. Except he considers the entire Kaylon race to be his relatives... and he also neglects to mention this to anyone else, so everyone naturally freaks out when 4000 ships suddenly drop out of quantum all around the Orville only a few weeks after the end of the war. Ed quickly has Talla contact the Union and let them know that this is not an invasion, in case someone scans that part of space and sees a massive Kaylon armada. Clare also has to spell it out for Isaac that millions of Kaylon can't fit in the simulator, so Isaac amends his invitation to only a few dozen Kaylon, including Kaylon Primary, with the rest observing remotely.
• In the fifth season of Riverdale, Veronica brings down slimy husband Chad by exposing his corrupt business practices, bankrupting his company and ruining him. She gushes to a friend on how she's ready to return as "the She-Wolf of Wall Street." Her friend has to break it to Veronica that her name now is "the Black Widow"...and it's not a compliment. Too late, Veronica realizes that people in Wall Street are going to be wary of working with someone who gleefully backstabbed and crushed her own husband and her reputation in New York has taken a huge hit.
• Rome:
  • The breakdown of relations that starts the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey is portrayed as a political case of this. The Roman Senate is essentially divided in 3; there's Cato's faction, which is rabidly anti-Caesar to the point of wanting him tried for treason, Caesar's faction, which backs him to the hilt, and Cicero's faction, which sympathizes with Cato's side and sees Caesar as dangerously ambitious, but also foresees that a bloody civil war is likely to break out as a result of Cato antagonizing Caesar and leaving Caesar with no option but to fight for his life. Eventually, in a Senate meeting where Marc Antony, Caesar's Number Two, is present with veto power, Cato's faction formally introduces a measure to declare Caesar a traitor to the Republic. After a long pause, Cicero brings his faction to back the measure, in large part because he believes Antony will simply veto it, rendering the measure and Cicero's move a purely symbolic gesture. The trouble is that Marc Antony is a soldier, not a politician, and is unfamiliar with the parliamentary procedure. Cicero, who literally just made the dramatic move to condemn Caesar, has to scream instructions at Antony to veto the measure while fighting breaks out between the factions on the Senate floor. By the time Antony understands and attempts to use his veto power, the Senate has descended into a brawl and amid the chaos Antony's veto is never recognized and thus the anti-Caesar measure is passed. (To the credit of everyone involved, they try to arrange a session for Antony to come back on a later day to use his veto power... only for a soldier employed by the patricians and a soldier acting as one of Antony's bodyguards to get into a fight over gambling debts while Antony is being escorted to the Senate. This is mistaken for an assassination attempt on Antony, and proves to be the final step on the road to civil war.)
  • Brutus and his fellow conspirators kill Caesar, justifying it by declaring him a tyrant. However Marc Antony points out that if Caesar was a tyrant, then by Roman law all his previous acts are void, including the appointment of the conspirators to their current positions of power. Rather than risk an election (given that Caesar was enormously popular with the common people while the conspirators are not), they're forced to make a deal with Antony. This gives Antony time and opportunity to rally the mob against the conspirators with his famous Rousing Speech at Caesar's funeral.
  • Octavian uses his new powers as Consul to have Brutus declared a public enemy in order to avenge Caesar's murder, but did not count on the fact that some of Rome's allies/client states would see Brutus as the legitimate ruler in the wake of Caesar's death and others would be looking for any excuse to cause chaos within Rome, resulting in these groups donating Brutus a massive army. This is perhaps the only time in the series that Octavian wasn't three steps ahead of everyone, and as a result he has to reluctantly unite with his rival Antony (whom Octavian despises due to the memories of Anthony carrying on a sexual relationship with Octavian's mother and also mistreating a young Octavian), to survive this phase of the power struggle.
• In an episode of Salute Your Shorts, Ug's girlfriend, Mona Tibbs, becomes the new park ranger, and gets into a fight with Ug over the various violations at camp, the boys realize that if the violations go unchanged and the camp shut down, Dr. Khan would not want to send everyone home because that would mean refunding their parents. So they figured he would end up sending them to nearby hotels for the rest of the summer, and all the closest hotels were next to the beach. So while the girls were trying all they could to patch things up with Mona and Ug, the boys were convincing Ug not to agree to fix the violations. Finally the girls inform the boys that if Dr. Khan is too cheap to refund their parents, he would definitely be too cheap to send all the campers to beachside hotels for the rest of the summer. As a matter of fact, they would be sent off to separate camps… camps even worse than Anawana. The boys quickly realized they screwed up and helped the girls to fix things.
• In a Saved by the Bell episode, Zack has detention on the day of a trivia contest for a trip to Hawaii. He sends Screech in his place, who comes back to ask him a question. Mr. Belding explains only those in detention can talk to others there, so Screech purposely gets in trouble. When he sits down, Zack tells him the obvious problem with that plan.
• Schitt's Creek: David suggests that his newly out boyfriend go on a date with young man who had given him his phone number, earnestly thinking that Patrick needs to sow his oats. Later, his sister asks what ground rules were set for the open relationship, and David replies none. David begins to realize he has put his relationship in jeopardy, and Alexis attempts to console him.
  Alexis: Was your plan flawlessly executed? No. Would I have done it? Hell no.
• Scrubs:
  • In the Season 5 episode "My Big Bird", Elliot finds out that a man she had a brief fling with was married, Elliot having mistakenly believed that the man's wife had passed away by said man's Exact Words ("She wasn't with us."). She angrily tells him to go tell his wife what happened... but since she doesn't go with him she doesn't realize until it's too late that she allowed him to spin the story anyway he wanted and put all the blame on her. The end result: after spending most of the rest of the episode running for her life, the Woman Scorned ultimately catches up to her and duct-tapes her to the wall.
  • In the Season 8 finale (JD's last day), Sunny helps JD trick Dr. Cox into admitting that he thinks JD is an exceptional doctor and person while JD is secretly listening. Once Cox gets over the initial shock of being tricked and JD leaves, he has this to say to Sunny:
    Cox: You realize that even though he gets to leave, you have to stay?
    Sunny: I didn't think that out.
    Cox: No. Ya didn't.
• Seinfeld
  • In one episode, George has sex with his new secretary, and blurts out "I'm giving you a raise!" in the heat of passion. He becomes worried that she's expecting to actually get a raise.
    Jerry: Just a quick sidebar here: Are you in any way authorized to give raises?
    George: Not that I'm aware of, no.
    Jerry: So you're so grateful to have sex that you'll just shout out anything that comes into your head.
    George: I didn't think ahead.
  • In the same episode, Kramer is at a department store when he decides to sell the clothes he's wearing to Kenny Bania, leaving him stranded in one of the store's changing cubicles in his underwear.
    Jerry: Where are your clothes?
    Kramer: I told you, I sold them to Bania.
    Jerry: You mean what you were wearing?
    Kramer: Yeah.
    Jerry: How'd you expect to get out of here?
    Kramer: Well, I didn't think ahead!
  • Kramer does this kind of stuff a LOT. Like betting that he could turn his apartment into a triple-tiered deck.
  • Topped when he tells Elaine a story about how he was going to return a pair of pants he bought to the store. On the way, he slipped and fell in mud, ruining the pants he had intended to return. When Elaine confirms that he was, in fact, wearing the pants he had intended to return, she asks the obvious question of what the hell he was going to wear on the way back from the store had he successfully returned the pants. His response? He never got that far, so it doesn't matter.
  • One episode has Newman planning an epic New Year's party for the new millenium. At the end, Jerry takes note of something.
    Jerry: By the way Newman, I'm just curious. When you booked the hotel, did you book it for millenium new year?
    Newman: (smugly) As a matter of fact, I did!
    Jerry: Oh, that's interesting, because as everyone knows, since there was no year zero, the millenium doesn't begin until the year 2001. (Newman's smug grin slowly falls) Which would make your party one year late. And thus, quite lame. Awww.
    Newman: (disgruntled wheeze)
• In Sherlock, scumbag tabloid editor and blackmailer Charles Augustus Magnussen is believed to have a secret vault of compromising material underneath his palatial home, including information on John's wife Mary which could get her killed. Once Sherlock and John get there, Magnussen smugly reveals that there is no vault, all the dirty little secrets he knows are stored in his Mind Palace, and he doesn't need proof to ruin someone's life, just put it into the public domain through his paper. What he didn't consider is that Sherlock is a Sociopathic Hero who can and will kill if he deems it necessary, and he just told him that the information that could hurt the people Sherlock loves exists only in his memory. Boom, Headshot!.
• The Shield: The Fatal Flaw in the immunity deal Vic secures with the Feds. Having pulled the grandfather of all fast ones to secure a position at ICE, he never stopped to think that they didn't exactly do things like The Barn did. (Meaning that Olivia isn't going to overlook his laundry list the way Claudette's superiors forced her to.) It all comes to a head in the Grand Finale when the Feds get him back in a big way by sticking him in an isolated cubicle.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
    • In "Attached", Picard and Dr. Crusher are abducted by a xenophobic faction of an alien world, another faction of which is applying for Federation membership. They were abducted because it was believed they would lead to more contact. When Riker points out that not returning them will result in more ships and very uncomfortable scrutiny, the look on the alien minister's face indicates she didn't consider the ramifications.
    • In the "Birthright" two-parter, we find out that, during the Khitomer Massacre, Romulans had captured a couple of Klingons and tried to use them to negotiate a trade for land. Unfortunately, Klingons don't do prisoner exchanges as they believe that if a Klingon was allowed to be captured, they would be dishonored and, thus, useless.
    • In "Parallels", When Worf asks Troi if she could become Alexander's surrogate mother, legally available to care for Alexander should anything happen to Worf. Troi asks what that would make her to Worf, and he says the Klingon word for this relationship, soh'chim, has no exact translation but the closest equivalent is stepsister. Deanna's response? "That would make my mother your stepmother."
      Worf: (look of shock) I had not considered that... (Beat) It is a risk I am willing to take.
  • The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • "Civil Defense" has O'Brien accidentally trigger a counter-insurgency program that was meant to prevent an uprising by Bajorans against their Cardassian keepers on the space station. Once warned of what's going on, Gul Dukat drops in for some Evil Gloating, attempting to strong arm those at Ops to get them to agree to add in a Cardassian garrison on the station in exchange for deactivating the program. However, as he decides to return to his ship to make them sweat, he finds that he can't transport back. To his absolute astonishment, his former commanding officer had put in a subroutine that would lock him out of the system and trap him on the station as it's ready to self-destruct in the off-chance that Dukat was trying to escape a situation he was unable to contain. He's completely shocked at these turn of events and Garak accuses him of this trope.
    • "The House of Quark" has a drunken Klingon fall on his own knife in Quark's bar. Quark had the brilliant idea to use it as a publicity stunt to increase revenue by claiming he had killed the Klingon in a heroic act of self defense. Somehow, he didn't consider that this might get him in trouble with the guy's family. What's worse, when he tries to tell the family the truth, they reject it, because being slain in combat is an honorable way for a Klingon to die, and a drunken accident is not.
    • In the two-part episode "Past Tense", Sisko, Bashir and Dax are accidentally sent to 2024 where San Francisco has a massive "Sanctuary" for the poor and ignored. Sisko realizes the area is about to be hit by the "Bell Riots", a huge uprising of violence that will kill hundreds but pave the way for Earth to change for the better. They're named for Gabriel Bell, who becomes a hero when he's killed by police protecting some hostages. In an altercation, Sisko and Bashir realize the man killed defending them was Bell. Sisko thus poses as Bell when the hostage crisis starts so history can unfold as it should. Bashir warns him there's one major issue...
      Bashir: Didn't you say Bell was killed when the police stormed the building?
      Sisko: That's right. But I'm not Bell.
      Bashir: And we're the only ones who know that.
      (Sisko's face falls)
    • This one is a bit more minor than most, since Sisko did plan it out pretty well with regards to his primary objective (to maintain/restore history), but it does seem that he may not have fully realized that he might have to play Bell's role all the way to the end, including potentially giving up his life.
    • In "Defiant", Maquis member Tom Riker stole the Defiant and invaded Cardassia to check out rumors of an invasion fleet being built in secret. Kira (the experienced terrorist) asks him "then what?" He had no answer.
    • Maquis leader Michael Eddington used stolen industrial replicators, months of Starfleet intelligence data, and a Cardassia weakened by the Klingon invasion to win military victories against Cardassia and build up the Maquis into a potential independent nation. Instead the Cardassians joined the Dominion and wiped out the Maquis.
    • Similar to the "Attached" example, Quark gives the same speech to the godlike Prophets who turned greedy Ferengi leader Zek into a philanthropist. Their desire to rid the universe of people like him and leave them alone would only bring more attention on them.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: In "Vis a Vis", Steth tries to steal Tom Paris's identity without bothering to learn anything about Tom's life. It takes a lot of fast-talking and flattery to keep the ruse going as long as it does, and even then, his cover is blown laughably fast.
• The Storyteller: In "The Soldier and Death", the soldier attempts to trick his way into Heaven by handing his magic sack to one of the souls waiting to enter Heaven, and asking the soul to call him into the sack once he is within Heaven. However, the soldier forgot that all souls entering Heaven lose all mortal life, so once he is in Heaven, the soul has no memory of why he has a sack or what he is supposed to do with it. So the soldier is remains Barred from the Afterlife and left to wander the earth without his magic sack.
• Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye: In "Cold Case", the men compete for who can get the highest bid at a charity bachelor auction. Myles drives up his bids by promising a date on the Italian Riviera, then panics when the others point out how expensive that would be. He ends up buying himself to avoid the trip, and his credit card is declined.
• In the opening to an episode of The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, Zack wins a bet against his brother, Cody, and now the latter owes him smoothies, which he now has to make.
  Zack: Did not think that through.
• In Season 5 of Suits Louis blackmails his way back into the firm by threatening to reveal Mike as a fraud. When he tries to fire Mike Jessica points out that by keeping their secret he has made himself part of the crime, and cannot expose him without getting himself charged. Removing any leverage he had.
  • Indeed, it's often noted by the other characters that, while a smart and savvy lawyer, Louis' main problem is that he'll jump into things without fully understanding the consequences.
• In the Superstore first season finale, when Manager Glenn is fired for giving one of the workers a massive Loophole Abuse-laden maternity leave, the others decide to protest by walking off. They later realize they have no idea what they're supposed to do next.
• Tales of the Tinkerdee: Sure, Taminella: order your minion Charlie "smasheroonie" as soon as he spots Princess Gwendolinda, and then go in disguise as Princess Gwendolina, and approach the very window where you already know Charlie is lurking while he's still under those orders. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? with such a plan?
• Taskmaster (NZ): In "My Uncle John", Guy Williams launches into what he claims is a genuine family story, somehow forgetting that the Taskmaster's Assistant is his own brother who proceeds to call him out on the lie.
• Temps de chien: At the end of the second episode, Antoine receives a call on his cellphone for an interview. He hangs up and then decides to throw the phone to the water in frustration. Immediately after that, he exclaims "Shit!" three times in a row over what he just did and tries to retrieve the phone as he needs it to contact any of his loved ones if the need arises.
• On Timeless Rufus finally stands up and tells the Rittenhouse organization he won't be their spy. Rufus is confident of his stance, pointing out that he's the only one who can pilot the time ship and thus they need him. The next day, he's informed that his assistant is being trained to pilot the ship. Boss Mason lampshades this:
  Mason: What did you think was going to happen? You'd stand up on your hind legs, do your little speech and they'd just slink off into the darkness?
• (Also counts as a Real Life example.) The Tonight Show: Johnny Carson would often have non-celebrity regular folks as guests (often the most interesting and entertaining part of the show). One was a self-styled "idea man" who came up with get-rich-quick schemes, none of which really panned out. He had high hopes for his latest — shaving his head and painting advertising on it (this was way, way before shaved heads were commonplace). Johnny commented that, coming on this show, he must have been able to charge some pretty high rates — and the guy froze...he never thought of that. Johnny tried to keep the tone light, but the guy spent the rest of his time there looking like he'd swallowed a foul-tasting bug.
• Top Gear:
  • In the amphibious car challenge. Hammond's car looked like a boat (with the steering wheel near the back) with an upper portion for the "girls in bikini to go", which he then noticed was so high up he couldn't see over while driving. James' car, a convertible with a mast to turn it into a sailboat, finds it's too tall to pass under an overpass.
  • Then came Jeremy Clarkson's mobility scooter in Season 18, which was arranged so that the drive wheels had nothing actually pressing them against the ground.
  • The motor home challenge: Clarkson designed a three-story home on top of his car. It was barely able to clear overhead passes, and proved to be top-heavy, nearly tipping over several times on the road, and finally did during a very windy night.
  • None of their cop car vehicle-stopping devices proved well planned. Richard neglected to consider that cars can turn, James neglected to consider that cars have windshield wipers, and Jeremy neglected to consider that a car's axle can handle only so much stress. The net result was that none of them managed to stop the Stig — and, as an additional bonus, one of Jeremy's wheels ended up a substantial distance from his car.
  • One of their car vs. X races had James and Hammond in a plane James was piloting racing Jeremy in a car along the ground. Sounds like a good plan, but by the time James had completed all the pre-flight checks Jeremy already had a considerable head start, which was a problem since they were in a small, single-engine plane that was barely faster than Jeremy's high-performance car. And then, to top it all off, they had to land at dusk, since James wasn't checked out on night flying, and finish the race on public transit. An amused Jeremy lampshades it when he hears about that part:
    Jeremy: He really hasn't thought this through, has he?
• In the The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville", corrupt CEO William Feathersmith agrees to a deal from "Miss Devlin" to go back in time to 1910 and enjoy the challenge of rebuilding his empire from scratch with just $1500. Confident of success thanks to his knowledge of the future, Feathersmith is soon hit by issues as his Self-Serving Memory causes him to "recall" the past in brighter terms. Feathersmith spends most of his money buying up 1400 area of land that sits on a massive oilfield. It's only when the deal is done that he realizes that it'll be 30 years before the technology to drill that deep is invented so there's no way to get at the oil. Feathersmith tries to "invent" items from the future but his lack of technical knowledge undermines him and he's soon a laughingstock. The kicker is when his health fails and Feathersmith realizes too late that while Devlin followed his request to look exactly as he did back then, she did nothing for his chronological age so he's still a 75-year old man going around as someone younger. Finally, Feathersmith sells the deed to the oil land to someone to get enough fare for a train trip home...not realizing that this alters history so that guy ends up the powerful CEO and Feathersmith is a janitor at his company.
• The Umbrella Academy: Sure, Luther, go ahead and lock your brother up like a rabid animal following a genuine accident and despite your siblings' protests, knowing that he's in the throes of a superpower-induced mental breakdown. See what happens when he breaks free.
• What We Do in the Shadows:
  • Lazlo is picked up by animal control in bat form and locked in a cage at their facility. Nandor's plan to rescue him is to turn into a dog so that he can gain access to the facility by being picked up by animal control, which entails getting locked in a cage. He's no more able to escape it than Laszlo.
  • When trying to get a young Colin Robinson a place in a private school they repeatedly mess up the interview, mind-wipe the interviewer, and start over while making changes to the setup without considering their implications, reaching its peak when they make the interviewer believe he is Collin's father asking them to let him in. It fails to occur to them that instead of trying to make a good impression on the interviewer they could just hypnotize him into accepting Colin. They also forget that repeatedly hypnotizing someone like this is extremely bad for the brain, and the interviewer suffers a stroke shortly after.
• In The Wire, Detective McNulty's cunning plan to fake a serial killer in order to get money for an investigation into a murderous drug crew becomes a textbook example of this. Although command showers him with resources, people gradually get wind that he's giving overtime out to people for different cases, so he ends up getting blackmailed into giving people overtime to go and play golf in Florida. Because the eventual bill runs into the millions, McNulty makes himself liable for not only firing, but serious jail time. Because the case becomes a political football, he ends up having to bullshit the entire police command staff and all of city hall. And because McNulty hadn't thought what he'd do when the drug crew were busted, leaving him with a non-existent "serial killer" to catch, he ends up having to find a way to de-escalate the thing rapidly. For a while, you think he'll manage to stay on top of things. He doesn't. The wheels come off. Spectacularly.
• The iconic WKRP in Cincinnati episode "Turkeys Away" as Arthur Carlson decide to celebrate Thanksgiving by giving away live turkeys... by dropping them out of a helicopter. Surprisingly Realistic Outcome is probably the least you could say about the outcome of this incident.
  Arthur Carlson: As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.
• In Wynonna Earp, a goofball slacker finds a genie and, amazingly, is able to figure out a way to wish for infinite wishes. He then uses this ultimate power to...make everyone in town frantic for Trivia Night so he can see who's smarter and eat their brains and thus absorb their intellect. As it turns out, eating raw human organs leads to diseases so the guy drops dead quickly. Both Wynonna and the genie herself marveled that this guy was clever enough to get the infinite wishes yet missed two things. First, winning a local trivia contest is not a sign you're more intelligent than others. Second, that it never occurred to this idiot to just wish he was smarter.
• In Yes, Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey plans to thwart a plan of Prime Minister Hacker's to move selected military units Oop North by discrediting the Employment Secretary, who came up with the plan, and making it seem like he's after Hacker's job. It works like a charm — until the end, when the Employment Secretary's gone and Hacker realises that there's now nothing left to stop him implementing the plan and taking all the credit for it. Humphrey realises too late that his plan involved attacking the Employment Secretary so much, it didn't actually do anything to discredit the plan itself.

---