Examples of Evil Is Not a Toy from live-action TV.
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. reveals during the third season that HYDRA is in fact an ancient cult dedicated to the worship of an evil, body surfing Inhuman known as Hive. Gideon Malick, one of the main antagonists of the season and HYDRA's modern leader, has spent his whole life trying to find a way to free Hive from his imprisonment through a wormhole; after half a season, he succeeds, only for Hive to quickly usurp control of HYDRA from him, ultimately culminating in killing Malick's daughter in front of him to make a point, and then killing him to prevent him squealing to S.H.I.E.L.D. in retaliation.
- Angel:
- Inverted in "I've Got You Under My Skin" when an already free demon possesses a boy, expecting to use him as a host. The boy turns out to be Eviler than Thou, and the demon finds himself trapped inside.
- Played straight when Gunn attempts to get help from the conduit to the Senior Partners in "A Hole in the World", only to get a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown:Conduit: This is the part where I need to be clear. I am not your friend. I am not your flunky. I am your conduit to the Senior Partners, and they are tired of your insolence. Oh, yeah. They are not here for your convenience.
- A room of Wolfram and Hart lawyers discover this after reuniting Darla and Drusilla. Once restored to a vampire (which was part of Wolfram and Hart's plan too) Darla turns out to be rather upset about being used as a pawn, and invade Holland Manners' house as he's organized a wine tasting party to celebrate his plan's victory. At that moment, Angel shows up, but instead of saving them as they expect, is pissed as hell at them as well and locks them all in, giving Drusilla and Darla free rein to tear them all apart.
- A first season episode of Ash vs. Evil Dead sees Ash and co. trying to learn more about the Necronomicon, etc. to stop the Deadites, so Ash decides to summon a demon to question it. He picks out what seems to be the weakest demon listed in the book, deciding based on the description that said demon is a "total nerd". Yeah, about that...
- In Big Wolf on Campus, the Werewolf Syndicate once successfully managed to brainwash Tommy into biting humans, in a bid to increase their numbers. Unfortunately for their leader, the first human that Tommy bites is Action Girl Lori, who becomes Eviler than Thou and promptly takes over said syndicate, requiring Tommy and Merton to stop and cure her.
- The meth industry from Breaking Bad: Not only has it turned Walt into a sociopath, but his family is now under constant threat of assassination from the cartels.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
- Ineffectual Sympathetic Villains Andrew and Jonathan were both prone to fiddling with magic they didn't understand, and unleashing horrible demons into the world. It also didn't help taking up with a genuine monster like Warren Mears.
- Spike and Drusilla release the Judge (an ancient demon with the power to incinerate anything with a trace of good in it). He notes that they love each other, which makes them vulnerable to his power, but Spike points out that they're the ones who set it free, and he relents. Whether this state of affairs would have lasted once he regained full strength is unclear.
- In season 4, Professor Walsh creates Adam, a Frankenstein-esque human/demon/cyborg creature intended to be the Super Prototype for an army of similar Super Soldiers. Within minutes of activation, Adam kills her himself and ultimately seizes control of Walsh's plans.
- Dawn may have done this when she attempted to bring Joyce back from the dead. Since the spell was broken before we saw the results in full, we will never know for sure.
- Anya's dealings with D'Hoffryn after she becomes a demon again — he didn't like her simply coming and going as she pleased.
- A demon in Charmed (1998) frees the Titans in order to take control of the Underworld. He doesn't even finish his Motive Rant before they kill him out of annoyance.
- Doctor Who:
- In short, the lesson many repeatedly learn is: don't mess with Time Lords, Daleks or Cybermen, be they collective or individual. Even if you think your stick is big enough to threaten them into submission with. Very Bad Things happen.
- This happened in "The Tomb of the Cybermen" (video
):Klieg: Are you listening? Do you understand me? Now that I have released you– ARGGHH... Let me go! I set you free! It was our plan!
Cybercontroller: YOU BELONG TO UZZ. YOU SHALL BE LIKE UZZ. - The Master ends up pleading in terror after unsealing the Daemon in the serial "The Dæmons".
- Davros, who discovered that he had absolutely no control whatsoever over his Dalek creations. Of course, seeing as how the Doctor had warned him that the Daleks were utterly uncontrollable by anyone not of their race, and how Davros himself had specifically removed all positive emotions (basically, everything besides hatred and self-love) to "ensure they would be the ultimate survivors", this is perhaps more a case of Davros being Too Egotistic/Stupid/Psychotic to Live.
- Stated to have happened in the backstory of "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy": Kingpin brought the Psychic Circus to Segonax, hoping to summon the powers there. When he tried, they enslaved him and the rest of the circus. In the episode itself, Captain Cook also plans to bargain with the powers; before he can try, he is killed and becomes a revenant under their control.
- "Dalek": American billionaire Henry van Statten has a secret museum full of alien artifacts, with the prize of the collection being the one living specimen — a Dalek (initially damaged). After the Doctor arrives and discovers what van Statten's precious "Metaltron" is, van Statten continues to consider it the prize of his collection even after it breaks out and goes on a rampage through the facility.
- A double dose in "The End of Time". In the first case, the Master, after being resurrected, is kidnapped by a billionaire who thinks he can use the Master to repair a piece of alien technology he has in his possession that he can use to his own ends. The Master repairs the device, all right, and then uses it to turn all humans on Earth, including the billionaire and his daughter, into copies of himself. Then later, he makes the same mistake when he brings back the Time Lords, who want to end time itself. Of course, he'd be okay with "the end of time itself", he just (incorrectly) assumed the Time Lords would let him rule with them.
- In the first two series of GARO, the Big Bad falls victim to this trope. Barago is devoured by Messiah after summoning her, and when Sigma Fudou draws power from Ganon's corpse once too often, it triggers a resurrection and he is absorbed.
- The seasonal Chessmaster Big Bads of Heroes regularly fall victim to this in regards to Sylar. They regularly try to recruit him as their Dragon, or at least use him as a pawn in their schemes. After going along for a few episodes, he regularly turns around and makes things end very badly for them. Bennet even lampshades this to Danko: "Just how dumb are you? Who did you think would be left standing the moment Sylar got bored? You?"
- More than one Kamen Rider villain has played with evil:
- Kamen Rider Ryuki has bratty upperclass twit Jun Shibaura think he can pit Takeshi Asakura against the other Riders, which ends poorly for him. In a rare case of someone realizing this trope is in play in time to act accordingly, Ren Akiyama also briefly partners with Asakura, but quickly realizes that the guy is just too evil for anyone to deal with and breaks off the partnership while he still can.
- Kamen Rider OOO has Mad Scientist Dr. Maki declare from minute one that he's an Omnicidal Maniac, in such a deadpan way that nobody really seems to believe him, hero or villain alike. Smug Snake Kazari even hands Maki the keys to become a much more powerful and dangerous monster than Kazari himself because he underestimates just how serious Maki is about wanting to end the world, nor does he grasp that the last set of Core Medals were left in their box for a reason.
- Played with in the Post-Script Episodes of Kamen Rider Wizard. Wizard gets drawn into a pocket dimension ruled by Amadam, who can control the various sources of evil power in Kamen Rider. Amadam also claims that the Kamen Riders themselves are "evil" (horrible at being evil, but "evil" nonetheless) since they're all Phlebotinum Rebels that share their powers with their enemies. Unfortunately for him, once he gets the means to summon past Riders, he finds that the summoning did not give him control over them and they promptly turn on him because he's the bad guy threatening innocents. The principle that Evil is Not a Toy still holds even when that Evil fights for Good.
- In Kamen Rider Gaim, Mitsuzane considers himself The Chessmaster and regularly brokers deals with the villains for his own ends, but has blinded himself to the fact that they're not the pawns he thinks they are. The villains, for their part, are amused by this and play along. Things finally come crashing down on Mitsuzane at the end of the series, where he makes a deal with Ryoma to save Mai's life — and Ryoma doesn't bother to hold up his end. Ryoma gives a "The Reason You Suck" Speech where he lampshades just how stupid it was to trust him, given how Mitsuzane knew what he wanted and what he was capable of.
- In Kamen Rider Drive, number of Roidmudes find gathering data for their personal evolution to go faster by partnering with a human, who inevitably outlive their usefulness. The Roidmudes themselves are playing with evil, however, by keeping their creator Dr. Banno around in digitized form on a tablet so they can use his knowledge to repair themselves. Not only was this Banno's plan all along, but upon getting back out of the tablet he proves far more vile than any Roidmude.
- In Kamen Rider Ghost, Adel abuses the power of the Ganmaizers after inheriting the ability to control them, unaware that the reason his father avoided using them was because their Resurrective Immortality caused them to grow both stronger and smarter after every use. They gradually go from mindless homunculi, whose prime directive is to prevent anyone from accessing the Great Eye, to a fully intelligent Hive Mind who conclude the best way to do that is to make sure there's nobody around left to try.
- Kamen Rider Ex-Aid lead villain Kuroto Dan pulls it off on both ends, betraying the few humans who know what a maniac he is but think they can control him, while getting betrayed himself by the Bugsters he created. Unlike the people he fools, however, Kuroto is aware this could happen and makes sure to have three separate contingency plans to resurrect himself in place, just in case the first two don't work.
- Kamen Rider Build is a comedy of errors about this trope, as four separate villainous factions think that Blood Stalk is really working for them, and when he arranged the downfalls of the other factions it was because they wanted him to. Naturally, Stalk stabs the fourth faction in the back as well.
- Kamen Rider Zi-O plays it out in smaller ways with a few of the Another Riders, particularly Another Kabuto and Another Kiva, but the crowning example is Swartz's master plan: to gather all of the powers of the Heisei Riders in their chosen vessel Zi-O after seeding Zi-O with a fragment of his own powers, then using that fragment as a channel to take all of the power for himself. Not only does this fail due to the full power of Zi-O proving far too vast for Swartz to handle, but it leaves Zi-O, now the most powerful being in the entire franchise, furious that Swartz has just murdered his only friends in front of him to awaken his full power. It doesn't end well for Swartz.
- Power Rangers Jungle Fury:
- Jarrod (accidentally) releases Dai Shi from his box. Dai Shi promptly possesses Jarrod's body. (The box containing the ancient über-evil opened when it was dropped on the ground. You'd think the Pai Zhua masters would lock the box or something, but no.) After that, Dai Shi keeps releasing more and more Overlords, even though in his human shape he's weaker than all of them. The third is finally fed up enough to boot Dai Shi off the throne and take it for himself.
- It's even worse in the Super Sentai series Jungle Fury was based on, Juken Sentai Gekiranger. Dai Shi's sorta-counterpart Rio wants to revive the last of the three kenma (the counterparts to the Overlords), and the two he's already revived tell him that's a bad idea. Think about this: two powerful, super-evil martial arts masters are saying that reviving the last of them is a bad idea.
- In Power Rangers Dino Fury, the Sporix Reghoul decides the best thing to do is to resurrect Lord Zedd's pre-Z-Wave self (and thus at his most evil) with the only thing keeping him in check is a Compliance Collar. The moment Ollie is able to destroy the Compliance Collar, the first thing Zedd decides to do is try to murder Reghoul before focusing on two Sporix that were still around once Reghoul escapes.
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: A double version in "Tangled", turns out you have to be careful when you hire psychopaths. A home invasion ends with a man beaten to death and his wife viciously raped. As it turns out, the man and his mistress arranged the ordeal to kill the wife, the mistress manipulated her Stalker with a Crush neighbor to do the deed, and the husband just wound up unintentionally being the victim. Said hired killer then used his knowledge to beat and rape the mistress, aware she could not go the police without revealing the original conspiracy.
- Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure: The ancient artifacts made by mermen have one primary purpose: kill mermaids. Zac learns that the trident he coveted for most of the first season is not cool toy that gives him superpowers when he nearly kills Lyla with it in a fit of rage. Erik spends most of the second season trying to find some higher purpose to the merman chamber, but when it's active, all it does is drain all the natural born mermaids in the area of their magic.
- Midsomer Murders: In "Blood on the Saddle", Susan Fincher seduced Adam Burbage, taking advantage of his love of Westerns and the Old West meaning that he secretly owned and knew how to use several illegal guns, to murder her husband and anyone else who stood in her way of gaining the disputed land in Ford Forley, planning to simply have Adam take the fall. However, she underestimated how unstable Adam was, thus upon realising she’s betrayed him Adam turns up intending to kill her next. She’s only saved by the intervention of Inspector Barnaby and Sergeant Jones.
- Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: Queen Metaria's evil becomes far more than Beryl can control and it eventually sends out Elite Mook youma out to collect energy for itself, removing the need for Beryl entirely.
- In one episode of Relic Hunter a monk tricks Sydney and Nigel into helping him unleash a demon which promptly kills him. The "evil" abbot who tried to prevent it happening turned out to have been the good guy all along.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
- In the last season, Kai Winn joins with Gul Dukat to free the Pah-wraiths (Bajoran demons) sealed deep inside the planet. While Dukat was insane and knew exactly what he was getting into (hell, they went so far as to empower him), Winn figured she could control both the Pah Wraiths and Dukat. It ended about as well as you would expect.
- Earlier in the series, Dukat also thought that he could leverage an alliance with the Dominion into a position of greater galactic influence for the Cardassian Union. In fairness, he was actually managing fairly well until he got captured by The Federation; it was under his incompetent, drunken successor that the alliance turned sour.
- Star Trek: Voyager:
- Something of a heroic example with Janeway's attempt to ally with the Borg against Species 8472 in "Scorpion". Thankfully, the crew is smart enough to prepare for the Borg's inevitable betrayal.
- In "Q2", while on a temporary stay on the ship, Q Junior decides to test the crew's abilities by magicking up three Borg cubes for them to fight. It only lasts a few brief minutes before daddy Q shows up, rescues them, and proceeds to tear into his son for being so foolish as to casually antagonize the Borg. This being the same Q who casually antagonized the Borg way back in TNG.
- A frequent occurrence in Supernatural.
- The major example is apparently Lucifer, who according to Crowley would have destroyed the demons who believed they had finally freed their "god" as soon as he no longer needed them.
- In "Malleus Maleficarum", a group of housewives turn to witchcraft to better their lives. They are horrified to learn that in doing so, they so they made a pact with a demon and damned their souls to hell. The demon possesses one and murders all the others when they either make too big of a scene, annoy her, or turn on her.
- The witch who summoned the demon Samhain, and was immediately killed after he had a body.
- The idiotic amateur witch (when will they learn?) who summoned a demon without any kind of protection. It possessed his friend, and offered him "gratitude" instead of the rewards they'd been promised for killing Dean. Then he complained to it about how hard he'd worked and demanded something more, at which point it killed him.
- Very much the case for Castiel at the beginning of Season 7. He sucked in every soul from Purgatory to make himself powerful enough to kill Raphael, declared himself the new God, and lasted a VERY short amount of time (hard to tell exactly in-universe, a few days probably, weeks at most, less than a full episode), and proceeded to get taken over and blown up from inside by the ancient race of evil that had been sealed in Purgatory.
- In "A Little Slice of Kevin", Linda Tran makes the horrible mistake of trusting a witch to help them fight demons, who immediately betrays them to Crowley. Said witch also makes the mistake of irritating Crowley, the new King of Hell, who responds by vanishing her away somewhere with a flick of his wrist. The episode never clarifies what happened to her, but knowing Crowley, she probably didn't end up somewhere pleasant.
- In season 11, Crowley takes in the child incarnation of Amara the Darkness — the primordial evil of the setting which frightens even the likes of Lucifer and Michael — and feeds her souls in a bid to get on her good side and manipulate her. By the end of the episode "The Bad Seed", she's become an adolescent and she wants even more souls and it starts to dawn on Crowley that he can't keep up with her demands. A few episodes later and Amara has completely broken free of Crowley's control, only sparing him because he's Not Worth Killing.
- Crowley does it again in Season 12. Instead of having Lucifer returned to his cage (where he'd be no threat), Crowley has him chained up in his throne room and boasts about how he will break Lucifer's will and reduce him to an attack dog. Unsurprisingly, this backfires horribly.
- Horton Rivers from the Tales from the Crypt episode "Television Terror" takes his television crew to an abandoned but allegedly Haunted House for thrills and ratings. The ghosts are all the more happy (or angry) to oblige them. The segment does bring big ratings, but Horton ends up being disemboweled and hung for his trouble, with his cameraman being killed shortly before Horton dies.
- In The Shannara Chronicles, Bandon resurrects the mysterious Warlock Lord. He's hoping the Warlock Lord will resurrect his girlfriend, and fight against the Crimson who are oppressing magic-users. Bandon does promise to serve the Warlock Lord, of course. The Warlock Lord is a lone wolf, however. Bandon sees his revived girlfriend get Mind Raped, mercy-kills her, and then gets his ass kicked.
- Ultra Series
- Yapool and his monster U-Killersaurus in the Ultraman Mebius film, Mebius & the Ultra Brothers. A gang of aliens attempt to release the latter (unaware the former is controlling the creature via Demonic Possession...or that he's the one who planted the idea of doing so in their heads), and Mebius manages to kill most of them. Nackle, the last of the bunch, succeeds in releasing U-Killersaurus, only for Yapool to kill him shortly after, having no need for his rescuers anymore.
- In the Ultra Galaxy Mega Monster Battle film, the alien Zarab releases the genuinely EVIL Ultra, Ultraman Belial from a space prison and presents him with the Giga-Battlenizer, a weapon that can control 100 monsters, in hopes that Belial will team up with him to conquer the universe as thanks for freeing him. Belial immediately kills Zarab upon receiving the weapon, not wanting to form an alliance with anyone.
- The Ultraman Zero movies and specials saw this again when the alien scientist Dr. Herodia and her team discover the Robot Me Darklops Zero floating around lifelessly in space and use it as the strongest soldier in their army of robot Ultras. However, Darklops Zero is actually a creation of Belial, and still loyal to its original master, the robot turns against Dr. Herodia and her men in the climax, killing them.
- In the Grand Finale of Ultraman Ginga S, Exceller resurrects the previous Big Bad Dark Lugiel as a cyborg monstrosity called Victory Lugiel and pilots it against Ultraman Ginga and Ultraman Victory with great success. But just as Exceller's victory seems assured, he is suddenly killed by Dark Lugiel, who reveals himself to have been in full control of his body the whole time and having his own plans for Ginga and Victory.
- The X-Files: In the episode "Die Hand die Verletzt", a small-town Satanic cult has been going a bit light on their worship lately, offering maybe token prayers. Then one of their kids actually summons the Devil. People die.Mulder: Did you really think you could summon up the devil and then expect him to behave?
