Eviler Than Thou / Live-Action TV

• In the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "Face My Enemy", HYDRA leader Daniel Whitehall confronts Raina, who's responsible for stealing the Diviner before HYDRA could get their hands on it. Raina attempts to talk her way out the situation, like she has so often before, but Whitehall quickly cuts her off and leaves her in no doubt that she bitten off way more than she can chew getting on HYDRA's bad side.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The vampires Angelus and Spike during the second season. Angelus, the more sadistic of the two, tried to drag the world into Hell, but was defeated when Spike and Buffy teamed up against him. Ironically, Angelus and Spike both underwent a Heel–Face Turn (although at different times) from Buffy's arch-enemy to Buffy's ally and lover. Both were karmically "punished" by regaining their souls (and thus their conscience and ability to feel guilt), and both underwent a sort of Karmic Death: Angel was swallowed by the demon Acathla and spent centuries in hell, while Spike became the show's Anti-Villain Butt-Monkey, suffering numerous humiliations and beatdowns and Badass Decay. Plus, then he had a literal Karmic Death in his Heroic Sacrifice in the final episode of season 7, though came back to life (or unlife) for "Angel" season 5 and carried on as a character in the comic continuations of both series.
  • Mr. Trick comes to regard Kakistos as an old-fashioned fool, abandoning him to be killed by Faith and Buffy ("These vengeance crusades are out of style, it's the modern vampire who sees the big picture.")
• Terry Silver ends up pulling this in Cobra Kai when he, between being bitter that Kreese manipulated him out of his peaceful life and back into their karate feud by playing into his PTSD and being sick to death of Kreese's general mistreatment, decides he's had enough and usurps the dojo. With Kreese framed for a severe assault he goes to town and proves himself to be far more of a threat: while Kreese was content to try and beat Daniel for the street cred and re-establish Cobra Kai, Silver wants to outright destroy Daniel's life via manipulation, gaslighting, and an eventual beating, and will torture children, burn down buildings, and outright murder to punish anyone who tries to interfere, never once taking the smug shit-eating grin off his face.
• Control Z: Downplayed with Pablo the Jerkass and the avenger, Alex. While Alex is the main Big Bad of the second season, however, she doesn't really show signs of personal maliciousness once she is revealed as the perpetrator by the end of the second season. Pablo, on the other hand, is more unsympathetic and vengeful than Alex is, as Raúl's actions as the hacker brought out his darker side: beating his former friend up almost everyday, prioritizing his own needs over María's and behaving like a GreenEyedMonster towards Claudia, whom he views as a threat.
• Degrassi, in its third and fourth seasons, contrasted Jay (a sociopathic criminal mastermind) with Rick (an unstable maniac who beat his girlfriend). When their schemes collided, Jay turned out to be Eviler than Thou — but Rick got more dangerous as Jay backed him into a corner. The sixth season has contrasted Drake (a violent gang leader) with Peter (a sleazy operator who was born to blackmail and frame people). So far, their schemes have not collided.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Master teams up with an evil alien in all five stories of Season 8. With two exceptions, he proves himself Eviler Than They. The exceptions: he agrees to help the Doctor destroy Axos in "The Claws of Axos", and he gets completely owned by Azal in "The Dæmons".
  • A very ironic variant in "Genesis of the Daleks". Davros, the creator of the Daleks, ends up being killed by his creations because they are programmed to believe that no other being is superior to them. Including Davros.
  • In "The Five Doctors", the Master teams up with the Cybermen, whose intentions to kill him later are clear to the audience from the beginning of the partnership. They never get a chance to, though, as he leads them directly into a death trap. Ironically, in this example the Master is actually on the Doctor's side, until he finally gets sick of the fact that none of the Doctors — not exactly without just cause — refuse to believe him.
  • "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday": An entire army of Cybermen stomps onto Earth from a parallel universe, seemingly taking control of the planet. Then four Daleks show up, and make it clear they view the Cybermen as no more than a pest problem even before they get matching numbers.
  • In "The End of Time", Rassilon proves to be even more evil than the Master, demonstrating it by listening to the Master's Evil Plan, then effortlessly undoing all he'd done so far with a literal flick of his wrist, restoring humanity, but not out of altruism — the way he immediately pulls a Kneel Before Zod on everyone present (which, scarily enough, they comply with) shows that he did it solely to screw with the Master and demonstrate who held the power. Needless to say, the Master gets the message, and immediately changes tack, submitting to Rassilon. Heck, Rassilon turns out to be responsible for driving the Master towards villainy, as part of a plan to escape the Time War and achieve godhood. However, the Master ultimately gets his own back, frying Rassilon and killing him so brutally, electrical energy mixed with shoving white star diamonds down his throat that his regeneration turned him into a frail old man — and that was after it was stabilised.
  • "World Enough and Time"/"The Doctor Falls": The "Harold Saxon" Master is responsible for the creation of Mondas-type Cybermen aboard a giant colony ship and allying with his future self Missy. Ultimately, though, thanks to the Doctor, the Cybermen grow out of control and start hunting Time Lords as well, and the Master and Missy end up killing one another over Missy's plan to go and help the Doctor.
• Scorpius to Crais in Farscape. In fact, it is Scorpius's bullying of Crais that leads the latter to his Heel–Face Turn and Heroic Sacrifice.
• The Maniax of Gotham had a brief contest between Jerome Valeska and a cannibal named Robert Greenwood, about who should lead the group of escaped maniacs. Greenwood's argument was that he terrorised the whole city and ate twelve women while Jerome merely chopped his mother to death. Jerome retorted that he despite his young age, has a vision and ideas about chaos and ambition and just eating people grows old after a while. And he proves to have all those qualities along with a total disregard for his own life which earns him the leadership among the psychopaths, essentially winning by proving that no matter how depraved others are, he has taken the idea of amorality and evil to a level that very few can even comprehend.
• Bennet and Sylar were villains in the first season of Heroes, Sylar being a sociopathic power cannibal, and Bennet a "for the greater good" kidnapping Government Conspiracy-employed Magnificent Bastard. Sylar eventually proved the greater threat thanks to the former's Start of Darkness and Morality Pet daughter.
  • Linderman and Sylar could be considered the two driving villains of the show's first season. Linderman being The Faceless Anti-Villain, wanting to do "good"; and Sylar the ever present Implacable Man. They never meet or intersect, but Linderman's plot for world renewal hinged on Sylar (or two other people) exploding in New York. His reasons for being so sure this would happen were sketchy.
  • On the other hand, Sylar was given a sympathetic Start of Darkness episode, too, in which we got to meet him as the gentle and nerdy Gabriel Gray before Chandra Suresh put all that talk about an Evolutionary Imperative into his head. In another episode, we got to meet Gabriel's neurotic mother. Sylar was horrified at the idea of becoming an Exploding Man and wiping out millions of lives. As evil villains go, he's not completely without redeeming qualities. The third season of Heroes will show if he comes out Eviler than Thou when pitted against other homicidal superpowered villains, or if he effects a Heel–Face Turn.
    • Sylar's doubts about destroying New York last for about ten minutes before he's out pursuing exploding powers, laughing as Peter is about to explode, and preventing Hiro from stopping the Exploding Peter. I don't think we can really think of Sylar as being all that sympathetic.
  • And now, Season 3 has brought us Arthur Petrelli, whose plan seems certain to blow up the world... and who has effortlessly defeated most of the other villains on the show. It's gotten to the point where a villain has defeated at least as many evildoers as the actual heroes!
  • It would seem that Sylar has won the Eviler than Thou contest. Arthur Petrelli lost due to a bad case of bullet to the brain, courtesy of Sylar.
  • The second part of Season Three has Sylar (still a super-powered egomaniac following his own whims) versus Danko (a non-powered, highly disciplined government agent acting on orders from the President). Sylar turns out to eviller this time too. We should perhaps just accept that you cannot out-evil Sylar... but Samuel wants to give it a try.
  • And Samuel vs. Sylar results in a draw on technical grounds — because Sylar makes yet another Heel-Face Turn before helping Peter defeat Samuel.
• Horrible Histories gives us four of the nastiest Roman Emperors trying to one-up each other through a Villain Song (based on Michael Jackson's "Bad"). Despite the presence of The Caligula himself, the clear winner is Nero.
  Nero: I'm bad! So baddy! Of badness, I'm the daddy! Come on, I wanna see a more evil bloke than me!
  Others: You're bad! Real bad! Nothing more to add! We all thought that we were awful, but you are really, truly, maaad!
• House: Downplayed. There was an epsiode where the doctors had to treat an insufferable teenage chess prodigy who has an almost supernatural ability to turn everybody against him. Even House himself hates this kid and this is from the guy who thinks that everyone is an idiot.
• Inazuman: The Despar Army make their introduction by rebelling against Emperor Banba and steamrolling over the Phantom Army's outposts one-by-one, forcing Banba to ally with Inazuman. The reason for the Despar Army's uprising turns out to be that Banba (who is definitely no saint) wasn't genocidal enough for their tastes.
• iZombie: Blaine and Vaughn in the later parts of the first season and throughout most of the second one. Blaine is a small-time crook trying to make it into the big leagues through charisma, guile and by profiting off of the zombie community. Vaughn is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who only thinks he's brilliant and charming but only really poses a threat due to being so obscenely wealthy, and who wants to kill all zombies as a side project. Adding to the symmetry is that they are jointly responsible for the existence of zombies in the first place: the zombie outbreak came from a combination of tainted drugs sold by Blaine and an experimental new energy drink developed by Vaughn's company.
• Several Kamen Rider shows have this happen to at least one villain:
  • Kamen Rider OOO presents Kazari as the evilest of the five main Greeed, even devouring the Cores of two of his companions in a bid for more power. He's outdone, however, by Dr. Maki, a mere human who Kazari unwittingly hands the keys to become a monster far beyond anything Kazari could have imagined. The flashbacks to the original OOO show it's not the first time a human was a bigger menace than any Greeed, either.
  • Kamen Rider Fourze sets up a rivalry between the Libra and Cancer Zodiarts, the former being one of the oldest but least talented Horoscopes while the latter is the newest and so talented that even the Big Bad is somewhat concerned by how quickly his powers develop. Cancer's newfound and rapidly escalating power makes him increasingly arrogant and depraved in his behavior, but at the end of the arc Libra proves the eviler of the duo and finally gets his revenge.
  • Kamen Rider Wizard has a rare case of a villain being eviler than himself with Sora, the Gremlin Phantom. Normally a Phantom replaces their human host's personality with the worst possible version of itself, and no longer consider their human identity to be anything but a convenient disguise. Gremlin retains Sora's original personality and sense of identity...because as a Serial Killer and low-functioning sociopath, Sora was already the worst possible version of himself.
  • Kamen Rider Gaim consists in no small part of various villains trying to prove that they're the evilest of thou all. Mitsuzane is usually on the losing end of these arrangements.
  • Kamen Rider Drive sees the Roidmudes make use of their creator, Dr. Tenjuro Banno, enslaved in the form of a tablet to assist in reviving themselves. Banno at first appears to have been a helpless participant, before revealing that he was manipulating the Roidmudes for his own ends the entire time. The Angel and Paradox Roidmudes, villains of their respective movies, were also drastically more evil than normal Roidmudes and had plans that would have been just as disastrous for their own kind as for humans.
  • Kamen Rider Build sees Blood Stalk proving he's the evilest of thou all by backstabbing his way through every other villainous faction in the show, none of whom realize he's actually an Omnicidal Maniac as they jockey against each other for a prize that doesn't exist. He also turns out to be an immensely powerful and ancient alien invader who's wiped out countless worlds.
    • And then in the Cross-Z V-Cinema we meet the one villain who can outdo Blood Stalk, his older brother Killbus.
• The Bad Future season 1 finale of Legend of the Seeker does this with Nicholas Rahl, the son of the season's Big Bad Darken Rahl and the Seeker's Love Interest in an I Have You Now, My Pretty moment. When Kahlen gives birth to a boy instead of a girl, she immediately begs Rahl to let her kill him, as per Confessor custom, as male Confessors invariably go mad with power and confess everybody around them in order to ensure loyal support. Darken Rahl refuses and claims both of them can raise little Nicholas to be a good ruler (yes, Rahl is under the assumption that he is a good ruler). Instead, Nicholas turns out exactly as expected, gets his mother executed for trying to kill him and confesses a guard to kill Darken Rahl during the funeral. By the time Richard arrives to the future, almost everybody in D'Hara and, possibly, beyond has been confessed by Nicholas Rahl.
• The Masters of Horror episode "Pick Me Up" has two serial killers (one who picks up and murders hitchhikers, and another who poses as a hitchhiker and kills anyone who picks him up) in competition with each other.
• Has happened more than once in Power Rangers.
  • Lord Zedd versus Count Dregon in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers season 3's Poorly Disguised Pilot for Masked Rider.
    • That same season, Master Vile (Rita and Rito's father) dropped by for several episodes. He routinely sought to prove that Zedd was inferior to him. Vile did achieve some major victories (most notably turning the Rangers into children), but he also suffered some big failures. He got so outraged by the Alien Rangers thwarting his ultimate plan that he rage quits and goes back home, much to Zedd's delight.
  • The rivalry between Lord Zedd and the Machine Empire in Power Rangers Zeo.
    • For a time, Zedd and Rita had to flee rather than face the Machine Empire. They had to go to the one person so evil that even Mondo and Machina would hang back: Master Vile. Unsurprisingly, Zedd was infuriated and felt humiliated.
  • Only momentary, but Power Rangers Lost Galaxy has Trakeena and Captain Mutiny. Mutiny is greedy and a slaver, but Trakeena is so ruthless she blows his ship out of the sky the moment she sees it.
  • In the crossover of Lightspeed Rescue and Lost Galaxy, Olympius shows he's more wicked than Trakeena by sabotaging her plan to remutate herself, causing her to transform into a mindless giant monster.
    Olympius: Be careful what you ask for, Trakeena.
  • The Dino Thunder / Ninja Storm Reunion Show ends with the Villain Team-Up breaking down and the two main villains fighting. Mesogog wins by hitting Lothor with his psychic Agony Beam and... turning him into an action figure. "Very collectible."
  • Power Rangers Operation Overdrive has no less than four villain factions fighting each other as well as the Rangers: Flurious, Moltor, Kandor, and the Fear Cats.
    • Though this is more played as an Enemy Civil War until Flurious kills his brother Moltor when the latter is beaten by the Power Rangers and then proceeds to collect all the last MacGuffins and becomes the series' Big Bad.
• Saturday Night Live has a sketch about a group of Mad Scientists competing to make the world's most evil invention. The competition screeches to a halt once one guy, Roy (played by Dwayne Johnson) presents a child-molesting robot. When everybody else is disgusted, Roy reminds them that "evil" means "amoral" and their Cartoonish Supervillainy isn't nearly as evil as child molestation.
  Roy: You know, I want to remind you guys that Webster's Dictionary defines "evil" as "profoundly immoral."
  Baronesse Antarctica: We know what "evil" means!
  Roy: Well, doesn't seem like you do, 'cause you built a freeze ray. I mean, Benito Mussolini used to force-feed people castor oil until they literally died of diarrhea. I mean, that's gotta be where the goalposts are, right? Am I crazy?
• The Shield has Armadillo Quintero. Up to that point, Farmington's drug trade was run by various divided gangs who had scruples and internal camaraderie. Armadillo, however, is a ruthless sociopath who murders the competition, assimilates their gangs into his own, and actively peddles drugs to children.
• Stargate SG-1 has the Goa'uld System Lords who are all completely evil, but will often fight against each other for territory or other things. Some even manage to outclass the others in pure malevolence.
  • Sokar, who was really into that Satan thing. He beats previous Big Bad Apophis after the latter's failure to conquer Earth, and then captures him to torture him for eternity and eventually dumping him on a hell world, giving Apophis time to plan his revenge.
  • Inverted with Yu, who is a ruthless tyrant like every System Lord, but he still plays things straight when negotiating with the Tau'ri despite their being "inferior" humans. And it was at least implied that he led the call for Anubis's original banishment in part because Anubis was too extreme even by System Lord standards. He was much less megalomaniacal, not desiring galactic conquest and not particularly interested in events outside his area of the galaxy, which included Earth. Yu becomes noticeably more megalomaniacal after his senility set in; the first time he explicitly declared himself a god (despite having, unlike every other known Goa'uld, taken on the persona of a real historical figure instead of a god) was shortly after the viewers were informed that Yu was senile.
  • Anubis was supposedly way too evil even for the Goa'uld. The Goa'uld System Lords enslaved the galaxy and were extreme egomaniacs. Anubis was more competent than the rest and his ultimate goal was to erase all life in the entire galaxy (including the total extinction of his own race) and then recreate it according to his own preferences. He was smart enough to trick Oma into letting him ascend, making him an immortal Energy Being far beyond any regular Goa'uld. Furthermore, he made a lot of Goa'uld (including System Lords) work for him, and crushed the rest of them, including most of Yu's fleet.
• In the Star Trek: Voyager two-parter "Scorpion", Species 8472 is more lethal than even the Borg. Yes, the near-unstoppable, all-consuming cybernetic Hive Mind that has been the terror of the galaxy for centuries is completely outclassed by the genetically superior, highly territorial eldritch aliens. The Borg want to assimilate everyone into their collective; Species 8472 wants to annihilate every other living thing because they consider it an affront to their vaunted purity.
• Super Sentai:
  • A pretty nasty one happens late into Choujin Sentai Jetman. Tranza, who was incredibly sadistic and bloodthirsty in his own right, gets tortured into insanity by Radiguet so he can retake control of the Vyram.
  • Ninpuu Sentai Hurricaneger: After Seventh Spear, Sandaaru makes his debut, he over the course of a short period of time covertly kills off the next two most powerful Dark Spears below him, Fifth Spear, Sargain and Sixth Spear, Satarakura, solidifying him as all the more dangerous.
• The Vampire Diaries frequently features multiple villains of varying importance and potency all playing the game at once, but up until season 4, the Ax-Crazy megalomaniac Klaus had been well-established as the most evil and formidable vampire in town (in the world really) - the mere mention of him was enough to terrify most people. Cue the introduction of Silas, who on his first appearance curb stomps Klaus with little effort and stabs him with a white oak stake, then proceeds to Mind Rape him brutally with the use of powerful hallucinations. While the other characters would normally rejoice at seeing the smug and arrogant Klaus receive such a thoroughly humiliating defeat, when Caroline finds him curled up on the floor weeping, begging for help, and desperately trying to pry a large splinter of wood from his own back with a pair of pliers before it can reach his heart and kill him, she is alarmed, because if Silas is able to reduce Klaus of all people to a sniveling wreck, she can only imagine what he's capable of doing to the rest of them.
• Wynonna Earp: Bobo Del Rey, leader of the revenants, and Constance Clootie, a "Stone Witch" who seems to have some kind of larger plan involving the Ghost River Triangle, have a fraught relationship over the course of the first season, with it being very unclear who's the real Big Bad and who's just The Dragon. Bobo turns out to be the more dangerous one - when Constance tries to renege on their deal, he attacks her, kills her newly-resurrected demon son, and would have killed her if not for the appearance of the heroes.
• Xena: Warrior Princess and later Hercules: The Legendary Journeys: Dahak is trapped in another realm, but he's still so powerful and intimidating that even the Olympians are terrified of just the idea of him getting out. Ares, one of the franchise's biggest threats, is afraid of directly acting against him (relying instead on Xena to do the dirty work) and was even once scared into being Demoted to Dragon. On another occasion, Ares (forcibly de-powered after Dahak did enter the world) was on the run and only made a move against Dahak after Hercules had already restrained him with the Stone of Creation.

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