Times where a villain's attempt to Screw Destiny and solve their problems through mass-murder completely backfires on them in Live-Action TV series.
- In the finale of season 2 of The 100, the inhabitants of Mount Weather attempt to harvest citizens of Arcadia for their bone marrow, as bone marrow transplants from the Arcadians, who have adapted to living on the irradiated surface of Earth, will allow the people of Mount Weather to survive there too. To stop this from happening, two Arcadians vent surface air into the Mount Weather compound, irradiating it and exterminating its entire population save one.
- A very longterm example occurs in the Babylon 5 universe. The Hyach once shared their planet with another sentient species, the Hyach-do. The two races coexisted peacefully for thousands of years, and even intermarried, until the Hyach exterminated the Hyach-do in a frenzy of religious fervor. Centuries later, it was discovered that the declining birth rate of the Hyach is because interbreeding with the Hyach-do was necessary to sustain the Hyach genome. Thus, in wiping out the Hyach-do, the Hyach have doomed themselves to extinction as well.
- In Barbarians Rising, Viriathus is a mere shepherd who escapes a Roman punitive slaughter of Lusitanian tribesmen and morphs into a reluctant Rebel Leader.
- Played with in Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman where the Big Bad was defeated by the flower of the first planet he wiped out (he forgot the memo to destroy it completely).
- Doctor Who:
- A rare heroic example: The Doctor has attempted genocide on the Daleks at least four times. It never takes. They just hate him even more now than they did before.
- He does deliberately avoid committing genocide in "Genesis of the Daleks", giving as his reason that while the Daleks are indeed evil, omnicidal Space Nazis, a lot of good has come out of people banding together to fight them. That decision sure came back to bite him in the ass.
- After the Doctor supposedly wiped out the Daleks and Time Lords when the Time Lords were prepared to destroy time itself, one more Time Lord managed to escape the War some time before. Not only is he his (other) arch-enemy, but the rest of the Time Lords use him to escape.
- The Doctor ended the Time War through the use of some unspecified superweapon, which was supposed to kill all the Daleks and accidentally killed all the Time Lords, but Daleks keep popping up. However, it becomes clear in the Tenth Doctor's last episode, "The End of Time", that this is because he wasn't just aiming at the Daleks.
- In "The Day of the Doctor", it's revealed that rather than destroy the Daleks and the Time Lords, the superweapon in question convinced the Doctor, with help from two of his next incarnations, to hide Gallifrey in a pocket dimension. Ultimately, it would have been the Daleks aiming at themselves.
- Game of Thrones:
- House Bolton tried to wipe out the Stark bloodline. The Stark remnants fighting back and Ramsay's own Stupid Evil tendencies led to the Bolton bloodline's extinction instead.
- Arya takes a particular delight in pointing this out as all the males of House Frey die from poisoned wine, annihilating it as a house, as Arya poses as Old Walder Frey via Skinchanging, saying they should have wiped out all of the Starks, root and stem, but since they didn't, they are where they are now.Leave one wolf alive, and the sheep are never safe
- Tried by Darken Rahl in Legend of the Seeker. He got wind of a prophecy that the True Seeker would be born in a certain town, so he had his troops, led by his most trusted lieutenant, to kill all the first born sons in the town. Sure enough, Richard was spirited away, and when Rahl finds out 20 years later, he executes the lieutenant.
- In Lexx His Divine Shadow was very thorough in wiping out the Brunnen-G in order to thwart a prediction that the last of their race would destroy him, but he made the mistake of mocking the prophecy by turning the last Brunnen-G Kai's corpse into an undead immortal killing machine under his control. The Divine Shadow himself is the parasitic essence of the last Insect that the Brunnen-G missed when they defeated the Insect Civilization.
- Uther Pendragon in Merlin (2008) attempted to kill all the magic users and dragons he could find. Now that he's cleared out all the harmless, innocent ones, the more violent and powerful ones are gunning for his blood. He did manage to kill all the dragons, but decided to keep the last one as an example. When it gets loose, it very nearly burns his city to the ground. And just when you think he's too much of a Karma Houdini, his daughter Morgana turns out to be magical and kills him.
- The Outer Limits (1995): In "To Tell the Truth", after the first wave of colonists arrived on Janus Five, they attempted to place the small and primitive native population into reservations, but the natives proved to be uncooperative. A squad of colonial marines was sent in to kill them, and they later reported that their mission had been accomplished. In spite of this, stories persisted that some of the natives had survived and that they were shapeshifters. It turned out that these stories were true, and that one of the natives had taken the form of the colony's security chief Montgomery Bennett. Moments before the sun flashed over as Dr. Larry Chambers predicted, Bennett tells the council chairman Franklin Murdock that Chambers' theory that the indigenous lifeforms had evolved to survive the aftereffects of the periodic devastation was correct. He adds that Murdock had been right himself in another respect: the natives planned to use the opportunity to retake control of Janus Five, and the humans' leftover ships and weapons would allow them to repel any further attempts to colonize the planet. The native in Bennett's form is killed, but he is praised by his people for making a Heroic Sacrifice so that they could reclaim their home.
- Stargate-verse:
- In Stargate SG-1 where Daniel lands in an alternate grimmer dimension where the Goa'uld have invaded Earth, a cold-hearted O'Neill sends a nuke to the Jaffa homeworld upon learning the location from Daniel. This bites him in the ass when he pleads to Teal'c to think of his son, who had been killed by the nuclear strike.
- In Stargate: Continuum, Baal is smart enough to know that trying to exterminate the Tau'ri will only cause eternal resentment among the survivors who will try and take revenge. Instead, he tries to woo humanity to his side peacefully with the intention of turning them into the next generation of Jaffa. Unfortunately for him, his wife didn't quite see it that way, and decided to do a bombardment of the planet after murdering him.
- Near the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the Cardassians have at that point lost all standing with the Dominion and are not much more than unwilling vassals. This leads elements of the the civilian population to subvert the Dominion war effort through acts of sabotage. In the series finale "What You Leave Behind", as a result of one particular incident which nearly cost them a battle, the Female Changeling orders a major Cardassian city to be wiped out by orbital bombardment as an example, and announces that the Dominion will destroy one city for every act of sabotage committed. After hearing this, however, the entire Cardassian fleet does an abrupt Heel–Face Turn mid-battle in favor of The Federation instead, as well as getting many Cardassian soldiers on-planet to defect. This in turn prompts the Dominion to start slaughtering the Cardassians en masse, but since her subordinate proceeds to send out most of their troops stationed at the base to do so, this leaves their installation critically under-guarded when Damar and his crew attack Dominion Headquarters screaming the name of the exterminated city as a battlecry. About half of the force that storms it had been guarding it up to that point. Irony time: the Cardassians used the same tactics during their earlier Occupation of Bajor, with the same results (except they were smart enough to not have Bajorans fighting alongside them on the front lines of an interstellar war at the same time).
- The Star Trek: Voyager story "Year of Hell" has a variant. The Krenim went around exterminating entire races from the timestream to make it so that their empire never fell. Unfortunately, this was a hit-or-miss endeavor. Sometimes, it resulted in their empire being at near full strength; other times, it set them back centuries. However, the first real backfire that happened was that one of the races that helped destroy their empire in the first place also introduced some disease treatment whose absence caused the death of the project lead's wife, and none of the altered timestreams had a cure. Since then, the project lead has been desperately searching for a way to fix things for his own selfish reasons. Ultimately, the problem is solved when Voyager rams the superweapon when it's about to fire, causing it to Ret-Gone itself.
- Star Trek: Enterprise: What's waiting for the Xindi if they succeed in wiping out humanity, which they do in one Bad Future. They've been told by a "benefactor" from the future that humans will destroy their world, when the truth is humans will save them and the rest of the galaxy from destruction, as the linchpin of the Federation.
- Supernatural: "Everybody Hates Hitler" opens with a Golem made by a secret society of Jewish sorcerers assaulting a concentration camp and utterly massacring the Nazis staffing it.
