Just Eat Gilligan / Live-Action TV

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Just Eat Gilligan in Live-Action TV.

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• Just about any series (Family Matters, Three's Company, etc.) with an "Annoying Next Door Neighbor." If said neighbor's constant presence bothers the family, then why don't they just lock their doors and/or get a restraining order?

• Arrested Development:
  • GOB routinely screws up Michael's plans to save the company, week after week after week, even to the point of undoing what good Michael has achieved. Given how often this occurs, it is surprising that Michael always has a change of heart right after he decides to finally get rid of GOB for good. Indeed, the humor of the series mainly stems from the Hard Truth Aesop that Michael should stop caring about his family, but he is unable to.
  • If only Michael had moved away from his incompetent, irresponsible and immoral family, he wouldn't have to deal with their shenanigans. To his credit, he did try to leave at the beginning of season two. But the SEC was extra suspicious at that point.
  • The Fox run of the show actually ends with the SEC coming after the Bluths again and Michael finally going, "Y'know what? Fuck this." One of the first things in the order of business of the Netflix season was getting Michael back into his family's life.
  • On the other hand, Michael can be just as bad and self-centered as the rest of the Bluths and one of the reasons why he hangs around is because he genuinely gets off on his own feeling of self-importance and needing to be relied on by the rest of the family. Him leaving the family to fend for themselves in order to spend time with his son he previously spent the entire series neglecting is arguably positive character development in the context.
• Arrow: Season 3 would be much shorter if at any point in time Oliver would just let the League of Assassins deal with the Magician like they wanted to. Considering that the Magician is a villain himself and Oliver himself wanted to kill him at two points of time for the same reasons League hunts him (the Undertaking and his role in Sara's murder) it makes very little sense that he would want to risk conflict with the League (which helped him in the past) just to protect him. Yes, he has a reason to protect him (he's Thea's father) but this falls flat when you remember that Thea herself rather sensibly disowned him after she learned that he drugged and brainwashed her to kill Sara, making it look like Oliver has the Conflict Ball super-glued to his hand. The show tries to justify it with the Magician's claim that the League will punish Thea since they're the one who actually fired the arrows, but once Ra's al Ghul makes clear he considers the Magician the real killer, Oliver could have just let the problem resolve itself.
• In Beetleborgs, a new villain waited until the heroes' base rose out of the ground and then having the monster-planes bomb it while the vehicles were still inside. Though the heroes eventually got new, cooler, vehicles, it was a devastating blow. It also made you wonder why absolutely no one's ever thought of that before. Which is really strange, because in the rest of the many-parts episode, this monster didn't use savviness. On the contrary, at this point he destroyed all the other weapons playing by the rules, just to show he could do it.
• In The Beverly Hillbillies, the Clampetts could have used their millions to buy a large farm ranch, like many oil barons in fiction do, instead of moving into a mansion in California. This would mean that they could enjoy their wealth while still living the rural life they were accustomed to and not have to deal with the many Fish out of Water situations they had in Beverly Hills.
  • In truth the only character who hates living in "Californy" is Granny. Jed is bemused by all the strange things he runs into, but he moved them there in the first place because he believed it was the proper place for rich folk like them to live. There are several cases where they do pack up and move back (and in one case Granny wanted them to move to Hooterville), but always come back because Status Quo Is God.
• The Black Donnellys: The sheer amount of trouble and misfortune that could be avoided if Tommy stopped bailing out Jimmy and Kevin every time they do something stupid, greedy, arrogant, or hot-headed is staggering. The two are seemingly incapable of following Tommy's advice on a single intelligent matter and cause themselves, Tommy, and everyone else around them no end of grief as a result. Joey Ice Cream lampshades this, noting that Jimmy and Kevin are always dragging Tommy down, and he lets them get away with it due to familial loyalty and guilt over maiming Jimmy.
• Early in Breaking Bad, Walter White is offered a job with excellent health insurance by a wealthy friend. Of course, his Fatal Flaw is pride, so he rejects this "charity" out of hand, but if he'd simply accepted with good grace, it would have been a very short show. His pride continues to be a crippling problem for the rest of the series.
  • It's implied that a similar incident made him abandon his research and become a low-paid science teacher in the first place. Heisenberg's meth trade may be new, but Walt's anger issues have always been there.
  • The same friend also offers to pay for Walt's treatment in full. If Walt's true motivation really was paying for his treatment and not leaving his family in debt, as he claimed it was, he would have been an idiot to say no. It isn't until the finale that he admits that he enjoyed cooking meth for its own sake.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Season Four has a particularly annoying example. Xander hands Buffy a flare gun, and she replies "We're fighting vampires, not signaling ships at sea". The characters haven't had a problem with using flaming arrows to great effect on vampires, so why wouldn't a flare gun be just as effective? She uses it later which obscures the vision of her enemies, but seriously, a flare gun would be a great weapon against any vampire. A big incendiary projectile.
  • Season Five established a) Glory can't leave this dimension without The Key. b) The key has been incarnated as Dawn, written into the timeline as Buffy's sister, c) Glory is much stronger than Buffy, and will stop at nothing to get The Key, d) Willow has the ability to send living beings to other dimensions (though admittedly her ability to choose a specific dimension is in question), and e) Buffy knows she can't take Glory head-on, so she chooses to take Dawn and run, presumably for the rest of their lives. The idea that Willow could have just sent Dawn (and probably Buffy in order to protect her) to another dimension and thus trap Glory here forever is never brought up. Glory has to do her thing in Sunnydale, on a specific date, after which (as far as we can tell) the Key is useless. So why not ship Dawn off to France for a few months? There's no indication that Glory can track her.
  • Season Seven would have had far fewer complications ensue in the second half of the season had the main characters invented some kind of mandatory "touch" system where they would have to make regular physical contact with each other to see if everyone present was corporeal. The First Evil caused so many problems by imitating other characters (but is incorporeal) that it seems odd that no system is invented to regularly verify that everyone there is really who they say they are. In their defense, The First didn't actually trick them this way all that many times. It could only imitate dead people, so besides Buffy and Spike, it could only trick people with a form that had died recently without anyone knowing about it. Most of the time the people it was talking to were well aware it wasn't their dead friend they were talking to, but the First just used the forms to mess with their heads.
  • For a villainous example, why there aren't more villains that simply find out where Buffy lives and dealing with her there? This is lampshaded in Season Six when the villain Warren simply gives her address to a monster to deal with her, and later visits her house and shoots her there. Probably the most problematic is in Season Seven when the First Evil's minion Caleb has killed all of the Watcher's Council using a bomb, later kills MORE Slayer Potentials using a different bomb, simply never bombs Buffy's house where she and all of her army are living.
  • Slayers rarely ever use fire when hunting vampires, despite it proving one of their greatest weaknesses, even to the oldest and strongest vampires? Particularly noticeable with the introduction of the Turok-Han, the uber-vampires from Season Seven who prove more resistant to stakes and holy water, are not affected by crosses, and do not need invitations to enter homes. Yet at no point does anyone suggest the possibility of testing their resistance to fire?
  • In Season 9, Andrew had set up a Deus ex Machina to deal with Simone: it involved creating another Buffybot, getting the real Buffy stoned, putting Buffy's mind in the bot (and making her think she's pregnant), then setting up the real Buffy with the bot's brain to think it lives a different life in a suburban home Andrew had set up, so when the assassin strikes, the bot with Buffy's mind might be ready for it, maybe, possibly. Andrew being Andrew, he was being far too clever for his own good; a much simpler solution would have been to use the bot to lure out Simone.
• Degrassi: The Next Generation:
  • In the third, fourth, and fifth seasons, more than half of the plots could have been resolved in ten seconds if the characters had chosen not to associate with Jay Hogart. He started off with a bad reputation, yet nobody even gives a second thought above how "cool" they'd look being his friend. What did his victims do when they finally realized he was manipulating them? They glared at him really angrily, and sometimes even spoke harsh words. Some of these kids have beaten each other up because of his tricks, but when they find out the brawl was his fault, they don't even throw a punch at him. However, he does become a semi-helpful member of the cast in the sixth and seventh seasons. He still manages to do the wrong things on several occasions there as well.
  • You'd think after Jay was expelled for being one of the leading causes of the school shooting that people would stop hanging around him, but Alex, Amy, Emma, and J.T. still thought he was cool, and just look at what happened to all of them.
• Dennis the Menace. Mr. Wilson's life would be much better if the Mitchells would move away. The worst part is that the man knows this, and his warnings to the other characters are tragically ignored. An episode of the animated series dealt with this. Dennis breaks Mr. Wilson's window and he boards it up, and tells Dennis to just pretend that he has moved away from now on, in an attempt to get some peace. A pair of movers show up, having gotten lost while on their way to move an entire house, and ask Dennis if he knows anyone who is moving. Dennis points them toward Mr. Wilson's house, and they take the boarded-up window as a sign that he is right. They lift the entire home onto a truck and take it away, with Mr. Wilson trying desperately to stop them. Eventually his house ends up in a nice coastal area, and he realizes that not only is his new location better, but no Dennis. But the movers figure out their mistake and take the house back over his protests.
• Just about any show which features Time Travel as a plot device has the potential to suffer from this trope if the heroes are too stupid to figure out a way to use that device to its full potential.
  • A stand-off occurs between the Doctor and the Master in the Doctor Who parody film Doctor Who: The Curse of Fatal Death. The Doctor wins the fight by arranging for the architects to have built a trap door under where the Master's feet would have been after the race goes extinct.
  • The Doctor Who series proper handwaves this by saying that the Doctor "can't interfere with established events" — which is code for "can't use time travel in any fashion that would make the dilemma of the week too easy to solve" or "having the Doctor solve the dilemma in stories taking place in the past would force the writers to have to keep track of a newly established Alternate History."
  • The in-universe explanation for this is that the Doctor and other "time aware" species like the Daleks are aware of fixed points in history that cannot be changed. This is usually indicated by their significance in subsequent history books. It seems that the more an event is ingrained into legend, the less power the Doctor has to alter it. Like the Titanic sinking, the volcano which destroyed Pompeii, the mysterious destruction of the first Mars colony, etc. Attempts to push against these boundaries seem fruitless as Fate keeps making them happen anyway, as their consequences are so ramified that no substitute event could achieve a paradox-free outcome. It is implied that it is possible to beat fate, but only by accepting all the ramifications to the stability of time. Even a Dalek is shown sparing someone's life because it realizes she isn't meant to die yet.
  • Series 6 shows what happens when a "fixed point" is altered irrevocably; it breaks history. The entire history of Earth is altered so it all takes place at once, and it's always the moment when time broke.
• For Drake & Josh, it's generally "Just Ground Megan", "Just Take Away Megan's Prank Supplies", or "Just Counter-Prank Megan". Many of the shenanigans Drake and Josh get into could have been avoided had they told their parents of Megan's misdeeds and gotten her punished. Since she acts as a Deliberately Cute Child in front of her parents to remain a Karma Houdini, this is more difficult than it sounds.
• Earth: Final Conflict has the alien Zo'or as the primary antagonist, meaning their death would end much of the show's conflict and as a result, numerous opportunities that would allow Zo'or's death or assassination by the resistance are prevented by Contrived Coincidences and Idiot Balls.
• Most of the problems caused in almost every episode of El Chavo del ocho could be avoided if the eponymous Chavo didn't screw something up with Don Ramon and Señor Barriga as the most common victims of Chavo’s thoughtlessness. Worst thing is that Chavo is allowed to live free in Vecindad just because of Señor Barriga’s kindness.
• In Falling Skies, Pope has caused a lot of trouble to the 2nd Mass, and has mostly been the The Load or The Millstone to the resistance, and is a leader to a group of killers. You have to wonder why they even put up with him for 5 seasons, rather than just shooting him for insubordination, or at least leaving him for dead, after he hindered their cause so many times.
• Farscape gave Rygel a great many opportunities to prove himself a life-endangering nuisance in the first season: at one point, trying to fool a gang of mercenaries into believing that he still holds a position of authority, he "borrows" a critical part of Moya's circuitry to decorate his sceptre- and almost gets the entire crew killed when the mercenaries kidnap him, sceptre and all. And after almost erasing Moya's data banks in an attempt to get home, releasing a virus on the crew, he eventually goes on to sell out his shipmates to Scorpius... only for the crew to begrudgingly accept his return when the attempted betrayal goes sour. Even the second season took a while to actually transform him into a useful character, revealing that they kept him around solely because while a useless, greedy, selfish idiot under normal circumstances, put him in a situation where intrigue and/or bartering are necessary and he suddenly turns into Prince Kheldar, which is quite handy when your budget closely resembles a shoestring.
• The Flash (2014):
  • Episode "the Flash is born" would've been over in five minutes flat if anyone thought of exploiting Girder's Logical Weakness. Bad guy in question can turn his skin to metal protecting him from practically anything Flash can throw at him. However, this wouldn't protect him from electricity. Solution: Buy a stun gun or ask local Gadgeteer Genius for an electric weapon to deal with him. No one from Team Flash thinks of this.
  • Inverted in "Rogue Time". Barry does have a way to quickly deal with Weather Wizard (after traveling back in time an episode earlier, he knows exactly where Weather Wizard is and can catch him immediately) and he does so, despite being advised otherwise by Dr. Wells. This however ends up massively backfiring causing problems, among others, with recurring villain Captain Cold. The rest of the episode is pretty much cleaning up the after-effects of eating said Gilligan.
  • In "Trajectory" is revealed that Zoom's powers are killing him. No one ever thinks of simply waiting for that to happen. Granted, there's a lot of damage he could do on Earth-2 in that time, so just leaving him be could be catastrophic, but no one seems to even consider the option.
  • In "Versus Zoom", Zoom kidnaps Wally and says he'll only release him if Barry gives him his powers. Zoom actually keeps his promise and leaves Wally free and stays still while they inject him with Barry's powers. No one for a moment even entertained the idea of putting absolutely anything else in that syringe. Poison, a narcotic, acid, etc. Any of those would have actually given them an advantage against him, at the very least for a few minutes. More than enough for them to get the upper hand and capture him.
  • The vast majority of the threats on the show are from villains who for whatever superpowers they might have still have normal human reflexes and reaction times. Instead of just running in and punching out the villains Barry has the tendency to just stand there quipping at villains which gives them the chance to actually use their powers. This is because otherwise Barry could defeat them and have them in chains before they were even capable of registering that he's there much less able to use their power. This is particularly blatant with villains like Captain Cold and Heatwave, who are just perfectly normal humans with some fancy sci-fi guns and who The Flash should be able to take out before they even pull the trigger.
  • Cicada quickly became a Scrappy among the series Big Bads by combining this trope with Informed Ability. According to Nora, no superhero can stop him (or at least the original timeline version, which isn’t indicated to be different in any meaningful way), but his main powers are enhanced physical abilities, an energy shield (that he rarely uses) and a dagger that nullifies (most) nearby meta’s powers and he can control telekinetically. Even setting aside using lethal force to stop him from killing a member of Team Flash or escaping to inevitably kill again, or getting Supergirl, The Legends or Team Arrow to hand him his ass with powers, magic, or tech that he can’t nullify, they almost never attack him with ranged weaponry, and when they do (or otherwise temporarily incapacitate him), they never simply beat him into unconsciousness to have Barry run him into the pipeline or slap him in meta cuffs, allowing him to recover and either attack or pull a Villain: Exit, Stage Left.
• Game of Thrones:
  • After Daenerys conquers the cities of Slaver’s Bay and frees the slaves, an elderly freedman asks her to let him voluntarily sell himself back to his old master, since he was well treated in the household as a tutor to his master’s children, and his life as a homeless unemployed freedman is materially worse than his life as a slave. He also states that there are many former slaves who feel the same way he does. This is intended to show that a charismatic leader cannot resolve structural societal ills overnight, that there are no easy solutions to complex problems, and that Dany’s idealism and good intentions may need to be compromised to keep society running smoothly. The idea that the man and people like him could simply work for pay with some legal protections, particularly the right to leave their current employers if they choose, is never considered or even mentioned. Even if the idea of a wage is too advanced for a medieval-like society, there's feudalism. Not good by modern standards but much better than slavery. Daenerys actually comes from a Feudal society, and even if she was too young to remember, she seems to be well-informed about the country she pretends to rule.
  • Littlefinger in the book is surprisingly good at defying this trope, as for all his Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, he's quite charming and useful in his own ways. Littlefinger in the show however is a Devil in Plain Sight and Adaptational Wimp, but it takes seven seasons and a convoluted gambit before anyone with power over him simply decides to kill him for his many betrayals and the obvious threat he poses.
• Gilligan's Island:
  • The title character is the Trope Namer, whose bungling so often sabotaged the rest of the cast's attempts to get back to civilization, that one has to wonder why they simply didn't eat him — or at least arrange for some sort of "accident" to happen to him. Or if they didn't want to be killers, they could've just locked him up until they got off the island (which would likely only take a week), then send someone back for him afterwards. Or they simply could have given Gilligan a less critical role in the plan.
  • Evidence from the show itself actually helps Gilligan's case. Statistically speaking, out of 98 episodes, only 37 involved a direct possibility of escaping the island. Of those 37, only 17 potential rescues were foiled as a result of Gilligan's actions. Admittedly, that's still a lot of rescues for one man to screw up, but the series also has a large number of episodes where Gilligan's actions save everybody — from death, enslavement, imprisonment, etc.
  • They did throw a lampshade on this in one escape attempt, in which they'd found gold on the island but the weight limit on the escape craft could only hold so much. Gilligan was the only one to actually abide by the limit, with the others attempting to smuggle more along with them than they were allowed, including the Professor.
  • Invoked hard in one episode. The castaways hear a radio broadcast where an investigation of the disappearance of the Minnow concludes that their disappearance was due to the negligence of the crew. In order to see if this was the case they recreate the day the shipwreck happened, with everyone involved repeating exactly what they did that day. It's discovered that as soon as the Skipper realized the storm was blowing them off course, he ordered Gilligan to drop anchor. Gilligan, however, hadn't bothered to tie a rope around the anchor, making it worse than useless. Therefore it really is Gilligan's fault that they were shipwrecked.^note Although Gilligan not tying off the other end of the anchor was just an accident waiting to happen, the only reason the Minnow was hit by a surprise storm was the radio weather report read the previous day's forecast.
  • The title character of Dusty's Trail, a Gilligan's Island rip-off also made by Sherwood Schwartz, was just as bad as the Minnow's first mate. As the show's own theme song explained, Dusty got his group separated from their wagon train going to California and nothing ever goes right because of him.
• Sort of a meta example for Growing Pains, but after Kirk Cameron became a born-again Christian, everyone else in the cast suffered for it (see #2 in this article). The simple solution would've been to write off (or more cathartically, kill off) Cameron's character or replace the actor with a less religiously zealous one. But that thought apparently never occurred to anyone when other cast members were kicked off because Cameron thought they were too "sinful". Well, as the Cracked article states: Cameron was the teenage heartthrob whose face was on the cover of Tiger Beat. Kirk Cameron made ABC money.
• In House, it's never fully explained why, even as a "oh there'd be phantom pain, oh it'd stop me trying to dress like I'm a guy in my twenties" Hand Wave, he doesn't cut off the leg that causes him almost unending misery to the point of having to admit he's thought about killing himself multiple times cause it hurts so much. House is established to be violently resistant to any semblance of change to his routine, and he's shown dismissing amputation when he's first injured, but that was before he had time to realize how miserable the constant pain and ensuing drug-addiction would make him (and, via Imagine Spots and temporary fixes) how much happier he'd be without it.
• Kamen Rider usually avoids this trope by not using the same "Big Bad sends a minion to defeat the hero each week" format as Super Sentai, but there are exceptions. More recent series (notably Den-O and Kiva) have the villains start using mass-produced MotWs as Mooks, but by that point, Wataru's gotten his Super Mode and they're no challenge (as seen when Kiva takes out six with a single Finishing Move). Meanwhile, in Kamen Rider Double, the villains of the week don't actually work for the Big Bad, whose plan just requires observing the thugs he's sold powers to, and he is perfectly happy to have Kamen Riders fighting them and getting them to show their true strength.
  • Kamen Rider Wizard has one particularly egregious case. Nitou/Kamen Rider Beast is powered by a Chimera who requires mana to survive lest he consume his host; he gets this by consuming defeated Phantoms. One of the Phantoms and major villains of the series, Phoenix, has the ability to be reborn every time he dies. So naturally, Beast devouring Phoenix would have resolved two problems at once: how to keep Chimera from not devour Nitou and how to ensure Phoenix wouldn't come back. Nitou actually brings this up, but Haruto decides he'd rather Hurl It into the Sun. While Haruto is well-established to hate Nitou's guts, and it's hardly the only time that Haruto's a Jerkass for very little reason, their relationship isn't that antagonistic.
  • Kamen Rider Zi-O plays it deliberately with the title character and Geiz. Geiz came back from the past to kill Sougo before he can become an Evil Overlord, and often swears he's going to do it, but never seems to actually manage it, but his failed attempts don't seem to deter Sougo from kicking Geiz out of his house. This is partly because Sougo is already much stronger than Geiz from the first minute of the series and Sougo knows it, and partly because Geiz's affectations of being a hardened soldier are a facade: he's simply too soft-hearted to kill someone who hasn't actually done anything wrong yet, and Sougo also knows this. Geiz becomes significantly stronger after he stops trying to be someone that he's not, after which he also stops trying to kill Sougo and becomes his loyal ally.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One has one that affects the whole plot. The Big Bad, the Ark, is an AI satellite sitting immobile at the bottom of a lake, unguarded. You'd think it would be easy for our heroes to find where the Ark is and blow it up since they know it's sunken somewhere in Daybreak Town, but this option is never brought up or even considered. And when they do decide to do something about it, instead of doing that they give it a physical body. Because apparently it having a body makes it easier to destroy it? That's... not what happens.
• For some reason, the characters in Keeping Up Appearances never just refuse to do whatever Hyacinth says. When Hyacinth ignores a "No", the characters appear resigned to obey her. It gets turned into a running gag when Emmet tries to coach Liz into refusing coffee with Hyacinthe. She's just. that. SCARY.
• Last Resort:
  • Sainte Marina's resident gang leader, Serrat, causes so much trouble for the Colorado sailors (particularly through manipulative actions, such as in the episode "Big Chicken Dinner" where he successfully gets a sailor correctly accused of rape found not guilty so the islanders will get angry and riot in protest against the sailors) that one has to wonder how he hasn't been summarily executed by now. Then again, the sailors (especially Captain Chaplin) seem to be trying to keep up a reputation of honor and justice - also particularly noticeable in "Big Chicken Dinner."
  • That's not even the half of it. He kidnapped three sailors and used them as hostages to get the Colorado to run a blockade. When they are late, he murders one of the sailors and it is implied that he rapes another (she later disclaims this, but the rest of the crew doesn't know that). He participates in the CIA strike team raid, helping them poison everyone, which leads to two more sailors' deaths. He then straps a bomb vest to another sailor, which King barely defuses, then halfheartedly offers up a scapegoat. Then he starts selling drugs to the sailors and tortures the COB when he tries to intervene. It would be justified if the islanders loved him, but they don't, they know he's an exploitative thug. It could also be justified if he was well-protected, but he isn't; King and another SEAL sneak right into his living room without difficulty. He's just wearing Plot Armor.
• One episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit centers around a teenage girl who comes to New York to get an abortion, because the state she's from requires parental consent and her father had previously thrown out her older sister for an unintended pregnancy. She went to the first clinic in the phone book, but the doctor there turns out to be against abortion and manages to delay her until she's past the legal limit for the procedure; as a result, the girl and her boyfriend end up battering the unborn child to death. But the entire thing would have been avoided if the teens had just gone to a different clinic.
• In Lost in Space, Dr. Smith is a sanctimonious coward who constantly gets the whole ship in trouble through his greed. A great many potential future problems could have been solved simply by leaving him to get killed in the mess he's caused for himself.
  • A later comic continuation by Innovation Comics partially addresses that by the Robinsons and West finally losing their patience with Smith, throwing him in one of the ship's cryo tubes and keeping him there. At least the movie adaptation gave an explanation as to why he wasn't immediately thrown out the airlock after his first treachery, and they did eventually leave him to die after his betraying them yet again.
  • The third season episode "Time Merchant" establishes that had Dr. Smith not been aboard the Jupiter 2, it would have been destroyed in space by a collision. Dr. Smith's additional mass changed the ship's trajectory enough to avoid the collision but also threw the Robinsons off course. It seems that Dr. Smith is incompetent all around.
  • In the original pilot (and the first few episodes) Dr. Smith was a scarily competent, utterly ruthless spy and saboteur who sneaks aboard the ship, disables (or kills) a guard with his bare hands, reprograms the robot to sabotage the ship, and only stays aboard because he miscalculates the amount of time he has to get off (he may have been set up by his controllers so he wouldn't still be around to answer any embarrassing questions). He was changed into the bumbling, cowardly character we all love to hate because the producers (and Johnathan Harris himself) realized that otherwise, they couldn't possibly justify the rest of the crew not getting rid of him somehow. In fact, Irwin Allen originally planned to kill off the character for exactly that reason but was convinced it would be better to use him as comic relief.
• Alexander Fitzhugh on Land of the Giants is basically an Expy of Dr. Smith – at least in that it's another Irwin Allen show and he fills the Complainer Is Always Wrong niche in the cast. Really though, he isn't nearly so hopelessly awful as Smith and generally proves himself to be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold and Cowardly Lion who will come through in the end, after spending half the episode loudly proclaiming that he'll do no such thing. And his fast-talking skills are consistently actually useful for the heroes. Which isn't to say that he doesn't make trouble for the others, but he's not a complete Load like Smith.
• Legends of Tomorrow perhaps has it worse than other Arrowverse shows, due to being a Spiritual Successor to Doctor Who. While there are stated limits as to the team’s ability to change history with the Waverider, such as sometimes being unable to interfere with events they were already a part of and certain events being fated to happen, character deaths tend to have this. Rip Hunter’s entire arc in the first season is wanting to save his family by preventing Vandal Savage’s rise to power, and later moving on. It’s never explained why he can’t just resurrect them by taking the Waverider back to pick them up before Savage killed them (presumably at a point where Past!Rip wasn’t with them). And when Laurel dies in Arrow, Rip explains that he deliberately dropped them off after the events of season 4 of Arrow because if Sarah was with Laurel at the time, she, Laurel, and their father would all be fated to die (and presumably taking Laurel with them wasn’t an option). But because there was a significant interval between Laurel being mortally wounded and dying, and the Waverider is established to have advanced medical technology, why not pick Laurel up and heal her right after she’s been stabbed and Darkh has left? Strangely, this is exactly what Prometheus and Black Siren trick Team Arrow into thinking happened at the beginning of Arrow’s 5th season.
• Lost thrived on this, which is not surprising considering the connections to Gilligan's Island.
  • All the survivors of 815 had to do was to hold a big meeting and compare notes about this VERY odd island to keep their cool and work more as a cohesive group. This is what the survivors tried to do initially. Except there were people trying to act in the best interests of the group, such as Sayid and co. keeping the French transmission a secret. And then people acting in their own interests, like Kate trying to keep her past a secret or Sawyer making everyone hate him because he's a Jerkass Woobie. And then there's Locke, who... is Locke. Arguably, part of the show's point is that when left to their own devices, people are prone to conflict and self-destruction.
    They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.
  • Part of the show's point is also that people only come to work together when all threatened by the same thing (Smokey, Others, No-Food/Water/Meds, wtf) but when they ain't, it's every man for himself.
  • Ben has random people kidnapped and murdered at his own whim, manipulates the protagonists continually, and is a flat-out bastard with only a few sympathetic traits (which he is quick to exploit for his own means) is constantly put into scenarios where the protagonists can kill him... and they don't. Every time this happens, it bites them in the ass later.
  • By season six they do stop going along with any plan of Ben's. Anyone who was ever thinking 'Stop listening to Ben!' had to laugh when Sun knocked him unconscious and stole the boat he had led her to, and the last season continued in that vein, with all other characters completely ignoring anything Ben said or wanted to do.
• Married... with Children: Marcy's life would be a lot less miserable if she just moved to another neighborhood away from the Bundys, but the only time she even considers it is when she gets a large payment from a car company for telling them where to build their new plant. The deal falls through, but given how she's the vice president of a bank and was elated at the prospect of being away from the Bundys for good, you'd think she would've moved by this point.
• McHale's Navy: McHale and his men would find themselves at risk of being court-martialed a lot less often if they'd transfer the greedy and conniving Torpedoman's Mate Lester Gruber to a different boat.
• Merlin:
  • You could make a case for it, but the title character's steadfast refusal to tell anyone about the fact that he has magic has caused more problems than it has solved. In particular, his treatment of Morgana led at least partially to her Face–Heel Turn. Particularly as she likewise discovers she has magic in the second series. Her neck is on the line just as much as his, as it doesn't seem like that Uther would have been merciful.
  • As of Series 5, this has turned into "just kill Morgana". Sure, he can't track her down, but he has so many opportunities to just snap her neck with magic, and yet he doesn't. Why? Just... why? She's way beyond redemption by now and is probably too insane to even be bargained with. And yet in "Another's Sorrow", he doesn't even kill her when she's strangling him, even though his life is in danger and it would be painfully easy for him to explode her head. You could say that he still feels sorry for her, but he doesn't seem to have any problem with attempting to kill Mordred, who is an In-Universe Designated Villain. Killing Morgana might actually be explained in the finale as it's established there (and no earlier) that Morgana is really hard to kill.
  • Merlin is screwed either way. No matter if he decides to ignore fate and help Morgana or Mordred or if he tries to avoid it and by killing either one of them, the result is always the worst possible outcome. The real useless character is the dragon because Merlin fares way better whenever he makes his decisions without being influenced by him or any other kind of prophecy. As soon as he knows what will come, he is doomed.
• The Middle has two such problems:
  • It's hardly suggested that Frankie would be a little less stressed out if Mike would offer to take up some of her duties or if she would call him out for just staying out of the way. Then again, it also depends on the issue as Both Sides Have a Point about Frankie worrying about things she shouldn't and expecting quick fixes, and there are times Mike has helped out.
  • It's also never suggested that the problems with the resident bad family, the Glossners, would be solved if someone would just call the police or social services and report them. The closest is Rita herself threatening to do so to Frankie after the latter notices a bunch of stolen stuff in the family's garage.
• Mission: Impossible actually has this inverted. Whenever there seems to be an easier, alternate way to accomplish the goal for the episode, one of the characters will bring it up in the pre-mission briefing and then an explanation as to why that can't work is given. (In "Trial By Fury," where the mission is to re-establish a convict's good name in prison so he can continue to serve as liaison for another prisoner who's the face of his country's democracy movement, Barney asks why they can't just free them both; Phelps replies that they both know they're of far more value where they are.) In fact, the standing reason why the Impossible Mission Force can't just assassinate targets (which is obviously much easier than the convoluted schemes on the show) is because of a "policy decision" on behalf of the higher-ups in the United States.
• On One Tree Hill, plenty of the show's characters, especially Lucas, Nathan, and Keith, spend much of their time trying to show up or prove themselves to main villain Dan Scott. As obnoxious as he is and as small of a town as Tree Hill is, a logical yet overlooked solution is to just cut him off/ignore him; although understandably Lucas wants him to acknowledge him financially and paternally, seeing what a Manipulative Bastard he is and how little he changed over the first four seasons, they would have saved themselves a lot of headaches by choosing to no longer associate with him and his toxicity.
• Power Rangers:
  • Many a fan has wondered why the Big Bad never just sends all the monsters at once instead of doing it one at a time, or simply launching an attack themselves if they were so powerful. Immediately, that is, not at the final episode where the heroes get an inexplicable power boost either. Similarly, more than a few seasons had the Rangers know exactly where the villain's base was located, but it never occurred to them to take three or four Humongous Mecha to the location and stomp on stuff until a final battle was forced.
  • The few times the villains do actually send multiple enemies for the Rangers to fight at once (for example, during the "Green With Evil" story arc which introduced the Green Ranger) the result is usually a decisive victory for the villains. Makes you wonder why they never took the hint and just did that all the time.
  • The monster sending was justified in Power Rangers Time Force as Ransik isn't strong enough to control all the Mutants if he released them all at once, as pointed out by Linkara. This reason was also used in Masked Rider.
  • Explained in Shin Kenjushi (New/Heart Gunman) (Née Jushi Sentai [Musketeer Squadron]) France Five, an Affectionate Parody of Super Sentai and French culture. The Eiffel Tower projects a forcefield around planet Earth, meaning that the Big Bad can only send small squadrons of troops to Earth at a time, including a monster, some Panous-panous, and his two lieutenants.
  • As per Tony Oliver at Power Morphicon 2007, quoting Haim Saban: "Because if they call 911, then I don't have a TV show." (Presumably Haim was saying that if somebody were to call the police whilst the Monster of the Week was still small or such, the Power Rangers would have an easy victory).
  • Also makes sense in Power Rangers RPM. The city of Corinth is surrounded by a forcefield, meaning that each monster has to have some way to get around that and into the city. Also, finding out where the enemy's base is is a major plot point.
  • Lothor, the lead villain in the delightfully self-aware Power Rangers Ninja Storm, actually attempts to supersize all of his monsters at once, only for the computer to respond with a memory error and his underling pointing out that he skimped on the memory upgrade that would let him supersize more than one monster at a time.
  • Similarly, still in Ninja Storm, "Why don't you just get the Zords from the beginning and stomp the monster?" was discussed (while not done in a way that justifies it for the whole series) when the Rangers were having trouble fighting multiple monsters who managed to break the Conservation of Ninjutsu (oh, and they actually were ninjas, working for the ninja-based villain faction.) Dax suggests sending the Zords even though "we don't normally do this," but they couldn't be launched due to an earlier monster-inflicted computer virus.
  • Natsuki uses this exact tactic in Boukenger. And it's simultaneously horrifying and hilarious.
  • Except once in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, but the result wasn't good, because this monster was specifically designed to hijack the Zords. And in Power Rangers Turbo, because the monster was sun-powered, and the Rangers decided the only way to defeat him was using the Megazord to shadow him.
  • The Zords couldn't be sent "all at once" because the "laws of Good" prevent Good from "escalating" the violence. The bad guys, especially in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers most likely have limits such as the magic taking a heavy toll on the user. In fact, Ivan Ooze in The Movie needed to hypnotize people to build the technology so that he could use it.
  • It's also lampshaded in the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers comic — one of the team asks why they don't just go straight to their Megazords and squish the villain while he's still small. The response is that Zordon has instructed them to only match force for force against their enemies, due to some pseudo-Eastern mystic from space logic about fair play... of course this means that the enemy will cause more suffering, death, destruction, and damage than if they'd fought unfairly...
  • "Why don't villains just blow up the Rangers' houses at night?" has also been dealt with, once again, by Ninja Storm. The Dragon suggests attacking them at the sports shop they work at, but Lothor says that a Ranger's power can only truly be destroyed while the Ranger is morphed. (Mind you, we've seen that prove untrue more than once in the past, but hey, they tried.)
  • This is more clearly explained in Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue and Power Rangers Samurai. In Lightspeed Rescue the demons locate the base, but since it's underwater they can't destroy it as water is their kryptonite. In Samurai, it's explained that a shield protects it from monster attacks.
  • Another reason is that provoking massively powerful superbeings with armies untrained for the situation at hand is a bad idea. The good guys are five teenagers who are invariably placed against nigh-impossible odds. Escalating the war would cause the villain to actually get off their duff and start actively trying to destroy shit. Sure a few buildings are destroyed along the way but it's better than the alternative.
  • Almost invariably in the early seasons, the Monster of the Week would be trashing the Power Rangers, and Rita would declare, "If you think you're having it rough now, wait until you see this!" before making the monster grow to a preposterous size. At this point, the Power Rangers would use their cool toys and destroy the monster, every single time. If only Rita had left the monster at its original size, she could have won easily. For that matter, why didn't the Power Rangers just use their giant mechas on the "human-sized" monster? Another thing: every villain in Power Rangers ever has had the ability to teleport at will, anywhere, through walls, and even bring along passengers or cargo. Picture the cataclysmic implications if they were to use this power intelligently. In the Alien Rangers arc of MMPR, Goldar and Rito did just that, only with a bomb of the usual villains' making.
• Revenge revolves around Emily Thorne's quest to take down the Grayson family and exonerate her framed father. This is something she easily could have accomplished in the first season as Emily effortlessly bugs Grayson manor and quickly collects a dossier of incriminating video evidence. But instead of simply turning this over to the police or the public, Emily throws the laptop full of evidence into the ocean claiming that it was a "distraction". She then proceeds to execute an elaborate 3-year-long plan where she seduces Daniel Grayson, marries into his family, and attempts to frame Victoria for her faked murder. Over the course of this plan, she loses her best friend, her lover's brother, her fiance, and her ability to bear children, all at the hands of the Graysons. Her eventual takedown of the Graysons only takes one episode and involves a fairly simple Engineered Public Confession, raising the question of why she didn't just do this to begin with.
• Played hilariously straight twice in Robin Hood with the obligatory female Kate, though both times it happened without the writers noticing what they'd done. That this girl is a liability to the team is undeniable; she's constantly getting kidnapped, injured, and sabotaging outlaw plans thanks to her reckless stupid behaviour. Therefore, it's rather amusing in the episode "Too Hot to Handle" that Kate is kidnapped (again) while the outlaws are en route to the River Trent. Instead of organising a rescue, they just continue on their way without any attempt made to go after her. Later in "Something Worth Fighting For" she marches off in a huff after being tricked into believing that Robin is cheating on her. Despite the amount of shilling that goes on, nobody seems to care about or even really notice her absence — though luckily she arrives back just in time to completely ruin their successful attempt at a peaceful sit-in protest.
• Sesame Street: During the seasons where Mr. Snuffleupagus was thought by the adults to be Big Bird's imaginary friend, it never occurred to Snuffy to scream or holler at the adults (or touch them or turn them around) to get them to notice him while he strolled right behind, likely because of his shy nature. As for Big Bird himself, he didn't think to have someone watch over Snuffy in case he runs off just as he brings the adults over to see him; it wasn't until Snuffy's reveal episode does Gordon suggest that thing, and Elmo became crucial to helping him succeed.
• Star Trek: Voyager. Neelix originally was a competent character. He owned and operated a single ship, knew the territory, was just ruthless enough to survive, and made his living as a grifter, a pirate, and a salvager. A few episodes later and suddenly he's a useless, obnoxious, egocentric buffoon with the intellect and emotional capacity of a toddler. At his worst, he's gotten several crew members killed and endangered the entire ship on multiple occasions. In one Very Special Episode, he went beyond reckless endangerment and committed bona fide, premeditated treason. Not only does he never earn anything worse than a stern reprimand for the multiple fatalities he causes, he actually gets put in charge of people. Despite not being an officer or even a member of Starfleet, nor having any noteworthy abilities beyond the sheer gall to appoint himself "morale officer". To top it off while he is in charge his leadership is directly the cause of one death while marooned on an alien planet. All because he has no concept of the buddy system. Even his cooking causes problems.
• Stranger Things: Why can't the residents of Hawkins, Indiana take a hint and move as far away from it as possible to avoid all the paranormal and supernatural happenings and to also avoid making any further contact with the Upside Down? That way, the kids wouldn't have to investigate these happenings and wind up in therapy for the rest of their lives. Amusingly enough, at the end of season three, the Byers family and Eleven actually do move out of Hawkins. Then season four starts and for a variety of reasons, it does not help.
• In Survivor, several seasons had people shouting, "Just vote out x!" at their TVs. Especially in recent seasons, wherein players seemed to have become afraid to rock the boat and try taking control of their alliances and vote out the designated "leader".
  • All-Stars: By the time Chaboga Mogo realizes that Rob and Amber have no intention of bringing them to the final Tribal Council, they're down to four people and Rob is still carrying the Immunity Necklace. This comes after Rob has repeatedly told the other members of the group that he won't break his alliance/relationship with Amber for any reason. This later leads to a series of "Reason You Suck" speeches at the final Tribal Council ... which rings hollow once the contestants realized that Rob proposed to her and that the engaged couple would win either way.
  • Redemption Island would have had a very different outcome if the Ometepes realized Rob was too dangerous to be allowed to run the game. Especially jarring considering the very first tribal council, Kristina reveals she has the idol meaning that Rob doesn't, and has a very big sign reading, "Vote me out" on his face. Unsurprisingly, he wound up winning.
  • South Pacific. Did it simply never occur to the Savaiis that they probably should have voted out Cochran? Especially after all they did to him?
  • One World. Viewers very quickly began to expect that everyone would just let Colton walk all over everybody. He did- until he was medevacked.
• In Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills, the bumbling sidekick of the Big Bad gets a chance to be in charge while the villain is away, and implements an ingenious tactic of sending down a monster, recalling it when it was close to death, and sending a new one, repeated until the heroes were worn down and defeated. On the verge of success, the Big Bad returns from his trip and proves that he had a firm grip on the Villain Ball by demanding that things be returned to the proven-to-fail "one monster each week" strategy.
• From the start of Ugly Betty, Wilhelmina is openly plotting to take over Mode and run it herself. She plots, schemes, is behind at least one hostile takeover attempt, fakes a pregnancy, tries to marry Bradford, and actively sabotages others, willing to hurt the magazine as long as she gets to be in charge. Thus, the question is why the hell the Meades haven't shown her the door years ago. The series openly addresses it by pointing out that Wilhelmina is very good at her job and contacts in the fashion world Mode needs. Also, if they were to fire her, any rival magazine will snatch Wilhemina up in an instant. Thus, the Meades figure it's better having Wilhelmina use her talents for them.