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" ...for the last time!"
— Pretty much everybody on this page
" Anyway, you will find the the justice of Hell is purely realistic and concerned only with results. Bring us back food, or be food yourself."
The main bad guy - usually a Diabolical Mastermind - kills one of his henchmen who has failed to capture and/or kill the hero, as a reminder to all of his other underlings that he is a badass. Presumably, the other underlings immediately all fall into line instead of quietly updating their resumes and trying to find a less psychopathic overlord to work for. This is related to Karmic Death, in that it means the hero doesn't have to dirty their hands.
Some bad guys will use The Blofeld Ploy to pull off the underling murder. Others will drop the offending underling through a Trap Door in The War Room into a Shark Pool or other deathtrap.
The main bad guy almost never kills the second person who fails, as he begins to develop a healthy respect for his adversary. Some evil organizations may actually have an explicit policy of "You fail you die."
See also: Bad Boss, Shoot The Messenger, You Have Outlived Your Usefulness and Villainous Demotivator. Contrast Even Evil Has Loved Ones.
Examples
Anime
- Gendo Ikari's motivation to switch to Unit 01's Dummy Plug in Neon Genesis Evangelion. Of course, the main reason why Shinji refused to kill the Angel in that instance is because it was an EVA gone bad... with Toji Suzuhara trapped inside it.
- Mimi and Sheshe suffer this fate at the hands of both their bosses in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch. They got off lucky the first time, only turning back to their original forms; the second time, depending which version you're following, either their hearts are absorbed like Seira's, or they get eaten alive.
- Subverted twice in Yes! Pretty Cure 5 by Bunbee. He drops Girinma down the Trap Door, presumably never to be seen again... only for Girinma to climb back up five episodes later, ready to fail him again. Much later, Bunbee finds himself on the other end of this trope, being dropped off of a building by Kawarino. Bunbee turns out to have grabbed a convenient ledge... and then remembered that, you know, he can fly, thus the reason why he has appeared during the sequel.
- The Quirky Miniboss Squad in four of the five Sailor Moon seasons all fall prey to this trope at the hands of each season's Big Bad. There was at least one villain per saga doing so, from Queen Beryl killing Jadeite to Galaxia eventually winding up killing all but one of her minions, including the "brainwashed" Uranus and Neptune. Rubeus gives a specially cruel twist to it in regards to Kooan from the Ayakashi Sisters, whom he gives an exploding Mac Guffin and sends off to fight the Senshi to pretty much force her kill herself for him, since she loved him.
- Sailor Stars is a particularly cruel instance of this trope. The Big Bad (Sailor Galaxia) sends her four minions, the Anima-Mates to Earth to find "true star seeds" (basically, immortal souls) inside of the living beings of Earth that would impede her chances of taking over the galaxy, and killed most of them when they failed (except Sailor Lead Crow, who was too ambitious for her own good and got eaten by a black hole). At the end of the series, it turns out Galaxia knew that the Sailor Soldiers held the true star seeds the whole time, which makes it seem like she toyed around with the Anima-Mates for yuks and giggles.
- Interestingly, the Live Action TV version, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon; averts this by having Queen Beryl respond to a subordinate suggesting their rival be killed for failure "....why should I kill a loyal servant?"
- Subverted in Excel Saga, in which Diabolical Mastermind Il Palazzo drops Excel down a miles-deep, alligator-filled pit almost every episode. It isn't always alligators; in fact, the first time they appear, Il Palazzo refers to them as a Christmas present ("I have provided you with a knife and all suitable supplies"). The next time we see Excel, she's discussing the proper way of killing an alligator and complaining about how tough it is to skin one.
- Played straight later in the series, when he actually tries to kill her.
- Mai-HiME: Father Joseph gets the "You're fired" speech from the higher-ups at Searrs for failing to eliminate the main characters in Episode 12. However, they don't actually kill him...they allow him to sit and watch as Alyssa and Miyu enact their plan to take over Fuuka Academy. He was eventually killed by Miyu after he shot little Alyssa at mission's end.
- During the Saiyan Saga of Dragon Ball Z, Vegeta kills his partner Nappa after he gets his ass kicked by Goku, considering Nappa to be no use to him as a Saiyan warrior considering how Goku made an idiot out of him.
- Well, his back was also broken during the course of the fight... it was still a jerkass thing to do.
- Frieza also does this to his henchman Orlen when he failed to question the Namek that he killed so he blasted him with his eyebeams.
- MetalSeadramon from Digimon Adventure kills Scorpiomon after he fails to capture and incapacitate all 8 of the kids (Joe and Mimi escape).
- In Princess Tutu, when Princess Kraehe continually fails to bring the Raven a heart as a sacrifice, he attempts to eat her heart instead. She escapes, but barely. (Ironically, he then later seems to be surprised when she betrays him and tries to save Mytho from the same fate.)
- In Full Metal Panic!: The Second Raid, a Running Gag sees Ax Crazy Psycho For Hire Gates do this to quite a lot of subordinates for any number of random reasons. It's mostly played for comedy, if only because of the utterly insane ways he does it: In one case, he shoots a man who gainsaid him in the head point blank and then argues with his corpse for a good thirty seconds before noticing he is dead, and then starts bemoaning the man's sudden and unexpected death and wonders how it happened.
- Marik Ishtar of Yugioh tends to do this whenever one of his Rare Hunters loses. He controls their minds briefly and leaves them in a seemingly permanent comatose state after delivering his messages.
- Averted in Mazinger Z, where Dr. Hell certainly punished and berated his subordinates when they failed, but never killed them for their failures. Heck, when Ashura died in battle, Dr. Hell was very pissed off at the heroes.
- The One Piece conspiracy group Baroque Works held this as the penalty for any agents failing their assigned mission. While none of them liked it (except insofar as it got them promoted), most of the Officer Agents treated it merely as part of the job.
- Subverted in Naruto. After Madara notices that Sasuke failed to capture the eight-tailed beast for Akatsuki, he intercepts him and reminds him that betrayal means death, but instead of killing him, has him go to kill Danzo instead.
- Used in Nurihyon no Mago. Interestingly, this isn't used just to demonstrate that the Big Bad is a dick. One of the protangonist's youkai allies uses this to infer that the Big Bad in question is extremely confident and has legitimate reason to be so.
- In episode 42 of Teknoman, the Venomoid Warlord imprisons Blade's twin brother in a sort of organic prison pod for his repeated failures. It's only when his sole other Teknoman is slain that he is willing to release Saber/Evil.
- Katekyo Hitman Reborn has a bad guy group which actually has a stated policy of killing those who fail. They're the Varia, the Vongola crime family's elite assassination squad. One of the reasons they're so tough is their tradition of "erasing the weak," meaning those who fail in a mission are swiftly put to death by one of the others.
- They must go through a lot of recruitment drives.
- This is apparently the standard policy of The Syndicate in Darker Than Black. Huang regularly reminds Hei of this whenever he gets insubordinate, but Hei, apparently aware of the absurdity of the situation completely ignores him most of the time. Huang was right, though; their bosses do try to wipe them out when they get too far out of line.
- In Bleach, after Renji is defeated by Ichigo in the Soul Society arc, Byakuya orders him imprisoned without having his life threatening injuries healed.
Film
- The trope names comes from what is possibly the most famous instance: Darth Vader's "You have failed me for the last time" before choking Admiral Ozzel and promoting Captain Piett to replace him before the body hits the floor in The Empire Strikes Back. True to form, Piett survives a number of failures, once Vader realizes the heroes may prove to be a bit of a challenge. It helps that he didn't take any foolish chances like Ozzel was punished for.
- He does it again to the hapless Captain Needa before the film's even halfway done, even when Needa had the foresight to apologize to Vader for losing track of the Millenium Falcon (There's a reason Vader says "Apology accepted, Captain Needa"). The turnover rate for Imperial officers must be appalling.
- And ultimately lampshaded by the end of the film, when the Falcon escapes to lightspeed. Piett visibly soils himself as Vader strides toward him, only to brush right past, apparently too depressed about losing his son to kill any more underlings today.
- That, and because it wasn't Piett's fault. Exactly how callous Vader is about his suboordinates varies Depending On The Writer, but mostly he's said to go after underlings that he thinks are to blame. Usually. He also likes some of them more than others, Piett had been with him for a while, and according to Allegiance he already distrusted Ozzel.
- It's even noted in one of the novels that the fastest way to promotion in the Empire was to get yourself assigned to Vader's flagship, the Executor. One could say that the commander of the vessel is an example of Exactly What It Says On The Tin... A really BIG tin...
- Lampshaded in Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina; an Imperial officer tells a local that he engineered his own demotions because "the mortality rate [under Vader] is phenomenal."
- The flip side of that coin is, as Pellaeon says, that this meant the crew of the Executor was entirely staffed by people who were either hypercompetent or very lucky, since they were the only ones who survived. Which meant that when it went down at Endor, the Empire lost more than a really big ship.
- Parodied in this Irregular WebComic strip
 , where Vader strangles an officer, and then admits he hadn't even done anything wrong.
- Parodied by Robot Chicken where it is revealed that the Imperial officers just pretend to be strangled by Vader. They are then dragged out of the room where they put on a fake mustache and uniform and go back to work, with Vader none the wiser. They do this because he still has a lightsaber, and only thinks he can choke people.
- Parodied yet again in this strip of Loserz.
- And again in Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman.
- In Space Balls the hapless officer get a Groin Attack rather than a killing when he displeases Dark Helmet. For the rest of the movie, his subordinates cover themselves when reporting to him.
- Years before Star Wars, in the Hammer Horror Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, Dracula (Christopher Lee) uses this line in a snarl to the hapless Zita (one of his pretty victims) before vampirising her to death and having her remains burnt in a baker's oven.
- Played straight in the first Austin Powers movie, when Dr. Evil dumps several underlings into a fiery pit for failing to kill Austin Powers. It is then parodied when he tries to do the same thing thirty years later...and the minion survives, and is very noisy. Dr. Evil gets someone to go down there and just shoot him, and that does the trick...eventually.
- In Desperado, after Bucho's gang repeatedly fails to find and kill the Mariachi, Bucho demonstrates what they're supposed to do by saying "Look! I don't know him! He has a gun! That must be the guy!" and shooting one of his henchmen. "How hard is that?"
- In The Fifth Element, Zorg apparently has all of his men (or all public phones) wired with explosives, and, in one scene, where a minion fails to impersonate the heroes, he types in the code to blow him up (with just barely contained rage) just as the heroes get away, not even knowing the mook had been there.
- The Rider in The Dark Is Rising (movie) actually said "You have failed me for the last time". You'd think it would be a Dead Horse Trope by now.
- Then again, it is an awesome indicator of villainy. Don't expect it to go away anytime soon!
- Nicely subverted in Die Hard 2, when the Card Carrying Villain puts the barrel of his gun to the Mooks' forehead and pulls the trigger. The gun doesn't fire, the Mook breathes a sigh of relief as the villain tells him that next time, the chamber won't be empty... and then happily goes back to work doing his evil Mook duties.
- In Mortal Kombat Annihilation, Shao Kahn does this twice to his minions. The Outworld ninja Rain, who failed to sufficiently torture some Earth Warriors (specifically, by making them beg for their lives before destroying them) is knocked into a lava pit with a big whacking hammer. Jade, Kahn's mole in the ranks of the heroes, suffers an even more ignominious death after she too fails to destroy them — she's fed to a monster carving in a wall, which lets out a great big burp after it's done with her.
- "Suicide, or be shot by someone else" was the option given to the losing Soviet general at the start of Enemy at the Gates.
- "No. YoU haVe FAileD yoUrsElveS."
- "Would you be killed in your sleep like an ailing pet?"
- Slightly debugged for Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, when Captain Barbossa shoots one of his own crewman, Pintel, to see if they're all still cursed with immortality, and Pintel survives. The screenwriters Elliot and Rossio remarked in the DVD commentary that this was the only way a villain could repeatedly achieve You Have Failed Me moments without ever running out of henchmen.
- Non-lethal version shows up in Shoot Em Up. After the first time Smith thwarts Hertz's men, Hertz is seen talking with one of them who was wounded in the buttocks. The guy says something to the effect of, "It won't happen again. I've got a piece of metal in my butt to remind me." At this point, Hertz pulls out his pistol, shoots him in the posterior once again, and quips, "And let that be a reminder never to fail me again," as the Mook collapses yelling "AAH! MY ASS!"
- In the film Peter Pan, Hook shoots two of his pirates for annoying him.
- In The Untouchables, Al Capone beats one of his goons to death with a bat.
- This is actually based on a real event. Capone hosted a dinner to let one of his henchmen, Antonino "Joe Batters" Accardo, kill two other henchmen with a baseball bat.
- Happens in Eragon, where Durza executes the head Urgal for failing to kill the title character then immediately promotes a random Urgal, whose look implies that he is not happy with the promotion.
- Happens twice in You Only Live Twice, to Osato and Helga Brandt.
- Happens to several mooks in District B13. Eventually the mooks band together and kill the Big Bad.
- Upon awakening in Transformers, Megatron reunites with Starscream who reveals to him that the Allspark, the very reason they are on Earth and the ultimate power source of Megatron's obsession, is in the possession of the Human soldiers who are attempting to keep it away from him. His response is quite a ticked off; You have failed me yet again Starscream. GET THEM!
- In Tim Burton's Batman, The Joker immediately executes his top henchman after his master plan is foiled:
The Joker: "My balloons. Those are my balloons. He stole my balloons! Why didn't anyone tell me he had one of those... things? Bob? Gun."
Bob the Henchman: hands the Joker a gun, who promptly shoots him
- Honestly, Joker does this all the time, but it's less about failure and more about the fact that he's the Joker.
- Drucker, the Big Bad in The 6th Day does this to his henchman Wiley. A fairly justified version of this trope. Not only has Wiley been screwing up the most, but he also accidentally shot Drucker just before, which apparently was the last straw.
Literature
- Subverted in the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels ''Heir to the Empire'' and ''The Last Command'', where tactical genius villain Grand Admiral Thrawn makes a point of not indiscriminately killing subordinates. He instead has a Tractor Beam operator (who was also a Contest Winner Cameo!) killed for not following procedure from his training - and for trying to pin the blame on his superior - and later actually promotes a different Tractor Beam operator who quickly came up with a creative solution to a sudden problem that was "no less impressive for its failure".
- The Evil Overlord version (in which the Big Bad kills a random minion as a lesson) is subverted in the New Jedi Order series. Supreme Overlord Shimrra can be a really Bad Boss, but he's clever enough to recognize when he's being played. Near the end, it looks as if he's about to execute High Prefect Jakan, who's been framed as a supporter of the heretics—then turns on the High Priestess who's framing him and is a heretic.
- This trope seems to be liked by villainous Imperials and former Imperials in general. In the X Wing Series, Zsinj, spying on the consoles of his bridge crew, sees that one of them is playing flight simulators instead of paying attention while on duty. He has been warned about this, but he wants to be a pilot so much. Zsinj has his second-in-command whisk the crewman off in the dead of night telling him it's a secret pilot test, put him through the standard set of pilot qualification simulations, praise or chastise him as necessary, and then kill him. Later on he puts a pair of scientists in a Shoot Your Mate Or I Kill You Both. The trope, and the fact that they're cruel about it rather than just shooting them, serves as a good reminder that while Zsinj and his Dragon are interesting, clever, and often funny characters, they are also the bad guys, and for good reason.
- Zsinj isn't actually all that bad about this. While he was unnecessarily cruel to the wannabe pilot, goofing off on duty can result in the deaths of everyone on the ship (He was a sensor operator. If a Republic fleet had jumped in while he was goofing off, they might not be spotted before the first shots hit the ship.) The Queen of this trope is Ysanne Isard, whose murderous punishments for failure were known to go as far as Familicide.
- When someone he's interrogating dies before giving up the information he needs, Kirtain Loor is summoned back to Imperial Center by Ysanne Isard, Empress in all but name. All along the way, even while marveling at the view, he's sweating and expecting her to kill him. She doesn't - not at that point in time - but she does make her displeasure at his poor thinking clear, and wants him to perform better.
- And of course, there's Moff Leona Tavira.
Corran: "Tavira, when she doesn't hear that you succeeded, will see you as having failed. And you know her — failure isn't an accident, it's a conspiracy."
- Harry Potter: The fear of hearing Voldemort say this, no doubt quickly followed by "Crucio!" and "Avada Kedavra!", hangs over the head of every Death Eater.
- However, very few times we see him actually killing one of his minions for failing him. Lucius Malfoy, for example, fails him spectacularly a number of times; and his punishment is psychological and possibly worse than death in its way: his only child sent on a suicide mission.
- It is suggested in the sixth book that Voldemort would be more, uh... picky if he didn't have so few followers.
- Animorphs' Big Bad, Visser Three, was famous for this, to the point where promotion for a Yeerk was a very dicey proposition, since every ladder rung you climb brings you slightly closer to Esplin 9466's stolen tail blade and hairtrigger temper. He does this so reliably that Marco's able to bluff his way out of a situation where three flunkies were expected by saying, "I think Visser Three killed them for doing something wrong".
- In Dan Abnett's Gaunts Ghosts novel Traitor General, Uexkull executes a commander as "an incompetent weakling" for failing to search for Gaunt and his men, and disables the second for not answering promptly enough — and has the third-in-command shoot him.
- In James Swallow's Warhammer 40000 Blood Angels novel Deus Sanguinius, at the end, Garand receives a message from Abaddon. He sends for his death-shroud before going.
Live Action TV
Comic Books
- Played straight and slightly subverted in the first Robin miniseries. The villain of the piece kills two of his Mooks with his bare hands for failing him, then promotes a Dragon Lady named Lynx to the position of head Mook. When she inevitably fails as well, he ponders over the dilemma of leaving her unpunished and having to kill a woman. He then hands her to his Dragon for a "not too dire, but memorable" punishment. Which to the Dragon, meant putting out her eye.
- This is also done in 'Welcome Back Frank', Garth Ennis's opening Punisher mini-series. Ma Gnucci, after having her arms and legs torn off by a polar bear in the NY Zoo, berates her Mooks for failing to catch Castle and then orders one of them executed for asking her how she's feeling. The guy she orders to do it protests, so she orders him executed as well. She goes through about three underlings before she finds someone willing to shoot the previous executees.
- One of the better variations on this trope in recent years was the "Tangled Web of Spider Man" issue(#4), "Severance Package", in which the Kingpin deals with an underling who botches an illegal arms job.
- In early issues of Sonic the Hedgehog, Robotnik often did this to robots who messed up.
Tabletop RPG
- In a galaxy full of unpleasant people, Abaddon the Despoiler of Warhammer 40000 doesn't so much take the cake as nuke the bakery from orbit. He is well known across the galaxy for having an insanely violent temper. A good indicator of this is that any underling would rather commit suicide than deliver him bad news. His wrath isn't reserved for people he meets personally either. Any ship that sufficiently screwed up in his presence during a naval battle would get a Wave Motion Gun in the face. This is an actual rule for Abaddon in the Battlefleet Gothic spin-off game - if one of your ships fails a (re-rolled) command test in his presence, his flagship will open fire on it... and if it's not in firing range, he will abandon that ship, preventing it from being able to use his rerolls for command tests for the rest of the game.
Video Games
- Averted (amazingly enough) by Darth Malak in Knights Of The Old Republic, after a bounty hunter hired by Saul Karath fails to kill the heroes. "The penalty for failure is death, Admiral Karath... but the failure was Calo's, not yours. You may rise."
- You can do this on Evil Genius with your minions to completely refill the loyalty, attention and endurance of everyone in the room.
- In Perfect Dark, after the first two version of their plan, which attempted to take advantage of Trent Easton's political connections, fail, Mr. Blonde reveals his alien nature and dispatches Easton in a combination of this trope and You Have Outlived Your Usefulness. When the last, least subtle plan is thwarted as well, the Skedar imprison their other ally Cassandra DeVries for the same reasons.
- Happens to Drakuru in World Of Warcraft. After being decieved and nearly defeated by the player, he summons the Arthas, The Lich King, and explains that you've been double-crossing them. Arthas' response—to say this, kill Drakuru, and spare the player.
- Ragnaros in Molten Core quite happily slays Majordomo Executus after he fails to stop the players reaching Ragnaros' lair. Not only that, but he also shouts "You have failed me, Executus!" before the encounter.
- Archimonde apparently has this as policy, as does most of the Burning Legion. Kil'jaeden stands out as being willing to give people a second chance.
- In the first Mega Man Star Force, Queen Ophiuca is killed by Gemini Spark shortly after her defeat. Gemini then sends an ominous warning to Megaman that the next lightning bolt will be for him.
- Admiral Alfonso attempts to save his own reputation by placing blame on his vice-captain and chucking the poor guy overboard (even if these were regular oceans, with water, all that armor would drown him) for this reason. Refreshingly, Galcian sees right through it thanks to Alfonso's own men filing a full - and accurate - report prior to the meeting.
- In the Zelda game Ocarina Of Time, the fake Ganondorf is punished by the real Ganondorf for pretty much exactly this reason.
- In Team Fortress 2, the price of being informed by the Announcer that "You failed!" is having your weapons removed, your opponents getting guaranteed critical hits, and being pulled into third person to watch your character cower and flee with their hands in the air. It's not called "Humiliation" for nothing.
- Tenchu 2. Suzaku kills Yukihotaru after she loses to Rikimaru.
- Devil May Cry has this, minus three words, after the final fight with Griffon, where Mundus appears in the sky as an ominous three points of light, declares " Griffon, you have failed me. You are no longer worthy" And Agony Beams Griffon to death while it begs for mercy.
- In Final Fantasy V, the Braggart Boss Gilgamesh gets banished into the Void by his boss Exdeath for being a one-man Goldfish Poop Gang. This is actually an effective Kick The Dog moment, because Gilgamesh is, while not sympathetic, really funny.
Web Comics
- Parodied in 8-Bit Theater, where Kary kills her minions for no reason at all, thinking that it's something villains just "do".
- Captain Kinesis is very efficient at this trope in this Bob and George strip.
- This Antihero For Hire strip. To the Wizard's defense, he is genuinely insane and the Big Bad corporation made him so.
- Parodied and lampshaded in this strip of The B-Movie Comic, titled "What henchmen are good for". See also the rant quotation titled "What henchman are good for" in the intro of this page, above.
- In Concerned, Dr. Breen (in here made a Card Carrying Villain) tends to try and pull off a faux Force Chokehold when he's angry at someone, wishing for his minions to at least play along.
- Khrima, from Adventurers!, doesn't normally do this, but this particular minion really had it coming.
- Subverted in The Wotch. This villain prefers minions with initiative.
- In Sluggy Freelance Lord Horribus kills a couple of demons for not doing their part in the hunt for Torg. It's actually somewhat more understandable in this case, since it was less a case of the demons failing to capture Torg and more that they hadn't even been trying.
- Slightly subverted at the end of the latest Order Of The Stick story arc, where O-Chul cuts out Redcloak's eye and with help of Vaarsuvius manages to get rid of Xykon's phylactery. Enraged, Xykon forbids Redcloak from ever magically regenerating the lost eye, as a reminder of his failure.
Web Original
Western Animation
- Phaeton, the Big Bad of Exosquad had a habit of summarily executing his generals whenever they really screwed up. But since he could easily clone them, he could easily replace them... with themselves.
- In the second episode of the Double Dragon cartoon, the Shadow Master kills two underlings (Abobo and Willy) for failing him by trapping them in the Shadow Mural. Particularly annoying, as he never does this to his goons later. Maybe he just realized that if he killed somebody for every failure he'd run out of men fast.
- The only other time he does such a thing is in the Season 2 episode "Shadow Conned", when Countdown revolts against the Shadow Master by freeing the Shadow Khan from his shield. He does so by trapping Countdown in the Khan's shield.
- An early Birdman villain in the employ of F.E.A.R., the Ringmaster, seems to be terrified of finding himself on the receiving end of this when he is captured. In "Murro the Marauder", a nameless mook gets the Trap Door treatment after being thwarted by Birdman in his attempt to steal a secret formula.
- In The Emperors New Groove, Yzma does something even worse than killing her lackey Kronk: she insults his spinach-puff recipe.
- Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker: One of the Jokerz mouths off to the Joker for not telling them his plan after they fail a heist...
- Phobos, the season one Big Bad of WITCH, punished his Mooks heavily for failure, to the point where by the end of the season, one of them defected to the side of the heroes after they found him injured following a battle, knowing full well what Phobos did to those soldiers he discovered had been wounded. He even took a break from the Final Battle to punish his right-hand Giant Mook Cedric, transforming him from a giant snake monster into a tiny, pathetic one. This would later come back to bite Phobos in the ass in season two, after he regains his power and gives Cedric one more shot. Cedric returns the favor by stealing all of Phobos' power by eating Phobos alive during the penultimate episode.
- Prime Evil, the Big Bad of Filmation's Ghostbusters, was quite fond of saying this to his ghostly minions, often exacting some kind of "humorous" punishment on them. (Example: Fangster, a werewolf ghost, gets inflicted with vampire fleas.)
- Black Mask from The Batman killed his Number One and told a random Mook "You! You're my new Number One." The first just because he was pissed and he shot, the second questioned anti-gravity spray working and was made a test subject.
- In the movie of Kim Possible Drakken used this to his employee Shego after she failed the mission. Subverted by the fact that Shego responded with Why are you all, "You have failed me for the last time!" Are you kidding me with that? and explained that this mission would be the one successful mission.
- In another episode, WorldWide Evil head Gemini tells one of his underlings: "You have failed me for the last time." The underlings response? "Um, I just started last Thursday, so I haven't actually failed you bef—" Gemini cuts him off with "Silence!" then sends him down a trapdoor anyway.
- Subverted in Cat City. After each failure, Mr. Teufel, The Dragon, invites his semi-competent secretary "for a few words". The latter survives, but appears in ever-increasing number of bandages.
- Lord Nebula of Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys uses the phrase constantly to terrorize his toady Rhesus-2 (along with a few hard knocks). It's not an idle threat because his predecessor, Rhesus-1, was threatened constantly as well; he was eventually shot with a death ray and reduced to a ribcage in a pile of red goo.
- Robotnik does this to a Swatbot in the Sat AM Sonic The Hedgehog episode "Hooked On Sonics."
Real Life
- Admiral John Byng had failed England at the Battle of Minorca.
- "Sometimes it is necessary to execute one admiral to encourage the others." Since Voltaire said it, you may come across the phrase "pour encourager les autres".
- It can be argued that it actually worked: the Seven Years War marked the rise of England as the major naval power in Europe, mostly due to the freshly 'motivated' attitude of the RN.
- To probably no one's surprise at all, Hitler pulled this one out of the cartoonishly evil playbook. As the remnants of the Sixth Army were dying at Stalingrad, with no hope of escape or rescue, he promoted their commander, General Paulus, to Field Marshal. Because no German Field Marshal had ever surrendered, it was obvious to everyone that this was a subtle order for Paulus to commit suicide for his failure to win the battle. Subverting the trope, he didn't.
- Stalin executed many high-ranking officers who lost to significantly smaller number of Finnish soldiers during the Winter War. Since "failing Stalin (for the last time)" is not a charge that can be formally brought at a court martial, one general's official offense was losing twelve battlefield kitchens to the enemy.
- As field kitchens were crucial for winter warfare, this isn't quite as silly as it sounds.
- Of course Stalin had also executed many high-ranking officers before the war started, because he was pathologically afraid of them turning against him. Which was part of why the Russian military failed so miserably durring the Winter War, they had almost no veteran tactitions left.
- After General Zhu Tao of the Tang Dynasty rushed into battle against two of his rivals and was soundly defeated, he executed two advisers who had advocated attacking immediately instead of allowing his soldiers to rest for a few days.
- Execution for failure was pretty much the standard in Ancient China. Part of why Cao Cao succeeded against Yuan Shao was that the latter kept executing capable generals for failures or for giving advice he didn't want to hear. Even Zhuge Liang (yeah, that one) executed one of his most brilliant generals when said general failed a crucial battle. According to the book, at least, it was because the general failed to take important tactical advice into consideration and Zhuge Liang was reluctant to do it because he considered the other man to be like a son to him.
- Even earlier, a Han general was captured by the Mongols, and landed his family in hot water for not committing suicide. The furious emperor had his family executed and had the one guy (surnamed Sima, incidentally) who spoke up for him thrown in prison.
- Cowardly Roman soldiers were punished by being divided into groups of ten and drawing lots, whereupon the unfortunate soldier in each group would be beaten to death by his comrades.
- This practice is at the origin of the word "decimated" - kill one out of ten
- During the French Revolution, and more specifically during the Revolutionary Wars, generals who failed were executed. This is explained by the fact that i. only traitors could fail considering French "élan vital" couldn't be bet (according to the Convention) ii. most if not all generals were generals during the monarchy, and henceforth considered as traitors, except if they proved otherwise by actually winning.
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