Mercy Kill / Live-Action TV

Mercy Killing in live-action TV.

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• 24: On Day 3, terrorists release a lethal virus into the ventilation system of a hotel, infecting everyone inside. Anyone who turns up a positive reading will die a slow, horrible death. On their own initiative, several CTU agents decide to provide the victims with an alternate way out by offering the suicide capsules normally reserved for captured agents to the hotel residents. Even the resident Obstructive Bureaucrat tacitly approves of this after he finds out.
• In The 100, Bellamy threatens to do this to Jasper, who's been speared in the chest and is disturbing everyone with his screaming. Later, when Atom has been severely burned by the poison fog and is begging to die, Bellamy finds himself unable to end Atom's life and Clarke ends up killing him instead. Later she kills Finn to spare him from a slow death by torture.
• In The 4400 Series Finale "The Great Leap Forward", Shawn does this when Danny is dying painfully from his ability.
• One episode of Adam-12 has an elderly man approach Reed and Malloy and confess to having done this to his terminally ill wife at her request. They inquire after him with the D.A. after taking him in, and all three of them are sympathetic, but the D.A. doesn't have a clue what his legal chances are.
• A non-lethal variety is featured on The Amazing Race. When a team gets so far behind that it would be impossible for them to catch up to the other teams, they are given a clue that sends them straight to the Pit Stop for their elimination.
  • Sometimes, even that can't be used due to circumstances. One time, a team got stuck in a Road Block, unable to find the hidden clue despite hours of work. Eventually, the host appeared in person to put the team out of their misery.
  • In season 29 there was a leg toward the end of the season that was probably the most physically demanding leg ever. Contestants had to ride bikes around 20km in Vietnam in July carrying huge baskets of fish. Floyd had to basically do the task twice and had a heatstroke because of it. Since there physically was no way he could press on, he and his partner Becca got eliminated at the medical tent.
• The Americans: Elizabeth euthanizes Erica after her husband gave her an overdose of morphine that didn't work, at her request.
• Andor: The best thing the prisoners of Narkina 5 can hope for, as proven when Ulaf suffers a massive stroke and instead of giving him proper medical care, the prison doctor (who is himself a prisoner) injects poison into his veins to euthanize him. The doctor himself calls Ulaf free, as the prisoners discover no prisoners are actually released with them all being kept as slave labor until their deaths.
• Angel:
  • In "Dead End", Lindsey tracks down the unwilling donor of his 'evil' new hand and, finding him and a number of other innocents locked up in a Wolfram & Hart body-part-harvesting factory, kills him, as well as any of the rest who are too crippled to live.
  • In "Home", Connor is so broken and destroyed by everything that's happened to him that he's not really himself anymore. As part of their deal to recruit Angel, Wolfram and Hart offer him the chance to give Connor his life back - a deal that apparently can only be activated by killing him as he currently exists.
    Angel: I love you, Connor.
    Connor: So what are you going to do now?
    Angel: Prove it. [STAB]
• Arrow:
  • In the Lian Yu flashbacks, after Slade Wilson cuts Dr. Ivo's hand off the wound becomes infected and he asks Sara Lance to shoot him to spare himself from a lingering death. Oliver Queen does it instead, not wanting Sara to become a killer (which is Dramatic Irony as the audience knows she will later join the League of Assassins).
  • There's a variation when a member of the League of Assassins sent to kill Thea Queen offers to kill her in a way that she won't feel any pain. In the Lian Yu flashbacks, Slade Wilson offers to do the same for Oliver Queen whom he figures will just get captured and tortured into revealing his hideout (however this turns out to be a Secret Test of Character to see if the billionaire playboy has the will to fight for his life).
  • Done as a Sadistic Choice by Count Vertigo, who injects one of his drug pushers with pure Vertigo which stimulates the pain receptors. He then gives the man a gun with one bullet, so he can either get revenge or Mercy Kill himself. The pain is so agonizing he chooses the latter.
  • In the Hong Kong flashbacks, Oliver Queen tortures General Shrieve for two hours in retribution for Akio's death, until Akio's father Maseo decides enough is enough, and puts a bullet in Shrieve's head.
  • In Season 4 after Sara Lance Came Back Wrong from the Lazarus Pit, her father is advised the merciful thing is to kill her. Quentin Lance goes to do so, but breaks down sobbing when his other daughter Laurel catches him in the act and can't go through with it.
  • In the flashbacks of the same season, after Taiana became possessed by the Khushu idol, she begs Oliver to kill her so that she doesn't become like Reiter. Oliver reluctantly does so.
• The nature and purpose of the kill isn't apparent at first, but in the pilot miniseries of Battlestar Galactica (2003), Caprica Six's killing of a baby in the street could definitely be seen as a merciful death-the entire planet is about to get nuked to hell.
  • A more conventional example would be in a later episode where Natalie-Six mercy-killed another Six. The second Six had previously been drowned in a septic tank: a horrible death to be sure, but then had the added disadvantage of being resurrected with the memory of her terror, pain, and the look on her killer's face. Cue months of horrendous psychological trauma that her "sisters" couldn't help her with. The traumatised Six eventually kills the human that drowned her and, as they're cut off from resurrection technology, Natalie shoots her in the head. Officially it's to appease the humans but the implication is she's showing her sister mercy.
  • Deckhand Socinus while they're on Kobol after a crash landing is given an overdose of a painkiller as he's in agony from his injuries and his survival is unlikely.
• In the last episode of The Big C, the main character, a woman on hospice care with late-term stage 4 skin cancer, begs her brother to find someone to help her die, because she is in pain (despite the morphine) and can barely see. To say he is upset at the prospect is a severe understatement.
• In Birdsong, during World War I Stephen kills a fellow soldier who is dying in agony after he begs him to.
• In one of the fourth season episodes of Blackadder. General Melchett reveals he's quite fond of mercy killing.
  Gen. Melchett: Now George, you remember when I came down to visit you when you were a nipper, for your sixth birthday? You used to have a lovely little rabbit, beautiful little thing, do you remember?
  Lt. George: Flossie.
  Gen. Melchett: That's right, Flossie! Do you remember what happened to Flossie?
  Lt. George: You shot him.
  Gen. Melchett: That's right! It was the kindest thing to do after he'd been run over by that car.
  Lt. George: By your car, sir.
  Gen. Melchett: Yes, by my car. But that, too, was an act of mercy when you remember that that dog had been set on him.
  Lt. George: Your dog, sir.
  Gen. Melchett: Yes, yes, my dog. But what I'm trying to say, George, is that the state young Flossie was in after we'd scraped him off my front tyre, is very much the state that young Blackadder will be in now: if not very nearly dead, then very actually dead!
• Black Mirror:
  • In "San Junipero", both protagonists are euthanized. However, only their bodies die, since they upload to an artificial reality that's much nicer.
  • In "USS Callister", Valdeck asks for this after Daly defeats him, who refuses. It also becomes the goal of the crew for themselves after they find out it's possible (usually they can't die unless Daly allows this). However, they are saved at the end.
  • "Black Museum": Invoked and even namedropped by Nish, calling it the "first double-decker mercy killing". She uploads Rolo's consciousness inside Clayton's virtual one before shocking it with enough simulated voltage to put her father's copy out of his misery forever.
• Blue Bloods:
  • It turns out that a woman died due to this in "Love Lost". She had an incurable illness, wanted to die on her own terms, and her husband euthanized her peacefully. Danny doesn't like it, but he still has to arrest him for this.
  • A physician who had euthanized his terminally ill daughter after she begged him to is the subject of another case. Erin decides to charge him only with manslaughter and to ask for only probation.
• Boston Legal: Discussed by Denny and Alan, when the former is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Denny fears losing his mind and control of his body completely and just being a vegetable kept alive by machines, and makes Alan promise to kill him before that happens. Alan says of course, if his health ever declines that much, he'll have the life support shut off so he won't suffer. Denny then clarifies, he wants to die on his own terms before he's ever put on life support... and he wants Alan to shoot him. This is met with a flat "no."
  Denny: I'd shoot you!
  Alan: Denny, I'm not gonna shoot you.
  Denny: You... Democrat! Protesting war and banning guns. If you nancies had your way, nobody would ever shoot anybody! And then where would we be?
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Dark!Willow feels the pain of everyone in the world, and intends to do this on a global scale.
  • In Season 9, Angel and Faith kill the people who took the Mohra Demon blood, as they kept growing giant tumors all over their bodies.
• Camelot: Gawain kills a villager who's mortally wounded to end his suffering, after the man accepts his offer for this.
• Charite: Doctor Behring has to give his loyal horse Lotte to the knacker because she won't recover anymore after having been a blood donor for his diphtheria research project for a long time. Despite her status as a test animal, she was a Morality Pet for otherwise rather difficult and unkind Behring, and he is visibly glum, not taking any money for her but asking the knacker that she won't be in pain when it happens.
• Cold Case:
  • In "The Letter", a man suffocated the woman he loved while she was being raped by a group of his drunken friends.
  • In "Boy Crazy", a young girl in The '50s is smothered to death by her friend after she's completely broken (mentally, physically, etc.) in the mental hospital where her family locked her up.
  • In "The Good Death", where it is thought that the victim, who was already dying from an inoperable brain tumor, was unwillingly killed by a hospice nurse/embittered wife/embittered son/jealous business partner, only for it to turn that his loving wife (they'd reconciled shortly before) gave him a lethal dose of morphine at his request.
  • In "The River", a doctor suffering from a gambling addiction, which strained his relationship with his wife and son, asks a close friend to kill him so his family could collect on his life insurance policy. Though reluctant, his friend honors his request and shoots him.
• Some unsubs in Criminal Minds believe they're performing these on their victims. They assume that the people they target want to die and unable to do so without "assistance" or are dying inside and need to be set free. In "Childhood's Finest Hour", the Unsub targets depressed and suicidal mothers, kidnapping their children and killing the mothers with their child's "permission". When he was younger, he was in the same situation, living with a depressed and suicidal mother. He followed her one day where she was sitting on the bridge, possibly considering jumping off. To "help" her, he pushed her off into the water. It's unknown if she wanted to die or if she just wanted to be alone on those days.
• In one episode of CSI, the victim of the week was a girl whose family had been using her as a glorified bone marrow bank for her very ill brother. The murderer was the brother himself in an attempt to end both her pain and his own. Grissom isn't very sympathetic, arguing that the brother could have simply killed himself, ending his pain and giving his sister the opportunity for a normal life; when he responds that suicide is a sin, Grissom, in the iciest voice imaginable, replies, "But you think your God forgives murder?" The rest of her relatives also end up going to jail for helping the brother, blatantly the favorite child, cover up the murder.
• CSI: NY has a personal one with Mac’s father asking his son to kill him when he’s dying of cancer. Mac can’t bring himself to do it.
• Dark Angel:
  • Defied when Max and Zack are weighing up whether or not to bring Brin back to Manticore to save her from the progeria she is dying of (the 'not' option would, given the example below, more than likely have involved some level of this trope), but Brin begs them to take her back there because she doesn't want to die. She has a Face–Heel Turn and is a full-tilt Manticore puppet soldier when next they meet, so it would have been better to go with the mercy kill.
  • Max kills her brother Ben (with his consent) rather than allow him to be reclaimed by Manticore. The whole thing is an homage to Of Mice and Men.
• Dark Matter (2015): Four offers this to Two when she's infected with an incurable virus which will turn her into a Technically-Living Zombie. She refuses, preferring to wait it out, and turns out to be fine.
• Al Swearengen does this for Reverend Smith in Deadwood, smothering him to save him from the lingering and painful death of a brain tumor.
• Dexter
  • Dexter faces himself with having to help an old friend put out of the misery of cancer. Although a killer by nature, he is reluctant to do it, but being in a time where his Code makes less sense in favor of helping his friends, he reluctantly agrees. See also the Literature entry.
  • In the series finale he does this for his adopted sister Deb.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Cybermen reproduce by removing the flesh and altering the mind of other species, a nightmarish and irreversible process to which this trope is the universally accepted solution. When the Daleks adopted a similar strategy in "Revelation of the Daleks", the trope also appeared when one character mercy killed her own father who was partially mutated into a Dalek.
    The Doctor: You sleep now, Sally. Just sleep.
    • This killing is made even more shocking when it transpires that the only way to stop the Cybermen is to turn off their emotional inhibitors, which stop them realizing just what they've become... It may be a mercy killing, but they died in agony.
      [Cybermen are exploding all through the factory]
      Cyberman John Lumic: What have you done?
      The Doctor: I gave them their souls back. They can see what you've done, Lumic. And it's killing them!
  • "Dalek": After the Dalek is "corrupted" by absorbing Rose's time traveller DNA, causing it to feel things other than hatred, it begs Rose to order it to kill itself, as it can't bear to be an impure Dalek. Rose reluctantly does so.
  • "Tooth and Claw": The werewolf's host, after being pinned in the beam of moonlight, asks to be killed. The Doctor obliges.
  • "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End": The Osterhagen Key is a device that activates a series of strategically placed nuclear bombs to blow up the Earth. It was intended by UNIT to be used if the suffering of the human race becomes so great that killing everyone is the more humane option.
  • "Death in Heaven": Poor Clara is forced to perform this on her own boyfriend, already once dead, in order for him to gain advantage over the other converted Cybermen and help the Doctor with their defeat. It's every bit as heartbreaking as it sounds, but both characters do their best to handle this awful personal sacrifice with dignity. (Fortunately, Danny actually retains his love for Clara and his devotion to helping his fellow humans, rather than either becoming full Cyberman or self-destructing.) In contrast, the Doctor is scarred by the experience, as he feels guilt over not being previously nice to the person who selflessly gave his life to provide them with a chance of defeating the Cybermen.
  • Played with in "Arachnids in the UK": The Doctor encounters a Giant Spider that has grown so large its internal organs are unable to sustain it, and it is slowly suffocating to death, which is soon shot by Jack Robertson. He adopts this trope as his rationale after being informed that the spider was slowly dying anyway, but the killing itself is still portrayed as cruel and cowardly.
  • "Orphan 55": After Benni is captured by the Dregs, when the rescue party is able to get in contact with him again he requests to be shot. Kane obliges during the escape from the crashed vehicle.
• In Dracula (2020), Jack stakes Lucy when she begs him to, after she finds out that she's facing eternity in a horrifically burnt body.
• Elementary: In "Lesser Evils" the killer of the week turns out to be an Angel of Death who was giving overdoses of Epinephrine to terminal patients to trigger heart attacks. When confronted he claims he was freeing his victims from their pain and suffering.
• Equal Justice: The episode "Do No Harm" (2x05) explores the "right to die" issue with a physician on trial for assisted suicide in giving a woman with terminal cancer lethal drugs so she could kill herself before it got even worse.
• Implied on ER, when the mother of a boy dying from ALS asks Doug to "help him". Doug later admits to giving her the means to provide the boy with an overdose of pain medication, but it's never established whether he or the woman actually did so.
• Fallout (2024):
  • Lucy and the Ghoul come across another ghoul named Roger in episode 4. Roger isn't doing so great and is on the verge of going feral, so the Ghoul distracts him with talk of Pre-War ice cream and apple pie before shooting Roger in the head.
  • In Episode 8, Lucy learns her mother is now a feral ghoul after Shady Sands was nuked courtesy of her father Hank. Before she leaves the Griffith Observatory to join the Ghoul in pursuit of Hank, Lucy shoots her mother dead to put her out of her misery.
• Firefly:
  • It is universally accepted that a quick death from a bullet or drug overdose is vastly preferable to what a Reaver would subject you to. It's also a common (but not universal) opinion that if you encounter someone who lived through a Reaver attack, they're likely better off dead rather than be allowed to go mad from what they saw.
  • Mal performs a mercy kill at the beginning of the Big Damn Movie. When a civilian is caught by a group of Reavers during a raid, Mal shoots him, killing him instantly, so that he doesn't have to feel the torture the Reavers are going to put him through. While Zoe agrees that shooting the man was "a piece of mercy", she calls Mal out on having shoved him off their vehicle in the first place.
  • Also, in The Movie, River begs Simon to kill her — partially because she doesn't want the others to suffer because of her, and can't kill herself because she's chained to the floor, but also partly because she doesn't want to be sent back to the Academy.
• Forever: Adam efficiently slits Henry's throat to kill him quickly as he's bleeding out from a fatal stab wound and unable to move due to his back being broken, and would likely be found by Detective Martinez before he died and vanished. The same efficient throat cut also lets Henry know that Adam has killed people in this manner before.
• A French Village: Kurt asks Jules to kill him and escape his pain that way. Jules does kill him eventually, though it's unclear if it was for this or simple jealousy/revenge as Kurt slept with his wife.
• Neil Chung in the Fringe episode "Making Angels" uses Observer technology to read the future and an arcane poison to terminate those with especially bleak futures. In one case he slips up and causes a paralyzing accident he was trying to avert.
• Future Man: Comically done when Wolf shuts down James Cameron's AI at her request, because she can't stand to serve him.
• Game of Thrones:
  • In a variation, Ned kills the direwolf Lady himself quickly because she deserves better than a butcher.
  • Daenerys Targaryen smothers her husband Khal Drogo when he's left an empty shell in the wake of Mirri Maz Duur's deliberately botched spell that saved his life with blood magic.
  • Maester Luwin asks Osha to finish him off when he's been stabbed in the gut, which she does.
  • Jon Snow kills Mance Rayder with an arrow shot into his heart, rather than let Stannis burn him slowly on a pyre.
  • Sandor Clegane stabs a farmer slowly dying of a gut wound in the heart while Arya Stark looks on.
  • After Sandor's severely injured with a broken leg miles from aid, he begs Arya to kill him as she's been threatening to do since Sandor cut down her friend Mycah on the orders of his sadistic master Prince Joffrey. Instead Arya robs him and walks off leaving Sandor to die slowly, an act that comes across as much more cold-blooded than in the novel.
  • After entering the House of Black and White, Arya discovers it has a fountain with poisoned water that any person can come and drink from. A man brings his daughter, who is dying from a painful and incurable sickness-Arya tells the girl that the water will cure her, letting her die in a painless way. Many other people also come to the temple for this purpose.
  • Joffrey claims that his ordering Ned Stark's beheading was meant as this in deference to Sansa...he was originally going to have Stark drawn and quartered.
  • Meera gives one to her brother Jojen, when he falls against wights while trying to get them to the Three-Eyed Raven's cave.
• In the Japanese Tokusatsu Show GARO, the Monsters of the week are humans possessed by demonic entities called Horrors. Whenever a human is possessed by a Horror, they will feel excruciating pain. This makes almost every kill the main character makes a mercy kill.
• Ginny and Georgia: Georgia smothers Tom Fuller, who's slowly dying of a painful disease, intending to end his pain. She gets arrested for his murder as a result at the end of Season 2.
• Gotham: Ra's al Ghul, it turns out, wishes to be killed with the dagger, since immortality causes him constant pain. Bruce grants his wish.
• The Handmaid's Tale:
  • Hanging is referred to as "common mercy" by the court, implying they think it's this (for homosexuals at least) in their view. Given the terrible conditions we see, some might even agree with them. Or it could simply be that it's still preferable to "particicution" (i.e. death by mass public beating).
  • June is tempted to do this to Natalie/Ofmatthew when she's in a persistent vegetative state, being kept alive until her baby can be delivered, although Janine stops her.
• In Helix, Jordan kills Dr. Van Eigem at her request with a morphine overdose, because she's infected with what amounts to a zombie virus and doesn't want to turn into one, which is deemed a Fate Worse than Death.
• In Highlander, Duncan flashes back to being in the Civil War prison camp Andersonville and breaking his friend’s neck to spare him continued suffering from his injuries and infection due to the awful conditions and lack of medicine.
• Homicide: Life on the Street: "See No Evil" has Felton try to stop his childhood friend from carrying out his abusive, cancer-stricken father's request to end his suffering by killing him. He fails, but he destroys key evidence so his friend isn't convicted.
• House:
  • "Informed Consent" deals with an elderly patient who is slowly and painfully dying requesting the doctors to help him die. Chase argues that this is part of the job, while House seems willing but needs to solve the puzzle. Once they diagnose him with a terminal illness, Cameron apparently does the mercy kill while the patient sleeps.
  • This is dealt with again in "The Dig," when we find out that Thirteen euthanized her slowly dying brother, who like her has Huntington's disease, at his request. This leads to a rather dark moment when she worries that, when her disease progresses to the point where she can no longer control her mind or body, she will have no one there to do the same for her, and House tells her that when the time comes, he will.
• How to Get Away with Murder: Nia, Nate's wife, asks Annalise to assist her in killing herself so she can escape the pain of her late-stage ovarian cancer. Annalise agonizes over it, even getting some pills, but ultimately refuses to let her have them.
• Lethal Weapon (2016): In "Flight Risk", Riggs has flashbacks to his childhood in which he can't bring himself to shoot a deer, so his father shoots it. The deer is still alive, so Riggs shoots it to put it out of its misery.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Kamen Rider Kabuto breaks up the Bash Brothers pair of Sou Yaguruma and Shun Kageyama when the latter falls prey to an Assimilation Plot and begins painfully mutating into an alien monster, forcing Yaguruma to put him down. Kamen Rider Zi-O, set a dozen years later, shows that Yaguruma never recovered from this.
  • Kamen Rider Decade features something of a mix between this and Suicide by Cop in its Grand Finale movie, with Decade turning evil, killing all of the other Riders, and then letting his love interest kill him in order to restore the destroyed worlds.
  • Kamen Rider Wizard ends with an unusual case, as Koyomi begs for death due to being a Revenant Zombie whose body is painfully breaking down. Both the hero and the villain are trying to keep her alive, so both refuse her request. The one who actually performs the kill on her ends up being The Starscream, as part of his ascension to the true final boss.
  • Kamen Rider Gaim puts Kouta in a similar position to Yaguruma above when one of his friends mutates into a monster, except he can't bring himself to do it, leading one of the villains to make the kill instead.
  • Kamen Rider Ghost ultimately finishes off former Big Bad Adel this way, when Adel's powers go out of control just as he was on the cusp of a Heel–Face Turn.
• Killjoys: Dutch kills an old scarback monk who'd been tortured and imprisoned for centuries at his request to end his pain, despite Alvis's objections.
• Kiss Me First: Leila's mother requested to be put out of her misery. Her wish was granted, but the person who did it still feels like a killer.
• The Last of Us: Episode 3 follows the story of Bill and Frank, two survivors of the Zombie Apocalypse who found each other, found love, and lived a peaceful life together. When Frank falls ill to a terminal illness, he and Bill make a date to have their own personal wedding and share one last meal together, during which Frank would drink a fine wine laced with a lethal dose of sedatives, so he could die peacefully in his sleep. Bill helps him, and also drinks some of the poisoned wine himself so that he and Frank could stay Together in Death.
• A Season 1 episode of Law & Order has the police arresting a man for murder. It turns out that his "victim" was a friend of his, a gay man dying of AIDS who'd asked him to kill him before his suffering became too great and to spare his parents the knowledge of him technically committing suicide. Throughout the prosecution part of the episode, the DAs are clearly reluctant to go ahead with the case, but have no choice, as what the man did was still technically murder—euthanasia was illegal in New York State at the time of the episode (1990) and still is as of this post. As such, the issue came up several times throughout the series.
• An episode of Law & Order: SVU involves a mother who carried out a Mercy Kill on her infant daughter after learning that the child had Tay-Sachs (an incurable and inevitably fatal disease), although the issue is further complicated when it's revealed that the child was the product of an affair and a desire to keep the affair secret might have also been a motivating factor in the mother's decision.
• Lawmen: Bass Reeves:
  • Bass kills One Charlie, a Native suspect who's on fire, to end his misery.
  • Later his wife Jennie shoots a calf dead who's dying after coyotes had attacked and partly eaten it.
  • Billy Crow finishes off an outlaw who he wounded with a shot to the head after Bass urges him to, since there's no doctor nearby that can help.
• Liar (2017): Laura's father, who was slowly dying of brain cancer, asked her to painlessly end his life with drugs if he lost his faculties. When he did, she euthanized him with great reluctance.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: When he is introduced, Adar comforts a dying Orc by stroking his head before mortally stabbing him to end his suffering. He looks regretful for being forced to kill an underling whom he perceives as his own child.
• In Lost Sawyer badly botches an attempted mercy kill, accidentally putting a bullet into the marshal's lung rather than his heart, leaving him to bleed slowly and painfully to death. Jack, despite his previous statements against the idea,^note As a doctor, Jack strongly believes in Thou Shalt Not Kill, coupled with hopes that they would be rescued in time to save the marshal's life quickly euthanizes the marshal to prevent his now inevitable death from being drawn out and agonizing.
• At the climax of the "Loving Murders", it turns out that the Serial Killer responsible for the slew of deaths genuinely believed that she was doing this for her victims, thinking them to be in emotional pain. Her mental breakdown is completed when someone tells her that she had no such motive for killing her boyfriend and only did it because he'd figured out she was the killer. Unable to live with what she's done, she begged a friend of hers to do this for her.
• The Magicians (2016): After entering her mind with magic, a comatose patient asks Julia to kill her. She refuses, but Richard gives an overdose to her once Julia tells him this.
• This is the main theme of Mary Kills People, revolving around a Canadian physician who provides illegal assisted suicide to terminally ill patients.
• Parodied in M*A*S*H. Colonel Potter's jeep has been run over by an out of control tank and smashed to pieces. He walks up to it, pulls out his gun, and shoots it in the engine.
• In the Masters of Horror episode "Imprint", the disfigured prostitute claims to have murdered Komomo to spare her the life of a prostitute and being tortured by the madam. She believes that she sent Komomo from Hell to Heaven.
• The Messengers: Rose started out euthanizing a mortally wounded soldier at his request. Then she moved on to killing terminally ill or elderly patients without their permission. Notably though, it's only when she deliberately murdered her lover's wife in jealousy and hate that she jumped off the slippery slope, becoming the Horseman of Death.
• Midsomer Murders: While still murder under UK law, Pru Bennett was actually performing one of these in "Blue Herrings". Her aunt, Celia Armstrong, faced a slow, undignified and agonising death from a terminal illness, and as the closest thing to a daughter she had, Pru couldn't bear to watch her suffer.
• Misfits: The coma patient in 3.5 gets unplugged at her request.
• Parodied in one episode of Mongrels where Nelson thinks he has rabies and asks Marion to kill him if he goes mad. Unfortunately he still wants to kill him after it turns out he's not rabid.
• Moon Lovers: Wang Eun begs Wang So to kill him when he's fatally injured. Wang So does.
• The Murders: The theme serial killer in "Stereo" believes that he's doing his victims a favor by killing them, as they'd all suffered from extreme guilt over something.
• NCIS:
  • Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard, off-screen, was forced to work for the CIA/MI-6 during the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, patching up people who had been tortured. So they could be tortured again. Eventually, he puts one guy out of his misery.
  • One episode revolved around a World War II veteran who was plagued by vague memories of having murdered a squadmate. When they finally jog his memory, they learn that said squadmate was badly injured, there was a Japanese platoon right around the corner, and he was forced to put the man out of his misery so his cries of pain wouldn't give away their position.
• Neighbours
  • Occurred in Susan Kennedy's backstory: when she was seventeen, her mother Grace was terminally ill and asked her to help her to die painlessly. It's treated as her Dark Secret, coming up once every ten years or so.
  • Stephanie Scully was falsely accused of this after her grandfather's death from enthysema, thanks to her mother and uncle walking in on her holding what looked like a Vorpal Pillow moments after it happened. She was charged with assisted suicide and convicted, but received a suspended sentence that she was later able to overturn on appeal. When Lyn admitted to suspecting her, Susan spoke up in her defence, confessing her own experience, which Lyn, a Catholic, did not take well.
• October Faction: Alice inflicts it on Fred and Deloris, making both of them feel all the pain they caused to supernatural beings across the years.
• Outlander:
  • Claire euthanizes a slave named Rufus with poisoned tea when he's about to be torturously killed for cutting an overseer's ear off after he whipped him.
  • Roger comes back when he's escaping to save Father Alexandre Ferigault from torture by tossing a barrel of oil onto the stake where he's burning, which then consumes him.
  • Brianna shoots Bonnet before he's slowly drowned. Roger asks if it was mercy, or to make sure that he's dead. She doesn't answer.
  • Roger smothers a girl dying slowly due to being horribly burned in a fire.
• Oz: In the very first episode Italian inmate Dino Ortolani is assigned to work in the AIDS ward as punishment for attacking an inmate who was making unwanted passes at him. He initially hates all the patients as he assumes them all to be gay but starts to develop a friendship with one of them, Emilio Sanchez, who begs Dino to put him out of his misery. Dino does so but in doing so creates a set of circumstances that allows Ryan O'Reily to orchestrate his death.
• In The Pacific, a Japanese soldier, having just seen his friends die all around him on Guadalcanal, stumbles out into the river and screams aggresively at the Marines. The Americans, having just seen a Japanese soldier pretending to surrender only to kill two Marines with a grenade, start sniping him in the arms and legs for "sport". Disgusted, Leckie ruins their "fun" by shooting him in the chest.
• Perry Mason (2020): Perry shot dead a mortally wounded German and American while in the trenches, as a cloud of poison gas reached their position..
• Played with on one episode of Reno 911!. While out on patrol, two of the officers are asked by a distraught man to Mercy Kill his dying dog. So, one officer takes his gun and shoots it. While the man is thanking them, a woman comes out of the house and screams when she sees the dog. It turns out the dog was hers and the man was actually a neighbor who wanted the dog to stop howling at night.
• In Revolution, Neville gives one of his mortally wounded soldiers a vial of poison so he can die quickly without more pain.
• In Roots (2016) a black spy for the North ends up hanged in a deliberately slow way. Nancy, who is also a spy, shoots him in the head instead of letting him slowly suffocate. This causes her to end up hanged as well.
• Sisters: Alex to Truman, at his request, should his Alzheimer's become too advanced. But when Charlie thinks that his nurse overdosed him, either accidentally or intentionally and is about to report her, as she's obligated to do, Alex confesses, not wanting an innocent person to take the blame.
• Smallville:
  • Chloe is forced to do this to Davis as he begins to transform into Doomsday.
  • Lex claims this in the series finale when he kills his half-sister Tess, saying that he does it so that she doesn't end up like him. What he doesn't realize is that, as she tells him as she dies, he didn't need to worry about that- Clark had already saved her.
  • Tess herself had previously attempted a Mercy Kill via cyanide injection on a suffering and apparently dying adolescent clone of Lex. His "suffering" turned out to be from the activation of the previously unknown Kryptonian DNA weaved into his genetics, and the needle couldn't break his skin.
• On The Sopranos, Tony Soprano murders his cousin, Tony Blundetto, in order to save him from being tortured to death by Phil Leotardo. It comes back to bite Tony later, as Phil doesn't feel satisfied by this.
• Stargate-verse:
  • In the first story of Stargate Atlantis, then-Major Sheppard does a Mercy Kill on his Colonel, who has just been fed on by a Wraith.
    • It's brought up again during the siege that the new military head doesn't believe it was a Mercy Kill until he experiences the feeding for himself. Before he's carted off with the wounded he tells Sheppard 'I wish you had been there for me.'
  • Happens again in Stargate Universe, when Col. Young puts Airman Riley out of his misery from being pinned under debris after a shuttle crash.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series: In "The Conscience of the King", Kodos the Executioner, governor of the Tarsus IV colony, ordered the execution of half the colonists (albeit according to his own personal eugenics theories) when a fungal infection destroyed most of their food supply, figuring this was better than everyone dying of starvation. Ultimately subverted; resupply ships arrived in time, rendering his actions unnecessary.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In "The Quickening", an entire planet has been infected with the "Blight", a disease that lays dormant for decades, then becomes active and causes horrific pain and slow death, in what is known as the Quickening. Trevean's job is to kill those who experience the Quickening, to save them from the terrible pain.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: In "Coda", Captain Janeway is experiencing The Many Deaths of You, including a Body Horror disease called the Phage which the Emergency Medical Hologram has no cure for. He decides that the only recourse is euthanasia with a Deadly Gas, which he carries out despite Janeway's objections. Fortunately, it's All Just a Dream.
  • Star Trek: Picard: Seven of Nine euthanized Icheb, who she'd found being vivisected for his Borg implants and dying in agony due to this, at his request. She was very distraught at it, as she'd considered him to be her son.
• Supernatural. While soulless, Sam encounters five men who are All Webbed Up and infected with venom by a spider demon. Instead of taking them to a hospital, he arbitrarily decides to shoot them to spare their agony, then burn the bodies. Unfortunately the spider demon was actually creating more of itself, and the result is Immune to Bullets and fire. One of the victims, an ally Sam used as The Bait to find the demon, survives and wants revenge. He points out that rather than sparing him, Sam has actually created more monsters.
  • If a Monster of the Week doesn't want to be a monster, yet is forced to be so because of the violent instincts monsters have, and if they can convince Sam and Dean that they don't want to be a monster, they'll most likely get a mercy kill from them, regardless if they accept that fate or not.
• In an episode of Third Watch, Bobby is asked to help his retired teacher stop hurting. In another one, as Doc is transporting a badly burned colleague to a hospital with a special burn unit, the man begs him to do this (aside from the agony he's already in, he knows full well it's only a matter of time before he dies from infection and dehydration). Doc finally complies and gives him a lethal dose of morphine.
• Timeless: Harriet Tubman shoots a wounded black soldier who's dying from a gut wound, begging to be finished, then berates the time travelers for hesitating in doing the same.
• In Torchwood: Children of Earth, when an alien drug-junkie demands 10% of the Earth's children to use as recreational drugs, the British government reflectively reluctantly agree to hand over the "gift", and decide to pick children who are deemed as having "no real future" to hand over for so-called "inoculation". In order to make the selection of children for "inoculation" seem random, the children of John Frobisher, the Permanent Secretary to the Home Office, were picked to be handed over publicly. To spare his children from their fate, he shot them, shot his wife, then shot himself.
• In one of the most emotional moments in the The Vampire Diaries, Damon is forced to stake his longtime friend and former lover Rose after she gets werewolf venom in her system, which condemns a vampire to a long and painful death. To ease her suffering, he uses his telepathy to give her a Dying Dream before finally ending her life.
• Van Helsing (2016): In "Big Mama", Axel, Scarlet, Doc, and Julius become guests of a group of survivors and find out they are catching and eating vampires. The survivors take a tied up vampire and give her a Lobotomy with a power drill and then throw her in an oven while still alive. Julius is so horrified that he opens the oven and slits the vampire's throat.
• Vikings: Athelstan mercifully slits the throat of a bishop who the Vikings had tied up and are firing arrows into.
• Done several times in The Walking Dead (2010) to zombies. Even though as a zombie the afflicted can't feel the pain or horror of their situation, the characters (especially Rick) often consider it a mercy kill to end their existence.
  • Also done by Dr. Edwin Jenner in the finale of Season 1. He considers continued living to be pointless and doomed to end in terror and agony, and though he eventually allows the other survivors the choice of leaving and continuing to fight for survival, he also offers anyone who stays an instant and painless death when the CDC building explodes — and at least one of them accepts this option.
  • In Season 2, Daryl delivers one to Dale via a shot to the head, after he's been disemboweled by a zombie.
  • Another non-zombie example, in the Season 4 episode "The Grove": After Lizzie kills her little sister so she'll come back as a walker (long story), Carol, now knowing she's absolutely insane, takes her out to the titular grove and shoots her in the back of the head.
  • In Season 6, Carol does this to an Alexandrian who's slashed through the stomach by one of the Wolves.
• Why Women Kill:
  • In Season 1, this is how Karl meets his end. He's dying of AIDS and doesn't want to become comatose, so Simone euthanizes him with his full blessing after a final dance.
  • In Season 2, this is how Bertram justifies his murders. All of the people he kills have some painful, terminal illness he doesn't want them to suffer from. This might be understandable... however, he never asks whether they prefer euthanasia (except in the first case), just makes the choice for them. He explicitly compares this with putting down sick dogs (he's a vet), while apparently oblivious to this being wrong at all, believing that it's compassionate.
• Willow: Ballantine is exorcised of the Gale which possessed him, but severely wounded by it being inside him and realizes he'll die. He has Jade kill him to spare him from a slow death.
• Without a Trace. While searching for his missing, cancer-stricken aunt, FBI Agent Martin Fitzgerald is stunned to learn that she's been doing this for the people in her support group (she's a nurse) and even more stunned that she's decided to invoke this on herself upon learning that she doesn't have much time left herself.
• Wynonna Earp: The title character has to do this a few times:
  • When her friend Shorty (who was already mortally wounded) is possessed by a revenant seeking to escape from the Ghost River Triangle, he begs Wynonna to kill him, as the revenant's presence is clearly causing him agony.
  • A revenant couple — who appear to be the Token Good Teammates of the lot — ask Wynonna to put them down, since one has already been put into pained catatonia by being outside the Triangle, and the other doesn't want to live without him.
  • She does this twice in the first season finale: when Willa is dragged off by the Eldritch Abomination she'd summoned, and when Bobo is being taken by the Black Badge Division to a prison outside the Triangle.
• In the Turkish series Yakamoz S-245, the crew of the eponymous submarine find a Sole Survivor of the Solar Flare Disaster in a bank vault where he was protected from most of the radiation, but he's in such agony the Executive Officer shoots him. Later several other sailors get accidentally locked in the same vault shortly before another burst of radiation is going to hit, so their officer is shown placing his pistol on the table and lighting up One Last Smoke.
• Y: The Last Man (2021): At the end of episode 4, Roxanne shoots one of her own fighters dead, since she's mortally wounded and can't be helped.
• Z Nation: Killing a zombie is considered giving the person mercy.

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