Dallas: J.R. Ewing, in his most ruthless moments, especially when he wanted to ruin a hated enemy, someone who he perceived to have double-crossed him (or actually did) or someone who called him out on his absolute lack of morals and ethics.
In the 2012 remake, John Ross Ewing takes this a step further...much to J.R.'s delight.
So many from Bad Girls. One of the most notable would be Natalie Buxton, a bullying, violent pedophile who will do ANYTHING to get her own way. She has no boundaries. You can't get much lower than her.
In Babylon 5, we have Lord Refa, who started off as an Smug Snake who wanted to 'return the Centauri to Glory', but he's the one who started Londo off on his Start of Darkness, making him ask Morden, the Shadows' servant, for favors. He's the one who began the entire Narn/Centauri War and authorized the illegal weapons the Mass-Drivers used against the Narn Homeworld, killing hundreds of millions. And he was a complete dupe for the Shadows, sending Centauri forces out to conquer far and wide, leaving the empire unprotected. Eventually killed off when Londo, who had grown to despise Refa, was under threat of political annihilation and, seeking revenge against Refa for his (supposed) murder of Londo's lover, enacted an Evil Plan that saw Refa torn apart by a mob of vengeful Narns. To a cheery, upbeat Gospel song about eternal damnation.
Jha'dur, AKA: Deathwalker. The last real leader of the Dilgar War and a perfect example of why they were wiped out. An unmistakable sociopath who conducted horrific experiments on other races, deployed weapons on civilian targets, and was planning to give other races immortality...with an ingredient that required other members of sentient species to induce mass murder and anarchy. The sheer joy she took in watching others suffer was nearly unmatched in the series.
We also have Emperor Cartagia who is the Centauri version of Caligula. Tortures G'kar just for the fun of it and wanted to kill off his own race at the end of it since he thought he was God. And he didn't just let other people torture G'kar for him-no, he himself got in on it and got his hands messy.
And we have President Clark. Turns the Earth Government into a dictatorship, uses the PsiCorps to Mind Rape and interrogate people, fonds the Nightwatch, which is the SS, bombs Mars and other colonies, and has Sheridan "interrogated". When he lost the war, he was going to take Earth with him.
Bester. He's got a sympathetic backstory and lots of people still want to crush his head with a rock. Manipulative Bastardry. Planned genocide. And the worst part is that he did it all with a smug little smile on his face.
He also brainwashed a main character, making him turn against everyone he cared about. And after he had completed Bester's mission, Bester revealed everything he had done and how it furthered his goals in painstaking detail. And that smug little smile never left his face...
Vir's former fiancée, Lyndisty Drusella. A Stepford Smiler, she eagerly tells Vir the culling of the Narns she participated in. Escorting 'aggressive Narns' to euthanasia clinics and killing them, and saying she had personally stabbed hundreds of them before. All the while trying to convince Vir to cross the Moral Event Horizon by killing a Narn who was after her, but she had subdued and tied him up. If Vir had more of a spine at that moment, he'd have called her a monster to her face. It also starts to become clear that, except for Vir, the Third Wife of the former Emperor, the former Emperor, and Londo, the entire Centauri Race is descending into Complete Monsterdom, since what she's doing is not only accepted on Centauri Prime, but applauded. Many fans cheered when her marriage to Vir was annulled.
Ulkesh, the replacement Ambassador to Babylon 5 after Kosh's Heroic Sacrifice. Tortures Lyta, holds everyone in contempt, has no love for the younger races...He and Cartagia are the only cases in the show of main characters deciding without hesitation that somebody just needs killing. After Cartagia's death, one person has retrospective qualms. Nobody does about Ulkesh.
The Streib are a whole race of them; they're based on the classic "Grey" alien types and abduct representatives from numerous races to put through various sadistic experiments, and if they're caught, they salt the earth by throwing all their prisoners into space.
The Streib, by the way, are not to be confused with the Vree, who are also based on the Greys—and travel the stars in actual flying saucers—but, are on the whole, good guys. There were, however, a few bad eggs—possibly Complete Monsters—who conducted Streib-like experiments on humans and other races; Vree law allows the descendants of these test subjects to sue the heirs of the experimenters for damages.
Murder In Coweta County: A 1983 made-for-TV movie that told the true story of John Wallace, a wealthy Meriwether County, Georgia land baron, and moonshine runner who, in the 1940s, virtually ruled the county with an iron fist and had the sheriff in his back pocket. He had excessively sadistic and cruel methods of doling out physical punishment toward people who wronged him; for instance, at the beginning of the film, the sheriff catches a black farmhand stealing from Wallace; Wallace directs the farmhand to place his hands and feet in the jambs of the door, then slams the door shut on him repeatedly. (The "altruistic" side of Wallace, which he presented to the community in general, was a mere cover for his true, sinister side. For instance, he regularly attended church, was a member of the choir and church council, and paid for new pews out of his pocket.) The key incident in the film, which happens in April 1948, comes in the first hour of the movie: a sharecropper named Wilson Turner, who ran shine for Wallace, made a little too much money and made his runs a little too often; Wallace finds out and — after beating him severely — orders him off of his land. In retaliation (and perhaps knowing that Wallace would bury him in small-claims court, since Wallace had several judges in his back pocket), Turner steals a prized cow from Wallace's pasture. Sure enough, Wallace finds out and has Turner arrested, but then later decides to drop the charge "on a lack of evidence." Turner is let out of jail, but his freedom is short-lived, as Wallace and three of his thugs are waiting for him at the gas station. Turner hightails it, with Wallace and his buddies in pursuit, and the chase extends into Coweta County, where Turner's truck runs out of gas at the Sunset Tourist Camp; Turner tries to flee but is immediately caught and savagely beaten, creating a disturbance that draws several witnesses. As the men are trying to place Turner in one of the cars, witnesses reportedly saw Wallace pistol-whip Turner atop the head with such force that the gun discharged, likely killing him instantly. It was not good enough for Wallace to merely dispose of Turner's body in a deep well on his property, especially upon learning that hard-nosed Coweta County Sheriff Lamar Potts was investigating the case and — knowing the fatal blow was administered in the adjacent county — he had jurisdiction for the entire series of crimes involving Turner's death. So, Wallace directs two African American farmhands to help extract the body from the well, build a pyre, douse the body and wood with kerosene, moonshine, and gasoline...AND SET EVERYTHING ON FIRE!!!! Wallace cackles evily as he dares Potts to arrest him now, believing that the lack of a body will cast doubt on where Turner was killed. Wallace does not count on bone fragments and brain tissue (the few bits of Turner's body that remained after it was otherwise completely cremated) remaining in both the river and well, and that — plus the testimony of the two farmhands, Wallace's goons refusing to testify in his defense (they were to claim that Turner was still alive when brought back to Meriwether County), Potts persistence in gathering other evidence...and Wallace's own eccentric statement during the trial — led to an eventual guilty verdict and sentencing to death. Even in the last half hour before his execution Nov. 2, 1950, Wallace remains defiant, declaring himself (to an unimpressed Potts) the leader of "The Kingdom" and that he was taught to do everything without conscience or fear of the consequences. His last statement, made in the electric chair moments before his execution, is: "Almighty God, only You know my true heart. Prepare to receive me into Your House." Griffith's portrayal of the ruthless, sadistic, cold-hearted Wallace was critically acclaimed and showed just how callous, mean, and evil this outwardly Christian man truly was.
Follow-ups: the three men that helped Wallace beat Turner to death pleaded guilty as accessories to murder and were sentenced to life in prison; they each would be released after serving seven years. The Meriwether County sheriff — also an accomplice to murder — pleaded not guilty, but died before being brought to trial; a guilty verdict surely would have meant a life sentence, and removal from office.
Gramps, a 1995 made-for-TV movie also starring Griffith in the title role, a grandfather named Jack MacGruder whose outwardly sweet side is a cover for a bloodthirsty sociopath who nearly succeeds in destroying his family ...all to get at and rape his "precious" 7-year-old grandson, Matthew. Why? About 40 years earlier, Jack was the autocratic head of his household and constantly came up with new ways to beat his poor wife when she stepped even a millimeter out of line; finally, the wife is able to build a backbone and leave, taking her 7-year-old son, Clark, with her (the wife wins the divorce, cleaning out Jack, who got no visitation rights to see his son). In the present, Clark tracks down his father and — hoping he's changed and gotten his anger issues under control — invites him to stay. Jack charms everyone with his guitar picking, but eventually, this sinister pedophile licks his chops as he unleashes his pent-up anger on innocent people: he breaks the housekeeper's legs with a baseball bat, smashes a fire extinguisher over the head of a police officer, runs down a teenaged girl with his car (and also does the same to his daughter-in-law), and kills his daughter-in-law's father after he gathers evidence to refute Jack's claim that the daughter-in-law was cheating on him. In the end, Jack died as he lived: kidnapping Matthew and one of his female classmates. There is one final confrontation along a river, and he threatens to throw the tykes over the edge of a waterfall if Clark does not pay a $1 million ransom. Clark agrees, but throws the money in the river to the girl. When Jack tries to go after the girl, she lets him have the money and begins throwing out bills into the river; the greedy Jack begins collecting the bills...until he is caught in the current and unable to avoid going over the edge of the waterfall. Clark rescues Matthew and the little girl as Jack is crushed to death on the rocks below.
Leverage lives off people like this. One man wanted to tear down a church to build a strip mall. Another burned down a horse stable with the horses STILL INSIDE to get the family to sell to him. The most heinous person yet wanted to kill off the world's wheat market with a super-plague, so her own plague-resistant super-wheat would make her and, by extension, her company infinity billion dollars. She was going to starve the WHOLE PLANET in the name of Capitalism. Parker's mentor and Master Thief Archie even called the woman the trope.
Archie: This virus would wipe out all the normal wheat...
Nate: Causing famine and making her super-wheat the only option.
Archie: She would have to be a monster.
Nate: Yes, she would.
The world would be populated with those with celiac disease.
A particularly horrific one-shot villain, serial killer John Smith, who would abduct women who were perfectly happy with their lives and hold them captive in a dark, cramped chamber, where the isolation, coupled with psychological torture, would eventually break their spirits, at which point he would seal them in and leave them to die. The guy seemed to have no Freudian Excuse whatsoever and did this simply to recreate an event from his childhood; while out hiking, he found a woman who had fallen down a well and, as she begged him for help, he leered down and spat on her, then waited and watched as she drowned from exhaustion. He described the sight of every last shred of hope in her eyes dying as "the most beautiful thing I have ever seen" and became obsessed with replicating the moment. Additionally, to make absolutely sure his victims were dead on the inside, he would offer them the chance to leave before entombing them, but no one ever acted on the offer. "Once hope is gone...dying is just a formality." Cold Case Pedia probably said it best when they listed his MO as simply "Mind Fucking".
Three other prominent villains on the show are Jim Larkin, Roger Mulverny, and George Marks. Jim Larkin is a fat, alcoholic Slob who has his son bring him girls for him to rape. When his latest prey (and the episode's victim) resists and calls him disgusting, he forces his son to help him murder her. When the dust clears, the boyfriend has been injured and the girl is raped and murdered. They don't even show the scene, it's so horrific. George Marks is a serial killer who abducts women he views as "strong". To replicate his murder of his mother (wh,o in all fairness, was sort of a bitch who deserved it), he abducts said women, chases them through the woods, and then kills them at dawn with a hunting rifle. During the interrogation sequence, he also mocks each of the detectives about their personal issues. He lures Lilly into a final confrontation and attempts to break her by forcing her to remember the worst moment of her life. Lilly resists and rips him apart, resulting in a Villainous Breakdown of epic proportions. He's still a bit of a Karma Houdini in that he dies in a manner of his own choosing. Roger Mulverny is a Corrupt Cop who beats his wife and kids, and who murders his own daughter when his wife tries to leave him.
Don't forget about Mike Delaney, a rapist who was a Karma Houdini and drove one of his victims to suicide. However, he was killed by the brother of one of his victims. The detectives coach the killer into claiming it was self-defense so as to not have to arrest him for the murder.
Charlotte Bayes from 'Churchgoing People', who not only abused her husband and kids, but was prone to violent fits of rage and had a sick compulsion to convince her son that she was the most important woman in his life, even having him help cover up his father's horrific murder (which she committed), and Lauren Williams, the victim from 'Blackout', who sexually abused her son when he was a teenager, was beginning to make advances to her grandson—and had not a trace of guilt or remorse over either.
When you sum up everything she did, the killer from "Blood On The Tracks" fits this. Her husband announces to her and their friends that he plans to confess to a crime they were all involved in 10 years earlier that left another friend dead. Afraid of facing punishment, she enticed her ex-lover to kill her husband (with the promise of them running away together) with a homemade bomb, then left her husband and another friend to die in the subsequent explosion. Afterwards, she assumed her friend's identity (they bore a strong resemblance to each other) and proceeded to live the life of Riley for the next 26 years (husband, children, upper-middle class lifestyle) while her ex suffered for all this time, thinking he had killed her. A selfish, cowardly, cold-hearted bitch.
Major Moe Kitchener, the Big Bad of the sixth season finale. He's a sociopathic military academy head and foaming-at-the-mouth misogynist who covered up the murder of his academy's first female student, both to save the school's reputation and because he felt women had no place attending it in the first place, and later attempts to drown Lilly when she gets too close to the truth. Unfortunately, he makes bail in season seven, sparking a Story Arc that climaxes in the dead girl's father putting a bullet through his skull.
Law & Order: SVU had Victor Paul Gitano, a notable suspect that completely topped anyone else Benson and Stabler have ever encountered. Gitano was a sadistic pedophile, and, as you find out later, absolutely proud of it. He lures kids in, then rapes, tortures, and kills them. He doesn't discriminate by gender either. On top of that, when trying to hunt Gitano down, things don't quite go as planned. Not only does he kill one of the two kids he had with him in a subway station full of people by slashing his throat, he almost killed Benson the same way. And then, when they corner Gitano in a warehouse, he manages to get behind Stabler and hold him at gunpoint with a shotgun. Gitano, despite knowing he'd get caught or killed at this point, outright boasts that he killed the other child he had (who was a girl) and bragged that she was a "slut" and a "real little whore" before killing her, even though he never got the chance to molest her. Fortunately for Stabler, Gitano gets killed by a police sharpshooter. Compared to any of the other serial killers on TV (even on Dexter and Criminal Minds), Gitano tops them ALL on the creepiness factor. By the end of the episode, you're glad he's dead. Oh yeah, and he's based on a real guy.
Another episode also had a particularly sadistic pedophile on his deathbed. During an interview, he actually stated "I can't wait to go to Hell... all those unbaptized babies."
A Man Child who rapes children and tapes it with a POV camera is bad enough, and then we meet his father, who made his son watch him have sex with prostitutes as a child, then had the son have sex with them as a teen, and after learning his son had a problem with little girls, made the son tape the rapes all because he was having a harder time getting off. And to top it all off, he declares that his son is dead to him as he yells "Daddy I love you!"
SVU had another one in the episode "Dominance" in the form of one Charlie Baker: by the end, he has murdered eleven people in about a week, after forcing them to have sex with each other first—including men with other men—or raping the victims himself. And he kidnapped two women, killed their boyfriends, and kept them captive on a roof. Oh, and he's also been raping his little brother and beating his alcoholic father all along. And he's played by dear, sweet, clueless Boone, of all people. WHAT.
Mark and Jana Whitlock in the episode "RAW", members of a white supremacist organisation who adopted a black boy so they could have him killed in a school shooting and collect on a $750,000 life insurance policy. Brian Ackerman and, arguably, his son Kyle from the same episode also qualify.
Jana's closing justification when he is found out: "We aren't racist, we just needed the money."
SVU is swimming in these. In fact, the first episode featured one - as the VICTIM! Ostensibly an innocent cab driver brutally murdered, "Victor Spicer" turns out to be Stefan Tanzic, a particularly Sociopathic Soldier and a perpetrator of the Serbian genocide. We receive anecdotes about him killing a little boy with a hatchet, as well as having all the men in a certain village killed, presumably so he and his cronies could have the women to themselves. He was indicted for raping 67 women. His killers turned out to be two women whose lives were ruined and families slaughtered by him; after one is Driven to Suicide, the ADA decides that pursuing charges against the second would be an absolute joke since nobody would convict her, and they simply elect to send her home.
Larry Moore from "Signature" would torture his victims through every conceivable means, meticulously record the sessions, and constantly play the tapes on a loop to torment current and future captives, and occasionally abduct more than one woman at once so he could have a captive audience. His Torture Cellar was pure Nightmare Fuel, and they implicate pretty heavily that he raped his aunt while still a teenager.
The villain in "Pure" is a serial killer and rapist who targets virgins. He's also a Phony Psychic who spends the episode convincing the mother of his latest victim that he can help her get her daughter (who she doesn't yet know is dead) back for her and tormenting the detectives (who suspect he did it, but can't prove it). At the end of the episode, when asked why he did it, when he could have probably gotten away with it if he'd just skipped town, he replies, "I just had to see what I had set in motion. The expressions on your faces were priceless. This place was like a big beehive that I poked with a stick."
A relatively early episode featured an Afghan ambassador who was absolutely this. When his daughter commits the horrible crime of losing her virginity before marriage, he has his son (the girl's own brother) rape and murder her, and later kills his wife himself when she turns testimony on the son in court. The son is convicted based on his mother's testimony, but this is barely even treated as a victory, as the father pulls Diplomatic Immunity and flees back to Afghanistan.
While the original Law & Order certainly wasn't lacking in complete monsters, perhaps the most striking one was the character of Mark Bruner from the episode "Bodies"; a cab driver who, over a few years, brutally raped and killed over a dozen teenage girls and kept their bodies in a secure location where he would go to admire them as he left them out to rot. But what makes him more monstrous than that is his amusement at the suffering of the hundreds of mothers of the missing girls who he may have killed, and his utter refusal to disclose the location of his victims so that they may be identified and their parents given closure — he wanted them to suffer not knowing, and he wanted Jack to suffer knowing that he couldn't move him to tell and couldn't give the parents the closure they so needed.
Let's not forget Jacob Lowenstein, from the 1st season episode "Indifference". Using his job as a psychotherapist as a cover to sell cocaine, the man would routinely beat his wife on a daily basis, then watched as she got high on his product and turned her anger towards their children. Beating her six-year old daughter and burning their young son's hands was the only the tip of the iceberg for this woman. Their father did nothing, coming home one night and ignoring the fact that his daughter was unconscious on the floor, with her head sitting in a pool of her own blood. And when she finally succumbed to her horrendous injuries, he tried to get off scott-free by pinning all the blame on his wife. Class act. The scariest part of this little story is the fact that it was based on a real-life monster
There was once a pedophile accused of kidnapping and killing a girl, and the girl's mother shoots him in a Vigilante Execution after getting out of court. So far standard, huh? The catch, however? The man wasn't the real complete monster...it was the mother. She and her lover had hired the guy to kidnap the girl, purely to spite her ex-husband. So the woman wasn't a grieving mother, but a Complete Monster who was silencing the person who would be able to blow her cover.
The Russian mob boss in the two-parter "Refuge". He ordered an innocent man murdered and dismembered because he had a relative who wouldn't go along with a money laundering scheme. When he finds out that the key eyewitness for the prosecution is a six-year-old boy, he sends assassins to kill him. They murder his mother and an A.D.A. The boy lives, but only because they didn't cut deep enough into his throat. In the second part, he orders the bombing of the precinct where the police protagonists work, just for giggles. He makes most of The Mafia seen on the show look like pikers.
The defendant in "Hubris" was a Domestic Abuser who murdered his girlfriend some years back, but was never charged because he made her body disappear. Years later, his current girlfriend finds out what he did (because he gave her a brooch he took off the body as a gift). What does he do? He kills her. And the old couple who were employing her. And her six-year-old daughter. Then he gets away with it at the trial by seducing a coworker into giving him an alibi, and seducing the jury forewoman into voting to acquit. A particularly well-deserved Karmic Death.
Think Children Are Innocent? Think again...the episode "Killerz" brings the viewers Creepy Child and Enfant Terrible Jenny, who killed an 8 year old boy simply because she Does Not Like Men and her Freudian Excuse (her father in jail and watching her mother sleeping with several men in front of her) is not enough to balance out her depravity. Not enough for you? Well then, during her interview with the psychiatrist, she admitted to poisoning her neighbor's cat for absolute no reason and with no remorse at all. Said psychiatrist even said that Jenny's an extreme sociopath and a lost cause. But the worst part is that she got away with it, with the judge agreeing that institutionalizing her is too extreme at her age and believing that Jenny can be treated. The Downer Ending of it all is that the scene ends with Jenny staring and smiling at a frightened little boy, imply that she will strike again...
"Deadlock": Leon Vorgitch was given a death sentence for massacring a restaurant and killing five people. But the law changes, so he gets to live. He uses this to kill two guards and escape from prison. The detectives hunting for him results in even more deaths, including a classroom of children. When Detective Green asks Vorgitch why he killed the kids, he laughs and says "Why not?" He also treats the justice system as a joke; his plea at arraignment was "kiss my ass", he said he would only plead guilty if he could get a cool new television, and he bragged to Jack and Connie that he would escape again and kill both of them. All the while laughing, since he knew the worst thing that the justice system could do to him was put him in jail. All this makes it particularly satisfying when the father of one of the dead kids gives him that death sentence anyway. The man freely pleads guilty, but only after discovering his attorney was manipulating him for headlines, which he should have figured from the start since she helped orchestrate Vorgitch's murder.
Every bad guy in CI, although special mention should go to the guy from the episode based on the Jon Benet Ramsey thing. He was a rich news reporter who kidnapped the Jon Benet Expy to get a ransom from her mom, killed her for fear that she might identify him by smashing her head into a washing machine door, and then making his mentally stunted son think he did it.
The Good Wife had a rare non-murderous example of a Complete Monster in TV talk show host Duke Roscoe. A Glenn Beck-esque political shock jock, he accused a woman whose child had been kidnapped of murdering her, hounded her until she committed suicide, then mocked her grieving husband to his face while continuing to insist that the dead woman was a murderer. When the network was sued for libel, he threatened to quit if they settled, and went on the attack against the opposing attorneys. And then CONTINUED to attempt to defame them after the child he accused the woman of murdering was found alive, kidnapped by strangers. This story was Ripped from the Headlines based on an incident with Nancy Grace.
The worst the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation team faced were probably Mandy and Cameron Klinefeld from the episode "Assume Nothing". They're a married couple of serial killers whose M.O. is abducting other couples and making the husbands kill their own wives. How do they accomplish this? By threatening to torture and rape the wives in front of the husbands, putting them in a position where a Mercy Kill seems the only way out. And then they kill the husbands too. Their motives are only hinted at, but it seems to be what they get off on.
The "Fannysmackin" gang. A group of about ten teenagers in Halloween masks who go around viciously beating the shit out of anyone who's wearing a fanny pack (who are usually tourists), killing one man. When Gregg tries to stop them, one of them takes off, running at him with a rock, intending to fling it through his window. What really settles this is the fact that they said they did all of this just out of boredom.
The Collins family in the episode "Blood Drops". The father sexually abused his daughter for years, eventually fathering a daughter with her. Then, when he started molesting her daughter, she and her boyfriend have him killed, along with her mother and brothers, for allowing it to go on.
What about Nate Haskell? Creepy bastard, absolutely obsessed with Ray Langston, killed sixteen people during his time as the Dick and Jane Killer (and was grooming a replacement), and didn't really have an ounce of remorse about it. His attempts to pass it off as being due to genetics or upbringing fall flat due to Ray having the same genes and a similar family life. He was an evil son of a bitch, plain and simple. More than one viewer is probably glad that the bastard's dead now.
Most of the seasonal Big Bads have been this. Paul Millander had a valid Freudian Excuse and Natalie Davis was pitiable in her craziness, but on the other hand, you have people like Haskell above, Frank McCarty (a Corrupt Cop who raped and murdered his own daughter, pinned it on an innocent man, then had his surrogate son shoot that innocent man in a Vigilante Execution), Lou Gedda (a Mafia Don fond of hits, Cold-Blooded Torture, and chopping off people's genitals), Charlie Dimasa (a Mad Doctor who once surgically implanted a piece of radioactive material in a person's brain, specifically the section that controls morality and inhibitions, then dropped the guy off at his best friend's house knowing that the last thing he'd do before the radiation killed him was slaughter his friend's family with his mind having no way of stopping what his body was doing; a realistic take on Nekron's plan), Laura Gabriel (who sells military-grade weapons to the mob, drug dealers, and whoever bids the highest, not caring about who gets hurt in the slightest, then frames her husband for all of this and Catherine for her husband's murder), and Undersheriff McKeen (who killed Warrick).
Howard Epps from Bones. We don't know exactly how many women he murdered, but we know of 6. Add to that the fact that he manipulated Bones and her True Companions into stopping his execution, and then escaped prison by starting a fire and killing a fire-fighter, dressing in the man's uniform, and walking out, only to continue his twisted little mind games with Bones. He then shows up in her apartment, tries to kill her, and jumps from the balcony, killing himself by letting go of Booth's hand.
Another notable example is the Gravedigger, who has this status simply due to the way he (or she, as it would turn out) dispatches victims: burying them alive.
There's also the cannibalistic serial killer Gormogon, who manages to be a Complete Monster even though he barely appears onscreen.
Wayne Callison of Shark probably qualifies, what with the whole torturing women to death, hiding their bodies underneath his younger brother's (whom he goaded into raping a girl at the tender age of 15) deck. He then threatens Stark's daughter during questioning just to enrage the guyto the point of attacking him, then tries to get him thrown off the case for it. When that doesn't work, he drives his one escaped victim to suicide and uses a loophole from that to become a temporary Karma Houdini. And that was just in his first episode.
Two episodes of Without A Trace had Emil Dornvald, a mercenary working for an African dictator. The missing person of the week is in love with a rebel opposing said dictator and knew where he and his friends were holed up. So Dornvald cold-bloodedly murders the pregnant teenager she's been mentoring and is very fond of, sends her a picture on the girl's phone, and offers to stop killing her loved ones if she just tells him where the men are.
Another episode had a conman preying on families who had adopted children from Africa; he'd claim to be the kid's birth father and guilt the parents into surrendering the kids to him, whereupon he'd take them and sell them on the black market. He also manipulated a Sudanese war orphan into helping him by claiming that he was only stealing the children to get them back to their birth parents, the young man having lost his own mother to militants. When the orphan finds out he's been had, he brutally stabs the guy to death and the FBI quite understandably decide to look the other way.
From Jonathan Creek: Alan Kallarnak. Granted, the man had a motive: as a fundamentalist Christian, he was furious that his ex-wife had an abortion. But what he does afterwards leads another character to claim that his "soul rightfully belongs in Hell". After discovering that his ex-wife had a child out of wedlock in her teenage years (one that she's befriended, but neglected to tell of his maternity), he approaches the now-grown son and convinces him to murder his own mother (without informing him that she is his mother; the son was actually in love with her and - being a bit mentally disturbed - couldn't understand why she didn't reciprocate). The son dutifully carries out the murder, and the woman dies reaching out for him. The scene in which she breaks down in front of her ex-husband, sobbing about how her own son wants to kill her, contains a moment in which the killer smiles to himself as he comes up with his plan, cementing his position as a Complete Monster. Upon learning this, neither Jonathan nor Carla are particularly inclined to turn his murderers over to the police once they determine who they are.
Jordan Chase and his fellow conspirators from season 5 of Dexter might just be the worst monsters in the whole show thus far. On Jordan's direction, the other men capture women to torture and rape for months before disposing of them in barrels. All the while, Jordan looks on, occasionally holding his watch to the women's ears and whispering, "Tick tick tick. That's the sound of your life running out." Watching the video footage they took of what they did to the women was enough to make Debra root for the people who were tracking them down and killing them (despite it being her job to catch the killers). Dexter himself admits that they sicken him. The tapes themselves, which the viewers listen to, are pure Nightmare Fuel. When Dexter and Lumen (the last victim who managed to get away) finally have Jordan at their mercy, he taunts Lumen about what he did to her, mocking her for being so "pathetic" and "helpless". When Lumen plunges her dagger into Jordan's chest, the only thing unsatisfactory about it all is how quick his death was. Unlike the Ice Truck Killer, Miguel and Trinity, none of these bastards are presented with a Freudian Excuse, making their actions all the more horrific.
George King, aka the Skinner, is another major villain whose actions are horrific and who has no known Freudian Excuse to balance out his crimes. In pursuit of a drug dealer who owes him money, the Skinner finds anyone who might have information about said drug dealer's whereabouts and questions them while cutting off their skin. One of his victims was an innocent boywho was confirmed to have died from the skinning process. When Dexter confronts the Skinner, he confirms that, despite the reasons the Skinner makes up for performing his grisly crimes (which are by no means a justification anyway), his only real reason is simply because he likes it.
Many of Dexter's minor victims fall into this category too. In fact, the major villains tend to come off as more sympathetic than most of the minor ones (seen with both Arthur Mitchell from Season 4 and The Ice Truck Killer of Season 1, who are still monsters). Chase and King are the crowning exceptions.
Special mention must go to two men who forced a young boy to try to suicide bomb a high school. Their reason? A petty vendetta over something the boy's mother did 18 years ago.
Ari. After breaking into NCIS, shooting and wounding Gerald and Gibbs in the process, he later kills Kate and tries to kill Abby and Jenny because Gibbs reminds him of his dad. He casually manipulates innocents (giving a doll with a guided missile tracking signal inside it to a little girl)/sacrifices his mooks (who, given their affiliations, aren't terribly sympathetic either) just so he can get close enough to the team to hurt them directly. It is worth noting that (as foreshadowed when Ducky wonders what could create such a person) Ari does have a fairly elaborate Freudian Excuse, if being manipulated and groomed specifically to become a mole by his father from birth even falls under that category. There have been more than a few worse criminals on the show, but Ari is mainly set apart in how he got to the NCIS team itself.
Kyle Boone from the episode "Mind Games"; he kidnaps and tortures women (and cuts off their tongues)! Think that's bad enough? He also snaps pictures of their suffering and keeps them in a journal (though he said he doesn’t need that; they will always be in his memories). His first victim was his own mother!
NCIS Los Angeles has recently gained one as well in Season 3 in the form of "the Chameleon." To elaborate, this is the guy who often runs several cartels from behind the scenes, and the closest thing to an MO that he has is that he acts as the driver. He gained a wound on his mouth via G. Callen, who at the time believed him to merely be the driver. He then proceeds to kill a lot of people by incinerating them alive inside their cars, often covering himself by using various dialects. Afterwards, he plays a dangerous game of "hide and seek" where he forces people to act as him to lure them to dead ends, which often results in their deaths in the process. Oh, and he also kidnapped and killed a Russian police officer so he could pose as him and infiltrate the NCIS headquarters to "aid" them in finding him. His final appearance was his most monstrous depiction: He arranged to have Agent Roarke join up with a family of illegal Arms Dealers (and arranged for a fake exchange with some dealers he hired without informing them of the packages) with the intention of setting him up to be caught and for NCIS to get involved. Turns out, the family did fall for the trick against his expectations, so he sent anonymous tips to both the dealers and the NCIS agents revealing that he was an agent, and that his cover was compromised, respectively. After the NCIS team killed most of the family at the area (and arresting the accountant) to rescue him, he then sniped Roarke across the jaw, forcing him into ER before he died from a heart attack, and he kills the Red Herring sniper member of the family in order to leave a message to Callen, and he later kills Agent Hunter via Car Bomb in front of NCIS before he lets himself get arrested. He also arranged for Hunter to leak a video to NCIS via password about what he wants, and even the password while also making it seem as though he didn't want her to get it in order to lure Callen's team into a death trap while Callen kept watch over him (which they only survived after Callen deduced his plan), and he forces them into a Sadistic Choice to release him in exchange for an American agent who was caught in Iran and had valuable information of security weaknesses in the United States, and killing his allies at some point earlier (and it is also strongly implied near the end that the Iranians were going to be informed by the Chameleon anyways about the security weaknesses even if the prisoner exchange went off without a hitch). Even when he died, he ended up having Cullen's life potentially stigmatized anyways via a breaking news report when Cullen decided midway through the prisoner exchange that he simply cannot let the Chameleon live after the atrocities he committed, even if it meant disobeying his superiors and getting himself arrested by the LAPD.
In Deadwood, Francis Wolcott and George Hearst were the Complete Monsters who squared off with Magnificent Bastard Al Swearengen. Wolcott was a sexual sadist who enjoyed murdering prostitutes and Hearst, well, let's just say that his lack of ethics and decency made Swearengen look like a moral paragon. The series ends with Hearst winning the conflict big time, riding out of town with everything he wanted and with Swearengen forced to go beyond the Moral Event Horizon by killing an innocent prostitute to save Trixie from Hearst's retribution. Something of a Foregone Conclusion, since the character is based on a successful businessman and US Senator from US history.
And then there's Cy Tolliver, Al's rival pimp and saloon operator, who apparently exists just to make him look not that bad by comparison. This is a man who richly deserved to get gut-stabbed at a wedding — by the minister. (Particularly considering that, before the guy found Jesus, he'd been a colleague of Cy's who'd gotten dumped in the woods to die of smallpox.) The only mildly redeeming thing he ever did was to keep the woman he sort of had feelings for (a suicidal prostitute he purchased from her father when she was about fourteen) from killing herself...after he'd forced her to shoot a young con artist he'd beaten nearly to death.
Several villains in The Shield, especially the minor ones who only last one or two episodes. The doctor who bought a seven-year old girl, kept her in a cage, and repeatedly raped her definitely fits this trope, as does the old sadist who sexually abused his foster daughters and force-fed Drano to the youngest one. But several villains are so despicable that they earn a "special" place in the viewers' hearts:
Armadillo Quintero, easily the most sickening villain on the show. A young Mexican drug lord, Armadillo is a calm and easy-going guy who likes to stay at home with a book. And a child to rape. After crossing the border, he united two rival Latino gangs under his own command by "necklacking" their leaders with car tires, then drenching them in petrol and burning them alive. But his Moral Event Horizon comes after this — a man he murdered had a cute twelve-year old sister who refused to keep quiet like her family told her. Instead, the little girl went by herself to the police and testified against Armadillo. Later, the cops took in Armadillo for questioning, and when he sat alone in the cell for six hours, he found the girl's lost comb and began laughing eerily to himself. He is released for lack of proof, and the same night, the little girl is nowhere to be found. When she finally comes limping home in a daze, Armadillo has brutally raped her and tattooed his gang sign — a dove — onto her face.
Antwon Mitchell from the fourth season takes the cake as the prime villain on the show, because he is a Magnificent Bastard as well as a Large Ham. But what cemented him on this page, besides replacing crack cocaine with heroin on the streets, was his murder of a thirteen-year old Woobie. After forcing the girl's mother to overdose on heroin, his thugs capture her and hold her in front of two cops. After taunting the weeping girl, Antwon takes their weapons — to incriminate the cops and bind them to him forever — and empties his whole magazine into her head.
Sean, the serial killer from Season 1, is definitely one. Aside from raping and murdering a twelve year old, he has over twenty further bodies to his credit. He thinks of himself as smarter than the police and thinks he is special. Then Dutch completely rips him apart with one glorious line: "If you're so special, how come a lowly civil servant like me just caught you?"
Vic himself is kept out of this territory for much of the series because he mainly goes after other Complete Monsters such as the above mentioned characters, though he has plenty of Kick the Dog moments to his credit, such as his murder of Terry Crowley, which was the crossing of the Moral Event Horizon for a lot of fans. But his behavior near the end of the series definitely qualifies, particularly when he becomes an informant in the last season and lets Ronnie take the full heat for his crimes, showing him for what he truly is: a violent and unrepentant bully who only looks out for himself. His Humiliation Conga in the final episode is very, very much deserved.
The Closer has at least one per season, but Philip Stroh is the most striking. A truly Amoral Attorney who defends sex offenders, Stroh also happens to be a serial rapist who used one of his clients as a stalking horse. He is notably one of the few criminals that Major Crimes hasn't nailed, managing to beat Brenda at her own game. For Brenda, he's That One Case.
Roger Stimple, a child molester who loves to rape and kill prepubescent black girls. You feel NO sympathy when Sgt. Gabriel beats the everlasting shit out of him.
The EE Kids from the season 4 episode "Time Bomb". 3 teenage Nietzsche WannabeOmnicidal Maniacs who hoped to one-up the Columbine kids and set the record for the biggest mass murder in history. And the scary thing is, if one of them hadn't blown himself up making a pipe bomb and gotten Major Crimes involved, they may have pulled it off.
Anubis from Stargate SG-1. He used to be a System Lord before he was banished by the other Goa'uld, who considered his actions unspeakableeven by their evil standards. (Bear in mind that this is a race of megalomaniacal Puppeteer Parasites who think nothing of torturing their dethroned rivals to death, then bringing them back to life and doing it again. And again. And again.) And his ultimate plan before he finally got taken out was to wipe out all life in the galaxy - all of it, mind you - so he could use the Ancient knowledge he retained to entirely recreate a galaxy's worth of races that would worship him as God.
Actually, most Goa'uld probably qualify, although Anubis was a particularly extreme example. Tanith, for example, is a very young and pretty minor Goa'uld who still manages to betray and murder an idealistic woman who thought she had reformed; misleads the Tok'ra into giving him a willing host, whom he promptly submerges; and then, to top it all off, wipes a civilization off the face of their planet. All with a calm voice and a pleasant smile.
There are also human complete monsters as well. A notable example of such a character was Dr. Keffler in the episode Resurrection where they go investigate a base that was under attack from an unstable Goa'uld hybrid, Anna. Anna was the man's daughter (long-story short, he cloned the original Goa'uld host/Goa'uld, Sekhmet, and she was the byproduct), and it is heavily implied that he submitted her through Cold-BloodedTorture for no other reason than to get her Goa'uld personality to unleash itself. His death at the hands of the hybrid was very much deserved. She even says that he is far more evil than the Goa'uld personality she has.
Horrifically, Repli-Carter might count as the extremely rare cross between one of these and a magnificent bastard...she betrays both Fifth and Carter in very short order, manipulating Carter into feeling sympathetic because Carter believes Fifth was cruel to Repli-Carter. Turns out, she was merely using Carter's torture experience as grounds to manipulate her. Then, she killed Fifth, not out of vengeance or emotion, but to fuel her ambition to consume the galaxy. When real Carter showed signs of sympathy, Repli-Carter coldly and calmly, with a strangely static and uncaring version of the mannerism's real Carter would use when comforting someone, told her that Fifth wasn't worth any empathy because he was weak. She then set about wiping out the Milky Way, with her army devouring God knows how many people, ships, and planets. Eventually, she captured and attempted to torture one of Carter's best friends. Despite claiming that the real Carter's emotions and memories weren't meaningless to her, and having 'given her word' that she wouldn't invade earth or kill Daniel Jackson, she promptly did both. So, in short: in the few months she existed she killed her fellow replicator and creator, Fifth; psychologically manipulated and tortured her human progenitor, Samantha Carter; committed galactic genocide; captured and killed one of her progenitor's very best friends and attempted to conquer their home planet; and all this in the image of a beloved galactic heroine, with just a little more ambition and a little less sentiment.
"You have untapped greatness inside you, Sam. But you're limited by your own fears. You play by the rules, you do as you're told and you deny yourself your own desires."
Doesn't help that Amanda played such an amazing psychopath.
The 456 from Torchwood: Children of Earth, while being Starfish Aliens, are very definitely examples of this trope. After taking control of all the world's children in order to communicate, it turns out that they use human children in some nasty symbiotic way in order to get high and are bargaining to take 10% of the world's children to use as drugs or else they Kill All Humans. This is a protection racket, and they would almost certainly have been back for more later. One child is seen hooked up to one of them and it's shown that he's been a human reefer for over 40 years. It's really twisted and nasty.
Also, in Children of Earth, Prime Minister Green calmly allows 10% of the world's children to be sold as NARCOTICS, orders the man who's been most loyal to him to give up his own children, just to make the cover story he's created realistic - which leads Frobisher to shoot his family and himself to spare them the horror. And after all the horror and pain, Green's first thought is "How do I blame the Americans for this?". The knowledge that he's certainly going to be put in prison, if not "Disappeared" by UNIT or executed for treason, is highly comforting. Granted, there's a whole Punch Clock Villain ensemble that's going to avoid the punishment meted out to the more visible Green.
Oswald Danes from Torchwood: Miracle Day, a convicted child rapist and killer whose defense in court was "she should have run faster." After surviving his execution due to becoming immortal (along with everyone else on Earth), he starts playing the media for forgiveness and seems well on his way to becoming a Dark Messiah.
On top of that, throughout the season, it's implied that he does have some guilt over what he did and wants to die — then the finale shows that these Death Seeker qualities actually make him more of a monster, not less. Why? Because he seems to believe that when he dies, he'll be able to torture his previous victim forever in Hell — in fact, his last words are to yell out that he's coming for her and that she should start running.
And who could forget the cannibal villagers from Countrycide who would kidnap passersby and butcherthem.
Psych: While a comedy/drama, it has a few notable monsters:
Mr. Yang - taunted Shawn over the course of a day in his first introduction, culminating in the kidnapping of his mother and strapping her to a bomb while threatening to blow her up if Shawn didn't have a heart to heart chat with the psycho.
Yin - created elaborate games, again for the purpose of taunting/tormenting Shawn to the extent of kidnapping Shawn's then girlfriend Abigail as well as Shawn's ongoing love interest, Juliet, and forcing him to choose which would survive. He also murdered a recurring character and acquaintance of Shawn's while Shawn and Gus watched helplessly. He later kidnapped both Shawn and Gus and prepared to murder Gus with a poison injection while explaining to Shawn that he had something special planned for "him".
Rollins - along with his partner Garth Longmore, aka McQuarry, shot and kidnapped Shawn, locked him in a car trunk, threatened him repeatedly with death through the night, and took him away in a truck with intents of disposing him.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Angelus is one of these, particularly so when contrasted with every other vampire in bothseries. He's explicitly referenced numerous times as THE worst vampire ever. By way of examples, Spike and Drusilla had a genuinely loving relationship, Spike looked up to Angel as a friend and mentor, Darla was devoted to the Master and loved Angel (even though it's implied she knew he was incapable of loving her back), Wishverse Willow and Xander seemed to truly care for one another (notice how overjoyed evil Willow is when she finds Xander alive after seeing evil Xander killed), and the Master was rather fond of Darla (and, in the Wishverse, Xander and Willow) and mourned her death. In contrast, Angelus was utterly devoid of all human feeling (to the point that a demon sent to burn humanity from the Earth was incapable of harming him) and considered Mind Rape to be an art form. One can also see a strongly abusive streak to his relationships with Darla and Drusilla, who in turn practically worship him for such cruelties inflicted on them as much as anyone else. In his spinoff, he is also shown mercilessly manipulating Spike in a flashback.
It puts things into perspective when the Master (an ancient and demonic vampire head of an order which worships Eldritch Abominations and seeks to bring about the end of the world) refers to Angelus as "the most vicious animal I have ever known".
Similarly, the Judge was a demon who sought to kill anyone with a shred of humanity. Spike and Drusilla were nearly killed because of their love for one another and a side character was killed because he had a love for knowledge. Angelus, on the other hand, was deemed "clean of humanity". He had no redeeming values.
Besides countless tortures, rapes, and murders for his own amusement, two incidents truly stick out...posing as a priest, he made an innocent, chaste girl his 'project,' where he slowly tempted her to evil, then brutally murdered her family. He hunted her down to a convent and slaughtered everyone in the day she was to take her vows before turning the now insane girl into a vampire to preserve his masterpiece. Second incident...Jenny Calendar. After brutally murdering her, he put her corpse in her love interest's bed...before sending him love notes, champagne, leaving flower petals strewn along to make it look like it'd be a romantic encounter...right until he found the body.
Perhaps more than physical torture, though, Angelus enjoys psychologically tormenting people. In season 2 of Buffy, he stalks Buffy, never hurting her physically, but making her terrified for her own life and that of her mother and family. He turned Buffy's classmates and friends just so they could deliver a message when she came to stake them, so she would be absolutely sure that he was the one who killed them. He would also draw pictures of Buffy, and also Willow and her mom, while they were sleeping, and leaving them there to be found when the person woke up. The fact that he was a really good artist just made it a thousand times worse. Angelus also constantly taunted her about their former relationship and exactly what his emergence had entailed. And most of all, Angelus mocked her when she couldn't kill him, because he had Angel's face.
Warren Mears, who, when introduced in season 5, seems to be just a pathetic loser-geek stereotype, but in season six, he slowly slides from that into a super-villain wannabe, into an "accidental" murderer who finds out that he likes killing women because it's the only time he feels like he has any power over them. His getting flayed alive by Dark Willow is cathartic as well as embarrassingly unsubtle.
He came back in (comic book) Season 8, now skinless but alive thanks to Amy. And he's become even WORSE, calmly nuking a castle full of hundreds of Slayers, seemingly for kicks.
Considering he only appeared in a single episode, the vampire Zachary Kralik did a remarkably good job in appearing as one of these. At this point in the show, vampires in general were seen as being a fairly low-level threat, but Kralik managed, partially through a quasi-Diabolus ex Machina and partially through his own utter hideousness, to be thoroughly terrifying and completely monstrous. It's impressive that even when given a Start of Darkness story involving the abuse he suffered from his mother, the viewer still cannot like him in the slightest.
Then there's Adam. As if the fact that he's assembled from various robotic and demon parts combined with his first act of stabbing his creator in the back isn't a big enough clue that he's a bad guy, we are hit over the head with a clear message by what he does next.
Adam: What am I?
Boy You're a monster.
Adam: I thought so. What are you?
Boy: Me? I'm a boy.
Adam: A boy? How do you work?
Boy: I don't know. I just do. [Referring to his arm which has a hidden spear] What's that for?
Adam:[Evil grin]
We are later told on the news that the boy was found stabbed and mutilated.
Season 7's Caleb, whom the insurmountably wicked First Evil considered his true disciple and who enjoyed asking the First to take the forms of the innocent women he killed, so he could do it all over again. And snapping several women's necks and ripping out Xander's eye.
Caleb - unlike most of the other example mentioned here, he's completely human, presumably with a soul. It's suggested that he was completely evil even before he fell under the influence of the First and used to use the implicit trust people had in him as a priest to torture and kill women. Oh, and there was never any Freudian Excuse in sight.
Three words about Caleb: scarier than übervamps.
The First itself certainly qualifies, and not simply due to its name. It tortures people psychologically, driving them to either suicide, murder, or outright villainy; it panders to Caleb's misogynistic urges; it even gloats about how irredeemably evil it is. Even the Senior Partners at Wolfram and Hart were so worried about it, they sent Angel with a medallion that could stop its plans (granted, this was part of a GREATER plan by the Partners to make Angel their servant, but still...)
Andrew Wells' brother Tucker probably counts. Although he was a one-off villain, he made a bad name for himself by training a pack of hellhounds to kill everyone at the 1999 Prom JUST BECAUSE a girl he liked wouldn't go out with him. In an interesting case of Real Life Writes the Plot, Tucker would have been the leader of the Nerd Trio in Season Six (with Warren and Jonathan as underlings) if his actor had been available. Odds are that HE would have been the one who did the evil deeds, while Warren may have become an Atoner (similar to Andrew). In other words, Warren only turned into a Complete Monster because Tucker decided to become a Karma Houdini wasn't available.
Apart from Angelus, Angel also features an episode in which Angel and his gang tries to exorcise a demon from a young boy that had been causing the child to start fires and attempt to murder his own sister...the twist comes when after being ejected from the boy, the demon reveals that it was trapped inside the child's body and the boy was so twisted, cruel, and malevolent that the otherworldly monster was actually afraid of him. Angel barely manages to get to the boy's home to stop him from succeeding in burning his sister alive.
Another, later episode of Angel had Charles Gunn heading back to his old hangout to meet up with his old gang of vampire hunters, who have since become indiscriminate demon-slaughterers, dominated by a new guy. This new guy is a racist killer who, when it is revealed that he did something really bad to a girl he knew, deflects accusations by accusing Gunn of letting his own sister die due to incestuous urges, just to get the gang back on his side. The guy gets bitten in half at the end but we don't get to watch him scream..
If it's possible for this trope to apply to not just a single character but an institution, it definitely applies for the first four seasons to that just plain awfullaw firm Wolfram & Hart. Leaving aside the number of murderers, rapists, and other scum who became Karma Houdinis because of the company, we learn in the season 2 episode Dead End that it keeps people alive in water tanks so it can remove their limbs to replace limbs their employees lose, which is how Lindsey gets a new hand. At least one of these prisoners must be in great anguish, judging from the fact that he begs Lindsey to kill him.
The truly horrifying thing about Wolfram & Hart is that the majority of its employees are completely human, with not a shred of demon in them. No corruption, no possession, no infestation, no nothing. They are just people who have decided that nothing is more important than power and will do anything to achieve it, fully aware of the despicable acts they commit and the motives of the powers they serve and not caring in the slightest.
Another example is Darin McNamara, the main bad guy in "The Ring". After tricking Angel at the start about his brother Jack being kidnapped by demons (he and his brother were doing the kidnapping), he has Angel captured and forced into participating in an underground fighting ring, where demons are forced to kill each other for the humans' entertainment - they can't escape, because the wristbands they wear disintegrate them if they cross the red line separating them from their captors. When Angel attempts to hold Jack hostage, Darin simply shoots him in cold blood.
Among Angel's villains of the week, it's hard to top Billy Blim for clearly falling into this category. While appearing to be a normal young man, he was actually a demon filled with an extreme power of misogyny and had the power to turn any man he touched or who came in contact with his bodily fluids into someone extremely savage and brutal toward anyone female. And he had no real reason to be doing this; rather, he appeared to do it only for his own sheer amusement. The fact that it was actually the normally very cold and amoral Lilah who took him out says volumes as to how horrible he was.
It gets worse than that. According to Word of God, they personally believe that Billy was conceived when a demon woman - a good demon woman - was raped by an evil human man. This is just as screwed up as it sounds - Billy was doomed to be a fucked-up man since he came into existence. This only justifies his power, however, and not why he uses it, which definitely makes him fulfill the role of a Complete Monster.
Bounty Hunter Jubal Early of the Firefly episode "Objects in Space" started off as a Boba Fett-style badass, but lost all our sympathy about the time that he tied up and threatened to rape Kaylee. And then River reveals to us during her Hannibal Lecture to him that he once tortured a neighbor's dog to death, revealing him to be a Psycho for Hire sadist who lives for power, control, and pain.
Adelai Niska definitely qualifies as well. This is a guy who tortures his wife's nephew to gain the fear and respect of prospective mercenaries he is hiring. And if you cross him, he gets even worse — he'll torture you to death, and then, through the miracle of modern technology, bring you back to life just so he can pick up where he left off with you.
Blue Hands. "You spoke to them?" *click* "This one is still alive." *click*
The MovieSerenity has a very notable subversion: The Operative commits truly monstrous acts, fully acknowledges how monstrous they are, and mourns their consequences, having only committed them because he thought they were in the interest of the greater good. He even admits that a monster like him has no place in the perfect world he is working to create—this very knowledge prevents him from being a true monster, and once he realizes he was very wrong, he severs his ties with the Alliance and disappears into oblivion.
Dollhouse has several villains almost approaching this, but two stand out in particular. First is Hearn, who repeatedly rapes Sierra while she's in a childlike state in which she's been conditioned to trust him. He is then sent to kill Paul Ballard's neighbor, Mellie, which he appears to enjoy. He gets his in the end. Then there's Nolan Kinnard, who, when his various Dollhouse-assisted attempts at seducing Priya Tsetsang fail, has her kidnapped, drugged to appear schizophrenic, and committed to a mental hospital. He then volunteers her to the Dollhouse as an active and books her for repeated engagements in which she is in love with him. A throwaway shot of his drawer of Polaroids of Sierra is a Crowning Moment of Squick, no mean feat in a series whose entire premise is designed to make you squirm.
Oz has many, the worst being Vernon Schillinger (the leader of the Nazi gang and a sadistic rapist, who makes his son kill an 8 year old), Simon Adebisi (a drug dealer and rapist, he injected a man with AIDS, decapitated an unarmed policeman, and killed a man by feeding him ground glass for a month), and Malcolm Coyle (a gang member who raped a dying woman and stabbed her baby "for fun"). Spoilered for the weak-stomached.
TIMMY KIRK. He is a two-faced and overly zealous Manipulative Bastard, whose crime was, arguably, far FAR more evil than anything that could be dreamed of by Schillinger. He leaves an infant to die inside a rat infested dumpster while its mother pleaded for mercy.
Also, the Governor, as, in direct and indirect ways, he made 90% of the plots happen just by making prison life so insufferable for every inmate.
Knox from Heroes was getting there. Victimized a bank full of people just so he can get revenge on one person, kills a small child in an episode that takes place in the future and feels no remorse, and tried to force Hiro into killing his best friend Ando simply because Ando has no powers and is presumably useless. He just gets worse as time goes on, aiding Arthur Petrelli in his nonsensical murder of Adam Monroe and later killing Scott, a promising new character played by Chad Faust. No surprise here, knowing that actor Jamie Hector played the equally ruthless and suave Marlo Stanfield on The Wire.
If Knox was 'getting there', then Arthur Petrelli went all the way and came back with the T-shirt. He makes his introduction to the series as a Smug Snake, only getting worse as time went on, first by pointlessly and cruelly offing the one of the most sympathetic villains of the show, Adam Monroe, and goes on to commit some of the most heinous acts seen yet in Heroes, including mind-wiping Hiro into thinking he is ten years old, trying to kill his own sons, and repeatedly mind-wiping his wife Angela.
What about Bob Bishop? He tortured his own daughter starting from when she was 8 years old.
Danko in Season Three. He intentionally allows Tracy to escape her cell and kills an analyst in order to bolster support for his evolved human hunting operation. He murders Daphne by having her removed from the medical facility, causing her gunshot wound to become septic. Oh, and he teamed up with Sylar.
Marlo Stanfield of The Wire definitely qualifies. He has no conscience, no sense of social responsibility, and no respect for human life; he doesn't even have a sense of humor. Absolutely the only thing that matters to him is that his name is respected and feared on the streets, and he will kill anyone who interferes with that or his drug business in any way. Although the realism of The Wire makes categorizing morality blurry (almost every character has at least one or two Pet the Dog moments), there are a few others who probably qualify, like Stringer Bell and The Greek.
Arnold Rothstein of Boardwalk Empire is much more polite and softspoken than most other examples here, but make no mistake. Beneath that affability hides a mind made to calculate just how much each and every death that he causes can be made towards his own benefit. He even once caused a man to choke to death on a cue ball, noting that it was for nothing more than his own amusement.
Parodied on an episode of Reno 911!: the cops appear to be overreacting (as usual) to their prisoner, a normal-looking young boy in a little-league uniform. They leave Lt. Dangle to watch the boy, whom he gently admonishes and sends away. The cops return and yell at Dangle for letting the kid who raped his little sister to death escape.
Some of the villains from the BBC's Spooks are just a big void of warm and fuzzy feelings. Interestingly, the two very worst monsters in the series are complete opposites; one is the white supremacist who murders one of the main cast by shoving her head into a deep fat frier and the other is the Muslim cleric who turns ten year old boys into suicide bombers. Next to these two, a lot of the other villains in the series can come across as kind of cartoonish.
Madan Senki Ryukendo has Baron Bloody, a demonic robot scientist. In his first appearance, he sets up the death of Noble Demon Jack Moon to use his body in his own experiments. Later, it is revealed that he is responsible for the death of the Sixth Ranger's parents...who tried to stop him from blowing up Europe. When confronted by said Sixth Ranger, he proudly takes responsibility and casually refers his parents as 'foolish couple'. Where the other villains still have some sense of humor in their plans, Bloody's plans are downright vicious. Luckily, he's no Karma Houdini, since his death involves screaming in fear, having an axe shoved into his mouth, and releasing a painful scream when he falls down to his death.
Garo has Barago AKA Kiba The Dark Knight, Barago is a rogue, power-hungry former Makai Knight who had chosen a child to be sacrificed to a Demonic Goddess so she could use the body to take over the human world. He also sold his services to this being in exchange for power and began to abuse his powers. There's also the part where he cut down an image of his own mother just to prove how much he was willing to give up. And finally, he is revealed to be the murderer of Kouga's father and Rei's family. It's well deserved when Messiah screws him over, seeing as how he was planning the same thing.
Desperate Housewives - By the end of season 3, Orson's mother, Gloria, has really come across as this. Seriously, here's a woman so insanely determined that her son will marry Alma, a woman he doesn't love, that she's not only completely willing to murder any other woman who gets close to him, but also quite ready to frame other, innocent people for the crimes and emotionally blackmail her vulnerable son into becoming an accomplice in the murder of a woman he loved. She continues her mad efforts to force her son back into this miserable marriage for so long, even after Alma herself has told him to give it up, that you have to wonder just who she's trying to please. And this is all before you find out that she infiltrated Bree's house and gained her trust solely for the sake of polishing her off too. And that's before you find out that, when Orson was a teenager, she murdered her husband, set it up to look like a suicide, and allowed the young Orson to blame himself for this. In the end, the viewer can only cheer when she ends up with locked-in syndrome and Orson takes the opportunity to taunt her.
In Primeval, Helen Cutter wants to wipe out the whole of humanity before it even began and along the way she'll screw with the cast's lives and minds just for the hell of it. She even shoots said husband immediately after hesaves her from a burning building (which was only on fire to begin with because of the suicide bomber she sent).
Brother Cavil. Made worse by the fact that he was introduced as an Affably Evil, Deadpan Snarker type. That was before we find out that he's the mastermind behind the human genocide, as well as a majority of the other bad things on the show. All because he was unhappy with the body he was made in. We later find out that Cavil murdered a young orphan boy just because they were becoming friends. And if you forget the genocide, using a Scarpia Ultimatum to rape his own mother after having his father tortured and mutilated probably would qualify him for this page on its own.
Some fans consider Baltar one of these, and wish he had received a better comeuppance at the end. These fans are insane. The worst of Baltar's actions have been extremely ill-advised, irresponsible, or cowardly. He hasn't gone anywhere near monstrous.
Helena Cain is one of these. She cannibalizes a refugee fleet for parts (including their FTL drives) and leaves them at the mercy of the Cylons (and we know how the Cylons deal with civilians). While doing that, she conscripts any able-bodied man in the fleet, shooting their families if they refuse to join her. Then she comes to the Galactica fleet and decides to take the fight to the Cylons, despite none of the other ships except Galactica being combat-capable. She also shot her Executive Officer in the head when he refused to order what looked like a suicide mission, right in front of the crew. And let's not forget Admiral Cain's standard procedure for interrogating female Cylon prisoners: violent rape, by the official Cylon Interrogator, as well as any crew member who feels like it.
Phelan, the ex-military mercenary turned crime lord from "Black Market" (played by Bill Duke, no less), counts too. He runs the titular market and garrotes anyone who threatens his supremacy. When Apollo investigates the death of one of Phelan's competitors, the man pays him a visit, abducting the Hooker with a Heart of Gold Apollo had been seeing regularly and taking her daughter and warning Apollo that "I hear any more talk about Fisk I'm gonna send your whore back to you piece by piece, and then I'm gonna start on the little girl." As if that's not enough, in his headquarters he keeps a bunch of children locked in a cell. When Apollo confronts him and asks about that, he gives this chilling reply:
Phelan: "Everyone has needs. Some settle for cigars and liquor. You wanted Shevon. Others are more...demanding."
Apollo demands the kid back, to which Phelan replies "Sorry, the little girl's been paid for. No refunds." Leads to a Crowning Moment of Awesome when Apollo proceeds to prove to him that Good Is Not Nice.
Phelan: "You're not gonna shoot. You're not like me. You're not gonna-"
Apollo: *BOOM*
LOST has Psycho for Hire Martin Keamy and Anthony Cooper, the con man who ruined the lives of two survivors (Sawyer, due to taking all the money of his parents and leading them to death; and his own son, John Locke, making him lose a kidney, his girlfriend, and the ability to walk).
The Start of Darkness story for the Man in Black (who doesn't count, as he has motives we're supposed to sympathize with) manages to give us another: the unnamed "mother" of MIB and Jacob. The episode starts with her murdering a woman who has just given birth and taking her newborn children, and by the end, she's fed her "kids" a bunch of lies about the outside world and the others on the Island just to keep them with her, tried to murder her own adoptive son for trying to leave the Island, and seemed to massacre a entire village that wasn't harming her and just wanted to escape.
Um, that was BEFORE Man in Black's transformation into a literal Complete Monster. Post-transformation, he was evil incarnate and manipulated people into doing his bidding by making empty promises he had no intention on keeping, turned people into his insane minions with the sickness, and has killed a LOT of people, some in order to get off the Island, some simply because he has no use for them. It's also implied that he's going to kill everyone once he leaves the Island, and his final plan is to destroy the Island so that he can drown everyone else on it, which could have possibly also destroyed the entire world. And while pre-transformation human Man in Black showed remorse over killing his mother, post-transformation monster Man in Black showed no remorse and sometimes has shown sadistic amusement at people's suffering. He managed to be FAR worse than his fake mother, who, while crazy, was protecting the Island in order to prevent the devastating consequences, and it's probably because of this job and going mad over having to do it for so long that she acted the way she did. By the end of the series, everyone teams up against Man in Black, even past villains like Ben and Widmore, and MIB's own "claimed" minions, Claire and Sayid, eventually regain their senses and turn against him as well.
Very well said, sir/madam. He was pure evil, to the point where season six didn't need a bomb/explosion in the finale (something every other season finale had) because, well, how do you top a nuke being detonating? The Man In Black, that's how.
Brainiac from Smallville has no emotions and is fond of skewering people through the head and draining the info from their brains. Despite being nearly equal to Clark in power, he prefers to perform complex manipulations to make others do his dirty work for him (including infecting Mrs. Kent with a deadly disease just to trick Clark into releasing General Zod from the Phantom Zone), putting Lana in a coma to force Clark and Kara to help him, giving Clark's secret to Lex, bodyjacking Chloe and using her as part of a plot to brainwash Doomsday, and trying on three separate occasions to Kill All Humans via deadly viruses. In the Wonderful Life episode, without Clark to stop him, Brainiac triggers a nuclear holocaust, saying the world is now perfect for Zod, Zod's consort Supergirl, and himself to rule. And that's not getting into his cannibalism of the silicon in peoples' bodies when he needs to rebuild himself, or his condescending personality, or the fact that Bizarro, Lex, and the various other villains who appear are all disgusted by him. He eventually Heel Face Turns, but since this is due to being reprogrammed and not because of a moral choice on his part, it doesn't count.
Owen, Annie's fiance from Being Human. When confronted by the ghost of the woman he killed, his reaction is "Why are you bothering me?" Until he starts screwing with her...He gets his in the end.
An example from Blake's 7 (which is not lacking in Complete Monsters) is Raiker from the very second episode. He's a sadomasochistic dictator to the prisoners and keeps a keen eye on female convicts who can pass muster to be his sex slaves (the latter of which get dumped out of the ship when they reach the prison planet...or en route, at any rate). Unsurprisingly, Blake (the protagonist) and the other prisoners rebel and succeed in taking over the ship's computer. Raiker deals with this by executing the prisoners recaptured during the revolt. Blake surrenders to stop this and Raiker responds by executing two more prisoners For the Evulz. Even his fellow crewmates are appalled by him. Raiker's comeuppance when he gets sucked out into space at the end of the episode just isn't satisfying enough.
Data's brother Lore, from Star Trek: The Next Generation, is a thoroughly unsympathetic android who kills his creator, reprograms his brother to follow his every command, and threatens to set Wesley on fire.
Lore (to Wesley): "Are you prepared for the kind of death you've earned, little man?"
Trying to immolate Wesley does not make up for all the other stuff he did. If he had succeeded, on the other hand...Oh yeah, he also tried to make the Borg (or at least a certain segment thereof) an even greater threat than they already were.
He also summoned the Crystalline Entity to his creator's colony when the other colonists petitioned Noong to deactivate him out of fear that he would turn on them. It could be argued that he acted in self-defense, but given everything else we saw of his true nature, it's obvious that he mostly did it for his own sick amusement. He tried to do the same thing to the Enterprise too.
Kivas Fajo from The Most Toys. At first, he seems to be just another guy who thinks Screw The Rules, I Have...well, something anyway. Then he talks very matter-of-factly about how he'd like to try out a particularly cruel Death Ray called a Varon-T Disruptor — illegal in The Federation because of how it slowly destroys the body from the inside out — and later does use it on his girlfriend. When your actions drive the emotionless android good guy to attempted murder, you're a Complete Monster.
Oh, and his aforementioned "girlfriend" was really more of a broken, codependent slave whom he treated like property.
His "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Data afterwards is particularly devastating. Data's response is to override his own ethical programming, because he knows he cannot desire justice and so must enact it for those who do.
Fajo: "Murder me - go ahead, it's all you have to do. Fire! If only you could...feel...RAGE over Varria's death - if only you could feel the NEED for revenge, maybe you could fire...But you're...just an android - you can't feel anything, can you? It's just another interesting...intellectual puzzle for you, another of life's...curiosities."
Once again, even Data, who has no emotions, sees Armus for what it truly is.
Data: "You are capable of great sadism and cruelty. Interesting. No redeeming qualities."
Armus: "So, what do you think?"
Data: "I think you should be destroyed."
Also from Star Trek, specifically Deep Space Nine, the Female Changeling certainly qualifies. She happily orders the killing of plenty of people, consistently tries to change Odo into a Founder, and crosses the Moral Event Horizon when she orders the complete and total extermination of the Cardassian people in the final episode. At least 800 million Cardassians died due to this order.
Gul Darhe'el, after being caught, openly bragged about working his labourers to death and sending his men to commit atrocities. Turns out, the man they caught was his file clerk, and he was trying to make up for his lack of action during the Occupation by impersonating his boss and forcing Cardassia to admit its atrocities during the Occupation. Still, the original man he was impersonating did plenty of things to warrant being put here, like routine executions, having women raped in front of their children, husbands beaten beyond recognition, elderly buried alive...you can see why the guy wanted to expose Cardassia's dirty laundry.
Gul Dukat. Sure, he had some amount of "sympathy for the devil" when he went rogue to fight Klingon occupation and in his interactions with his half-bajoran daughter; however, even that doesn't stop him from selling out his people and the rest of the Alpha Quadrant to ally with the Dominion. Even that is presented as somewhat morally grey: he claims it was to save Cardassia from dissolving into complete chaos after the Maquis and Klingon attacks and to restore them to their rightful glory. But after his daughter is killed in front of him by his protege for betraying them to the Federation, he goes off the deep end. He manages to pull his mind back together in some (loose) semblance of sanity again and has it out verbally with Sisko about why everyone hates him (finally getting called on all his hypocrisy and evil to his face). He ends the conversation by beating an already battered Sisko to a bloody pulp and deciding to just embrace his role as an all out villain. By the finale, it is made very clear why the Pah-Wraiths chose him over Kai Winn as their Emissary. Originally, Dukat starts as almost a Noble Demon, but his development? By the final season, he is this trope. An Omnicidal Maniac (who gloats about how his evil gods will soon be setting the universe on fire) with no affection for anything but his own desires and cruelties.
The Borg Queen from Star Trek: Voyager, first introduced in Star Trek: First Contact. She is the personification of the Borg Collective, the cybernetic pseudo-race in the process of conquering the galaxy through "assimilation". This consists of absorbing all of a civilization's technology and raw materials and then injecting the people with nanoprobes that submerge their individual identities into the mass Hive Mind so that they become Borg themselves. Their cyborg transformation is completed through surgery without anesthesia. And why does the Queen do this, you ask? She wishes to bring them to "perfection", of which she sees herself as the embodiment. It's been implied that she's been at this for thousands of years.
Despite a significant amount of Villain Decay on Star Trek: Voyager, her appearance in "Dark Frontiers" is probably one of Trek's most chilling. She forces Seven of Nine to watch the assimilation of a helpless planet. We hear the screams of the victims brought to the Borg ship and see a half-assimilated man on a surgical table. And the Borg Queen actually seems aroused by this, breathing in deeply and rhapsodizing about how she can feel the new Borg "becoming one" with her.
MANY villains on Supernatural come very close to this trope. After all, they are, for the most part, monsters, and that's what they do. As a result, it takes a special kind of evil to actually qualify. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be), several of the Big Bads and their flunkies are able to provide just that kind of evil. Here are the assorted bastards:
Alistair. Hell's Grand Inquisitor, he gets a real kick out of torturing the innocent and trying to turn good people to the dark side. He regularly torments Dean about what he made him do in Hell and enjoys his job far too much. And that's without getting into the crap he pulls while hunting Anna.
Lilith. Possibly the Queen Bitch of all of Supernatural. Just for starters, she enjoys possessing little girls and tormenting their families on her days off, convincing them their child has gone mad and then killing them one by one. "Grandpa, you made me mad." She spends the entire season tormenting Sam and Dean, doing her best to break them and force them to open the final seal imprisoning Lucifer to bring about the end of the world. She's creepy. She's sadistic. And, oh yeah, she Eats Babies. Cannot repeat that often enough. She eats freaking babies. Not for power or anything, but to Kick the Dog. A truly heinous, vile piece of scum.
Even if Azazel is certainly one of the cruelest beings to have appeared on the show, he is also its best Magnificent Bastard and Chessmaster. However, it should never be said that he is NOT a complete monster. Azazel takes sheer delight in torturing people and crushing them mentally. He kills people for no other reason than interrupting him for a moment and his anger at the deaths of his children comes across as more personal offense than any affection (how dare you do this to ME!). His Sadistic Choice to Mary Winchester is perhaps one of the best examples, along with the delight he takes in corrupting and shattering the Winchester family.
Three of the Four Horsemen certainly count: War manipulates people's paranoia by making their eyes look demon-black to other people, essentially making them turn on and murder each other - not realising that the other side is innocent - all the while grinning like a Smug Snake. Famine manipulates people's hungers and desires to the point where they are incapacitated, before he consumes their SOULS - and when Dean is unaffected, mocks him by stating that Dean is only immune because he's empty inside. And Pestilence makes people gravely sick just for the evil - that's not considering the Alternate Future, where his Croatoan virus has wiped out countless lives. Death, who's so powerful that his three "brothers" simply pale to him in comparison (he regards even Lucifer as nothing but his bratty nephew), is just an eternal force of nature maintaining the balance of the universe, without any specific malintent from his side.
In a little bit of irony, one of the show's worst examples of a Complete Monster isn't a demon at all but an ANGEL. Smug Snake angel Zachariah is a completely amoral member of the Celestial Bureaucracy who views humans as completely disposable and loves to "persuade" people into serving him by torturing their friends and family to death in front of them. He's as sadistic as Alastair, but he thinks he's one of the good guys. You can't even really call him a Well-Intentioned Extremist - his intentions are anything but benign. His ultimate goal? The 'cleansing' of the world...and he doesn't even seem to care about a greater good. Only his own self advancement.
A demon possessed Post Man from the latest episode falls into this perfectly. He and the demon had a relationship and were working together to commit a series of grizzly murders when Lilith was still around. Dean and Sam, thinking he was a victim, exorcised said demon. He then goes on to be a serial killer, threatening a woman to help him summon the demon back...and we see a Gory Discretion Shot of him killing a puppy in shadows for a sacrifice.
Captain Selto Durka of Farscape. A Peacekeeper captain legendary among the ranks for "getting results", he spends a good deal of his appearances torturing people; not only did he torture Rygel for years long before the story began, but during his second episode, he also left the comm channel open so the rest of the crew would hear him burning Aeryn's face off. Oh, and then there was that attempt to abort Moya's child just so she would be capable of Starbursting to safety. Which makes Rygel killing him, cutting his head off, and keeping it as a trophy very satisfying.
Natira. As if being Scorpius' ex-girlfriend wasn't bad enough, she clearly gets off on torture and mass-murder: when an unwanted shipment of slaves ends up in her hands, she has all but one of them executed for her own amusement. Then she takes aside Rorf and Crichton for a little game of "I love your lying eyes", and you begin to realise just why Scorpius doesn't want her around (apart from the assassination attempt).
Kaarvok would probably outdo every other Farscape example here if he'd had any more screentime. As a cannibalisticMad Scientist with a hand-held cloning machine on standby, he's willing to do anything to ensure that he has more food...or family; he's forgotten that there's a difference. This includes cloning his victims (before killing one in front of the other), keeping Rovhu's traumatized Pilot alive so his regenerating limbs can be harvested for meat, and forcing members of Moya's crew to breed with his degenerate clone army just so he'd have something tastier than clone-brains to look forward to.
Captain Jenek earns this title when he incinerates a test subject's unborn child when it shows no sign of unique development.
Commandant Grayza, who spent her second episode date-raping John Crichton before going on to sell out entire sections of inhabited space to the atrocity-prone Scarran Imperium. And when she screws up, she's not prepared to go down unless she takes everyone aboard her command carrier with her - men, women, and children. Thankfully, Braca managed to stop her.
Tauza from "Incubator"? Not only was she in charge of a hybridization project that had at least ninety Sebacean women raped, but she also abused the surviving offspring, Scorpius, to an unbelievable extent - all in an attempt to purge him of "Sebacean impurities": torturing him with heat lamps, beating him savagely for using the word "please", and forcing him to watch a recording of his mother being raped. Then Tauza made the mistake of showing her back to Scorpius, andshepaidforit - hard.
The Sopranos has several; Livia Soprano may be the worst, other examples include Richie Aprile and Ralphie Cifaretto.
Also, the FBI borders on this frequently, especially in their manipulation of Adriana.
Carla from Burn Notice. She finds operatives to help in her activities by blackmail mostly, usually involving threats to their families, and has no problem causing sheer pain to one's family as a warning. Her activities are also usually undertaken with no regard for the lives of anyone, including her operatives, who are killed if she finds any possibility of them compromising the operation. One of the few villains on the show who was killed directly by one of the protagonists, and hardly not deserving.
There is also Simon, a Psycho for Hire who proved too homicidal for Management's taste and had his profile switched with Michael's. After seeing what he did, it's surprising Michael wasn't assassinated by the government to protect the citizenry.
Blue Duck in the Lonesome Dove miniseries, a half breed Indian murderer and rapist, he kidnaps and rapes Lori and kills a few people, including a child. At the end, he is finally caught and about to be hung when he jumps out of a window, taking a guard with him, and both are killed.
The Cigarette Smoking Man on The X-Files is supposed to be a Knight Templar, but he veers into Complete Monster territory on several occasions. Trying to burn Mulder alive after Mulder finds the mass grave where the CSM and his associates threw the bodies of aliens that had been vaccinated and experimented-upon to death is just one example. There's also the Crew Cut Man, who murders Deep Throat in cold blood after making a trade with him.
CSM's cold-blooded murder of his own son, especially as he probably had many other means to neutralize him, certainly cements his status.
Oh, it gets worse than that: in the final season, we discover CSM's son didn't die from being shot. Somehow, he survived - and CSM had him experimented on, until he's so hideously deformed that Scully had to run a DNA test just to make sure it was him!
Eugene Victor Tooms from "Squeeze" is an immortal genetic mutant with the ability to elongate his fingers and squeeze through tight spaces. His only goal is to eat the livers of five human victims and then hibernate in a nest made of torn up newspaper glued together with his own bile
Also, Robert Modell, A.K.A. Pusher, can control people with his mind. He uses this ability to make people kill each other and themselves as part of a "game" he plays (such as a cop who he makes pour gasoline on himself and set himself on fire).
Donald Pfaster is a necrophiliac who collects the hair and fingers of his female victims after he's done with them
Cecil Lively, a pyrokinetic who sends love letters to women in powerful positions and burns their husbands and other family members to death.
Erwin Lukesh, who shifts into alternate realities so he can murder women and cut out their tongues without being cut, then brings them back and feeds them to his unsuspecting mother. He also taunts Agent Reyes about how satisfying the death of her Parallel Universe counterpart was and murders his own mother. But at least he's crying during the latter.
Jack Franklyn is a narcissistic warlock who makes human sacrifices by taking over the minds of various surgeons and having them kill patients in horrific ways (draining a patient's blood via liposuction, nearly cutting a patient's head off with a laser, and melting a patient's face off) so that he can retain his looks. And the worst part? The fucker escapes.
The warden from The List is a manipulative sociopath who beats a prisoner to death simply because the prisoner won't tell him if he's on Neech's list.
While it is debatable, Darren Peter Oswald arguably qualifies for this trope by using his powers to cause disasters and kill random cattle whenever he gets bored.
The Congolese soldiers who appeared occasionally on ER, made all the more jarring by how very out of place they seem. It's as if the director woke up one day and thought "You know what this show needs? Stuff Blowing Up!" (in a medical drama?) and out they came.
Michael Cambias on All My Children, a cut above the typical Soap Opera villain. Coming to Pine Valley with a goal of taking over all the major corporations based there, he used spies and a seduction of Kendall (using an alias), exploiting her hatred of Erica Kane, with a goal of stealing top secret formulas and documents, One of his spies, Lena, is also his lover, with orders to seduce Erica's daughter, Bianca; Lena winds up falling for her, but is forced to continue working for Michael due to threats against her mother. Kendall, meanwhile, finds out about the affair between him and Lena, deciding to become a double agent; when Michael catches him in his office, he attempts to rape her, but Erica stops him. After double-crossing him by pretending to leave her company, Michael tries to rape her, but Kendall returns the favor in stopping him. When he's thwarted from that, he goes and rapes Bianca. After he is acquitted of all charges due to Bianca burning all evidence, she turns around and puts a bullet in him.
In the new Vseries, the Big Bad is the Visitor leader Anna, who definitely qualifies as a Complete Monster. So far, she's ordered fellow Visitors to skin other Visitors alive, forced Georgie to watch the memories of the Visitors who murdered his family in such a way that he experiences it all over again and can't stop watching, and ordered some of her other minions to break her daughter's legs - after smacking her to the floor. She is as completely emotionless as all other non-Fifth Column Visitors as she does these things, and in one scene, she casually expresses her intention to eviscerate some Fifth Column members. Even her sidekick Marcus - himself mostly emotionless - occasionally seems mildly uncomfortable with how cold-hearted she is.
It was the sheer casualness of Anna turning to her minion and telling them to "break her legs" (referring to her own daughter), then cheerfully walking away afterwards that sealed the deal on just how monstrous this woman (read: genocidal alien queen) is.
Let's not forget her habit of emotionlessly mating with underlings chosen for their genetic superiority while refusing to look them in the face, then EATING them!
In Season Two, Anna has become even more vicious. Within two episodes, she's casually slaughtered one of her own fleet captains in front of a crowd just to prove a point and ordered the murder of the woman carrying a human/Visitor hybrid baby. The way Anna constantly refers to the baby as "it" is incredibly disturbing, and to make matters worse, she is now torturing the newborn infant just to manipulate Ryan, the baby's father. Total, absolute monster.
She becomes still worse later in Season Two - especially the finale, "Mother's Day". To make a long story short, she has twisted said hybrid, Amy, into a murderous little hellspawn who kills Ryan in cold blood and later helps her Bliss all of mankind; she has figured out how to use emotions to manipulate people, particularly Lisa, by pretending to love her; and she has locked Lisa away in Diana's prison (after murdering Diana in full view of her people, too) and forced her to watch Fake Lisa mate with and eat Tyler. No Karmic Death would be good enough for her by now. Diana was Anna's own mother, and worse yet, when Diana - just before succumbing to her wounds - states that Anna's actions have doomed them all, Anna doesn't even flinch, suggesting that she no longer cares about her own race anymore - she just wants to gain power over everyone she can and torment those who stand against her For the Evulz. What a bitch.
Chuck usually plays most of its villains for laughs, being a dramedy. The exception, however, is Ring operative Daniel Shaw, who has multiple moral event horizons over the course of the third season. He has the Freudian Excuse of a murdered wife, but the extremes he goes to avenge her pushes him way over the line. Attempting to murder Sarah in revenge may be slightly understandable, but once he returns with an intersect in his head, obsessed with Chuck, there's no grey area anymore. He murders Chuck's father to compromise his feelings and proceeds to wire the Buy-More with bombs in the middle of a sale.
And let us not forget the man who put Daniel Shaw on the road to the dark side, the Ring Director. This man was responsible not only for all of the evil antics over the course of the first three seasons, which doesn't qualify him for this title by itself, but what does is how he took particular pleasure in showing Daniel the person at whom he should direct his vengeful rage over the loss of his wife, knowing that Shaw's whole reason for living was to kill said person, whom Daniel told the audience and Sarah he thought an agent of the Ring.
Leo Johnson from Twin Peaks, disregarding the very last episodes where he is frightened for Shelley's safety, because that's just f'cking stupid. He's a murderer, a rapist, a drug pusher, and a wife beater.
Though obviously intended as humor, nearly all main characters of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia qualify. Though never killing anyone (at least, directly), all characters have sociopathic, self-centered tendencies, are responsible for torturing the lives of other characters in terrible, monstrous ways (sometimes repeatedly), and show very little, if any, sympathy or remorse.
It's Always Sunny is a complicated case. While it's no doubt that all of the main cast are Jerkasses, they all have sympathetic qualities to varying degrees (especially Charlie and Dee, the show's resident Butt Monkeys). Our by the book CM is Dennis, a major Karma Houdini who is frequently implied to be an outright sociopath. He buys a boat, apparently for the sole purpose of impressing women and using it to extort sex from them with the "Implication" that he would drown them if they said no, and he has a system in place where he could have sex with any woman he wants by means of near psychological torture. He also takes it as a compliment when Charlie calls his methods "Like A Serial Killer".
Lie to Me had Andrew Jenkins, a serial rapist who kidnapped, tortured, blinded, and raped 12 women, and then let them go explicitly because he wanted them to live on to think about him every day. His copycat is almost as bad, first seeking out and marrying one of the victims to "be close to what he did to [her]" and then starting his own crime spree himself.
Martin, the titular psychopath in the aptly-named episode "Beat the Devil", a psychology student who gains Lightmans' notice when he is aroused by pictures of women being tortured; Cal correctly surmises that he has probably already killed people, and it turns out that he is, in fact, a Serial Killer, whose M.O. was water boarding young girls repeatedly, then killing them after forcing them to dig their own graves. The water boarding thing is part of his pathology - he does it because, when he was a boy, his sister drowned in their swimming pool; he didn't murder her, but he saw her drowning and decided to not raise the alarm. The reason?
I wanted her bike.
Zach from the series finale screws over his supposed friends for money. He doesn't care who he hurts in the course of getting ahead.
A lot of characters in Frasier are called this for laughs, but Maris Crane is the one who takes the title. She manipulates her husband into doing whatever she wants. There's a long list of petty little deeds in between, all adding up to her lack of compassion, but the kicker has to be when she shoots her ex with a crossbow and kills him. And after this, she goes under house arrest, worms out of her tracker bracelet, ships herself across the border in a box under the guise of an antique that's being auctioned off, and uses the same technique to get the tracker shipped in the opposite direction.
The League of Gentlemen is full of undesirables, but Papa Lazarou takes the cake as the worst of all. His actions include but are not limited to capturing women and locking them in a cage to have water sprayed at them by his dwarf minions and stitching people up inside his circus animals.
The Mentalist has some criminals who are flat out irredeemable and unsympathetic. One is obviously Red John, the serial killer that was responsible for Patrick Jane's involvement with the CBI. Another was in the episode "Red Carpet Treatment", where they attempt to investigate the death of a serial killer who was cleared of DNA evidence. The complete monster in question was actually the serial killer they were investigating. The serial killer was so horrific that even the man responsible for his death was allowed to get off scot-free for a very good reason: he killed the Serial Killer when the latter not only refused any requests by the man to stay away from his wife, but also implies that he might intend to slit his wife's throat shortly after his release.
Rachel Bowman in "Ball of Fire" is an interesting case. She has somewhat of a Freudian Excuse: her single father was a killer who was put in jail by Jane's team and later died there. But given all that she does in the episode - hiring a hitman to capture Jane, shooting that same hitman, torturing Jane with a cattle prod, luring Lisbon to the hideout so that she can burn them both alive - she definitely qualifies.
While most villains in the Dan Schneider universe are Played for Laughs and jerkasses at worst, the Drake & Josh movie, Drake and Josh Go Hollywood, had two nasty criminals who were, understandably, two of the most wanted criminals in the USA. Their terrors include stealing Josh's G.O. and replacing it, masquerading as cops to trick Drake and Josh, kidnapping them in a warehouse, stealing a money machine from the U.S. Treasury Department to unfairly make money with, and trying to drown the titular characters. In a film based on a children's show, these are some especially dark actions. While Megan puts a stop to their crimes and helps Drake and Josh get them busted, this should still demonstrate their nastiness.
Alastair Crane. Just Alastair Crane of Passions. His list of crimes seems completely endless. He has forced his grandson to rape his granddaughter, attempted to murder everyone in his family, committed several counts of rape, faked the deaths of two of his grandchildren, his daughter's lovers, his ex-wife, and her sister, leaving his daughter to believe that she killed her mother, tricked Whitney into believing she had slept with her brother, and he committed most of these crimes for two reasons, to find a suitable heir or simply because it amused him.
Several of the killers in City Homicide, beginning in the pilot with Dr Sean Macready, a psychiatrist who kills over a dozen children by starting fires, each time making them look like electrical accidents. His motive each time is to punish his adulterous female patients, five of which later killed themselves, something he probably caused through his sessions with them. The one point of sympathy he gets is that his own children were killed in a fire when his wife was away with her own lover, but then it's implied that he started that fire as well. He is killed at the end of the episode when he unsuccessfully attempts to pull one of his victims into the fire, after the other two had escaped.
The following episode has Brett Semple, the teenage illegitimate son of an armed robber who gets involved with his father's gang after he goes missing, and then proves himself to be far worse: he kills a bank teller in cold blood during a heist, and later shoots at the police when they come for him, with his own mother in the room. The ironic part is that Brett's father kept out of his life specifically to avoid tainting him and bringing him down that path.
Frances Deerborne, who murders her husband's rich family, down to his younger siblings and the housekeeper, to ensure that he receives his inheritance. It is suggested that she intends to kill him later and Make it Look Like an Accident.
Billy Pierce, who starts by framing Superintendent Waverley for corruption as revenge for her supposed responsibility for his brother's suicide. In the season finale, he crosses the Moral Event Horizon by kidnapping her teenage son, slashing his wrists, and leaving his body for Waverley to find.
Daniel Worthington, a misogynistic serial rapist who specifically targets strong women who he can't dominate in any other way. Worse, he drugs his wife and daughter during a movie night so that he can leave to commit his rapes, while ensuring they'll provide an alibi for him. The only reason he fails to get away with it is because Claudia baits him during her interrogation of him, and he forgoes his overseas trip to target her.
Dr. Foster from Skins, Series 4, who attempts to Mind Rape Effy and murders Freddie and tries to do the same to Cook. Even his "excuse" is just further evidence that he's a twisted, sick bastard: he's infatuated with Effy, his teenage patient.
The drug smuggler (possibly named Arkie Ragan) in Bangkok Hilton. Using various aliases, he seduces young women and uses them to smuggle heroin overseas. When Kat gets arrested in Thailand, he abandons her with no apparent remorse about the fact that she will be sentenced to death and proceeds onto his next run.
Most of the villains in Fringe have some trait establishing them as more of an Anti-Villain. The unreformed Nazi in "The Bishop Revival" who develops a toxin specifically to target and kill Holocaust survivors and their descendants is one notable exception. He tests his toxin on a bunch of random people in a coffee shop just to see if it'll kill everyone with the genetic traits that he picked and in the end tries to disrupt an international peace conference with a massacre just for the hell of it.
The alternate universe's Brandon also qualifies. He takes cold and amoral scientific researcher to new standards. He coldly proposes killing Olivia just to observe it and proposes possibly fatal tests to be performed on children, something even his boss Walternate is strongly opposed to.
Morgan Steig, from the pilot episode. He releases a flesh-melting toxin aboard a crowded airplane as a demonstration to potential buyers; worse still, the toxin arrived on the airplane through the insulin pen of his unsuspecting twin brother, who was chosen as a victim simply to show just how dedicated Steig was. Face it, the audience gave John Scott a round of applause for smothering him with a pillow.
David Esterbrook from "The Cure" definitely qualifies as well. He's a pharmaceutical executive running a program turning young women suffering from a rare disease into radiation-emitting bioweapons and tested it out on a cafe of innocent people.
Nikita: Percy, the head of Division, at first seemed like an Affably Evil character who was Only in It for the Money, working for Corrupt Corporate Executives and criminal organizations just as easily as for the government. However, as the series progressed, we've seen just how far he'll sink to achieve his goals, including murdering the loved ones of his own agents to keep them loyal. Perhaps the most shocking example of this was the recent revelation that the terrorist who killed Michael's family was, in fact, a Division agent who did so on Percy's orders so that Percy could recruit Michael into Division in the first place with a promise of revenge.
Methinks you missed a plot point. Michael was supposed to be the one to die so that Kazim Tariq could be Percy's mole in al-Qa'ida. When Kazim accidentally killed Michael's family instead, Percy recruited Michael with the promise of getting even.
Amanda is also a Complete Monster and a Manipulative Bitch who constantly and ruthlessly tricks people into doing what she wants and earning their loyalty (or at least their fear; she's quite Machiavellian). But more to the point, she's the resident Torture Technician and is quite skilled at her job, using everything from electrocutions to breaking bones to threatening lobotomies in order to get information out of her victims — and it's quite clear she enjoys doing it. It's notable that she's the one person Nikita is afraid of.
Klaus of The Vampire Diaries very much qualifies for Complete Monster status, remorselessly manipulating and murdering countless people in order to achieve his full potential as a werewolf/vampire hybrid, as revenge on anyone who causes things to not go precisely the way he wants them to (for instance, Katerina's entire family after she becomes a vampire, rendering her useless to him), and simply because he enjoys it. The final episode of Season Two sees him upholding his promise to "reunite" his brother Elijah with their family by daggering him as he did his other siblings and blackmailing Stefan into joining him, making him drink vast quantities of human blood and checking that he is addicted again by having him chase down and kill an innocent bystander.
Despite initial appearances, Season Three only further demonstrates how vile Klaus is — true, we get to meet the rest of his family and see him shedding tears over how at odds they've been, but it's made clear that he damn well deserves the blame for much of that turmoil and that he doesn't truly care if they die. His brother, Kol, may well qualify for Complete Monster status himself — he's certainly psychotic and arrogant enough, and petty — but an even more terrifying example is their mother, Esther, the Original Witch, the one who turned them all into vampires in the first place. Her presence is first felt when she sends the ghost of Vicki Donovan to murder Elena, having her use Matt to gain the means for this — it may seem a little forgivable because Elena's blood is the key to making more dangerous hybrids, but then Esther resurrects herself through Bonnie's bloodline and proceeds to use a sample of that same blood to bind her family so that killing one will kill them all and the entire vampire race, playing the loving and forgiving mother around them until she reveals her hand. After that fails, she comes to Rebekah and reveals that she's dying, even apologizing for leaving her alone for a thousand years — only to invalidate it by possessing Rebekah's body and forming an alliance with Alaric's Ax Crazy alter-ego, who wants all vampires dead just as much as she does. What makes all this most frightening is that Esther, unlike the gleefully evil Klaus and Kol, thinks she's one of the good guys — it's not the first time a witch has been shown to be something far more sinister than a loyal servant of nature, but it's the most explicit demonstration thus far.
The Secret Circle has Eben, leader of thewitch hunters. He's bad enough when we first see him in a flashback that reveals he and his men murdered the members of the old Circle by pretending to want peace and tried to kill John Blackwell, but he gets even worse when he turns out to have survived the fire, only with nasty scarring, and proves hell-bent on killing every witch alive, even those who have never heard of him, for absolutely no good reason. He doesn't bat an eye at using magic provided by a resurrectedandpsychotic Nick to brainwash Cassie into trying to murder her father and to survive an attack by the Circle that should've killed him outright. Later, he summons and absorbs multiple demons for their power, no doubt driving him even Ax Crazier — and that's after sacrificing one of his own men to a demon and using him to lure Blackwell and the Circle into a death trap that just barely fails. Oh, and according to another witch hunter, he's even killed off Isaac, who was downright sane compared to him — and then he kidnaps Faye, fully intending to murder her and her covenmates. Fortunately, Jake gives him a swift, satisfying Karmic Death in "Family" after Charles has taken the demons out of him.
Quite every villain in Legend of the Seeker, which is based on Sword of Truth, the book series. Darken Rahl commits mass infanticide, murders for kicks and for ink, horribly tortures people to gain magical powers, etc. He has his own sister beat violently and lies to her so she will betray her other brother and bring him the tools to take free will from every living thing in the world. He also unleashes a plague on his own people (killing hundreds of them, including a meek looking boy we are shown) for the sole reason of trying to turn people against Richard, and when all of this fails to win him victory, he kills a kitten with his BARE HANDS . Bonus points come from the fact that all of the above happens in one episode. Nicholas Rahl from the Bad Future is even more evil. He is shown to kill both of his parents and later enslaved the whole of humanity. Princess Violet manages to become a Complete Monster despite being a child, as she already orders beheadings, keeps a "playmate" who she regularly slaps and punishes for no reason other than her own enjoyment, enjoys torturing prisoners, and makes plans to have women she does not like gang-raped by the castle guard. Her mother, Queen Milena, is even more horrible as she executes anyone who annoys or upsets her! It is clear that she is the reason for why Violet is who she is.
The demons in the Spanish series Angel o Demonio are unbelievable bastards whose only purpose in life is to wreck lives with More than Mind ControlFor the Evulz. They don't have the slightest bit of empathy; in fact, they laugh at the death of OTHER DEMONS. One of them, Alexia, releases a virus with the intention of destroying the most part of humanity, and when she fails, the others punish her, not because she had gone too far, but because she had been dominating them. Monsters indeed.
The Nazis in the Spanish series El Internado, being, well, Nazis and all that.
Don Joaquin aka Karl Fleischer was a Nazi officer during WWII, began racial purity experiments at the orphanage near the end of WWII and held out hope for the Third Reich after Hitler's suicide. When Jacinta threatens to go to the police to denounce him for kidnapping children, reporting them dead to their parents and the state, and handing the children over to adoptive parents, he tries to kill her. If you felt bad for him after his death at the end of season 4, you'll feel a lot better when you find out he's a Nazi.
Jacques Noiret kills Cayetano and made it look like he had overdosed, bought his son Ivan from a drug addict for 2 million euros and murders his wife when she finds out and tries to make amends to the biological mother.
Ritter Wulf was a doctor at a concentration camp during the Holocaust, performing horrific, often lethal, experiments on children. After the war, Wulf fakes his death and takes the name Santiago Pazos-he's the grandfather to the series' protagonist.
Prison Break: Wyatt Mathewson, the season four Dragon who murdered Alex Mahone's innocent son, is arguably the worst (or at least scariest) character in the series in terms of sheer cruelty and pitilessness, despite being just an executive agent and assassin.
And Christina Scofield. What a bitch.
Sherlock has Jim Moriarty. He commits horrific acts for fun and to get Sherlock's attention, actively enjoys what he's doing, and is feared even by the criminals he works with.
Arguably, his worst act is when he straps a bomb to a child as part of a 'game' with Sherlock and then proceeds to blow up a blind old woman. He also straps a bomb to John!
In the second series, he threatens the lives of those closest to the jurors at his trial so that he can walk free.
To top it all off, Moriarty destroys Sherlock's reputation to deliberately drive him to suicide. He even kills himself so that Sherlock has no choice but to kill himself in order to save the lives of John, Mrs Hudson, and Lestrade. Bastard.
Johnny Cooper of Home and Away, probably the most evil of the show's villains. He and his group of surfers survive solely on the proceeds of armed robberies, and worse, he coerces his brother Rocco into helping them despite the latter's desire to go straight. When Rocco betrays him and puts him in jail, he has him killed by another member of the gang and then torments Rocco's foster brother after he is falsely convicted of his murder. A year later, he breaks out and attempts to kill Sally because she turned Rocco against him, while holding her brother hostage during the confrontation. Finally, he blackmails Sam into hiding him, possibly raping her offscreen at one point. And unlike villains like Sarah Lewis and Eve Jacobsen, there is never any suggestion of Johnny having a Freudian Excuse.
The Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood certainly qualifies. In the first few episodes, he seems to be a mere Dirty Coward, but by the end of the first season, he seems to take a maniacal glee in finding new and unexpected ways to cross the Moral Event Horizon, to the point where most episodes involve his dragon, Guy of Gisborne, suggesting a ruthless option to accomplish their goals, and the Sheriff sneering and proposing (and implementing) a much more sadistic one.
Warehouse 13: Walter Sykes, the Big Bad of Season 3. He's a textbook Bad Boss who indiscriminately kills his minions, whether they've failed him or not. And let's not forget his vendetta against the Regents — which leads to the deaths of Steve, Helena, and Mrs Fredric and the destruction of the entire Warehouse — is fueled entirely by the fact that Warehouse agents took an Artifact away from him when he was younger. Some fans view his death by Portal Cut as being too easy an out for him. One does have to remember that said artifact did essentially turn him evil, but the sheers lengths to which he went make you wonder just how much of it was artifact mojo and how much was genuine evil.
Played for Laughs in an episode of 30 Rock on the Mexican soap opera Los Amantes Clandestinos with the character of The Generalissimo. The very first time we see him, he has duct-taped a stick of dynamite to a child's head (it explodes offscreen). According to Elisa, he once seduced the female protagonist by stealing her love letters to make her think he was a good guy, and then raped her. She later gave birth to the devil (it was sweeps).
Elisa's grandmother, who is a big fan of the show, hates Jack because he bears a striking resemblance to the Generalissimo's actor, Hector Morena. Jack is finally able to get on her good side by buying the rights to the show and rewriting the character to be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold who falls in love with an elderly woman.
Veronica Mars has a few but none worse than Mercer Hayes. While he never kills anyone, he drugs and rapes several girls, simply because he doesn't want to seduce anyone because "it takes too long". And then, to add insult to injury, he shaved their heads for no reason whatsoever. He also runs an illegal casino in his dorm
Shane Casey borderlines this on CSI: NY, primarily after realizing his brother was actually guilty and starting to torment Danny and Lindsay.
Methos: I killed a thousand. I killed TEN thousand and I was good at it. I was death. Death on a horse.
A lot of one-off Immortals fit this description at times, though plenty are just Smug Snakes, Sympathetic Murderers, or Magnificent Bastards. There are some exceptions...of the Horsemen, Methos's closest friend Silas is a big, childish man who doesn't seem to comprehend his actions. Kronos, though? Kronos was worse than Methos: a murderous rapist who revels in destroying life (while Methos treated it with cold detachment). Kronos even planned to wipe out humanity for giggles. And then there's Caspian, who's a psychotic serial killer and cannibal.
Kalas, the Big Bad of Season 3. Kalas used a sanctuary for immortals as a trap to hunt them down and kill them as they exited. When Duncan MacLeod exposed him and had him exiled, Kalas retaliates, centuries later, by trying to strangle a girl Duncan might be having a fling with. In the present, Kalas is a ruthless manipulator and murderer. He can destroy someone's life easily and shows no remorse for those he uses as pawns in his game to hurt MacLeod.
One episode on season 1 featured a beauitful young woman on the run from an imposing, frightening immortal named Devereaux who wanted her hand, with strong insinuations Devereaux was a vicious killer of women. Turns out, he's hunting her because she murdered his wife and baby. This is her MO: to find skilled fighters, brutally kill their loved ones, and kill them when they're thrown off their game. Infuriatingly, she is a Karma Houdini while Deveraux dies in combat with her because Macleod's idiot sidekick convinces him to spare her.
There's Kern of Line of Fire. We first see Kern in the past, taunting Duncan over the death of his Lakota village...with their scalps. By his own admission, Kern gleefully tortures, rapes, pillages, and kills with no remorse.
One shot, brief villaisn Bryce Korland and Horvan Kant are vicious murderers and heavily implied to be the worst of the worst. There's Martin Hyde who tortures his prey psychologically to drive them to the brink, murdering thief Lyman Kurlow...Highlander had a LOT of these. The worst one shot villain, though? Almost certainly Ernst Daimler, an unrepentant Nazi who, in his own words, has killed old men, children, mothers with babies in their arms...he still holds to Nazi philosophy and is just a nasty son of a bitch in general who ordered massacres of innocent civilians in the past and killed a kind old priest in the present
"He held the rank of a captain in the S.S. He was a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain, and like his colleagues of the time he shared the one affliction most common amongst that breed known as Nazis: he walked the Earth without a heart."
He walks around his old abandoned concentration camp, thinking about the atrocities he committed and smiling as if those were the best years of his life! This made his ultimate fate all the better as he is forced to mentally relive all the pain he inflicted on his subjects by the spirit of Becker, one of the inmates. And Becker implies its only going to get much worse from there
Due to its morally ambiguous nature and realistic tendencies, Homicide: Life on the Street didn't have many of these, preferring to keep their villains as pathetic figures. But a few do stand out. The most prominent is Luther Mahoney, a Drug kingpin who has complete control over the Heroin deals in Baltimore. He escapes justice time and again and just loves rubbing his wealth and Karma Houdini status in the face of the Detectives. He's also very smart, making himself a pillar of his community that no one wants to think anything bad about. His crimes include murdering rival dealers and anyone who stands in his way, intimidating witnesses, and ordering murders. It's mentioned at one point that he is responsible for dozens of murders.
Harlan County crimelord Bo Crowder in season 1. To punish his son Boyd, he commands his nephew Johnny to savagely beat Boyd. When Boyd returns to his vigilante "church" in the forest, he discovers that Bo and his henchmen murdered all of his followers.
Season 3 has Robert Quarles, a Detroit mob lieutenant. Quarles has no qualms about killing colleagues or mooks who outlive their usefulness, and he has a long history of abducting, torturing, and sexually abusing male hustlers. His antics were so alarming to the Detroit mob that he was exiled to Kentucky to manage the Oxy trade there.
The son of a Corrupt Corporate Executive who drowns his own wheelchair-bound father with a Psychotic Smirk on his face to take over his company and doesn't give a damn that his activities are destroying the native's homeland; and the Chairman, along with his killer for hire Lazarus, who is capable of murdering an innocent child without even feeling anything.
The white supremacist group from the episode "The Soul Of The Winter", where they assault anybody who isn't white and have no problems attacking teenagers. The group's leader convinces everybody that non-white races are evil and wants to kill his former military comrade, just because he is black, and planned to crucify and burn him, and on top of that, they worship Hitler and Nazi Germany, making them the closest counterpart to the Nazis in the series.
The satanist cult from halloween episode "The Children of Halloween". They kidnap innocent children and plan to kill them all on Halloween night, and one of cult members even suggested killing one of the children befor Halloween. They also sacrificed goats and killed one of their own men. The leader of the cult even calls himself Lucifer.
Johnny Blade from "The Lost Boys" organizes the heist and kills a cop. Then he gives a gun to one of his accomplices and the same accomplice hides it in his friend's house. After learning this, Johnny Blade threatens an innocent young teenager Jesse (the friend of his accomplice and Carlos' nephew) to remain silent about his crimes or else he will kill his mother and later forces him to take all the guilt fdr his crimes or else he will kill his mother, whom he kidnapped, but Blade planned to order his lawyer and his accomplices in the prison to kill him, even after he took all the guilt, and planned to make Jesse's mother to commit suicide. This was so evil that a few of his henchmen looked like they were disgusted by it.
Reccuring villain Victor La Rue is also incredibly nasty. He attempted to rape Alex and in the episode "The Trial of La Rue". He takes the courtroom hostage, kills the judge, and taunts Alex and his actions range from death threats for a sandwich, televising his crimes, terrorizing a divorced couple at a custody hearing, and killing people at random, and the worst of it is when he said that he would kill an innocent little girl.
Luis Guerro, abusive father of Juan Guerro from the episode "Golden Boy". He beats his own wife, because she didn't make him dinner, even though she left a note that she did and brutally beats Juan repeatedly, because he was protecting her, giving him a lot of injuries in his face. He doesn't care about his own son and wife but cares about himself, and his irresponsible driving is one of the reasons why he and his wife later died in a car crash. His abusive treatment is also the reason why Juan tries so hard to study and provide his mother with a better life. What makes him worse is that he is just a minor character, yet manages to be more despicable than the drug dealers, who were the main villains in that episode.
Charles Hoyt of Rizzoli And Isles. He's a unrepentant sociopathic serial killer who tortured and killed many people. In particular, he preys on Jane and threatens to rape Maura. Also, much of his behavior is uncomfortably reminiscent of rape.
Mr. Cannon on 90210. Already a wanted rapist from England, he comes to America and rapes Naomi. He then tries to drug and do the same thing to Silver. After he runs away to avoid arrest, he sneaks into Naomi's place and threatens to kill her and Silver if she does not say that they lied.
JAG: Mustafa Atef a.k.a. Mohandesh, the in-universe number 3 in Al Qaeda was captured by U.S. Army Special Forces in Afghanistan and given the death penalty by a military tribunal.
A couple psychos make the extra effort to stand out in Breaking Bad.
"The Cousins," Marco and Leonel Salamanca, are a pair of mechanical, near emotion-free hitmen for a drug cartel who kill without any hesitation. Their Establishing Character Moment comes when they cross the border into the United States in a truck and casually slaughter every single person that came into the country with them.
The twins are only the way they are because of who they grew up with. Meet Hector "Tio" Salamanca; a feeble old man who can't even speak in present time. However, in flashbacks we see him for the monster that he was. He nearly drowned one of the twins as a child just to prove a point about 'family,' and gleefully kills Gus's business partner; pinning him down and forcing him to look into his dead friend's eyes afterwards. We don't see much of him as a younger man in the show, but what we do see makes clear just how wretched he was. In fact, he was probably a major player in making Gus the homicidal man that he became.
The drug dealers who get little kids to do their dirty work, making them kill to prove themselves and murdering them if they become a liability aren't exactly boy scouts, but the smile that they flash Jesse after they think they've gotten away with it shows that they truly have no remorse.
Tuco may count, though you could make a pretty solid argument that he's just a crazy idiot.
