Never Recycle Your Schemes in Live-Action TV series.
- Lampshaded by the Big Bad in the first season of 24, when Ira Gaines points out he can still use Jack Bauer's daughter as leverage. Ironically, Drazen would end up kidnapping Jack's daughter later on and using her in the same fashion.Andrei Drazen: When Plan A fails you go to Plan B, not Plan A recycled.
- Blake's 7: Notably the marble-sized plague sphere which came within a gnat's whisker of killing the crew in Project Avalon. There should have been any number of ways of smuggling that weapon about the Liberator, and it would have been a short show if Servalan had bothered to try.
- In the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer The Master, angry that Buffy has been killing so many of his servants, sends a trio of vampire warriors to kill her. They almost do, but Angel shows up and they run away. When they return to report that Angel intervened, he has them killed, and has Darla try to remove Angel as a factor. While this at least shows he's paying attention to what caused the plan to fail, it doesn't change the fact that even if Darla gets rid of Angel, he's just killed off the only vampires he's got who not only survived their encounter, but sent her running.
- Colditz: Any escape plan which the guards discover tends to get new security procedures installed to prevent it happening again. Some of the schemes fail for other reasons and are able to be retried later, though.
- In Stargate SG-1, one episode's plot concerns the Ori unleashing a Synthetic Plague on Earth. This plague is nigh-impossible to treat and extremely contagious, and rapidly spreads across most of the planet. All of Earth's medical science fails to come up with a treatment, and ultimately the plague is cured by one of the Ori's own Priors (priests) defecting to Earth's side and using his Ori-granted powers to cure the plague. Said Prior is immediately killed by the Ori for his betrayal. What isn't explained is why the Ori don't simply re-release the plague on Earth, considering that it is extremely unlikely that Earth would be able to convert any further Priors, and as stated, Earth's medical sciences were simply not up to containing the plague.
- Subverted in a single episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In "The Gang Recycles Their Trash", the gang uses bits and pieces from old scams to create a new one (being garbage collectors). When that fails, they briefly consider just outright redoing one of their scams wholesale (because they can't remember why it didn't work), but they get distracted, fight amongst each other and forget about it.
- All of the several ways to counter the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation only ever worked once. This was used for suspense, and explained as the Borg being masters of adaptation. Apart from this, however, Star Trek: The Next Generation was known for solving problems through technobabble and rarely referring to the same solution again.
- During the course of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Federation either encountered, captured, or developed several different pieces of technology that would have made dandy anti-Borg weaponry. The soliton wave (originally intended to be a "warp drive for ships without a warp reactor") and the sentient nanites, just to name two. But did Starfleet use such weapons? Of course they don't...
- Also the grand-daddy of all forgotten weapons technology, Project Genesis from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Let's see the Borg adapt to that!
- And of course they never consistiently reproduce the one technology that has proved itself repeatedly effective against the Borg: bullets and other such kinetic energy weapons. The fact that the Borg haven't already adapted to it proves that they can't — what are the odds that of all the species the Borg have assimilated, they never encountered one that used guns? The Federation did, in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, reveal the prototype TR-116 rifle, but it was dropped for regenerative phasers.
- Super Sentai and its adaptation Power Rangers generally suffers from this, but there are more than a few occasions where the villain recreates a monster than was defeated before, only with improvements.
- An unusual example comes from the final few episodes of Choujuu Sentai Liveman — where it's revealed Professor Bias has previously led groups of students like the ones who serve as his underlings and reduced them to Brain in a Jar status, all to use as a Fountain of Youth so he can repeatedly become young again. So he was recycling a scheme, with the usual Monster of the Week tactics basically serving to kill time until A: he could get the aforementioned youth effect going and B: see through his main plan — Mass Hypnosis across the planet, which actually succeeded; only Yusuke having snuck aboard the Brain Base and Kemp rebelling at the last moment prevented him from continuing.
- Subverted in the last episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. Master Vile reveals his scheme to turn the Rangers into powerless children and Zedd responds with "I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but we tried this once before and it failed!" Of course, to Zedd's chagrin, Vile's version of the plan worked surprisingly well and came much closer to wiping out the Rangers than Zedd or Rita ever did.
- Also subverted during Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers. Vile decides to blow up the Command Center with a bomb which Alpha detects and quickly disarms. Later on that season Zedd recycles the scheme by sending Goldar and Rito to tunnels underneath the Command Center where they can place a bomb that won't be so easily detected.
- Subverted in Ressha Sentai Toqger. The villains send out a Monster of the Week with the power to manifest desires into real life, followed by him literally crushing them to cause the victim great distress. After the rangers nearly destroy said monster, Schwarz, one of the villainous generals, saves it in order to start an improved version of said scheme.
- Depending on the series, villainous factions in Kamen Rider avert this trope by bringing back earlier defeated monsters and upgrade them to have a better chance at defeating the hero(es). Each series in the Showa period of the franchise featured at least one episode in which the Rider had to fight recycled monsters.
- Kamen Rider Ryuki: It turns out that Big Bad Shiro Kanzaki recycled his scheme to sacrifice 12 Kamen Riders to save his sister's life countless times through the use of time travel, but it failed each time due to several wild cards in his scheme not doing what he wants and because his sister doesn't want to be revived at the cost of other people's lives.
- The movie Super Hero Taisen GP: Kamen Rider #3 averts this trope, as the villains use the exact same plot as they did in OOO, Den-O, All Riders: Let's Go Kamen Riders, which is altering history so they rule the world, while having the brainwashed Kamen Riders fighting at their side.
- Phantoms, the villainous race in Kamen Rider Wizard procreate by making Gates, humans with the potential to become wizards, succumb to complete despair. If a Gate does succumb, he or she will turn into a Phantom themselves. Most Phantoms have creative plans to humiliate their victim into feeling despair, but if those are foiled, they all resort to the same backup plan: simply physically attack their victims to turn their fear of death into despair. In the final episode, Gremlin, at that point the last surviving Phantom, also recycles his predecessor Phoenix's scheme: instead of trying to find the specific people who are Gates and tailoring schemes to them, just go on a murderous rampage and someone in the crowd will turn into a Phantom eventually.
- Kamen Rider Ex-Aid recycles the same ten monsters throughout the show: because the monsters are video game villains who've come to life through a supernatural virus, they simply need another host to manifest through. The schemes gradually get less effective, however, since while the monsters do become more powerful each time they come back, measured by Power Levels from 1 to 99, the heroes level up much faster.
- UFO (1970): Each episode has a different alien plot to destroy SHADO headquarters, kill Ed Straker, release nerve gas or whatever. Each time a plot fails the aliens never try it again even if it has a good chance of working. On the human side, Straker builds a billion-dollar electron telescope in an effort to obtain information on the aliens' home planet. The mission fails because of an oversight that made it impossible to accurately interpret the images that it sent back, and SHADO never builds a second telescope.
- V (1983): In the TV movies, the Visitors' plan to befriend humanity so they can eventually enslave/destroy them was thwarted by the heroes. In the series proper, after Diane escapes imprisonment, she knows that they can't pretend to be humanity's friend again, and instead opts to just attack Earth directly.
