Nightmare Fuel / Malcolm in the Middle

"Call...animal...control."^note How did he get the bees into the robot anyway?

• In "Malcolm Holds His Tongue", Malcolm decides to hold everything in, becoming 100% agreeable. By the end of the episode, his internal monologue has become a screaming demonic voice, and he spits up a large amount of blood due to developing a severe ulcer.
• Francis hunting down the mythical rat "Rose Marie" and instead ending up completely enveloped in her offspring. As funny as it is, you can't help thinking you'd scream like that too if you were trapped in a crawlspace and covered in live rats.
• Craig's helper monkey revealing himself to be deranged and homicidal and trying to murder him and Hal in "Monkey".
  Craig: He watches me while I pretend to be asleep.
• Malcolm, Reese, Dewey, and Stevie being locked in a closed amusement park in the middle of the night then being chased by a crazed security guard in "Carnival".
• Malcolm getting screamed at by his girlfriend's Boyfriend-Blocking Dad when he finds out he isn't just her tutor. Malcolm is so terrified that he curls up into a fetal position.
• "The Red Dress"
  • Hal ruined Lois's dress while smoking cigars, and decided to flush it down the toilet rather than confess what happened. He then left his sons to take the fall. Let's repeat: he let his underage sons take the fall for ruining his wife's dress.
  • Lois's set of punishments for interrogating the boys are normal from making them spin around their baseball bats to tossing their toys and making them lie under the beds. Francis apparently has the list memorized and guides his brothers through them. He also says that it doesn't matter if they claim none of them burned the dress; if Lois thinks they're guilty, they're guilty.
  • One part very quickly switches from funny to fearsome. Lois is about to smash the TV to punish the boys for ruining her dress (which they didn't do); Lois finds out that they perfectly memorized their location and hid the TV while she wasn't looking. Then this happens...
    Lois: In your room... NOW.
• Lois and her mother. Imagine being raised by people this cruel, manipulative and abusive, who simply do not care how horribly they damage their offspring. Lois' mother is actually WORSE than she is, but not by much. We can only hope that Malcolm never becomes President, because imagine what an individual that damaged would do with access to nuclear weapons.
• "Malcolm Babysits": The moment where Malcolm discovers that his babysitting clients have been filming him all around the house. He notices the TV is recording him and follows the cable to a closet with a bunch of labeled cassettes as well as a VCR. Considering the labels are "Malcolm Using Our Bathroom" and "Malcolm Scratching Himself In Weird Places," him saying they were "jerks" was quite an understatement.
• Hal being covered in bees in "The Bots and the Bees".
  • The context makes things severely worse: Hal was suffering from severe insomnia due to Lois leaving town to visit Francis at school, winding up (in one scene, at least) watching a horror film while staying up all night. This leads into him deciding to do some modifications to Malcolm's robot (long story, Malcolm got into BattleBots), by adding a buzz saw, which he demonstrates by cutting a chair clean in half (Hal's only complaint that it was too slow, deciding to add on a bigger blade as compensation). This ultimately leads to him adding a laser-guided bee cannon. After four days of this (during which Hal still has not slept), Malcolm tries getting Craig to talk Hal down, prompting Hal to respond by attacking Craig (albeit by forcing him to the ground and giving him pink bellies). This prompts Malcolm to respond by taking the robot's remote control and turning it on Hal. Soon, a struggle over the control causes the cannon to activate, aim at Hal, and you can guess what happens next...
    Hal: Call...animal...control.
    • It gets worse in the aftermath: while covered in bees, Hal practically mumbles for help, which Malcolm points out is not possible: Hal ripped the phones out of the wall, and the family's reputation means no one will help them. As such, all they can do (as per Malcolm's suggestion) is to sit and wait for Lois to return.
• "Grandparents":
  • Grandma Ida gets Malcolm beaten up by local bullies after insulting them and letting him take the fall, in an attempt to toughen him up instead of being the smart guy. When Lois tends to his injuries, she says it's okay to tell him about who beat him up. Malcolm doesn't want to because he knows things are tense enough as it is. Plus, that would mean admitting that Ida is physically abusive by proxy.
  • While the actual scene is Played for Laughs, Hal and Lois are not amused when they find out that her dad had a live grenade. He proceeded to show it off to Reese, and they accidentally pull out the pin. Malcolm points out that Grampa Victor ought to know better because Reese is an idiot, something that Reese confirms, and he has to toss the grenade into the new fridge that Hal and Lois just bought. When Lois sees the aftermath and hears the story, her reaction is completely understandable: "You brought live firearms into my house?!" Hal also tells Victor and Ida that he will call the cops on them unless they pay three thousand dollars to compensate for the fridge.
• In "Zoo", Malcolm and Dewey get stuck in a tiger enclosure at the zoo. The zoo workers briefly mention a similar situation in another zoo and how they're trying to figure out what went wrong with that one, and were going to try tranquilizing the tigers had Malcolm not pointed out that that would just tick them off long enough to kill them before they settled down.
• That episode with the new neighbors. The little girl was trying to eat Reese. Literally, he was covered in bite marks.
• "Lois' Sister" has Francis get a Girl Scout troop lost. When they upstage him in wilderness survival to the point he tries to throw away their food to keep authority, they beat him up and tie him up. By the end of the episode, they dragged him all the way back down the mountain and forced him not to tell their scout leader what they did.
• "Bill Board" suggests that Lois' psychological grip on the boys is so strong she can use mind control on them. And has done it before.
• Reese in general. He actually shows signs of being a sociopath, he talks about hearing voices, and in "Malcolm's Girlfriend" he shows Malcolm that he can "turn his brain off".
  • In "Blackout" he proudly admitted to having drugged family members on numerous occasions.
• In "Company Picnic" Hal, nervous about meeting his new boss, recalls a series of flashbacks showing him meeting previous staff members; while the first two are more funny (Hal touching his supervisor's belly under the assumption she was pregnant, and another new staff member walking in on Hal doing a Cheek Copy as his coworkers cheer him on) the third one takes a much darker turn when Hal's boss introduces his daughter, and as Hal walks to shake her hand, he trips and pulls her down by her necklace, slamming her face into a table. She receives a toothpick in her eye among other injuries, and it's said she was gushing blood (though fortunately it's not shown on-screen.)
  • Even worse, her dialogue implies she may have died, or at least come close to it.
    Kelly: I'm outside of my body! I can see a light! Grandma, is that you?
• While it's mostly Played for Laughs, Malcolm almost dying due to getting trapped inside of his car with the engine on while the garage slowly fills up with smoke is genuinely frightening, especially since you can hear the clear desperation on his voice as he keeps screaming for help. Good thing Stevie came just in time to save him.
• One can only imagine what Lois would do to the boys if she ever found out the Nuclear Option from the Finale. All three boys agreed that everything they have ever done is poultry compared to tricking Lois that she had cancer.
• Two instances in "Christmas" and they both involve fire:
  • During the montage of flashbacks of where the boys ruined Christmas for the family with their antics, the last one shows their Christmas tree on fire, apparently the result of their pranks. As it burns, silouettes of Lois and Hal are shown running back and forth, with Lois angrily demanding to know who's responsible for the inferno while Hal frantically tells her to drop and roll — implying that she has caught fire, but is too enraged to notice or care. For anyone who has had this holiday mishap happen to them, it might stir up some bad memories...
    • And this wouldn't be the first time Lois was un-phased by fire, either...
  • Later on in the episode, Lois comes home from the store to find the boys up to no good again in the name of fun, this time by having a tree ornament fight in the living room. This proves to be the last straw for her, and she decides to make the boys behave for a change by holding Christmas hostage: she takes all the presents, decorations, treats, etc., locks them in the garage and tells her sons that the holiday will only be re-instated if they all stay out of trouble until Christmas morning; but if even one of them steps out of line just once before then, the gifts will be returned to the store, the decorations will be stored away again, the tree and food/treats will be donated to charity, and Christmas will be cancelled for the family. Reese, in a moment of bravado (likely leftover adrenaline from the ornament fight), makes the foolish decision to call his mom's bluff on this. One quick Gilligan Cut later, we see Reese on his knees, crying like a little kid as his treasured Christmas stocking burns in the fireplace, as Malcolm and Dewey look on in shock and horror, and Lois watches in satisfaction. It's also a bit of a Tear Jerker for Reese, but he should've known better than to challenge his mom, and that when it comes to her, she never bluffs, especially regarding her boys' antics (which this scene certainly proves).
• Francis has a boa constrictor devour a Jack Russell terrier alive.
• In the episode "High-School Play", Malcolm's friends made a rocket that went rogue and scared their teacher, Caroline Miller, enough to make her go into labor. Want to hear the worst part? We never hear about her again. One can only wonder what the hell happened to Caroline and her baby after this incident...
• Everything about the episode "Surgery". Oh boy, where do we start...
• Reese's fractured leg on the episode "Minibike". This is nightmarish not only because of how the scene when the broken limb it's shown comes out of nowhere, but also that Reese reveals he was hiding the injury from his mom.

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