Outside Context Problem / Live-Action TV

Outside-Context Problems in live-action TV.

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• Each season of The 100 so far has ended with a new, completely unforeseeable problem for the main characters to face:
  • The 100 spent Season 1 fighting against Grounders until the last episode revealed that the Mountain Men, previously thought to be another clan of natives, were in fact the remnant of the US government and military and by far the most technologically advanced faction in the story.
  • In Season 2, the main storyline dealt with the conflict with Grounders and Mountain Men the former becoming allies of the heroes, and the latter being exterminated. But the secondary plot ends up introducing A.L.I.E., an evil A.I. responsible for the nuclear apocalypse who tries to assimilate the last remains of mankind, and who comes completely out of left field compared to the more down to earth survival tone of the rest of the show.
  • At the end of Season 3, A.L.I.E. revealed that nuclear plants all over the globe were about to go critical after a century of lack of maintenance and threatened to send enough radiation in the atmosphere to exterminate all life on Earth, a problem so far out of reach for people who still live in scavenged pieces of trash with no means of intercontinental transportation it's not even funny.
  • The better part of Season 4 is spent looking for ways to survive the deathwave instead of fighting a human enemy, so when a spaceship from the barely mentioned before "Eligius Corporation" lands on Earth at the end it comes as quite a surprise.
  • Season 5 is based around combatting these newcomers, but also one of the characters becoming a bloodthirsty cult leader and half the cast undergoing serious Sanity Slippage as a result.
  • Season 6 tosses everything in the air when everyone is forced to relocate to a legitimately alien planet, and having absolutely no idea how to survive a borderline Eldritch Location, complete with a temporal anomaly.
  • Season 7 reveals that the temporal anomaly is a portal to other time-dilated planets in a connected system of planets that are under control of a space cult of individuals who are trying to invoke an event known as the Last War. It is revealed that the Last War is not a war but a judgment which is enacted upon humanity by a godlike hivemind known only as the Judge, which chooses to either save all of humanity or destroy it, and this Judge has performed the same test upon the races of each planet in the temporal anomaly system.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. shows that S.H.I.E.L.D. has a name for Outside Context Problems: 0-8-4, code for an object of unknown origin and utility. Thor's hammer was one, and a laser weapon found in some ancient ruins was another. Obviously, eventually sometimes context is provided; they still don't know much about Mjolnir, but they know where it came from and whom it belongs to. Likewise, the laser weapon turned out to be a device commissioned from HYDRA during WWII. The code 0-8-4 had a simple explanation: the first Outside Context Problem they ever found (What ultimately turned out to be a Kree gene-splicing tool that killed anyone who touched it without first being properly prepped or descended from someone who had been prepped) was the 84th unique item that the SSR confiscated from HYDRA, and so ended up in a box with 084 stenciled on it.
  • Season 4 introduces magic, in the form of Ghost Rider and the Darkhold, which even in a world of superpowers and aliens, make no sense to the characters whatsoever.
  • Season 5 introduces time travel, with the cast spending the whole season figuring out how it works and whether or not they can break the Stable Time Loop they've become trapped in.
• Alphas villain Marcus Ayers explicitly calls himself — and all other Alphas — an "out-of-context problem" for normal humans. He then fatalistically points out that only way humans know how to deal with such a problem is to destroy it, which they try to do to him shortly afterwards.
• Angel had many examples of this trope. The first was Sahjan, whose presence was not even explained to the audience until his final episode. Then there was The Beast, the cast given only vague warnings about its arrival and were outclassed by it in every possible way. Then there was Jasmine, who had even less warning and was so beyond their experience the only way they acquired information of her at all was due to a visitor from her home dimension.
  • And then things really get bad when Illyria wakes up. Her two episode introduction is more or less devoted to a long realization that this really is a horrible Lovecraftian Physical God, not a poser, and that things like pointing guns or swinging swords at her are really quite quaint.
• The Arrowverse:
  • When Barry shows up to rescue Team Arrow and Malcolm Merlyn from the League of Assassins in Nanda Parbat, it's shown that dealing with a true superhuman of the Flash's abilities is something that they are so utterly unprepared for. Curb-Stomp Battle doesn't even begin to describe how effortlessly he takes out an entire fortress of highly skilled warriors in about 10 seconds.
  • Metahumans in general are something completely out of left field as far as most authorities of Earth-1 in the Arrowverse are concerned, and in the first season of The Flash they (and the legal system) have no way of dealing with them. By the third season there's a dedicated metahuman wing at Iron Heights prison, Central City police are getting outfitted with special gear to deal with them, and are cooperating with the local superheroes.
  • The Crisis Crossovers of the Arrowverse pretty much ride on this. In the first, "Invasion!", the heroes have to team-up against the Alien Invasion of the Dominators, who are bent on destroying all metahumans on Earth, and in the second, "Crisis on Earth-X", they have to deal with an army of Nazis from an Earth where Germany won World War II.
  • Legends of Tomorrow lives for this trope. In the first season, Rip Hunter recruits a team of crooks, assassins and d-list superheroes to serve as this to his nemesis Vandal Savage. In the second season, the team have their first encounter with magic and changes to the timeline that can't be fixed with more time travel. In the third season, historical anachronisms have started appearing everywhere, giving rise to such situations as Caesar at a toga party in Aruba and Helen of Troy upstaging Hedy Lamar's acting career. Finally, Season 4 sees all kinds of magical creatures let loose across history, of which almost nobody on the team has any experience, which results in John Constantine joining the Legends.
  • Finally, there's the matter of Mar Novu, the Monitor. He's introduced in the Elseworlds (2018) event, having decimated Earth-90, with only that Earth's Barry Allen as a survivor; he subsequently begins to cause havoc on Earth-1 with the Book of Destiny and John Deegan. It eventually emerges that he's doing this to prepare the denizens of Earth-1 for an even worse threat: the Anti-Monitor, his double from the antimatter universe. The Anti-Monitor, with help from an unwitting Harrison "Nash" Wells, breaks free and constructs an anti-matter cannon, designed to spread an anti-matter wave across the multiverse. This manifests in red skies across the afflicted Earths, before they're wiped from existence. In turn, Wells becomes the Anti-Monitor's servant Pariah, forced to watch world after world be destroyed. To counter the threat, the Monitor assembles the various heroes with the help of his own ally, Harbinger (Lyla Diggle), and has them fight against the Anti-Monitor's Shadow Demons. Ultimately however, the Anti-Monitor succeeds in wiping both the Monitor and all remaining Earths from existence. It's only through the remaining heroes taking refuge in the Vanishing Point, and Oliver Queen becoming the Spectre, that they're able to deal with him (Oliver ends up rebuilding the multiverse, resulting in Earths 1 and 38, as well as Black Lightning's Earth, being merged into one Earth-Prime). Even then, he's still not down, and they ultimately shrink him down to microscopic size forever.
    • The Crisis itself is this to the various other Earths who didn't know; the opening shows the residents of Earth-9, Earth-66 and Earth-89 reacting to the red skies, while Jefferson Pierce is teleported from his Earth by Pariah just before its' destruction to assist the heroes. Thanks to skipping out on the Elseworlds event, the Legends are also unaware of the Crisis, until Lyla as Harbinger teleports into the bar where Ray and Sara are to recruit them. There's also the matter of Movie-Barry Allen, who encounters his Arrowverse counterpart in the Speed Force, and is not only unaware of the Crisis, but unclear on how he's there in the first place.
    • The tie-in comic shows several other worlds who were unaware of the Crisis until it was too late, including Earth-F, Earth-76 and Earth-N52.
• Babylon 5: Humanity itself turned out to be one on two occasions.
  • In the Dilgar War in the backstory, the eponymous Scary Dogmatic Aliens were easily overpowering the fractious League of Non-Aligned Worlds, until the Earth Alliance, newcomers to the galactic political scene, joined the war on the League's side and helped drive the Dilgar all the way back to their homeworld, where they were rendered extinct when their sun went nova.
  • The Vorlons attempted to use humanity as their catspaws in their Forever War with the Shadows. John Sheridan was entirely uninterested in following their ancient rules and resorted to a nuclear sneak-attack against the Shadow homeworld, upending the conflict and forcing the Shadows and Vorlons to fight each other directly for the first time in many thousands of years, which in turn allowed him to force the Abusive Precursors to make peace and leave the galaxy alone.
• Better Call Saul: When Gus Fring meets Lalo Salamanca, it's clear he was unaware of his existence beforehand, in spite of his obsession with getting revenge on his uncle Hector. He is subsequently taken by surprise by Lalo's sheer competence, calculating nature and relative subtlety in comparison to the rest of his Stupid Evil family and struggles a great deal to neutralize him. This ends up making him extremely paranoid to the point of being terrified for his life after numerous failed attempts. It's notable that after Gus finally manages to defeat Lalo through a lot of luck, no one else in the Cartel ever gave him even close to the same level of difficulty again.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Buffy had Glorificus. Best exemplified by Buffy's expression when told that Glory isn't a demon, but a god.
  • Inverted by Warren Mears. Used to dealing with vampires, demons, and gods, Buffy wasn't prepared to deal with one Ax-Crazy human Mad Scientist.
  • Even before Warren Mears, there was Ted, the titular killer robot from the episode "Ted". Buffy knew how to handle vampires and demons and things that went bump in the night, but a killer robot who pretended to be a regular human was completely alien to her and she had no idea how to deal with him until she learned his secret.
  • Also The Initiative as an organization — science intruding into a fantasy world.
    • Buffy herself turns out to be an Outside Context Problem for The Initiative (they were under the impression the Slayer was just a myth), which is why Walsh tries to have her killed. Tries.
    "If you think that's enough to kill me, you really don't know what a slayer is. Trust me when I say you're gonna find out."
• In Chernobyl, scientist Valery Legasov contextualizes the Chernobyl disaster for bureaucrat Shcherbina by describing it as "something that has never occured on this planet before." For the first time ever, a man-made disaster could have potentially rendered a whole continent uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years.
• Defiance: Season 3 introduces the Omec, a race from the Votanis System that everyone assumed didn't survive the system going nova. A rapacious, predatory species, they were considered demons and boogeymen by the other Votan races, and nobody mourned their apparent extinction. When they show up in Earth orbit with an Arkship of their own, that's actually quite a bit more advanced technologically than the other Votans, nobody takes it well.
• Doctor Who:
  • By the show's basic premise, the Doctor is an Outside Context Hero. The very first episode of the show is about two schoolteachers concerned with the home life of an odd student; they go over to her address and instead find an old-fashioned Police Box with Alien Geometries belonging to a strange old man who turns out to be "not of this Earth". The Genre Shift from a school-based drama to science fantasy is a phenomenal twist and the episode still packs quite a punch today, although anyone who watches it is already spoiled for it. In the Series 5 finale of the new series, a large group of his enemies, none known for working well with others, pool their resources and abilities to trap him in the ultimate prison — as he was known for just "dropping out of the sky and ending your world".
    • Queen Victoria, after an encounter with werewolves and the Doctor, established the Torchwood Institute, recognising the need for the Empire to have some measures in place to respond to Outside Context Problems, such as werewolves — and the Doctor.
  • The villains of "The Celestial Toymaker", "The Dæmons" and "Battlefield" have what appear to be actual magical powers, which stand out even in a science fiction series (even a Science in Genre Only show which uses a lot of Magic from Technology).
  • In "The Ice Warriors" climate change scientists are trying to hold back a glacier, in a way that is clearly business as usual in the setting. Then one of the members finds a mummified body frozen in an ice floe and brings it back for research purposes. It turns out to be a Martian warrior downed in an ancient plane crash and trying to find its allies again. They are dependent on their computer to calculate probabilities and obsessively do what it says — naturally, it has no programming to deal with alien invasions, leaving them high and dry and forcing them to rely on the Doctor, for whom these things are more normal.
  • "The War Games" is mostly a story about aliens kidnapping soldiers from various historical eras and making them fight each other, until (in the eighth episode of ten) the Doctor is forced to summon the Time Lords to imprison the War Chief, an evil Time Lord and get all of the kidnapped soldiers home. The Time Lords arrive and immediately break the plot, with irreversible consequences.
  • Sutekh from "Pyramids of Mars" has such awesome power that, as the Doctor says, that if unleashed, even the Time Lords couldn't stand against him.
  • The Beast from "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit". The Doctor is used to Doing In the Wizard, facing creatures that are just using technology or tricks to make themselves look fearsome. So when he faces something claiming to be from "before time", and the actual Devil, he has no idea what to do.
  • In an entertaining twist on this trope, the Doctor becomes such an out-of-context problem for his enemies that, between Seasons 5 and 7, he becomes very much permanently in-context. The overall storyline spanning three whole seasons involves multiple convoluted plots throughout all of time to get rid of him, planned by a coalition of his worst enemies (accompanied by quite a few monsters-of-the-week as filler). Pretty much every episode, even the typical plot-of-the-week ones, features some clue towards the nature the overarching conspiracy. Every time the Doctor encounters any recurring villain (and, for that matter, quite a few new ones), they seem to have been expecting him. Until he decides he "got too big" and goes up and down time and space erasing all possible record of his existence during Season 7. By Season 8, he's almost entirely unknown again.
  • "Day of the Moon": In 1969, the Silence have their own hypnotic powers recorded and used against them because they don't recognize a 21st century smartphone as a possible video recording device.
  • Spinoff The Sarah Jane Adventures: "Secrets of the Stars" has the cast dealing with an astrologer who can control people with astrology using something called the Ancient Lights, despite it supposedly being impossible — even their supercomputer is unable to deal with it since astrology breaks the laws of physics. Finally they theorise that the Ancient Lights come from a universe that predates ours, one where the laws of physics are different and astrology worked.
    • And then Luke, who wasn't born and therefore has no astrological sign to allow the Ancient Lights to control him, breaks the villain's plan, essentially making him an Outside Context Problem to the Outside Context Problem.
  • Other spinoff Class acquired this problem in its first (and only) season finale, "The Lost": The Governors turn out to work for the Weeping Angels, and are plotting to unleash some sort of Angel god. While Weeping Angels are previously known to Doctor Who fans, not a single one of the protagonists of this show has ever heard of them, and in fact don't yet know about the true threat, much less how to deal with it. Unfortunately, due to the show's cancellation, if this is ever resolved, it probably won't be on TV.
  • "Resolution": The police and military who wind up encountering the villain are not UNIT, and thus unaware that they are dealing with a Dalek. As a result, they either fail to realize it's a threat until too late, or suffer an utter Curb-Stomp Battle when they try to destroy it with conventional weaponry.
• On Elsbeth the title character is this to every killer. Each one of them was ready to take on conventional detectives and might very well have gotten away with it as even veteran cops can miss stuff and would fall for their Frame-Up of an innocent suspect and most just want to close the case as fast as possible and move on. What they never expected was a wildly eccentric lawyer whose quirky mind allows her to latch onto a detail others would dismiss and often befriend them while slowly but surely chipping away at the story until she can prove the killer's guilt.
• The Expanse: The protomolecule is something out of speculative science fiction in a hard sci-fi setting. It doesn't behave by any known laws of physics, is capable of evolving given enough biomass to work with, and seems to have knowledge of technology far beyond humanity given its ability to move an entire asteroid with tremendous speed while generating Artificial Gravity and jamming radar. Holden actually Lampshades this in "The Monster And The Rocket";
  "When the European tall ships first arrived on the American continent, the natives couldn't see them. The sight was so completely outside of their experience, it just couldn't compute. So they didn't see."
• Fringe: Most of the problems the Fringe team face are out of their context, but the shapeshifters, and the improved ones in particular, come right out of the left field for them. But the crown contender is the Invaders, time-travelling cyborgs who want the present day so they can ruin it. The only person who even suspected they were coming was William Bell. And when they do arrive, they quickly curbstomp the entire planet.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Aegon I Targaryen to the seven divided kingdoms he invaded, though not to Houses Tyrell and Tully, whom he elevated to their current ranks.
  • As in the books, the White Walkers: an almost invincible enemy from the periphery of the world, thought to be mythical until they return, who convert those who die fighting them into their own almost invincible soldiers, whose motives for their conquest are not known although they are bent on it all the same.
  • In Seasons 4—6, The High Sparrow. Both Cersei and Olenna are well-versed in dealing with political schemers, who can be either negotiated with, bribed, or threatened. They're genuinely flummoxed in dealing with a genuine zealot, who's happy to put his own life on the line, is completely uninterested in gold or secular power, and is completely unbending in his rules. He promptly arrests the Queen, her brother, and later the Queen Mother for various crimes that would have been ignored by any other leader, and no pleas, offers, or attacks will make him reconsider.
  • Bran becomes this to Littlefinger in Season 7. Littlefinger may be a schemer and manipulator without peer among normal people, but it counts for naught against an omniscient boy who can see through all his lies and knows his true role in betraying Ned and instigating the entire conflict for his own gain. Bran exposes Littlefinger's treachery to Sansa and Arya and the Stark children have him summarily executed in front of all the assembled lords.
• While occasional Grimm episodes deal with truly supernatural creatures, most episodes and seasons revolve around dealing with Wesen, beast-like creatures that live among us and can only be seen by Grimms. Then along comes the sixth and final season, where the Big Bad appears to be the Wesen devil from their version of Hell, who doesn't appear to be able to be harmed by anything, even automatic bursts at full-auto. This Zerstörer ("destroyer" in German) slaughters an entire precinct full of cops, kills Hank, Wu, Eve, Renard, Adalind, Monroe, Rosalee, and Trubel with ease. Fortunately, he can't stand up to four angry Grimms: Nick, Trubel (resurrected by Zerstörer), and the ghosts of Nick's mom and aunt, and his staff turns out to have Time Travel properties, rewinding everything back to before the creature arrived to our world.
  • In a way, Nick is this to the Wesen. Grimms are the boogeymen that all Wesen are taught to fear from birth. With some exceptions, Wesen reaction to realizing Nick is a Grimm is pants-wetting fear.
• Subverted in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981). Arthur Dent's words "I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle" travel through a wormhole to the far reaches of space millions of years in the past to a planet populated by two races, the G'Gugvuntts and the Vl'Hurgs. Unfortunately, this sentence in Vl'Hurg is the most grave insult imaginable and kicks off a war that lasts millions of years. Eventually the two races figure out that the offending words came from Earth and their combined fleets set course for Earth to exact revenge. This doesn't present a threat to Earth because it is on an entirely different scale from the G'gugvntts and Vl'Hurgs's home planet, and both fleets are soon swallowed by a small dog.
• Kamen Rider:
  • Many of the franchise's movies involve the heroes dealing with an antagonist who has little or nothing to do with the threats they normally face, justifying the movie being a standalone work.
  • Kamen Rider Decade is a living version of this trope. Rather than having a proper story and antagonist of his own, his story arcs involve wandering into a story loosely based off one of his predecessor Riders, who are usually struggling until Decade's interference helps them to finally come out on top.
  • Kamen Rider Gaim has an episode promoting the then-airing movie Kikaider REBOOT, in which he teams up with Kikaider to fight his nemesis Hakaider. Gaim also had a crossover event with Ressha Sentai ToQger in which they face a monster from the Underground Empire Badan, who's outside both of their contexts.
  • Kamen Rider Drive has a crossover with Shuriken Sentai Ninninger similar to the Gaim crossover, but with each of their villains teaming up instead, making them each an outside context problem to the other.
  • Kamen Rider Ghost teams up with Dobutsu Sentai Zyuohger in two individual episodes rather than one hour-long special, but with the same basic gimmick as the above.
  • Kamen Rider Zi-O plays this deliberately within itself in the Another Kiva arc, where the usual time travel-based Monster of the Week is interrupted by a space alien appearing out of nowhere and forcing all of the heroes and villains to drop what they're doing and team up in order to beat him. This is to serve as a reference to Kamen Rider Kiva itself, which infamously ends with alien vampires from the future arriving without explanation.
• The last half of Season 2 of Once Upon a Time is shown to be controlled, at least in part, by Peter Pan. While people on both sides of the fourth wall had probably been expecting him since Captain Hook showed up, it's doubtful they thought it'd be as a villain. The first hint we see of him is his disembodied shadow coming to take lost and forgotten boys to Neverland, and even when he is finally shown in person, he's still different from anything they've experienced before. He controls Neverland completely, he can out-gambit Rumpelstiltskin, manipulate people without trying, and even those who have faced him before are unsure how to defeat him, or even if he can be. The most startling thing about him is that he has ties to the entire main cast — he's Rumpel's father, making him Neal's grandfather and Henry's great-grandfather — and no one had any inkling of the possibility of his interference.
  • The main villains in the latter half of Season 2 are two humans from The Land Without Magic and not fairy tale or literature characters (although they are allied with Peter Pan).
• In Season 4 of Person of Interest, criminal masterminds Dominic and Elias struggle for control of organised crime in New York, only to be gunned down in the Season Finale thanks to the machinations of an Artificial Intelligence whose existence they're not even aware of.
• Power Rangers:
  • Power Rangers Time Force: The monsters of the week for this season are typically either Mutants working for Ransik or robots created by Frax. However, the episode "Beware the Knight" has the Rangers fighting an evil Black Knight who seeks to acquire a great power source. No explanation is given about who this Black Knight is and where he came from and the episode is really only an excuse so the Red Ranger can get his own Super Mode.
  • Power Rangers Lost Galaxy: The main threat are the villainous forces led by Scorpius and later Trakeena. However, toward the end of the season, the Rangers end up in the titular Lost Galaxy, where they come into conflict with the Space Pirate Captain Mutiny who serves as a major antagonist for seven episodes before being killed off.
  • Power Rangers Zeo has Rita and Zedd from the previous seasons celebrating how they just blew up the Rangers' base, when the Machine Empire randomly comes along and decides to invade Earth, too. Though Rita and Zedd are Put on a Bus for much of the season, the Rangers' retrieval of the Zeo Crystal gives them new powers and weaponry to stop the Machine Empire's plans. Somewhat lampshaded — once they're settled in at their new base beneath the old one, the Rangers immediately start bombarding Zordon and Alpha with questions, causing Alpha to have a nervous breakdown.
• Primeval: Throughout Series 1, the team have to deal with time portals opening anreleasing creatures from the past into the present. Then comes the finale where another anomaly opens, but the creature it releases is from the future, meaning that they have literally no idea what it could be. The potential dangers it could cause are enough that Cutter decides that the best option is to just kill the thing before it can alter the timeline by accident. This carries forward to later series, where future creatures are the only ones with a consistent kill on sight policy due to how impossible they are to predict.
• Stargate SG-1 has this in spades.
  • In the movie, modern-day humans found themselves fighting an alien, Ra, who commanded soldiers wielding Energy Weapons, and had access not only to powerful healing technologies but also fighters capable of spaceflight. It took a nuclear warhead to bring down Ra's spaceship and even then it was very close.
  • Once the series itself begins, the Goa'uld Empire becomes this. The Tau'ri (Earth humans) thought that Ra was the Last of His Kind and that they'd eliminated any threat to Earth when they took him out. Then a year later his brother Apophis shows up, to say nothing of the other System Lords, who rule over a galaxy-spanning empire and have legions of loyal Jaffa at their command and hundreds of Ha'tak motherships, each of which can hold dozens of Death Gliders. The first season is spent showing just how outgunned humanity are in that they have to rely on luck and ingenuity just to stop two motherships from conquering all of Earth.
  • The Replicators, an extragalactic, mechanical Horde of Alien Locusts, become the first major escalation after the Goa'uld. They consume anything they touch and multiply exponentially fast, and are the single biggest threat against the Asgard, the most powerful allies that the Tau'ri can rely on. It's shown that even if you destroy the vast majority of a horde of Replicators, if even one bug survives it can consume and multiply enough to destroy a planet all by itself. Although SG-1 have a fair amount of success due to a Replicator's inability to resist the kinetic impact of a speeding bullet or the explosive force of C4, the Goa'uld have significantly more trouble dealing with them.
  • Anubis, whom the System Lords thought had died eons ago after his banishment. Turns out he was Not Quite Dead, and during his banishment had become a half-Ascended being. His return in Season 5 forces both the System Lords and the Earth/Tok'ra/Free Jaffa alliance to shift their priorities from each other to the new enemy, who was not only lethally competent but had access to technologies that rivaled even the Asgard. In the end it took the intervention of another Ascended being to stop him for good.
  • The Ori in the last two seasons. For nearly a decade, Ascended beings have been built up as the most powerful entities in the setting, having existed for millions of years when the Ancients (the race who built the Stargates) reached the end of their evolutionary line. Enter an entire other galaxy of humans, the original galaxy that the Ancients hailed from, ruled by Ascended beings who draw their power from those who worship them as gods. While the Goa'uld could pretend at being gods by utilizing advanced technology to trick primitive peoples, the Ori, by almost any definition, were gods, and were able to bring their full might of their armies upon the Milky Way, completely outclassing almost any technology that the Milky Way had access to
  • And, of course, the Tau'ri are this to the System Lords. For 5,000 years, the Goa'uld had a nice little system set up where they could squabble with one another, had a treaty with the Asgard to keep them off their backs (though this was more because the Asgard were busy keeping the aforementioned Replicators contained, and didn't have the resources to just wipe the Goa'uld off the map already), and run their own little kingdoms as they wanted. Then a small group of primitives from a long-forgotten world show up, kill Ra, and proceed to kick their asses so hard that an empire that survived for millennia falls in under a decade. What turned the trick here was that while the Goa'uld were smart enough to conquer or suppress planets that could eventually grow to oppose them (or at least negotiate treaties with those of equal power), the Tau'ri had spent millennia cut off from the gate network, growing in size and power such that their one planet had the resources of several industrialized nations and a population of billions, and had learned ways of fighting wars that didn't rely solely on intimidation through superior technology.
• Star Trek seldom has these, but when they do, they're doozies:
  • Star Trek: The Original Series gives us "The Doomsday Machine," and the titular machine in question is this gigantic, implacable monstrosity floating through space that's big enough to eat entire planets, for fuel. How could anyone in Starfleet even think to prepare for something of this magnitude? Countless lives have already been lost by the time we even find this thing, including the entire crew of one Commodore Decker, who, overwhelmed with trauma, takes over the Enterprise and tries one more time to bring a fight to this monster. Decker's clearly in denial — no one starship could possibly step to this thing, and the whole crew knows it, even as they're stuck carrying out Decker's orders.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: Judging Picard — and by extension, all of Humanity — to have grown overconfident and complacent, Q engineers such a situation. He transports the Enterprise several thousand light years from home, and right in the path of the Borg. The Borg are so powerful and so alien that the crew find they can do nothing against them. Not even escape. It's only through Q's intervention that they even survive. This was retconned later into Q averting this trope; the Borg were already on their way (making use of a Schrödinger's Gun from the first season of outposts mysteriously disappearing) and this engineered encounter gave them enough of a warning to survive.
  • Q himself is something of an Outside Context Problem — a problem that everyone he encounters wishes would just go away.
  • And from the Borg's perspective, there's Species 8472 from Star Trek: Voyager. They're the first species that the Borg can't assimilate, and one of their bioships can destroy 15 cubes.
  • Another example from VOY was Annorax and his quest to restore the Krenim — and more importantly, his deceased wife — from "Year of Hell". At first, the Voyager crew have no clue why these temporal shockwaves are happening, nor are they remembering the effects altering the timeline. Then they create temporal shielding... but that just ends up attracting Annorax's attention.
  • Getting back to Next Generation: In Season 3, there's an episode called "The Hunted" that features Roga Danar, one of numerous former soldiers from the planet Angosia, who have been enhanced with superhuman abilities in order to fight their wars. Unfortunately, they become renegades, and even prisoners, afterward, when there's no place in society for them. When the Enterprise crew are forced to deal with a rogue Danar, they find themselves completely unprepared for someone who can No-Sell phaser blasts, block their own life signs from scanners, and — get this — resist the transporter beam. He's basically John Rambo as a superpowered alien.
  • Season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery is all about this trope, as the Federation (and our entire galaxy) find themselves facing a ginormous and destructive anomaly so massively outside their scope of technology (even a thousand years into the future of the original series) that it takes almost the entire season just to figure out its origin — an extragalactic species utterly unlike any race the Federation has encountered.
  • In Season 3 of Star Trek: Enterprise, the Enterprise is sent into a region of space known as The Expanse to destroy a superweapon being developed by the Xindi. The entire region is filled with subspace anomalies that can tear an unsuspecting ship to pieces and are completely undetectable by standard equipment. Fully one third of the season is focused on the crew learning how to deal with these anomalies so they can safely navigate the region and get on with their primary mission.
  • The Federation becomes an Outside Context Problem for the Borg in kind; through the successive efforts of a future Admiral Janeway in the VOY series finale dealing catastrophic galaxy-wide damage to the Collective's integrity, and Picard and company finishing off the remnants in the series finale of his own titular series. "Resistance is Futile" is their demoralizing catchphrase, which they have proven to be horrifyingly accurate throughout the Delta Quadrant... and yet the persistent resistance of Picard, Janeway, and their respective crews ended up being the catalyst of the entire Collective's demise.
• Supernatural:
  • Several episodes deal with crazy humans, leaving Dean bewildered. He even lampshades in the first episode with one of these villains that he can understand all sorts of supernatural things, like ghosts, vampires, demons, etc. It's humans he has trouble dealing with. "Demons I get. Humans are just crazy."
  • Ironically, the first time Sam and Dean actually fought a demon in "Phantom Traveler", it was portrayed in this manner, being vastly more powerful than anything they'd faced until that point.
  • Angels, especially Archangels, also qualify as this when first introduced. Angels hadn't been on Earth for millennia at the start of the series, so almost no human knew how to fight them when they tried to bring about the Apocalypse. As more and more angel-killing weapons are introduced, and the Archangels are all killed off, they lose this status. Lucifer and Michael in particular, being immune to typical angel-killing weapons like angel blades, the Colt, and holy fire, take this to the next level.
  • Alphas, similarly, were thought by many hunters to be myths before they appeared. They're hard to fight as they are immune to the typical weaknesses of their species. Crowley, however, quickly discovers that iridium can hurt them.
  • Eve, the mother of all monsters, appears as a Disc-One Final Boss in Season 6. Not only is she herself an example, again not having been on Earth for millennia, but she is made even more so by the fact that she has the ability to make new Outside-Context Villains, meaning that the season has a lot of them.
  • The end of the season has yet another one, with Castiel, having become a Physical God after absorbing the souls of Purgatory. The Winchesters are forced to bind Death himself in order to have a chance against him.
  • S7 has yet another with the Leviathans, beings locked in Purgatory by God at the beginning of time to stop them from killing everything else. They can't be killed by anything except other Leviathans and "the bone of a righteous mortal cloaked in the three bloods of the fallen" (the blood of a fallen angel, the blood of the king of demons, and the blood of an Alpha).
  • Season 11 introduces Amara, who is ultimately revealed to be God's sister. Given her age and power level, it's a while before anyone really has any idea of how to deal with her.
• Short-lived series Threshold was premised on the US government turning to the plans of the one person for whom alien invasion was not an Outside Context Problem. Many of the complications with her plans come from either the aliens being more insidious than she'd anticipated, or resistance and disbelief from everyone else for whom the aliens are completely outside their context.
• Tokusou Exceedraft typically deals with soft science-fiction plots involving criminals who use futuristic technology to commit various crimes. So who's the final Big Bad they face? Satan.
• In Ultraseven X, most aliens seem considerably outclassed by the title hero. It turns out Ultraseven is the Showa timeline Ultraseven who learned of the Graykess when they attempted to invade his universe and crossed over only to fail miserably. Ultras don't exist in that universe whereas in his original timeline an Ultra showing up to stop an Alien Invasion amounts to 'oh no! It's the cops!' So even the main villains have little ability to deal with him at his full power.
• The Walking Dead (2010):
  • Ezekiel, the leader of the Kingdom, keeps a pet tiger named Shiva; he was a former zookeeper who rescued her when she was injured in her exhibit, which earned her Undying Loyalty, and later liberated her from the zoo when society collapsed. She is understandably rather out-of-place in a Zombie Apocalypse, and every survivor who meets her doesn't quite know what to make of her. This comes in very handy when the Kingdom fights back against the Saviors at the end of Season 7; she's the first one to jump in, and her presence distracts everyone long enough for the Kingdom's forces to come in.
  • In Season 9, the members of the Coalition are caught off guard by the existence of the Whisperers, a cult who wear masks made from the skins of dead humans, allowing them to disguise themselves as walkers and blend into the post-apocalyptic background. While the protagonists have faced plenty of human antagonists before this, this utterly bizarre tactic allows the Whisperers to get the drop on otherwise competent fighters who aren't expecting quick and armed opponents.
  • The final episodes of Season 11 feature the emergence of a variant breed of walkers who retain rudimentary human intelligence, being capable of things that nullify the simple techniques that all survivors have relied on for over a decade to keep the walkers at bay — such as opening doors, climbing up ladders or over barricades, or even using blunt objects as weapons. This threat is best demonstrated in the Grand Finale, when a horde of variants is able to get over the Commonwealth's walls, quickly overwhelming the Commonwealth Army, which was utterly unprepared for an enemy actually capable of getting past their defenses in large numbers.
• Zero Zero Zero: As drug brokers, the Lynwoods are comfortable dealing with organized crime figures of all stripes. When a series of unexpected circumstances force them to bus their latest shipment through North Africa, however, they run afoul of jihadists and have no idea what to do.

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