Person Of Mass Destruction / Live-Action TV

People of Mass Destruction in live-action TV.

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• In Babylon 5, Vorlons used telepaths for their war with the Shadows. Most telepaths were of "regular" "read thoughts, cause headache" kind, and their only combat use was to disrupt the psychic link Shadow battleships had with their pilots. However, (at least) one telepath, Lyta Alexander, was upgraded beyond all known levels and became the equivalent of a Doomsday Device. (Un)fortunately, we never learn what exactly they were capable of.
• Willow of Buffy the Vampire Slayer had become this by the end of Season 6. In Season 7, she gets stronger and has better control.
• Doctor Who: The Doctor once killed his entire race. Although, unknown to the Doctor himself, that later turns out not to be true.
  • It's important to consider that the Doctor not only has the technological knowledge of the Time Lords, but also constant access to the heart of the TARDIS, which would make him a Physical God and Reality Warper, and which he probably could use even more effectively than Rose/Bad Wolf, thanks to his advanced understanding of physics. And using it would only cost him a regeneration, not result in any kind of permanent damage. The only reason he doesn't is that he doesn't trust his own morals.
    The Doctor: No one is ever meant to have that power. If a Time Lord did that, he'd become a god, a vengeful god.
  • In Series 9, a Story Arc teases the arrival of the Hybrid, a creature of Gallifreyan prophecy, said to be the greatest warrior ever known. All prophecies state it will be the ruin of a planet, that it will "burn a billion billion hearts to heal its own". The season's Final Boss is willing to torture the Doctor for as long as it takes to learn its identity. In the end, it turns out to be possibly nonexistent; several candidates are suggested, but none are confirmed. Moreover, the most likely candidate, in a Prophecy Twist, is the Doctor himself, who temporarily becomes a sympathetic villain thanks to being Driven to Madness by said torture and the death of his beloved companion Clara and risks the universe's safety by trying to undo said death.
  • Of course, the fascinating thing about the Doctor is that unlike just about everyone on these pages, he has almost no super-powers. He's just that good of a Guile Hero.
• Crichton of Farscape, for whom the least qualification is strapping himself to a nuclear bomb with a few dozen kinds of dead-man switches in order to crash a peace summit between two galactic superpowers. But his wormhole knowledge is so much worse for its ability to create wormhole weapons. When it's first seen unlocked, he helps design and build a "displacement engine" which uses a wormhole to siphon matter out of a star and vaporize a Scarran Dreadnought—usually considered to be almost unkillable—in a matter of seconds. Later on in the Peacekeeper Wars miniseries he unleashes a worse weapon on the Scarran and Peacekeeper fleets to force them to the table and prove that wormhole weapons are too terrible to ever be used. The weapon? A rapidly expanding black hole, which eats most of the fleets, the planet they're orbiting, and if not stopped would possibly destroy the galaxy.
• Game of Thrones: Dragonriders of House Targaryen are mostly ordinary human beings, but put them on a dragon and they can destroy cities, as a single blast of dragonfire can shatter stone just as easily as it immolates people. Aegon the Conqueror earned his name this way, and Daenerys Targaryen incites the destruction of cities even before her dragons are fully grown. After her dragons are grown, particularly Drogon, she becomes this trope fully, particularly when she goes Jumping Off the Slippery Slope in the final two episodes.
• Heroes featured exactly one of these per season:
  • Ted Sprague from Season 1 was the posthuman everyone and their mother was worried about, as his power was a nuclear-based Walking Wasteland ability. Despite the fears that he'd use those powers to irradiate New York, as it turned out it wasn't Ted they had to worry about abusing this ability...
  • Maya Herrera of Season 2 was even worse in this regard, as her power combined the Walking Wasteland trope with Plaguemaster. This was bad enough on its own, but worse because Maya had Power Incontinence and would start emitting her deadly plague of black tears whenever she got emotional (which was kind of often). She at least had a brother who acted as the opposite half of Sibling Yin-Yang and could hoover up her anthrax tears on command, but unfortunately Sylar killed him off to have Maya all to himself.
  • Arthur Petrelli of Season 3 was the next step up on the Sorting Algorithm of Evil, as he had both of the above posthuman abilities, stolen from Maya and his own son Peter respectively. Fortunately for the world he never got to do anything with them before Sylar killed him.
  • And rounding out the Persons of Mass Destruction in Heroes was Season 4's Samuel Sullivan, who was by far the most extreme example. By itself his power was simply Dishing Out Dirt, but unlike the above PoMDs his ability got stronger in the presence of other evolved humans. At its strongest his power was great enough to literally split the world in two, which was the token Bad Future of the season the heroes were trying to avert.
• The Kamen Rider franchise contains several individuals who could be this. One of the most notable ones is Kamen Rider Kuuga, who actually viewed his growing powers with some worry. During the mid-point of the series when he was dealing with a power up to his basic forms, he unleashed his newly upgraded super move on a monster. It created a devastating explosion roughly two miles in diameter. After that, Kuuga had to work with police to get any monster he needed to unleash that move on to isolated areas so as not to hurt anyone. The truly scary part? He gets at least two more upgrades before the series is done, with exponential rises in power. It was theorized by some that without the extreme self control Kuuga exercised, he could have devastated the entire world.
  • Kamen Rider Gaim ultimately becomes a Physical God in control over Helheim, a parasitic alien dimension of plant lifeforms that have in the past completely decimated other planets. However, Kouta Kazuraba is so selfless and heroic that he just takes the potentially world-destroying plantlife away from Earth to give it a new home planet that will prevent the cycle of destruction from recurring.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In WandaVision, Wanda's powers are upgraded to full Physical God levels. She takes over an entire town, mind-controlling everyone and altering reality to fit her fantasy world. One of the most powerful witches in the world is utterly gobsmacked by how powerful she is, and struggles to figure out how she's doing everything. Wanda, however, is only doing things subconsciously, and her conscious control is much more limited. Agatha eventually determines that Wanda is the Scarlet Witch, the most powerful witch of all time, prophecized to bring about the end of the world. Wanda accepts this mantle, gains full control over her powers, and undoes as much of the damage she did over the series as she can. At the very end, she is shown to be reading and studying in order to go from Unskilled, but Strong to Strong and Skilled. Unfortunately, the book she's reading from is the Darkhold.
    Agatha: You have no idea what you've unleashed.
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. introduces Daisy Johnson, also known as Quake. She can produce violent tremors, which can be used as a sort of telekinetic push, or shatter someone's spine, or bring down a building. A Kree who has studied the Inhuman project theorizes that she might be able to affect entire continents, and in one Bad Future she seemingly destroyed the Earth.
  • Also from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., there is Alveus, more commonly known as Hive. For starters, it is one of the Inhuman Prototypes created directly by the Kree, rather than having Inhuman DNA being passed down through the generations, like Quake. It possesses corpses, rendering them superhumanly strong and durable with a massive Healing Factor. It can also turn its host's flesh into sand-like spores that it can use to devour any living thing it chooses, as well as infect other Inhumans to add to the Hive Mind, allowing it to manipulate them into following its orders. From what we see, Hive is strong enough to withstand electrocution, having multiple bone fractures, being shot repeatedly, and being able to recover from Lash's energy blasts, which have been shown to instantly kill anyone else. Its weakness is fire, which is a moot point since it can just abandon the burnt body and salvage a new one. It is also susceptible to mental attacks, which disorient and confuse it due to its Mind Hive — even then, it recovers over a few hours. When Hive is first encountered, it is on an alien world that has been turned into a barren desert with a near-perpetual sandstorm. Hive is quite happy to explain to people that there used to be a prospering civilization that spanned the entire planet — until Hive ate everyone.
• The titular character of Merlin (2008). He is the most powerful sorcerer on Earth. He can easily take out towns and cities with the wave of his hand. He can also kill groups of people and take out armies all at once, like what was seen in the Series Finale when Merlin took out the entire Saxon army, plus Morgana, with the wave of his hand.
• Shadow and Bone has several: The Black Heretic was a shadow summoner who created the Shadow Fold and the monstrous vulcra inside it, hundreds of years prior to the start of the show; General Kirigan is a shadow summoner who is greatly feared by Ravka's enemies and is later revealed to be the Black Heretic himself; his mother Baghra is implied to have taught him nearly everything he knows (save for the merzost that allowed him to create the Fold); and Alina Starkov is the mythical Sun Summoner, who is capable of destroying the Fold and who can summon immense amounts of light. Many of the other Summoners may count as well- with Inferni being able to summon a lot of fire, Tidemakers able to drown people on dry land, and Squallers able to summon powerful gusts of wind, they could definitely cause a lot of damage. Heartrenders also prove capable of doing a great deal of damage to the human body, and many of the more skilled ones can attack multiple people at once.
• Most of Smallville's villains fell just below this threshold, with two notable exceptions: Doomsday a.k.a. Davis Bloome from Season 8 and Darkseid from Season 10. The former is an Ultimate Life Form created by the Kryptonian renegades Zod and Faora the express purpose of wiping out all life on Earth, while the latter is identified by Jor-El as the personification of evil in the Smallville universe. Both cause catastrophic property damage over the course of their screen time.
• The Enterprise meets one in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Survivors". Kevin Uxbridge appears to be an eighty-five-year-old human male but is actually a Douwd who obliterated the entire Husnock species in retaliation for his human wife's death during their attack on his home. In his grief, he exiled himself to live alone on the dead world with a facsimile of his dead wife.
  • Technically, most non-corporeal beings in Star Trek could count, the Q being the most obvious example, being, effectively, gods from a human standpoint.
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • Icheb of the episode "Child's Play" has been genetically engineered to pass on an infection that will destroy Borg cubes when he is assimilated (this causes problems when Voyager returns the youth to what they assume will be his doting parents). When you think that the average cube has a crew of tens of thousands of drones and can destroy a Federation battlefleet, this is pretty damned impressive.
  • Kes becomes one after being in space turns her Psychic Powers up to eleven.
  • One wonders if Icheb is the inspiration for Future Janeway's Batman Gambit in the Grand Finale "Endgame". Future Janeway jumps to the past, taking with her one very nasty anti-Borg bug. She suckers the Borg Queen into assimilating her... while she has the bug in her. Future Janeway thus actually goes one-up on Icheb, killing the Borg Queen, demolishing her Unimatrix, and basically crippling the entire Borg Collective, one of the most fearsome forces in the entire galaxy. Now that's mass destruction!
• In Supernatural, Castiel briefly becomes one at the end of Season 6. While he was already quite a powerful supernatural being to start with, he upgraded himself with what essentially amounts to a supernatural nuclear reactor: 40,000,000 souls from a trans-dimensional monster afterlife. He goes mad with power and goes around killing hundreds if not thousands of people around the globe and showing his godly 'benevolence' by performing miracles. It's repeatedly mentioned that he's unstable and might take a large part of the planet with him when he reaches critical point. He's eventually compelled to give up his powers because he's housing far meaner beasties inside him.
  • Sam and Dean Winchester, together and apart. Both were raised as tyke bombs, and genetically engineered by Heaven to be the perfect host for Lucifer and Michael respectively, meaning they were always meant to fight and kill each other with the fate of the planet in the balance and it gets worse from there...
    • Sam was fed demon blood as a baby, which ramped up his natural telekinetic gifts. Every woman he's ever loved dies which makes him rely on his brother more and more; finds out his brother sold his soul to keep him alive so embarks on an insane quest to keep his brother from dying; falls for a demon who lies to him that feeding on demon blood will ramp up his powers enough to save his brother; epically fails to save his brother because it turns out it was all a Xanatos gambit to give him enough juice to open the gates of hell; spends the next year trying to fix his mistake and dies closing them; came back wrong; got better but has been known to go off the deep end where his brother is concerned which is a problem because as of Season 9...
    • Dean was always meant to house the archangel Michael, which means that he physically and emotionally had to be able to deal with being the human embodiment of the highest of the angels. To get there meant being raised as a warrior; losing everyone he cares about; dying multiple times; going to hell; surviving hell for 40 years; breaking the first seal by torturing people in hell after refusing for the first 30 years, and only after continuously being tortured himself; being raised from the dead by angels; taking on the Mark of Cain, yes THAT Cain; and finally refusing to allow the Mark to make him a killing machine and allowing himself to be die, knowing he saved the world and the only family he has left are safe, only to be brought back from the dead because the Mark 'wouldn't let him go'. Now? He's the First Knight of Hell, the demon that all other demons fear and only slightly less powerful than Lucifer himself. As of Season 10, it's heavily implied that Dean may in fact be immortal due to having the Mark and being forced to kill it's original bearer Cain, which means that any hope of removing the Mark and returning it to its rightful owner is gone. Dean is Cain for all intents and purposes with everything that implies. Until he kills Death itself (to save his brother: see a pattern here with these guys?), and removing the Mark unleashes a being that is basically the embodiment of the negation of the entire Universe. Awesome.
• The Umbrella Academy (2019): Allison is able to blow up people's heads. Ben can summon monstrous tentacles from his stomach. And Vanya has immense telekinetic powers (labeled as cataclysmic telekinesis) that lead to the end of the world, several times, as well as her slaughtering large numbers of the FBI in season two (without really trying!) and taking out the entire Commission (save for the Handler and Lila). There's also Lila herself, who can mimic any power used against her, including Allison's Rumors and Vanya's world-ending telekinesis.
• The Wheel of Time (2021): Lanfear gives Rand aid when he's imprisoned in Cairhien with the most destructive means possible. She marches through the Foregate, casting fireballs that set fires everywhere nearby and kills probably dozens then easily destroys the gate of the Sun Palace where he's held. Lanfear leaves a huge swath of destruction in her wake.
• The Witcher (2019): Mages in the series are shown to be capable of taking on many muggle soldiers together and can do magic causing explosions. They can still be overwhelmed by numbers though, especially when as seen in the Battle of Sodden Hill when they go outside the protection of the castle walls to fight, rather than cast spells from behind it against attackers.

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