Pyrrhic Victory / Live-Action TV

Pyrrhic Victories in live-action TV.

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• 24 excels at this.
  • America always wins but at the cost of many lives and politically, nothing ever changes; another group of terrorists will just show up in the next season. Living in the world of 24 just sucks.
  • In season 8, the terrorists execute President Hassan but they are all killed. This sets up the final act ending with Kamistan becoming an enemy of the West.
• Lampshaded by Billy Crystal during the 64th Academy Awards when he quipped that Orion Pictures, the studio which released The Silence of the Lambs, "can't afford to have another hit!" For context: Dances with Wolves, an Orion release, won Best Picture the previous year. However, the studio was bankrupt at the time. The Silence of the Lambs ended up winning Best Picture, giving Orion two Best Picture honors in a row. This proved so ruinously expensive for Orion that even by the time they reemerged from bankruptcy, the studio would go out of business. ^note at least until the brand was relaunched in 2013.
• At the end of American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson, Simpson manages to get acquitted thanks to a combination of a fiendishly clever defense team, a string of poor decisions by the prosecutors, and one of the officers pulling a last-minute Fifth Amendment plea to avoid being cross-examined. He is technically a free man, but half of Los Angeles (including most of his white neighbors) now hates his guts, his former in-laws are challenging him for custody of his younger children, and Robert Kardashian, one of his few real friends, has realized that Simpson used him and never wants to see him again. And of course, his victory would prove to be short-lived; he ended up being sued into oblivion by the Goldman family.
• The Battle of Witchhead in Andromeda turned into this for the Nietzscheans, although they arrived at the battle preparing to ambush a fleet of 100 High Guard ships with an armada of 1500, which would've been a Curb-Stomp Battle. Then Hunt (AKA the Angel of Death) shows up and wipes out 1000 ships, damaging the rest, and sewing disarray among the Nietzchean ranks. The High Guard fleet shows up shortly after and is still wiped out, but the Nietzscheans are left with hardly anything themselves. In fact, the ruling Drago-Kazov Pride was supposed to form the dynasty for the new Nietzschean Empire, but their losses mean that they no longer have the power to unite the warring prides, resulting in a 300-year power vacuum.
  • Interestingly, the pride that turned on the Drago-Kazov and prevented them from forming an empire ends up allying with Hunt 300 years later, as they have been mortal enemies with the Drago-Kazov since then.
• In the series finale of Angel the main cast has successfully set back Wolfram and Hart's plans for the apocalypse by at least several years. The cost is the loss of their control over the firm's earthly assets, the death of two major characters, abandonment of a third, severe wounding of a fourth, and a textbook Bolivian Army Ending. And despite all of that, they decide to make their end memorable.
  • In the episode “Destiny” Spike wins the fight against Angel. However, the episode makes it BLATANTLY clear that the fight was in no way, shape, or form a cakewalk for Spike. He was up against an older vampire (who was not on his A game) who was still legendary for his martial prowess. By the end of the fight, Spike is not much better off looking than Angel (both are bruised, battered, and bloodied). It’s telling that after the fight Spike (someone known for his bragging) is clearly battered and is actually very humbled. Gunn himself put it best to Angel “looks like you gave as good as you got”. To cap it all off, the fight was all to obtain a MacGuffin that wasn't even real.
• Another Life (2019): Killing the alien virus by exposing the infected crew to a nearby star's gamma radiation turns out to be this. Everyone will live, but everyone's now sterile and will never be able to have children. Keep in mind that with the exception of Niko, who already has a daughter, everyone aboard the Savare is in their mid-twenties, and several of these characters explicitly mentioned wanting to have lots of kids. August, however, ends up pregnant anyway, thanks to she and one among her two partners beating the odds.
• Arrow: Malcolm Merlyn's life post-Season One. Sure, he destroyed (half) the Glades like he wanted to, but the plan killed his son and ruined his reputation thanks to Moira outing him, along with the wrath of the then-Ra's al Ghul, his former master. His attempts to escape retribution from the League of Assassins goes very much the same way — he manages to get off their shit list and even becomes Ra's al Ghul for a time, but it eventually costs him his daughter's love, the League itself, and one of his hands. By the time the Legion of Doom goes to recruit him, he's become a Jaded Washout, little more than a thug desperate for his Glory Days. He finally meets his end on Lian Yu when Oliver recruits him to help save his friends (including Merlyn's daughter Thea) from Prometheus. Thea ends up stepping on a land mine, and Merlyn takes her place to save her life, before stepping off just as Digger Harkness and a few mooks come close.
• Londo Mollari on Babylon 5 had a few of these.
  • In the third season, Londo collaborates with G'Kar to assassinate the villainous Lord Refa, which ultimately removes the only moderating influence on an even worse leader, the insane Emperor Cartagia.
  • And then in the fourth season, Londo and Vir kill off Cartagia and Morden and blow up all the Shadow ships stationed on Centauri Prime, finally freeing the planet from the Shadows' influence... but this causes the Drahk, who were servants of the Shadows, to seek revenge in the final season. The manipulations of the Drakh lead to Centauri Prime's isolation from the rest of the galaxy, the firebombing of its cities, and just general devastation of the whole planet. And not only does Londo have to watch all this unfold, but he also gets possessed by a Body Snatcher — and he has to live with all this for the rest of his life. For Londo, who intensely loved his world and was fiercely proud of it, this is a hellish fate.
• During the evacuation of New Caprica in Battlestar Galactica, the Galactica and most of the civilian ships manage to escape the planet... at the cost of massive damage to Galactica and the loss of the newer, higher-tech, and more advanced battlestar Pegasus, which was capable of building Viper fighters that the human fleet desperately needs. Nice job breaking it, Lee.
• Breaking Bad:
  • Walter White manages to slip the law, his competitors and former allies in the drug trade. Each time he does, it ruins the lives of those around him and costs him a little more of his soul. By the end of the series, he finally secures millions of dollars for his children and dies on his own terms. In the process, among other tragedies, his brother-in-law is murdered, his partner is almost psychologically destroyed, his wife and son despise him, dozens of people of varying levels of innocence are killed (including two children), he indirectly causes a plane crash, and his criminal life becomes national news.
  • Jesse Pinkman initially agreed to partner up with Walt to earn a lot of money, but while he does end up getting a massive amount of cash, far more than he could ever use in his lifetime, the months of physical and psychological torture he went through to get it, including the death of his girlfriend, countless people getting hurt or killed in front of him, including multiple children, having to murder people to survive, and getting continuously belittled and manipulated by Walt, makes him hate looking at the cash, never mind spend it. Eventually, he's tossing bundles of cash at strangers out of his car window just to be rid of it.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Season 2 ended with Buffy killing Angel to save the world, right after his soul was already restored. That put together a combination of Buffy's mother rejecting her, getting expelled from school, and Kendra's death getting pinned on her caused an emotionally shattered Buffy to run away to Los Angeles. Fortunately, she gets over enough of her grief to return home and face her family and friends early in the following season.
  • Season 5 also ends on this, as Buffy manages to save her sister, friends, and the rest of the world from destruction by a demonic portal, but is forced to jump into the portal to close it, sacrificing her life in the process, and leaving her friends and family mourning her loss. Fortunately, thanks to Willow in the following season, the Slayer eventually returns to fight another day.
• Burn Notice:
  • Season 2: Michael sticks it to Management and loses the Burned Spies Organization's "protection" so his cover is blown and his old enemies will probably be gunning for him. He's also stuck in the middle of the ocean and has to swim back to Miami.
  • Season 3: Michael defeats Simon and saves Management, but he is captured and sent to a secret prison.
  • Season 5: Michael saves a team of spies from getting burned, but Fiona turns herself in to the police for the accidental British embassy bombing so she won't be used as leverage against Michael anymore.
  • Season 6: Michael gets off the blacklist, but his family and friends are disappointed.
• Charmed (1998): In the Season 3 finale, the evil forces managed to kill Prue, dismantling the Power of 3 in the process. This will ensure the victory of the evil side, if the Halliwell sisters's mother illicit romance with her whitelight doesn't just provide the Power of 3 with another sister, to replace Prue's role.
• Chernobyl: The reactor is finally contained, no longer spilling out radiation over the whole of Eastern Europe. All it takes is dooming thousands of workers, miners, and conscripted soldiers to be killed by Acute Radiation Syndrome or with eventual cancer and other radiation-induced illness. Even if they don't, they become as emotionally scarred as if they had gone to war. Both Legasov and Shcherbina expect to die within five years for their tireless efforts to manage the disaster (Legasov is Driven to Suicide before then, and Shcherbina passes away in 1990). Additionally, the cost—in money and resources—of mitigation, containment, and evacuation are so astronomical that Gorbachev later credited the fall of the Soviet Union to the Chernobyl disaster.
• The Chinese Paladin (Xian Jian Qi Xia Zhuan) TV Series definitely qualifies here, as the main character, Li Xiaoyao, literally loses everyone dear to himself except his newborn daughter a couple of scenes right after the "final battle."
• Many of the murders in Cold Case are this. The killer escapes for years or even decades but time and circumstance change and the murder they committed becomes a senseless act which they still must pay for.
• Delete: Daniel tries to tell the AI letting the US destroy technology using EMP blasts from detonating nukes would be this since it would get left holed up in a few shielded servers. It doesn't care, however.
• Daredevil (2015):
  • The fate of District Attorney Samantha Reyes in season 2. She tries to get Frank Castle either killed or in jail for life to cover up the fact she was indirectly responsible of his family's death with her carelessness because it would ruin her career. She does succeed in having him sent to jail and saving her job... only for Wilson Fisk to arrange for Castle to escape a few days later, reducing her to a panicked wreck under the belief he will come for her. And just to make sure saving her career was pointless, she is machine-gunned to death right in front of Matt, Foggy, Karen, and Blake Tower right after deciding to come clean (albeit not by Castle.)
  • Season 3 sees Wilson Fisk go to great lengths to get his beloved Vanessa Marianna back. Once she does come back, his criminal empire falls apart within a matter of days once she orders the death of Ray Nadeem.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The War Games": The Doctor is forced to call on the Time Lords to end the War Games. The humans are sent back to their own times, the Big Bad is dematerialised, but Jamie and Zoe are sent back to their own times with their memories erased and the Second Doctor is exiled to Earth and forced to regenerate.
  • "The Hand of Fear" has the classic line "So now you are king, as was your wish. I salute you from the dead. Hail Eldrad. King... of nothing." Not that the nominal winners were much better off.
  • In the final episode of "Earthshock", the Doctor, having just learned that, instead of destroying 26th Century Earth, the space freighter will crash into the prehistoric Earth and cause the extinction of the dinosaurs, tells the Cyber Leader: "You've lost!" The Cyber Leader retorts that the Doctor "will not enjoy the victory", meaning he will not be alive to enjoy it. Instead, the Doctor doesn't enjoy the victory because it is overshadowed by Adric's death. (Adric, unaware of the freighter's significance in Earth's timeline, is killed trying to prevent it from crashing.)
  • "Dalek": The Doctor seems to be feeling this after the Dalek self-destructs.
    Rose: Is that the end of it then? The Time War?
    The Doctor: I'm the only one left. I "win". How about that?
  • At the end of "Last of the Time Lords" the Master gets shot by Lucy Saxon after the Doctor's ended his regime over the Earth. Rather than regenerate (and subsequently spend the rest of his life imprisoned on the Doctor's TARDIS) he chooses to die, leaving the Doctor alone as the only living Time Lord once again (for the moment). It's a pyrrhic victory for them both.
    The Doctor: You've got to! Come on. It can't end like this. You and me, all the things we've done. Axons! Remember the Axons? And the Daleks. We're the only two left. There's no one else... REGENERATE!
    The Master: Look at that...I win!
    • However, the Master pulls a Thanatos Gambit by anticipating his death and getting his cult to resurrect him a year later. But he's not the only one. Lucy Saxon has also made arrangements to prevent this, and ends up making a Heroic Sacrifice to prevent her husband's resurrection; he ends up Coming Back Wrong.
  • The Doctor's victory in "The Waters of Mars". He saved the remaining crew but changed history in the process, believing that the rules of Time will bend to his will. Adelaide realizes how wrong the turn of events is and subsequently kills herself in order to correct the timeline. The only thing her suicide did was cause the Doctor to realize how wrong he'd been, thinking that he's untouchable. The timeline was already altered, as the survivors revealed what happened to the authorities; in the original timeline, the events on Mars remained a mystery.
  • "Vincent and the Doctor": The death of the Krafayis, since the Doctor and friends had just figured out that the creature was abandoned by its pack because it's blind, which then leads to its death when it impales itself on Vincent's easel. As the Doctor puts it:
    "Sometimes winning is no fun at all."
  • "The Woman Who Fell to Earth": The Doctor manages to stop an alien headhunter from claiming his target... unfortunately, Grace O'Brien dies in the process, not to mention the other people the alien killed during his hunt.
• Extraordinary Attorney Woo: Geumgang ATM's CEO fights hard to win his case against Ilhwa ATM but spent all his energy and resources winning one battle while his opponent focused on winning the bigger war.
• Fargo: Season Four ends with Loy Cannon winning his Mob War against the Fadda Family. However, with all the Faddas dead, the Italian gang simply reforms as the Kansas City Mob under the capable leadership of Ebal Violante who has obtained the backing of the East Coast Mafia bosses. Loy lost too many men in fighting the Faddas, can't fight another war and has to accept a humiliating peace offer. Loy then gets killed by a side character he betrayed a few episodes earlier and his crime empire is absorbed by the Kansas City Mob.
  • Pyrrhic victories seem to run in the family. Years later, Loy's son, Mike Milligan, manages to take over the Gerhard crime family's territory, but since he already works for the Kansas City Mafia, the mafia sends lower-ranking grunts to take over all the violence and leg-breaking, and he gets Kicked Upstairs to a boring desk job.
• Feud: Capote vs. the Swans ends with the Swans triumphant, as, with the exception of Babe, they all outlive Truman Capote and he never manages to finish Answered Prayers, a book that they feared would expose all their secrets and ruin their good names. On the other hand, without Babe or Truman bringing them together, they drift apart and fade into obscurity, whereas Truman gets hit with a major case of Dead Artists Are Better, as people forget about his messy personal life and remember him as a brilliant writer. The final scene shows the Swans as ghosts, watching in disgust as the remains of their friend-turned-nemesis are auctioned off to the same rich elites that they tried to rally against him.
• For the People: Comes with the territory, since there are plenty of times where the prosecution successfully punishes someone who's morally innocent, or the Defense successfully defends a bad person who's only technically innocent.
  • Leonard clearly feels guilty about winning his first case, since Sandra clearly had the moral high ground — her client was clearly being entrapped by the FBI.
  • Jill feels terrible about having to defend a DEA Agent who locked up an innocent man and forgot about him for four days and winning, especially since she's the one who insisted the US Attorneys charge him in the first place.
• Played for laughs in Friends when Chandler got the highest score in Ms. Pac-Man but his hand became spasmed and stuck in a "claw" formation.
  I got the highest score, but at a price.
• Game of Thrones:
  • King Robert in the season 5 Blu-ray lore about the Dance of the Dragons describes how Rhaenyra Targaryen sacrificed her sons to (temporarily) win the Iron Throne. It's also probably an omen of his wife Cersei doing the same thing in the season 6 finale after she blows up the Great Sept of Baelor using wildfire with all of her political rivals inside it. While this action places her in the Iron Throne, it turns what is left of the country against her. The Reach and Dorne have joined forces with Daenerys and her invading armies. The North and Vale have declared independence under the new King in the North, Jon Snow. With the death of Walder Frey and his two most prominent sons, the Riverlands can't be counted on for support. Even the Westerlands are suspicious since one of the people she killed was her uncle Kevan, the ruler of the Westerlands.
  • Robert's Rebellion in the backstory, especially for Robert whose main motivation was to rescue his beloved Lyanna Stark from Rhaegar Targaryen. When Lyanna died at the end of the war, Robert was left with the throne and married to someone he despised instead of the woman he loved. It's even worse that in truth, Lyanna and Rhaegar did fall in love with one another and married in secrecy. The entire rebellion is based on poor miscommunication among the parties involved which makes it very tragic with Robert having no idea that his beloved left him for another man.
  • By Season 4, House Lannister holds the Iron Throne with their enemies all either broken or retreating. However, their manpower is badly depleted from hard fighting, the Crown is deep in debt to the Iron Bank, their gold mines have dried up and they have been forced to concede a lot of power to the Tyrells, putting them in a very fragile position. The only thing they have going for them is that no one else knows for sure how bad their situation really is. The dire situation becomes unmanageable after the demise of Tywin, the only one able to clean up the mess.
  • Daenerys overthrows the regimes in Astapor, Yunkai, and Meereen and frees the slaves, but as soon as she is gone the Wise Masters of Yunkai return to slaving and her regime in Astapor is overthrown by a freeman butcher named Cleon.
  • In Season 7, Jaime deliberately engineers one. When Dany's forces plan to attack Casterly Rock, he strips it of all its supplies and leaves behind only a token force, sending the bulk of his forces to attack Highgarden and wipe out one of Dany's major allies. At the same time, Euron's fleet destroys the ships that brought them in the first place. This victory nearly destroys Dany's forces. However, the assault was so incompetent that they only won at all because the keep was empty; if he'd mounted a traditional defense along with Euron's assault the Unsullied (attacking unsupported in a role they're bad at) would have been annihilated.
  • Despite managing to kill Oberyn during the trial by combat, the Mountain is ultimately rendered comatose by Oberyn's poisoned spears and left at the mercy of the torturously pragmatic Qyburn.
  • And in the Series Finale, Daenerys conquers Westeros... at the cost of her sanity and credibility. Driven mad by paranoia, inadequacy, incest, and the deaths and betrayals of most of her cabinet and the deaths of two of her children, she gives in to her demons and commits genocide on King's Landing. Jon assassinates her before she can wage war on the world itself. Weeks later, Bran is elected king and uses his powers to solidify the progress of Westeros, ensuring that Daenerys's dream of a free world would eventually be fulfilled because she was no longer in its way.
  • King Aegon III Targaryen becomes king at the end of the Dance of the Dragons but he and his wife are the Sole Survivor of the whole family.
  • King Aegon II Targaryen outlived his opponent Rhaenyra, both of his sons, his wife, and his dragon Sunfyre. However, Aegon never really recovered from his injuries. Living in pain for the rest of his days, his reign would only last for about 6 months, with his own supporters eventually poisoning him when it became obvious that they couldn't win the continuing civil war. And, adding insult to injury, the crown passed to Rhaenyra's child, Aegon III, when he died without (male) issue. Rhaenyra's claim was vindicated in the long run.
• Sylar finds this out the hard way in Volume 5 of Heroes. He's got everything he ever wanted. He's the most powerful Evolved Human on the face of the Earth. He's immortal and invulnerable to harm. There's maybe a grand total of two people (that we know of) who could realistically pose a threat to him and he can easily take all the powers he wants. He's also killed the only two people who ever cared for him and realises that he's now going to be utterly alone, wretched, and despised for eternity. It's enough to make him have yet another Heel–Face Turn, this one seemingly more permanent than the previous ones.
• In How I Met Your Mother, Marshall was able to win a lawsuit against a pharmaceutical company but the judge was unwilling to hurt the company by fining them with the intended 25 million dollars and so, reduced it to 25 thousand (0.1% of the original). Marshall was very upset since more was probably spent on court fees and lawyer paychecks for each side. This event would inspire him to apply to be a judge so he would have more influence on the system. An earlier episode revealed that Marshall's law firm kept itself afloat by settling all their cases and avoiding fighting any cases where they could experience one. Marshall inspired them to contest cases in court again which resulted in his case ending up as one. By the end of the season, the law firm is broke and has laid off almost all employees.
  • Ted experiences this when he ensured that Robin would go after Barney at the expense of leaving him alone at the opening of the building he designed. The last scene is him looking out a window depressed while the rest of the gang was happy.
• I, Claudius: Livia succeeds in having her eldest son Tiberius named Emperor of Rome. However, she's destroyed his life to do so (having separated him from everyone he's ever cared about, be it via murder or forced divorce), in addition to killing a huge number of possible rivals. She also poisoned her own husband Augustus, who she apparently genuinely loved, when she realized he was going to disinherit Tiberius. However, Tiberius ends up resenting her for messing up his life so drastically, meaning she doesn't exercise the same kind of power through him that she did through Augustus. She also ends up fearing that her soul will be condemned to Hell for her actions, leading to her attempting to manipulate her great-grandson Caligula into declaring her a goddess to make her immune to consequences for her actions once he becomes Emperor, but he taunts her on her deathbed that he has no intention to do so.
• Jeopardy!: Since consolation prizes were eliminated in 2002, a challenger who beats the champion with a final score of less than $1,000 actually ends up taking home the least money for the day (second place gets $2,000, third gets $1,000, and the champ keeps whatever he/she has already won). However, they do get to come back for another game to try and win more.
• Things tend to work out this way for Justified's Boyd Crowder. Though he's always able to survive, he typically loses out in one way or another. In Season 1, he brings down his father but loses his Church. In Season 2, he defeats the Bennetts but his girlfriend Ava ends up in the hospital and Dickie evades him. In Season 3, his enemy Robert Quarles is captured but his henchman Arlo goes to jail and Boyd misses the chance to claim Mags' money. In Season 4, he outlasts Nicky Augustine and gets the chance to be Wynn Duffy's new partner, but at the cost of Ava going to jail. And in Season 5, he manages to kill the treacherous Johnny and survive the Mexican cartel and Daryl Crowe both, but his fledgling empire is in tatters, Ava becomes a CI, and Rachel, Raylan, and Vasquez are coming for him.
• In the Swedish noir thriller The Lawyer, Frank succeeds in avenging his parents' death, but the collateral damage includes an innocent woman dead, Frank's heroin addict sister relapsing and Frank imprisoned for a murder that was actually self-defense, though that last one doesn't stick in the second season.
• The third season finale of Legends of Tomorrow. The plan seems sound: the demon Mallus, the Big Bad for the year, can't be attacked as a Sealed Evil in a Can and is causing a lot of trouble from said can. They finally have the means to vanquish him, but they can only do it up close and personal. So, break the seal and finish him, right? But by the time it's over, Rip Hunter and a reformed Damien Darhk are dead, and every monster who was also in said can is unleashed, providing almost all of next year's bad guys. Their "win" was costly and seems to have done much more harm than good in the end.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The War of Wrath shown in Galadriel's Myth Prologue may have ended with Morgoth's defeat, but all of Beleriand was laid waste in the battle and sank under the sea, and many Elvish lives were lost. Sauron even escaped and the Orcs multiplied under his rule.
• Lucifer (2016): Bobby Lowe stole jokes from another comedian and used them to get a major sitcom deal. The stolen jokes were about his character having a Teeny Weenie, but when the show proved to be a hit with a younger audience the network forced him to cut the jokes to make the show more family-friendly. So Lowe is now stuck doing a show he hates and can't quit due to a clause in his contract.
• Luke Cage (2016):
  • By the end of Season 1, Mariah gets out of Harlem's 29th precinct without charges on Cottonmouth's murder (due to having the one witness against her killed off), but with Harlem realizing her criminal activities.
  • She gets it worse in Season 2: Mariah wins the Mob War against Bushmaster, but the immense savagery she showcases (annihilating an entire restaurant full of innocents just to get one of Bushmaster's family members) disgusts Shades, who sells her to the police. And just as soon as she believes that she may still build a criminal empire from behind bars, a delayed-effect Kiss of Death from her estranged daughter kills her. The one possible victory she may still get (from the grave) is the chance of corrupting Luke Cage by leaving him the Harlem's Paradise club, but the show's cancellation leave the show on a cliffhanger, with Luke declaring himself the unofficial "sheriff" of Harlem and thus unclear how it will turn out.
• Married... with Children: For the most part, even when Al wins, he loses.
  • "Born To Walk": Al, having lost his license, and sick of getting no help from his family when they cost him a chance to win money at a horse race, vows to never help his family again, nor for them to help him. The next day, he passes the driving test, but the instructor runs over his foot.
  • "Tooth and Consequences": Peg finally gives in to Al's demand and makes an amazing dinner for the family... Which Al can't eat because he had recently taken a trip to the dentist.
  • "Just Shoe It": Al gets to star in a shoe commercial, but it's just an excuse for him to get crushed by Ed "Too-Tall" Jones, beaned by a pitch by Steve Carlton, and knocked out by Sugar Ray Leonard. And then he doesn't even get to appear in the commercial, his feet only being shown getting knocked out of the shoes that were being advertised.
  • "A Shoe Room With a View": Thanks to Al's efforts, the aerobics studio next to the shoe store gets an attractive trainer, who brings many attractive clients with him. However, since he fell out of a window and was left in a wheelchair, he couldn't look through the holes that were drilled in the shoe store to ogle the attractive women, like his friends were.
• Morgana from Merlin lives for vengeance, but when she finally manages to have King Uther killed, it's clear that she doesn't feel the victory the way she thought she would.
• Nikita season 1 ends with Operation Sparrow getting foiled and Michael running away with Nikita with a Black Box in their possession but her relationship with Alex is damaged and she stays at Division under Oversight's supervision.
• Person of Interest. Team Machine's victories have become more pyrrhic since season 4, often ruining innocent lives to save them from Samaritan. What's sadder is that no matter what they do, Samaritan just keeps winning. Defeating Samaritan once and for all required the team to fry the entire internet while they preserved the Machine by uploading it to a satellite and then have it download back to Earth after the virus ran its course. Root, Reese, and Elias were all killed by Samaritan agents by the time it was all over, and Finch faked his death in the same explosion that killed Reese so that he could have a personal happy ending with Grace in Italy.
• The Spinosaurus in the first episode of Planet Dinosaur manages to fight off a Carcharodontosaurus and steal the tasty carcass they were fighting over, but unfortunately, the Carcharodontosaurus manages to damage the Spinosaurus’ sail with its jaws, and the Spinosaurus dies.
• In Power Rangers RPM, in the Grand Finale, after three long years the rangers win the Robot War... but by the time the Big Bad goes down, at least 90% of humanity is dead, with the entire planet outside of Corinth's protective dome having been bombed to a post-nuclear war wasteland. Plants are just starting to regrow in the less radioactively "hot" areas, but the global ecosystem is by and large too far gone to recover most of the lost biodiversity or return with new life with any speed.
• In Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Princess Sailor Moon falls into a deep rage after Endymion dies and, using the Silver Crystal, performs a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum as a result, since if she can’t be happy with Endymion, no one can, and successfully destroys the world. In the end, however, she is left with nothing but regret over what she did.
• The Red Dwarf episode "Meltdown" has Rimmer leading "good" waxdroids of famous historical figures against "evil" waxdroids. His plan ends with Kryten turning the planet's boiler up, thus melting every last waxdroid. Since they had more or less become the figures they were based on, this is akin to mass murder on all sides. Rimmer, however, considers the ordeal a victory for himself.
• In Revolution the rebellion led by Miles Matheson is winning victories against the Monroe Republic but for Miles every such victory is pyrrhic. Every fighter he loses is someone he cannot replace and the enemies he is killing are old friends and protegees of his. Even if he removes Monroe from power, the Republic will be finished and it will become part of the Georgia Federation.
• RuPaul's Drag Race: The "Lipsynch Assassin" of the season is the queen who puts on a fierce "Lipsynch For Your Life" and sends multiple queens packing. But in the normal (non-All Stars or Vs the World) seasons of the show, being in that position in the first place means failing multiple challenges and doing poorly enough to land in the bottom two, and the more often a queen lands in the bottom, the more likely she will get eliminated. It may lead to some memorable recap clips, but it is not an ideal position in the long run.
• In The Shield's series finale Vic Mackey succeeded in getting away with everything he's done, but no friends in the world, his family relocated out of fear from him, his reputation as a cop destroyed for good and his new employment is guaranteed to be Hell for the next three years (an Ironic Hell he has to endure or his immunity deal is void and he goes to prison for life). So yes, he won, but the cost was obscene.
• Smallville: The episode "Asylum" ends with Clark unable to stop Lionel Luthor from erasing Lex's memories. However, Lionel only finds out after he's done this that, shortly before Lex had his memories wiped, he'd learned Clark's secret - the secret Lionel is obsessed with. The episode ends with a horrified Lionel replaying a clip of Lex telling Clark that he knows Clark's secret over and over again, forced to face how he'd just destroyed his best chance at finding out.
• The Sopranos: In the last few episodes, an open Mob War erupts between the DiMeo crime family, led by Tony, and the Lupertazzi crime family, led by Phil. Tony eventually ends the war when Phil loses the support of his subordinates, who secretly give Tony the go-ahead to assassinate their boss, succeeding in doing so from a tipoff to Phil's location from an FBI agent with a grudge against Phil. However, calling Tony a winner is extremely generous, as he lost three of his closest remaining associates, one of whom has turned informant and is likely going to testify against Tony in court, and there's a strong possibility Tony himself was whacked at the end of the last episode, leaving the future of the DiMeo family in dire straits, with nearly all its old guard dead, imprisoned, in witness protection, or worse.
• Squid Game: When the dust settles on the Deadly Game, Gi-hun is the winner. The expense, however, is immense: the friends he made throughout the game are all dead (save for an old man, who is revealed to be the mastermind), his Childhood Friend became a cold-blooded killer in order to survive and ultimately kills himself in the final game so Gi-hun could win, his daughter left the country with her mother and stepfather, and by the time he returns home, his mother has passed away from an illness he threw himself into the game to get the money to treat. He is 45.6 billion won richer, but by the following year, he has become a miserable drifter who has refused to even touch his money.
• The eponymous team of Stargate SG-1 is accused of this from time to time in the show. In one episode they're bragging that they've done more in the last few years to defeat the Goa'uld than other groups have managed to do in centuries. The ally they're talking to points out that all they've really done is create power vacuums among the System Lords that have almost inevitably resulted in even worse individuals attaining power. Since Jack is usually the one this is directed at, his response amounts to "at least we're trying."
• Star Trek:
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", the ship is occupied by two aliens from a species where half are black on their right side and white on their left, and the other is the opposite, and the former have set themselves up as the societal superiors of the latter, in an obvious metaphor for the racism prevalent at the time. The black-on-the-right one is chasing the white-on-the-right one as a criminal and ultimately succeeds in forcing the crew to return to his home planet, where his prisoner can be judged. However, they find that while the chase was going on, the war between the two sides escalated until every single person on the planet was killed. The two aliens promptly accuse each other of their people being responsible, and teleport down to the planet to continue their war, as Kirk somberly notes that their hatred for each other is all they have left.
  • In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Chosen Realm", pretty much the same thing happens with two religious factions on the planet Triannon fighting over their dogmas. One faction claims that the Sphere Builders created the Delphic Expanse in nine days, while the other insists it was ten. In homage to the TOS episode, both factions have the same mark on their faces, but the colors are different and they're on opposite sides. And yes, the ending is the same.
  • From Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
    • Discussed in the two-part special "The Way of the Warrior" when the battle between Deep Space 9 and a Klingon attack force reaches a stalemate.
      Worf: Consider what you do here today, Gowron! Kahless himself said, "Destroying an empire to win a battle is no victory."
      Gowron: "And ending a battle to save an empire is no defeat."
    • In the opening battle of the Dominion War, Dukat managed to capture Deep Space 9, but lost over fifty ships, let Starfleet take out a vital shipyard while the fleet was otherwise occupied, and failed to bring in reinforcements through the wormhole thanks to Starfleet blockading it with self-replicating Space Mines that took months to get rid of. Oh, and just to set the tin lid on it, Starfleet was able to hold the combined Cardassian/Jem'Hadar fleet off long enough to evacuate all their personnel and comprehensively trash the station itself. Dukat being Dukat, he was perfectly fine with this... at first. Retaking the station was the last time anything went well for him for some time.
    • Invoked in "What You Leave Behind" by the Female Changeling. Graceful Loser she is not. Penned in by the allied fleets, now including the better part of the Cardassian military after a Heel–Race Turn sparked by her Orbital Bombardment of a city to quell a popular uprising, and near death from a biological weapon, she orders the Jem'Hadar to slaughter the entire Cardassian species. She only relents in exchange for Odo delivering the cure for the plague to the rest of the changelings, by which point 800 million Cardassians are dead.
      "You may win this war, Commander, but I promise you, by the time it's over, you will have lost so many ships, so many lives, that your 'victory' will taste as bitter as defeat."
• Supernatural:
  • There's an odd example at the end of the fifth season. Sam and Dean manage to defeat Lucifer, but at the cost of Sam having to jump into Lucifer's cage. Particularly heartbreaking because all Dean was trying to do was save his brother for most of the series. Then it turns out that Sam's actually alive after all... but we find out in S6 that he's now The Soulless and The Sociopath. When he gets his soul back, he also gets back the memories of being tortured by Lucifer in the Cage for over 120 years, and the resulting PTSD nearly kills him. Though technically, Eric Kripke intended to end Supernatural with season five, and both Sam and Dean were supposed to go into the cage.
  • Season six ends with Well-Intentioned Extremist Castiel preventing Archangel Raphael from restarting the Apocalypse. To do so, he only allies with a demon he then betrays, kills his closest angel allies, breaks Sam's mind, then absorbs all the monster souls from Purgatory for the power to declare himself the new God.
  • And if this wasn't bad enough, season seven opens with Castiel smiting numerous angels who opposed him and humans who offended him, and losing control of this power so it releases voracious, unkillable monsters from Purgatory on the world.
  • Season 7 has Sam and Dean successfully kill the Leviathans and save humanity from a future of being mindless cattle, but Dean and Castiel are sent to Purgatory in the ensuing blast, Meg and Kevin are captured by Crowley's demons, and Bobby by then has passed on. So basically Sam is alone with Crowley in control of the power vacuum caused by the Leviathans.
  • Another one at the end of Season 4. Sam kills Lilith, the season's Big Bad, but in doing so breaks the final seal and frees Lucifer from his Cage.
  • At the end of Season 10, Sam cures Dean of the Mark of Cain... but the result is the freeing of the Darkness, the original source of evil in the Universe.
• In That Mitchell and Webb Look one episode of Numberwang went on for so long that the game went into sudden death. The first contestant to inhale enough of the poisonous Number Gas won. But, y'know, died.
• Occasionally happens on Top Gear with their races or challenges. For example, in the four-way race across London during rush-hour traffic between a bike, a car, public transportation and a motorboat down the Thames, Hammond, riding the bike, won, but he spent the entire episode cursing out traffic lights and almost getting hit by buses. He was also visibly exhausted by the end. Jeremy came in second on the boat, but he had by far the most relaxing and least stressful journey.
  • As this is a show all about how awesome cars are, the fact that the winners all beat a car caused Clarkson to declare that the entire race was a lie and he, in fact, died when his boat exploded.
  • The end of the Bolivia and especially the Argentina specials. Having driven their cars all that distance, they certainly didn't achieve much for their trouble.
• At the end of the Torchwood miniseries Children of Earth, Jack manages to save the world. However, in order to do so, he had to kill his grandson. Not to mention that his boyfriend also just died in the previous episode...
• The Twilight Zone
  • The episode "The Masks" has a benign, rich, and dying Jason Foster having to deal with his greedy, callous, and hypochondriac daughter, her husband, and their vile children in the last hours of his life. They are there just to see him die so they can inherit his vast fortune and he knows it. So he makes an addendum to his will: if any of them removes a special mask he had made for them before midnight, one which, he says, reflects the opposite of their "true" face, ^note though in truth holds all the ugliness and villainy that their pretty faces hide, they will inherit only enough money to take the train back to Boston. They succeed and Jason soon dies after midnight. When they remove the masks, they see their faces have contorted and shifted to be perfect matches for the ugly masks they were just wearing for hours. Now they must live with these faces that reflect their inner vanity and pettiness.
  • The episode "The Silence" has heavily indebted Jamie Tennyson accept a bet from fellow club member Archie Taylor to not say a word for an entire year for $500,000. Tennyson manages to win the bet despite Taylor trying to get him to talk by gossiping about his wife leaving him. Then Taylor reveals that he lost his money years ago and can't pay $500,000 (or even the $1,000 and $5,000 he offered Jamie earlier to end the bet early). Jamie then reveals he severed the nerves to his vocal chords to win the bet. So Jamie wins the bet, but he wasted a year of his life, he's still in debt, his wife possibly has left him and he's now permanently mute.
• The War of the Worlds (2019): Humanity may have inherited the Earth whilst the Martian invasion force died off, but with the red weed still choking away the planet's biosphere, humanity looks doomed to go extinct within a generation (until the miniseries' final scene). Ultimately Played With, as the Propaganda Machine is telling survivors After the End that the Martians were defeated by military might, when it was actually Earth's microbes which killed them off.
• The Wire is a whole series of pyrrhic victories as the police generally succeed in jailing drug lords, only to have even worse ones take over in the aftermath. Not to mention that the aftermath consists of gangs violently battling for control of the drug trade.
• This is tackled in the Xena: Warrior Princess episode "A Good Day". She and Gabrielle save a village caught in the middle of Caesar and Pompey's war by performing a Salt the Earth campaign. As they light funeral pyres for their dead, Xena tells Gabrielle "it was a good day of battle".

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