NOTE: Since this trope reveals a villain being responsible for other events in the series (potentially even after their own demise), expect spoilers.
Villainous Legacies in Live-Action TV series.
- When The Shadows left the galaxy on Babylon 5, they left behind some technology, and at least one planet-killer ship—and their old Henchmen Race race the Drakh, who searched for and obtained some of these items for use in their own designs for conquest.
- Breaking Bad: In Season 5, After Gus Fring dies, his killer Walter White inherits his drug empire and expands it to the entire nation and as far as Czech Republic and Germany in Season 5 mid finale. In Walt's own words however, he confessed that his past failures had made him so jaded that he wasn't able to leave a legacy that he kept on his meth business as 'atonement' for his earlier rashness. When Walt eventually falls in 'Ozymandias', Walt's former ally and Hank's killer Jack Welker and Todd Alquist became the new meth kingpins, under the general public's misinformation that Heisenberg is still cooking all the blue meth. They achieved infamy and wealth to the level Walt himself was unable to achieve, only for Walt to come, kill them all, and destroy the blue meth empire once and for all. Also in a positive manner, Walt succeeds in the main reason he turned to meth in the first place, by ensuring that his family will get 10 million dollars as charity, more than 13 times the money he set to achieve for them.
- Whenever Doctor Who allows Davros to stay dead, he is this to the Daleks, his creations that continue to menace the universe long after his control over them is gone.
- The Flash (2014):
- Both Eobard Thawne and Hunter Zolomon leave a lasting impact on the show long after their defeats. Thawne is so integral to the timeline that even after Eddie Thawne kills himself to prevent his existence, a time remnant of his younger self remains to ensure his timeline plays out to completion, one that Barry will inevitably encounter numerous times in the future, as a taunting reminder of what the man did to him. Not to mention, the singularity created by Eddie's death was responsible for the events of Season 2, as it alerted Zoom to Earth-1's, and therefore Barry's, existence. Meanwhile, Hunter Zolomon is directly responsible for the events of Season 3, as his decision to murder Henry Allen drives Barry into creating Flashpoint. Flashpoint then creates Savitar, a rogue time remnant of Future Barry, who is every bit as evil as Thawne and Zolomon (though, admittedly, significantly more tragic than both combined). Meaning, Zolomon actually was successful in corrupting Barry, if only indirectly. Essentially, Season 3 is not only an arc of Barry trying to move on from his self-hatred, but also from the damage his two greatest enemies have done to his life.
- This trope is a major plot point late in Season 5: it's eventually revealed that Orlin Dwyer's actions as Cicada eventually inspire his niece Grace to grow up to become the second Cicada and continue his anti-metahuman campaign.
- Game of Thrones: Aerys Targaryen's actions continue to be felt by the people of Westeros twenty years after his death, and in entirely bad ways. Jaime still struggles to get out of the shadow of the name Kingslayer, Joffrey is compared to him a few times for his cruelty and borderline insanity, in Season 6 Cersei uses his wildfire caches to destroy the Sept of Baelor, along with a good chunk of her enemies, and in Season 7 Daenerys has to struggle with being his daughter who is known for using dragonfire to kill her enemies, which causes a lot of the Westerosi to fear she's just Mad Aerys 2.0. They were right to fear as such, and Daenerys surpasses her father in that regard.
- In Gotham, this is how the character Jerome fits into the Joker legacy without upsetting the idea of The Joker being a Create Your Own Villain: he is initially set up as the in-universe version of Joker, but upon his death it is revealed that he has instead gained a massive following that has begun to manifest itself in an As Long as There Is Evil sort of way. Then it turns out that his twin brother Jeremiah is the real future Joker when the latter is corrupted with an insanity gas after Jerome's death, turning his skin bleach white and causing Jeremiah to vow that he will be a superior successor to his brother's legacy.
- Justified: Mags Bennett may have been dead since Season 2, but the three million dollars she left to Loretta McCready, and her deal with Black Pike have continued to effect events in Bennett township and Harlan County ever since, with both her son Dickie and surrogate daughter Loretta trying to step into her shoes. One could make a similar case for Bo Crowder and Arlo Givens, whose legacies live on in the form of their sons Boyd and Raylan.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The Distant Prologue shows how Morgoth destroyed the two Trees of Valinor and waged war against the Valar, Men and Elves. Galadriel narrates further that Sauron continued Morgoth's job of creating Orcs. Later is revealed how Morgoth created the first generation of Orcs called the Moriondor. Many of them are very much alive in the Second Age, and a real threat to the entirety of Middle-earth.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The whole of HYDRA is one, in a sense: Red Skull may most likely be long gone, but the organization is still very much alive and continuing to cause trouble, until S.H.I.E.L.D. (partnering with Gideon Malick and later Graviton) deals enough damage that it appears to finally be fatal, though Mitchell Carson is still out there.
- Daniel Whitehall is the Big Bad for the first half of season 2, but is abruptly shot and killed by Coulson in the midseason finale. Nevertheless, the ramifications of his actions are felt for the rest of the season, as his abduction and experimentation on Jiaying form the basis for her distrust of regular humans and eventually leads to her succeeding him as Big Bad when the full scope of her insanity is revealed and she kicks off a war between S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Inhumans. To a lesser extent, there's also Kara Palamas, a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who was captured by HYDRA, and who Whitehall brainwashed. After his death she falls in with Grant Ward, who takes her on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the people who (she feels) have wronged her.
- Izel is killed in the season 6 finale, but Chronyca-2 was one of many casualties of her Shrike army when she was still alive, and the loss of their planet spurs the Chronicoms to take up the mantle of Big Bad in the following season.
- Daredevil (2015): Shades claims that her main motivation for making moves on Harlem is to accomplish the conquest of the area that her father attempted and failed to complete back in the day due to the opposition of Mama Mabel.
- Luke Cage (2016): Though long dead by the modern day (and even the flashbacks) Buggy is the man who started the Stokes descent into crime.
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The whole of HYDRA is one, in a sense: Red Skull may most likely be long gone, but the organization is still very much alive and continuing to cause trouble, until S.H.I.E.L.D. (partnering with Gideon Malick and later Graviton) deals enough damage that it appears to finally be fatal, though Mitchell Carson is still out there.
- NCIS: Ari Haswari. The first villain of Season Seventeen is one of his old partners in Hamas. By the time she appeared, Ari has been dead In-Universe for over fourteen years. She's not even the first villain that's been connected to Ari over the years either; the Big Bad of the first half of Season Twelve was his half-brother via his mother. All of this on top of his sister Ziva's lingering trauma over killing Ari confirms that he's the one villain that will never leave the series.
- Primeval: Even after Helen Cutter's death, it turns out over the course of the final two seasons that she was the one who convinced Philip Burton to create the New Dawn project that almost destroyed the world in Matt's future.
- Supernatural:
- Even when Lucifer is not onscreen, the repercussions of his actions are frequently making life hard for the Winchesters. His influence ends up driving Sam mad in Season 7. He passed the Mark of Cain onto Cain himself — who subsequently passed it onto Dean, which ends in him being turned into a murderous Knight of Hell in Season 10. And after his actual death, his influence corrupts his vessel Nick, leading him to murder his family's killers and then try to bring Lucifer himself back.
- The Dr. Gaines Leviathan dies early on in the season, but his food additive, with some refinements, is retained for use as part of the Leviathan's endgame.
- The alternate Michael from Apocalypse World has a surprisingly positive one. His Motive Rant to Castiel and Sam when he's their prisoner resonates, and when God returns he's visibly thrown when Sam asks him if any of it was true. Once God seems a little too eager for Dean to kill Jack, this leads Sam to put the pieces together and realise that God is the Greater-Scope Villain who's been making their lives a misery from the start. When the main universe's Michael finally returns, Castiel shows him his memories in an effort to convince him that God is actually evil - and it's his memories of this Michael's actions (and realisation he wasn't even the only Michael) that finally cause him to turn on his Father.
- The War of the Worlds (2019): The Martians die off just like in the source material, but unlike in the source material, their Alien Kudzu still spreads and Hostile Terraforms the Earth after their deaths, leaving an apocalyptic wasteland where the surviving humans are struggling to survive.
- Taken: In "Charlie and Lisa", Eric Crawford shows his daughter Mary the artifact found at the Roswell crashsite that his father Owen left him and invites her to join him at the UFO project so that she can continue the family legacy.
- The Tribe: Zoot, the leader of the Locos in season 1, continues to effect events long after his death. These include the Chosen, a fanatical cult who revere Zoot as a god, and a straight-up resurrection of his old tribe in the form of the Zootists with a Zoot impersonator. Though it seems his legacy will finally be laid to rest when the impersonator drops the act on a live broadcast and admits that the city has lived long enough in Zoot's shadow.
- Willow: Sorsha had told Kit and Airk they, along with her, have the potential to be like Bavmorda as they're her descendants. It turns out Bavmorda herself was the descendant of a long-ago evil sorceress as well. Sorsha warns her children they could all become evil as well because of this. Bavmorda's acts overshadow the story as well, since her allies attempt to finish what she began by sending Elora into a damned dimension for them to seize control over the world.
