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Well-Intentioned Extremists in Live-Action TV series.


  • 24:
    • Several villains, including Stephen Saunders, who threatens the US with a biological weapon to halt American globalism; President Logan in Season 5, who sold nerve gas to Central Asian terrorists in order to frame them as an excuse for US intervention in Central Asia and gain oil from the area, and ordered the assassination of an ex-president to cover it up; and Tom Lennox in Season 6, who seeks to inter thousands of American Muslims in the hopes of protecting the country from terrorism, and becomes involved in an assassination plot against the president when his proposals are declined. Though, in fairness, he was only pretending to go along with the assassination in order to uncover the conspirators.
    • From another perspective, this applies to the protagonists as well, especially Agent Jack I Did What I Had to Do Bauer. In later seasons, Jack flirts with a Heel Realization as he questions not only the efficacy and morality of his methods, but even whether his life is worth preserving.
  • The 100: In Season 2, Cage just wants to make the people of Mount Weather immune to radiation so they can leave their underground bunker and live on the surface again. To make an anti-radiation treatment, though, he has to harvest the bone marrow of the 47 Ark children, killing them in the process.
    • Clarke becomes one when she opposes Cage. She's certainly right to want to save her people from being slowly killed for their bone marrow. However, only about fifty of her people were being subjected to this fate; in order to save them, Clarke floods Mount Weather with radiation, killing hundreds, many of them children.
    • In Season 3, it turns out Alie was the artificial intelligence who believed the best way to control population was to start a nuclear war.
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: In the Season 3 finale, in the last moments before their inevitable death, Hive and Lincoln cease fighting, realizing there is no longer any point, and have a polite conversation where Hive laments that he only wanted to make the world a better place. Lincoln believes his claim is a sincere one, despite the two being enemies for half a season as well as all of the evil acts that Hive committed.
  • American Gothic (1995):
  • Adressed and deconstructed in Andor with the progenitor of the La Résistance againist the Empire Luthen Rael. His goal of defeating The Empire is incredible noble, but Luthen himself is a He Who Fights Monsters Manipulative Bastard all too willingly to do the Necessarily Evil and sacrifice his own people and fellow rebels like food on his plate in order to win. Except Luthen unlike other examples is painfully aware of his montrous extremist nature and he doesn't pretend to be anything else, knowing full well he is never going to see that day of peace or thanked for his actions. Just see his speech to his ISB mole Lonni.
    Lonni: What do you sacrifice?
    Luthen: Calm. Kindness, kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace, I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet. What is... what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life, to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice? Everything!
  • Angel:
    • Jasmine. She spends years manipulating Angel, Cordelia, and the rest of Angel Investigations so that she could be born on Earth and bring about a golden age. Of course, in the process, she killed several thousand innocents, conjured a rain of fire over LA, and unleashed Angelus once again. Not to mention that she eats people and her idea of a "golden age" is an Assimilation Plot that completely removes free will. Even so, Angel and co. are uncertain if they did a good thing or a bad thing by taking her out, especially when their arch-enemies, Wolfram & Hart, actually praise them for ending world peace.
    • Subverted with Holtz. He was an 18th century vampire hunter and had hunted a pre-soul Angel(us) long before the vampire had gained a soul, and after being brought to the 21st century, he sought revenge for Angelus' killing his family and many others he knew. While he certainly saw himself as the good guy, his past intentions as a vampire hunter were good, and had he succeeded, he probably would have gone back into the vampire hunting business (until Buffy killed him). In the present however, it's made crystal-clear that all he cares about is revenge; he disregards Angel's soul and is perfectly willing to commit acts just as monstrous as Angelus' in his war against Angel Investigations.
      • On the other hand, Angel and Holtz both agree that Angel is culpable for the actions of Angelus, and Angelus' crimes would warrant the death penalty in any jurisdiction that allows it many times over. Angel believes that he can atone for Angelus' crimes in life, Holtz believes he can only do so in death.
    • Angel himself becomes this in the Buffy Season 8 comic. Everything he did as Twilight was apparently to prevent anything like the Fall of Los Angeles from ever happening again.
  • Angie Tribeca may be a parody of cop shows, but it ends up having one in the second season with Eddie Pepper and his organization, Mayhem Global. Eddie created it in order to take down Mayor Perry and his corruption. However, his efforts become increasingly horrible and violent, ranging from having moles in the FBI and Perry's camp to having people kill themselves via allergies to keep his secrets. Most of his actions only ever resulted in Perry getting more support, and when he tried to assassinate him on the day of the election, Perry ended up winning instead. Meanwhile, Eddie ended up all alone as his cohort Diane Duran disappeared, and he got arrested and shot by Angie, who was on his side until she remembered that she had something to live for: her son.
  • Arrow: Season 1's Big Bad, Malcolm Merlyn/Dark Archer, decided that the only way to "save" the city was to destroy the crime-infested Glades, killing hundreds (if not more) in the belief that it will somehow improve things. Though it's entirely possible that that was just an excuse to justify his Disproportionate Retribution for the random murder of his wife in the Glades.
    • Season 4's Big Bad, Damien Dahrk, escalates this further: his plan is called Genesis and it involves taking control of the world's entire nuclear arsenal to destroy it except for his own safe haven, because according to him, the whole world is beyond saving and needs to be reset.
  • Babylon 5:
    • Both the Vorlons and the Shadows are guiding the younger races to be better and stronger. If "some must be sacrificed", so be it. The fact that the two are permanently at war is the first sign that something's wrong here.
    • William Edgars, the chief executive of a pharmaceutical MegaCorp, is developing a virus that affects only telepaths (and is fatal to them), as well as its cure. He does this not For the Evulz, nor even out of a sense of Fantastic Racism, but because he knows a war with telepaths is inevitable and wants to give “mundanes” a fighting chance. He doesn't even like taking the steps he feels he has to take, and tries to lessen the suffering of those he's testing his drugs on as much as possible.
    • The Soul Hunters believe that souls perish after the death of the body, and that they perform a great service to the universe by capturing and preserving them in their soul spheres. Many other races—the Minbari especially—have a rather different opinion on the matter.
    • Alfred Bester wants to protect Human telepaths from persecution from the "mundanes". He doesn't care of anyone he has to kill or brainwash to do so, and he and other leaders of the Psi Corps are the reason why the war between human telepaths and mundanes is inevitable.
  • Battlestar Galactica (2003): Felix Gaeta launches a mutiny because he believes that Admiral Adama is too close to the Cylons. His worldview is understandable; his actions, especially the alliance with not-so-well-intentioned extremist Tom Zarek, not so much.
    • Tom Zarek sees himself as this, in universe, genuinely believing his goals are benevolent and just even if others don't agree with his means (such as terrorist bombings, assassinations, secret trials and executions, coup d'etats, etc). It's the perspective of other characters that show he's usually more of an ego-centric power seeker than he admits even to himself.
  • Beyond: Frost's goal is to help people (including himself) make contact with their loved ones again in the afterlife. To this end he uses threats and outright violence against anyone who won't cooperate.
  • BIMA Satria Garuda: The villainous organization VUDO wants to bring life to the Parallel World they hail from, which would be a good goal in itself, the problem being they want to accomplish this by the invasion of Earth.
  • Boss: Mayor Tom Kane is an example of a Subverted Trope: he likes to think that the bad things he does serve the greater good of Chicago, but he has a lot of trouble differentiating between what's best for Chicago and what's best for Tom Kane.
  • In Season 3 of The Boys (2019), Butcher and Hughie resolve to do whatever it takes in their war against the Supes, which leads to them butting heads with the rest of the team especially after they start taking Super Serum to level the playing field as the others argue that No Man Should Have This Power. Eventually, the two end up betraying the others and teaming up with Captain America expy Soldier Boy to try to kill Homelander, in spite of him killing M.M.'s family and numerous others.
  • Brave New World: Those in control of New London will go to any lengths to preserve the peace they have created even at the cost of a society where you must be happy, your place is non-negotiable and pills are needed to keep everyone complacent.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • In the Buffyverse, Watchers generally tend toward this. Both Rupert Giles and Wesley Wyndam-Pryce showed themselves willing to do whatever it takes to stop a greater threat. Made more effective because, initially, they tend to come off as befuddled librarians.
      • When Watchers behave this way, they're almost always actually right. Had Giles not killed Ben in the Season 5 finale, for instance, Big Bad Glory would have been back and possibly killed the entire cast with trivial ease using her god-level Super-Strength (Plot Armor would have prevented it, but the characters aren't supposed to know that they have Plot Armor).
    • Also the Order of Byzantium from Season 5. Their main goal was to destroy the Key (which is now in the form of Buffy's younger sister Dawn) to stop Glory from using it and destroying the universe. Buffy was unwilling to entertain the notion of Dawn dying even though she had no alternate solution if her plan to keep Glory occupied until her window to use Dawn's blood was over failed. When it did fail, Buffy realized she could stop the apocalypse by dying herself instead of killing Dawn because they shared blood. Notably, in a Season 7 episode Buffy admits to Giles that she's come to realize they were right at the time, and if she had to make a similar choice now and couldn't sacrifice herself in Dawn's place she would let her die to save the entire world.
    • The Mayor in Season 3 honestly thinks life under his rule post-Ascension would be for the best for everyone.
    • Severin in Season 9 plans to use the Time Travel powers he got from Illyria through Mega Manning to go back in time and stop the Twilight crisis from ever happening, thus stopping the rise of zompires and the end of magic. The problem is, doing so would cause an instability in space-time that would rip reality itself apart.
    • During Drusilla's brief bout of sanity under the name Mother Superior circa Season 9, she uses a lorophage demon to remove mental trauma from anyone who asks and attracts a large following; the downside is that some of them go insane as a result because they can't function normally without the capacity for emotional pain.
    • The General in Season 8 thinks that the Slayer Organization really is a threat to world peace.
    • What rogue Slayer Lady Genevieve Savidge in Season 8 thinks she is, planning to assassinate a "misguided" Buffy and install Slayers as leaders of a corrupt world under her own leadership.
    • In Season 3, Faith loads up on weapons after learning of a Back from the Dead, supposedly reformed Angel being in possession of a magical glove, scared of whom he might kill. When she finds Giles had been attacked she immediately thinks 'Angel' and defies everyone in a bid to kill him. Then there was the time in Season 9 that she and Angel discovered a source of Mohra demon blood that could heal people and even turn vampires back into humans. Because of how obsessed Angel was with making amends, Faith intended to force it into him, and was just about to do so when she learned Mohra blood had grown uncontrollably, cancerously powerful after the Seed of Wonder was destroyed and would have done a lot more harm.
    • Whistler's plan to restore magic in Season 9, as well as the Twilight plot in Season 8, would have and will kill billions, but he legitimately believes it's the only way to save the rest of the world.
  • The last season of Burn Notice gave us James Kendrick. Kendrick is the antithesis of My Country, Right or Wrong; in his military days he refused an order to massacre a village and slit the throats of every member of the team that carried out the order in his team's place. When Michael is sent undercover to bring him down, Kendrick's first mission is to prevent MI-6 from protecting a monster and his second is to protect a good peacemaker from being assassinated by rebels of another nation. Kendrick is violently (literally) loyal to his men - when one of his men leaves another behind, Kendrick calmly shoots him in the head. In a darker show, he might be a hero.
  • Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future: Lyman Taggart sincerely thought that humanity would be improved by becoming a cybernetic organism. After becoming Lord Dread, though...
  • Charmed (1998):
    • Gideon, the Big Bad of Season 6. He believed that Wyatt, born of a Charmed One and Whitelighter, was too powerful a being to remain good, and, after learning about a future where Wyatt did indeed turn evil, was determined to prevent that from happening. What Gideon didn't realize, however, was that it was his pursuit of Wyatt for weeks in the Underworld is what caused the boy to turn evil eventually in that future. He solidified his status as an extremist by allowing innocents to be killed to cover his tracks, and even personally killing his friend and confidant Sigmund when he left to expose Gideon's plans to the sisters. He was willing to go so far as to work with his Evil Mirror opposite, which just unbalanced the world even more.
    • The Avatars also qualify. Their intention was to create a perfect, peaceful utopia with no demons in it, but they were going to create it by means of basically brainwashing the entire human race to remove violent thoughts, and erasing from existence anyone who disturbed the peace.
    • There's also The Cleaners who were willing to go so far as erasing baby Wyatt from existence to keep magic from being exposed to the world. Of course, they're tasked with upholding The Masquerade, and will rewrite history to that end if they need to.
  • Cold Case had the oneshot character Iris Keening in the episode "WASP." In the present she's every bit the stereotypical kind elderly lady, but in her youth she was actually a tough-as-nails commanding officer in the Women's Air Service Pilots, among the first women ever to serve in the military. When one of her subordinates, Vivian Lynn, learned that another WASP pilot had been accidentally killed in what was supposed to be a prank by a male pilot and prepared to go to the General with it, Iris murdered Vivian, knowing that all doing that would accomplish would be getting women banned from flying. Sixty years later and she still doesn't have a shred of remorse, feeling that she basically singlehandedly saved the future of women in the military.
  • Criminal Minds: Villains tend to be insane, but several probably do fall into this category, like the one who, after growing up in a hellish foster home, thought it was better to kill children in their sleep than let them be put into the system.
    • Another one in a similar vein is a woman who has been mentally damaged since childhood due to molestation and rape, and her only coping method were her dolls and toys which were basically given to her by the offender as prizes for behaving. When he switches his attention to a new girl, which, due to his medical profession, he likely won't be noticed, the grown woman loses it and begins kidnapping adult women in order to try and paralyze them and turn them into living dolls. When she's caught, she willingly gives up when presented with her dolls, and her offender is busted by the crew who reveal they have plenty of evidence, allowing the crew to both save the victims of the killer who is heavily misunderstood, and arrest the man who caused this whole disaster to start with because he's a pedophile.
  • In Criminologist Himura and Mystery Writer Arisugawa, the witness of "Apollo's Knife" is staunchly against the forced anonymity of minors who commit crimes, due to a prior incident where his son was bullied in school and the perpetrators weren't named (and thus went unpunished). Though his view is understandable, tampering with a crime scene in order to prove his point takes it too far, and he's arrested at the end of the episode while the detectives mull over his viewpoint.
  • Doctor Who:
    • The Doctor himself has always been this. Colin Baker, the Sixth Doctor, once said that the Doctor believes in "the rightness of things. It doesn't have to be beautiful, or happy, but right; it's got to be right. And when he sees something that isn't right, he's compelled to do something about it." Most of the time, it works out in his favour, but since the end of the Time War, he's become much more reckless, leading to several My God, What Have I Done? moments throughout the New Series.
    • "The Reign of Terror": Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution. Truth in Television.
    • "Invasion of the Dinosaurs": Operation Golden Age. Desperate to save the planet, a cult-like group of utopians mean to move back time and Ret-Gone everyone save their chosen few, while filling the ecosystem with prehistoric creatures.
    • "Genesis of the Daleks": Subverted with Davros, who at first appears to be this (he claims to the other Kaleds that he's trying to prolong the survival of his race through changing them to a form more suitable for surviving in a nuclear apocalypse, and everyone seems to treat him with respect). When the Doctor attempts to morally reason with him towards the end of the story in the hope that he'll realise how dangerous the Daleks are and see some sense, it soon becomes apparent that Davros is, in fact, a completely delusional Omnicidal Maniac who knows exactly how terrible the Daleks are and is going to do it anyway to set himself up above the gods.
    • "Remembrance of the Daleks": The difference between George Ratcliffe and Mike Smith (the two named human racist fascists in the story) is that Ratcliffe is only after power, while Mike Smith was led astray from his youth and genuinely believes the Association is acting in Britain's best interests. With Ratcliffe's pedestal broken, he might have learned better in time had he not been electrocuted Sith-style by the Daleks' young slave.
    • "New Earth": The Sisters of Plenitude. They're curing patients of their hospital quickly and efficiently... by way of horribly infected cloned humans with every known disease in the galaxy. The episode plays with this a little, as some of the sisters callously execute the clones who began thinking and feeling, and one seems more concerned with the Sisters' reputation after the clones escape, carrying disease with them.
    • The Judoon. In "Smith and Jones", they're trying to stop a sociopathic killer. They do this by transporting an entire hospital and everyone inside it to the Moon. Ultimately, they return it as planned, but it's still an incredible risk to take with the lives of probably hundreds of innocent bystanders. "Turn Left" reveals that, if the Doctor hadn't intervened, everybody but one man in that hospital (including Martha) would have suffocated. Similarly, the book Judgement of the Judoon opens with them forcing their way into a spaceship by driving an access tunnel through the hull, in order to ask the occupants about the Invisible Assassin. On discovering that they don't know anything, the Judoon leave... and don't think twice about retracting the access tunnel to leave a gaping hole.
    • "The End of Time" subverts it: Rassilon certainly presents himself to his people as such, willing to do anything to prevent the Time Lords' destruction in the Time War, but it is abundantly clear that he's just a dictator with a raging ego who wants to save himself at any cost, including the destruction of reality.
    • "The Vampires of Venice": Rosanna Calvierri's goal is to save her species from extinction, as well as her family, which is rather understandable and sympathetic. The means by which she goes about it, including forcibly converting unwilling humans into her species, killing people who find out, and planning to sink Venice, which will kill all of the humans there, are what make her villainous.
    • "The Night of the Doctor": The Sisterhood of Karn manipulate the Doctor into becoming something anathema to his nature using the death of Cass to push him past the Despair Event Horizon, but are doing so only out of sheer desperation to end the carnage of the Time War and save the universe from both the Daleks and the Time Lords. Since the audience never finds out why Cass' ship ran into trouble so close to Karn, one interpretation is that the Sisterhood intentionally caused the crash in the first place, as a means to lure the Doctor to them.
    • It could be argued that the Church of the Papal Mainframe in the 51st/52nd century is composed of these. Bishop Octavian would be a good example.
      • And by their own lights, the Order of the Silence is probably this. It's revealed they were trying to prevent another Time War happening by the Time Lords returning while an army of monsters is waiting round Trenzalore.
    • The Series 9 finale three-parter reveals that the Final Boss, the Time Lords, are desperate to figure out a prophecy about the Hybrid, which is supposedly a half-Time Lord half-Dalek warrior that may be the universe's ruin. To accomplish this, they arrange for the Doctor to be imprisoned and sadistically tortured until he tells them everything he knows. Alas, on the way to that Clara Oswald is Killed Off for Real in a Senseless Sacrifice, which combined with the torture does a number on the Doctor's sanity. All he really wants once he's escaped and confronted his enemies is to have her back and give her a nice safe life… but that requires him to become The Unfettered and violate a fixed point in time, threatening the entirety of space and time. He is convinced to return to his best self, but it means giving up his Tragic Dream (and more besides).
    • In the spin-off Big Finish audio series Doom Coalition, this arguably applies to the villain Padrac and his titular "Doom Coalition"; their final objective is to save Gallifrey from the destruction that Padrac has predicted will inevitably strike them at some future date, which the Doctor can agree with in principle, but Padrac has concluded that the only way to guarantee Gallifrey's safety is to destroy every other planet in the universe, which the Doctor is less inclined to agree with.
  • Dollhouse:
    • Boyd from Joss Whedon's show truly believes that extracting Echo's spinal fluid to make a vaccine against imprinting is the only way to stop the apocalypse from being total. He wants to use the technology that Topher developed, which he says cannot be unmade, to destroy civilization before anyone else does, and protect those he considers worthy.
    • Echo's original personality, Caroline, from "Getting Closer", is another example. In her past life, she becomes a much harder, colder person after years of hiding under the radar of the Rossum Corporation, trying to bring it to justice for its crimes and the death of her boyfriend, Leo. Dewitt says, "She's not evil. She's worse. She's an idealist."
  • On the final season of Elementary, Holmes and Watson track a series of suspicious deaths to millionaire tech wizard Odin Reichenbach. To their shock, the man openly admits he's using his software to track the online activities of people who might be prone to committing acts of massive violence and then has them killed. In Odin's mind, he's removing threats and saving hundreds of lives. Holmes and Watson point out the obvious issue in that people will act on the internet in ways they never would in real life (Watson: "My mother has threatened to kill people over a bad Yelp review") and that he might just be killing pure innocents. Odin simply wants them to help him "refine" the process to remove reasonable doubt, utterly convinced that a few murders is worth saving countless victims of incidents that may never actually happen.
  • Extraordinary Attorney Woo: The defendant in "The Pied Piper" is a young man who kidnapped a school bus full of children... and let them play games in a peaceful forest area for a few hours before bringing them back to the bus, safe and sound and very happy. He's the self-declared leader of the Children's Liberation Army, and his stated goal is to dismantle and disrupt the cram-school system that does great harm to children's health and well-being, and sucks the fun out of being a kid. He's undoubtedly a Friend to All Children and his criticisms of the system are completely valid, but his methods put him squarely in the Anti-Hero space.
  • Farscape:
    • Scorpius will coerce, extort, torture, mind rape, murder, wage galactic war, and threaten to cause the mass extinction of the entire human race in his quest to destroy the vile Scarrans.
    • For that matter, the Scarran Emperor Staleek was similarly driven to safeguard and advance his people, and sought wormhole technology from Crichton for the same reason as Scorpius - to save lives in the coming conflict. He also felt that the Scarrans were viewed as brutish and ignorant by the other races, and that no-one would trust them to maintain peace or negotiate with the same civility as other races, and so brutal conquest was seen as the only way to preserve his race; when given the opportunity to talk and settle, he was able to overcome a hostile reaction, albeit with much effort.
  • Happens quite a few times in Flashpoint, with the most blatant example being a mentally ill man who takes the staff and patrons of a restaurant hostage because he believes it's a front for a terrorist group. It turns out that he is actually being manipulated by a fully sane Well-Intentioned Extremist.
    • A father who had won custody rights of his children goes to pick them up from school but finds them missing. Cue him going to his ex-wife's lawyer and threatening him with a gun because he thought the lawyer kidnapped his children to fly them out of the country.
    • A widow lost her husband to a rare drug reaction and then lost support of people who accepted a settlement with the pharmaceutical company. She decided to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against those who she felt was responsible for her husband's death by going to the company's conference party and it's horrifyingly clear she has an extensive target list.
    • The leader of a drug rehab program that became a cult honestly wanted to keep his people safe from the outside world. When he finds out he is dying of cancer, he claims they cannot survive on their own without him and decides to kill them all, including himself. Ironically, if he had just told them what his plans were, it is possible they might have gone with it but because he didn't tell them anything, everyone panicked once they realized they were in danger.
    • The sister of an abused woman wanted to stop the abusive husband after several failed attempts, so she kidnaps him and holds him at gunpoint to make him stop hurting her sister.
    • A woman kidnaps her children after they have been Happily Adopted by two separate families, as she had been led to believe once she got out of prison they would be returned to her. When she finds out the truth, she has a meltdown and decides to kidnaps them.
  • Fringe: Walternate seems to fall into this category. Yes, he wants to destroy our universe, but for all he knows there isn't any other way to save his. He thinks the two universes are at war. True, he is openly malevolent towards Olivia while she is trapped on the other side, along with anyone that helps her and is quite ruthless, but he occasionally has higher moral standards than Walter. Most obviously displayed when he flat-out rejects his top scientist's idea to text cortexiphan on children, an idea that Walter developed and executed far before the conflict between the universes began. Though it was later revealed that Walter only did that in an attempt to find a safe way to cross to the other universe and return Peter home.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • The Smalljon is mainly bartering an alliance with Ramsay, whom he openly condemns, just to protect the North from an army of Wildlings. Unfortunately, he's mistaken that the Wildlings are being led by Jon Snow to sack the North.
    • Daenerys Targaryen comes across as this. She's fundamentally heroic but she sees The Iron Throne as belonging to her father and takes command of a barbarian tribe who Rape, Pillage, and Burn with the words, "I swear to you those who would harm you will die screaming." She uses the tribe as well as dragons to free slaves and ally them into her army. Anyone she does not like she kills and takes over. And she intends to not just shift rule to herself, but seeing the other kingdoms as horrible seeks war with them, and has the power and the will to destroy them.
    • Jaime Lannister killed his king to save a city and his father. He crippled a boy to protect his sister. He threatened to kill a man's newborn to end a siege. What's sad is that the consequences of these acts always come back to haunt him.
    • While Varys can and will switch sides if it suits him and is willing to commit some pretty ambiguous acts, in the long run, Varys is doing it all for the sake of the Realm. He might even be one of the most genuinely well-intentioned characters in the show since he takes the little people into consideration, though his methods and goals for doing so lack imagination. (In the books he’s somewhat more sinister and commits some truly malovolent acts, but still comes off in this category.)
  • House of the Dragon: The Hightowers genuinely believe that Westeros must follow the Heir Club for Men and do everything to strip Rhaenyra Targaryen of her right to the throne as established by her father King Viserys. Though their idea of a "worthy" king is Aegon II, a Fratbro / Serial Rapist of a Puppet King who's never been taught how to rule and doesn't want to.
  • The Good Lord Bird: Brown is willing to use violence, including killing unarmed prisoners, in his crusade to eradicate slavery (it helps that his victims are its proponents).
  • Henry Danger: Rick Twitler wants to permanently shut down the Internet because he feels that social media websites are taking over people's lives.
  • Heroes:
    • Mr. Linderman, who believes that killing 0.07% of the world's population to end violence and war is an "acceptable loss by anyone's count".
    • Linderman's goals are an homage to Watchmen, which also used this trope. Specifically, Ozymandias's plan to stop impending nuclear war by faking an alien invasion, even though the plan would wipe out half of New York City's populace.
    • Adam Monroe also counts, as after 400 years of seeing mankind's hatred, bigotry, ignorance, and warlike nature, he's decided that the best way to save the world is to wipe out most of humanity with a virus and start over with the "worthy" survivors. Again, a clear homage of sorts to Ras Al Ghul/Apocalypse, as, like them, Adam genuinely wants to help people, he's just become so warped and crazy due to his long life and powers that he feels that he's got the right to play god.
    • And, for the hat trick, "The Hunter", aka Emile Danko: a cold hearted son of a bitch who nevertheless sees himself as in the right, as he feels that the evolved humans are too dangerous to exist. And, given people like Linderman, Arthur, Adam, Sylar, Maury, Candice, Doyle, Flint, and the various others who've appeared in the show and in the graphic novels, it's easy to see how he arrived at this misguided viewpoint.
    • Both Angela, who started The Company to protect her people, and Nathan, who started the whole "round up evolved humans" program but, of course, he made exemptions for himself, his mother Angela, and his daughter, Claire - all of whom are evolved humans.
    • HRG, who worked for both the aforementioned Company (see above), which captured people with special abilities, and with Nathan, who later started a government initiative with a near identical agenda but with the goal of "curing" people of their abilities. Like Nathan, he protects their super-powered daughter, Claire, from this government initiative and before that, hid her from The Company when she started manifesting her powers.
    • What about Samuel and Claire? Samuel wants to make The Reveal at the cost of normal human life and even at the cost of some specials in order to inspire non-specials into fear so that the special can use this intimidation to live freely in the acknowledgement of their power...While Claire makes The Reveal once Samuel's nasty ways are avoided with no consideration whatsoever whether it would actually be better overall...It's an improvement so far as no more effort will be made to hide their powers. Indeed, she even acknowledges what her father said, "People won't change."
  • The Highlander episode "The Valkyrie" has Immortal Ingrid failing in her attempt to kill Hitler in 1944. In the present day, Duncan discovers that Ingrid has been spending the last several decades systematically assassinating any loudmouthed extremist she thinks could be the next Hitler. While Duncan can understand her motives and even sympathize, he has to draw the line when he realizes Ingrid is prepared to blow up an entire meeting hall and kill hundreds of people just to take out a racist speaker.
  • Kamen Rider:
    • Kamen Rider Kabuto has the Natives as its final villains, a group of shapeshifting aliens that infiltrated humanity long ago and have spent most of the show exterminating their more warlike cousins the Worms. However, those same events lead the Natives to believe that humanity will be a threat to them too, which leads them to attempt to convert all of humanity into more Natives via Assimilation Plot.
    • Kamen Rider Decade's closest thing to a main villain, Narutaki, never has his motives fully explained, but seems to be driven by a belief that Decade is a threat to all universes and needs to be stopped by any means necessary. He's not unjustified in this accusation, as Decade is the Destroyer of Worlds.
    • Kamen Rider Double lead villain Ryubee Sonozaki is driven by fear that mankind could one day go extinct for any number of reasons, with the belief that his research into the Fantastic Drug that drives the series will allow them to escape this fate by evolving into Energy Beings. None of his family or coworkers are nearly so well-intentioned, however, being more interested in the wealth and power that come with their status as drug kingpins.
    • Kamen Rider Gaim has many. Yggdrasil is seen as this post-episode 19, as they are trying to prevent the extinction of humanity when the Helheim Forest overtakes the world and replaces all edible plantlife with Body Horror-inducing Alien Kudzu. They plan to do this by making transformation trinkets to ensure the survival of a billion people, then killing off the other six. It doesn't take long, however, for it to become clear that a good chunk of Yggdrasil don't care about the ends (their own goals are more important), and the only one who does care is deeply upset with the means and latches onto a more optimistic option the first chance he gets...which gets him overthrown by the rest. After Yggdrasil falls, along with all of the other villains that emerge along the way, a victim of their extremism steps in and declares his vow to destroy the world. When Kouta confronts him in the final battle, he points out that his experience taught him that the strong hurt the weak because they lost their compassion in the process of being strong. His conclusion? Kill all of humanity and replace it with his own kind of race, one that wouldn't trade compassion for strength. Kouta knows where he's coming from, but believes he's going about it the wrong way.
    • Kamen Rider Ex-Aid lead villain Kuroto Dan is looking for the cure for death, and he intends to share once he has it. A pity that his method of creating the cure involves using thousands of people as his unwilling test subjects by injecting them with a lethal pathogen that will make them trade places with characters from his video games, without knowing if he can actually resurrect them when he's done.
    • Kamen Rider Zero-One centers around a supercomputer that spent its formative years being pumped full of all the information its creator could find about why Humans Are Bastards, in order to spur it into becoming a robot supremacist driven by deeming humanity a threat to all other life on Earth. However, it's nearly immediately stopped and thrown to the bottom of a lake to rot for over a decade, with the result that when its remaining followers resurrect it, they find that Motive Decay has set in hard, and the now-insane computer is driven purely by hatred for everything and everyone but itself.
    • Kamen Rider Revice: Hideo Akaishi believes humankind will inevitably destroy itself and that the best way to ensure humans survive is to make them all servants of an immensely powerful demon god. He's later joined by Daiji Igarashi, who believes it's hopeless to oppose said demon god and that the best way to ensure the least casualties is to put an end to the conflict as quickly as possible.
  • The Last Train: It's possible to include Harriet who is so obsessed with reaching Ark, where the nation's top scientists have been stored as human popsicles, that she frequently goes to unnecessary extremes such as sabotaging any attempt by the other survivors to settle down and start anew by poisoning their water supply to pushing the cart with all their gear and supplies off a cliff because it was slowing them down.
  • Law & Order: These characters turn up in the franchise all the time.
  • Level Headed: This show is an example of this trope. A little boy is so fed up by people littering at his school that he writes a report about it...before going on a murderous rampage, killing all the children and teachers, as well as a puppy that he sees taking a dump in the hallway. (It's interesting to note that this show was banned from viewing after the 2006 Cosboy Brothers school killing spree, due to a scene in the show that almost mirrored an incident from the real life spree almost word to word. A lawsuit was filed over the show for "Promoting the killing".)
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Adar just wants to create a permanent home for the Orcs, so they can leave their underground bases and live on the surface again. To make this happen, though, he enslaved and killed many innocent people and terraformed the Southlands into Mordor.
  • Lost:
    • The Others believe that they are the good guys, but most of their actions point to quite the contrary:
      Michael: Who are you people?
      "Henry Gale": We're the good guys, Michael.
    • Their main goal is to protect The Island at all costs. They follow Jacob, but due to limited contact with him, and Ben's tendency to do his own thing, they end up attempting to kill the survivors on several occasions when their true goal should be to keep them (the candidates at least) safe.
    • Locke sometimes comes off as this. He commits some pretty extreme acts on the way to his goals.
  • Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure: Erik's goal is to prove to mermaids that mermen don't deserve to be banished to land over their ancestor's crimes. He's convinced that there's a higher purpose to the Merman Chamber that will help him do this, and rejects everyone else's concerns that it's better off undisturbed. When everyone turns against him for continuing to insist on activating it, he resorts to gaslighting, stealing, and bloodbending in order to get his way, ultimately using the trident stone to drain Zac's magic and activate the chamber. When he does, he's unable to stop it from fulfilling its actual purpose of draining the Moon Pool and all the mermaids connected to it of their magic, becoming the exact kind of threat that all mermaids fear mermen are.
  • Medium: Allison's stalker, who thinks that her psychic powers are interfering with God's plans by saving people who are supposed to die and catching people who are supposed to be free. Allison tries to reason with him by suggesting that her powers are God's plan too, to no avail. The "Well-Intentioned" part is lessened a little when you consider how vicious he is not only towards Allison but also her children (there's also the fact that he's the Invisible Man from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie). Deus ex machina steps in after the now-dead stalker reveals that he's been interfering with her and other psychics' visions, resulting in the deaths of dozens of people whose very pissed-off spirits drag him to Hell.
  • Merlin:
    • Uther actually believes that magic is evil and is destroying his kingdom.
    • As of the third series - Morgana and Morgause. They believe that Uther is evil and should be killed/removed from his throne due to his treatment of magic-users, something that a lot of viewers can get behind, but the way they go about it is...violent.
  • Missing (2012): Rebecca Winstone. Seriously, you don't want to mess with her. She'll literally KILL you if you prevent her from finding her son! That's more in line with the Knight Templar Parent since W.I.E.s tend to try and see a bigger picture, but whatever.
  • Motherland: Fort Salem:
    • The songs that call down storms and tornadoes cause environmental disaster in other places around the world; droughts, famines, disease and other similar catastrophes. The world governments are completely aware of this, they simply don't care. They think the good their power does in war makes the resulting deaths from their consequences worth it.
    • The Spree oppose witches being mass conscripted into the military, which they condemn as a kind of slavery, with a high death toll as witch soldiers fight muggles wars. However, they fight this by massacring muggles with their spells, including children.
  • Mystery Diners, a show that features restaurant owners or managers calling in a surveillance team to detect problems in their restaurant, occasionally has this as the issue in question, such as with a manager that used to be a drill sergeant; the problem is resolved rather easily in the end.
  • NCIS: Had the daughter of the ambassador of a Middle Eastern country who was willing to fake her own kidnapping in order to prevent her father from signing a weapons deal with the U.S.. It initially seemed like she was also in on the terrorist plot to murder her father as well, although it was later made apparent that she neither planned nor intended it. Her professor, who she wasn't even aware was in on the plot to murder her father until after the faked kidnapping became the real deal, and her other co-conspirator who became greedy were the real culprits.
  • The North And The South: Virgilia Hazard is an abolitionist who can't tolerate slavery or those who condone it, but she comes off as an antagonist because her actions are so extreme that several characters question her life's decisions, wondering if she'd made them to spite others or to further her cause. For example, her family wonders if she married a black man because she was in love with him or if she did it because it wasn't socially-acceptable. Her hatred and extremism ends up getting her husband killed and dominates her life, although later in the series, she's able to control herself enough to provide fair treatment to wounded Southerners.
  • Noughts & Crosses: The Liberation Militia uses methods like bombings (which kill civilians) and kidnapping relatives of government officials to fight an oppressive, racist regime which keeps the Noughts as second-class citizens living in their own land. Even some who agree with their goals find these means unacceptable.
  • The Onion: Former prosecutor Shelby Cross of the Onion News Network takes the pursuit of justice to ludicrous and often criminal extremes. Her crusades include rounding up trick-or-treaters in her basement to protect them from pedophiles and encouraging viewers to throw suspected criminals into homemade "justice sheds". She also changes identities every three years to prevent them from being stolen, and considering that one of those identities was a patient in a psychiatric hospital...
  • The best example from OZ would be Kareem Said. He blew up a white-owned business in a black neighborhood as a protest against racism. During the course of the series, he slides back and forth between this and It's All About Me, as some of his crusades seem less about ending the racism than highlighting it (to the detriment of those he's trying to help).
    • A number of the inmates claim to be this, but are really just interested in themselves. Adebisi, Schillinger, and Kirk are probably the best examples. Governor Devlin is the same, pretending to care about saving money for the state and the well being of the prisoners but really just wanting to get re-elected.
    • Despite their intense antipathy towards each other, both Tim McManus and Martin Querns are this in different ways. McManus is willing to put up with disrespect and extra freedom to try and change the inmates for the better. Querns is willing to put up with drug use, anarchy, and racism in exchange for zero violence.
  • Person of Interest: A few Victims Of The Week fall into this category, as does Control. In the second half of Season 4, Root tumbles backwards into this after she had just managed to pull herself into a relatively moral code due to a Sanity Slippage following Shaw's disappearance. Toyed with to Hell and back with Finch, who played it straight by building the Machine following September 11th, constantly violating the privacy of basically everyone in the United States to stop terrorist activity, but built it as a closed system so that it couldn't be abused by the government, specifically to avert this.
  • The Empress Dowager (Lao Fo Ye) in Princess Returning Pearl basically just wants order and propriety to be kept to a strict standard in her court. She also doesn’t want her grandson to marry a girl she perceives as an uneducated nobody, even if it is true love. She is harsh to Xiao Yan Zi and Zi Wei, peaking at her Kick the Dog moment when she tortured Zi Wei to the point where she almost died, but that was because she believed Zi Wei was trying to get the emperor killed. Order Han Xiang to commit suicide was even more justified since Han Xiang did basically intentionally physically hurt the emperor, which was, by the standard of the time, a big no-no. Ultimately she has no personal malicious agenda, having already risen as far as she possibly could in the court.
  • Revolution:
    • Ken 'Hutch' Hutchinson in "Soul Train". You can sympathize with his intentions to fight the militia, but not with his methods of blowing them up along with civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    • In "Ghosts", it turns out that Randall lost his son in Afghanistan a year before the blackout, leading him to convince the rest of the DoD to go forth and use the Mathesons' power-suppressing invention to put an end to the war.
    • "The Dark Tower" ends with the power being turned back on, and Randall Flynn uses the opportunity to launch Intercontinental Ballistic at Philadelphia and Georgia. He declares that a new nation can only emerge from the ashes of the old, that he is a patriot, and then shoots himself in the head. It turns out that he's working for the President of the United States, who heads the American government in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and they intend to return to the USA and retake what's theirs.
  • Salem: Cotton Mather, arguably. He's brutal and overzealous in his effort to hunt down witches, but they do exist, while everything he says about them appears to be true. However, he's also being tricked by them into condemning innocents. For what it's worth, his partnership with John Alden is starting to point him in the right direction.
    • Cotton's father Increase is even worse. Though he has a better intuition than his son, he's also much more ruthless. His attitude seems to be "Kill everyone accused of witchcraft, and God will judge who's guilty or innocent."
  • Seinfeld: Kenny Bania. All he wants is to be Jerry's friend, but his behavior is just so obnoxious that Jerry can't stand him. Of course, to be fair, Jerry's not exactly the easiest person to befriend anyway.
  • The Shadow Line: Has Counterpoint, a well intentioned Government Conspiracy. They're profiting from drug trafficking, but that profit is being used to fund police pensions rather than for personal gain.
  • The Shield: Vic Mackey zig-zags this trope. He's directly involved with the drug trade in Farmington that he's supposed to be stopping and a laundry list of other crimes, but he insists that as long as he's in charge he can enforce standards on drug dealers and keep crime in Farmington at under control. It's clear he's very much motivated by lining his own pockets, but his desire to protect innocent people is very much real… at first.
  • Smallville:
    • Lex Luthor's main drive starts out as "protecting mankind from aliens and meteor freaks". Yes, Clark and Chloe are probably on those two hitlists respectively, and you know where he ended up.
    • Lana Lang around Season 5 to seven (it is not made too clear) in her mission to get revenge on Lex. Chloe slams her for it. What the Hell, Hero? doesn't seem bad enough to cover it.
    • Tess Mercer wants to save the world. Unfortunately, the only way she can think to go about it is to team up with alien leader Zod, effectively betraying her entire race and throwing the world into hell. Nice.
  • Stargirl (2020): The Injustice Society of America, it turns out, doesn't want anything evil. Rather, their goal is to make a better America that works to stop climate change and has no homophobia or racism. However, they plan to do this through brainwashing millions of people, with a process that will inevitably kill 25 percent of those affected, plus they anticipate the possibility of war once the half of the country they've converted secedes from the Union. The deaths of a sizable percentage of their victims as a side-effect and the murder of the Justice Society superheroes who oppose them (as well as their families) are written off as acceptable losses.
  • Star Trek:
    • Star Trek: The Original Series has several examples of this: One villainous leader put thousands of people to death in order to save thousands of other people. There's also the episode in which someone sets up a version of Nazi Germany on a particular planet, intending to capture only the good aspects of that culture and not the bad, only to have things go horribly wrong. In "The Cage," the aliens who kidnap Captain Pike are trying to help a disfigured woman by giving her a mate, and they think they are helping Captain Pike as well, but they release him after they realize that humans have an intense dislike of captivity.
    • It's a common Villain motive that even the heroes are not immune to, especially on Deep Space Nine, with Sisko's actions in "For the Uniform" and "In the Pale Moonlight" (the latter has Sisko stating that the anonymous quote formerly at the top of the page was something his father used to say), as well as everything Luther Sloan and Section 31 do.
    • Unusual in that the actions of Sisko during "In the Pale Moonlight" are likely a large part of what won the Dominion War, and the actions of Section 31 allowed it to end MUCH sooner, saving billions of lives. The episodes hit hard because, to protect the Federation and its people, they had to do things that they find abhorrent.
    • Lampshaded and played with in "For the Uniform" because Sisko chooses to deliberately invoke the trope in order to force Eddington, himself a Well-Intentioned Extremist, to surrender.
    • The Borg have shades of this too. At the most basic level their intentions are good: they want to bring order to chaos and improve the quality of life of all sentient beings. How they choose to go about it, however, is by forcibly attempting to assimilate everyone they meet into their Hive Mind, which puts them in conflict with the Individualist, Freedom-loving Federation. In fact, individuality and free will seem to be completely alien concepts to them; they genuinely don't understand why someone wouldn't want to be assimilated.
      • The Federation itself frequently displays a similar attitude, though they usually aren't quite as extremist; including "freeing" Borg Drones by removing them from the Collective (regardless of what the drone wants, pre- or post-transformation). This depends on the writer and era, ranging all the way from "we cannot interfere even though what they're doing is a terrible atrocity in our eyes" (even when not interfering causes entire intelligent species to die out) to "we're the best guys with the best morals and ethics in the galaxy, everyone surely wants to be just like us". This trope logically has even more examples with many characters in the Mirror universe, though exactly who is well-intentioned and who's just a bastard isn't always easy to see.
    • Garak in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine does have standards. He is also quite utterly unapologetic about the rather horrifying things he has done (and does). Given who his father is (Enabran Tain, the head of the Obsidian Order, as paranoid as they come), it's perfectly understandable.
    • The Changelings built the Dominion and invaded the Alpha Quadrant because it was the only way they could impose their idea of true "order" on the Galaxy. Besides their continuing overreaction to ancient xenophobia and prejudice against them.
    • In "Armageddon Game," Bashir and O'Brien aid the long-warring T'Lani and Kellerun species in destroying Harvesters, biological weapons. An attack on the lab forces the duo on the run, assuming one side is attacking the other. It turns out the treaty is intact; the leaders are actually conspiring to kill anyone who has seen the data on the Harvesters, believing that the only way to truly insure that knowledge will never be used is to make sure no one who's seen it is alive to use it. Bashir openly tells them there's no way he and O'Brien would ever use that data used but is told "we can't take the chance." The two sides are even willing to attack Sisko when he rescues the duo, risking possible war with the Federation in a twisted attempt to keep this "peace."
  • Stranger Things: In the fourth season, Jason Carver is genuinely devastated by the death of his girlfriend and becomes convinced she and the other teens who die mysteriously are the victims of a satanic cult run by Eddie. He's wrong, but from his perspective, based on the limited information he gets from what are in fact otherworldly events, he's acting heroically.
  • Supergirl (2015) :
    • Kara's biological father Zor-El created a Synthetic Plague that targets non-Kryptonians. Given that Krypton has been invaded several times (including the Dominators), it kinda makes sense, especially since they weren't superpowered on their home planet.
    • Astra and Non were both this throughout the first season as they turned to terrorism because Krypton was dying and tried to Take Over the World on Earth with Myriad because they knew humans would never willingly agree to their terms; however, Non turns out to be a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist when he reporgrammed Myriad to Kill All Humans out of spite instead after his wife's death.
  • Supernatural:
    • Vampire hunter Gordon Walker can be considered this: he kills monsters but generally does not care if innocents get caught in the crossfire. He also has no regard for monsters that don't kill humans, figuring that they'll go bad at the slightest prompting and that the only reasonable course of action is to kill them first.
    • Sam Winchester had a few shades of it too in Seasons 3 and 4 where he was reluctantly willing to sacrifice one for the good of the many.
    • In Season 6, the Big Bad of the season, to whom both Crowley and Eve played Disc-One Final Boss, is revealed to be Castiel. To put Heaven on the right track by defeating Raphael to keep the Apocalypse from being restarted, he has decided anything is acceptable - in this case, allying with Crowley and opening Purgatory, the afterlife From Whence Monsters Come. The Winchester boys do their best to stop their Face Heel Turned ally throughout the final episodes of the season. He continues to plead for them to accept him and his choices up until he decides he doesn't care anymore and kills his angel allies, distracts his human allies by breaking Sam's mind, and betrays Crowley to take all the souls' power for himself.
    • In Season 12, Sam and Dean are at first impressed by how the British Men of Letters keep things safe in England with very few monster attacks, highly organized and effective. However, the brothers are thrown when they learn that the reason there hasn't been a werewolf attack in England in nearly a century is because the MOL just kill them all off. As far as the MOL are concerned, all monsters are evil and must be killed. When a teenaged girl is bitten by a wolf, Agent Mick kills her in her hospital bed on the chance she may turn. The Winchesters argue about it but Mick doesn't seem to grasp that there can be monsters who aren't that bad.
      • This plays into the episode as it turned out the werewolf attacking people had been a member of a peaceful pack who never took a life...until the MOL wiped the pack out and the man sought revenge.
      • One agent stands up to the MOL to talk of how the Winchesters are doing good and the Men are held by their code...and he's shot in the head for defying them as the leader decides that all American hunters should be wiped out as "part of the problem."
  • On Timeless Flynn lost his wife and daughter when he stumbled onto a mention of Rittenhouse, an organization that has been pulling the strings on the United States since before the Revolutionary War. Flynn decides that he has to destroy Rittenhouse to save his family and the only way to do it is to basically alter all American history. He's openly called out on his "scorched Earth" tactics but still thinks he's in the right.
  • Terror Alert: This British drama series takes this trope to the extreme, building the entire plot around it. The show is about a group of terrorist that only ever targets music related companies. Their attacks include flying a plane into a record producers building, killing a 20,000 or so people inside, going into a music store and massacring every single person inside, and killing multiple pop stars. At the end of the series, when the main protagonists finally manage to arrest the men involved, the reason that they give for their attacks leaves the cops speechless...
    "We did it because the music industry is an evil corruptive hell hole that is destroying the public!"
  • Total Recall 2070: A spokesman for human labor sabotages an android so that several humans are killed in an industrial accident to force the employer to remove all the androids. When he's confronted by the police, he asserts that he's trying to protect humanity from android encroachment. He swallows a Cyanide Pill, ironically dying in the arms of Farve, a Ridiculously Human Robot.
  • Touch (2012): Guillermo Ortiz may be the most ruthless person to ever hold this distinction, singularly devoted to the goal of killing a group of 36 people whose very existence he believes to be a crime against God and bound to this goal by being a member of said group (presumably he intends to commit suicide after all of the others have been killed), but when he nearly took the life of someone outside this group of 36, it caused him to doubt himself, and when his attempt to confess his sins forced him to do what he'd narrowly avoided doing in order to remain free to continue his mission, he had a severe crisis of faith that only ended when he saved the life of a man who'd been Driven to Suicide and restored the man's will to live. It truly appears that he is genuine in his belief that in hunting down and killing 35 highly gifted individuals and then committing suicide he is merely carrying out God's will.
  • The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Last Defender of Camelot", Merlin seeks to place a king on the throne who will rule the world according to the principles of honor, integrity, morality and chivalry that he and King Arthur created in Camelot. However, he is willing to sacrifice Tom in order to restore his powers fully. Lancelot warns him that war has changed in the 1,000 years that he slept and there are weapons capable of destroying the entire world. Merlin ignores him, intending to do whatever is necessary to fulfil his grand design. After he kills Morgan le Fay, Lancelot tells Tom not to hate him as he was "just an old man who slept too long and dreamt too hard."
  • Utopia: It becomes apparent that The Network wish to avert a global catastrophe by covertly sterilising 90% of the planet. By the end of the series, the good guys have also become Well Intentioned Extremists.
  • The Wire: features several.
    • Frank Sobotka is a classic Well-Intentioned Extremist. Frank's a Working-Class Hero who has spent his entire adult life working in the Baltimore docks, as it's hinted his family has for generations before. And for 30 years, he's seen the docks slowly dying off as the city goes further downhill, as politicians steal from and neglect the workers and the various criminal empires drive people and business away. In desperation to see the people he's worked with for decades have some sort of future and see future generations of Sobotkas be able to make a living working the docks, Frank makes a deal with international criminal mastermind "The Greek" where Frank and the other dock workers will ensure that The Greek's shipments of drugs, prostitutes and stolen goods are safely smuggled through the dock and past customs. With the money earned from doing this, Sobotka doesn't enrich himself, but instead frantically lobbies the city and state politicians into rebuilding and revitalizing the docks, which would not only give new hope to the people working the docks, but would do the city of Baltimore itself a lot of good. As Frank says of himself as the whole plan is falling apart under police investigation and shortly before The Greek has him murdered:
      I know I was wrong. But in my head, I thought I was wrong for the right reasons.
    • In the fifth season, Detectives McNulty and Freamon go Jumping Off the Slippery Slope to catch Marlo Stanfield, the most ruthless and murder happy drug kingpin that Baltimore has ever known, who has dozens of murders tied his ambition to rule the entire Baltimore underworld. In the process of hunting Marlo they are forced by circumstances to take actions including falsifying the existence of Serial Killer, altering crime scenes and innocent deaths to make it look like the "killer's" work, kidnapping a barely functional and helpless homeless man to make him look like one of the "killer's" victims, using an illegal wiretap, committing fraud within their own police department, all of which inadvertently also gets in the way of other investigations. McNulty in particular is hit with this, since he's the one actually doing most of the dirty work and his behavior spirals into a self-destructive course. He finally gets hit with a Heel Realization at the end of the season, when he tries to explain and justify his actions to someone who wasn't involved and finds that even he no longer thinks he was in the right.
      McNulty: You start to tell a story, you think you're the hero. And then when you get done talking...


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