"You Said You Would Let Them Go!" moments in Live-Action TV series.
- 24: In the fourth season, Mitch Anderson threatens an Air Force officer's family so that he will take him to his air base, enabling him to steal a fighter jet. When the officer does as he's told and asks to speak with his family, Anderson informs him that his family is dead and that he will be the next to die before shooting him.
- Altered Carbon. The Anti-Hero version happens in "Force of Evil". Takeshi Kovacs has been tortured for hours in Virtual-Reality Interrogation, but he's eventually able to fool the Torture Technicians into waking him up in the real world. He then pretends to be an undercover officer for a CTAC special forces unit, spells out a To the Pain description of what will happen to them for this stuff-up, but says the first man to release him will get to live. The technicians rush to do so, whereupon Kovacs proceeds to Real Death them and everyone else in the building. As he's exiting the building, he encounters his sidekick Vernon, who's convinced the cyborg thug who originally captured Kovacs to take him to where Kovacs is being held. Kovacs Boom Headshots the thug without breaking stride, whereupon Vernon says belatedly that he'd actually promised the thug his life.
- Battlestar Galactica (2003): Inverted Trope: in season 2, the fleet captures a Cylon and Roslin tells him to cooperate or he will be flushed out of an airlock without a spacesuit. He cooperates but she had him spaced anyway just because he was a Cylon.
- Castle: Subverted Trope in the episode "Heartbreak Hotel": mafia boss kidnaps the girlfriend of a guy who accidentally stole 10 million dollars from the mob. Mafia boss promises if he returns the money, they'll return his girlfriend unharmed. Guy returns the money. Guy utters this line word for word. Mafia boss thinks for a moment, then... returns his girlfriend unharmed.
- Heroes:
- Sylar wants his abilities blocked by Matt. While doing that, he traps him in his own head for eternity. I guess after threatening a guy's family, killing his friends and taking over his body asking him for a favor is a bad idea.
Sylar: (unbelieving) You said you would help me.Matt: Yeah, well... Guess there is still a little of you left inside me. Because I lied. Enjoy hell. (He disappears from Sylar's mind, leaving him scared. He then starts to wall up Sylar's body in his basement.)- Subverted Trope in Volume 1 of Heroes. DL Hawkins manages to pay off the debts to Linderman and give them to Linderman's Amoral Attorney, but then the Attorney implies that Linderman had altered the amount and takes the money. A later episode reveals that Linderman ordered a hit on that same attorney for stealing the money to buy diamonds for himself, implying that Linderman fully intended to uphold the deal.
- Power Rangers: Standard for the franchise whenever the Rangers make a deal with the villain.
- Revolution: Played with in the first season finale. When Tom Neville becomes the new leader of the Monroe Republic, his son asks him to please spare Charlie and Rachel, whatever happens in the Tower. In Tom's defence, he was going to uphold the deal, but the minute Team Matheson got into the control room on level 12, Tom orders the troops to break into the room and kill them all. He snidely asks his visibly shocked and uncomfortable son if he has a problem with that.
- Smallville: In "Checkmate", Clark gets hit with this when Amanda Waller had agents holding Chloe at gunpoint and demanding him to reveal himself.Amanda Waller: I'd like to have my cake and eat it too.
- Doctor Who: In "Nightmare in Silver", the Doctor plays Chess With Cybermen with human hostages as the stakes, and correctly anticipates this outcome beforehand.
- A variation in Mob City: Mob enforcer Sid Rothman has hero Joe Teague restrained saying he'll let Teague go if he lets loose the location of a witness, but he'll kill him if Teague doesn't cooperate. When Rothman's associate calls him that he's in the process of assassinating said witness, Rothman gives us this gem: "I guess this cat got skinned another way, so, uh, never mind," and starts untying Teague.
- Game of Thrones
- King Joffrey Baratheon agrees to be merciful to Eddard Stark at the behest of his bride-to-be Sansa, who is also Eddard's daughter, as long as he confesses to treason and declares Joffrey as legitimate. Eddard makes said declaration but Joffrey has him beheaded anyway. Sansa calls him out on this, but Joffrey coldly points out that he never said he let her father live, since he considered the beheading more merciful than a slow and torturous death.
- Ramsey Snow sends Theon Greyjoy to negotiate the surrender of the Ironborn in Moat Cailin, only to have them Flayed Alive. As they view the flayed corpses, Ramsey says mockingly, "You didn't think I was going to let them go, did you?" Theon of course had no such illusions, having already been tortured and broken by his sadistic captor.
- In Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, Jafar promises to Will that he will spare Anastasia if he tells where his heart is. As Anastasia herself predicted, he still kills her anyway.
- Quark. Zorgon threatens to crush the Betty twins unless Quark talks. He does so, and Zorgon is so grateful he has all three chained up to be eaten by a lizard monster instead. When Quark protests this trope, Zorgon is hurt — this is him being merciful!
- Mentioned but averted in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "The Assignment". A malevolent entity possessed Keiko O'Brien and used her to force Miles to sabotage the station in a plot to destroy the Bajoran Wormhole, indicating that it would release Keiko once O'Brien had fulfilled its command. Miles was able to drive the entity from Keiko's body, saving her and the Wormhole. Keiko later told Miles that she could sense the entity's emotions and admitted "I don't think it had any intention of letting either of us survive."
- M*A*S*H: A visiting Congressional aide, R. Theodore Williamson, arrives at the 4077th to investigate Margaret for possible Communist sympathizing as she had once dated a man who was a known Communist. Hawkeye, B.J. and Charles later tell Williamson that he's wasting his time as Margaret is no Communist sympathizer ("If Hot Lips Houlihan dated Josef Stalin, the only thing she'd remember is that his moustache tickled!," says Hawkeye). They play up Margaret's romantic tendencies, so later, Williamson visits Margaret at her tent and says he can get her off the hook — for a little romantic tussle. Margaret pretends to go along with it, but it's actually a ploy to get a compromising photo of Williamson in order to force him to back off. After the setup is revealed, Williamson says he had no intention of letting Margaret off the hook even if she'd gone through with it. Fortunately for everyone except Williamson himself, because of the picture, he's left with no choice but to walk away.
- Chuck: In "Chuck Versus The Leftovers", Big Bad Akexei Volkoff has locked up the team and Chuck's mother inside the Buy More. He says he'll let them live if they hand Frost over to him. They do so and Volkoff still tries to kill Chuck twice. Mary is forced to reveal she is Chuck's mother and threatens him at gunpoint to get him to spare their lives.
- In Arrow, Damien Darhk's response is "One, that was more implied than actually agreed upon; two (and more importantly) "Bad guy, remember?"
- Star Trek: The Next Generation. In "A Fistful of Datas", a Genre Savvy Troi has to warn Worf of this trope, pointing out the villain always breaks his word in The Westerns their holodeck program is based on.
- Blake's 7.
- In "The Harvest of Kairos", Servalan captures the Liberator and threatens to execute our heroes one-by-one until they order Zen to transfer command authority to her. Tarrant points out Servalan will likely kill them anyway, and refuses. Avon however concedes, but quickly adds a provision to Zen that Servalan must first leave them unharmed on a planet with Earth-like conditions. Unfortunately the nearest planet of that description is a Death World, and Servalan later tries to destroy them with Orbital Bombardment just to be sure.
- In "Terminal", Servalan uses a Hostage for MacGuffin ploy, throwing in her own spaceship in exchange for the Liberator as a way off the planet. Unfortunately her hostage is actually an illusion created with a Lotus-Eater Machine, and her spaceship crashlanded on arrival so they might not be able to repair it. And did she mention that the planet's fauna is extremely hostile and all the technology she left behind is booby-trapped?
- Invoked a couple of times in NUMB3RS:
- In "Backscatter", two bank employees are kidnapped to force their boss to facilitate a heist. When Don and Gary Walker are trying to convince the boss to help them, one of the things they tell him is that no matter what the guy claims, the hostages are pretty much guaranteed to be killed as soon as they're no longer needed.
- In "One Hour", two bodyguards who had been involved in a conspiracy to kidnap their charge are shot, one fatally. When the agents confront the survivor with evidence that he was in on it, he points out that if they're willing to kill their accomplices, "You gotta figure they don't plan on leaving that boy alive." This is later confirmed; when Colby makes the ransom drop and rescues the boy, the kidnapper is seen trying to set up a shot before David comes in and arrests him.
- In a White Collar episode, a little girl is kidnapped and held for ransom. Naturally, the kidnappers are promising that she'll be released unharmed if the random is paid, but Neal quickly figures out that they're not hiding their faces in front of her, which is a clear indication that they're not worried about her identifying them later because they don't intend to let live.
- Gotham Knights (2023): In "Under Pressure" the Mutant Gang plan to kill the hostages even after getting what they want, having promised previously they'd be spared for this. However, thankfully the hostages are saved anyway.
