History GodzillaThreshold / LiveActionTV

* In "The Last Sontaran", an episode of ''Doctor Who'' spin-off ''Series/TheSarahJaneAdventures'', despite the fact that Sarah Jane DoesntLikeGuns and distrusts the military, the presence of a Sontaran ship on Earth prompts her to make plans to call in UNIT.

** The Earth-Minbari War was one for Earth Alliance. As shown in ''[[Recap/BabylonFiveFilm01InTheBeginning In the Beginning]]'', realization of the Minbari's power caused Earth Alliance to start freely fielding nukes (usually kept in reserve), buying alien weapons (something they don't usually do, preferring to reverse-engineer technologies to not become dependent on the sellers and to understand how they work e.g. so they don't blow up in their face), and even ramming Minbari ships to just [[HopelessWar try and slow them down enough to evacuate a sizable part of Earth's population away from the genocidal enemy]]. Even ten years after the Minbari decided to spare Mankind and surrender, Earth is ''still'' trying to put together a more powerful fleet, even fielding {{Wave Motion Gun}}s and [[spoiler:collaborating with the Shadows]].

** In the first season, the station's dockworkers go on strike. Faced with a complete shutdown of the station's operations, Commander Sinclair is authorized to end the strike "By any means necessary". He does the unthinkable [[spoiler:and reallocates part of the station's military budget to meet the dockworkers' demands]].

** The ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' episode "Operation: Annihilate!" involved them considering passing the Threshold to prevent the spread of an alien pancake parasite. Kirk demanded they find and TakeAThirdOption.
** But he didn't always. In "Where No Man Has Gone Before", he tells the ship's medical officer, Dr. Fix, that if the ship hasn't heard from Kirk within 12 hours after Fix and Spock beam back up, it is to proceed to the nearest starbase and pass along Kirk's "recommendation" that the entire planet be subjected to lethal radiation in order to kill Gary Mitchell.

** At the end of "Obsession", Kirk sets off an antimatter bomb that basically renders the cloud creature's (admittedly desolate to begin with) home planet uninhabitable in order to destroy the creature.
** Kodos the Executioner/Anton Karidian in ''The Original Series'' episode "The Conscience of the King" used this as his excuse to execute half the colonists of the Tarsus IV colony when a fungus destroyed most of their food supply. It's worth noting that he was wrong about one of his assumptions: It turned out that the Federation did manage to get relief supplies to the colony in time. Had he turned out to be ''right''...
** ''[[Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine Deep Space Nine]]'' discusses this several times during the Dominion War arcs, both at a governmental level (with [[NoSuchAgency Section 31]], that thinks the Federation [[TheWorldIsAlwaysDoomed is constantly living on the edge of the Threshold]] and [[UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans this gives them reason to do every single thing they do]], no matter how monstrous) and a personal and moral level (such as in the episode "In The Pale Moonlight").

** The Borg Collective's very existence is considered the threshold for the Federation. Whenever they've shown up in any of the TV series or movies, Starfleet has been willing to employ whatever means necessary to stop them from assimilating the Federation. The TNG episode "I, Borg" included the deployment of a computer virus that would kill every single Borg drone, a violation of the Federation's sacred principle of not using genocidal weapons or tactics. The ''Enterprise'' crew don't go through with it because of their moral qualms, but Admiral Nechayev later makes it clear the Starfleet Command wanted them to and is furious that they didn't.
** Also from the Borg, Deep Space Nine reveals that after the battle of Wolf 359, where a single Borg Cube routed an entire Federation fleet, they authorised the creation of the Defiant, the first ever Federation space ship with no other purpose than combat.
** In the ''Series/StarTrekVoyager'' two-parter [[Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS3E25S4E1Scorpion Scorpion]], Voyager encounters Species 8472, a threat ''even more dangerous than the Borg''. To stop them from [[OmnicidalManiac purging the galaxy]], Janeway enters an alliance with the Borg. [[spoiler:It turns out that the Borg were the aggressors, having invaded Species 8472's universe. Species 8472 were only retaliating and at the time believed that the Borg controlled the whole galaxy]].

* ''Series/TheLastOfUs2023'' shows the beginning of the fungal outbreak in Jakarta. When a mycologist is brought to examine an infectee, leading her to realize that it can infect people now and that 14 possible infectees are missing, she calmly, albeit terrified and devastated, tells the military officer with her that the only possible solution to prevent TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt is to bomb their city and kill everyone in it. [[ForegoneConclusion It didn't work]].

* ''Series/TheLastOfUs2023'' shows the beginning of the fungal outbreak in Jakarta. When a mycologist is brought to examine an infectee, leading her to realize that it can infect people now and that 14 possible infectees are missing, she calmly tells the military officer with her that the only possible solution to prevent TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt is to bomb their city and kill everyone in it. [[ForegoneConclusion It didn't work]].

* ''Series/{{Warehouse 13}}'': The pilot of Season 4 is built on this. With the Warehouse destroyed, so was its most well-protected artifact: Pandora’s Box, and with it the concept of Hope. With the entire world undergoing a literal DespairEventHorizon, the heroes track down an artifact that will let them erase the last 24 hours, where messing with things like time and death with Claudia, Myka, and Pete each pulling a HeroicSacrifice to let Artie claim the artifact. And the monk who had been guarding it cautions Artie that the price for using it was an evil of the user's own making that they would have to live with for the rest of their days. When Artie finally admits the truth to Mrs. Frederick later in the season, she concedes immediately that he made the right choice.

* The first half of ''Series/{{Warehouse 13}}'' season 4 is built on this. The artifact the team spends episode 4.01 searching for unleashes an evil into the world. Considering that the alternative is the whole world being completely drained of all hope, this is the better alternative. Of course, the evil they unleash decides to invoke the Godzilla Threshold as well in hopes that the team will undo what they did.

** In ''Film/TheArkOfTruth'', one of the weapon systems the humans bring with them to the Ori home galaxy as a fallback in case their primary plan fails is a Replicator with reprogrammed failsafes. [[spoiler: The failsafes turn out to not be as fail safe as hoped.]]

* ''An Hour to Save Your Life'', a medical documentary series on Creator/TheBBC, showed two people receiving surgery under general anaesthetic at the roadside because they were dying of internal bleeding after being severely injured in road accidents. One had open heart surgery, and the other was given the REBOA treatment, which is risky in an operating theatre, never mind at the side of a road. The medics decided that the patients could not wait to be taken to hospital.