History OutsideContextProblem / LiveActionTV

** Season 7 reveals that the temporal anomaly is a portal to other time-dilated planets in a connected system of planets that are under control of a space cult of individuals who are trying to invoke an event known as the Last War. [[spoiler: It is revealed that the Last War is not a war but a ''judgment'' which is enacted upon humanity by a godlike hivemind known only as the Judge, which chooses to either save all of humanity or destroy it, and this Judge has performed the same test upon the races of each planet in the temporal anomaly system.]]

* The Federation becomes an Outside Context Problem for the Borg in kind; [[spoiler:through the successive efforts of a future Admiral Janeway in the VOY series finale dealing catastrophic galaxy-wide damage to the Collective's integrity, and Picard and company finishing off the remnants in the series finale of his own titular series. "Resistance is Futile" is their demoralizing catchphrase, which they have proven to be horrifyingly accurate throughout the Delta Quadrant... and yet the persistent resistance of Picard, Janeway, and their respective crews ended up being the catalyst of the entire Collective's demise.]]

** Other spinoff ''[[Series/Class2016 Class]]'' acquired this problem in its first (and only) season finale, [[Recap/ClassS01E08TheLost "The Lost"]]: [[spoiler:[[OmniscientCouncilOfVagueness The Governors]] turn out to work for the [[EldritchAbomination Weeping Angels]], and are plotting to unleash some sort of ''Angel god''. While Weeping Angels are previously known to ''Doctor Who'' fans, not a single one of the protagonists of this show has ever heard of them, and in fact don't yet know about the true threat, much less how to deal with it.]] Unfortunately, due to the show's cancellation, if this is ever resolved, it probably [[TheResolutionWillNotBeTelevised won't be on TV]].

** Another example from ''VOY'' was Annorax and his quest to restore the Krenim -- and more importantly, his deceased wife -- from "[[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekVoyagerS4E8YearOfHell Year of Hell]]". At first, the ''Voyager'' crew have no clue why these temporal shockwaves are happening, nor are they remembering the effects altering the timeline. Then they create temporal shielding...but that just ends up attracting Annorax's attention.

* In ''Series/TheWalkingDead2010'', Ezekiel, the leader of the Kingdom, keeps a ''pet tiger'' named Shiva; he was a former zookeeper and rescued her when she was injured in her exhibit. She is understandably rather out-of-place in a zombie apocalypse, and every survivor who meets her doesn't quite know what to make of her. This comes in very handy when the Kingdom fights back against the Saviors at the end of Season 7; she's the first one to jump in, and her presence distracts everyone long enough for the Kingdom's forces to come in.

** Even before Warren Mears, there was Ted, the titular killer robot from the episode "Ted". Buffy knew how to handle vampires and demons and things that went bump in the night, but a killer robot who pretended to just be a guy? She had no idea how to deal until she figured out his secret.

** And from the Borg's perspective, there's Species 8472 from ''Series/StarTrekVoyager.'' They're the first species that the Borg can't assimilate, and one of their bioships can destroy 15 cubes.
** Getting back to ''Next Generation:'' In Season 3, there's an episode called [[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS3E11TheHunted "The Hunted"]] that features Roga Danar, one of numerous former soldiers from the planet Angosia, who have been [[SuperSoldier enhanced with superhuman abilities]] in order to fight their wars. Unfortunately, they become renegades, and even prisoners, afterward, when there's no place in society for them. When the ''Enterprise'' crew are forced to deal with a rogue Danar, they find themselves completely unprepared for someone who can NoSell phaser blasts, block their own life signs from scanners, and -- get this -- ''resist the transporter beam.''

* In ''Series/{{Chernobyl}}'', scientist Valery Legasov contextualizes the Chernobyl disaster for bureaucrat Shcherbina by describing it as "something that has never happened on this planet before." For the first time ever, a man-made disaster could have potentially rendered a whole continent uninhabitable for tens of thousands of years.

** In [[{{Film/Stargate}} the movie]], modern-day humans found themselves fighting an alien, Ra, who commanded soldiers wielding EnergyWeapons, and had access not only to powerful healing technologies but also fighters capable of spaceflight. It took a [[NukeEm nuclear warhead]] to bring down Ra's spaceship and even then it was very close.

* ''Series/StargateSG1'' as well:
** Initially, the Goa'uld themselves. The Earthers thought the one they'd killed in the movie was the LastOfHisKind and that they'd eliminated any threat to Earth when they took it out. Not so much...
** The Replicators, an extragalactic, mechanical HordeOfAlienLocusts who make all kinds of trouble for SG-1 and its allies and eventually invade the Milky Way. By then SG-1 had some experience with them, but the Goa'uld still saw them as this trope.
** Anubis, whom the System Lords thought had died eons ago after his banishment. Turns out he was NotQuiteDead. His return in Season 5 forces both the System Lords and the Earth/Tok'ra/Free Jaffa alliance to shift their priorities from each other to the new enemy.
** The Ori in the last two seasons. For nearly a decade the heroes have been fighting the Goa'uld, whose modus operandi is to use technology to trick primitives into thinking they're gods. Now they have to fight aliens who by almost any definition ''are'' gods.
** And, of course, Stargate Command and the Tau'ri (Earth humans) in general are this to the Goa'uld. They had a nice little system set up where they could squabble with one another, had a treaty with the Asgard to keep them off their backs (though this was more because the Asgard were busy keeping the aforementioned Replicators contained, and [[JustifiedTrope didn't have the resources to]] [[WhyDontYouJustShootHim just wipe the Goa'uld off the map already]]), run their own little kingdoms as they wanted... and then a small group of primitives from a long-forgotten world shows up and proceeds to kick their asses so hard that a system that survived millennia goes down in under a decade.

*** The Crisis itself is this to the [[LockedOutOfTheLoop various other Earths who didn't know]]; the opening shows the residents of [[Series/{{Titans}} Earth-9]], [[Series/{{Batman}} Earth-66]] and [[Film/Batman1989 Earth-89]] reacting to the red skies, while [[Series/BlackLightning Jefferson Pierce]] is teleported from his Earth by Pariah just before its' destruction to assist the heroes. Thanks to skipping out on the ''Elseworlds'' event, the Legends are also unaware of the Crisis, until Lyla as Harbinger teleports into the bar where Ray and Sara are to recruit them. There's also the matter of [[spoiler:[[Franchise/DCExtendedUniverse Movie-Barry Allen]], who encounters his Arrowverse counterpart in the Speed Force, [[HeroOfAnotherStory and is not only unaware of the Crisis]], [[NoodleIncident but unclear on how he's there in the first place.]]]]

* In ''Series/TheWalkingDead'', Ezekiel, the leader of the Kingdom, keeps a ''pet tiger'' named Shiva; he was a former zookeeper and rescued her when she was injured in her exhibit. She is understandably rather out-of-place in a zombie apocalypse, and every survivor who meets her doesn't quite know what to make of her. This comes in very handy when the Kingdom fights back against the Saviors at the end of Season 7; she's the first one to jump in, and her presence distracts everyone long enough for the Kingdom's forces to come in.

* ''Series/AgentsOfSHIELD'' shows that S.H.I.E.L.D. has a name for Outside Context Problems: 0-8-4, code for an object of unknown origin and utility. [[Film/{{Thor}} Thor's hammer was one]], and a laser weapon found in some ancient ruins was another. Obviously, eventually sometimes context ''is'' provided; they still don't know much about Mjolnir, but they know where it came from and who it belongs to. Likewise, the laser weapon turned out to be a device commissioned from [[Film/CaptainAmericaTheFirstAvenger HYDRA]] during WWII. The code 0-8-4 had a simple explanation: the first Outside Context Problem they ever found (What ultimately turned out to be a Kree gene-splicing tool that killed anyone who touched it without first being properly prepped or descended from someone who had been prepped) was the 84th unique item that the SSR confiscated from HYDRA, and so ended up in a box with 084 stenciled on it.

** Season 4 of ''Series/StarTrekDiscovery'' is all about this trope, as the Federation (and our entire galaxy) find themselves facing something so massively outside their scope of technology (even a thousand years into the future of the original series) that it takes almost the entire season just to figure out its (possible) origin.

* ''Series/PowerRangersTimeForce'': The monsters of the week for this season are typically either {{Mutants}} or robots commanded by [[TheStarscream Frax]]. However, the episode "Beware the Knight" has the Rangers fighting an evil BlackKnight who seeks to acquire a great power source. No explanation is given about who this Black Knight is and where he came from and the episode is really only an excuse so the Red Ranger can get his own SuperMode.
* ''Series/PowerRangersZeo'' has Rita and Zedd from the previous seasons celebrating on how they just blew up the Rangers' base, when the Machine Empire randomly comes along and decides to invade Earth, too. Though Rita and Zedd are PutOnABus for much of the season, the Rangers' retrieval of the Zeo Crystal gives them new powers and weaponry to stop the Machine Empire's plans. Somewhat lampshaded -- once they're settled in at their new base beneath the old one, the Rangers immediately start bombarding Zordon and Alpha with questions, causing Alpha to have a nervous breakdown.

%% This page has been alphabetized. Please add new examples in the correct order.

** The 100 spent season one fighting against [[FuturePrimitive Grounders]] until the last episode revealed that the [[TheDreaded Mountain Men]], previously thought to be another clan of natives, were in fact the remnant of the US government and military and by far the most technologically advanced faction in the story.
** In season two, the main storyline dealt with the conflict with Grounders and Mountain Men [[spoiler:the former becoming allies of the heroes, and the latter being exterminated.]] But the secondary plot ends up introducing A.L.I.E., an [[AIIsACrapshoot evil A.I.]] responsible for the nuclear apocalypse who tries to [[AssimilationPlot assimilate]] the last remains of mankind, and who comes completely out of left field compared to the more down to earth survival tone of the rest of the show.
** At the end of season three A.L.I.E. revealed that nuclear plants all over the globe were about to go critical after a century of lack of maintenance and threatened to send enough radiation in the atmosphere to exterminate all life on Earth, a problem so far out of reach for people who still live in scavenged pieces of trash with no means of intercontinental transportation it's not even funny.
** The better part of season four is spent looking for ways to survive the deathwave instead of fighting a human enemy, so when a spaceship from the barely mentioned before "Eligius Corporation" lands on Earth at the end it comes as quite a surprise.

* ''Series/{{Alphas}}'' villain Marcus Ayers explicitly calls himself - and all other Alphas - an "out-of-context problem" for normal humans. He then fatalistically points out that only way humans know how to deal with such a problem is to destroy it, [[spoiler:which they try to do to him shortly afterwards]].

** ''Series/LegendsOfTomorrow'' lives for this trope. In the first season, Rip Hunter recruits a team of crooks, assassins and d-list superheroes to serve as this to his nemesis Vandal Savage. In the second season, the team have their first encounter with magic and changes to the timeline that can't be fixed with more time travel. In the third season, historical anachronisms have started appearing everywhere, giving rise to such situations as Caesar at a toga party in Aruba and Helen of Troy upstaging Hedy Lamar's acting career. Finally, season four sees all kinds of magical creatures let loose across history, of which almost nobody on the team has any experience, which results in [[Series/{{Constantine}} John Constantine]] joining the Legends.

** Also The Initiative as an organization - science intruding into a [[Main/FantasyKitchenSink fantasy world.]]

* ''Series/{{Defiance}}'': Season Three introduces the Omec, a race from the Votanis System that everyone assumed didn't survive the system going nova. A rapacious, predatory species, they were considered demons and boogeymen by the other Votan races, and nobody mourned their apparent extinction. When they show up in Earth orbit with an Arkship of their own, that's actually quite a bit more advanced technologically than the other Votans, [[OhCrap nobody takes it well]].

** By the show's basic premise, the Doctor is an Outside Context Hero. The [[Recap/DoctorWhoS1E1AnUnearthlyChild very first episode]] of the show is about two schoolteachers concerned with the home life of an odd student; they go over to her address and instead find an old-fashioned Police Box with AlienGeometries belonging to a strange old man who turns out to be "not of this Earth". The GenreShift from a school-based drama to science fantasy is a phenomenal twist and the episode still packs quite a punch today, although [[LateArrivalSpoiler anyone who watches it is already spoiled for it]]. In the [[Recap/DoctorWhoS31E12ThePandoricaOpens Series 5 finale]] [[Recap/DoctorWhoS31E13TheBigBang of the new series]], a large group of his enemies, none known for working well with others, pool their resources and abilities to trap him in the ultimate prison — as he was known for just "dropping out of the sky and ending your world".
*** Queen Victoria, after an encounter with [[Recap/DoctorWhoS28E2ToothAndClaw werewolves]] and the Doctor, established the Torchwood Institute, recognising the need for the Empire to have ''some'' measures in place to respond to Outside Context Problems, such as werewolves — and the Doctor.

** In [[Recap/DoctorWhoS5E3TheIceWarriors "The Ice Warriors"]] climate change scientists are trying to hold back a glacier, in a way that is clearly business as usual in the setting. Then one of the members finds a mummified body frozen in an ice floe and brings it back for research purposes. It turns out to be a Martian warrior downed in an ancient plane crash and trying to find its allies again. They are dependent on their computer to calculate probabilities and obsessively do what it says — naturally, it has no programming to deal with alien invasions, leaving them high and dry and forcing them to rely on the Doctor, for whom these things are more normal.

** In an entertaining twist on this trope, the Doctor becomes such an out-of-context problem for his enemies that, between seasons 5 and 7, he becomes very much permanently in-context. The overall storyline spanning three whole seasons involves multiple convoluted plots throughout all of time to get rid of him, planned by a coalition of his worst enemies (accompanied by quite a few monsters-of-the-week as filler). Pretty much every episode, even the typical plot-of-the-week ones, features some clue towards the nature the overarching conspiracy. Every time the Doctor encounters any recurring villain (and, for that matter, quite a few new ones), they seem to have been expecting him. Until he decides he "got too big" and goes up and down time and space erasing all possible record of his existence during Season 7. By Season 8 he's almost entirely unknown again.
** Spinoff ''Series/TheSarahJaneAdventures'': [[Recap/TheSarahJaneAdventuresS2E5E6SecretsOfTheStars "Secrets of the Stars"]] has the cast dealing with an astrologer who can control people with astrology using something called the Ancient Lights, despite it supposedly being impossible — even their supercomputer is unable to deal with it since astrology breaks the laws of physics. Finally they theorise that [[spoiler:the Ancient Lights come from a universe that predates ours, one where the laws of physics are different and astrology worked]].

* The last half of season 2 of ''Series/OnceUponATime'' is shown to be controlled, at least in part, by Peter Pan. While people on both sides of the fourth wall had probably been expecting him since Captain Hook showed up, it's doubtful they thought it'd be as a villain. The first hint we see of him is his disembodied shadow coming to take lost and forgotten boys to Neverland, and even when he is finally shown in person, he's still different from anything they've experienced before. He controls Neverland completely, he can out-gambit Rumpelstiltskin, manipulate people without trying, and even those who have faced him before are unsure how to defeat him, or even if he ''can'' be. [[spoiler:The most startling thing about him is that he has ties to the entire main cast--he's Rumpel's ''father'', making him Neal's grandfather and Henry's great-grandfather--and no one had any inkling of the possibility of his interference]].
** The main villains in the latter half of season 2 are two humans from The Land Without Magic and not fairy tale or literature characters (although they are allied with Peter Pan).

* ''Series/PowerRangersZeo'' has Rita and Zedd from the previous seasons celebrating on how they just blew up the Rangers' base, when the Machine Empire randomly comes along and decides to invade Earth, too. Though Rita and Zedd are PutOnABus for much of the season, the Rangers' retrieval of the Zeo Crystal gives them new powers and weaponry to stop the Machine Empire's plans. Somewhat lampshaded- once they're settled in at their new base beneath the old one, the Rangers immediately start bombarding Zordon and Alpha with questions, causing Alpha to have a nervous breakdown.

** ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'': Judging Picard - and by extension, all of Humanity - to have grown overconfident and complacent, Q engineers such a situation. He transports the ''Enterprise'' several thousand light years from home, and right in the path of the Borg. The Borg are so powerful and so alien that the crew find they can do nothing against them. Not even escape. It's only through Q's intervention that they even survive. This was retconned later into Q ''averting'' this trope; the Borg were already on their way (making use of a SchrodingersGun from the first season of outposts mysteriously disappearing) and this engineered encounter gave them enough of a warning to survive.

** Getting back to ''Next Generation:'' In season 3, there's an episode called [[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS3E11TheHunted "The Hunted"]] that features Roga Danar, one of numerous former soldiers from the planet Angosia, who have been [[SuperSoldier enhanced with superhuman abilities]] in order to fight their wars. Unfortunately, they become renegades, and even prisoners, afterward, when there's no place in society for them. When the ''Enterprise'' crew are forced to deal with a rogue Danar, they find themselves completely unprepared for someone who can NoSell phaser blasts, block their own life signs from scanners, and - get this - ''resist the transporter beam.''

** Eve, the mother of all monsters, appears as a DiscOneFinalBoss in S6. Not only is she herself an example, again not having been on Earth for millennia, but she is made even more so by the fact that she has the ability to make new Outside-Context Villains, meaning that the season has a lot of them.

* In ''Series/TheWalkingDead'', Ezekiel, the leader of the Kingdom, keeps a ''pet tiger'' named Shiva; he was a former zookeeper and rescued her when she was injured in her exhibit. She is understandably rather out-of-place in a zombie apocalypse, and every survivor who meets her doesn't quite know what to make of her. This comes in very handy when the Kingdom fights back against the Saviors at the end of Season Seven; she's the first one to jump in, and her presence distracts everyone long enough for the Kingdom's forces to come in.

* ''Series/TokusouExceedraft'' typically deals with soft science-fiction plots involving criminals who use futuristic technology to commit various crimes. So who's the last bad guy they face? [[spoiler:{{Satan}}.]]