All For Nothing / Live-Action TV

All for Nothing in Live-Action TV.

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• 24 does this constantly, to the point that it could be called "All for Nothing: The Series":
  • The show's second season had Jack recover some of his ordinary life by the end. The third season reveals that he has completely screwed it up between seasons, becoming (among other things) a heroin addict.
  • Tony sacrificed his marriage and his good standing with the government over the course of the third season after he was blackmailed by the main antagonist of the season. He ultimately finds redemption in Season 4, helping to stop a new threat and ends up patching things up with his wife. In Season 5 his wife, and as it later turns out, his unborn child are killed in a car bomb, Tony himself is badly injured in the explosion and later left for dead by the same man who helped plot their murder, it turns out that President Logan, the same man they were aiding in Season 4, was one of the collaborators in the plot of Season 5 and has stabbed everyone in the back, and by Day 7 when Tony discovers the mastermind that collaborated with Logan and led to his wife and son's death he becomes so desperate for revenge he resorts to terrorism to get the man, which eventually leads to his arrest.
  • Said government constantly stabbing everyone in the back, including leaving Jack a prisoner in China for nearly two years at one point, destroys his own faith in the government. Allison Taylor, the President as of Day 7, is easily the most moral one in the series since David Palmer, and she's eventually able to help restore his faith is gradually over the course of the season. Then in Day 8 Taylor betrays him and her own morals for her own purposes and destroys Jack's faith for good this time.
  • Speaking of Allison Taylor, in Day 7 she is forced to make some tough decisions and ultimately loses her entire family; her son due to murder, her daughter due to her committing a crime and thus allowing her to be arrested, and her husband due to him divorcing her after their daughter's arrest. Her actions in Day 8 see her try to get an important peace treaty signed and it's clear she's desperate to see it happen because of what she sacrificed in the previous season to make it have some sort of meaning. When it turns out Russia, one of the parties supposed to sign the treaty, has been involved in masterminding terrorist attacks to get out of it, the aforementioned moment of her abandoning her morals comes as she blackmails them into signing the treaty with Logan's help and attempts to keep the truth about the events silenced. While she has a change of heart, she realizes confessing her crimes will destroy her presidency and leave her political career in irreparable shambles, meaning her worst fear, that her sacrifices really were meaningless, ended up coming true.
  • In 24: Live Another Day after Jack is left a fugitive following the previous season's events, he comes out of hiding to prevent a presidential assassination and is given a pardon. His ex Audrey is murdered and Jack is ultimately forced go give himself up to Russia by the end of the season, making it meaningless.
• This is the theme of The Americans. Phillip and Elizabeth are deep cover KGB agents in 1980s Washington. The series revolves around them doing dirty jobs, sacrificing so much and ruining the lives of friends for their mission. The series finale has them "burning" their lives in America, leaving behind their children and returning to Moscow. The series ends with the duo back home, unaware that just four years later, the USSR will collapse, the KGB will be disbanded and everything they did for their country will be for naught. In other words, the series focuses on two Cold War soldiers with no idea they ultimately will lose the War.
• Angel Season 3 has such an example when Wesley discovers a prophecy that seems to predict that Angel will eventually kill his newborn son Connor. Fearing for the baby's life, Wesley makes a deal with Angel's old enemy Holtz to spirit the baby away before that happens, but Holtz ends up double-crossing him; as a result, Wesley ends up with a Slashed Throat while Holtz and Connor end up trapped in the hell dimension Quor'toth. Then it's revealed that the prophecy was in fact fabricated by the demon Sahjhan, who had discovered that Connor was destined to grow up and kill him. When Fred visits Wesley in the episode, she informs him of his blunder, even quoting the trope name word for word.
• Astrid et Raphaëlle: In the Season 1 episode "Fulcanelli" two people got murdered over a 16th century alchemical recipe — since the nook with the key to the recipe's container also had gold ingots, they likely thought it would be a way to transmute gold, at the very least. In the end, however, it was revealed that the recipe described the secret of phosphorus — a surefire ticket to riches in the 16th century, but worthless today.
• Bar Rescue:
  • For all the work Taffer puts into the bars, some of the owners have reverted back to their old ways after he leaves. Some of this is minor. Other cases are major. Quite a few have closed permanently or been sold, in some cases even before their episodes aired.
  • He's walked out entirely in four cases to date (O'Face, Second Base re-rescue, Black Light District, Hideaway Bar & Grill), after seeing that the bars and their owners were just too screwed up to benefit from any help he could offer.
  • Second Base (formerly Extremes) failed again after Taffer rescued the bar in Season 2. He tried to do a second rescue in Season 4, but gave up after the owner refused to put any of his own money into the re-design.
• The Barrier: By the time she and her brother are ready to deploy their vaccine for the noravirus Alma has been branded a traitor due to being assumed to be an accomplice to to her husband, who has turned against the government. She lives in a dicatatorship whose leaders aren't big fans of letting traitors live for very long. The situation gets subverted when the President catches noravius and Alma's brother finds people who have secretly been given an old experimental vaccine better than the one she came up with.
• Better Call Saul: In "Five-O", Mike exposits the real story of what happened to his late son Matty to Matty's widow. Matty looked up to Mike and even followed in his footsteps by also becoming a cop, but he was devastated to learn the department was hopelessly corrupt and his own father was in on it. Mike outright begged Matty to abandon his morals and go along with it for his own safety, which Matty very reluctantly did, but because he hesitated in taking the dirty money, his partners got paranoid he was going to rat them out and shot him to death anyway.
  Mike: He was the strongest person that I ever knew. He'd have never done it, not even to save himself. I was the only one... I was the only one that could get him to debase himself like that. And it was for nothin'! I made him lesser. I made him like me. And the bastards killed him anyway.
• On the ninth season of The Blacklist, a scientist begins killing members of the team who helped him develop a sonic weapon. The team assumes it's to eliminate those who helped so he could sell it to the highest bidder. In reality, the man is so guilty over this weapon that he's getting rid of anyone who could make it and planning to kill himself. After he does, an angry Ressler confronts the government contractor behind the project who not so subtly indicates another team is already working on a new version of the weapon. Ressler sardonically sums up that "eight people died and you're not even going to miss a beat."
• Black Mirror: "Shut Up and Dance" revolves around several people secretly guilty of vices such as racism, adultery and pedophilia that are blackmailed by hackers into performing increasingly criminal tasks, under the promise of said hackers not divulging the life-ruining information they have. Once everything is said and done, the participants are sent trollfaces as their secrets are revealed anyway.
• In Season 3 of The Boys (2019), Butcher and Hughie resolve to throw away everything — their relationships, their values, their lives — on one final gambit to kill Homelander. After spending half the season babysitting the crux of their plan, the Came Back Strong Soldier Boy, and catering to his every whim in exchange for his help killing Homelander, he turns on them after learning that Homelander is his son before trying to kill Ryan and renders their efforts all for naught.
• This is a recurring situation in Breaking Bad:
  • In Season 2 Walt gets Wrongfully Committed for three days in the hospital as part of what he calls "the world's most expensive alibi" as part of his plan to keep Skyler from finding out about everything. This backfires on him later, as she figures out that he was faking it and it becomes another factor in her divorce attempt.
  • The entire point of the Train Job in season 5 was to steal their supply of methylamine without having to worry about witnesses, and it goes off almost without a hitch until the kid on the dirt bike seen at the beginning of the episode shows up at the last minute and Todd executes him.
  • "Ozymandias", Walter White's ill-advised kidnapping of his infant daughter Holly when he realizes Skyler and Walter Jr. have turned against him and thinks that Holly couldn't turn against him due to not knowing enough practically put a final nail in the coffin for any chance of redemption. And he is proven wrong, as she starts crying "Mama!" Having realized he'd gone too far, Walt sends Holly to the Fire Station to be brought home to his wife and son, and he spends the rest of his life at least partially trying to make amends until his death in the finale. The entire series revolved around Walt turning to a life of crime to provide for his family, but it's because of his Living a Double Life that he ended up losing them. Walter even shouts "It can't all be for nothing!" in the second-to-last episode when his son refuses his attempt to send money, blaming him for Hank's death. Walter manages to subvert it in the Grand Finale by having his old business partners give the family everything he had under their name, but it's still a Pyrrhic Victory.
  • Jesse's major motivation for sticking with Walter and continuing to cook meth is to make a ton of cash and get rich. However, over the course of the series he undergoes an utterly massive Trauma Conga Line which nearly breaks him, and ends up becoming a nationally wanted criminal when Walt's activities are exposed, so he's forced to use nearly all his remaining money to get a new identity and flee to Alaska. The only faint silver lining is that he never, ever has to deal with Walt, meth, or the cartel, ever again.
  • Mike's main drive to work for Gus (and then Walt) was to accumulate a huge nest egg for his granddaughter. Unfortunately, it all ends up for naught when the police discover the offshore bank accounts Gus used to pay his employees, and they confiscate all the money. Then, once they uncover concrete evidence connecting Mike to Gus's criminal activity, Mike is forced to flee New Mexico without even saying goodbye to his granddaughter, and worse he ends up being killed by Walt in a fit of rage, and his body is unceremoniously disposed of.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 5 has all the drama of Joyce's brain tumor. Then she dies of an aneurysm after the tumor is removed.
  • A purposeful, tragic example in Season 7: a girl named Cassie has prophetic powers and repeatedly predicts that she will die this Friday. Because of this, a cult tries to sacrifice her to a demon, figuring people will just rule her disappearance a suicide. Buffy saves her from the demon, saves her from a booby trap, tells her that people can make their own destinies. Cassie then falls dead from a heart condition that she didn't even know that she had. After giving a veiled prediction that Buffy will stop the Apocalypse.
• Cheers: The season 5 episode "A House is Not a Home" has Diane impulsively buy a house for her and Sam to live in, only to get cold feet from guilt, refuse to sell it, insist on the original family coming back... eventually Sam reaches breaking point and they decide to keep the house. The very next episode, Diane gets Put on a Bus for the remainder of the series, and the house is never mentioned again (Sam presumably selling it between seasons 5 and 6).
• Chernobyl
  • Akimov and Toptunov spend the night standing waist-deep in irradiated water to turn coolant valves. At that point they probably could have gotten away with disobeying Dyatlov (as Stolyarchuk, who begs them not to go, does), but the thought of the core being gone is so incomprehensible that Akimov believes that it would be putting lives at risk to not go. He and Toptunov die a few weeks later of ARS from their attempt to cool a core that no longer existed.
  • Subverted with the liquid nitrogen heat exchanger that was installed beneath the plant to prevent the meltdown material from reaching the water table. Ultimately, the corium didn't get that far, but the workers who risked their lives (many of whom did die young from radiation-induced illness) were still glad they did it. The chances that it would were 40%, which is way too high when talking about poisoning the groundwater relied on by millions.
• One of the recurring characters on Come Fly With Me was Fearghal O'Farrell, a gay air steward who resorted to increasingly unethical methods in an attempt to win Steward of the Year, including deliberately giving a customer food they were allergic to so they could save them and be hailed a hero, and sleeping with the airline's (female) CEO. All this proves to be for nothing in the finale, when another employee wins the award instead. Fearghal is so incensed by the snub that he reveals all the unethical lengths he went to and then steals the trophy. He's unsurprisingly fired.
• The Crown (2016). After the Suez Crisis, Lord Mountbatten notes that not only was it all for nothing, Britain has ended the affair with "less than nothing" — the country is now faced with price rises, fuel shortages and a seriously damaged international reputation.
• A few times on CSI: Miami.
  • A pair of crooks rob an armored car, killing one of the guards. One is killed himself by the cops while the other is caught. It's then discovered that the money was actually fake as the crooks just happened to pick a shipment that had been swapped by another pair of crooks for the real cash. The captured thief can't believe he's going to jail for killing a man over a pack of fake cash.
  • A set of triplets conspire to murder the rich husband of one sister, figuring their identical appearances will guarantee the cops can never prove which one of them did it. Not only are they wrong but as it happens, the man they killed was actually their husband's Body Double and he's very much alive to raise the son of one of his "wives."
  • A series of seemingly random murders at Spring Break turn out to be the work of a young woman who had been horribly bullied by those kids as overweight and ugly. After a huge makeover, she hunted them all down to kill them off. The episode ends with the woman (in her "original" form) smiling as she's led off in handcuffs. As soon as the cell door shuts, she becomes her current version with her smile fading as it sinks in how she let her desire for payback for some minor bullying ruin her entire life.
  • More than one dying crook has had the last thing they hear be Caine dryly asking if "it was all worth it in the end."
• Degrassi Junior High
  • L.D. has to deal with trauma from her mother's dying of cancer. She finally learns not to fear and distrust all things relating to health — and in Degrassi High, L.D. gets leukemia.
  • Much of Degrassi Junior High is Big Ego, Hidden Depths for Joey, who learns not to be such a lazy ass. In Degrassi High, all that talk about getting off his butt and working hard is rendered meaningless when it turns out he has dysgraphia. (It still fits his character arc, since he still has to cope with feelings of inadequacy, but it's a huge shift.)
  • The Christmas Episode of Degrassi Junior High is about Arthur and Yick learning to stay friends even though Arthur is richer and Yick is more rebellious. The lesson sticks for the whole series. But in Degrassi High, they almost stop being friends completely for those same reasons.
  • As the resident Anti-Hero, Wheels is always getting shoved through the Heel–Face Revolving Door. More than once, he turns heel off-screen, with no warning until we're suddenly told that he's been acting this way for weeks. Second-Hand Storytelling makes the perfect tool for manipulating the audience.
• In Designated Survivor, Atwood falsely confesses to a murder to protect his son. Atwood later finds out that the conspiracy never intended to keep their word and kills his son anyways, meaning Atwood sacrificed their career and everything they stood for all for nothing.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Caves of Androzani", in which almost every action and event is rendered pointless by almost everyone dying. What's more, the only thing the Doctor was able to accomplish was saving Peri's life; meanwhile, he caused a gigantic power collapse on Androzani Major and managed to destroy one of the planet's most valuable resources.
  • "Dragonfire" shows how villain Kane was exiled from his home planet of Proamon and has spent three thousand years trying to find an energy source to power Iceworld. He finally succeeds and is prepared to reconquer Proamon for his ultimate revenge. At which point, the Doctor reveals there's no one to get revenge from; Kane's home planet was destroyed when its sun went nova two thousand years earlier. Kane does not take this well.
  • "Bad Wolf"/"The Parting of the Ways": The Doctor discovers that, after he sacrificed his own species to destroy the Daleks in the Time War, they're still around, meaning his people died for nothing.
  • "Daleks in Manhattan": The Doctor has this reaction again when he finds out the Daleks escaped the Battle of Canary Wharf, where he lost Rose stopping them.
    [Tranquil Fury] "They survived. They always survive, while I lose everything."
• In the Pilot Movie of Emergency!, the thing that convinces John Gage to become a paramedic is when he rescues an electrocuted line man and because the lineman didn't get any life saving treatment to stabilize him before transport to the hospital, he was hopelessly terminal by the time he arrived. As John remarks, "Rescue, Hell. All we rescued was a corpse."
• In Everybody Loves Raymond episode "The Angry Family", when Michael tells a short story about a bickering family, it results in a chain of events in which Raymond, Debra, and their in-laws end up in therapy. It's at the end of the episode that Raymond and Debra learn that Michael actually based his story off a tv show he watches.
• Game of Thrones universe:
  • Game of Thrones:
    • Jorah Mormont's plan to regain Daenerys' favour by presenting her with Tyrion. All he gets out of the whole adventure is a case of greyscale.
    • After sacrificing his daughter so he can resume his advance, Stannis loses everyone and everything including the battle.
    • Despite a season worth of effort, Myrcella dies anyway.
    • Theon sabotaged Sansa's attempts to free herself from Ramsay Bolton in order to protect her from his wrath (as he believed that escape was impossible and trying would only make things worse), but eventually realizes that all his efforts are meaningless because Ramsay is still planning to torture and eventually kill her anyway (after he gets a Child by Rape from her to secure his claim to the North). Knowing this makes him snap and he breaks out of being Reek for the first time.
    • Robert's rebellion ended with his beloved dead, and him stuck with a crown he never wanted. "The Dragon and the Wolf" reveals that Lyanna was never kidnapped by Rhaegar, but instead went with him willingly because she was truly in love with him.
    • Queen Cersei's schemes and plots cost her all her allies, the lives of her children and the love of her brother/lover, but in the end she's once again forced into an unwanted marriage, except with a much worse suitor, she's completely alone and surrounded by enemies. She does get Jaime back in the penultimate episode of the last season...only for both of them to die not long after their reunion.
    • Perhaps the biggest example is Tywin Lannister. He spent years trying to build up the Lannister legacy, committing ruthless and outright horrific acts to protect it, accruing enemies on every side who would love nothing more than to see him dead and his house wiped out. This eventually culminates in the Red Wedding, where he has Robb and Catelyn Stark and most of their bannermen murdered while they were under guest right. Considered his greatest triumph, it's after that everything begins to fall apart. First, Jaime refuses to leaves the Kingsguard and carry on the family name, then Cersei reveals his aforementioned legacy is nothing more than a lie by confirming the rumors about her and Jaime are true, and then Tyrion outright murders him after being put through a sham-trial that was meant to end in Tyrion's death, unable to take his father's emotional abuse anymore. Once Tywin dies, that's when everything really goes downhill: the Tyrell alliance he painstakingly tried to maintain crumbles after Cersei blows the Great Sept of Baelor sky high with wildfire, killing Margaery, Loras, and Mace, along with Tywin's brother Kevan. This sees Tommen commit suicide and Cersei taking the Iron Throne for herself in a desperate bid to stave off the inevitable retaliation. The Starks he had seemingly wiped out and defeated have retaken Winterfell, and then Daenerys Targaryen lands in Westeros, dragons and all. All of that eventually leads to Jaime and Cersei dying in Daenerys's inevitable attack on King's Landing, leaving Tyrion, the son he despised, as the last remaining Lannister. To top it off, Tyrion has been celibate since Shae's death, so unless he breaks out of that mindset, House Lannister will go extinct.
  • House of the Dragon:
    • The relentless efforts of King Viserys and Queen Aemma to have male heirs a brought to a sad end with the Death by Childbirth of Aemma (via a Traumatic C-Section she didn't consent to)... and the death of the child a couple hours later.
    • King Viserys has spent his whole reign trying to conciliate as much as he could, avoid war at all cost, maintain a strong realm and consolidate his succession. It all goes up in flames as soon as he dies, with the Succession Crisis and looming Civil War between two rival factions of Targaryens competing for the Iron Throne.
• Gotham: Sofia Falcone seduces Jim Gordon, the man who murdered her brother into allying with her, creates an orphanage solely to manipulate Penguin, summons a Serial Killer to Gotham, allowing him to cut a bloody swathe through the GCPD just so Gordon can take him down and be considered a hero, and assassinates her own father in hopes of recreating the Falcone Empire in Gotham with her at the head. Before Season Four is even over, she's in a coma, her empire is permanently crippled and fractured, and any remaining influence her family had in Gotham is gone for good.
• On Hawaii Five-0 a girl is seemingly kidnapped by her boyfriend who killed her father. The team find evidence the girl was abused by her dad and the boyfriend was trying to help her. But as they dig deeper, they realize the evidence is fake and the girl was using the man to kill her father so she could inherit his million-dollar life insurance policy. The girl arranges for her dupe "boyfriend" to be killed by the cops and talks of him as a madman attacking her family. But not only does the team know the truth but in interrogation, they drop the bomb: Wanting to make sure her college education was paid for, her father stopped payments on his life insurance so the policy had lapsed. Kono openly snaps "you've got nothing" as they leave the girl to spend her life in prison.
  • Jenna was forced to spy on the team as Wo Fat was holding her fiancee hostage. She finally delivered Steve right to his enemy, was brought to see her love...only to find he'd been dead for months and Wo Fat was hiding it to continue to use Jenna. She ends up sacrificing herself to save Steve, noting that she threw her entire life away for nothing but can at least help him.
• How I Met Your Mother ends this way: Barney and Robin get divorced after three years of marriage, Ted finally meets the Mother and is blissfully happy for eleven years until she comes down with an illness and dies in 2024, six years before he started telling the story, and the kids have realized that the story was really a way to ask them for approval to chase Robin AGAIN.
• The proto-Monty Python special How to Irritate People has a character played by Graham Chapman spending most of an office party trying to persuade a co-worker played by Michael Palin to offer him a lift home. It's not until the end of the party that Palin reveals that he came to the party via train and thus can't give Chapman a lift home — though as John Cleese notes in the hosting segment, it wasn't a complete waste of time for Chapman since he did at least get to have fun irritating Palin.
• Kamen Rider Outsiders: The heroic Riders' blind faith in Zein ultimately did more but to condemn humanity into self-destruction than supposedly protecting them. Not helped that they used a forbidden video game that kills people in real time to power up the Zein Driver. As soon Zein is outed as a villain, Horobi, Tachibana, and Brain can only look on in utter despair with the entire human race now under the mercy of another rogue A.I. dead set in wiping out all sentient life and place the world under stasis where malice is rendered non-existent.
• Kingdom (2019): At great risk to himself, the Crown Prince ensures no survivors are left behind as they flee from the ruins of Dongnae to Jiyulheon just as night falls. However, forces loyal to Cho soon track him down and demand his surrender in daytime. When he refuses, Cho's forces unleash a hail of arrows that kills many innocents.
• Law & Order has a case where a Jewish woman killed a man thought to have her grandfather's Nazi-confiscated coin collection. Eventually, after several false starts, red herrings, and wild goose chases, the prosecutors find out that said murder victim never possessed the collection in the first place; he said he did as a financial pretense on which to back his fortune and only knew of the collection from an old auction catalog he'd read. The murderer breaks down in tears and horror as she realizes she killed a man for nothing but a memory.
  • Played for Black Comedy in "Couples", which opens with a man dying of a heart attack while jogging with his husband. It later turns out he was poisoned and the cops go to his spouse. To their surprise, the man immediately confesses to the murder, assuming the cops already figured it out. He then starts moaning over how his lawyer just broke it to him that the state of New York refuses to acknowledge the marriage as legal and since everything was in his husband's name, he's about to lose their home and not able to inherit any money or even access accounts.
  • In one episode of Law & Order: SVU, a developmentally disabled and traumatized boy fights through his (very much justified) fear to publicly implicate his abusive foster mother in the death of another child. The following scene reveals that the foster mother subsequently died of a heart attack before the conclusion of the trial, meaning that the entire trial was ultimately pointless.
• Ray Palmer of the Arrowverse feels this way about his wealth and inventions, which is what motivates him to join Rip Hunter in the Pilot of Legends of Tomorrow:
  Ray: I died, or at least people thought I did, and nothing happened. All the money, all the inventions, all the buildings (Beat) and no one cared.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Despite all the struggles of the Southlanders to defend their home from Adar and the last minute arrival of the Numenoreans, his plan to cause a volcanic eruption to create Mordor still succeeds. Worse than that, Galadriel finds out all her pushing to convince Halbrand to accept being crowned weighs to nothing, because he is Sauron in disguise. All she succeeded to do was to reignite Sauron's ambition when he was at his lowest point.
• On Lost, Jacob has become the Island's protector reluctantly, almost against his wish. He wants it to be different for his replacement, so he sets up an elaborate system of candidates that last for at least a few dozens if not hundred years, affecting and ending the lives of hundreds different people. Near the end it appears to pay off, as Jack takes on the job consciously and willingly. However, he then performs a Heroic Sacrifice within the following day and passes the job to Hurley, who is extremely reluctant to take it from him and went as far as saying "Just glad it's not me" when Jack himself volunteered for the job. Jacob's entire plan eventually resulted in nothing. (though Jack's sacrifice was to stop the Big Bad that Jacob tried to keep from leaving the Island, so it did pay off... at the cost of both Jacob and Jack's lives)
  • Another example: The Oceanic 6 spend 3 years lying about the time they spend on the Island and the fates of people that they left behind, believing themselves to be protecting their friends from Charles Widmore. This causes most of them some serious guilt issues. However, it is later revealed that Widmore performed an off-screen Heel–Face Turn and, while still a big jerk, was actually on the same side as our heroes. Even then, he couldn't have possibly harmed any of the people left on the Island, as those were stuck in a completely different time period. Sorry, Hurley, the Lie was All For Nothing.
  • Could be argued that most of the characters' storylines became All For Nothing at various points through season 6, the writers just killing them off seemingly without a care for any kind of subplot they still had going on. Probably worst of all when Sun spends almost a season and a half returning to the island and finding Jin so they can return to their daughter before both simply drown.
  • John Locke's entire story arc also seemingly turned out to be All For Nothing, as he was simply a pawn in The Man In Black's game all along. However, Locke's life and death did had one major consequence: he had finally managed to convince Jack of the truth of his beliefs, thus allowing all the events of the last two seasons to happen.
• The first season of Madam Secretary has the subplot of a splinter group of the CIA and State Department working to overthrow the current Iranian government to put in a leader who can be far more friendly to American interests. Liz is briefly tempted to let them do it...until she discovers that their hand-picked new leader has a terminal brain tumor and just six months to live. Thus, the coup will barely be settled before his death kicks off a power struggles that will leave the nation a mess all over again.
• The Man in the High Castle takes place in a 1962 where the Axis won World War II. Hawthorne is able to collect films from alternate worlds, including a few where the Allies won. Finding out, the Nazis put together a massive machine designed to cross over to these other worlds. In the season 3 finale, Commander Smith tells a captive Hawthorne that the Nazis have tested the device with three "volunteers" exploding and a fourth vanishing. They are now going to use it to invade and conquer other Earths. Hawthrone smugly tells Smith this won't work for one simple reason: A person can only cross over into another reality if their counterpart in that world is already dead. There's no way the Nazis can know what world they're going to go into, let alone which of the soldiers sent have living counterparts or not. So unless the Nazis plan to field a force made up only of anyone born since 1947 (and it's 50/50), there's no chance their invasion won't end up with sixty to ninety percent of the soldiers not surviving the trip.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Daredevil (2015):
    • Season 1 ends with Matt, Karen and Foggy defeating Wilson Fisk and putting him away after getting a corrupt detective to link Fisk to the murders of Detective Blake and several other cops. However, this only temporarily stops Fisk, as season 2 shows him rebuilding his criminal empire from within prison, even using Frank Castle to get rid of the kingpin who heads the prison's underground economy. And in season 3, he gets out of prison and seeks revenge on Matt, Karen and Foggy for putting him away.
    • Matt's defeat of Nobu and the Hand in season 2 is rendered this trope by Iron Fist (2017) season 1 and The Defenders (2017), which reveal Matt only defeated a faction of the Hand, and never got close to touching the other factions led by Bakuto, Madame Gao, Sowande, and Alexandra.
    • Matt manages to save Stick from Elektra in the 12th episode of season 2, but this only prolongs Stick's life by a couple months, and the next time around, in The Defenders (2017), Elektra kills Stick, with Matt unable to stop her.
  • Jessica Jones (2015) season 1 sees the protagonists trying to clear Hope's name, after Kilgrave made Hope kill her parents. Jessica Jones and her allies go through dangerous lengths in order to capture him alive just to prove his powers and therefore, Hope's innocence. In the end however, he evades all their traps and Hope kills herself so Jessica can focus on killing him instead of bringing Kilgrave to justice.
  • Luke Cage (2016): All of Misty Knight and Luke Cage's work to take down the Stokes-Dillard gang succeeds in putting away Luke's murderous half-brother Diamondback, but Mariah walks free due to arranging for Shades to kill the one witness who could link her to Cottonmouth's murder.
• M*A*S*H:
  • In the episode "Adam's Ribs", Hawkeye and Trapper go through great lengths to get an order of ribs delivered from Chicago to their outfit in Korea. The moment the ribs are served and the cast is about to have dinner, casualties are arriving and they're all off to the O.R.
    • Well, they have the ribs, they'll just need to be reheated. So this is more like delayed gratification.
    • Also they forgot the coleslaw.
  • There was another episode where they were so desperate for real food (Father Mulcahy in particular) that they spent months growing corn. And then the cook creamed all of it, much to Mulcahy's chagrin.
  • In one ep, Potter was delighted by an accidentally-delivered can of tomato juice, something he hasn't had in a long while. Radar wants to get him a whole case, so he, Hawkeye and BJ engage in a load of horse-trading and just plain grief to acquire it. When they get their goods, Potter reveals that he remembered why he had gone so long without tomato juice - he's horribly allergic. Ultimately played with: when Radar quotes the trope Potter gently admonishes him. "An act of kindness is never for nothing, son."
  • Sending money that a deceased soldier might have gotten through ill-gotten means to his parents in "Private Finance", Hawkeye goes out of his way to keep from revealing how much their son had been corrupted by the war. It's too late though as another soldier had already told them of everything Eddie had done.
    Matthew and Betty Hastings: We don't know what happened to change Eddie, but something did. We are a simple Christian family, Dr. Pierce. We would rather remember Eddie the way he was. The money you sent us came from an Eddie we never knew. You seem to be an honest, trustworthy man and we are confident that you can find a way to use Eddie's money to help someone there so we are returning it to you.
• Merlin. At the inception of the series, a teenaged Merlin comes to Camelot and is made Arthur's manservant, being told repeatedly by a prophetic dragon that the two of them have a great destiny together: to unite Albion, to legalize magic, and to usher in the Golden Age. It never comes to pass. After five seasons, which amounts to ten in-show years, Arthur dies at Mordred's hands before any of this can occur. Unless you count the brief three years of Arthur and Guinevere's reign that happened entirely off-screen in the Time Skip between series 4 and 5 (in which Merlin is still a lowly servant and the druids and other magic-users still have to live in hiding), everything that Merlin ever worked, waited and hoped for comes to naught. Though given that the Distant Finale shows that Merlin is still around, and Arthur is traditionally the King in the Mountain...
• Midsomer Murders:
  • "The Noble Art": Shortly before his arrest, Gerald Farquaharson discovers that the match on which he had wagered his mansion was rigged, so the bet was canceled and the three murders he committed were unnecessary. Gerald himself recognizes the irony of the situation.
  • "Fit for Murder": In the end, the murderer turns out to be Phoebe Archbald. Her motive is twofold: partly she wanted to prevent her greedy and despicable husband, Luke Archbald, from selling the estate, but the real motive behind her actions was that she found out that he and Kitty Pottinger were planning to steal the manuscript of the novel that Phoebe's best friend, Miranda Bedford, had been writing for twenty years in order to blackmail her. When Phoebe confesses this, Miranda explains that she finished writing the novel over a year ago and has already had it published, so there was nothing Luke and Kitty could have done.
  • "The Killings of Copenhagen": Clara Trout is the daughter of the real creator of the Calder Cookie Factory's most famous creation. She felt that her mother had been bought out and never received the fame and fortune that was deserved. However, after creative director Armand Stone confesses that it's the truth and is spared being the fifth victim, he drops the best bombshell ever: Clara's mother had given her daughter a job for life, for a loved one's future was more important. Upon hearing this, she realised their terrible mistake.
• More than once on Murder, She Wrote, the killer discovers too late that the motive for the murder (from a supposed payday to winning over someone's love) either never existed or isn't what they expect. A key example is "Night of the Coyote." A man kills a rancher to find the location of a lockbox stolen by bandits a century before. He finally digs it up, expecting gold or silver. Instead, he finds it's filled with bonds...for a company that went bankrupt in 1905.
• My Country: The New Age: Seon-ho rebels against his father and kills his father's servants to save Yeon... and she gets killed right when she's about to escape.
• The Mythbusters have made several very complicated myth setups, only for them to completely blow up in their faces.
  • A giant Lego ball that took hours of work of about a dozen people to make, after getting both all the blocks from Lego Land and the largest private collector, completely broke apart before it even made it halfway down the setup track. It was a huge success in that it proved that the video they were trying to imitate was a fake.
  • When they attempted to retest the JATO Rocket Car myth from their pilot episode, they wanted to give it the best possible chance of actually getting airborne, so they pulled out all the stops: spending a lot of money on a "real" rocket (instead of their original homemade version), building and reinforcing a massive ramp, installing remote controls and elaborate tow-lines so it could be launched safely. After all that effort and expense, their professionally-built rocket engine exploded when it was ignited. This was perhaps the only time since the first season that they couldn't give a verdict of "busted", "plausible", or "confirmed". As this was the "Supersized Special", they ended up calling the myth "appropriately supersized"; after all, they'd still gotten a consolatory fireball.
• A version of this trope that actually favors the protagonists occurs in an episode of NUMB3RS. A billionaire businessman conspires to rig California's election system, and then starts killing anyone who could implicate him. While the businessman is able to avoid arrest, the investigation results in the scheme being made public, thus ensuring that it won't succeed.
• This was a big part of Power Rangers Samurai. Throughout the entire season, it has been stated that the sealing symbol of the Red Ranger was the only thing that could seal Master Xandred away forever. However, when the big moment comes for it to be used, Master Xandred shrugs it off, having gained an immunity to it earlier. It's not just the build up for the sealing power that's for nothing, but the fact that Jayden kept his sister's existence hidden from his friends, as well as all of Lauren's hard work to master the sealing symbol, and their father's plan that started it all. It was even lampshaded.
• Red Dwarf: In "Waiting for God", Lister discovers that during the 3 million years he was in stasis, the race of beings that evolved from his cat founded a religion worshipping him as "Cloister the Stupid". They then proceeded to have a holy war over whether the sacred cardboard hats at his hot dog stand were supposed to be red or blue. What makes it this trope is that according to Lister, the hats were supposed to be green.
• Reservation Dogs:
  • In the beginning of the first episode, the gang steals a truck filled with spicy chips and sells it to Kenny Boy (although they get to keep the chips). However, when Bear finds out that the truck driver lost his job because of the theft and his wife left him because he lost his job, he decides to return the money and give the truck back. After an argument with Elora, they finally decide to do it and go to Kenny Boy... who reveals that they already dismantled the entire truck except for the frame. Kenny Boy laughingly tells them they can have the frame if they want.
  • Bear gets his hopes up trying to see his dad after two years, to the point of buying him pricey gifts, despite everyone telling him his dad NEVER visits him. Unfortunately, they're right.
• On the Rizzoli & Isles episode "Boston Strangler Redux," the team investigate murders matching the infamous Boston Strangler. They're aided by a veteran cop who's long held the man arrested as the Strangler wasn't the guy. It turns out he's the current murderer who was trying to get the investigation reopened so he could go after who he thought was the real killer. The cop naturally doesn't take it well when Maura tells him the evidence is clear there's no way his suspect could have been the Strangler and he killed three innocent women for no reason.
• The Sandman (2022):
  • After his father beats him over the belief that Alex was going to betray him and free Dream, his father demands that Alex shoot and kill Jessamy to prove his loyalty. Alex does it but even after he completes the task, his father simply berates him further and continues to abuse him, while also angering Dream and guaranteeing retribution from Dream later on.
  • Erasmus Frye and Richard Madoc horrifically abused Calliope in order to gain inspiration for their books to achieve fame. However, in the end, they would lose that fame they so desperately craved. Frye became largely forgotten and his books are no longer in print. Madac's career is effectively over after Dream takes away all his ideas.
• In Sons of Anarchy Jax Teller sacrifices everything in order to fulfill the club's obligations to other criminal organizations and finally get the Sons out of the gun running business and making money in legitimate ways. The followup series Mayans M.C. takes place a few years later and the Sons are back to running guns as without Jax, their leadership drive faded and they fell back into their old ways.
• Squid Game
  • Seong Gi-hun main motivation for returning to the games was to procure funds to cure his mother's diabetes. After he finally returns from the games however, she was long dead.
    • Wanting nothing to do with the dirty money he had won, he makes a final All or Nothing bet with Il-nam based on their differing philosophies: If anyone helps a drunken man they spotted on the streets by midnight, Il-nam would have to take back all the prize money. Despite Gi-hun winning the bet, Il-nam had silently passed away on the dot, preventing the latter from acknowledging his loss and leaving Gi-hun stuck with the money. It ultimately becomes subverted as this event also convinces Gi-hun to accept and use the money for good.
  • Ji-yeong throws her game with Sae-byeok to allow her to progress, as she believes Sae-byeok's family gives her something to live for outside of the game, but Sang-woo ends up unceremoniously killing her offscreen the night before the final game, voiding Ji-yeong's sacrifice.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Omega Glory" Captain Ronald Tracey blatantly violates the Prime Directive and gets involved on a primitive planet's war, takes Kirk and his landing party prisoner, murders their Red Shirt in cold blood and throws Kirk in with savages to die, all for the sake of getting a serum that supposedly can extend a humanoid's lifespan by centuries. Needless to say, he doesn't take it very well when Dr. McCoy discovers that the natives simply evolved that way and thus there is no serum to isolate.
  • In "Operation: Annihilate", McCoy determines that a parasite that has infested Spock, as well as millions of civilians, can be killed by an intense light. At Spock's request, McCoy reluctantly tests the treatment on him; the treatment successfully kills the parasite, but also leaves Spock blind. Just as they're absorbing this fact, McCoy receives lab results that reveal a horrifying fact: the creature is vulnerable to one specific type of light, which is beyond the visual spectrum and thus wouldn't cause blindness. (Fortunately, it turned out that Spock's blindness wasn't permanent.)
    McCoy: I threw the total spectrum of light at the creature. It wasn't necessary. I didn't stop to think that only one kind of light might've killed it... I didn't need to throw the blinding white light at all.
• The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Lower Decks" has Sito Jaxa (the most focused on of the ensigns and also the one with the most to prove) killed at the end, making all of her efforts moot.
  • The episode "The Price" deals with four different groups vying for the right to a wormhole near the planet Barzan II, which is connected to the Gamma Quadrant (a few years before the Bajoran Wormhole is discovered). Devinoni Ral, a part-Betazoid negotiator, ends up buying out one race's bid and sets up an agreement with the Ferengi so that the race he's helping, the Chrysalians, can win the rights. However, Data and Geordi, along with two Ferengi, discover that the wormhole is actually unstable on the other end as it not only has an exit point in the Gamma Quadrant, it has one in the Delta Quadrant. The wormhole is useless, the Chrysalians are stuck helping a practically useless planet and two Ferengi are trapped in the Delta Quadrant for a few years.
  • The entire Klingon Civil War saga was brought about by this trope. The House of Duras was a powerful and influential within the Klingon Empire, so much so that when one of their own allowed the Romulans to massacre a Klingon colony on Khitomer, they pinned the blame on the Klingon Mogh and, years later, forced his son Worf to accept discommendation for it as if the truth came out, a civil war would break out. Two years after the forced discommendation, the Duras Sisters make a power play when Gowron is set to become Chancellor of the Empire and when Picard, as Arbiter of Succession, is forced into a Morton's Fork, his decision sets off the civil war.
  • Caused a secondary case with Worf's younger brother Kern, who is caught in the backlash of Worf's decision. Unable to cope with the loss of honor or acclimate to life in the Federation as Worf did, he became a Death Seeker. Worf and Sisko arrange to have Kern undergo mind wiping and plastic surgery, to live his life as a member of a house friendly to the House of Mogh. A sacrifice rendered unnecessary later, when Worf has the family honor restored in return for directly joining the Klingons in their efforts against the Dominion. And later supplemental stories suggested that the mind wipe wore off anyway.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • Dukat engages in a series of negotiations and has the Cardassian Union join the Dominion - with Dukat proclaiming at every turn that the Cardassians and the Dominion are "equal partners in all things." However the Cardassians are pushed more and more to the side as the war turns against the Dominion, and by season seven the Cardassians are another conquered race. By the series finale they are a broken and defeated people, with their homeworld in ruins and over 800 million Cardassians dead on the homeworld alone.
  • Subverted with a vengeance in the episode "In the Pale Moonlight" where Sisko himself notes in his log that after violating one moral principle after another in a scheme with Garak to bring the Romulans into the Dominion war, the whole thing blew up in his face and it seemed all his moral compromises were wasted. Garak, however, refused to let his Xanatos Gambit go to waste that easily and managed to salvage it with one thoroughly brilliant and utterly criminal act of treachery.
• Taskmaster involves 5 contestants doing ridiculous tasks in the hopes of receiving points from the Taskmaster, Greg Davies. Greg usually roasts the contestants for their efforts and then awards them up to 5 points. The points determine the winners of the episodes and of the entire series. There have been instances where Greg was so impressed that he gave each contestant 5 points, rendering the entire task meaningless, a fact immediately lampshaded by his assistant, Alex Horne.
  • On the other end of the scale, there have been tasks where every contestant was disqualified, earning each person 0 points.
• On Timeless, Wyatt believes his wife was murdered by a notorious serial killer. He steals the time machine "Lifeboat" to go back to 1983 and prevent the killer's parents from meeting. It turns into a mess as the man destined to be that killer's father accidentally dies. Wyatt is shaken but copes with how he prevented his wife's murder. Returning to the present, he's not only arrested but discovers that while the killer wasn't born and his other victims were alive, Wyatt's wife isn't. A stunned Wyatt realizes someone else killed his wife and the trip just ends up with him arrested.
• In The Terror, despite all the crews trials and tribulations, the majority of them die off far from home and in various horrible ways. The sole survivor is then forced to settle down with the local Inuit, avoiding searchers out of guilt.
• The Tudors: Henry goes through deplorable lengths in order to beget the son he always wanted for the sake of securing the Tudor Dynasty. As history would show, and as constantly foreshadowed by the series itself, all his efforts come to naught because his long awaited heir dies as a teenager before he could have any children himself, and would end up having a comparatively unremarkable reign to the ones his older sisters would have. To pour even more salt in the wound, Henry himself is to blame for the dynasty dying out, as his refusal to let Mary get married during his reign led to her marrying at too old an age to have children, while Elizabeth absolutely refused to get married herself due to her view of marriage being warped by his actions.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • In "I Shot An Arrow Into The Air", a group of astronauts on a prototype rocket crash-land on what they believe is an asteroid somewhere in the Earth's orbit. Only three of them — Col. Donlin, Corey, and Pierson — survive and are left with limited supplies, little water, and no way off. While everyone is focused on survival, Corey gradually descends into a Crazy Survivalist who butts heads with the other two constantly. He goes so far as to murder Pierson on an expedition to take his water and then guns down Donlin before setting out on his own. After spending the better part of a day climbing over a mountain, Corey makes it over the top and sees telephone poles and a sign for Reno, Nevada. Realizing that they just crashed back into the Earth, he starts Laughing Mad before breaking down crying.
  • In "The Rip Van Winkle Caper", four thieves steal a shipment of gold and then go into stasis for a hundred years, confident that they'll never be caught. In the end, not only do all of them die before they can get to civilization thanks to their own greed and selfishness of one of their own, but it turns out that, in the future, gold is now manufactured and worthless.
  • In "The Silence", a chatterbox named Jamie makes a bet with an aristocrat named Archie: if he could stay silent for one whole year, Jamie will win fifty thousand dollars. After a whole year of silence, Archie finally admits that he is a fraud; he lost his fortune a year ago. Distraught, Jamie writes down on a paper that he is a fraud, too. Knowing he would never be able to keep his end of the deal, he had the nerves to his vocal cords severed.
• In the series finale of Veep, Selina Myers throws long-time loyal friend Gary under the bus to go to jail for her own misdeeds, bans gay marriage which means daughter Catherine no longer speaks to her and accepts a VP she hates to win votes which drives the rest of her loyal staff to quit. So what is Selina's ultimate reward for throwing away any principles and friendships to be President again? She loses the next election to her rival who serves two terms which is then followed by Richard becoming a great President who finally brings peace to the Middle East. She's nothing but a historical footnote only remembered for her many mistakes and to top it all off, her funeral is overshadowed by the networks cutting to news of Tom Hanks having died.
• The Wire ends like for this for Jimmy McNulty, whose fake serial killer scheme finally wrecks his police career. It did get Marlo Stanfield off the streets but it's implied it's temporary and in the greater scheme of things, it didn't make Baltimore a better place.
• Y: The Last Man (2021): The entire giant sub-plot of preparing to coup Jennifer's presidency is rendered completely moot, as the same day as the coup starts, the Pentagon is stormed by Bomb-Throwing Anarchists, the coup leader gets shot and what's left of the US government and emergency services is deliberately and intentionally destroyed.
• Young Sheldon: In "A Loaf of Bread and a Grand Old Flag," Sheldon causes a fuss when a company changes his favorite bread by producing it cheaply to save money, and in a series of escalating events ends up accidentally supporting communism because he thinks it will get him better bread. At the end of the episode he announces that he gave the bread another chance and he likes it, trying to make himself sound mature, but the rest of his family is still mad at him for what he put them through and isn't talking to him.

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