Forced To Watch / Live-Action TV

• 24:
  • Jack Bauer orders Qurac soldiers to kill a terrorist's son on a webcam feed in order to break him. It's staged.
  • Jack threatens to do something similar to the villain of Season 3:
    Jack: When your daughter is infected, I'm going to make you watch her die.
• Parodied in an episode of 'Allo 'Allo!. Michelle informs Rene that one way the Germans may try to get information out of him is to torture his wife in front of him until he breaks. When Edith panics, Rene reassures her "Don't worry, I will tell them nothing."
• In American Horror Story: Coven, Delphine is sent to a personal hell where she is forced to watch her daughters be tortured over and over again in torture devices she herself devised.
• Angel season 2 has a particularly brutal example. Just as Angel has finally saved Darla and convinced her to live out the remainder of her life as a human, Wolfram & Hart comes in with Drusilla; Lindsey McDonald himself tasers Angel and makes him watch as Drusilla turns Darla into a vampire again. This pushes Angel into He Who Fights Monsters territory for a good few episodes.
• Babylon 5: Discussed but ultimately averted. Two of President Clark's interrogators are putting Captain Sheridan through 2 + Torture = 5 to get him to confess to treason. One of them suggests bringing in Sheridan's father (who they'd captured earlier) and putting a gun to his head to force his confession, but the other interrogator dismisses it as too much of a risk. If Sheridan still refuses and they kill his father, it only strengthens his resolve against them; but if he refuses and they don't carry out the threat, it only weakens their position and gives any further threats the possibility of being a bluff as well.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003) has an unplanned bonus to Boomer impersonating identical humanoid robot Athena. Helo, Athena's husband, comes into the bathroom where Boomer has just Bound and Gagged Athena in a bathroom stall, and mentions that since "she" is going on a mission they should take the opportunity to say an intimate goodbye. Of course, Athena chooses that moment to become drowsily awake enough to watch.
• Happens once each season in Black Mirror:
  • "Fifteen Million Merits": Advertisements are everywhere in this dystopian future, and unless you can skip them (which costs money, called "merits"), they're mandatory viewing to the point that if you try to look away or close your eyes, a piercing tone tells you to resume viewing. Especially heinous when after Bing gives 15 million merits to his Love Interest Abi so she could audition for her freedom, he is left with insufficient merits to skip any adverts and is forced to watch Abi be raped in an advert for a porn channel.
  • "White Bear": After the events of the episode were all revealed to be a lie, and that Victoria actually filmed the torture and murder of a child, she is strapped to a chair and made to watch the video she filmed of the child's murder while having her mind wiped.
  • "Men Against Fire": Soldiers are gifted with MASS implants that help them kill Roaches, which are regular people made to look inhuman thanks to the implants. When Stripe finds out the truth about killing Roaches, his implant falls apart and is Mind Raped into submission by seeing his true actions: butchering an innocent terrified young man to death.
  • "USS Callister": Robert Daly uses a personal mod of a game to reenact his favorite show Space Fleet and to torment his co-workers, who he feels have wronged him one way or another. Of all the digital clones who aren't very happy to be there, Walton is the most gung-ho about playing along, and for good reason. When Walton refused to play along with Daly's fantasies, Daly shot a digital clone of Walton's son and threw him out of the airlock, making Walton watch and threatening to torture his son in more sadistic ways if he didn't comply.
• Breaking Bad:
  • In a flashback showing some of Gus's past, we see that Hector, before he was paralyzed and worked as one of Don Eladio's enforcers, shot and killed Gus's partner Max right next to him, and then pushed Gus to the ground to force him to look into the lifeless eyes of Max's corpse as punishment for using underhanded tactics to gain the cartel's attention. Gus would then spend the next few decades plotting his bloody revenge against the cartel.
  • Walt, handcuffed and surrounded by armed Neo-nazis, can only watch helplessly as Jack executes Hank right before his eyes.
  • In the penultimate episode, Jesse, who was captured and made to make his trademark blue meth for Jack and Todd, gets caught trying to escape their compound. Jack retaliates by forcing Jesse to watch his girlfriend Andrea get executed at her front porch by Todd and then threatening to do the same to her son Brock if he tries to escape again.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In season five, Glory, while confronting Buffy in her own home, invokes this when she openly threatens to kill Buffy's loved ones and friends and make Buffy watch her do so if she doesn't turn over the Key.
    Glory: I'll kill [your sister]. I'll kill your mom, I'll kill your friends... and I'll make you watch when I do.
  • In the Alternate Universe in "The Wish", the vampirized Xander and Willow kill Cordelia in front of Giles, who's trapped in the library bookcage.
    Vampire Xander: So you're a Watcher, huh? Watch this.
• Chicago P.D.: Inverted in the episode "8:30 PM". The criminal is a terrorist who likes to watch his bombs go off. Voight subdues him and then dangles him off a roof, and forces him to watch his bomb not go off.
• Jerks like this are common on Criminal Minds:
  • In "No Way Out", Frank Breitkopf vivisects his victims, using drugs to keep them conscious and cauterizes their arteries to keep them alive as long as possible. He does this on a table beneath a mirror, forcing the victim to watch this happen to themselves.
  • In "Revelations", the UnSub (Tobias Hankel) watches his potential victims through their webcams, then records and posts their murders online. He also kidnaps Reid and forces him to choose one of the victims to be murdered. When Reid instead chooses one to save, Tobias goes and kills a different one (and their spouse), leaving Reid tied up and forced to watch it happen on the laptop in front of him. Cue Reid's guilt. The next time we see him, he's staring catatonically. Garcia also had to watch all of the videos repeatedly, unable to track Tobias. Later in the same episode, when the team's efforts to track him down make him angry, Hankel punishes them by switching the video camera back on and making them watch while he beats Reid nearly to death.
  • In the episode "Children of the Dark", the two UnSubs would force the kids to watch as the first UnSub beat the parents to death. Then the second UnSub would inject them with poison.
  • In "True Night", the UnSub's backstory was that a street gang forced him to watch as they murdered (and implied gang-rape) his pregnant girlfriend, whom he'd just proposed to. No wonder he snapped.
  • It was part of Karl "The Fox" Arnold's modus operandi: he targeted dysfunctional families and forced the father to watch as he killed the other members before finally killing him.
  • In "100", The Reaper (using a stolen cell phone) forces Hotch to listen to his wife being shot dead. The entire team hears it, too. It does not end well for the Reaper.
  • The same thing happened to the team when Prentiss was being beaten up by a cult that had her and Reid. She used the fact that the team was listening to get a message to them.
  • Tim Curry's character in the two-parter "Our Darkest Hour"/"The Longest Night" would always leave behind a witness after raping, beating, and killing their loved ones. It turned out that his mother, a prostitute, used to make him watch while she worked. It's implied she also offered him up to her clients.
  • In the episode "Proof", the UnSub kidnaps and tortures his niece, burning her hands off with acid. In the final scene of the episode, her father (as some sort of self-punishment for not noticing that his brother was seriously screwed up) forces himself to watch the video of his daughter being tortured.
• In Colombian telenovela Decisiones Extremas's episode "A imagen y semejanza", after tying up Esteban to the bed in which he performed surgery on her, Laura takes advantage of her new appearance to bring the real Gloria's lover to kiss in front of him. He is unable to do anything about it but watch and scream.
• The Devil Judge: Sun-ah and Jae-hee force Yo-han to watch K's death.
• The "Bonus Round" on Distraction: Get a question wrong, watch the brand new car that you've already won get vandalized or one of your prizes get destroyed.
• Doctor Who has many examples. Most villains find that the most effective way to break the Doctor is to do this to him.
  • "Genesis of the Daleks": The Doctor has to tell Davros how every Dalek war was lost or Sarah Jane and Harry will be tortured.
  • "The Long Game": The Editor gets the Doctor to reveal who he really is by shocking Rose in front of him.
  • "The Sound of Drums": The Master forces the Doctor to watch Earth literally get decimated while helpless to stop him. Why? For the Evulz, of course!
  • "Last of the Time Lords": It's mentioned that the Master made Martha's captured family stand on the deck of the Valiant and watch him obliterate Japan, which is one reason why Francine wants to kill him at the end.
  • "Journey's End": Davros once again tried to break the Doctor, first by making him watch the TARDIS (with Donna in it) get destroyed, and then was seconds away from forcing the Doctor to watch as the Daleks destroyed reality itself with the Reality Bomb.
  • "The Magician's Apprentice": Davros forces the Doctor to watch helplessly as Missy and Clara are exterminated. Actually, they're faking it. Not that the Doctor knows this at the time, however.
  • Torchwood: Jack Harkness describes being subjected to this in his past: "I went to war when I was a boy. I was with my best friend. We got caught crossing the border over enemy lines. They tortured him, not me, because he was weaker. They made me watch him die. And they let me go." Icing on the cake: Jack convinced his friend to go to war. It would have been an adventure, he claimed.
• In the TV movie Echo, Jack Wagner's twin brother character moves into his brother's life after abducting him and makes love to his fiancée, having it broadcast to his brother through a live camera so he can sit helplessly and watch.
• In Firefly the crew stumbles upon a derelict ship plundered by vicious space cannibals called Reavers. All the passengers on the ship but one man were brutally tortured and murdered. As it turns out, the Reavers deliberately left him alive and made him watch as they did their work on the others, traumatizing the man so badly that the only way he could cope was by becoming a Reaver himself.
• A French Village: Antoine and Suzanne can only watch helplessly from hiding while a resistance fighter is killed along with his family by the Milice (being heavily outgunned, there is nothing they can really do).
• Galavant: Madalena's solution to a ridiculously minor dispute — two farmers arguing over who owns a chicken that hatched right on the boundary between their properties — is resolved by her eating the chicken for lunch and making the farmers watch. It confuses the hell out of them, and when they start arguing again Like an Old Married Couple, Madalena snaps, "This! This is why I'm making you watch!"
• Game of Thrones:
  • Ned believes it is important for his sons to watch him carry out executions with his own hand to instill them with a strong sense of justice. His children continue to be forced to watch terrible things for far less noble purposes throughout the series.
  • Olly sees both his parents killed when the wildlings raid his hamlet in the Gift. Styr then forces him to look at their bodies while gloating that he is going to eat them before sending Olly to Castle Black as a lure.
  • Metaphorically speaking, Forced to Watch can be seen as a choice for all the most dangerous criminals instead of losing a limb (or something else), as they are "forced to (Night's) Watch". Literal meaning can be the Night's Watch itself being forced to watch the realm of people.
  • When Ramsy forces Theon/Reek to watch him rape Sansa as psychological torture.
  • When Queen Cersei captures Ellaria Sand and her daughter Tyene, the women who poisoned her daughter, she gives Tyene a Kiss of Death with the same poisoned lipstick, then tells her mother that she'll be left chained to the wall (force-fed if necessary) so she can watch her daughter die, then decompose. Cersei then tells her guards to bring in fresh torches every few hours so Ellaria won't miss any of it.
  • King Aegon III Targaryen was forced to watch his mother get eaten by a dragon.
• Suggested but thankfully not done in Guest from the Future. When Kolya is tortured by the pirates but still refuses to reveal the mielophone's location, Rat says they can capture Kolya's mother and torture her in front of him instead.
• The Handmaid's Tale:
  • After Ofglen is found in a relationship with a Martha, the soldiers force Ofglen to watch as her lover is hanged. Because Ofglen is fertile, she's spared, though subject to a clitorectomy.
  • In the first episode of season 2, Offred is put through this by Aunt Lydia: she is spared torture for refusing to stone Janine because of her pregnancy but has to watch her fellow Handmaids go through it.
• Sylar does this in Volume 4 of Heroes; he tortures one of the soldiers sent to kidnap him, then immobilizes him while torturing two innocent bystanders. Well, one innocent bystander and one villain wannabe, but he didn't know that yet...
• Intergalactic: Candy's mother had to watch as her sons and husband were hanged by Commonworld officials for theft. Candy has to watch as she herself is shot later.
• In Kurosagi, Kurosaki is unable to stop his father from murdering his sister and mother before coming for him as well.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
  • In the episode "Father Dearest", the detectives discover that the culprit has been framing a former colleague for stealing his girlfriend 20-something years ago when they were in college. To that end, he has kidnapped their daughter and insists that he will only reveal her whereabouts to the wife. When she enters the interrogation room, he demands that she dance with him so that "He has to endure watching you with another man the way I've had to all these years." Indeed, we see the other man watching through the two-way mirror, incredibly distraught.
  • "Betrayal's Climax": A teenage girl is gang-raped in front of her boyfriend, who has a gun to his head, forcing him to see it but do nothing. Worse, the girl had more than one involuntary orgasm during it, leading to him temporarily thinking she enjoyed it. The fact that she had never been able to have one during consensual sex with the boyfriend just adds to the issue.
  • "Signature": The Serial Killer "The Woodsman" would sometimes hold two victims at a time, so that one was forced to watch (or at least listen to) the other being tortured. When the police find his Torture Cellar, a tape depicting one of the torture sessions is playing, allowing the killer to continue his psychological torture of the remaining victim even though there's no one else physically present.
• The Legend of Xiao Chuo:
  • Xi Yin and Wuguli are forced to watch Xi Yin's father's execution.
  • Xian is forced to watch Zhi Mo be partially blinded, castrated, then thrown down the stairs.
• On Lost, Pickett prepares to execute Sawyer for killing his wife Colleen and, knowing that Sawyer and Kate are involved, ordered a caged Kate to watch (in the rain, no less). Sawyer tells Kate not to look, though she ignores this and tries for a Please, I Will Do Anything! instead, but Pickett is interrupted Just in Time by a call from Jack, of all people, who arranges for Kate's escape.
• Lucifer (2016): Charlotte Richards was punished this way during her time in Hell. She and her family would sit down for a meal when one of the criminals she helped get released in life would break in and murder her husband and children in front of her. Each time the loop reset the criminal responsible changed to another of her clients. Once she returns to life she continues to have nightmares about her punishment.
• Midnight Sun (2016): Sparan was tied up and made to watch as his son was drowned in front of him.
• Midsomer Murders: In "Hidden Depths", Otto Benham, a snobby wine lover, is tied to his lawn while the murderer is catapulting wine bottles at him. His wife, Bernie, has been taken to the window and her wheelchair disabled in order to make her watch the whole thing (though the murderer remains unidentified). When she sees the bottle miss, she calls out corrections in aim to the murderer. The next morning, the police arrive but she, of course, didn't see anything.
• Mouse (2021): Mu-chi is forced to watch as Mu-won is murdered on live TV.
• NCIS: When Gibbs and McGee are held captive by drugrunners in Paraguay, Gibbs is tortured for information... but McGee is forced to watch. After they're rescued, Gibbs seems to think McGee had it worse than he did.
• The Outpost: Tobin relates that even after his father swore loyalty to the Prime Order, his sister was killed in front of them as a warning of what would happen if they betrayed them.
• Person of Interest:
  • It's a case of Forced To Listen in "The Crossing". HR has captured Detective Fusco and sends a mook to kill his son, putting him on the phone to his father so they can exchange last words before his Sound-Only Death. Only what Fusco hears is Shaw reassuring him that his son is safe (having shot the HR mook) but because of this she doesn't have time to save him as well.
  • A sci-fi version of this trope occurs with the Machine; because Robots Think Faster the Benevolent A.I. can run thousands of simulations to get the main characters out of a dangerous simulation, but when someone dies it becomes this trope.
    "I watched her die 12,483 times in the seconds before she expired. I couldn't save her, but I kept trying. You can't conceive of my grief because you can't experience it like I do, but it's there."
• In Power Rangers Super Megaforce, after Vrak has defeated the Rangers for a second time (the first time showing them Cruel Mercy), he tells them that he will leave them alive so they are forced to watch his drills destroy the planet.
• The Rise of Phoenixes: Zhi Wei wakes up in time to see Chang Hai kill Zhu Yin. She can't do anything to stop him because he'll kill her too if he knows she's there.
• Shades of Blue: A "forced to listen" variation and rare heroic example. Harlee gets back at her creepy FBI handler Stahl for forcing a wire on her by seducing and sleeping with DA Nava, forcing Stahl (who has a massive crush on her) to have to listen to her having sex with another man. It's implied in the next episode she brought her A-game to bed and made herself louder just to sink the knife deeper.
• In Seventeen Moments of Spring, Kat is given a Sadistic Choice of betraying Stirlitz (which would also have continent-scale consequences) or watching her baby son freeze to death as he is placed by an open window when there's a frost outside. She is absolutely wrecked by the sight but nevertheless refuses to talk. Luckily, one of Kat's wardens has a change of heart and rescues her and the baby in time.
• Space Cases: Spung do not question Andromedans. Humans are far more vulnerable to this trope.
  • The first season finale contained a textbook example, where Warlord Shank demands information about the Crysta from Harlan after some of the gang have been captured and tied up. When Shank brings out his Agony Beam, Harlan, of course, defiantly tells him that torture won't make him talk. Shank calmly asks, "Who said anything about torturing you?" before turning it in the direction of the unconscious Catalina. Good thing he also didn't say anything about giving him truthful information.
• Recurring bastard Kolya on Stargate Atlantis pulled one of these on the entire city of Atlantis when he forced nearly every member of the command team to watch his torture of Lt. Colonel John Sheppard via live-telefeed.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • In "Ensign Ro", the eponymous Bajoran tells a story about how when she was a little girl, the Cardassians made her come into a room and watch her father being tortured to death. In this case, the goal was not to torment Ro but to humiliate her own father, as she witnessed his loss of dignity under the torture.
  • In "The Mind's Eye", Geordi is brainwashed into a Manchurian Agent by the Romulans by being shown horrifying images directly to his brain through his ocular connections.
• A Sunset Beach storyline involved an evil twin imprisoning his good brother... and forcing him to watch through a two-way mirror as he made love to the man's fiancée.
• Wildly bizarre example in an episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles — Derek breaks a man who he believes is a Machine collaborator sent back from the future by kidnapping his younger present-day self and torturing him in front of him.
• A third Ozian example. In Tin Man, Cain was locked in a Steampunk stasis chamber for eight years while a holographic recording of his family's torture was set on repeat playback.
• The entire point of the MTV Game Show Trashed. Don't get enough questions right, and you get to see your prized possessions go up in smoke (sometimes literally). The final round puts one of each team's players on the line.
  • Kidnapped, another MTV offering and somewhat of a Spiritual Successor to Trashed, based the whole game around saving one's teammate from torture.
  • Downfall (2010) is similar to Trashed; don't get the questions right, and the prizes up for grabs go off the side of a skyscraper via Conveyor Belt o' Doom. The show's two Lifelines play out the exact same way as Trashed and Kidnapped in that one requires you to put a personal possession on the belt, and the other a friend or relative you've brought along.
• Happens thrice during The Walking Dead (2010). Negan forces Rick's group to watch as he brutally beats Abraham to death. He specifically states that if anyone moves, he'll rip Carl's eye out and feed it to Rick. When Daryl angrily punches him, Negan proceeds to murder Glenn whilst everyone, including his pregnant wife watches helplessly. Finally, he forces the group to watch as he orders Rick to cut Carl's arm off. Thankfully he doesn't actually go through with this one.
• Inverted and Subverted in an episode of Workaholics. High on acid, Alice is convinced a man has information on how to find a poaching fellow salesman, Psycho D. She threatens to melt her face with a clothes iron in front of the man's children if the man doesn't start talking. She then puts it to her face, screaming only to realize it wasn't on.
  • In another episode, the guys come to rely on Jillian after she saves them from a tough guy in the opening of the episode. At the end, she defends them from a man by threatening to beat his ass in front of his "ugly, funky-butt children."

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