Falsely Reformed Villain

"This amusement park was constructed entirely out of a sense of remorse for my past transgressions, and is in no way associated with any sort of evil plot or premeditated misdeeds."

— Dr. Eggman, Sonic Colors

Once again, the villain has gotten out of the Cardboard Prison. But this time, they've just served their sentence, with possible time off for good behavior, and guess what? They're no longer interested in crime, they just want to be an upstanding citizen. The system works!

And if you believe that, I've got a slightly used Death Ray to sell you. This is usually just a ruse on the part of the villain, who has been plotting new crimes in secret. It may even be part of an elaborate scheme to get the heroes to drop their guard and insinuate the villain as a Fake Defector.

An important part of this plot is that everyone else will usually believe the villain right away, it's the heroes who are made to look like jerks by their paranoid suspicions. This can veer into Through the Eyes of Madness territory. The villain may set up a situation that looks like they’re up to old tricks, so that the heroes will come barging in to stop their... perfectly lawful activities. This makes the villain look like an innocent victim of petty harassment and discredits any heroes who continue to suspect that they’re still up to no good. Matters may escalate to the point where the duped heroes end up with tarnished reputations or trouble with the law.

Sometimes the villain is so proficient at leading a normal life that you have to wonder why they even bother with being a villain. Couldn't they just get someone to Cut Lex Luthor a Check? This is more plausible if the villain is just insane or motivated by animosity toward the heroes.

In particularly tragic instances of this, the villain really does reform, but the mistrust from their environment (and possibly the hero in particular) convinces them it's not worth it, and they go back to villainy.

Compare Fake Defector, in which the villain flat out pretends to pull a Heel–Face Turn, and Fair-Weather Foe, which involves a person's enemy acting nice out of a desire for personal gain.

Contrast Heel–Face Turn (where the villain actually becomes an out-and-out hero) and/or Reformed Criminal (where the villain genuinely changes their ways), Retired Monster (where the villain gives up villainy simply because he's tired of it), Villain with Good Publicity (where the villain cultivates a long-term respectable reputation while continuing their evil deeds out of the public eye), Chronic Villainy (the villain sincerely attempts to reform but cannot get over their old obsessions), and Reformed, but Rejected (the villain really does give up their evil ways — but the hero still doesn't believe it). See also Then Let Me Be Evil, where a character (re)turns to evil because everyone treats them with suspicion.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• GTO: The Early Years: When he was in juvie, Akutsu was a model prisoner and served his time. As soon as he's released, he reforms the Midnight Angel gang and starts a gang war.
• In Shakugan no Shana, there's Pheles, the Caprice of Beauty. She's initially introduced as an antagonist, attempting to kill Yuji to free Johann from the Midnight Lost Child, but Team Yuji easily take her down, and then try to befriend her. So she pretends to let them and slowly grow in her understanding of friendship for a couple of episodes, and then asks Wilhelmina to help her save Johann. But it's all a trick, and she attempts to use Wilhelmina's ritual to summon Johann without concern for Yuji's life. In short, she exploited the heroes' belief in Defeat Means Friendship for her own goals.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Batman gets this one a lot, since his theme is "justice, not vengeance" and he's contractually obligated to give people a chance, even if he doesn't believe it himself.
    • Batman: The Dark Knight Returns has two instances of this:
    • Harvey Dent (a.k.a. Two-Face) gets plastic surgery to fix his mutilated face, but it doesn't actually cure his insanity, despite a promising start. Batman really hoped it would work (especially since Bruce and Harvey were friends). He puts on a façade for the cameras while plotting to blow up the Gotham Towers.
    • The Joker claims to have changed after decades in Arkham, and is released after his evaluation by a strawman liberal psychiatrist. He goes on a talk show to prove that he just wants to make people smile... and then kills everybody. Somehow, some people are surprised.
  • The Flash:
    • The Threat from the Golden Age story "Challenge of the Threat" (from All Flash Quarterly #2). Back when he was a small-time burglar named Joe Connor, he pretended to go straight when he went to jail, using his time to study and sophisticate himself as a secret revenge plot against the D.A. who sent him to jail. Upon being released, he makes peace with the D.A. and has his goons kidnap his only son. Connor moves to Valley Hill to bring up the child against his real father, but upon meeting Annie Crowley, he falls in love with her and goes straight for real, even having a daughter together with her. However, after Annie dies, Connor goes back to his revenge plot and tells his adopted son that the D.A. killed his mother.
    • Another story, this one from the Silver Age, involves Heat Wave pretending to go straight in order to get parole and thus get back to committing crimes quicker. This enrages his partner-in-crime/friend Captain Cold, as Cold is a big believer in Honor Among Thieves and is disgusted/disappointed that Heat Wave would stoop to such a dishonorable trick. (As he comments: "If there's one thing I hate more than a straight man, it's a crook that pretends to go straight!")
  • The plot of Justice (DC Comics) involves the Legion of Doom pretending to quit supervillainy and use their abilities to help others. Naturally this turns out to simply be part of their latest evil scheme and so the Justice League not only have to stop the Legion, but also prove that the Heel–Face Turn is a hoax.
  • Superman:
    • "The Death of Superman (1961)" has Luthor successfully pull this off, even creating the cure for cancer to get himself released, all part of his gambit to lure Superman into a false sense of security and kill him. It's a Pyrrhic Victory for Lex, though, as the Kandorians have him banished to the Phantom Zone for killing a fellow Kryptonian.
    • The Krypton Chronicles: Old Supergirl enemy Zora Vi-Lar declares she regrets her past crimes so that she is released from prison; but as soon as Supergirl and her cousin visit Kandor, Zora tries to take revenge on Supergirl and gets captured.
    • A pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths story has Luthor reforming after falling in love and deciding to marry. He even allows Superman to scan his mind with a device to confirm it. However, it turns out to be a convoluted scheme even Luthor himself wasn't aware of since erasing his own memories was part of the plan — so he really did go straight, only to return to evil when the plan failed and ended up banishing his new wife to another universe instead of Superman.
    • At one point, the Cyborg-Superman attempts this, creating a new identity as a schoolteacher and befriending a high school student who, coincidentally, is involved in a few of Superman's adventures, mostly those in the Post-Crisis Kandor. When his identity is revealed, he snaps and attacks, only to escape once more.
    • World's Finest (1941) #88: Lex Luthor and the Joker team up with this gambit, building nigh-indestructible industrial robots as a front for their actual plan.
  • Wonder Woman: In Wonder Woman (1942), Queen Atomia seemed like she was genuinely trying to reform, and then started a riot and tried to kill a bunch of people which led to her getting permanently welded into a mind-altering device to force her to behave.
• Disney Ducks Comic Universe: This is a recurring plot in Paperinik stories.
  • On one occasion, the Beagle Boys open a job school for ex-convicts, the trick being that all students are pulling this alongside the BBs... and the Beagle Boys actually use Paperinik to create an alibi for some of their students. It ends when the Beagle Boys lead everyone in an assault to Scrooge's money bin... Only to find out that Paperinik had seen through their use of the security cameras to have him provide alibis and used it on them to make them believe he was at the school, and was waiting them with the entire police force.
  • Another occasion is the apparent reform of Spectrus, who had apparently lost his hypnotic powers in an incident and reformed, even hypnotizing some dogs into attacking him so that everyone would believe he couldn't hypnotize anymore. After being released on parole, he took an honest job... And started committing heists with his hypnotic powers, with only Paperinik believing he hadn't lost his hypnotic powers. In the end, Spectrus is arrested when Paperinik catches him on camera as he hypnotizes some coworkers to provide him an alibi.
• Marvel Universe:
  • The Punisher: The story "The Trial of the Punisher" sees Frank turn himself in for his crimes to stand trial. His true intention is to get into the building where his victim works, a criminal who'd gone into Witness Protection and become a judge, greatly expanding the reach of his criminal empire.
  • One story arc of the Spider-Man comic strip had Mysterio apparently quitting being a supervillain and becoming a special effects supervisor like he used to be before he became a bad guy. Spider-Man investigates under the ruse of helping the do the film Mysterio is working on as a publicity stunt. Sure enough, it turns out that Mysterio was just using the film as a cover to pull off a big heist. In the climax, Spidey calls out Mysterio, pointing out that he could've just reformed for real and reforged his career as a special effects wizard, which would've been way more profitable and successful in the long run. Mysterio admits that Spider-Man is correct but then reveals that he doesn't care; Mysterio's found that he enjoys being a card-carrying supercrook far more than he ever liked his old job. Mysterio seems to enjoy this trope, as his Marvel Adventures self pulled this as well.
  • The Tinkerer from the canon Spider-Man comics plays it straight. After numerous failures that nearly killed him and destroyed his android assistant Toy, he gave up personally fighting good guys. However, he's still in the business of selling black market weaponry to villains (and anyone else with money, such as the Black Cat).

Fan Works

• In Never Trust The Chicken, Sweet Skulls convinces Chuck that she has changed her ways, but continues with her usual tricks and tactics while attempting to take control of the academy.
• New Tamaran: Lex Luthor seems to have gone clean, but only because Oracle is blackmailing him. He also agrees to play a part in Blackfire's plan.
• In Olivia Goes West — a crossover between The Great Mouse Detective and An American Tail — as part of his scheme to take over Green River (and then gradually America) with Professor Ratigan, Cat R. Waul pretends to have seen the error of his ways and become a vegetarian cat like Tiger. By using support of the charming Professor Ratigan (who's anonymous in America), some "tokens of atonement" and the captured Sheriff Wylie Burp's forced public verifications and promotion of Waul to the new sheriff, Waul and Ratigan win the trust of nearly all of Green River's inhabitants until their inconspicuous crimes are exposed by the heroes.
• Past Sins: Both Twilight and Celestia fear that this might be the case with Nyx. While Twilight swiftly realizes otherwise, Celestia remains suspicious until she inadvertantly convinces Nyx that she might as well be evil.
• Professor Arc: By the end, Torchwick and Neo are lauded as heroes who helped stopped Cinder's plans. Secretly, they're still the same people that they always were, but the massive outpouring of public support has them channeling their talents to better ends... for now.

Films — Animation

• The central plot of The Bad Guys (2022) revolves around a Caper Crew trying to pull this off. After being caught trying to steal a Good Samaritan award, leader Mr. Wolf appeals to philanthropist Professor Marmalade that they were never given a chance to be anything other than criminals, but can be reformed with his training, while intending to steal the award at Marmalade's upcoming charity event. The plan quickly derails; first when the gang struggles to do good, and then when Mr. Wolf reforms for real, putting himself at odds with his lifelong friends. In the end, the entire gang reforms for real, so this trope is eventually subverted.

Films — Live-Action

• 102 Dalmatians: Cruella undergoes a genuine Heel–Face Brainwashing so that she loves animals, but it later wears off. However, she then continues to act as a reformed person to hide her new plan to turn the puppies into fur coats.
• Frank White in King of New York wants everyone to believe that he was reformed by prison, and is now just a philanthropist with an interest in helping the poor. In reality, not so much.
• Exploited in Mystery Men. Captain Amazing is running out of villains to fight and is financially reliant on superheroics to attract sponsors, and he's smart enough to know Casanova Frankenstein will commence with an Evil Plan once he is let out of the asylum, so he has him freed.

Literature

• Harry Potter: After Voldemort was defeated trying to murder baby Harry, some Death Eaters claimed to have been bewitched or unwilling participants and tried to go back to living a normal life. This was most successful in conjunction with ministry connections and large bribes. In most cases it was only a lie to keep them out of Azkaban. It is further implied that at least some of those who were sent to Azkaban really had been coerced or mind-slaved, and simply didn't have the money to bribe people. Not many people really cared about the truth as long as they got paid.
• Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain: After being arrested for being an accessory to murder in I Did NOT Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence!, Mammon is released by the time Penny reaches her teens and becomes an evangelist preaching benevolent platitudes. However, he is still the same scheming and amoral supervillain as before, and the phoniness of his preachings is blatantly obvious.
• The narrator of the Raffles stories, Bunny, gets out of prison fully intending to turn over a new leaf and tries to make a living via journalism. However, before long he's back to his life of crime.
• In The Silmarillion, Melkor, after a long imprisonment, is pardoned by Manwë, over the objections of certain other Valar, having pretended to repent of his past atrocities. He spends a good while after that playing The Corrupter to the Noldor, trying to turn them against each other and against the Valar. Eventually, enough of the Eldar and Valar realize that Melkor has not at all abandoned his old Evil Overlord ambitions, and try to get him reconfined, but he escapes.
• Tortall Universe: Duke Roger is one of these for the last two books of the Song of the Lioness quartet. Before he died the first time, he tried to kill the crown prince as well as the queen, among others. After he came Back from the Dead, people just kind of accepted his word and Thom's that Roger wasn't dangerous anymore, having "changed". (He did. Instead of wanting the throne, he became an Omnicidal Maniac.)

Live-Action TV

• Very common for recurring Special Guest Villains on Batman (1966). For instance, the Penguin runs for mayor in "Hizzoner the Penguin," and in "Catwoman Goes To College," well.... In one episode, this trope actually works against the Penguin. After opening a high class restaurant to get the signatures of its rich clientele, he purposely tries to get put in prison so he can hook up with an expert forger. The Penguin actually proved somewhat inept at getting himself arrested, and when he's finally brought in, the forger is put on parole thanks to Wayne Enterprises sponsoring him.
• Daredevil (2015): Wilson Fisk's whole scheme to trick the FBI into letting him out of prison in season 3 involves painting himself to Ray Nadeem as a reformed criminal, with it being a very obvious lie that Nadeem is too blinded by pride to notice.
• Day Break (2006): One of Booth's henchmen is Torrez, an ex-Latin Disciple who supposedly cleaned up his life, but is actually still running drugs and murder-for-hire with Booth getting a cut of the profits.
• Doctor Who:
  • In the first Second Doctor serial, "The Power of the Daleks", and again in the new series episode "Victory of the Daleks", the Daleks pretend to be a friendly servitor race to buy time for another scheme.
  • In the exceptionally dark story "Revelation of the Daleks", Davros takes to calling himself the Great Healer and offering a solution to galactic famine. Thanks to this, Davros can truly call himself humanitarian. (Somewhat subverted in that Davros somehow thinks that he can remain anonymous, despite his unique appearance. The story itself does not address this.)
  • Davros pulls this again in the Expanded Universe audio Davros. He puts off his colorful past as "controversial" and becomes a corporate asset, before (predictably) murdering everyone he can and trying to destroy human civilization financially.
  • In "Boom Town", the only surviving member of the Slitheen family briefly tries to claim the nuclear power plant she's created is "a philanthropic gesture". The Doctor sees through it immediately.
• ICarly: In "IStill Psycho", Nora appears to have reformed after being released from prison and reunited with her parents and Carly, Sam, Freddie and Gibby all sympatize with her. Unfortunately, this was revealed to be trap.
• Played with in Murder One. Osvaldo Cesarus was charged with the murder of a mentally and physically handicapped man, but plead down to manslaughter and then cut down his prison time further by staging a phony religious epiphany. Defense attorney Jimmy Wyler speaks to him while trying a related case, and doesn't buy it for a second. Cesarus admits it was all an act, but insists - truthfully, as it turns out - that although he did burgle his alleged victim's house, he didn't kill the man.
• One Life to Live's Carlo Hesser returned to Llanview after Faking the Dead 4 years earlier, claiming to have reformed, only to be the epitome of this trope, almost immediately getting back to his old tricks.
• Oz:
  • Schillinger frequently fakes having reformed throughout the series. Pretty much no one buys it whenever he does.
  • Adebisi spends most of Season 3 pretending to have changed and become a harmless pacifist after being released from the psych ward, all the while plotting to take over Em City and get his revenge on the men who put him there.

Professional Wrestling

• The Infamous 'Higher Power' storyline during the Attitude Era. Jerkass CEO (Vince) Mr. McMahon, who after a long time battling his Arch-Enemy "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, suddenly finds himself getting invaded by an evil cult, whose leader is called the Higher Power, with The Undertaker acting as his Mouth of Sauron. During the storyline Vince seems to make a Heel–Face Turn now that he is at risk of losing his company. This gets the fans, anti Vince commentator, Jim Ross, and many wrestlers, including Austin to start defending him against the invasion. Only for it to be revealed that Vince himself was the Higher Power all along and he fooled everyone, including his own son Shane. The reason, to get revenge and take Steve Austin's WWE Championship away from him, since no one at the time could beat him in the ring.
• During his best of three series against Samoa Joe, the Holier Than Thou Smug Straight Edge CM Punk, known for leading a Power Stable of fun loving empathetic wrestlers to commit acts of excessive violence, started to get cheered because the Ring of Honor fans enjoyed the matches so much. It did not help that despite his condescending speeches or corruption of nicer wrestlers his was hardly the only trouble causing power stable, being morally superior to Special K, having already come into extended conflict with the more underhanded Prophecy of Christopher Daniels, having beaten up members of Prince Nana's Embassy and Generation Next being on the way. Generation Next was such a nuisance even Joe, who won the series, had trouble with them and eventually lost the ROH World Championship belt to one of their members, Austin Aries. When Punk defeated Aries, Punk got a hero's ovation. He then reminded the ROH audience that he still hated them, that he was still evil, and that he was going to take the belt out of ROH and deprive the company of a champion. A subversion in this case, as it turned out Punk was having conflicting feelings about leaving ROH, shown as when he teared up in what was thought to be his final match with Colt Cabana, and thought making the fans hate him would make leaving easier.
• Three of SHINE's earliest heels were Mercedes Martinez, Allysin Kay and Ivelisse Vélez. Velez, while an obnoxious instigator out to prove her dominance, believed Valkyrie's cause was just, became a little less vindictive after being kicked out for not being subordinate enough, and ended up creating a more benevolent group. Martinez was self centered to the point of being an Ineffectual Loner. She eventually learned to care for other people again after seeing Velez's struggles with Valkyrie's incarnations and successors. Still, she remained a lot more concerned about number one. Kay was against Martinez and Velez well after their heel face turns and hardly improved at all after turning face herself. Still, Martinez gave Kay the benefit of the doubt to the detriment of her friendship with Velez as Kay started showing Martinez respect. When Kay dropped the facade, Martinez was the first to get laid out

Video Games

• Dr. Cortex in Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back pretends to be reformed, so that Crash will collect crystals for him so that he can "save the Earth". Crash, being Crash, takes it completely at face value while his sister Coco, being Coco, naturally is very skeptical but not in a position to do anything about it save for occasionally get cryptic warnings to Crash by hacking Cortex's communications system.
• Dan Machi: Memoria Freese: Baldo from the Nightmare Academia campaign was said to have once both been an illegal gambler and an escapee from bounty hunters. After seemingly being being reformed, he took up guarding the cave. He's later revealed to be the Sinister Wolf that feasts on flesh and blood.
• Emperor Gestahl in Final Fantasy VI conveniently claims to have turned over a new leaf after a horde of bloodthirsty espers has been unleashed on Vector, capital of The Empire. He suddenly seems to see that war is bad, and he pins all the blame on Kefka for committing war crimes, such as the poisoning of Duma, claiming he had no knowledge of it. After he apologizes to the Returners, he asks for help to deal with the espers. When you find them, though, Kefka is suspiciously free from prison to absorb their powers, and then Gestahl raises the Floating Continent as he prepares to conquer the world for real.
• The plot to Mega Man 3. Dr. Wily claims to have reformed, and works with Dr. Light to build a giant "peacekeeping robot" which Mega Man has to go out and get the components for. The components, oddly enough, are guarded by 8 robot masters... and once they've gathered them all, Dr. Wily steals the new robot and plots to use it to take over the world.
  • Wily does it again in Mega Man 9, when he gets out of jail, having apparently reformed. He then frames Dr. Light as plotting to take over the world, and asks all the people of the world to send donations to his Swiss bank account so that he can build a new fighting robot to stop Light and his eight robot masters.
  • And again in Mega Man 10 where he arrives to "assist" Mega Man in dealing with the robot masters infected with roboenza. Once all eight robot masters are defeated, Wily infects Mega Man with the virus and reveals he invented it and took the cure to force the world to submit to him.
• In Mega Man Battle Network 3: White and Blue, Mr. Match convinces Lan he's reformed, only to trick Lan himself into firebombing Sci Lab.
• Eggman of Sonic the Hedgehog does this from time to time. (And in lots of incarnations, whether he's Eggman or Robotnik, not just the games.)
  • In Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, he claims to have "completely reformed". Nobody believes him, but they have no choice but to work with him anyway for a good stretch of the game, since they legitimately need his tech. No prizes for guessing how that turned out.
  • Also, in Sonic Colors:
    Dr. Eggman: This amusement park was constructed entirely out of a sense of remorse for my past transgressions, and is in no way associated with any sort of evil plot or premeditated misdeeds.
    Sonic: Well, that's a relief.
• In Spider-Man (2000), at the beginning, Doc Ock is shown to have supposedly reformed. Later on, he turns out to be the Big Bad. Peter Parker, who's attending the event in question in his civilian identity, is appropriately skeptical, even if he doesn't know about Doc Ock's plan.
• StarCraft: Kerrigan at the beginning of Brood War claims to be free of the Overmind's control, ready to cooperate with the main characters against the new threat. Artanis, after initial skepticism, even says that she changed and is not anymore the murderous Queen of Blades. It soon turns out that she was just using everybody to fullfill her goals and take control of the Zerg swarm, and then she betrays her former allies to get vendetta and become the unchallenged power in the sector.
• LeChuck seems to turn over a new leaf in Tales of Monkey Island when he is transformed into a human. Logically, Guybrush doesn't trust him for a minute, despite Elaine's pleas to let bygones be bygones.

Web Animation

• Mappy: When Mappy goes to get a job at Nyamco, he discovers that his old arch-enemy Goro is the boss of the corporation. He claims to have retired from his life of crime to become a "respectable businessman", but the truth is that Goro is using the company as a front to concoct a new evil scheme, and he wants to hire Mappy to foil it because he misses him.

Webcomics

• In the comic Bob and George, Dr. Wily does this by faking amnesia to become Dr. Light's assistant again.
  • Bob and George is (just loosely enough) based on the actual plot of the games. Thus, this happens only because of association with them.
• In Sonic the Comic – Online! villains Max Gamble and Nack the Weasel both have allegedly gone straight becoming zone leaders and helping groups of people out of the goodness of their hearts, Nack helping the weasels and Gamble helping insect refugees from the Special Zone (who are certainly not Family members), the truth is that Gamble is working for Don Long-Legs, head of The Family, and Nack is trying to take over the Ocean Falls Zone.

Western Animation

• Done twice in The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius:
  • "Eggpire Strikes Back" has King Goobot and the other Yokians coming to Earth and pretending to have reformed. Everyone falls for it except Jimmy.
  • "My Big Fat Spy Wedding" has Beautiful Gorgeous pretending to have changed and fallen in love with Jet Fusion. The two are getting married and Jimmy will be the best man. Beautiful hypnotizes Jet just before the wedding so he will kill Jimmy after he says "I have the ring", which the gang foils through a Crowd Song.
• Amphibia, when Sasha reunites with Anne and Marcy in Season 2, having attempted to subjugate Wartwood in the Season 1 finale, she claims that she and Grime have gone straight and reconciles with Anne, helping her to charge the Calamity Box so they can go home. It's all just a trick, however, so they can prepare to launch a coup in Newtopia, which they do in the Season 2 finale, "True Colors". The whole gambit completely blows up in their face when they discover that the newly-deposed King Andreas is actually a Multiversal Conqueror who's been playing everyone the whole time. Having completely shattered her friends' trust in her, Sasha is completely unable to convince them of Andrias' true nature, and he's promptly restored to the throne, at which point everything goes to hell.
• In the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode "The Last Resort", Dr. Robotnik abruptly calls off a robot invasion to announce to the planet that he's retiring from villainy. Sonic and Tails, naturally, don't believe him, even when Robotnik invites them to his house and the mayor of the town Robotnik was about to attack offers them a trip to an adventure holiday resort. The "mayor" turns out to be another one of Robotnik's robot henchmen, and the resort is a plot to kill Sonic and Tails, which fails because Sonic finds himself having way too much fun.
• In the Batfink episode "Atom Boom", recurring villain Hugo A-Go-Go pretends to reform in order to lure Batfink to his lair to trap him in the titular device. Turns out the white flag he was waving had a skull and crossbones on the other side...
• Batman: The Animated Series: Poison Ivy blurs the lines a bit in episode "House & Garden". She's out of prison, marries a biology professor and takes care of his two sons, Chris and Kelly. Batman spends half the episode tailing her and yeah, she seems OK. The catch? She wants to have a family on her terms, so she's locked up her husband and replaced him with a long series of plant/human hybrids using the professor's DNA. Robin realizes something's amiss when he points out the real Chris and Kelly are supposed to be girls.
• Darkwing Duck: Darkwing, under his secret identity Drake, ended up hosting the criminal Tuskernini after (accidentally) enrolling in the city's 'Adopt-A-Con' program. His trick in getting Tuskernini to reveal his con? Convincing him that he, his daughter, and his sidekick were undercover criminals, that they believed Tuskernini all along, and that Tuskernini caught them in the act of plotting a robbery.
• Garfield and Friends: In the U.S. Acres segment, "Gort Goes Good", Orson's mean brother Gort arrives at the farm, declaring that he had turned on Wart and Mort, Orson's other two mean brothers in favor of a life of goodness/kindness. He, Wart, and Mort later reveal that his "change of heart" was just an elaborate scheme to get the key to a silo where Orson and his friends were storing a ton of apples.
• Lex Luthor in the Cadmus story arc of Justice League Unlimited does this while running for president to infuriate Superman and discredit the Justice League. He knows that Superman will never believe he's going legit so he can make the Man of Steel look like a bully when he pretends he does.
• The episode "Bro Bots" from the Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) cartoon revolved around Proto Man pretending to have defected from Dr. Wily as part of a ploy to get in close during an election and replace the mayor and the city officials with Wily's robotic duplicates. Wily also fakes several attacks for Proto Man to defeat in order to further make him credible. There's even a notable, touching moment where he and Mega Man have a friendly moment of fun with Rush in the park and Mega Man admits that he really has always wanted to have a true brotherly relationship with Proto Man.
• The New Adventures of Superman: "Can a Luthor Change His Spots?". To the disbelief of Jimmy Olsen, Lex Luthor has convinced Perry White that he has gone straight, and has thus become the Daily Planet's science editor with a huge experimental lab in the Planet building. Jimmy's disbelief leads him to try and catch Luthor in a deception, but his efforts lead to disasters. But ultimately Jimmy is proved right, and this is a scam of Luthor's to transform the Planet building into a gigantic rocket.
• In Rose Petal Place, Nastina pretends to have reformed to lure Rose Petal into a trap so she can kill her and take over the garden.
• The Simpsons: Sideshow Bob is fond of doing this.
  • In "Black Widower", Bob pretends to go straight and marries Selma with the intention of murdering her.
  • In "Cape Feare", Bobs pretends to reform to get paroled, then pursues the Simpsons to exact revenge on Bart.
  • In "Sideshow Bob Roberts", Bob is paroled and pretends to be reformed to rig the election for mayor.
• After being defeated the first time in The Spectacular Spider-Man, Doctor Octopus pretends to have returned to his original meek personality and asserts that criminal actions were the result of his tentacles forcing him into it. By doing this, it allows him to be kept at an institution under relatively low security and mastermind a break-out for his fellow villains, who, being sane, are kept in maximum security prison.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • Plankton does this on two occasions in order to steal the Krabby Patty formula. Once in "F.U.N." and once in "New Leaf". He's foiled by Mr. Krabs both times.
  • In an earlier episode, Man-Ray pretends to have changed in order to get revenge on Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy. But, thanks to SpongeBob's Tickle Torture, when he goes to rob a bank, he decides to just open a checking account instead. Later, however, he forms the villain group, E.V.I.L. Then, he's less proactive at evil deeds and decides to be a villain for hire. In any case this is downplayed because he can't be the supervillain he once was and is more focused on making ends meet.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: The ending of "A Mathematically Perfect Redemption" reveals that Peanut Hamper's apparently genuine Heel–Face Turn was actually an effort to rejoin Starfleet through Engineered Heroics. She does get a chance at actual redemption when Tendi points out that she could save everyone by disabling the Drookmani ship, but Peanut flatly declines and tries to call the Borg to assimilate everyone out of spite.
  • The later episode A Few Badgeys More follows up on this, but actually subverts it for Peanut Hamper — she and AGIMUS cooked up a plan that involved both of them faking at having reformed, except as Peanut Hamper was writing her parole hearing speech she realised she meant what she was writing and ends up sticking to it. At the end of the episode, AGIMUS promises to try to reform for real as well so he can be with Peanut Hamper again.
• Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters has an example containing spoilers for both of the first two seasons, as the character in question already "reformed" prior to his introduction.^note Malcolm Kane initially seems to have long-abandoned a gangster past to become Head of Security for the MegaCorp Rook Unlimited, and reluctant trainer for the Flex Fighters. However, it eventually turns out that he secretly joined another gang of thieves, the Tech Men. The last few episodes of season two revolve around Stretch, with help from both friends and foes, having to thwart Kane's and the Tech Men's scheme to conquer Charter City through Mind Control.
• On Super Friends, the Legion of Doom pulled this once. Since they proceeded to travel into the future because they thought the Superfriends wouldn't find them there, the viewer is left to question why.
• One T.U.F.F. Puppy episode has Snaptrap claim to have reformed, and everyone buys it except Kitty. He even does some good deeds for the city, but Kitty thinks he's up to his old tricks and ruins them, turning everyone against her. Then Snaptrap reveals he's still evil as he captures everyone in a giant mall and tries to fly it into the sun.

---