Moral Event Horizon / Arrowverse

Moral Event Horizon in the Arrowverse.

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• Arrow: Almost every main villain crosses the line at least once at some point.
  • In the first appearance of the series’s first truly evil character, The Count, injects a dealer with an overdose of Vertigo just because he failed to kill the Arrow. He makes it obvious that he enjoys the subsequent suffering his drug causes as he hands the dealer a gun, offering him the choice between his life and the Count’s. The pain is so great that he chooses to kill himself as the Count laughs.
  • Helena Bertenelli/The Huntress is given multiple chances to redeem herself, but in her final crossing moment, she yells that Oliver betrayed her and began fighting him. Any remaining doubt is squashed when she paralyzes Makenna Hall, forcing her to retire from the police force.
  • Malcolm Merlyn/The Dark Archer spends an entire season building up to a crossing. In his Merlyn persona, he kidnaps Walter, threatens Thea’s life, and mentions repeatedly that he killed Robert to force Moira to stay in line. The tension boils to the point that Moira turns to the Chinese Triad to assassinate him. As the Dark Archer (even if his dual identity is kept separate at first), he beats Oliver to near death in their first encounter, then initiates the Undertaking, a manmade earthquake that hit the Glades and killed 503 people, including his son Tommy. Later, after returning from faking his death, he forces his daughter Thea to murder Sara Lance while she’s drugged to force Oliver to confront Ra’s al Ghul and later allied with Damien Darhk.
  • Barton Mathis, having killed 8 girls in his prior killing spree with his excruciatingly painful methods and helping drive Quentin to alcoholism, began his killing spree anew with 3 girls, including Laurel Lance as revenge against Quentin for arresting him.
  • Slade Wilson/Deathstroke kidnapped Roy Harper, using his blood to create more Mirakuru soldiers. He sucked out enough blood that Roy was comatose for two weeks and when he awoke had more Mirakuru in his body than blood, driving him to a feral state that led to him murdering a cop and attempting to kill his girlfriend Thea. Not long after, he murders Moira Queen in front of her children. In the flashbacks, it’s revealed that he tortured Oliver with electricity and tattooed Shado’s tattoo on his back to force him to remember her.
  • Sebastian Blood helped Slade Wilson through his entire campaign to make Oliver Queen suffer, but he crosses the line when he kidnaps Thea, leaving her imprisoned with only Slade Wilson. In a rare moment for the Arrowverse, Sebastian managed to cross the line and actually redeem himself, giving Oliver the Mirakuru cure and allowing him to take back the city, with Oliver later referring to him as a friend.
  • Amanda Waller may have the best intentions, but her “ends justify the means” mindset means she’s willing to do horrible things for the good of the United States. Threatening to blow up Starling City, murdering millions of civilians in the process, to prevent Slade Wilson’s soldiers from escaping showcases this perfectly
  • Warner Zytle proves to be a worthy successor to the title of The Count, modifying the formula to cause the victim to hallucinate their greatest fear. The formula is so strong it causes the person he injects with it in his first appearance to die on the spot. Not fifteen minutes later, he blows up an entire restaurant just to kill Oliver.
  • Despite his actions being defendable at first due to his sense of honor, everything Ra’s al Ghul does after learning of Oliver’s survival from their duel is reprehensible, from murdering innocents every day until Oliver agrees to become his heir, including his sister Thea, indoctrinating him forcibly into the League of Assassins through a ritual that included forcing Oliver to believe he was killing his friend John Diggle, marrying him to Nyssa against both of their wishes, and finally deciding to destroy Starling City with a virus. Despite all of that, Oliver later refers to him as honorable to Talia.
  • General Shrieve of the Season 3 flashbacks is revealed to be behind the poisoning of Hong Kong through the Alpha-Omega virus simply to damage China’s economy and prevent it from calling on United States debt. If he had any hope of redemption, it was lost when it was revealed his actions killed Akio, an 11-year-old boy, and he laughed in Oliver’s face. Oliver and Maseo tortured Shrieve to death for his actions, driving Oliver away from home and Maseo to the League of Assassins.
  • Maseo himself crossed it when he joined the League; he gave Ra's Al-Ghul the Alpha/Omega Virus in order to become a member.
  • Ra's Al-Ghul officially crosses it not when he orders his massacre on Starling but when he personally kills Thea in cold blood as the "proper" motivation for Oliver to become his heir.
  • Damien Darhk doesn’t so much cross over the Line as much as he pole vaults over it and gets gold from the judges he hasn’t murdered yet. In a rare moment, he establishes himself as truly evil before he even appears, as Ra’s tells Oliver that he was behind several of the potentially city-destroying threats Oliver stopped in his second year, including a second earthquake machine created by Malcolm Merlyn. In his first appearance, he drains the life force of one of his soldiers for failing him using dark magic, horrifying Team Arrow as that is mostly their first encounter with true magic. Later on, he attacks a community service project with a drone, nearly killing a little girl, kidnaps William and threatens him with death to get Oliver to drop out of the mayoral race, and murders Laurel Lance using Oliver’s own arrow out of revenge. This is all before he reveals his end game is to literally destroy the world using nuclear weapons. By the time Oliver kills him, he has established himself as one of the most, if not the most, evil villain to appear in the series. His subsequent actions on Legends of Tomorrow do not make him any better.
  • Andrew Diggle is given multiple chances to redeem himself. Instead, he gives Damien Darhk the final piece he needs to recreate the idol controlling his magic, leading to Laurel Lance’s death. He ends up torturing his brother John as well with no regrets. His final mistake was threatening to kill John’s daughter Sara, leading to John killing him.
  • Prometheus appeared to be nothing more than a serial killer at first, but he later revealed himself to be a monster hellbent on revenge against Oliver. The moment that showed how far he was gone? Adrian having his identity revealed to his wife, only to murder her immediately as she tried to talk him down.
  • Talia al Ghul has no direct crossing, but helping create Prometheus and joining his crusade against Oliver, a crusade that Oliver ironically notes her father would not have supported marks her as irredeemable.
  • Cayden James may have been manipulated by Ricardo Diaz into wanting to destroy Star City, but hacking the city and killing random innocents he did of his own accord. Despite that, upon realizing he’d been manipulated and seeing William, being reminded of his own son in the process, he felt remorse for his actions and couldn’t go through with the city’s destruction. As with Sebastian Blood, Oliver seemed to realize this, granting him his request to visit his son’s grave one more time.
  • From the beginning, Ricardo Diaz was an evil force. In addition to being revealed to have manipulated Cayden James into destroying the city before murdering Cayden to take control of his criminal cabal, he also had a large number of cops on his payroll and leaked the photo that originally created the investigation into Oliver and the Green Arrow. To establish his ruthlessness, he confronted his childhood bully, Jesse, after 30 years and burned him alive, an act so disturbing even Black Siren, a brutal killer who once blew up a man’s head without remorse, couldn’t look at it directly.
  • Edward Fyers obliterates the line when he shoots Yao Fei in the head right in front of his daughter after he fulfilled his end of the bargain.
  • Anthony Ivo crosses it when he offers Oliver a Sadistic Choice — spare Sara or Shado. When Oliver attempts a Heroic Sacrifice, he kills Shado out of spite. It's later noted that he didn't even know Shado's name, and it was likely he didn't even care.
  • Conklin either crosses it when he starts killing labourers to force a confession out of the rest or when he manipulates Ivan into attacking Oliver by telling him he killed his sister, which forces the latter to kill him in self-defense.
  • Baron Reiter has a few possible moments, but him destroying a plane full of his slave labourers who were trying to get away simply to spite Oliver and Taiana and further fuel his magical powers is the absolute point of no return.
  • If Lonnie Machin didn't cross it when he tortured the girl he kidnapped even though he had no reason to keep her in his clutches, then he definitely crossed it when he tried to kill Damien Darhk's wife and daughter as revenge for firing him.
  • Cupid was an already unhinged, but somewhat sympathetic villainess when first introduced. In Season 4 however, she rolls hard over the line after deciding that love only leads to death and starts killing innocent couples simply for being happily in love.
  • Evelyn Sharp crosses it when she teams up with Prometheus to take down Oliver as revenge for being the Hood, and betrays the identities of her teammates in the process. If that failed to put her over the line, her actions in "Kapiushon", where she not only helps Prometheus psychologically torture Oliver, but smugly rubs it in when Oliver finally breaks, certainly does.
  • If Prometheus doesn't cross it with his serial killings or later tricking Oliver into killing Billy Malone, then he definitely crosses it when he frees the Black Siren from S.T.A.R. Labs and has her impersonate the Earth-1 Laurel just to screw with Team Arrow even more after he's already brought them to the point of hopelessness from his prior actions, before ripping this one seeming bright spot in their lives away from them. He crosses it even further when he murders his own wife because She Knows Too Much.
  • Anatoly crosses it either when he steals diabetes medicine from a struggling company to produce drugs or later during the direct conflict with Oliver when he orders his civilian hostages to be killed, all tragically highlighted with the fact that he used to be the Morality Chain for Oliver and is now just as bad as Ishmael Gregor before him.
  • Black Siren has many possible moments, on both Arrow and The Flash, like for example her sadistic Dead Person Impersonation game to lure Quentin into Prometheus' trap, but she is definitely over the line by the sixth Season, where she is willing to kill scores of innocent police men just to get to him. However, Dinah views her killing of Vincent as this, which in turn pushes Dinah over the Despair Event Horizon, and Thea and Quentin seem to lose their hope of redeeming Earth-2 Laurel after they hear of it, too. Ironically, this is inverted for Siren herself as it's one of the first murders she seems unnerved by..
  • Once Ricardo Diaz is revealed as the true Big Bad of Season 6, it is also revealed that he already crossed the line a year ago by having Cayden James's son killed and putting the blame on Oliver, manipulating both parties into a war, all so he could murder James himself later and take over the city.

• The Flash (2014)
  • The Reverse-Flash passed this long ago. First, he traveled back in time to kill a young Barry Allen, but failed thanks to interference from the Flash. Instead, he settles on killing Barry's mother then leaves. However, he discovers that he's Trapped in the Past. He knows exactly what happens in history so he kills Wells' wife for no reason, takes the genetic code of the real Dr. Wells, and creates all the events of the series on purpose, with complete disregard for all the lives of others. All so he can get revenge on Barry and steal his speed for himself.
  • Lewis Snart put a bomb in his own daughter's head to make his son work for him.
  • Zoom's first appearance on Earth Two was to fake a call about the hostage situation and kill 14 out of 15 cops that came to rescue them. The last one was spared to tell the tale... and after he did, Zoom murdered him too.
  • In "Running to Stand Still," the Trickster and Weather Wizard pass out hundreds of bombs to children all across the city by disguising the Trickster as Santa Claus. When the Flash discovers this, the two gleefully laugh about how they will blow up multiple families if the Flash doesn't let them beat him to death slowly.
  • Deathstorm's casual admittance that he hasn't let Martin Stein out in years.
  • Zoom's father murdering his wife while making his young son watch.
  • Grodd's attempt to nuke Central City permanently establishes how far beyond sympathy he is. Even Caitlin, who had shown affection for Grodd and was even something of a Morality Pet for him, flat-out says that there's no good left in him.
  • Zoom impaling Barry's father right in front of Barry, just so he can prove to him that the two of them are the same.
  • Although Savitar has doubtless committed multiple atrocities during his travels throughout time, he finally draws the complete ire of Team Flash by killing Iris in the future, driving Barry into an eight-year-long Heroic BSoD and splitting both the team and the West family apart in the process. It gets even worse with the reveal that Savitar is none other than Barry Allen himself via the Flash creating a time remnant in the future to stop Savitar. After his complete ostracization from Team Flash and a who-knows-how-long Mind Rape in the Speed Force, Savitar/Future Flash hates his former self and friends so much that he is willing to kill the love of his life and break his family apart out of pure spite. It really says something that his entire existence is a direct result of crossing the Moral Event Horizon.
  • Clifford DeVoe's possession of an innocent man and incrimination of Barry was heinous, but the line was crossed when he become abusive to his wife and created a loop in which he drugged her with The Weeper's tears to keep her seduced and whenever she discovered the truth, he would wipe her memories. Basically he put the one person he loved in a fate worse than death. His irredeemable status is made more apparent when Barry and Ralph find out that DeVoe's good side is literally dead.
  • Any pretense that Future Grace Gibbons can be redeemed goes out the window when she stabs her uncle Orlin In the Back, killing him. This is what establishes her as a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist.
  • As the episode title suggests, "There Will Be Blood" really marks the point where the Mad Scientist Ramsey Rosso truly becomes the supervillain Bloodwork, when he murders several people at a hospital, turns them into zombie drones, and then absorbs their dark matter infused bodies into himself in a mad attempt to stave off his cancer forever and effectively achieve immortality.
  • While Eva McCulloch was shown to be a Sympathetic Murderer when she kills her husband, she becomes less sympathetic when she frames Sue for said murder.
• Supergirl:
  • General Lane earns another medal by having Kryptonite injections on hand to torture Astra with. Did he come up with them just for her, or did he have a different target in mind when they were first developed?
  • Maxwell Lord truly cements what a bastard he is in "Bizarro" when it's revealed that he kidnapped not one, but seven girls in an attempt to make a Supergirl clone, inflicting Death of Personality on the seventh and actual death on the first six. To be fair, all of them were brain-dead with zero chance of recovery, but the nonchalance with which he experiments on and disposes of them sends the clear message he is NOT a good person.
  • If Non didn't cross it for you by using Myriad to brainwash all of National City to do his bidding, even commit suicide should he order it, he probably did when he sent a brainwashed Alex in a Kryptonite-powered suit after Kara, fully intending that either or both of them should die in petty revenge for Astra's death.
  • Indigo clearly crossed it a while ago, having tried to exterminate all life on Krypton, but in the present day, not only does she try to pull the same crime on Earth twice, she urges Non to use Myriad to conquer whole other worlds, and even gives him the aforementioned idea to send Alex to kill Kara.
  • The version of Kara that emerges when she is infected with Red Kryptonite crosses it when she goes after and tries to kill Alex.
  • CADMUS (particularly Lillian Luthor and Hank Henshaw) in season 2 has a number of potential crossing points, but they sink to their absolute lowest when they intend to unleash a virus over National City that will exterminate all alien life, with their ultimate goal being the entire world.
  • Roulette was pretty bad in her first appearance, exploiting aliens in an underground fight club. She flew over the horizon in her next appearance, cooperating with alien slavers to abduct and sell humans. She shows zero empathy for her role in this, outright bragging about the diamonds she's being paid with and how she's taken human trafficking to a new level.
  • If Mon-El's mother and Queen of Daxam Rhea trying to kill Kara to force her son to return to Daxam with them first through bounty hunters and then personally wasn't it, then she DEFINITELY crosses it when she murders Lar Gand, her husband and King of Daxam over the fact that he let Mon-El go back to Earth and then swears vengeance on the Earth. She tells Mon-El that he died of heartbreak. Later in the series, she zooms even further past the event horizon when she forces a marriage on Mon-El and Lena by targeting one of Lena's charity hospitals and threatening to destroy it.
  • Morgan Edge crossed it when he poisoned dozens of children across the city just to frame and get back at Lena for buying CatCo.
  • Winn's father Winslow Schott Sr. AKA Toyman crossed it before the series even started. When Winn was a child Toyman responded when Winn's mother Mary tried to leave him and take Winn with her by running her off the road, giving Winn a concussion and then threatening to kill Winn if she ever went anywhere near Winn afterward. The fact that he later coaches his apprentice into following through with the threat even after his death makes it clear it wasn't something said in the heat of the moment. Mary also implies that Toyman had been abusive to her even before he went insane.
  • Ben Lockwood has several potential moments:
    • When he bludgeoned an innocent alien factory worker to death.
    • When he kills Fiona just for being an alien.
    • His plan to sic mind-controlled aliens on children to provoke public xenophobia. Making this even more disgusting, Agent Liberty is a father himself; he knows what it's like to fear for your child's life, and he's actively trying to spread that feeling around to suit his own agenda.
  • Manchester Black abandons the last of his morals when he plans on destroying the National City dam, flooding the city and killing thousands of people, all just to prove a point to J'onn.
  • If Lex Luthor didn't cross it when he turned the Sun red in an attempt to kill Superman (putting who knows how peoples lives at risk), he defiantly crossed it when poisoned the judge, jury, and prosecutor at his trial for turning the Sun red.
  • Lena during her villainous stage in Season 5, had Hope violate Eves body and overwrite her mind. It was never explained what happened to Eves personality. She also was prepared to reveal Kara's identity to the world without any concern for Kara's family and friends becoming targets for Supergirl's enemies.
• Legends of Tomorrow:
  • If the "Legends of" two-parter didn't tell you enough how bad Savage is, him murdering Rip Hunter's wife and son during his global conquest in the very first scene surely does. He only gets worse in the third episode when the Savage of the past hears of this and gloats about how he looks forward to doing it.
  • Chronos killing two innocent civilians simply because they were witnessing Rip Hunter's ship take off. The team, however, doesn't know about this, and after The Reveal, start trying to reform him.
  • Mikhail sadistically torturing Mick and Ray with glee.
  • The Time Masters cross it when they condition Mick into becoming Chronos to hunt down the Legends. And when he fails, they deploy the robotic Hunters to finish the job. When they fail, they decide to Ret-Gone the team.
  • If you haven't watched Arrow or The Flash then you might not realize how horrible Eobard Thawne and Damien Darhk are, but the show is more than happy to remind viewers of how awful they are in the season premiere more where they try to blow up New York City with a nuke.
  • Bishop commits a number of despicable actions throughout the season, but in the season's penultimate episode we see a new low to his depravity, when he poisons John Constantine, sets a bomb to destroy the half-Necrian eggs of Kayla and Mick which possibly kills the latter, and reveals that his ultimate intention is to encourage an alien invasion of Earth to hasten its destruction, so that he alone can restart it.
• Black Lightning:
  • Tobias Whale has several possible moments throughout the series; the first notable one occurred before the start of the series, namely him murdering Jefferson's dad by literally shoving his newspaper articles down his throat until he chokes. But him brutally ripping Khalil's spinal implant out of his back and leaving him to a slow and agonizing death is by far his worst moment and seals the deal of him being an utter psychopath.
  • Agent Odell has many possible moments throughout season 2 and the beginning of season 3, but his most despicable action is without a doubt implanting a brain chip into the newly resurrected Khalil and making him kill his own mother to test out its effectiveness, which he ultimately does. Even Odell's right-hand man Carson Williams objects to this; while he claims it's on pragmatic grounds, it's implied he actually finds it going way too far. And if that didn't do the trick then basically turning Jennifer into a Child Soldier by feeding her misinformation and getting Lynn addicted to Green Light to ensure her productivity surely does.
• Batwoman:
  • Alice makes an elaborate plan to kill her stepmother in front of her stepsister, while framing her father for the crime, all because she's too deep into her obsession with revenge for abandoning her. Also counts as an In-Universe example, since this makes Kate and Jacob to finally give up on her, vowing to take her down.
  • In the Batwoman segment of Crisis on Infinite Earths (2019), we meet a version of Bruce Wayne who abandoned his moral code and started killing his Rogues Gallery. At first, Kate persistently tries to convince him to redeem himself for the good of the multiverse... and then an angry, suited-up Kara storms into the Batcave with broken glasses and a bombshell that causes a horrified Kate to give up. Turns out, the reason this Bruce is forced to walk with an exoskeleton is because he's also a racist lunatic who was too afraid of Superman's power to recognize Superman for the good person he was, prompting him to murder the Man of Steel out of paranoia, justifying this by claiming he gave governments too much power.
  • Black Mask crossed the line when he has Kate's plane shot down, kidnaps her, uses a hypnotist to brainwash her into believing she's his long-deceased daughter, and decides to burn Gotham to the ground so he can "save" it.