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Season 1
- The show's first official episode, "Blink", involved a real condition known as "Locked-in Syndrome", where a person is fully conscious but unable to move a single muscle except for maybe an eyelid or certain facial muscles (communication can be facilitated with computer equipment). The French name for this translates literally to "walled in alive." Oh, and if this happens to you, there is no cure (although a few patients have partially or fully recovered on their own). Think on that a while and try sleeping soundly tonight. Bonus points for it being in the first episode, too.
- The opening of "Outside Man" where a victim is shown trying to breathe with a clear bag over his face before being shot point-blank in the temple.
- The guy in "Officer Blue" who got his head slammed in the door of a burning hot oven.
- In "Tanglewood", the gang members used a workshop-type sander to sand off the wannabe's fake tattoo before offing him. Yikes.
Season 2
- "Charge of This Post": Detective Flack's injuries and all those close-ups of blood spurting out of arteries and Mac using another man's shoestring to tie one off.
Season 3
- "Hung Out to Dry" showed a dead man hammered to a tree. Through his empty eye sockets. With railroad nails. But that's not all. Mac then finds the missing eyeballs in the man's bloody front pocket, and we get a lovely close-up of them...and one is somewhat deflated!
- "Sleight Out of Hand" involved a magician murdering his victims in ways based on his three new, high-profile tricks. The start of the episode shows him sticking his ex-assistant in a box and sawing her in half for real, using your run-of-the-mill hand saw. Not only do they give you a lovely shot of the bloody stump where half her body used to be, but they make it explicitly plain that she was still alive as he sawed her in half.
- "Past Imperfect" had a guy who cut off his victim's eyelids before killing her.
Season 4
Season 5
"Yahrzeit": The flashback where teenage Klaus Braun delivers the Schnitzler family to Auschwitz, where they are immediately executed with bullets to the head, including the children.
Season 6
- The inventor's "House of Death" in the episode "Death House" is pretty damn creepy. Spikes that swing from the ceiling to impale you, a room that can either roast you to death or smush you, and the list goes on. All concealed in what appears to be an ordinary penthouse.
Season 7
Season 8
- In "Clean Sweep", one of the victims was embalmed in a particularly crude way: one needle vacuuming out the blood, one needle replacing it with household cleaner. The victim was jabbed both times in the neck. He was also still alive.
Season 9
- The woman who was locked in the elevator and basically cooked to death in "Where There's Smoke".
- Then there's "Blood Out" where a live guy got cut in two with a chainsaw.
- In-universe example—getting that tongue in the mail in "Seth and Apep" was definite nightmare fuel for Mac, who retreats to his office and can't keep from imagining what might have happened to Christine, and though he's still unsettled when she calls him, at least he knows she's still alive and intact.
