Required Secondary Powers / Live-Action TV

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• 7 Days (1998) acknowledges the positioning problem of Time Travel by requiring Parker to "fly the needles" when using the Sphere. He still usually winds up several (hundred) miles from the mountain base. One of his predecessors didn't do that well.
  • A lot of time, he even ends up back in the hangar.
  • Strangely, the scenes of time travel usually show him appearing in orbit and then falling to the surface, which would indicate that he appears "in front of" Earth, as the planet wasn't at the same location 7 days before. However, he seems to be too close for that.
  • Another required secondary power for time travel is extreme resistance to pain. Parker has it. His back-up Craig Donovan has never actually performed a Backstep, and the one time he tries, he can't handle the pain, so they abort.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
  • The episode "Girl in the Flower Dress" features Chan Ho Yin, a pyrokinetic whose Required Secondary Powers (not being burned whenever he used his powers) are a major plot point. The "Centipede" organization harvests his heat-resistant platelets to stabilize the Extremis component of their Super Serum. (For more about Extremis, see the Live-Action Films sub-page.) The results for Chan are not pleasant.
  • Skye/Daisy is not immune to her own vibration powers. Without suppressive gauntlets, overusing her powers results in thousands of microfractures, causing massive, massive pain and horrific bruising.
• Alphas is built on this trope, or more precisely showing what happens when you don't have them. The title characters are shown as a drastic mutation in the human genome, but their bodies and minds have to adjust dramatically to accommodate their powers. You can read electromagnetic signals? Great, but that means you brain is now mostly a data processor, eating up the neurons used for emotional neural paths, making you severely autistic. One girl has enhanced senses. She's a neat freak because she can see bacteria, Can't Have Sex, Ever because it would overload her sense of touch/taste, and when she supercharges one of them, all other senses shut down because her brain can't handle the information. Bill can trigger his Flight-or-Fight response to become super strong, but has a Hair-Trigger Temper and using his powers is bad for his heart. Cornell Scipio has a Playing with Fire-esque power, but only his hands are fireproof. The rest of his body can be burned, same as anyone else. Stanton Parrish is immortal, but he suffers The Fog of Ages effect because his brain isn't built to hold 200+ years worth of memories at one time. He counters this by using an Alpha who can store and retrieve the memories of others at will. Said Alpha also suffers from a lack of Required Secondary Powers: He has no way to distinguish between the memories he has in storage and his actual memories, making him something of a Cloudcuckoolander.
• Briefly played for laughs in The Aquabats! Super Show! when Eaglebones is gifted with the power to summon and command The Dude, a magic bird that is Invisible to Normals. This gift does not contain the power to actually see The Dude, so Eaglebones is briefly left to marvel at absolutely nothing before he points it out and is given the power of True Sight, which he refers to later in the series as "Eagle Vision."
• Both Being Human (UK) and Being Human (US) feature werewolves who transform from human to wolf at the full moon. While conservation of mass seems to be ignored, the werewolves do not get the benefit of pain resistance in transformation, as it has been pointed out multiple times that the transformation involves each of the body's organs failing as it transitions from man to beast. A 39-year-old werewolf in the remake seems to be well into his sixties on account of having a heart attack once a month since he was 14. The only thing saving the werewolves is the secondary healing factor, dependent on the natural transformation; should a werewolf somehow start the transformation outside of the full moon, he will not survive the organ failure, which George discovers in the UK version.
• The Boys (2019): Unlike Superman, Homelander needs leverage and support in order to be able to lift something big, even though he has Super-Strength. So when the plane he and Queen Maeve were trying to save is crashing, he tells Maeve that he can't push off from thin air, so that option is out.
  • Much like Pyro from the Marvel Universe, Lamplighter requires an external source of fire such as his staff or a lighter in order to use his pyrokinetic powers.
  • Starlight is only able to use her Light 'em Up powers when she can absorb electricity from an external source, causing Butcher to remark that she has a "shite superpower". When she is imprisoned in the Vought Tower, she is placed in a cell with no lights or electricity to prevent her from using her powers.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy has super strength and resilience, as do the vamps of her universe, but lack super anchoring. This results in them being thrown around a lot in fights without sustaining any significant injuries.
  • The Healing Factor is also much slower than in most other works. Slayers and vampires heal at a rate faster than a human, but slow enough so as not to violate the laws of physics.
  • In the episode Earshot Buffy kills a telepathic demon and accidentally gains the ability to hear other people's thoughts. Unfortunately, the transfer of power did not include the ability to process all of the information it provides, nor the ability to "tune out" the input. The lack of such Required Secondary Powers caused Buffy to collapse when she overheard the thoughts of a cafeteria full of students and it nearly drove her insane.
  • Also frequently used In-Universe against Monsters Of The Week with Resurrective Immortality: if nothing can kill them, just cut them up and bury the pieces separately.
    • A variant occurred when a 14th century Monster of the Week said "no weapon forged" can stop him. Buffy realises that said villain was from a time before mankind started forging rocket launchers. After the blast, this villain is also disposed of by keeping the pieces seperate after the blast.
  • Used to humorous effect in one episode where a demon casts a spell on the cast, locking them inside of a house. When the demon goes to leave after giving them all a blistering "The Reason You Suck" Speech, the demon finds out that the spell also prevents her from leaving, and must rescind the spell in order to depart.
• In something of an aversion of the pyrokinetic version, Charmed has offered any number of witches, demons and warlocks who are completely vulnerable to their own fire-based powers, most notably Christy, who is burned to death by her own flame-throwing ability when she tries to use it against her telekinetic sister Billie.
  • Early in Season 6, Phoebe gains the power to sense others' emotions, but can't turn it off. This causes her to uncontrollably act out other people's negative emotions which even leads to locking herself in the basement. It also becomes a nuisance to those around her who don't want their privacy invaded.
  • This problem with empathy was shown earlier. An empath specifically passed his power on to a demon without passing on the ability to filter the stimulus, which turns the demon into an emotional wreck unable to function. Prue suffers from the same problem when she cures the demon (she didn't know he was a demon at the time). Empathy is supposed to come with the secondary ability to filter it. The Elders just unlocked Phoebe's primary ability early because they needed her to deal with an emotional problem, and she was left to work on honing the secondary ability herself.
• In The Comic Book Greats, Stan Lee spent some 20 minutes with Rob Liefeld and Todd McFarlane creating a character named "Overkill". Stan, after so many questions about who the character really was, noted late into the process, after the other two had gleefully incorporated the comic-book excesses of the '90s Anti-Hero:
  There's no way this man can move. He's gotta have a power to defy gravity, I would say, just looking at him...
• Doctor Who:
  • The Time Lords must have spent millennia perfecting all the biological processes necessary with the act of a body undergoing DNA rewriting at the most basic cellular-level across every organ from bone to hair. And it happens in roughly a minute, and doesn't kill the person undergoing it.
    • The energy is referred to multiple times by the Doctor as ''healing energy'', rebuilding and restoring damaged cells as much as slightly rewriting their DNA to modify appearance and personality. They don't just call it regeneration because it sounds cool.
    • Time Lords have been seen to change not only height and hair colour, but race and even sex (sometimes all of the above at once!), a process some Time Lords seem to have more control over than others.
      "Still not ginger!"
    • Decades before, it was shown that Romana could potentially have regenerated into a tiny blue alien.
    • As a general rule, a person or object meeting itself at multiple points in its own timeline creates a Temporal Paradox, the result of which varies from an energy discharge to monsters pouring through a tear in spacetime. However, these effects seem to be minimized in the case of a Time Lord meeting another of their regenerations, except for the earlier version losing their memory of the encounter^note (Usually). Regeneration may then be a RSP for time travel itself.
  • In "The End of Time", the Master lacks a Required Secondary Power — creating the energy he uses when he gains the power to shoot energy bolts.
    The Master: I am so hungry!
  • While Jack Harkness has a healing power, he doesn't have resistance to pain.
    • Several other secondary powers (both mentioned above and not) are explained by the fact that his healing isn't so much restoring damaged tissue as it is reverting it. He is a "fixed point in time"; however, if this is explained as something like hitting the refresh button every so often, then how is he able to retain his memory?
    • Captain Jack remembers dying, so the fixed point aspect probably only retains physical attributes. His memory is unaffected.
    • His immortality could also be explained by the Bad Wolf Entity's power having restored him to life after his first death, but with the Entity's imperfect understanding of space time it restored him to life every time he died simultaneously.
      The Doctor: It's Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey.
    • Also, the mobile game Torchwood: Web of Lies has an assassin hired by the Families put Jack through an MRI scan, which causes him enormous pain, since it turns out that every bullet or piece of shrapnel to ever pierce his body is still there. His body simply restored around the foreign objects without, apparently, causing him any discomfort. However, the MRI magnet then starts to pull all those metal pieces out.
  • Ashildr was granted immortality by the Doctor, however, she still possesses a human brain that cannot retain her memories of her adventures spanning centuries. As a result, she refers to herself as "Me" (having long forgotten her true name) and keeps her history documented in journals.
  • The Eleventh Doctor makes mention of "perception filters" several different times over the course of his tenure, this being a sort of psychic invisibility that prevents you from noticing what is generating it. The Silence also have this in their ability to make you forget them as soon as you're not looking at them, which is the show's explanation for déjà vu. You walked into the room and saw the Silence, but when you stopped looking, you forgot what you even came into the room for. This posits that the Silence erase even the immediate short-term memory surrounding their presence in their target's mind and not just the subject's memory of them.
  • The Doctor references offhandedly in "Flatline" that the TARDIS also alters gravity to be more or less as light as its exterior is, otherwise it would crack the surface of the planet it lands on, which makes sense since the TARDIS is shown at times to be huge (her engine is a star, to begin with).
• One episode of Eureka dealt with a serum giving the user Super-Speed, but like Darker than Black, the Required Secondary Power of withstanding friction only applied to air. The results were quite gruesome. They also had Hyperactive Metabolism, which helps Carter figure out who the users were.
  • The serum also, apparently, turned them stupid, as one of the scientists didn't think to look both ways when crossing the street at Super-Speed, resulting in him slamming into a car.
• The lack of said required abilities — specifically, the ability to filter input from Super-Senses — is a crippling problem for Firefly's River Tam. Since she cannot filter incoming stimuli due to her empathic abilities, being in contact with the minds of other people is debilitating, and when others suffer sudden physical trauma it can render her catatonic.
  • It's strongly implied that part of what the Alliance did to River was to remove her required secondary powers. Examining her brain in a high-tech medical scanner, her brother discovers that "they stripped her amygdala", the part of the brain that allows overriding thoughts and emotions. "She's feels everything, she can't not." The point of the experiment seems to be increasing a psychic's power at the expense of their control over it.
• Touched on in the premiere episode of The Flash; the first time Barry accidentally uses his super-speed, the friction from the air reduces his clothes to rags. His eventual costume is made from a high-tech combat suit.
  • A later episode has a scientist attempt to duplicate the Flash's ability, but his attempts result in the test subjects literally burning up from the friction. Not only that, but it's obvious that they lack the ability to slow down, something Barry had to learn to do. The scientist manages to grow a clone of Barry's named Pollux, who appears to master Barry's abilities without any problems.
  • In the 2014 version, Barry's clothes also occasionally catch on fire, but only when the writers remember that they should. He also needs to eat a lot to keep up with his hyperaccelerated metabolism (he is shown to eat 4 pizzas or a few dozen burgers without a problem). Cisco made him a special heat- and abrasion-resistant suit that originally also had a breather mask which protected Barry's eyes and face from wind and dust, as well as allowed him to breathe (have you ever had trouble breathing in strong wind?). He promptly ditches the mask after using it once and doesn't wear it again, those things, apparently, not being a problem. He also Never Gets Drunk. The closest he gets is when Caitlin makes him a shot of super-strong alcohol, which lasts about 5 seconds.
  • Barry and all Speedsters must also be granted super stamina, as they often run hundreds of miles in a few seconds. Speeding up shouldn't affect the distance they can run on its own.
  • Also Barry's "Flash Time" power that allows him to perceive the world in slow motion is in itself a RSP. What's actually happening is the Speed Force amping up his brain's processing speed allowing him to still see where he's going when he starts moving faster than a normal person would be able to perceive and react to obstacles. Without it, Barry would never be able to run as fast as he does without plowing into everything at speeds that could literally turn him (or others) into paste.
• H₂O: Just Add Water and Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure: Across the series are affirmations that turning into a mermaid includes changes less visible than your legs becoming a fish tail. These changes only apply to mermaid form, however.
  • Merfolk have a massive lung capacity, being able to hold their breath for much longer than any human. Rikki and Emma tested fifteen minutes underwater in their first week of being mermaids. Zac's attempt to do the same led to him getting bored of counting after an hour.
  • Their eyes can adapt to seeing underwater as clearly as they see through air, which Ms. Chatham points out while hinting to Cleo that she knows more than she's letting on.
  • Being able to swim at super speed also means merfolk are stronger than they appear to be, as Emma was able to flip Lewis over her head with one arm.
  • Super speed swimming can only be done in short bursts. While every merperson has demonstrated the ability to swim faster than a marlin, an extended chase will wear them out as easily as it would a human running on land. Joe was able to chase Nixie on a motorboat that could only go up to 60 kilometers per hour (37.5 mph for those using the imperial system), with her speed visibly dropping until she couldn't keep it up.
  • One aversion is water pressure, as merfolk are evidently epipelagic as a species. While Rikki was noted to dive to depths past any human free diver, other characters advocate for dropping dangerous artifacts into the oceanic abyss where no merperson could survive long enough to retrieve them.
• Heroes has many examples of powers with and without Required Secondary Powers, some explicit and others implied.
  • Dale Smither (the mechanic with super-hearing) had to listen to music constantly to block out distracting faraway sounds, and when Sylar stole her ability, he found the suddenly-loud sounds agonizing.
    • Likewise Matt and Peter both struggle with their mind reading powers and how to shut them off so they can't hear people all the time.
    • Peter for much of the first season struggles with juggling all his powers full stop.
  • And in Series 2, Peter Petrelli's ability to heal caused his new tattoo to be rather less than permanent. The writers have yet to explain how Claire can have a tan and pierced ears, though. (Maybe the tan's fake.)
    • Tanning is the result of two biochemical processes, one involving cell damage and one not. She could easily use one without the other and still get a mild tan.
    • And healing wounds as piercings is how the body reacts to having something stuck through it and not removed (just as long as it's kept clean and doesn't get infected first, and as long as the person isn't allergic to the type of metal used, which is known to happen). It also helps (maybe?) that she was pierced before she got her power.
  • More on Claire: in the episode where everybody lost their powers, Claire gets easily infected in addition to a gunshot wound. Since her regeneration had amped up her immune system so much and killed every infection, her body is incredibly weak due to its sudden absence.
    • This is actually mentioned in The Office (US), where Dwight claims he has never been sick. Jim replies that he shouldn't have any immunities then.
  • Another thing on Claire: her healing doesn't work if there's something in the way. She can re-grow a toe, and possibly as much as a hand, but she would have to reset a broken bone or pull a knife out of a wound. Bullets either get pushed out, or they somehow wind up in the healer's mouth to be spat out (which makes no sense, since the bullet went nowhere near her mouth, but whatever).
    • She can heal from death, but only after the stick pulverizing her brain was pulled out.
    • The pain tolerance secondary power was played with. For the first two seasons, Claire was shown to have an extremely high pain tolerance, albeit not immune. This abruptly changed in the first episode of Volume Three. When Sylar cut open her skull and took her powers, she lost her own ability to feel pain. At all.
  • Hiro has been shown to slow time to a crawl when his powers are going wacky, so it's implied he never actually stops time, just slows it down to the point where objects and such are effectively frozen, but extremely fast things, such as photons, aren't. Their wavelength should still change, however.
    • Supported in Season 3 when Hiro gets a rival who has Super-Speed. He can slow time down to a "stop", but she's so fast that it merely brings her down to normal speed. She even says to him "You must not stop time completely, or we wouldn't be talking right now."
  • Peter and Hiro, who both have time-travel powers, seem to be immune to the effects of Temporal Paradox, their memories remaining exactly the same regardless of how they alter the past.
  • Hiro avoids the "flung off the planet" side effect because his powers explicitly affect spacetime, not just time. It also makes for handy teleportation — into the ladies' room, but hey.
  • DL seems to affect the objects he phases through, rather than affecting himself, given the wavy effect of any object he goes through. His intangibility is also selective, apparently instinctively; he can reach through a door, then reach back with the same hand and unlock it from inside.
  • Meredith the fire starter is not only unable to be burned, but also doesn't seem to need to breathe oxygen either (which makes sense, seeing as how fire eats up oxygen and would suffocate you if you needed it).
    • This is shown in the episode where she is training Claire by locking themselves in a small room with no ventilation and lighting a fire. Meredith is fine, but Claire starts suffocating.
  • Likewise, Ted Sprague is unaffected by the radiation and explosions he generates. The series creators even refer to this trope as the "Rule of Ted".
  • Daphne the super-speeder is explicitly able to extend her protection from her power to anyone she's touching (and doesn't leave a trail of ripped-up pavement wherever she goes).
  • Elle Bishop's electricity-based powers cause her pain, but apparently no physical damage.
  • Lampshaded by Doyle in the online comics. When Doyle uses his people-puppet-power to force a Company agent to shoot himself in the head with a finger laser, he muses "So tell me, are you one of these guys immune to your own power? Hmmm... Guess not."
  • Perhaps the oddest use of this trope is with Isaac Mendes — his artistic ability appears to be a secondary part of his prophetic painting powers. When other people copy his powers, they are shown to be able to paint pictures just as well (though in different styles). This is partly explained when Peter copies his powers and appears to be simply tracing visions that appear over the canvas.
• Averted in the Highlander television series. Immortals, while not invulnerable, have an extremely fast healing factor provided that their heads remain attached to their bodies. However, they still need to breathe and eat as mortals do and can temporarily die of starvation, dehydration, suffocation or enough bodily damage from ordinary weapons. There is one episode centered around an immortal seeking revenge against Duncan Macleod for marooning him on an island without food or water. The vengeful immortal asks Duncan if he has ever had to endure constant recurring death, resurrection, then death again from starvation and dehydration. This cycle was implied to have continued for two centuries before the other immortal escaped the island.
  • Possibly even worse than this is the way immortals first have their immortality activated — at the moment of their first death. This means if an immortal dies before puberty, they will resurrect and remain at that age, being small and helpless and often easy prey for another immortal to take their head. Likewise if an immortal suffers their first death at a very old age, they will remain permanently old and infirm until death by beheading. As an immortal, you had better hope another immortal discovers you who is kind enough to kill you while you are a healthy adult so you can enjoy immortality until your head is eventually taken by an evil immortal who will usually have his head taken by Duncan later on.
    • An early episode of the series explains that people who will become immortal are naturally drawn into dangerous situations and professions, making it extremely unlikely they will grow old before dying for the first time. They may even be driven to suicide if they reach sufficient age of maturity without dying. This is explained as a sort of secondary power that should ensure that immortals will be in their prime of life when their immortality activates.
• The Invisible Man:
  • The "Quicksilver" coating warps/blocks out all visible light but converts ultraviolet passing through it into wavelengths that Darien can see. When invisible, Darien can still see, just in black and white. Not only that, but he can also see other invisible people and vice-versa. Occasionally, he only covers his eyes in the Quicksilver rather than going entirely invisible for the effect (also saving money on effects). He's also cold due to much of the heat passing around him.^note Somehow, however, he's able to freeze a bomb in the second episode but doesn't turn into a Human Popsicle every time he goes invisible, or alternatively suffer a heat stroke due to not being able to radiate his own body heat plus absorbing ambient heat. In one episode, Darien is also able to see a ghost (actually the disembodied entity of a woman killed with a particle accelerator). In another, what would have been a permanently blinding attack is reduced to a temporary inconvenience because his eyes are coated in quicksilver at the time (and he's still able to see as usual if he quicksilvers them up again while they heal).
  • He also Can't Have Sex, Ever, at least with anyone who doesn't know about his powers. This is because his quicksilver gland is directly tied to his adrenal gland, which means that, every time he gets aroused, he loses control over his powers. He taught himself yoga to gain a better control over the gland, but the problems still crop up when sex is involved. Not to mention the fact that he might pump his sexual partner full of quicksilver, which can cause the person to temporarily go into a "walking id" mode.
  • He can Quicksilver his clothes and other objects he carries or touches (they may be rather big, like a dumpster, bike, or a person). He's rather inventive with this ability (invisible Grenade Tag anyone?).
• Kamen Rider usually brings all the required secondary powers together with the super-suit, but there's some exceptions:
  • Most of the Showa Riders don't just wear a suit: in order to be able to withstand their own superpowers, almost all of their bodies are replaced by cybernetics.
  • Kamen Rider Kuuga uses an artifact melded with his stomach that does much the same as the Showa Riders, making internal enhancements to his body so that he can safely wear the suit that it manifests. These enhancements are sufficiently thorough that the artifact can even raise him from the dead with the aid of an electric shock.
  • Kamen Rider Agito secondary Rider Kamen Rider Gills is an imperfect version of Agito who has the ability to grow biological armor, but not the ability to properly control when it stops growing, essentially meaning he gives himself cancer every time he uses his powers. He dies from this twice before his second resurrection finally comes with the needed secondary powers.
  • Kamen Rider Build has a standardized secondary power in the form of a person's Hazard Level, their body's ability to withstand the toxic cosmic gas that fuels all of the other superpowers in the show. Someone with a Hazard Level of 0 that gets transformed with the gas is dead on the operating table, while a high Hazard Level also comes with the super toughness needed to safely wear more powerful suits.
  • Kamen Rider Zi-O has the power to create new future timelines from his dreams, but not the power to control what he dreams about. When he becomes afraid of his potential to become an Evil Overlord, he spawns a whole future timeline with its own set of time travelers specifically geared around creating someone who can kill him.
  • Kamen Rider Zero-One briefly uses a suit in The Movie which comes with a Healing Factor as its only measure of protection for the operator: that is to say, throwing a punch with super strength does exactly what you'd expect it to do with no super toughness attached and breaks his arm, after which the suit puts it back together. He spends most of the fight screaming in agony.
  • Kamen Rider Revice uses Drivers which all draw on the user's inner demon in some fashion. Most people who use one of the Drivers suffer consequences such as greatly reduced lifespans as a result. The only people who can avoid this are the main characters, all of whom are the biological children of a powerful demon lord. It's not until late in the series that better Drivers are developed which can be used safely by most people, at the cost of being much weaker than the ones the Igarashi siblings use.
• No Ordinary Family includes a few examples of imperfect powers. In one episode, Jim tries to stop a moving car, but his super strength and invulnerability are not enough to overcome a car's momentum. This results in him getting run over repeatedly. Stephanie is depicted as consuming huge amounts of food to fuel her super-speed. She also trips and tumbles for hundreds of meters when she tries reading a text message while super-running. There's also a bit of lampshading going on, with Stephanie's assistant spouting the number of laws of physics that are being broken (Why doesn't the friction burn off her clothes? Shouldn't the sand destroy her corneas at that speed? How is she compensating for the wind shear?).
• Painkiller Jane averts the Healing Factor version (and is also a Non-Indicative Name): Jane can heal herself, but has no super tolerance for pain and has to endure every minute of the pain associated with the injury she receives. However, she does become more resistant to pain and is able to avoid showing the pain, which she does when she's trying to convince a Neuro that he is being Hoist by His Own Petard (she shoots her hand and shows it to him as the damage is repaired without any reaction on her face).
• RoboCop: The Series shows Robo stopping cars several times, thanks to a gadget in his legs that allows him to anchor himself to the ground.
• The problem with Super-Senses causing a person's brain to occasionally overload and filter out all other sensory input is also present in the 90s show The Sentinel, although Jim doesn't appear to have the other problems she has. This is one of the purposes of Blair Sandburg, who keeps Jim from doing things like walking out onto a busy street while looking at a flying frisbee. Another episode has Jim undergo a physical, resulting in the doctor cleaning out the huge wax build-up in his ears. Because of that, Jim can't concentrate at work, since he hears every tiny sound like it's a jackhammer next to his ear. Blair solves the problem by giving him white noise earbuds. His super-vision also gives Jim Improbable Aiming Skills with a standard-issue police 9mm. An episode where Jim is wounded also indicates what happens when a person with super-senses is experiencing pain, although Blair helps him learn to turn the pain down by imagining it like a dial. Jim also gets sick from over-the-counter drugs, forcing him to rely on Blair's homeopathic alternatives, which actually do work.
• Both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman would rip their bionic arms right off when trying to lift a big enough weight, unless their entire skeletal structure were augmented to support the stress of heavy lifting, not to mention their running speeds. Acknowledged and gently handwaved away in the 1987 TV movie The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman, where Rudy Wells mentions adding such augmentation "just as we did for you and Jaime" to Steve's now-bionic son. Also averted in the 2007 Bionic Woman; her bionics are grown by nanotechnology, which does a certain amount of general augmentation of her body to support them.
• Possible subversion in Smallville: in a cliffhanger where Clark loses his powers near the end, a doctor must save his life by injecting him with a substance via syringe. Clark's parents (unaware that he has lost his powers) are terrified that the doctor will discover their son's secret, as they expect him to be invulnerable to needles in much the same way that he is invulnerable to bullets. However, the needle goes in fine, because of the loss of his powers.
  • The Monster of the Week is occasionally done in by their own powers. For example: a guy who was Playing with Fire died when he tried to blast Clark, but the flames spread and burned him to death.
• Stargate-verse:
  • In an episode of Stargate Atlantis, McKay finds an ancient alien device which creates a forcefield around him, giving him invulnerability. Unfortunately, the forcefield also "protects" him from food and drink. And it won't come off... (for some reason it still allows him to breathe, though.)
    • And the others can hear him just fine.
    • The shield generator won't come off because, like many Ancient devices, it is telepathic in nature. Since Rodney isn't exactly the master of his own thoughts, his constant fear results in the device permanently activated, until Weir intentionally suggests he be used as bait for an energy-draining creature due to the shield, causing the device to shut off.
    • A later episode brought up another issue when a character was working with the Genii in a Monster Protection Racket tries to stand up to them using the shield... only for them to waterboard him in a barrel of water, with their leader to wonder what would happen if they buried him alive...
  • The DHD provides many of the secondary systems that make gate travel possible (or at least more convenient) in addition to its primary purpose of allowing the user to select the destination. When the Stargate program was initiated on Earth, they didn't have a DHD, so the Air Force had to kit-bash three supercomputers to fill in for it. The lack of required secondary systems (which included many failsafes) caused complications during a few episodes.
    • In one episode of Stargate SG-1, the lack of a DHD turned out to be a benefit. One function of the DHDs was to update the physical locations of various Stargates, so the gates would be able to find each other. Ba'al used this update system to spread a virus that disabled all DHDs by scrambling the addresses. The only unaffected gate was Earth's, as the aforementioned computers calculated the star's position from astronomy data not available to regular DHDs. For that episode, Earth alone could dial other planets, although it would be a one-way trip.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation contains many examples of required secondary powers, some explained and some not. Many show up in the later spinoffs as well, since they take place during the same technological period.
  • Many of the gadgets exist only because they are required secondary powers for the show's cooler technology, like warp drive. Among them:
    • The Inertial Dampener counteracts the effects of ship acceleration which, depending on the speeds involved, would otherwise reduce the crew to either a fine paste or a cloud of plasma. They have a brief lag time in response to unexpected impacts, to justify the industry standard Screen Shake from weapons, etc.
    • The deflector array, a lower-energy form of the defensive shields, protects against particulate matter and even stray hydrogen atoms, which would rip an unprotected ship to shreds at warp speeds.
    • The structural integrity field reinforces the strength of a ship's hull, since the larger ships in the show (most notably the Enterprise) are too large to hold their shape on their own under the stresses they endure. (Star Trek has its own forms of super strong materials which also help, but the integrity field gives more wiggle room when required by the plot.)
    • The Heisenberg compensators are a bare-faced Hand Wave to explain away the problem of quantum uncertainty, which ought to make the transporter impossible. No explanation is given on how they work^note When put to the question by TIME Magazine, Art Supervisor Michael Okuda's response was, "They work just fine, thank you.", it's just the writers' way of saying "Yes, we know this violates the laws of physics, but it's the future and they fixed it with this thingy."
  • Data is somewhat heavier than a human of the same size and proportions would be: his skeleton is made of the same material as starship hulls to withstand the strain his super-strong artificial muscles can put on it.
  • Some unexplained examples:
    • The warp core and transporter have some sort of perfected radiation shield that doesn't kill the crew every time they're used. The Required Secondary Tech is touched upon, briefly, in Star Trek: Enterprise.
    • A transporter malfunction in "The Next Phase" causes Ro and Geordi to become out of phase with the world, making them invisible and intangible. There is no explanation for why they can still breathe, touch the floor and use turbolifts, or see the world around them. Lampshaded when Ro considers the possibility that they're dead and in some sort of afterlife. Geordi counters by pointing how strange it is that they're still wearing their uniforms and he still has his visor, when by her logic they should be naked and (in his case) blind.
    • In the episode "Timescape", the Captain, Troi and Data use devices that give them personal "subspace isolation fields" which allow them to enter and move freely in the time-frozen Enterprise. The field apparently allowed air molecules it came into contact with to speed up to their rate and slow to normal on leaving, so they could move and breathe, and also extends itself into objects they touch, so they can move things and open doors.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • The Founders are shapeshifters with more than necessary secondary powers. They possess heightened intelligence, eidetic memory and the attention to detail that allows them to analyze their photographic memory with frightening efficiency. One Founder posed as chief medical officer Dr. Bashir for more than a month, successfully performing critical surgeries on main characters while mirroring his every nuance, while trying to destroy the Bajoran sector with an artificially induced supernova at the same time.
  • Odo, a Founder who was separated from the rest of his kind, doesn't have all the secondary powers. While he can shape-shift, he cannot replicate the fine details of a humanoid face, causing his face to always have an Uncanny Valley appearance. He also implies that he has this same limitation regarding non-humanoid organisms as well, suggesting that his seagull form wouldn't fool actual seagulls.
  • The episode "One Little Ship" features a runabout that is reduced in size to microscopic proportions, which becomes an important component for recapturing the Defiant from some Jem'Hadar. While the runabout has its own life support systems, for its crew to operate outside the runabout, they need an air supply beamed out with them, as non-shrunken air molecules would be hundreds of times too large for their shrunken lungs to absorb the oxygen within, and they would suffocate. O'Brien actually comes close to doing so.
• In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Terminators don't need to breathe; that also means they can't take air into their lungs to float like humans can and sink in deep water. Terminators that need to infiltrate human society also cannot weigh much more than humans, which is especially important for ones that have to pretend to be lightweight, small human women, like Cameron. That also makes them very easy for other Terminators to pick up and throw around and reduces their physical strength, meaning a Terminator like Cameron can't win a straight slugging match. A Terminator's mechanical nature means that it cannot heal physical damage like a human can and must keep a stockpile of parts to repair itself, and damage to its neural chip means that it cannot repair damage to its programming at all.
• Subverted in Torchwood: Miracle Day. Everyone on the planet becomes immortal, but without the required secondary power of super-healing. Thus, the guy who gets a metal rod through his chest survives, but still needs to spend days recuperating on painkillers. The suicide bomber whose entire body gets pulverized survives, even when a flat puddle of muscles and bones on a table, and even when they remove his head. Jack is the only mortal on the planet (mortality was reversed for everyone), so when he suddenly gets sick on the plane to the U.S., he assumes it's because he doesn't have any immunities due to his former immortality (although he should, at least, have immunities from when he was mortal). It turns out to be poison. Additionally, Word of God is that it is only Jack's Healing Factor that is removed by the Blessing, not his Resurrective Immortality. Perhaps this is because a strange hole in the planet should not be powerful enough to undo the actions of the Time Vortex itself.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: A king manages to trap Death, meaning no one can die, which sounds great... unless you're in horrible pain from a terminal injury or illness. Hades asks our heroines to save Death in order to save mankind from eternal suffering.
• The X-Files:
  • The titular antagonist in "Trevor" is killed because his powers suffer from Crippling Overspecialization. He's intangible but can only phase through objects that have electrical energy flowing through them. Thus, when someone tries to run over him with a car, he instinctively phases through the car only to be bifurcated when the upper half of his body collides with the non-electrical glass.
  • An aversion of this is a plot point in "Rush". An artifact in a cave gives a group of teenagers the power of superspeed, but only partially changes their body structure to withstand physical effects. As a result, the physical damage caused by constantly running so fast leads to the teenagers slowly and unwittingly killing themselves through abuse of their superspeed; Scully notes that one of them, age 17, has musculature more similar to a man in his eighties.

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