Training The Peaceful Villagers / Live-Action TV

• Xena: Warrior Princess has done this more than once.
• MacGyver (1985) likewise has to train a peaceful village in a Republica del Platano to fight their drug lord oppressors, in the episode "The Golden Triangle."
• The Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Marauders" has the Enterprise crew do this with a mining colony that was being raided by a Klingon warbird.
• Combined with a Stable Time Loop in a particularly bizarre episode of Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. A time-displaced Peter is surprised to learn the besieged group of Shaolin monks he's landed among have no clue how to fight off their attackers. The rudimentary self-defense he teaches them eventually became the basis for the kung fu his Shaolin father taught him.
• Done in the third season finale of Buffy and many a character's Moment of Awesome.
• Red Dwarf: Rimmer tried this with a group of entertainers and pacifists in "Meltdown," and expended the few troops that survived his training on a suicide mission.
• An episode of Merlin uses this trope after the title character's home village is attacked by raiders.
• The Mandalorian Chapter 4 "The Sanctuary" embraces the trope as the hero saves peaceful villagers from raiders and a rampant AT-ST. A Training Montage displays how far they have to go. He meets a Retired Outlaw Action Girl who helps him train the villagers. The Hero finds a Love Interest — a widow with whom he "wished he could" settle down with, but he can't.
  • The spin-off The Book of Boba Fett has a more reciprocal version. While the Tuskens are anything but peaceful, they are woefully outdated when it comes to fighting against "outsiders with machines." Boba not only trains them in using speeders, but also helps organize them into a fighting unit capable of taking down the Pykes. In turn, they have also been training him in the ways of fighting as a Tusken. However this backfires because it them becomes more expedient for the Pykes to wipe out the entire tribe, leaving Boba the Sole Survivor.
• Doctor Who
  • A variation on this trope occurred in "The Daleks". Rather than being ignorant the Thals were instead morally opposed to violence due to the wars of their past, which was OK until the Daleks decided to massacre them.
  • Played for Laughs in "The Girl Who Died". After their best Viking warriors are abducted by aliens, the Doctor and his companion decide to do this trope with the remainder, who lack any experience in fighting. Hilarity Ensues when they burn down their village by accident during training. Of course the Doctor comes up with a cunning plan instead to save the day.
• Star Trek: The Original Series subverts this in "Errand of Mercy," when war breaks out and Kirk and Spock try to get the apparently primitive citizens of the planet Organia to side with the Federation. However, the Organians aren't interested and seemingly go along with the Klingons seizing control of the planet while resolutely protecting the Starfleet officers, who are trying to rouse a resistance, with incomprehensible motives and means. In the end, the Organians suddenly stop the war themselves and reveal that they are actually energy beings of godlike power and were only humoring the warring powers around until their patience ran out.
  • Played straighter in "A Private Little War" where Kirk must decide whether to arm and train the Hill People of a planet who are being attacked by previously peaceful Town People (and to make matters worse, he had surveyed the planet beforehand and found it a peaceful paradise, as well as befriended the Hill People personally). It turns out the Town People were being given lessons in weapons development by the Klingons, allowing Kirk the legal pretext to arm the Hill People, while tortuously aware that he is starting an arms race that will plague the planet. It's an allegory to the then-ongoing Vietnam War.
  • In "The Omega Glory", Kirk has to stop a fellow officer from arming the villagers of the last village left on the planet, who all look Chinese with phasers against wild, brutish invading Americans who worship freedom but are pretty fuzzy on its finer points. This one is also a Cold War fable.
• Subverted in Robin Hood. In an early S3 episode Robin rallies the villagers and tells them that one day he will call upon them to fight; likewise a press release revealed that Tuck would be organizing a "people's army." Turns out that what Robin and Tuck had in mind was for the villagers to stage a peaceful sit-in protest.
• One episode of Firefly ("Heart of Gold") involved the crew digging in to help train and defend the local... whorehouse, complete with montage. It works.
• Stargate SG-1 tries to do this with a planet about to be invaded by the Ori. They only have time for a quick crash course in using P90s, which does not include reloading. As soon as ammo runs out, the villagers surrender.
  • Stargate also has a villainous example with the Ori followers. Aside from the whole burning people thing, the Ori army were previously decent people. The Ori whipped them into an effective army rather quickly.
  • And also in Stargate Atlantis, in a Bad Future where Ronon trains villagers as a guerrilla army to fight Michael's army of hybrids.
  • Averted in the first-season episode "The Nox," as SG-1 attempted to warn the pacifist Space Elves the Nox about the invading Goa'uld. It turned out the Nox were a Perfect Pacifist People who already had such advanced defenses (including invisibility, healing powers, and raising the dead) that the Goa'uld posed no threat to them at all.
• The outlaws in Robin of Sherwood travel to the village of Uffcombe in the two-part adventure "The Swords of Weyland" (originally broadcast as a feature-length special), where the villagers are being terrorised by the Hounds of Lucifer not supernatural demons as it turns out but merely the horseriding, mask-wearing minions of the local Priestess of a Satanic coven which is pretending to be a religious order of nuns. No, really. Actually...it works.
• An episode of Legend of the Seeker zig-zags this. On finding a peaceful village being harassed by raiders, Richard tries to train volunteers to fight in defense, only to find that they're under an old spell that paralyzes them should they even try to be violent. Richard convinces Zedd to remove the spell despite his objections, and finds out why it'd been cast in the first place: The villagers are the descendants of a group of brutal enforcers for an ancient ancestor of Richard's. Their anger is linked to him, and through him to the Sword of Truth, fanning their rage. This leads to them attacking and killing some of the raiders in their sleep, prompting the rest of the raiders to move for revenge—leaving Richard with only himself and a handful of men freed from the spell against the hundreds of raiders. They set up a bluff, arming the rest of the village, and try and convince the raiders to leave...which only works because one of the (still peaceful) villagers had saved one of the raiders earlier in the episode.
• An Andromeda episode has Dylan arrive to train a tribe of peaceful locals to fight off-world pirates armed with guns. Dylan brings a crate-load of force lances (extendable pikes that double as guns with guided ammo), but a missionary, ironically the one who called him there thinking he'd bring his warship and scare the slavers off, destroys them, refusing to allow Dylan to corrupt the locals as they had Genetic Memory and their descendants would know violence from birth. Instead, Dylan has them build fortifications and trains them to throw spears from the walls. They win, briefly. But when the slavers stated they were coming back with reinforcements one of the villagers sacrificed herself to spawn a group of Magog with her memories that could protect the rest.
• When Krane and his gang take over the town and hold all of the Dons hostage in the Queen of Swords episode "The Hanged Man", the Queen has to train the Dons' wives to fight back.
• The Musketeers has this in the episode "The Return", where Athos is dragged back to his lands by the tenant farmers, who want him to reclaim the title of Comte de la Fère to protect them from a baron who sees the land as abandoned. Instead of reclaiming his title, he gifts the land to the people and the Musketeers train them to fight so they can keep it.
• Tour of Duty: In "Paradise Lost", Bravo Company is saved from a group of VC by some Montagnards, who then bring the guys back to their village, home of a former Special Forces agent. Brigade determines that Bravo Company should train the villagers on weapons. The Special Forces agent opposes giving the tribe the weapons, as it will cause them to become a target. Brigade wants the Montagnards to cut off the VC trail running near the village.
• Sharpe: In "Sharpe's Peril", Sharpe and Harper do this.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Arondir stays behind and teaches the remaining refugees in Ostirith to fight and improvise weapons for the upcoming battle with the Orcs.