| abstract
| - Television has evolved a lot over the years. It used to be that you couldn't even say the word "damn" on the airwaves. Now you've got entire cable channels where people can say anything they want. These looser standards have also made it that much easier to showcase genuinely horrifying villains. Any Crime and Punishment Series or Mystery show will have at least a few of these, unless they make a point of avoiding them. Among the shows that have been seen to use the trope: Law and Order, Law and Order Special Victims Unit, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Matlock, NYPD Blue, CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: NY, Magnum, P.I., Homicide: Life On the Street, Shark, Veronica Mars, Bones, The Closer, and the list just goes on and on and on. They're generally Monsters Of The Week (no pun intended), rather than recurring characters, though. Some specific examples are listed below. Shows with their own pages include
* 24
* Buffyverse
* CSI Verse
* Criminal Minds
* Doctor Who
* Game of Thrones
* Law and Order
* Kamen Rider
* Power Rangers
* Super Sentai
* Teen Wolf
* The Vampire Diaries Examples of Complete Monster/Live Action TV include:
* Alcatraz:
* Kit Nelson is a savage child-killer who is despised by all the other hardened inmates in Alcatraz. He murdered his younger brother when they were both kids by strangling him to death. Then he placed a flower on his brother's bed, adopting this method for all his subsequent murders. He breaks into young boys' bedrooms at night to abduct them at knifepoint, threatening to kill their families if they don't comply. He forces them to take part in his late brother's favorite hobbies for a few days, before strangling them to death with murderous glee. Afterwards he drops off the boys' bodies back in the place he abducted them from.
* Paxton Petty plants mines in public places and enjoys watching people get blown to pieces. During The Korean War, he planted mines in the local children's playgrounds to eliminate potential Child Soldiers, for which he was arrested and sent to a military prison. After escaping Alcatraz, he starts to plant more mines around San Francisco (including in elementary school yards) to kill as many random civilians as possible. He traps Agent Hauser on one of these mines, but modifies the bomb in such a way that the bomb disposal expert who rescues Hauser would inevitably be killed during the dismantling procedure no matter what they did.
* Michael Cambias from All My Children is a cut above the typical Soap Opera villain. Coming to Pine Valley with a goal of taking over all the major corporations based there, he used spies and a seduction of Kendall (using an alias), exploiting her hatred of Erica Kane, with a goal of stealing top-secret formulas and documents. One of his spies, Lena, is also his lover, with orders to seduce Erica's daughter, Bianca; Lena winds up falling for her, but is forced to continue working for Michael due to threats against her mother. Kendall, meanwhile, finds out about the affair between him and Lena, deciding to become a double agent; when Michael catches her in his office, he attempts to rape her, but Erica stops him. After double-crossing him by pretending to leave her company, Michael tries to rape Erica, but Kendall returns the favor in stopping him. When he's thwarted from that, he goes and rapes Bianca—getting back at all three women in one fell swoop, as Bianca is simultaneously Kendall's sister, Erica's daughter, and Lena's girlfriend.
* Dian Lamitan from Amaya. She treats Dal'lang like dirt, tries to kill Amaya when she was a kid, lied to Rajah Mangubat that Datu Bugna is a traitor as a revenge for slapping her for attacking Amaya & so she could easily stripped Amaya out of her position as a princess & turn her into a slave as well as abusing her, forced her favorite daughter Marikit to divorced Bagani & marry his father instead by using a love potion on him then aborts her offspring with Bagani that made her insane & then drugged her so the rajah won't find out about this, conspired with Uray Hilway & Angaway after Rajah Mangubat betrayed her upon finding out her schemes & upon regaining her position as a Dian, she told lies about Amaya about her being an evil person & declared her as an outcast, blackmails her less favorite daughter Binayaan by harming Dal'lang who had become her adoptive mother, she conspired against Angaway on her own as well (upon finding out Amaya & Bagani are planning to attack him) by bribing Datu Pulajan into joining her side & then invited them into a ball by serving poison on both sides excluding hers', had her rival Hara Lingayan killed secretly, bribed many soldiers & officials to do her bidding, took Dayaw as a hostage so that Posaka will surrender Amaya to her but was secretly planning to kill both of them but Dayaw escapes upon finding out and commits suicide, which Lamitan quickly finishes him off, had Asinas killed for conspiring against her, betrayed Datu Pulajan after discovering he made a secret alliance with Amaya by poisoning him & taking control of his army & tried to massacre civilians in an attempt to force Amaya & Bagani's forces to surrender, only to fail. She even took Alunsina, who was a little girl, hostage & warns everyone she will kill her if they tried to stop her so she could escape her death penalty and escape to a faraway land. Most of her actions are avenged when Rajah Mangubat stripped her off her position as a Dian, when Amaya chopped her hand off & voodoo her to lose her agimat's power & when Amaya finally kills her by summoning Bakunawa to devour her.
* Are You Afraid of the Dark?: "Margot" from season 5’s "The Tale of the Night Shift" is a teenage girl who gets a job as a nurse at a hospital working on the night shift. We find out that "Margot" is actually a sadistic, ancient vampire who spends his time feeding on the hospital’s staff and patients, one of whom is a young boy in a wheel chair, and attempting to turn them into his vampire slaves. When confronted by the episode’s protagonist Amanda and her friend Colin, the vampire compares a hospital to a candy shop for him. When Amanda's recently turned friend Felix tries to help Amanda, the vampire attacks him too. During the climax of the episode, the vampire chases Amanda to the roof of the hospital and lifts her up, planning to drop her off and lick up what's left, all while relishing Amanda's screams, before deciding the old-fashioned way is a better way to kill. Even in this Nightmare Fuel-filled series, "Margot" stands out.
* In Babylon 5, we have Lord Refa, who started off as an Smug Snake who wanted to 'return the Centauri to Glory', but he's the one who started Londo off on his Start of Darkness, making him ask Morden, the Shadows' servant, for favors. He's the one who began the entire Narn/Centauri War and authorized the illegal weapons the Mass-Drivers used against the Narn Homeworld, killing hundreds of millions. And he was a complete dupe for the Shadows, sending Centauri forces out to conquer far and wide, leaving the empire unprotected. Eventually killed off when Londo, who had grown to despise Refa, was under threat of political annihilation and, seeking revenge against Refa for his (supposed) murder of Londo's lover, enacted an Evil Plan that saw Refa torn apart by a mob of vengeful Narns. To a cheery, upbeat Gospel song about eternal damnation.
* Jha'dur, AKA: Deathwalker. The last real leader of the Dilgar War and a perfect example of why they were wiped out. An unmistakable sociopath who conducted horrific experiments on other races, deployed weapons on civilian targets, and was planning to give other races immortality...with an ingredient that required other members of sentient species to induce mass murder and anarchy. The sheer joy she took in watching others suffer was nearly unmatched in the series.
* We also have Emperor Cartagia who is the Centauri version of Caligula. Tortures G'kar just for the fun of it and wanted to kill off his own race at the end of it since he thought he was God. And he didn't just let other people torture G'kar for him-no, he himself got in on it and got his hands messy.
* And we have President Clark. Turns the Earth Government into a dictatorship, uses the PsiCorps to Mind Rape and interrogate people, fonds the Nightwatch, which is the SS, bombs Mars and other colonies, and has Sheridan "interrogated". When he lost the war, he was going to take Earth with him.
* Bates Motel has a couple:
* Season 1’s Big Bad, Jake Abernathy, AKA Joe Fioretti, the boss of a Sex Slave trade, operates his business out of several towns and supplies some of his subordinates with girls as a special compensation. When he learns that the operation in White Falls is compromised, Abernathy begins to stalk Norma Bates and threaten her to get the money he believes she has. When he is confronted by Sheriff Romero, Abernathy attempts to establish a new partnership with him to continue the slavery business and keep it going in White Falls.
* Zach Shelby seems at first like a charming, likable guy who wants to help Norma Bates and her family out. It is soon revealed Shelby is a deadly, violent man who participates (along with Keith Summers, who is killed early on) in the sex slave operation under the direction of Jake Abernathy and just helped out the family so he could sleep with Norma. Shelby keeps an Asian sex slave named Jiao locked in terrible conditions in his basement where he regularly rapes her, and when he discovers the Bates family have helped her escaped, he attempts to murder them all. When he sees Jiao again, he tries to murder her as well, presumably succeeding, before he forces Norma, Norman and Dylan Bates into the motel so that he can kill them.
* The new Battlestar Galactica Reimagined:
* Brother Cavil. Made worse by the fact that he was introduced as an Affably Evil, Deadpan Snarker type. That was before we find out that he's the mastermind behind the human genocide, as well as a majority of the other bad things on the show. All because he was unhappy with the body he was made in. We later find out that Cavil murdered a young orphan boy just because they were becoming friends. And if you forget the genocide, using a Scarpia Ultimatum to rape his own mother after having his father tortured and mutilated probably would qualify him for this page on its own.
* Helena Cain is one of these. She cannibalizes a refugee fleet for parts (including their FTL drives) and leaves them at the mercy of the Cylons (and we know how the Cylons deal with civilians). While doing that, she conscripts any able-bodied man in the fleet, shooting their families if they refuse to join her. Then she comes to the Galactica fleet and decides to take the fight to the Cylons, despite none of the other ships except Galactica being combat-capable. She also shot her Executive Officer in the head when he refused to order what looked like a suicide mission, right in front of the crew. And let's not forget Cain's standard procedure for interrogating female Cylon prisoners: violent rape, by the official Cylon Interrogator, as well as any crew member who feels like it.
* Phelan, the ex-military mercenary turned crime lord from "Black Market" (played by Bill Duke, no less), counts too. He runs the titular market and garrotes anyone who threatens his supremacy. When Apollo investigates the death of one of Phelan's competitors, the man pays him a visit, abducting the Hooker with a Heart of Gold Apollo had been seeing regularly and taking her daughter and warning Apollo that "I hear any more talk about Fisk I'm gonna send your whore back to you piece by piece, and then I'm gonna start on the little girl." As if that's not enough, in his headquarters he keeps a bunch of children locked in a cell. When Apollo confronts him and asks about that, he gives this chilling reply:
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* Apollo demands the kid back, to which Phelan replies "Sorry, the little girl's been paid for. No refunds." Leads to a Crowning Moment of Awesome when Apollo proceeds to prove to him that Good Is Not Nice.
* Being Human (UK) has William Herrick, John Mitchell's sire, is a truly nasty piece of work. Initially hiding under a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire facade, Mitchell learns the truth when he sees that Herrick has kept a larder for the vampires consisting of homeless people and teenage runaways where they are fed on relentlessly with no time to recover. When Mitchell protests, Herrick puts him firmly in the 'minus' column and decides to kill him and everyone he loves. Later, Herrick casually slaughters a police station save one woman...then kills her as well because he doesn't want anyone to think he's gone soft. Even before he became a vampire, Herrick was a piece of work and was turned by his sire Hettie while trying to sell her to a brothel. Hettie looks ten.
* Kirby is the ghost of a serial killer whose favoured method of killing was to seduce women by pretending to be great with kids and then murder the families once they trusted him. He turns the housemates against each other through manipulation and shatters Annie the ghost her into pieces, before performing a celebratory Happy Dance and immediately trying to kill a baby.
* Finally, we have Mr. Snow, the de facto leader of The Old Ones, the ruling class of vampires. Snow is so ancient he claims to have looked upon 'pharaohs and the son of the carpenter.' First introduced when he forces a ship's crew to feed him a luckless young man with the chilling tonight "Someone Or Everyone," Snow planned to launch a full war to enslave humanity and in the timeline where he isn't stopped, personally drained the British Prime Minister on live TV. Snow would preside over a regime where humans were enslaved and drained, all with nothing more than cheery good humor.
* Douglas Atherton from Beverly Hills, 90210 is a wanted rapist from England. He comes to America, renames himself Miles Cannon, and becomes a teacher to find new victims. At the end of season 2 he raped Naomi Clark, even telling her that because she lied about him sexually harassing her earlier, no one would believe her about her rape. After he is found out, he flees his apartment, only to confront Naomi later on and threaten her with a knife.
* The Blacklist contains the most dangerous criminals to ever appear on the face of the earth, but there are still a fair few that manage to stand out above the rest.
* Floriana Campo, who appears in season 1's "The Freelancer", acts as a human rights activist by day, fighting against the Everhardt Cartel, but by night actually runs said cartel, which is one of the largest slave trading cartels in the world. As the leader of the cartel, she has hundreds if not thousands of men, women, and children kidnapped, has her insignia branded on their back, and sells them to her wealthy clients either as Sex Slaves or as manual labor. Through these methods, she has ruined the lives of many, all just so she could make her own life luxurious. When her husband gets too close to discovering the truth, she murders him in cold blood. She has proven to be so vile, even Reddington despises her.
* Owen Mallory, formerly Michael Shaw, is Number 64 on the Blacklist and appears in the season 1 episode, "The Cyprus Agency (No. 64)", where he runs a supposed adoption agency called the Cyprus Agency. Initially believing that the Agency kidnaps children just to sell them towards the wealthy, when FBI task force led by Elizabeth Keen delves into the agency's darkest secrets they find out the truth is far worse. Instead of kidnapping children, the agency kidnaps women all over the world regardless of age and puts them into comas, where Owen himself would rape them so they can produce children, even injecting sedatives to prolong the comas and the process. He has done this to many women, and if some of the women die he simply has his employees dispose of them. He also isn't very good to his employees either, as such when he has his employee kidnap a college girl and said employee makes a mistake, he callously shoots him. When Elizabeth finally catches him she sees how many women he kept in comas and raped, which is in the dozens, and those are just the women still alive. When she asks him why he did all this, he says that as a child in the adoption system he felt that he wasn't perfect, and by kidnapping all these women to rape, they could make his children, thus " ensuring his legacy" and making it so he won't feel that way anymore.
* Black Sails: Ned Low, captain of The Fancy, outdoes any other pirate in series for evil and cruelty. In the opening scenes of Season 2, Low waylays a ship called The Good Fortune that peacefully surrenders, but upon finding a valuable hostage on the ship, Low has the crew massacred and personally shoots the captain dead as the man pleads he has a family. Low sets up shop at Nassau and tries to intimidate the head of business Eleanor Guthrie with a speech of how his crew knows Low is a monster. He later fantasizes about raping Eleanor to within an inch of her life. When his quartermaster, Meeks, tries to ally with Eleanor, Low tortures and beheads him in full view of Eleanor's entire bar, then kills her bodyguard when the man tries to make him leave. Low makes clear he will eventually come for Eleanor and confesses he is a man driven solely by cruelty and instinct that he often surrenders to. As he himself says: "When they see me slaughter the crew of The Good Fortune. When they see me cut out a man's tongue for lying. When they see me burn a boy alive in front of his father. There's no lie there. There's no remorse. I simply don't have it in me."
* An example from Blakes Seven (which is not lacking in Complete Monsters) is Raiker from the very second episode. He's a sadomasochistic dictator to the prisoners and keeps a keen eye on female convicts who can pass muster to be his sex slaves (the latter of which get dumped out of the ship when they reach the prison planet...or en route, at any rate). Unsurprisingly, Blake (the protagonist) and the other prisoners rebel and succeed in taking over the ship's computer. Raiker deals with this by executing the prisoners recaptured during the revolt. Blake surrenders to stop this and Raiker responds by executing two more prisoners For the Evulz. Even his fellow crewmates are appalled by him. Raiker's comeuppance when he gets sucked out into space at the end of the episode just isn't satisfying enough.
* Blindspot: Maxwell Tate from season 1's "Rules in Defiance" is a rich and powerful man, who for at least seven years ran a forced prostitution ring. He has his agents in immigration select young women who are being deported back to Mexico then has his thugs abduct them. Taking them to a building he owns Tate throws elaborate parties for the rich and powerful where the women are repeatedly raped and abused for the guest's pleasure. When one woman, Paloma Diaz, was killed by a guest, Tate forced her friend Camila to dispose of the body, then had a false case built to frame Paloma's boyfriend Ronnie Vargas for abusing, raping and murdering her, guaranteeing Vargas would be executed. When Vargas tried to prove his innocence, Tate had Vargas's sister's home burned to the ground as a warning, almost killing her and her three children. When Tate discovers Tasha Zapata has infiltrated his organisation, to cover up what he has been doing he simply has all the women, including Tasha, rounded into the basement where he kept them, then sets the building on fire, dismissing it as "I can't risk leaving any evidence."
* Blue Bloods:
* Dick Reed, the Serial Killer/rapist from season 1's "Re-Do," is a thoroughly misogynistic Smug Snake who gets his conviction overturned because a lab tech screwed up the protocols. He scares his surviving victim into silence and lets one of his fanboys have her. He also beats his sister and ties her up for saying something she "shouldn't have." He shows zero remorse and no redeemable qualities and after slitting a janitor's throat, he finally attempts to perform his usual MO on Erin Reagan, the ADA who convicted him, before she is saved by Frank.
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* The Phantom, aka Donald Washington, from season 2's "The Life We Chose," is a cold-blooded crack dealer and murderer. He shoots detective Cruz and kills Detective Gates, who pleads that he has three kids, to which Phantom replies "Too bad for them". This shocks his cohort, who was only planning on robbing them. Phantom later kills his cohort, targets Ray Bell, a man who ratted him out to the police, and holds Ray's family hostage.
* Yuri Denko, an arms dealer whom Erin prosecutes in season 2's "Working Girls," is a cold-blooded sadist who has no problem executing a man's wife in front of him in their living room over a business dispute. He then threatens the man's children in a courtroom outburst to scare him into not testifying, then has him killed after the threats scare him into running. He puts out a hit on the surviving witness, hounding her mercilessly, and went after her grandma back in Russia, too (the FSB got there first and protected her).
* Blue Heelers has three:
* Vincent Platt from season 3’s "Spider Man" and "Day of Reckoning" is introduced getting his kicks watching police divers fish out the body of a little girl who was kidnapped, raped and murdered, one of his victims, which disgusts Wayne. The police bring him in, but they can't get any evidence out of him so they cut him loose. He immediately kidnaps another girl, and when he's brought in he refuses to help, cries about his rights, then tries to bait Nick into attacking him by describing techniques on kidnapping little children and how sexually appealing they are. When that doesn't work, he tries to assault him. Nick then brings in the photo of Platt's victim, trying to appeal to some form of decency. Platt steals the photo, taunts Nick about the victim, declares he doesn't have a conscience, and brags that the police "will never find the little bitch.” Nick is so infuriated he tries to kill Platt, before becoming disgusted at what he might have done, but it gives Platt the idea to bash himself and make it look like Nick did it; this fatally backfires.
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* Ashley Barker from season 12’s "Childs Play” and her boyfriend Luke Knight find young adults to have sex with, by force if they are not willing, then brag about it and Ashley videotapes it and posts it on the Internet. When Luke had picked out a girl, he genuinely liked her. Ashley reacts by using a pair of scissors to stab the girl. She then got Luke to slash her throat but he couldn't, so after he stabbed the victim until he got tired Ashley kept stabbing her even though she was well past dead before she and Luke made another girl Beth stab her as well. When caught, Ashley and Luke both mock the victim's mother.
* Howard Epps from Bones. We don't know exactly how many women he murdered, but we know of 6. Add to that the fact that he manipulated Bones and her True Companions into stopping his execution, and then escaped prison by starting a fire and killing a fire-fighter, dressing in the man's uniform, and walking out, only to continue his twisted little mind games with Bones. He then shows up in her apartment, tries to kill her, and jumps from the balcony, killing himself by letting go of Booth's hand.
* The Gravedigger, aka Heather Taffet, is a dark cross between a serial killer and a serial kidnapper. The modus operandi is to sneak up on victims, knock them out with a custom-made stun gun, and bury them in a hidden container with 24 hours of air; either the ransom is paid, or the victims die. The Gravedigger's introduced by doing this on Dr. Brennan - not because Brennan is a threat, but just because. The Gravedigger also traps Dr. Hodgins at the same time (cutting the available air to around 12 hours) just because he witnessed the kidnapping. When reappearing, The Gravedigger then tries to similarly bury Booth alive to destroy evidence, plus tries to kill Brennan and Booth again. The Gravedigger also kills a private investigator with her stun gun because The Gravedigger thinks that there's a chance that he might find The Gravedigger in the future. Several of the other victims are also sought, with the cruel circumstances behind them all played up. In the end, The Gravedigger admits to just enjoying killing people and the effects that buried alive has on victims; the ransom money was immaterial.
* Gyp Rosetti of Boardwalk Empire is an absolute lunatic of a mob boss who eclipses Nucky Thompson and any other gangster on the show for sheer, senseless and brutal violence. Introduced beating a man to death after the man fixed his car but made an offhand comment Rosetti interpreted as condescending, Rosetti soon all but declares war on Nucky and sadistically burns a man to death later after dousing him in gasoline. In an attempt on his life, Rosetti uses the waitress he was sleeping with as a Human Shield and soon beats a priest to rob his church. When one of his men makes a comment indicating he knows more about nautical terms than Rosetti, Rosetti buries him up to his neck in the sand for the tide. He shows 'mercy' when his bodyguard begs him to, as the buried man is said bodyguard's own cousin, by taking the shovel, walking to the man and then smashing his skull in with it.
* A couple psychos make the extra effort to stand out in Breaking Bad.
* "The Cousins," Marco and Leonel Salamanca, are ruthless enforcers for the cartel. We get a hint of their viciousness when they decapitate an informant for the DEA named Tortuga and for a touch of black comedy put his head on a tortoise rigged with a bomb to catch the Federales. After arriving in America after the death of their cousin Tuco, the two slaughter every immigrant they arrived with, then kill an old woman to take her house as a base, and the police officer who comes to investigate. The two later stalk and attempt to murder DEA agent Hank Schrader, treating everything with nothing more than emotionless, single-minded ruthlessness.
* Jack Welker, leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, is just as nasty as any of the Mexican Cartel. Jack starts off using his prison connections to arrange the murders of ten prisoners Walter White is afraid will turn State's witness. Jack later kills DEA agents Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez with his gang and steals the money Walt had buried for his own after personally executing Hank. Jack keeps Walt's old partner Jesse Pinkman enslaved and chained in the meth lab to cook for the Nazis under threat of murdering his loved ones. A threat that turns out not to be idle when Jesse attempts to escape. After Jesse is forced to witness the murder of his beloved Andrea, Jack informs him her son will be next if Jesse tries anything again. Even when Walt returns, Jack decides to kill him rather than bother with any other step and only stops to parade Jesse's poor treatment in front of him.
* The Closer has at least one per season, but Philip Stroh is the most striking. A truly Amoral Attorney who defends sex offenders, Stroh also happens to be a serial rapist who used one of his clients as a stalking horse. In season 4's "Power of Attorney," he has his client Chris Dunlap find him victims to rape; one of them fights back and is killed. Upon returning in season 7's "Hostile Witness," he goes on to become even more brutal, strangling his victims with a chain, and trying to kill a man who witnessed the crimes. When arrested in the same season’s "The Last Word," he offers his services to a fellow inmate in exchange for sending letters, ordering several murders and threatening the witness. He is notably one of the few criminals that Major Crimes hasn't nailed, managing to beat Brenda at her own game. For Brenda, he's That One Case.
* Roger Stimple, a child molester who loves to rape and kill prepubescent black girls. You feel NO sympathy when Sgt. Gabriel beats the everlasting shit out of him.
* The manager of the Summerview rest home, Mr. Wayley, had been killing old people without loved ones just so he can get a bonus. He not only expressed nothing but contempt for his victims (his "Who cares" speech), he even has the gall to try to bribe the police to drop the charges and let the witness investigating him stay at Summerview free of charge.
* Jacob Shaw from the Costantine episode "A Whole World Out There" is a demented, Ax Crazy Serial Killer who evaded punishment after getting caught by transferring his mind from his body to a Pocket Dimension found during his occult studies, where he essentially became a god-like Reality Warper, able to live out his sick fantasies as much as he wanted. When a group of teenagers accidentally trespasses into his realm, he takes this as an opportunity to live out his sadistic pleasure even more. He starts hunting the teenagers in the real world by appearing on reflective surfaces, driving them nearly insane, and then brutally killing 3 out of 4 via impaling, dismembering with a knife and suffocation. Afterwards, he keeps the souls of the deceased in his realm, where he keeps on torturing them and tells them that they will experience a never-ending circle of getting hunted down and killed by him, all just because he finds it fun.
* "The Man," from "Waiting for the Man," is introduced as a Satanic redneck who abducted three little girls. Said girls are almost mindlessly devoted to him; how that happened is not made clear, but it involves getting married to him, with a collar and bruise marks around each girl's necks. He sends them off to find another bride for him, and while waiting for them to return he brutally tortures and murders a bypassing, helpful man in a ritualistic way, for seemingly no other reason than being near him at the wrong time. Later, it is revealed that "The Man" murdered his real wife six years ago as a sacrifice for Satan and when John gets to his lair, he finds the aforementioned three girls murdered in bed, with the fourth girl only surviving because she ran away and was saved by John's crew in the nick of time. "The Man" is such a despicable individual that John and Jim Corrigan decide to outright murder him instead of just having him face the law. What worse is that, unlike magic-empowered villains like Jacob Shaw, "The Man" is, aside from being a Satanist, completely normal.
* In Deadwood, Francis Wolcott and George Hearst were the Complete Monsters who squared off with Magnificent Bastard Al Swearengen. Wolcott was a sexual sadist who enjoyed murdering prostitutes and Hearst, well, let's just say that his lack of ethics and decency made Swearengen look like a moral paragon. The series ends with Hearst winning the conflict big time, riding out of town with everything he wanted and with Swearengen forced to go beyond the Moral Event Horizon by killing an innocent prostitute to save Trixie from Hearst's retribution. Something of a Foregone Conclusion, since the character is based on a successful businessman and US Senator from US history.
* And then there's Cy Tolliver, Al's rival pimp and saloon operator, who apparently exists just to make him look not that bad by comparison. This is a man who richly deserved to get gut-stabbed at a wedding -- by the minister. (Particularly considering that, before the guy found Jesus, he'd been a colleague of Cy's who'd gotten dumped in the woods to die of smallpox.) The only mildly redeeming thing he ever did was to keep the woman he sort of had feelings for (a suicidal prostitute he purchased from her father when she was about fourteen) from killing herself...after he'd forced her to shoot a young con artist he'd beaten nearly to death.
* Desperate Housewives - By the end of season 3, Orson's mother, Gloria, has really come across as this. Seriously, here's a woman so insanely determined that her son will marry Alma, a woman he doesn't love, that she's not only completely willing to murder any other woman who gets close to him, but also quite ready to frame other, innocent people for the crimes and emotionally blackmail her vulnerable son into becoming an accomplice in the murder of a woman he loved. She continues her mad efforts to force her son back into this miserable marriage for so long, even after Alma herself has told him to give it up, that you have to wonder just who she's trying to please. And this is all before you find out that she infiltrated Bree's house and gained her trust solely for the sake of polishing her off too. And that's before you find out that, when Orson was a teenager, she murdered her husband, set it up to look like a suicide, and allowed the young Orson to blame himself for this. In the end, the viewer can only cheer when she ends up with locked-in syndrome and Orson takes the opportunity to taunt her.
* Patrick Logan from season 6, an environmental terrorist who probably has devolved into Terrorist Without A Cause and is bent on destroying Angie and Nick's lives. He kills in cold blood the neighbor who tells him where Angie is hiding, and later threatens Angie into making a bomb that he plans to blow up into her house to kill her son Danny.
* Jordan Chase and his fellow conspirators from season 5 of Dexter might just be the worst monsters in the whole show thus far. On Jordan's direction, the other men capture women to torture and rape for months before disposing of them in barrels. All the while, Jordan looks on, occasionally holding his watch to the women's ears and whispering, "Tick tick tick. That's the sound of your life running out." Watching the video footage they took of what they did to the women was enough to make Debra root for the people who were tracking them down and killing them (despite it being her job to catch the killers). Dexter himself admits that they sicken him. The tapes themselves, which the viewers listen to, are pure Nightmare Fuel. When Dexter and Lumen (the last victim who managed to get away) finally have Jordan at their mercy, he taunts Lumen about what he did to her, mocking her for being so "pathetic" and "helpless". When Lumen plunges her dagger into Jordan's chest, the only thing unsatisfactory about it all is how quick his death was. Unlike the Ice Truck Killer, Miguel and Trinity, none of these bastards are presented with a Freudian Excuse, making their actions all the more horrific.
* George King, aka the Skinner, is another major villain whose actions are horrific and who has no known Freudian Excuse to balance out his crimes. In pursuit of a drug dealer who owes him money, the Skinner finds anyone who might have information about said drug dealer's whereabouts and questions them while cutting off their skin. One of his victims was an innocent boy who was confirmed to have died from the skinning process. When Dexter confronts the Skinner, he confirms that, despite the reasons the Skinner makes up for performing his grisly crimes (which are by no means a justification anyway), his only real reason is simply because he likes it.
* Many of Dexter's minor victims fall into this category too. In fact, the major villains tend to come off as more sympathetic than most of the minor ones (seen with both Arthur Mitchell from Season 4 and The Ice Truck Killer of Season 1, who are still monsters). Chase and King are the crowning exceptions.
* Dollhouse has several villains almost approaching this, but three stand out in particular.
* Joe Hearn is The Handler for the doll Sierra, and at first seems nothing more than a callous Jerkass who doesn't care when the dolls under his care die. He proves himself to be far more evil, however, when it's revealed that he's been taking advantage of the blind trust dolls are implanted with towards their handlers and, while Sierra is in her neutral child-like state, has repeatedly forced her to have sex with him. His crimes close to being discovered, he tries to convince his superiors that the doll, Victor, is the true perpetrator and argues to have him sent to the Attic. When Hearn himself is revealed to be the culprit, his boss Adelle DeWitt issues him an ultimatum, either be sent to the Attic himself, or rape and murder Paul Ballard's girlfriend Mellie to deter him from investigating the Dollhouse. Hearn chooses the latter, and sets to the task with apparent glee. However, it turns out to be a set-up planned by DeWitt who was so repulsed by Hearn's actions that she had arranged it so Hearn would be killed by Mellie.
* Nolan Kinnard was one of the Corrupt Corporate Executives behind the Dollhouse program, and a psychotic Yandere who formed a disturbing obsession with a young artist named Priya Tsetsang. When his increasingly expensive attempts to seduce her fail, he tries, and fails, to flat-out rape her instead. In retribution for Priya's rejection, he arranges for her to be abducted, imprisoned in his hospital and regularly pumped her full of drugs which stopped her brain from producing adequate amounts of serotonin and dopamine. This caused Priya to suffer from visual and aural hallucinations, making her seem to the outside world like a paranoid schizophrenic. He then convinces the Dollhouse to take Priya on as an "altruistic" charity case, turning her into the doll Sierra, and, once they do, Kinnard frequently hires her out, having her imprinted with a personality that was hopelessly in love with him. He then uses this imprint to rape her over and over again, taking a picture of her after each engagement as a trophy of what he's done to her. When DeWitt and Topher Brink discover the truth behind Priya's transformation into the doll, Sierra, they are horrified and try to keep her away from Kinnard, only for him to use his pull with the Dollhouse to order her permanently imprinted with the love-struck personality to keep as his Sex Slave for the rest of her life. When Sierra is "delivered" to him, however, she reveals that she is imprinted with her original personality, slaps him across the face and tells him how much she hates him. In retribution, Kinnard beats her and comes after her with a knife, only stopping when Priya kills him in self-defense.
* From the first episode, "Ghost", there's the unnamed, pedophilic kidnapper whom is a serial rapist and killer of little girls. When twelve-year-old Davina Crestejo is abducted by him and his cohorts, the doll, Echo, is implanted with the artificially constructed personality of a hostage negotiator named Eleanor Penn, and sent by the Dollhouse to negotiate Davina's release. The personality of Ms. Penn was constructed partially from the memories of a little girl who was kidnapped as a child herself. When the time comes for the kidnappers to collect the ransom, however, Ms. Penn has a nervous breakdown upon seeing the face of one of the kidnappers and recognizing him as the same man who kidnapped her as a child. She then reveals this kidnapper's modus operandi. Kidnapping little girls, he ransoms them to their parents, then, after the money arrives, murders his partners and keeps the girls as his Sex Slaves, killing them when they grow too old for his tastes. When Echo informs his fellow kidnappers about what their partner's planning for Davina, they are so disgusted that they immediately try to kill him before allowing Echo to leave with Davina.
* Bounty Hunter Jubal Early of the Firefly episode "Objects in Space" started off as a Boba Fett-style Badass, but lost all our sympathy about the time that he tied up and threatened to rape Kaylee. And then River reveals to us during her Hannibal Lecture to him that he once tortured a neighbor's dog to death, revealing him to be a Psycho for Hire sadist who lives for power, control, and pain.
* Adelai Niska definitely qualifies as well. This is a guy who tortures his wife's nephew to gain the fear and respect of prospective mercenaries he is hiring. And if you cross him, he gets even worse -- he'll torture you to death, and then, through the miracle of modern technology, bring you back to life just so he can pick up where he left off with you. When he first meets the crew of Serenity in "The Train Job", Niska shows off the mutilated corpse of his wife's nephew to solidify his reputation in their eyes and to show them what price they'll pay should they fail him. After commissioning the crew to steal important cargo from an Alliance train, the crew is horrified to realize that what they've stolen is the medicine needed to treat a city full of sick settlers. In his next appearance in "War Stories," Niska carves up another failed employee, before getting his hands on Mal and Wash, whom he proceeds to torture for hours. Eventually Zoe, Mal's first mate and Wash's wife, offers to buy Niska's captives off of him, but Niska tells her that with the money she has, she can only afford one of them and tries to force her into a Sadistic Choice. When Zoe ruins his fun by immediately picking her husband, he responds by saying there is enough money for some of Captain Reynolds. He then cuts off Mal's ear and gives it to her. Niska spends the remainder of the episode torturing Mal to death, only to use advanced technology to bring him back to life so Niska can have the pleasure of torturing Mal to death for days.
* The Movie Serenity has a very notable subversion: The Operative commits truly monstrous acts, fully acknowledges how monstrous they are, and mourns their consequences, having only committed them because he thought they were in the interest of the greater good. He even admits that a monster like him has no place in the perfect world he is working to create--this very knowledge prevents him from being a true monster, and once he realizes he was very wrong, he severs his ties with the Alliance and disappears into oblivion.
* Garo had Barago, who was a rouge power hungry former Makai Knight wo was responisble for many of the horrible things happening in the first series from Kaoru being the gate for Messiah to The murder of Kouga's Father and Rei's Family there was also the part where he cut down the mirage of his own mother just to show not only how much he was willing to give up but to prove that his own family was less important to him than power, which was all he wanted from life, it's quite ironic when he is screwed over by Messiah since he was planning to stab her in the back in order for, you guessed it, POWER.
* The Good Wife had a rare non-murderous example of a Complete Monster in TV talk show host Duke Roscoe. A Glenn Beck-esque political shock jock, he accused a woman whose child had been kidnapped of murdering her, hounded her until she committed suicide, then mocked her grieving husband to his face while continuing to insist that the dead woman was a murderer. When the network was sued for libel, he threatened to quit if they settled, and went on the attack against the opposing attorneys. And then CONTINUED to attempt to defame them after the child he accused the woman of murdering was found alive, kidnapped by strangers. This story was Ripped from the Headlines based on an incident with Nancy Grace.
* Gotham: Jerome Valeska, who appears in "The Blind Fortune Teller" and the first three episodes of season 2, is the son of a snake charmer who ended up in Arkham Asylum for murdering his mother. When interrogated, he laughs it off as if it was a joke. In season two, he and several other inmates is recruited into the Maniax gang by Theo Galavan. Jerome functions as he de facto leader, announcing their presence by throwing several hostages off a roof. Later he attempts to dose a bus full of cheerleaders on fire and shoots up the GCPD station, personally killing Commissioner Essen, and kills one of his men for cracking a joke he was about to make. Following the massacre, he announces on live TV that the people of Gotham "ain't seen nothing yet." Later, Jerome kills his father when the carnival is back in town, and poses as a magician to hold a children's hospital charity hostage, killing the deputy mayor. He plans to kill thirteen year old Bruce Wayne, threatening his butler Alfred to draw him out. When he gets his hands on Bruce, he begins to slowly slit his throat in the following standoff. While his death prevents him from growing up to be Gotham's most infamous villain, we see the wake of his death sets the inspiration for more maniacs to come.
* Gramps, a 1995 made-for-TV movie also starring Griffith in the title role, a grandfather named Jack MacGruder whose outwardly sweet side is a cover for a bloodthirsty sociopath who nearly succeeds in destroying his family ...all to get at and rape his "precious" 7-year-old grandson, Matthew. Why? About 40 years earlier, Jack was the autocratic head of his household and constantly came up with new ways to beat his poor wife when she stepped even a millimeter out of line; finally, the wife is able to build a backbone and leave, taking her 7-year-old son, Clark, with her (the wife wins the divorce, cleaning out Jack, who got no visitation rights to see his son). In the present, Clark tracks down his father and -- hoping he's changed and gotten his anger issues under control -- invites him to stay. Jack charms everyone with his guitar picking, but eventually, this sinister pedophile licks his chops as he unleashes his pent-up anger on innocent people: he breaks the housekeeper's legs with a baseball bat, smashes a fire extinguisher over the head of a police officer, runs down a teenaged girl with his car (and also does the same to his daughter-in-law), and kills his daughter-in-law's father after he gathers evidence to refute Jack's claim that the daughter-in-law was cheating on him. In the end, Jack died as he lived: kidnapping Matthew and one of his female classmates. There is one final confrontation along a river, and he threatens to throw the tykes over the edge of a waterfall if Clark does not pay a $1 million ransom. Clark agrees, but throws the money in the river to the girl. When Jack tries to go after the girl, she lets him have the money and begins throwing out bills into the river; the greedy Jack begins collecting the bills...until he is caught in the current and unable to avoid going over the edge of the waterfall. Clark rescues Matthew and the little girl as Jack is crushed to death on the rocks below.
* Knox from Heroes was getting there. Victimized a bank full of people just so he can get revenge on one person, kills a small child in an episode that takes place in the future and feels no remorse, and tried to force Hiro into killing his best friend Ando simply because Ando has no powers and is presumably useless. He just gets worse as time goes on, aiding Arthur Petrelli in his nonsensical murder of Adam Monroe and later killing Scott in cold blood. No surprise here, knowing that actor Jamie Hector played the equally ruthless and suave Marlo Stanfield on The Wire.
* If Knox was 'getting there', then Arthur Petrelli went all the way and came back with the T-shirt. He makes his introduction to the series as a Smug Snake, only getting worse as time went on, first by pointlessly and cruelly offing the one of the most sympathetic villains of the show, Adam Monroe, and goes on to commit some of the most heinous acts seen yet in Heroes, including mind-wiping Hiro into thinking he is ten years old, trying to kill his own sons, and repeatedly mind-wiping his wife Angela.illains from the BBC's Spooks are just a big void of warm and fuzzy feelings. Interestingly, the two very worst monsters in the series are complete opposites; one is the white supremacist who murders one of the main cast by shoving her head into a deep fat frier and the other is the Muslim cleric who turns ten year old boys into suicide bombers. Next to these two, a lot of the other villains in the series can come across as kind of cartoonish.
* Holly Oaks has these two sick individuals:
* Finn O'Connor is possibly the most evil teenager in the history of soap operas. He rapes John Paul out of homophobia, hospitalizes Blessing partly because he'd just found out she's transgender and partly to act out the sick stuff he'd been watching on his computer, tries to rape Nancy, blackmails a witness into keeping quiet by threatening to do the same to him, and at his trial he claims John Paul was the one that sexually abused him.
* Pete Buchanan is a sick pedophile who sexually assaulted Porsche McQueen when she was 15 years old and subjected her younger sisters, Celine and Cleo to varying levels of abuse, and now he's successfully blackmailed his way back into Cleo's life and he's trying to make sure she has no life or friends outside of him. Perhaps the worst thing about him is he acts like his treatment of Cleo is perfectly normal. It's a huge relief when he finally gets convicted and sent to prison.
* Johnny Cooper of Home and Away, probably the most evil of the show's villains. He and his group of surfers survive solely on the proceeds of armed robberies, and worse, he coerces his brother Rocco into helping them despite the latter's desire to go straight. When Rocco betrays him and puts him in jail, he has him killed by another member of the gang and then torments Rocco's foster brother after he is falsely convicted of his murder. A year later, he breaks out and attempts to kill Sally because she turned Rocco against him, while holding her brother hostage during the confrontation. Finally, he blackmails Sam into hiding him, possibly raping her offscreen at one point. And unlike villains like Sarah Lewis and Eve Jacobsen, there is never any suggestion of Johnny having a Freudian Excuse.
* Due to its morally ambiguous nature and realistic tendencies, Homicide: Life On the Street didn't have many of these, preferring to keep their villains as pathetic figures. But a few do stand out. The most prominent is Luther Mahoney, a Drug kingpin who has complete control over the Heroin deals in Baltimore. He escapes justice time and again and just loves rubbing his wealth and Karma Houdini status in the face of the Detectives. He's also very smart, making himself a pillar of his community that no one wants to think anything bad about. His crimes include murdering rival dealers and anyone who stands in his way, intimidating witnesses, and ordering murders. It's mentioned at one point that he is responsible for dozens of murders.
* JAG: Mustafa Atef a.k.a. Mohandesh, the in-universe number 3 in Al Qaeda was captured by U.S. Army Special Forces in Afghanistan and given the death penalty by a military tribunal.
* From Jonathan Creek: Alan Kallarnak. Granted, the man had a motive: as a fundamentalist Christian, he was furious that his ex-wife had an abortion. But what he does afterwards leads another character to claim that his "soul rightfully belongs in Hell". After discovering that his ex-wife had a child out of wedlock in her teenage years (one that she's befriended, but neglected to tell of his maternity), he approaches the now-grown son and convinces him to murder his own mother (without informing him that she is his mother; the son was actually in love with her and - being a bit mentally disturbed - couldn't understand why she didn't reciprocate). The son dutifully carries out the murder, and the woman dies reaching out for him. The scene in which she breaks down in front of her ex-husband, sobbing about how her own son wants to kill her, contains a moment in which the killer smiles to himself as he comes up with his plan, cementing his position as a Complete Monster. Upon learning this, neither Jonathan nor Carla are particularly inclined to turn his murderers over to the police once they determine who they are.
* Justified has several
* Harlan County crimelord Bo Crowder in season 1. To punish his son Boyd, he commands his nephew Johnny to savagely beat Boyd. When Boyd returns to his vigilante "church" in the forest, he discovers that Bo and his henchmen murdered all of his followers.
* Season 3 has Robert Quarles, a Detroit mob lieutenant. Quarles has no qualms about killing colleagues or mooks who outlive their usefulness, and he has a long history of abducting, torturing, and sexually abusing male hustlers. His antics were so alarming to the Detroit mob that he was exiled to Kentucky to manage the Oxy trade there.
* Legends of Tomorrow gives us Vandal Savage originally known as Hath-Set, is an immortal tyrant bent on world domination and the Big Bad for season 1. Starting out as an obsessive Stalker with a Crush to Chay-ara, the future Hawkgirl, Hath-Set murdered her and her lover Prince Khufu, the future Hawkman, when he discovered their relationship. After becoming immortal, he repeated this crime in each of their reincarnations, often resorting to extreme methods to do so, such as triggering a destructive flood, killing millions, and threatening to lay waste to Central City. Over the millennia, Savage has manipulated and worked with a number of historical figures, including Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, to help further his goals. In his campaign for world domination, Savage commits a number of terrible crimes, including horrifying human experimentation in attempts to replicate Hawkman and Firestorm's powers, selling a nuclear warhead to terrorist groups, and leading acult that worships him as a god. Acting as a mentor to Per Degaton in the 22nd century, Savage manipulates him into murdering his own father, then releases a biological weapon to decimate the world's population. Savage later betrays and murders Degaton, using his resources to take over the world. Conquering Earth by 2166, Savage causes billions of deaths, uses a giant robot as a weapon of mass destruction and personally murders Rip Hunter's wife and son, endlessly taunting Rip over this as they encounter each other throughout history. In the end, Savage attempts to cause a temporal paradox that will reset history back to Ancient Egypt, where he plans to start his war of conquest all over again.
* Leverage Anne Hannity is the most heinous villain yet featured on the show. She wanted to kill off the world's wheat market with a super-plague, so her own plague-resistant super-wheat would make her and, by extension, her company infinity billion dollars. She was going to starve the WHOLE PLANET in the name of Capitalism. She also threatens Archie Leach's family to make him help her, and attempts to murder the entire Leverage team when they find her out, asking them how they would like to be killed ("Mister Voorhees is flexible.") On a show where most villains are interested in stealing patents and building strip malls she, and her Dragon, cold-blooded Security Cheif Voorhees really stand out. Parker's mentor and Master Thief Archie even called the woman this.
* Lost has Anthony Cooper, the father of John Locke, whom he sired with a teenager half his age, and was a notorious Conman who formerly earned his money by having affairs with married women, scamming them out of their money, then ditching them once he had what he wanted. Flashbacks reveal that he was the man who scammed Sawyer's parents, resulting in Sawyer's father murdering his wife then committing suicide, something he's completely unapologetic about when he meets Sawyer as an adult. When he finally meets his son, John Locke, whom he had neglected before, he comes off as a kindly man and the father Locke has always wanted. In reality, it's just another scam. Cooper's kidneys are failing and the nice guy act was just a ruse to get Locke to donate a kidney to him, after which he coldly dumps his son, telling him he wants nothing to do with him. Later on, Locke is approached by a man named Peter Talbot, the son of a wealthy woman that Cooper is planning to marry for her money. When Talbot expresses a desire to stop the wedding to protect his mother, he later ends up mysteriously murdered. When Locke confronts his father on killing Talbot, his father responds by attempting to kill Locke himself, throwing him out of an eight-story-window and paralyzing him.
* Martin Keamy from season 4 works for Charles Widmore, who sent Keamy and his mercenary team to attack the island, capture Benjamin Linus, and kill anybody else. Keamy, despite being informed that a baby is among the innocents there, wages an all-out assault on the Barracks where Linus is held up; at least three survivors are killed before he arrives in front of Ben's house. There he brings out the 16-year-old Alex, Ben's foster daughter, and threatens to kill her if Ben doesn't leave the house by the time Keamy finishes his countdown. When Ben tries to resist Keamy's threats and negotiate instead, Keamy forgoes the rest of the countdown and coldly shoots the young girl in the head while her father watches. Keamy kills and threatens to kill several other innocent people (including one by slashing his throat), and also shows no emotion when he inadvertently kills his own loyal dragon Omar by kicking an active grenade that landed at his own feet over in Omar's direction. Upon being gravely wounded by Ben, Keamy reveals he has a bomb on the freighter he arrived on that's rigged to go off in the event of his death, just so he can kill as many people as possible when he goes out.. The psychopathic Keamy had the distinction of being one of the few villains in the series who just enjoyed killing people.
* Masters of Horror has lots and lots of terrible villains but none of them is as horrifying as the Serial Killer nicknamed "Moonface". He always kidnaps people from the road to brutally torture and murder them, taking care to dispose of their cars so no one will catch him. He typically uses an electric drill in his torture cellar to perforate his victims through the skull, eyes first. Then he crucifies the corpses and displays them around his lawn. He has also kept an elderly man captive for an untold amount of time to the point that the guy went completely crazy and became slavishly devoted to him. There are even some infant skeletons stashed around his cabin, still in their baby carriages.
* The Wicked Witch from Dreams in the Witch-House episode is not that much better. She habitually sacrifices babies for her magic rituals. She uses her abilities to force various men to kill them for her, destroying countless more lives in the process. She also uses a Shapeshifting Seducer trick to have sex with the protagonist by impersonating his neighbor, apparently to further mess with his mind for kicks. It's later discovered that there were at least 80 baby corpses hidden in the walls of the house going back all the way to the 1600s, so she has been willingly doing this for centuries and for seemingly no other reason than For the Evulz.
* Her servant rat with a human face, Brown Jerkin, is just as bad. He enjoys helping the witch in her evil and worst of all, while the witch dies in the episode, Jerkin stays alive and finishes the job for her by biting the baby to death. In the very end, he goes to prison in which the protagonist is sitting and bites him as well. Worst of all, unlike his boss, he is a Karma Houdini.
* From "The V Word," Mr. Chaney is a blood-thirsty vampire who sees his new transformation into a creature of the night as a great opportunity to murder people to his heart's content. He was also a pedophile before his undeath who sexually abused many boys at the school he worked at. He slaughters a mortuary's entire staff, turns two teenage boys in the age group he previously targeted to become his new obedient vamp minions and tries to force one of them to murder his little sister to prove himself to his new "master".
* That mad psychiatrist from the Mission Impossible episode "Mindbend", who works for The Syndicate and Mind Rapes petty crooks, brainwashing them into single-use hit men who kill themselves once they have killed their target.
* Monk monk is not known for sympathetic villains but one villain stands out as the most Vile. Stewart Babcock from the episode monk and the 12th man is a Vile serial killer who kills 11 people who served on a jury because he couldn't be bothered to find out which one of them was blackmailing him even though he had the resources to do so. Most of of his murders are brutal but in one scene he litrally drags a man to death with his car.
* Murder In Coweta County: A 1983 made-for-TV movie that told the true story of John Wallace, a wealthy Meriwether County, Georgia land baron, and moonshine runner who, in the 1940s, virtually ruled the county with an iron fist and had the sheriff in his back pocket. Wallace would brutally abuse his sharecroppers, such as the time he put a man's hands and feet in door jambs and slammed the door on them, all while appearing to be a kind charitable man. When Wilson Turner, who ran shine for Wallace, made a little too much money and made his runs a little too often, Wallace beats him severely and orders him off of his land. Knowing that Wallace had several judges in his pocket, Turner steals a prized cow from Wallace's pasture. Wallace then has Turner arrested, released "on a lack of evidence", then ambushed at the gas station. Turner tries to flee but soon runs out of gas, and is beaten to death by Wallace and his thugs. When Wallace is finally arrested and sentenced to death, his last statement is: "Almighty God, only You know my true heart. Prepare to receive me into Your House."
* NCIS has its fair share:
* Special mention must go to two men who forced a young boy to try to suicide bomb a high school. Their reason? A petty vendetta over something the boy's mother did 18 years ago.
* Ari. After breaking into NCIS, shooting and wounding Gerald and Gibbs in the process, he later kills Kate and tries to kill Abby and Jenny because Gibbs reminds him of his dad. He casually manipulates innocents (giving a doll with a guided missile tracking signal inside it to a little girl)/sacrifices his mooks (who, given their affiliations, aren't terribly sympathetic either) just so he can get close enough to the team to hurt them directly. It is worth noting that (as foreshadowed when Ducky wonders what could create such a person) Ari does have a fairly elaborate Freudian Excuse, if being manipulated and groomed specifically to become a mole by his father from birth even falls under that category. There have been more than a few worse criminals on the show, but Ari is mainly set apart in how he got to the NCIS team itself.
* Kyle Boone from the episode "Mind Games"; he kidnaps and tortures women (and cuts off their tongues)! Think that's bad enough? He also snaps pictures of their suffering and keeps them in a journal (though he said he doesn’t need that; they will always be in his memories). His first victim was his own mother!
* NCIS: Los Angeles has recently gained one as well in Season 3 in the form of "the Chameleon." To elaborate, this is the guy who often runs several cartels from behind the scenes, and the closest thing to an MO that he has is that he acts as the driver. He gained a wound on his mouth via G. Callen, who at the time believed him to merely be the driver. He then proceeds to kill a lot of people by incinerating them alive inside their cars, often covering himself by using various dialects. Afterwards, he plays a dangerous game of "hide and seek" where he forces people to act as him to lure them to dead ends, which often results in their deaths in the process. Oh, and he also kidnapped and killed a Russian police officer so he could pose as him and infiltrate the NCIS headquarters to "aid" them in finding him. His final appearance was his most monstrous depiction: He arranged to have Agent Roarke join up with a family of illegal Arms Dealers (and arranged for a fake exchange with some dealers he hired without informing them of the packages) with the intention of setting him up to be caught and for NCIS to get involved. Turns out, the family did fall for the trick against his expectations, so he sent anonymous tips to both the dealers and the NCIS agents revealing that he was an agent, and that his cover was compromised, respectively. After the NCIS team killed most of the family at the area (and arresting the accountant) to rescue him, he then sniped Roarke across the jaw, forcing him into ER before he died from a heart attack, and he kills the Red Herring sniper member of the family in order to leave a message to Callen, and he later kills Agent Hunter via Car Bomb in front of NCIS before he lets himself get arrested. He also arranged for Hunter to leak a video to NCIS via password about what he wants, and even the password while also making it seem as though he didn't want her to get it in order to lure Callen's team into a death trap while Callen kept watch over him (which they only survived after Callen deduced his plan), and he forces them into a Sadistic Choice to release him in exchange for an American agent who was caught in Iran and had valuable information of security weaknesses in the United States, and killing his allies at some point earlier (and it is also strongly implied near the end that the Iranians were going to be informed by the Chameleon anyways about the security weaknesses even if the prisoner exchange went off without a hitch). Even when he died, he ended up having Cullen's life potentially stigmatized anyways via a breaking news report when Cullen decided midway through the prisoner exchange that he simply cannot let the Chameleon live after the atrocities he committed, even if it meant disobeying his superiors and getting himself arrested by the LAPD.
* Pritam Mondal, from season 7's "Seventh Child", runs a terrorist organization that kidnaps children in third world countries and raises them to become suicide bombers against the US, by brainwashing them into believing that their parents abandoned them and that the only way to reach heaven was to kill themselves in the name of Islam. He has done this to many children and some end up so psychologically damaged that they would rather blow themselves than receive help. When one of the children rebels against Pritam, he still straps the bomb vest on him and his twin brother and forces them to blow themselves up in a public, with the twin brother getting killed. When NCIS breaches his headquarters he was more than willing to surrender to them just so he won't get killed. When NCIS agent Kensi Blye calls him out on his willingness to save himself despite telling children they should sacrifice themselves, Pritam simply responds with a grin.
* Malcolm Tallridge and John Bordinay from season 1's "Ambush" are the heads of a dangerous militia group called "Enhancing Law Enforcement", a group known for killing immigrants or anyone who remotely looks like one, and a group which has stolen several anti-tank missiles. Tallridge, the leader, would order the hits, while Bordinay, described by Special Agent Mike Renko as a "paranoid nut job", served as his second-in-comand, and would carry them out without the slightest hesitation. Their actions resulted in the deaths of over a dozen immigrants, including three children, who were chased into the desert and died of thirst. They are also just as brutal and ruthless to their men; when a member, Scott Reilly, brings in NCIS agent Callen into their fold without their knowledge, they have Reilly killed without a second thought.
* Some minor villains in The Shield who only last one or two episodes. The doctor who bought a seven-year old girl, kept her in a cage, and repeatedly raped her definitely fits this trope, as does the old sadist who sexually abused his foster daughters and force-fed Drano to the youngest one. But several villains are so despicable that they earn a "special" place in the viewers' hearts:
* Armadillo Quintero, easily the most sickening villain on the show. A young Mexican drug lord, Armadillo is a calm and easy-going guy who likes to stay at home with a book. And a child to rape. After crossing the border, he united two rival Latino gangs under his own command by "necklacking" their leaders with car tires, then drenching them in petrol and burning them alive. But his Moral Event Horizon comes after this -- a man he murdered had a cute twelve-year old sister who refused to keep quiet like her family told her. Instead, the little girl went by herself to the police and testified against Armadillo. Later, the cops took in Armadillo for questioning, and when he sat alone in the cell for six hours, he found the girl's lost comb and began laughing eerily to himself. He is released for lack of proof, and the same night, the little girl is nowhere to be found. When she finally comes limping home in a daze, Armadillo has brutally raped her and tattooed his gang sign -- a dove -- onto her face.
* Antwon Mitchell from the fourth season takes the cake as the prime villain on the show, because he is a Magnificent Bastard as well as a Large Ham. But what cemented him on this page, besides replacing crack cocaine with heroin on the streets, was his murder of a thirteen-year old Woobie. After forcing the girl's mother to overdose on heroin, his thugs capture her and hold her in front of two cops. After taunting the weeping girl, Antwon takes their weapons -- to incriminate the cops and bind them to him forever -- and empties his whole magazine into her head.
* Sean, the serial killer from Season 1, is definitely one. Aside from raping and murdering a twelve year old, he has over twenty further bodies to his credit. He thinks of himself as smarter than the police and thinks he is special. Then Dutch completely rips him apart with one glorious line: "If you're so special, how come a lowly civil servant like me just caught you?"
* Vic himself is kept out of this territory for much of the series because he mainly goes after other Complete Monsters such as the above mentioned characters, though he has plenty of Kick the Dog moments to his credit, such as his murder of Terry Crowley, which was the crossing of the Moral Event Horizon for a lot of fans. But his behavior near the end of the series definitely qualifies, particularly when he becomes an informant in the last season and lets Ronnie take the full heat for his crimes, showing him for what he truly is: a violent and unrepentant bully who only looks out for himself. His Humiliation Conga in the final episode is very, very much deserved.
* In Once Upon a Time, the greatest evil is not the Evil Queen, Rumpelstiltskin, Captain Hook, or the Queen of Hearts - it's Peter Pan. He's the amoral, self centered, sociopathic boy of the original tale taken Up to Eleven and stripped of any redeeming qualities. Pan is a demon boy who sends his shadow to take children away from their homes and families to Neverland and once there, they are made his servants who are never permitted to leave. All who try to leave he has the shadow kill by taking out their souls. He has an extreme Lack of Empathy for anyone who isn't himself, only thinks about his own interests above all else, and delights in torturing and destroying others, mentally and physically. because it amuses him. Since he was dying due to Neverland's magic leaving him, his ultimate plan that was decades in the making was to absorb the heart of the child who is the truest believer in magic, so that he can then absorb the magic of the entire island in order to become all-powerful and immortal, while the child dies in his place. That said child is Henry Mills, his own great-grandson. Since Henry must give up his heart willingly, Pan emotionally manipulates Henry, playing off his psyche and pretending to be his friend. On the side, he kept Wendy Darling captive for years and used her life as leverage so that her two brothers (kept alive by his magic) could do his work running the anti-magic organization on Earth. Once his initial plan fails, he swaps bodies with Henry and plans to re-cast the Dark Curse on Storybrooke so that it can be frozen in time and he can become it's ruler, making it the new Neverland. The citizens would be him to torture as he pleases, as he puts it "death is final - their suffering will be eternal." The kicker? Pan is in truth Malcolm, a callous, negligent Psychopathic Manchild who abandoned his son Rumpelstiltskin for the power of eternal youth. Unlike most villains on the show, Pan does not value family, as he emotionally abused and resented his son from day one since he hates the responsibilities of adulthood. To Pan, a baby is a "pink, naked, squirming little larva who eats away at his hopes and dreams." He even places more value and so-called love on his Psycho Supporter Felix, whom he kills without hesitation or remorse when it's needed to complete a curse, than he does for his own child, and ultimately attempts to murder his entire family just because he knows how much they mean to Rumpelstiltskin. Feared and loathed by all, Pan was a nightmarish character whose end was very well deserved!
* The spin-off series, Once Upon A Time In Wonderland gave us Jafar. As the Big Bad of the story, Jafar is as bad as it gets. A true Bastard Bastard and Evil Sorcerer extraordinaire, his plan is to enslave three genies and use their combined magical powers to wish for the rules of magic to be changed so that he may the all-powerful ruler of Wonderland. Cruel, utterly ruthless, devoid of empathy, and detached from humanity, not an episode goes by in which he does not threaten, manipulate, torture, murder, or all at once in order to get what he wants. Jafar's most noteworthy atrocities were changing the woman who loved him and taught him sorcery into his serpent staff, threatening to murder Alice's father in order to make her surrender her two remaining magic wishes, and not only murdering a young woman in cold blood just to get a reaction out of her lover, but later reviving her and making her fall in love with him right in front of said lover, who is powerless to stop it. Worst of all is that we're led to believe that he ultimately just wants love from his abusive father and wishes to change the rules of magic in order to force him to give him affection, but it's revealed that he really wanted to make his father love him so that the peace of mind and vengeance he'd get out of murdering him afterwards would be sweeter. In the end, all Jafar truly wanted was power to do whatever he pleased with.
* The 456 from Torchwood: Children of Earth, while being Starfish Aliens, are very definitely examples of this trope. After taking control of all the world's children in order to communicate, it turns out that they use human children in some nasty symbiotic way in order to get high and are bargaining to take 10% of the world's children to use as drugs or else they Kill All Humans. This is a protection racket, and they would almost certainly have been back for more later. One child is seen hooked up to one of them and it's shown that he's been a human reefer for over 40 years. It's really twisted and nasty.
* Also, in Children of Earth, Prime Minister Green calmly allows 10% of the world's children to be sold as NARCOTICS, orders the man who's been most loyal to him to give up his own children, just to make the cover story he's created realistic - which leads Frobisher to shoot his family and himself to spare them the horror. And after all the horror and pain, Green's first thought is "How do I blame the Americans for this?". The knowledge that he's certainly going to be put in prison, if not "Disappeared" by UNIT or executed for treason, is highly comforting. Granted, there's a whole Punch Clock Villain ensemble that's going to avoid the punishment meted out to the more visible Green.
* Oswald Danes from Torchwood: Miracle Day, a convicted child rapist and killer whose defense in court was "she should have run faster." After surviving his execution due to becoming immortal (along with everyone else on Earth), he starts playing the media for forgiveness and seems well on his way to becoming a Dark Messiah. On top of that, throughout the season, it's implied that he does have some guilt over what he did and wants to die -- then the finale shows that these Death Seeker qualities actually make him more of a monster, not less. Why? Because he seems to believe that when he dies, he'll be able to torture his previous victim forever in Hell -- in fact, his last words are to yell out that he's coming for her and that she should start running.
* Psych: While a comedy/drama, it has a real standout example in the form of serial killer Karl Rotmensen, also known as Mr. Yin. The brains behind him and his partner and daughter Yang, Yin is introduced by murdering several people, rearranging their corpses to make a Yin-Yang symbol. Being a fan of both Alfred Hitchcock and sick mind games, Yin tested his wits against protagonist Shawn Spencer by going after the people he loves. He succeeds in murdering Mary Lightly, a recurring character and acquaintance of Shawn's in a recreation of a scene from Psycho while forcing Shawn and Gus to watch helplessly. After that, he kidnaps Shawn's then girlfriend Abigail as well as Shawn's ongoing love interest, Juliet, and forces him to save one of them or go after him. In his second appearance, he kidnaps both Shawn and Gus and prepares to murder Gus with a poison injection, forcing Shawn to watch while explaining to him that he had something special planned for "him". Thankfully, whenever Shawn convinces Yang to stand up to him, she murders him by stabbing him with the injection. Sadly, even Yang was never worth anything to Yin, despite being his daughter. Yin never loved her and groomed her into the psycho she is today so he could use her as a tool to assist in his murders.
* Anubis from Stargate SG-1. He used to be a System Lord before he was banished by the other Goa'uld, who considered his actions unspeakable even by their evil standards. (Bear in mind that this is a race of megalomaniacal Puppeteer Parasites who think nothing of torturing their dethroned rivals to death, then bringing them back to life and doing it again. And again. And again.) And his ultimate plan before he finally got taken out was to wipe out all life in the galaxy - all of it, mind you - so he could use the Ancient knowledge he retained to entirely recreate a galaxy's worth of races that would worship him as God.
* Horrifically, Repli-Carter might count as a cross between one of these and a Magnificent Bastard...she betrays both Fifth and Carter in very short order, manipulating Carter into feeling sympathetic because Carter believes Fifth was cruel to Repli-Carter. Turns out, she was merely using Carter's torture experience as grounds to manipulate her. Then, she killed Fifth, not out of vengeance or emotion, but to fuel her ambition to consume the galaxy. When real Carter showed signs of sympathy, Repli-Carter coldly and calmly, with a strangely static and uncaring version of the mannerism's real Carter would use when comforting someone, told her that Fifth wasn't worth any empathy because he was weak. She then set about wiping out the Milky Way, with her army devouring God knows how many people, ships, and planets. Eventually, she captured and attempted to torture one of Carter's best friends. Despite claiming that the real Carter's emotions and memories weren't meaningless to her, and having 'given her word' that she wouldn't invade earth or kill Daniel Jackson, she promptly did both. So, in short: in the few months she existed she killed her fellow replicator and creator, Fifth; psychologically manipulated and tortured her human progenitor, Samantha Carter; committed galactic genocide; captured and killed one of her progenitor's very best friends and attempted to conquer their home planet; and all this in the image of a beloved galactic heroine, with just a little more ambition and a little less sentiment.
* Doesn't help that Amanda played such an amazing psychopath.
* Oz has Vernon Schillinger (the leader of the Nazi gang and a sadistic rapist, who makes his son kill an 8 year old), Simon Adebisi (a drug dealer and rapist, he injected a man with AIDS, decapitated an unarmed policeman, and killed a man by feeding him ground glass for a month), and Malcolm Coyle (a gang member who raped a dying woman and stabbed her baby "for fun"). Spoilered for the weak-stomached.
* Timmy Kirk is a two-faced, overly zealous Manipulative Bastard whose crime was, arguably, far FAR more evil than anything that could be dreamed of by Schillinger. He leaves an infant to die inside a rat infested dumpster while its mother pleaded for mercy.
* Madan Senki Ryukendo has Baron Bloody, a demonic robot scientist. In his first appearance, he sets up the death of Noble Demon Jack Moon to use his body in his own experiments. Later, it is revealed that he is responsible for the death of the Sixth Ranger's parents...who tried to stop him from blowing up Europe. When confronted by said Sixth Ranger, he proudly takes responsibility and casually refers his parents as 'foolish couple'. Where the other villains still have some sense of humor in their plans, Bloody's plans are downright vicious. Luckily, he's no Karma Houdini, since his death involves screaming in fear, having an axe shoved into his mouth, and releasing a painful scream when he falls down to his death.
* In Primeval, Helen Cutter wants to wipe out the whole of humanity before it even began and along the way she'll screw with the cast's lives and minds just for the hell of it. She even shoots said husband immediately after he saves her from a burning building (which was only on fire to begin with because of the suicide bomber she sent).
* Parodied on an episode of Reno 911: the cops appear to be overreacting (as usual) to their prisoner, a normal-looking young boy in a little-league uniform. They leave Lt. Dangle to watch the boy, whom he gently admonishes and sends away. The cops return and yell at Dangle for letting the kid who raped his little sister to death escape.
* Brainiac from Smallville has no emotions and is fond of skewering people through the head and draining the info from their brains. Despite being nearly equal to Clark in power, he prefers to perform complex manipulations to make others do his dirty work for him (including infecting Mrs. Kent with a deadly disease just to trick Clark into releasing General Zod from the Phantom Zone), putting Lana in a coma to force Clark and Kara to help him, giving Clark's secret to Lex, bodyjacking Chloe and using her as part of a plot to brainwash Doomsday, and trying on three separate occasions to Kill All Humans via deadly viruses. In the Wonderful Life episode, without Clark to stop him, Brainiac triggers a nuclear holocaust, saying the world is now perfect for Zod, Zod's consort Supergirl, and himself to rule. And that's not getting into his cannibalism of the silicon in peoples' bodies when he needs to rebuild himself, or his condescending personality, or the fact that Bizarro, Lex, and the various other villains who appear are all disgusted by him. Incapable of empathy, and dedicated to the annihilation of all organic life, Brainaic was easily the most vile foe that Clark ever faced.
* Lx-3, a failed clone of Lex Luthor who was so depraved that even the LuthorCorp staff at Cadmus Labs felt the need to incarcerate him. Accidentally freed by Tess Mercer, Lx-3 beats her and handcuffs her in place, tries to kill the five year old Lx-15 then grabs a blowtorch proceeds to set fire to the lab, slaughtering all the other clones while claiming that "There can only be one Lex Luthor!" Making his way to Metropolis, Lx-3 wires the Daily Planet building to explode, planning to crush hundreds of people in the streets below, then journeys to Smallville where he kidnaps Lois Lane, ties her to a stake, and sets the field around her on fire. Confronting Clark, Lx-3 gloats that Clark can save the woman he loves, or the citizens of Metropolis but not both, sneering that Clark's pride will be the death of him yet. Almost out of time thanks to Clone Degeneration, Lx-3 spends his last moments trying to force Clark into violating his moral code by killing him. Not bad for a one episode villain.
* Desaad is Darkseid's Number Two, and unlike his underwhelming master is determined to live up to his reputation, unnerving even his Co-Dragons, Granny Goodness and Gordon Godfrey. Operating a chain of BDSM-themed nightclubs, Desaad uses them as a front to corrupt the minds of his clientele, making them susceptible to a mass Mind Rape by Darkseid. Anyone who cannot be corrupted is gruesomely murdered, as Desaad uses his telekenetic powers to induce hemorraging and implode their internal organs, leading to an agonising death from internal bleeding. Having disposed of several FBI agents who were investigating him, Desaad kidnaps Chloe and subjects her to an extended Mind Rape, attempting to turn her into one of Darkseid's minions. When she proves resistant, Desaad tries to kill her, tries to kill Clark when the latter intervenes to save her, and then turns Oliver Queen/Green Arrow into a minion of Darkseid after provoking the archer into brutally beating him. Incarcerated under Belle Reve, Desaad breaks out, gives the now mind controlled Oliver a Gold K ring, and tries to force him to depower Clark, so that the future Superman can be slain and the end of the world ushered in. Devoted to freeing Darkseid and bringing about The End of the World as We Know It, Desaad is equal parts Torture Technician, cultist, and Serial Killer.
* MANY villains on Supernatural come very close to this trope. After all, they are, for the most part, monsters, and that's what they do. As a result, it takes a special kind of evil to actually qualify. Here are the assorted bastards:
* Alistair. Hell's Grand Inquisitor, he gets a real kick out of torturing the innocent and trying to turn good people to the dark side. He regularly torments Dean about what he made him do in Hell and enjoys his job far too much. And that's without getting into the crap he pulls while hunting Anna.
* Lilith, the Queen Bitch of all of Supernatural. Just for starters, she enjoys possessing little girls and tormenting their families on her days off, convincing them their child has gone mad and then killing them one by one. "Grandpa, you made me mad." She spends the entire season tormenting Sam and Dean, doing her best to break them and force them to open the final seal imprisoning Lucifer to bring about the end of the world. She's creepy. She's sadistic. And, oh yeah, she Eats Babies. Cannot repeat that often enough. She eats freaking babies. Not for power or anything, but to Kick the Dog. A truly heinous, vile piece of scum.
* The leader of the Leviathans, commonly known by assumed name Dick Roman, wasted no time in establishing himself as one of the worst Supernatural's ever had to offer. Not content with simply lurking in the shadows to feed on humanity, Roman planted his minions in key positions, murdering and devouring every human in the way. Taking control of a major company, Roman began to place chemicals in corn syrup so humanity would be rendered helpless as cattle for the Leviathans to feed on. The Winchesters, who he knew could prove an issue, he framed for a nation-wide killing spree. Other monster species were seen as 'competition,' with Roman planning to exterminate them as well after manipulating them into helping him. A Bad Boss even by the show's standards, Roman was known to devour his minions in a fit of rage or 'bib' them: forcing them to devour themselves. Few villains on Supernatural have managed to inspire the same fear or hatred as Roman did, and his killing of Bobby Singer only deepened the hatred the Winchester brothers had for him.
* Captain Selto Durka of Farscape. A Peacekeeper captain legendary among the ranks for "getting results", he spends a good deal of his appearances torturing people; not only did he torture Rygel for years long before the story began, but during his second episode, he also left the comm channel open so the rest of the crew would hear him burning Aeryn's face off. Oh, and then there was that attempt to abort Moya's child just so she would be capable of Starbursting to safety. Which makes Rygel killing him, cutting his head off, and keeping it as a trophy very satisfying.
* Natira. As if being Scorpius' ex-girlfriend wasn't bad enough, she clearly gets off on torture and mass-murder: when an unwanted shipment of slaves ends up in her hands, she has all but one of them executed for her own amusement. Then she takes aside Rorf and Crichton for a little game of "I love your lying eyes", and you begin to realise just why Scorpius doesn't want her around (apart from the assassination attempt).
* Kaarvok would probably outdo every other Farscape example here if he'd had any more screentime. As a cannibalistic Mad Scientist with a hand-held cloning machine on standby, he's willing to do anything to ensure that he has more food...or family; he's forgotten that there's a difference. This includes cloning his victims (before killing one in front of the other), keeping Rovhu's traumatized Pilot alive so his regenerating limbs can be harvested for meat, and forcing members of Moya's crew to breed with his degenerate clone army just so he'd have something tastier than clone-brains to look forward to.
* Captain Jenek earns this title when he incinerates a test subject's unborn child when it shows no sign of unique development.
* Commandant Grayza, who spent her second episode date-raping John Crichton before going on to sell out entire sections of inhabited space to the atrocity-prone Scarran Imperium. And when she screws up, she's not prepared to go down unless she takes everyone aboard her command carrier with her - men, women, and children. Thankfully, Braca managed to stop her.
* Tauza from "Incubator"? Not only was she in charge of a hybridization project that had at least ninety Sebacean women raped, but she also abused the surviving offspring, Scorpius, to an unbelievable extent - all in an attempt to purge him of "Sebacean impurities": torturing him with heat lamps, beating him savagely for using the word "please", and forcing him to watch a recording of his mother being raped. Then Tauza made the mistake of showing her back to Scorpius, and she paid for it - hard.
* The Sopranos has two examples:
* Livia Soprano stands out even in a world of brutal gangsters. Livia derives little pleasure save to hurt and makes others miserable, even telling Tony's wife he'd get bored with her on their wedding day. Livia psychologically tortures Tony as much as she can and even has a hit put out on him in revenge for trying to put her in a nursing home. Her abuse of Tony has been there for years. She even tried to stick him in the eyes with a fork when he was a child.
* Richie Aprile sticks out as the most crazy and evil gangster in a world of crazy and evil gangsters. Impulsive, violent, greedy and callous, Richie at one point paralyzes a man with a car solely for perceiving disrespect. He's such a loose cannon, Tony has to stop him from murdering gamblers at their casino for no reason. He also beats his fiancee for nothing more than saying she'd accept his son for being gay, which culminates in her snapping and murdering him herself.
* Carla from Burn Notice. She finds operatives to help in her activities by blackmail mostly, usually involving threats to their families, and has no problem causing sheer pain to one's family as a warning. Her activities are also usually undertaken with no regard for the lives of anyone, including her operatives, who are killed if she finds any possibility of them compromising the operation. One of the few villains on the show who was killed directly by one of the protagonists, and hardly not deserving.
* There is also Simon, a Psycho for Hire who proved too homicidal for Management's taste and had his profile switched with Michael's. After seeing what he did, it's surprising Michael wasn't assassinated by the government to protect the citizenry.
* Blue Duck in the Lonesome Dove miniseries, a half breed Indian murderer and rapist, he kidnaps and rapes Lori and kills a few people, including a child. At the end, he is finally caught and about to be hung when he jumps out of a window, taking a guard with him, and both are killed.
* Michael Cambias on All My Children is a cut above the typical Soap Opera villain. Coming to Pine Valley with a goal of taking over all the major corporations based there, he utilizes spies and starts by using Erica Kane’s daughters, Bianca and Kendall, to try and take over Erica’s company/steal top-secret formulas/documents, etc. Exploiting Kendall’s connection to Erica and her many issues with her mother, Michael (initially using an alias) seduces Kendall and proceeds to send one of his spies and secret lover, Lena, to seduce Bianca. Lena winds up falling for Bianca but is forced to continue working for Michael due to threats against Lena’s mother. Kendall, meanwhile, finds out about the affair between Michael and Lena and decides to become a double agent. When Michael catches her in his condo trying to steal his files, he attempts to rape Kendall but Erica stops him and saves her daughter. After Erica double crosses him by pretending to leave her company, Michael tries to rape Erica but Kendall manages to stop him and save her mother. When he's thwarted from that, he goes and rapes Bianca—getting back at all three women in one fell swoop, as Bianca is simultaneously Kendall's sister, Erica's daughter, and Lena's girlfriend.
* In the new V series, the Big Bad is the Visitor leader Anna, who definitely qualifies as a Complete Monster. So far, she's ordered fellow Visitors to skin other Visitors alive, forced Georgie to watch the memories of the Visitors who murdered his family in such a way that he experiences it all over again and can't stop watching, and ordered some of her other minions to break her daughter's legs - after smacking her to the floor. She is as completely emotionless as all other non-Fifth Column Visitors as she does these things, and in one scene, she casually expresses her intention to eviscerate some Fifth Column members. Even her sidekick Marcus - himself mostly emotionless - occasionally seems mildly uncomfortable with how cold-hearted she is.
* It was the sheer casualness of Anna turning to her minion and telling them to "break her legs" (referring to her own daughter), then cheerfully walking away afterwards that sealed the deal on just how monstrous this woman (read: genocidal alien queen) is.
* Let's not forget her habit of emotionlessly mating with underlings chosen for their genetic superiority while refusing to look them in the face, then EATING them!
* In Season Two, Anna has become even more vicious. Within two episodes, she's casually slaughtered one of her own fleet captains in front of a crowd just to prove a point and ordered the murder of the woman carrying a human/Visitor hybrid baby. The way Anna constantly refers to the baby as "it" is incredibly disturbing, and to make matters worse, she is now torturing the newborn infant just to manipulate Ryan, the baby's father. Total, absolute monster.
* She becomes still worse later in Season Two - especially the finale, "Mother's Day". To make a long story short, she has twisted said hybrid, Amy, into a murderous little hellspawn who kills Ryan in cold blood and later helps her Bliss all of mankind; she has figured out how to use emotions to manipulate people, particularly Lisa, by pretending to love her; and she has locked Lisa away in Diana's prison (after murdering Diana in full view of her people, too) and forced her to watch Fake Lisa mate with and eat Tyler. No Karmic Death would be good enough for her by now. Diana was Anna's own mother, and worse yet, when Diana - just before succumbing to her wounds - states that Anna's actions have doomed them all, Anna doesn't even flinch, suggesting that she no longer cares about her own race anymore - she just wants to gain power over everyone she can and torment those who stand against her For the Evulz. What a bitch.
* Chuck usually plays most of its villains for laughs, being a dramedy. The exception, however, is Ring operative Daniel Shaw, who has multiple heinous acts over the course of the third season. He has the Freudian Excuse of a murdered wife, but the extremes he goes to avenge her pushes him way over the line. Attempting to murder Sarah in revenge may be slightly understandable, but once he returns with an intersect in his head, obsessed with Chuck, there's no grey area anymore. He murders Chuck's father to compromise his feelings and proceeds to wire the Buy-More with bombs in the middle of a sale.
* And let us not forget the man who put Daniel Shaw on the road to The Dark Side, the Ring Director. This man was responsible not only for all of the evil antics over the course of the first three seasons, which doesn't qualify him for this title by itself, but what does is how he took particular pleasure in showing Daniel the person at whom he should direct his vengeful rage over the loss of his wife, knowing that Shaw's whole reason for living was to kill said person, whom Daniel told the audience and Sarah he thought an agent of the Ring.
* BOB from Twin Peaks. The rape and murder of Laura Palmer is just the tip of the iceberg, as he's a demonic entity who feeds on the fear and pain he inflicts through Demonic Possession of hapless people. Also doesn't help that he's a Complete Monster and an Eldritch Abomination rolled into one.
* Lie to Me had Andrew Jenkins, a serial rapist who kidnapped, tortured, blinded, and raped 12 women, and then let them go explicitly because he wanted them to live on to think about him every day. His copycat is almost as bad, first seeking out and marrying one of the victims to "be close to what he did to [her]" and then starting his own crime spree himself.
* Martin, the titular psychopath in the aptly-named episode "Beat the Devil", a psychology student who gains Lightmans' notice when he is aroused by pictures of women being tortured; Cal correctly surmises that he has probably already killed people, and it turns out that he is, in fact, a Serial Killer, whose M.O. was water boarding young girls repeatedly, then killing them after forcing them to dig their own graves. The water boarding thing is part of his pathology - he does it because, when he was a boy, his sister drowned in their swimming pool; he didn't murder her, but he saw her drowning and decided to not raise the alarm. The reason?
* The Oliver Stone-produced sci-fi miniseries Wild Palms has two flavors of Complete Monster: Evil Matriarch Josie Ito and Creepy Child Coty Wyckoff.
* The League of Gentlemen is full of undesirables, but Papa Lazarou takes the cake as the worst of all. His actions include but are not limited to capturing women and locking them in a cage to have water sprayed at them by his dwarf minions and stitching people up inside his circus animals.
* The Mentalist has some criminals who are flat out irredeemable and unsympathetic.
* One is obviously Red John, the serial killer that was responsible for Patrick Jane's involvement with the CBI. Red John's sexual perversions and sadism led him to torturing and murdering women. Early in his career, Patrick Jane, then a phony psychic, said he would use his "powers" to help the police catch Red John. Unfortunately Jane made the mistake of insulting Red John on the air, which caused the killer to murder Jane's wife and young daughter. Years later, Red John is mostly "retired" from serial killing, but he still kills many, either to silence loose ends or to play mind games with Jane. Some of Red John's most notable crimes include murdering a teenage girl and kidnapping her twin sister to lure Jane into a trap; having Sam Bosco's entire CBI team killed; kidnapping Kristina Frye and brainwashing her into believing she's dead, all because she empathized with him on television; having Madeline Hightower's cousin tortured to death to get information on where she was hiding, then later sending a mole to murder her and her kids; trying to get Jane to murder his best friend and Love Interest, Teresa Lisbon; murdering a woman because Jane had a happy memory of her as a child; and decapitating the therapist who helped Jane recover from his psychological breakdown following his family's death. Red John is also the mastermind of the Blake Association, a criminal conspiracy and protection racket for corrupt law enforcement officials and controls them from behind the scenes. In addition, Red John has his own devoted followers, usually comprised of psychotics and killers, that help him in his crimes or vice versa. However, their lives mean nothing to him, and he either kills them when they outlive their usefulness or drives them to suicide in order to protect himself. Overall, Red John is a raging narcissist with a massive ego and a god complex. He is driven by an intense need for attention and gets off on the power he has by holding thousands of lives in his hands.
* Tommy Volker is a Corrupt Corporate Executive responsible for the slaughter of over three hundred Amazonian tribesmen when they refused to relinquish their land so he could use it for development of his geothermal project. When a journalist finds evidence Volker was behind the massacre, he manipulates an old friend into sabotaging her car. While his friend believed it was only a prank he was pulling, Volker intended her to die and had his assassin, Charles Milk, trail her. After her crash, Milk suffocated her, stole the evidence that implicated Volker, and Volker left his "friend" to serve as the fall guy for his scheme. At the same time, CBI Agent Teresa Lisbon convinced Volker's secretary, Rebecca Shaw, to provide evidence against him. In response, Volker visited Shaw that night with his assassin, and watched, smiling, as he strangled her to death. This apparently is a habit of Volker's, as he's also shown attending the strangulation of another employee who intended to reveal Volker's involvement in the Amazonian tribe massacre. Loyal employees fair little better with Volker as he has Charles Milk assassinated in a drive-by shooting, along with two innocent bystanders, when Lisbon got too close to Milk, and later promised to kill another of his hired goons just because the man was interrogated by the police. When Volker discovered a little boy had witnessed one of his crimes, he had no reservations in personally trying to execute him when other hitmen of his refused to do so. A cold-blooded sociopath, Volker was driven by nothing other than a disturbing mixture of greed and sadism.
* Alastair Crane. Just Alastair Crane of Passions. His list of crimes seems completely endless. He has forced his grandson to rape his granddaughter, attempted to murder everyone in his family, committed several counts of rape, faked the deaths of two of his grandchildren, his daughter's lovers, his ex-wife, and her sister, leaving his daughter to believe that she killed her mother, tricked Whitney into believing she had slept with her brother, and he committed most of these crimes for two reasons, to find a suitable heir or simply because it amused him.
* Several of the killers in City Homicide, beginning in the pilot with Dr Sean Macready, a psychiatrist who kills over a dozen children by starting fires, each time making them look like electrical accidents. His motive each time is to punish his adulterous female patients, five of which later killed themselves, something he probably caused through his sessions with them. The one point of sympathy he gets is that his own children were killed in a fire when his wife was away with her own lover, but then it's implied that he started that fire as well. He is killed at the end of the episode when he unsuccessfully attempts to pull one of his victims into the fire, after the other two had escaped.
* The following episode has Brett Semple, the teenage illegitimate son of an armed robber who gets involved with his father's gang after he goes missing, and then proves himself to be far worse: he kills a bank teller in cold blood during a heist, and later shoots at the police when they come for him, with his own mother in the room. The ironic part is that Brett's father kept out of his life specifically to avoid tainting him and bringing him down that path.
* Frances Deerborne, who murders her husband's rich family, down to his younger siblings and the housekeeper, to ensure that he receives his inheritance. It is suggested that she intends to kill him later and Make It Look Like an Accident.
* Daniel Worthington, a misogynistic serial rapist who specifically targets strong women who he can't dominate in any other way. Worse, he drugs his wife and daughter during a movie night so that he can leave to commit his rapes, while ensuring they'll provide an alibi for him. The only reason he fails to get away with it is because Claudia baits him during her interrogation of him, and he forgoes his overseas trip to target her.
* Skins has two;
* Josh Stock from Series 1. He initially seems to be a nice guy, but when Tony screws him over he invites his 14-year-old sister Effy to a party, gets her drugged up until she loses consciousness, and tries to force Tony to have sex with her. his Karma Houdini status doesn't help.
* Dr. Foster from Series 4, who attempts to Mind Rape Effy and murders Freddie and tries to do the same to Cook. Even his "excuse" is just further evidence that he's a twisted, sick bastard: he's infatuated with Effy, his teenage patient.
* The drug smuggler (possibly named Arkie Ragan) in Bangkok Hilton. Using various aliases, he seduces young women and uses them to smuggle heroin overseas. When Kat gets arrested in Thailand, he abandons her with no apparent remorse about the fact that she will be sentenced to death and proceeds onto his next run.
* Most of the villains in Fringe have some trait establishing them as more of an Anti-Villain. The unreformed Nazi in "The Bishop Revival" who develops a toxin specifically to target and kill Holocaust survivors and their descendants is one notable exception. He tests his toxin on a bunch of random people in a coffee shop just to see if it'll kill everyone with the genetic traits that he picked and in the end tries to disrupt an international peace conference with a massacre just for the hell of it.
* Morgan Steig, from the pilot episode. He releases a flesh-melting toxin aboard a crowded airplane as a demonstration to potential buyers; worse still, the toxin arrived on the airplane through the insulin pen of his unsuspecting twin brother, who was chosen as a victim simply to show just how dedicated Steig was. Face it, the audience gave John Scott a round of applause for smothering him with a pillow.
* David Esterbrook from "The Cure" definitely qualifies as well. He's a pharmaceutical executive running a program turning young women suffering from a rare disease into radiation-emitting bioweapons and tested it out on a cafe of innocent people.
* Nikita: Percy, the head of Division, at first seemed like an Affably Evil character who was Only in It For the Money, working for Corrupt Corporate Executives and criminal organizations just as easily as for the government. However, as the series progressed, we've seen just how far he'll sink to achieve his goals, including murdering the loved ones of his own agents to keep them loyal. Perhaps the most shocking example of this was the recent revelation that the terrorist who killed Michael's family was, in fact, a Division agent who did so on Percy's orders so that Kazim Tariq could be Percy's mole in al-Qa'ida. When Kazim accidentally killed Michael's family instead, Percy recruited Michael with the promise of getting even.
* Amanda is also a Complete Monster and a Manipulative Bitch who constantly and ruthlessly tricks people into doing what she wants and earning their loyalty (or at least their fear; she's quite Machiavellian). But more to the point, she's the resident Torture Technician and is quite skilled at her job, using everything from electrocutions to breaking bones to threatening lobotomies in order to get information out of her victims -- and it's quite clear she enjoys doing it. It's notable that she's the one person Nikita is afraid of.
* The Secret Circle has Eben, leader of the witch hunters. He's bad enough when we first see him in a flashback that reveals he and his men murdered the members of the old Circle by pretending to want peace and tried to kill John Blackwell, but he gets even worse when he turns out to have survived the fire, only with nasty scarring, and proves hell-bent on killing every witch alive, even those who have never heard of him, for absolutely no good reason. He doesn't bat an eye at using magic provided by a resurrected and psychotic Nick to brainwash Cassie into trying to murder her father and to survive an attack by the Circle that should've killed him outright. Later, he summons and absorbs multiple demons for their power, no doubt driving him even Ax Crazier -- and that's after sacrificing one of his own men to a demon and using him to lure Blackwell and the Circle into a death trap that just barely fails. Oh, and according to another witch hunter, he's even killed off Isaac, who was downright sane compared to him -- and then he kidnaps Faye, fully intending to murder her and her covenmates. Fortunately, Jake gives him a swift, satisfying Karmic Death in "Family" after Charles has taken the demons out of him.
* Ironically, Eben looks tame compared to the true monster -- John Blackwell. The season finale, "Family", reveals his master plan to use the Crystal Skull to kill all witches without Balcoin blood and create a truly dark Circle. He even tries to kill Adam, who's already dying from the spell in front of a helpless Cassie and Diana. Luckily, Cassie manages to unleash Diana's dark magic so they can break free and reverse the Skull's power, killing Blackwell instead.
* Quite every villain in Legend of the Seeker, which is based on Sword of Truth, the book series. Darken Rahl commits mass infanticide, murders for kicks and for ink, horribly tortures people to gain magical powers, etc. He has his own sister beat violently and lies to her so she will betray her other brother and bring him the tools to take free will from every living thing in the world. He also unleashes a plague on his own people (killing hundreds of them, including a meek looking boy we are shown) for the sole reason of trying to turn people against Richard, and when all of this fails to win him victory, he kills a kitten with his BARE HANDS . Bonus points come from the fact that all of the above happens in one episode. Nicholas Rahl from the Bad Future is even more evil. He is shown to kill both of his parents and later enslaved the whole of humanity. Princess Violet manages to become a Complete Monster despite being a child, as she already orders beheadings, keeps a "playmate" who she regularly slaps and punishes for no reason other than her own enjoyment, enjoys torturing prisoners, and makes plans to have women she does not like gang-raped by the castle guard. Her mother, Queen Milena, is even more horrible as she executes anyone who annoys or upsets her! It is clear that she is the reason for why Violet is who she is.
* The demons in the Spanish series Angel o Demonio are unbelievable bastards whose only purpose in life is to wreck lives with More Than Mind Control For the Evulz. They don't have the slightest bit of empathy; in fact, they laugh at the death of OTHER DEMONS. One of them, Alexia, releases a virus with the intention of destroying the most part of humanity, and when she fails, the others punish her, not because she had gone too far, but because she had been dominating them. Monsters indeed.
* The Nazis in the Spanish series El Internado, being, well, Nazis and all that.
* Karl Fleischer( Don Joaquin) was a Nazi officer during WWII, began racial purity experiments at the orphanage near the end of WWII and held out hope for the Third Reich after Hitler's suicide. When Jacinta threatens to go to the police to denounce him for kidnapping children, reporting them dead to their parents and the state, and handing the children over to adoptive parents, he tries to kill her. If you felt bad for him after his death at the end of season 4, you'll feel a lot better when you find out he's a Nazi.
* Jacques Noiret kills Cayetano and made it look like he had overdosed, bought his son Ivan from a drug addict for 2 million euros and murders his wife when she finds out and tries to make amends to the biological mother.
* Ritter Wulf was a doctor at a concentration camp during the Holocaust, performing horrific, often lethal, experiments on children. After the war, Wulf fakes his death and takes the name Santiago Pazos-he's the grandfather to the series' protagonist.
* Prison Break: Wyatt Mathewson, the season four Dragon who murdered Alex Mahone's innocent son Cameron and blew the child's head off post-mortem to mutilate the corpse just to spite his father further, is arguably the worst (or at least scariest) character in the series in terms of sheer cruelty and pitilessness, despite being just an executive agent and assassin. Nearly every scene he's in involving him killing someone or torturing people to death while talking to them in a calm, soothing tone. He kills or tortures many people (mainly, anybody working against Krantz); this includes the aforementioned Cameron Mahone. When he's given intel on Scofield and his crew by Roland, he promises to give Roland $1 million and to let him go in exchange for the others. Once there, Wyatt progressively shoots Roland in the kneecap, then his thigh, and then in his stomach to watch him bleed out.
* Christina Rose Scofield, who first appears in season 4 but is mentioned earlier, is a high-ranking leader of the Company and along with General Krantz is revealed to have been behind most of the events in the show. She's a sociopathic Insufferable Genius who only cares about her own advancement. She sacrifices her whole family; she abandoned both her sons Lincoln and Michael while they were kids without saying a word, rejected her husband after he turned on the Company and had him hunted down, and arranged for her adopted son Lincoln (whom she despised for his relative lack of intelligence) to be framed and executed for a staged political assassination of Terence Steadman. She tries to kill General Krantz to steal a device called "Scylla" and sell it for its profitable military use, then kills her conspirator when he botches the hit. She pretends to sell the technology to a renowned Indian scientist/politician, but instead has him assassinated in public and frames Lincoln again, along with Michael, Mahone and Don Self. Christina intends to unleash a decades-long war between India and China so she can sell the tech to both sides for a quick profit, knowing that it would quickly escalate into a global conflict. When Michael steals Scylla back from her, she kidnaps Lincoln and gives Michael an ultimatum for its return by shooting Lincoln in the lung to watch him die slowly. She later tries to kill Michael when he's ruined her plans one too many times.
* Sherlock has Jim Moriarty, the world's first consulting criminal, and also the most vile person Sherlock's ever come across. His whole M.O. can be boiled down to him wanting Sherlock to notice him... on the occasions he isn't just incredibly bored with life. As a Foil to Sherlock, he also has the insane genius to pull off such complicated plots as stealing the crown jewels, opening the vault in the Bank of England, and releasing thousands from prison - and then, at his own trial, threatening the jurors via television to let him go free. He has no respect for human life, either, as one of his plans involved kidnapping two children, doing something unknown to make one of them terrified of Sherlock, and then poisoning them with mercury during the ordeal. He's strapped children, senior citizens, and Watson to bombs, murdered said senior citizen (and eleven others) for trying to describe her insane kidnapper to Sherlock. The worst part of his crimes is that the world believes Sherlock is the worse monster, as Moriarty framed Sherlock as a complete fraud of an investigator, pawned off most of his crimes onto Sherlock, and then shot himself to ensure that no one would ever know... and to force Sherlock to kill himself.
* The Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood certainly qualifies. In the first few episodes, he seems to be a mere Dirty Coward, but by the end of the first season, he seems to take a maniacal glee in finding new and unexpected ways to cross the Moral Event Horizon, to the point where most episodes involve his dragon, Guy of Gisborne, suggesting a ruthless option to accomplish their goals, and the Sheriff sneering and proposing (and implementing) a much more sadistic one.
* The third season featuresThornton, the husband that Isabella ran away from. A loathsome bastard with no redeeming features who emotionally abuses his wife and threatens to rape her. Fortunately, he earns himself a well deserved Karmic Death.
* Charles Hoyt of Rizzoli and Isles. He's a unrepentant sociopathic serial killer who tortured and killed many people. In particular, he preys on Jane and threatens to rape Maura. In general, much of his behavior is uncomfortably reminiscent of rape.
* Mercer Hayes of Veronica Mars stands out as one of the vilest rapists in the setting whose crimes are not treated as backstory. He selects college girls with his accomplice who sets it up for him to drug random girls at the local parties, creating a panic on the campus. He rapes the girls and shaves their heads afterwards just to humiliate them further. His reasoning amounts to "getting into a girl's pants the normal way takes too long".
* Gunther Lutze, the Villain Protagonist of "Death's-Head Revisited" from The Twilight Zone, as described by the episode's Opening Narration:
*
* He walks around his old abandoned concentration camp, thinking about the atrocities he committed and smiling as if those were the best years of his life! This made his ultimate fate all the better as he is forced to mentally relive all the pain he inflicted on his subjects by the spirit of Becker, one of the inmates. And Becker implies its only going to get much worse from there: "Your final judgement will come from God."
* Due to its morally ambiguous nature and realistic tendencies, Homicide: Life On the Street didn't have many of these, preferring to keep their villains as pathetic figures. But a few do stand out. The most prominent is Luther Mahoney, a Drug kingpin who has complete control over the Heroin deals in Baltimore. He escapes justice time and again and just loves rubbing his wealth and Karma Houdini status in the face of the Detectives. He's also very smart, making himself a pillar of his community that no one wants to think anything bad about. His crimes include murdering rival dealers and anyone who stands in his way, intimidating witnesses, and ordering murders. It's mentioned at one point that he is responsible for dozens of murders.
* Any villain from Walker, Texas Ranger. Yeah, that show does not believe in subtlety.
* The son of a Corrupt Corporate Executive who drowns his own wheelchair-bound father with a Psychotic Smirk on his face to take over his company and doesn't give a damn that his activities are destroying the native's homeland; and the Chairman, along with his killer for hire Lazarus, who is capable of murdering an innocent child without even feeling anything.
* The white supremacist group leader from the episode "The Soul Of The Winter", where the group assaults anybody who isn't white and have no problems attacking teenagers. The group's leader convinces everybody that non-white races are evil and wants to kill his former military comrade, just because he is black, and planned to crucify and burn him, and on top of that, the leader has them worship Hitler and Nazi Germany, making them the closest counterpart to the Nazis in the series.
* The satanist cult members from halloween episode "The Children of Halloween". They kidnap innocent children and plan to kill them all on Halloween night, and one of cult members even suggested killing one of the children before Halloween. They also sacrificed goats and killed one of their own men. The leader of the cult even calls himself Lucifer.
* Johnny Blade from "The Lost Boys" organizes the heist and kills a cop. Then he gives a gun to one of his accomplices and the same accomplice hides it in his friend's house. After learning this, Johnny Blade threatens an innocent young teenager Jesse (the friend of his accomplice and Carlos' nephew) to remain silent about his crimes or else he will kill his mother and later forces him to take all the guilt fdr his crimes or else he will kill his mother, whom he kidnapped, but Blade planned to order his lawyer and his accomplices in the prison to kill him, even after he took all the guilt, and planned to make Jesse's mother to commit suicide. This was so evil that a few of his henchmen looked like they were disgusted by it.
* Reccuring villain Victor La Rue is also incredibly nasty. He attempted to rape Alex and in the episode "The Trial of La Rue". He takes the courtroom hostage, kills the judge, and taunts Alex and his actions range from death threats for a sandwich, televising his crimes, terrorizing a divorced couple at a custody hearing, and killing people at random, and the worst of it is when he said that he would kill an innocent little girl.
* Luis Guerro, abusive father of Juan Guerro from the episode "Golden Boy". He beats his own wife, because she didn't make him dinner, even though she left a note that she did and brutally beats Juan repeatedly, because he was protecting her, giving him a lot of injuries in his face. He doesn't care about his own son and wife but cares about himself, and his irresponsible driving is one of the reasons why he and his wife later died in a car crash. His abusive treatment is also the reason why Juan tries so hard to study and provide his mother with a better life. What makes him worse is that he is just a minor character, yet manages to be more despicable than the drug dealers, who were the main villains in that episode.
* Warehouse 13: Walter Sykes, the Big Bad of Season 3. He's a textbook Bad Boss who indiscriminately kills his minions, whether they've failed him or not. And let's not forget his vendetta against the Regents -- which leads to the deaths of Steve, Helena, and Mrs. Fredric and the destruction of the entire Warehouse -- is fueled entirely by the fact that Warehouse agents took an Artifact away from him when he was younger. Some fans view his death by Portal Cut as being too easy an out for him. One does have to remember that said artifact did essentially turn him evil, but the sheers lengths to which he went make you wonder just how much of it was artifact mojo and how much was genuine evil.
* Two episodes of Without a Trace had Emil Dornvald, a mercenary working for an African dictator. The missing person of the week is in love with a rebel opposing said dictator and knew where he and his friends were holed up. So Dornvald cold-bloodedly murders the pregnant teenager she's been mentoring and is very fond of, sends her a picture on the girl's phone, and offers to stop killing her loved ones if she just tells him where the men are.
* Another episode had a conman preying on families who had adopted children from Africa; he'd claim to be the kid's birth father and guilt the parents into surrendering the kids to him, whereupon he'd take them and sell them on the black market. He also manipulated a Sudanese war orphan into helping him by claiming that he was only stealing the children to get them back to their birth parents, the young man having lost his own mother to militants. When the orphan finds out he's been had, he brutally stabs the guy to death and the FBI quite understandably decide to look the other way.
* Marlo Stanfield of The Wire has the distinction of being the only completely unsympathetic and irredeemable character in the entire show. Introduced as an up-and-coming drug lord, Marlo runs his territory with ruthlessness and unrelenting brutality. When Stringer Bell, the Number Two in the Barksdale organization, approached him with an offer to join the Co-op, a coalition of drug lords who teamed up to share their product to increase their profit and end the violence between their factions to deter police attention, Marlo refuses, taking the offer as a sign of weakness. Marlo and the Barksdale wage a bloody gang war with each other, which claims many lives, until Marlo eventually ends up in control of West Baltimore's best territory. Among Marlo's crimes are having his lieutenants torture, and eventually kill, Blind Butchie to get at his friend Omar Little, ordering Snoop to kill his fourteen-year-old soldier, Michael on the suspicion the kid talked to the cops, and murdering his mentor, Proposition Joe, when he learns everything he could from him. Marlo then usurps Joe's drug connections and disbands the Co-op, becoming the biggest drug kingpin in Baltimore. By far the most horrifying reveal about Marlo is the discovery of his tombs, where it's revealed that he's been having his soldiers, Chris and Snoop, murder people then preserve their bodies with quicklime and seal them up in vacant houses. Over twenty people were found in this manner, and they weren't just rival criminals either. One of his most pointlessly cruel acts was after he deliberately egged on a security guard in a convenience store by stealing something in front of him. When the guard caught up with Marlo, he told him he had a family to support, and basically asked for nothing other than to be treated like a human being. Marlo responded by having him killed for "talking back" and hiding his body with the others. In a crime series where even the most despicable criminals were humanized and sympathetic to some degree, Marlo Stanfield was nothing more than a power-hungry sociopath whose mere presence managed to darken an already pessimistic show known for its Grey and Gray Morality.
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