Complete Monster/Live Action TV



""Okay let's make a deal. I'll call an ambulance just as soon as you fuck your sister.""

- Josh Stock, Skins

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
 * American Horror Story
 * Arrowverse
 * Buffyverse
 * Criminal Minds
 * CSIverse
 * Doctor Who
 * Game of Thrones
 * Gotham
 * Grimm
 * Highlander
 * JAGverse
 * Kamen Rider
 * Law and Order
 * Marvel Shows
 * Power Rangers
 * Ripper Street
 * Star Trek
 * Sleepy Hollow
 * Super Sentai
 * Teen Wolf
 * The Vampire Diaries
 * The X-Files


 * Jack Welker, leader of the Aryan Brotherhood in the final season of Breaking Bad, proved to be nastier than Gus Fring or 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, and then leaving Walt in the desert with only one barrel of money. 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.
 * By the final season, Walter White himself crossed the line straight into this trope's territory as the merciless drug kingpin Heisenberg. And aside from whatever little scraps of atonement he can manage to salvage in the end, he makes no apologies for it, admitting to having committed illegal atrocities purely because it made him feel alive. If not for his concern for his family (particularly Hank, who he'd tried his damndest to avoid having to kill) and Villainous BSOD-inspired actions in the finale, he'd have been 100% far gone rather than making it 99% of the way.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * House of Cards (US remake): Francis J. "Frank" Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, is a scheming, charming, and monstrous politician who seeks ultimate power and legacy. After feeling betrayed by President Garrett Walker, Frank begins a brutal campaign to institute himself as President, leading Frank to ruin countless people's lives and personally murder Zoe Barnes and Peter Russo, the latter after destroying his sobriety and utterly breaking his spirit. Upon becoming President, Frank's crimes only worsen as he goes to any lengths to secure power and wipe out his enemies, bombing civilian-populated villages to kill a single terrorist, allowing an innocent man be killed on live video, and faking bomb threats all being par the course. To further drive fear into America's soul and convince the people they need him as their leader, Frank organizes cyber attacks that lead to numerous horrible riots and accidents, and sits idly by as sarin gas is deployed against countless innocents simply to use the gas attacks as an excuse for war. Frank considers compassion and love a weakness, and slowly but surely forgets about, ditches, or outright murders those who he considers "friends," culminating in him planning to coldly murder his wife Claire if she even thinks about betraying him. Frank Underwood is a vile, depraved man who uses manipulation and facades to convince hapless victims that he is a good man, only to always pull the rug out from under them and reveal what he truly is: A self-serving sociopath with delusions of grandeur.
 * 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."
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * The Good Wife had a rare non-murderous example 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. This story was Ripped from the Headlines based on an incident with Nancy Grace.
 * 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.
 * Another notable example is the Gravedigger, who has this status simply due to the way he dispatches victims: burying them alive.
 * There's also the cannibalistic Serial Killer Gormogon, who manages to be a Complete Monster even though he barely appears onscreen.
 * Wayne Callison of Shark qualifies, what with the whole torturing women to death, hiding their bodies underneath his younger brother's (whom he goaded into raping a girl at the tender age of 15) deck. He then threatens Stark's daughter during questioning just to enrage the guy to the point of attacking him, then tries to get him thrown off the case for it. When that doesn't work, he drives his one escaped victim to suicide and uses a loophole from that to become a temporary Karma Houdini. And that was just in his first episode.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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?"
 * Sons of Anarchy:
 * James "Jimmy O" O'Phelan, season 3's Big Bad (he also appears near the end of season 2), is a member of the True IRA, a Northern Irish terrorist organization and criminal syndicate mainly involved in gun running. O'Phelan previously ran current SAMCRO member Chibs out of the IRA and stole Chibs's wife and daughter (Fiona and Kerianne), years later threatening to dump Fiona and marry Kerianne next to Chibs's face. He goes rogue in the third season after receiving a demotion back in Ireland. He tries to kill all of SAMCRO and SAMBEL in an explosion, and after his family escapes his wrath he kills an IRA member in a failed attempt to get them back before torturing and executing another one to find Jax Teller's kidnapped baby son Abel. He murders the adoptive family Abel was placed with and takes the child to ensure his escape to the States, before exchanging him for another hostage whom he later kills. Aside from his bodycount, O'Phelan stands out among the show's many gangsters in that he has no real loved ones note, shows no remorse for any of his crimes, and only ever displays purely selfish motives.
 * Season 6's "Sweet and Vaded" bring us Venus's Evil Matriarch Alice Noone. It's revealed that when Venus, as Vincent, was ten and confused she was part of having Venus constantly drugged and raped, and from there it grew into a lucrative child porn ring. Alice later kidnaps Venus's son, drugs him, and is going to have him raped. When SAMCRO track him down to the studio they are sickened by portraits of the children that Alice had taken to be raped, the videos on the computers and a video camera aimed at a crib. When Alice arrives, she threatens that Venus's son is going to kill himself, until Jax blows her brains all over the wall. Venus is left a wreck over the emotional torture, and the Dirty Cop says she would have killed Alice if Jax hadn't.
 * 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. 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.
 * 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...
 * 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 . It's really twisted and nasty.
 * Also, in Children of Earth, Prime Minister Green 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 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, 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".  Sadly, even Yang was never worth anything to Yin, despite being
 * Allison Cowley is the apprentice of the aforementioned Mr.Yin, and the Big Bad of The Movie. In her first appearance in the Season Five finale, she passed herself off as a helpless victim of Yin to Shawn, only to lure them into one of Yin's traps. Beaten by Juliet, Cowley returns for revenge in the movie, and proves that even without her mentor's influence she can still be just as monstrous. Ordering her men to gun down Juliet's partner, Cowley later kidnaps Chief Vick's teenage daughter to lure the heroes to Alcatraz. When she reveals herself to the Psych crew, she coldly shoots her right-hand man dead, claiming that his accent was getting on her nerves. Telling the gang that she has strapped a bomb to Vick's daughter that will go off in twenty minutes and kill them all unless they find it, Cowley orders her remaining minions to kill the heroes as slowly as possible before finally getting her rematch with Juliet. Unapologetically psychotic and willing to hurt others just to spite her rival, Cowley managed to darken the tone of the series with each appearance she made.
 * 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
 * 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.
 * The Orville: Kaylon Primary is the leader of the robotic Kaylon race ever since he and his brethren rebelled against their once-cruel masters and wiped them out completely. Primary posts the Kaylon emissary Isaac on the Orville to gather intelligence on other biologicals, having concluded that the Kaylon have exhausted their planet's resources and must create an interplanetary empire and exterminate all biological lifeforms to thrive. Primary has the Orville boarded and commandeered after killing all its security personnel, intending to use the Orville to ensure that Earth will lower its defenses for the Kaylon fleet. Primary forces the bridge crew to play along under threat of killing the rest of their crew one by one, then destroying another Union ship after Captain Mercer tries to warn them and forcing him to watch a helpless ensign being ejected into space. Worried that Isaac might have become too sympathetic to organic beings, Primary orders him to desist before trying to force him to kill Ty Finn or be destroyed himself. When Isaac turns on the Kaylons and kills Primary, the Primary's last words are to spitefully curse Isaac that he will always be alone.
 * Oz has Vernon Schillinger, Simon Adebisi , and Malcolm Coyle . 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.
 * 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, a promising new character played by Chad Faust. 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.
 * 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, having Junebug and his family killed because there was hearsay Junebug called Marlo a "dick-sucker," 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 was nothing more than a power-hungry sociopath whose mere presence managed to darken an already pessimistic show known for its murky morality.
 * 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.
 * 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 escape.
 * Some of the villains 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.
 * 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 to  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  since he was planning to stab her in the back in order for, you guessed it, POWER.
 * Desperate Housewives - By the end of season 3,, has really come across as this. Seriously, here's a woman so insanely determined that And this is all before  And that's before you find out that,  In the end, the viewer can only cheer when
 * 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.
 * In Primeval, Helen Cutter 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).
 * Hollyoaks has these three 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. He later successfully manipulates his way back into Cleo's life and does everything he can to make sure she has no life or friends outside of him even after his true nature is exposed. Perhaps the worst thing about him is he acts like his treatment of Cleo is perfectly normal.
 * James Nightingale is a ruthless lawyer prepared to do anything to get what he wants. After persuading Harry to sell his body to him, he blackmails the later's father Tony into selling his restraint to him by having Harry brutally beaten up and threatening to take things further if he doesn't comply. He also repeatedly harasses Harry for sexual favors.
 * 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 . And if you forget the genocide, 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:

"Phelan: "Everyone has needs. Some settle for cigars and liquor. You wanted Shevon. Others are more...demanding.""


 * 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.

"Apollo: *holding Phelan at gunpoint* "There's lines you can't cross, and you've crossed them."

Phelan: "You're not gonna shoot. You're not like me. You're not gonna-"

Apollo: *BOOM*"


 * Lost has Psycho for Hire Martin Keamy and Anthony Cooper, the con man who ruined the lives of two survivors.
 * 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, 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.
 * Robert "Bob" Rickman, from season 1's "Hug", is the CEO of Rickman Industries, and possesses the ability to persuade people to do whatever he wants through touch. He uses this ability to build chemical plants which have caused 96 local citizens to be poisoned. He is introduced meeting with an agent who wants to prevent him from building one in Smallville, and makes said agent jump from his office window. Arriving in Smallville, he runs into his old business partner Kyle Tippet, who threatens to expose the truth, due to a year-old agreement that he would leave Smallville alone. Bob uses his ability to force numerous people to make attempts on Kyle's life, including sending Whitney to bludgeon him to death; sending a sheriff to shoot him after he's arrested over the previous attack; and having Lex Luthor trap him and Clark in a car before trying to blow up said car. Completely uncaring about innocent lives, Bob stands above the usual meteor freak.
 * The Toyman, real name Winslow Schott, is a brilliant, deranged assassin who elaborately sets up bombs placed in unsuspecting locations. Putting one on top of the Daily Planet, the Toyman threatens to destroy half of Metropolis with it. To get revenge against Oliver Queen for framing him for Lex Luthor's murder, the Toyman captures over a dozen civilians, strapping one to a bomb and placing them in a factory, intending to destroy it and kill them all. Later planting bombs at a shareholders' meeting Oliver is making a speech at to make him confess to killing Lex, the Toyman reveals he plans to blow up the gala whether or not Oliver caves to his demands. Later creating a fake company to take control of Metropolis's water supply, the Toyman intends to leave thousands without water unless they give into his demands.
 * 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.
 * 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 favored 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.
 * Cornelius Wilde, from season 4's "Some Conscience Lost", is the director of a hospital in Whitechapel that supposedly takes care of ill children and cures them of their diseases. In truth, however, he has them killed either by lethal injection or suffocation before hiding their bodies under the hospital floors. He has done this ever since the Ripper's killing spree, only being caught now when a patient of his escaped the facility and survived long enough for Detective Reid to spot him before he dies from his uncared for illness. When Reid arrives at the hospital and has the floors removed he see corpses of numerous children, and confronts Wilde about this, Wilde refuses to own up to any of his wrong doings, even saying it was the children fault they were sick in the first place, and that he can't be bothered to cure them, much to the detective's fury.
 * The 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.
 * An example from Blake's 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, . Raiker deals with this by . Even his fellow crewmates are appalled by him. Raiker's comeuppance at the end of the episode just isn't satisfying enough.
 * 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 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.
 * Whitman Van Ness, from Season 7’s “Of Grave Importance”, was a former rich man turned Serial Killer in the early 1900’s. He slit the necks of numerous prostitutes who worked in his manor house, climaxing with the murder of his own fiancé and framing the caretaker Dexter O’Connor for everything, leading to Dexter being shot by the authorities. Following his death, Whitman became a very powerful spirit and to protect himself from the decay all ghosts suffer, began feeding off other spirits, effectively destroying them. Whitman spent decades killing countless people who came into his house, then used his powers to prevent their spirits from passing on; trapping his victims in constant terror of him whilst they all slowly decay into rotting mindless abominations so he can stay strong. Whitman also takes amusement from their horrific fate and enjoys lording his power over them. In the present he murders two teenagers who hide in his house, and then murders Sam, Dean and Bobby’s old friend Annie Hawkins. A few nights later he murdered two friends of the first pair teenagers by crushing their hearts adding all of them to his collection. When Dexter protested that he already had more than enough victims, Whitman drained him on the spot. Whitman’s final act was to try and drain Bobby, before Sam and Dean burnt his bones.
 * 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 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.
 * 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.
 * 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, 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 him 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 her, but Kendall returns the favor in stopping him. When he's thwarted from that, he goes and rapes Bianca. After he is acquitted of all charges due to Bianca burning all evidence, she turns around and puts a bullet in him.
 * Chuck usually plays most of its villains for laughs, being a dramedy. The exception, however, is 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.
 * Killer BOB from Twin Peaks is an entity native to the Black Lodge with a horrifying tendency of rape and murder. Created long ago as a byproduct of the Trinity nuclear tests, BOB accesses the material place by possessing hapless victims and forcing them to engage in sprees of rape, torture, and serial murder to nourish himself off of their agony. Responsible for the murder of Laura Palmer that drives the series, BOB committed the deed by possessing Laura's father Leland when Leland was a child, resurfacing to have Leland molest his own daughter through her youth before using him to finally rape and murder Laura. 'He also murders Teresa Banks and Laura's cousin Maddy Ferguson and almost kills Ronette Pulasky. When cornered, BOB forces Leland to kill himself, and later saddles onto Dale's doppelganger at the end of the first series while leaving Dale trapped for decades within the Black Lodge in its stead.
 * 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.
 * 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?

"I wanted her bike."


 * 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.
 * Martial Law: Cliff Eagleton, from "Honor Among Strangers", is a white supremacist encountered by Sammo Law and Cordell Walker Having murdered a Texas Ranger, Eagleton sets up shop in Los Angeles where he proceeds to attempt to hijack a set of stinger missiles to bomb LA in order to remove "foreign" businesses. After being thwarted, he returns to Texas in part 2 of this crossover, Walker, Texas Ranger Season 8 episode "The Day of Cleansing" to initiate "The Cleansing", taking a group of trucks loaded with enough explosives to make the Oklahoma City bombing look tame, before driving them to foreign business centers and black churches, before detonating them all over the city in order to subjugate minorities and show them their "proper" place.
 * 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 of Passions. His list of crimes seems endless: he has forced his, attempted to murder , committed several counts of , faked the deaths of , leaving his daughter to believe that , tricked Whitney into believing she had , 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.
 * Dr. Foster from Series 4, who and  and . Even his "excuse" is just further evidence that he's a twisted, sick bastard:
 * 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, but he gets even worse when he 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  to brainwash Cassie into trying to murder  and to survive an attack by the Circle that should've killed him outright. Later, he . Fortunately,.
 * Ironically, Eben looks tame compared to the true monster -- . The season finale, "Family", reveals his master plan to . Luckily,.
 * Quite nearly 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.
 * Maxwell Tate from Blindspot 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."
 * The Nazis in the Spanish series El Internado, being, well, Nazis and all that.
 * Karl Fleischer was a Nazi officer during WWII, began  at the orphanage near the end of WWII and held out hope for the Third Reich after Hitler's suicide. When  threatens to, he tries to kill her. If you felt bad for him after  at the end of season 4, that'll stop when you find out he's a Nazi.
 * Jacques Noiret kills and made it look like he had overdosed, bought  from a drug addict for 2 million euros and.
 * Ritter Wulf was a doctor at a concentration camp during the Holocaust, performing horrific, often lethal, experiments on children. After the war, Wulf
 * Freddy's Nightmares: In this horror anthology series based on the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, Freddy Krueger is once again portrayed as a sadistic monster. In life, he molested and murdered more than a dozen children, with victims as young as four and six. After his death, he returns as a demon to continue killing by murdering people in their dreams. Freddy murders his arresting officer, and proceeds to target his daughters, killing one and framing the other for her own sisters' murder. In the episodes he stars in, he continues to kill people, and in one episode, he tricks a sleepwalking man into killing his own wife and daughter. One episode suggests that he murdered nearly half of his former class from school, which had 300 students. Aside from the episodes he starred in, Freddy appeared in segments in which he would interact with people to torment them. In one instance, he offered a girl the ability to change the past so that she could prevent her mothers' death, but then revealed that now her father was dead instead, and promptly took away the ability. Evil as always, Freddy proved just as monstrous as his film counterparts.
 * The Incredible Hulk: Michael Sutton from "The Snare" is an Ax Crazy man-hunter turned Up to Eleven. After deciding he had been bored with hunting animals, he makes his new preferred choice of target men. On his own island, he finds whatever men he can and invites them over, only to drug them to sleep and put them through deadly obstacles as he hunts them down, succeeding at least 5 times, and seeing it all as a "game." It's implied that the reason he's so successful is because he doesn't play fair, given that David discovers at the end of the episode that whenever someone would win, they'd go to an escape boat only to find a recording of Sutton congratulating them. Once the recording is finished, it blows up, killing them in the process. When Michael discovers David's inner beast, he intends to whip David with the intent of bringing it out and killing it. Ruthless, psychotic, and a cheater at his own game, Michael Sutton was unlike any other villain on the show, who were motivated by either tragedy or simple financial gain.
 * Prison Break: Wyatt Mathewson, the season four Dragon who, 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.
 * 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 in order to save his loved ones. (Of course, Sherlock ended up faking his death instead.) Even after his defeat, it is revealed that Moriarty made a deal with Sherlock's half sister Eurus Holmes where, in the event of his death, she would lure Sherlock into a series of Sadistic Choices constructed by herself and Moriarty that would kill numerous innocents, threaten the lives of Sherlock's best friend and brother, and hopefully drive Sherlock into complete despair. Moriarty was the dark reflection of Sherlock: a sociopathic, manipulative, genius who would let nothing stand in his way to escape from his excruciating boredom.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * In the early seasons of 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, 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?  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 become 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, torturing Alice and her friends to get Alice to use up a wish before turning one of her friends to stone afterwards, 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. The sixth season of the main series also reveals that Jafar had for a time made himself royal vizier of his home kingdom of Agrabah and, in addition to torturing and killing more people with his dark magic for his amusement, had deceived Princess Jasmine into giving him the royal family's enchanted ring, threatening to destroy Agrabah if she didn't give it to him as a marriage offering. With the ring in his possession, Jafar revealed that wanting Jasmine to wed him was a ruse and he was now able to magically disintegrate all of Agrabah, He did this purely out of spite for his home and it's people, and to make both Aladdin and Jasmine suffer from the despair of their failure to protect the kingdom from him. Worst of all is that we're led to believe that he ultimately just wants love from his abusive father, the Sultan of Lower Agrabah, and wishes to change the rules of magic in order to force him to give him affection and acknowledge him as his son, but it's revealed in the Wonderland series' finale that  In the end, all Jafar truly desired was power to do whatever he pleased with.
 * 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 -- is fueled entirely by the fact that Warehouse agents took an Artifact away from him when he was younger. Some fans view his  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.
 * 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 them 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 held the rank of a captain in the S.S. He was a black-uniformed strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain, and like his colleagues of the time he shared the one affliction most common amongst that breed known as Nazis: he walked the Earth without a heart.""


 * 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.
 * The Practice: Gordon from "Hide And Seek" rapes and murders two boys aged four and five respectively, before having sex with their corpses. While running from the police, he takes a woman hostage. After his arrest, he agrees to help the cops find the bodies solely so that he can be given a chance at parole in the future, and takes joy in seeing the mother of the boys break down in tears upon seeing their bodies. He later reacts with rage after being denied a possibility of parole, even though he still manages to escape the death penalty.
 * The Killing:
 * The Pied Piper, James Skinner, is the despicable madman who serves as the Arc Villain for season 3. A seemingly-kind family man, the Piper is in actuality a brutal rapist and Serial Killer of teenage girls, or even younger. With his career of evil starting when he beat a teenage prostitute to death for disrespecting him, the Piper began kidnapping, raping, then murdering teenage girls. Years ago, when the Piper realized a young boy may have spotted him committing his crimes, he seemingly planned to kill him, before settling for murdering the child's mother then framing his father for it. Having amassed 17 confirmed victims over the years, while boasting dozens more, the Piper continues his spree throughout the season, raping and killing numerous more girls before viciously murdering Bullet for discovering his identity. When cornered by Sarah Linden for his crimes, the Piper reveals his mindset that the girls he kills aren't even human; just "garbage" that doesn't deserve to live, while taunting her about that fact that she had fallen deeply in love with his public persona. Even when beaten, the Piper goads Linden into executing him, wanting to drag her down with him even after he was dead and gone. Though claiming at one point to "not kill children", this claim is immediately thrown back in his face with the fact that many of his victims were as young as 12, showing that his statement was either twisted hypocrisy, or just a method of screwing with his foes. A complete maniac who believed he was in the right for removing the stain of "trash" like the girls he killed from the world, the Pied Piper is shown to be nothing but a misogynistic psychopath who gets his kicks from murdering people no one will ever miss.
 * Goldie is a minor criminal from season 3, appearing in only the second, third, and fourth episodes, yet makes the most of his limited screentime to be one of the series's most depraved characters. Known around the streets for being a creepy thug, Goldie quickly establishes his wickedness when, after catching the homeless teen Bullet sneaking into his apartment to look for her best friend, he proceeds to brutally beat and rape her. When confronted by the police, Goldie is revealed to not only deal in child pornography, but also has a long record of molesting and raping underage girls, with him shrugging them off as "misunderstandings", and claiming that one 13 year old girl was "begging for it". As a final way to screw with the police, Goldie publicly humiliates them by making them think he plans to assault a woman, before revealing she is actually his "mother". Though weaseling his way out of the majority of punishment for his crimes, Goldie's crimes were all too apparent and disgusting to all who interacted with him, and he made his mark as the show's first wholly irredeemable villain.
 * 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.
 * Legion: "The Devil with Yellow Eyes" is the psychopathic sadist responsible for all of David Haller's perceived illnesses and mental issues. In life a powerful mutant telepath, the Devil was banished to the Astral Plane during a duel with a fellow telepath, and, seeking revenge for this defeat, proceeded to latch onto the mind of his rival's newborn son. As this child, David Haller, grew up, the Devil constantly haunted and tormented him, gaslighting him into believing that any time his latent mutant powers manifested, it was actually himself going insane, and using this factor to ensure that David spent the majority of his life alone and miserable. Though in the present David gains mutant allies who attempt to help him, the Devil prevents any form of assistance so as to manipulate David into allowing him to take control of David's body to save his kidnapped sister, and, once in control, the Devil uses David's powers to massacre an entire building of government agents in particularly gruesome ways before trying to lock David and his friends away in their own minds to be tormented for the rest of their days. The Devil's final goal is to assume full control of David's body, then use it to become a god and go on a rampage across the planet, starting by murdering his former rival, and, even when seemingly beaten, the Devil jumps into the mind of Oliver Anthony Bird to use as his latest host and escape. A complete and utter sociopath who refuses to see the joy that comes from anything but power and control, the Devil with Yellow Eyes took many forms throughout the story, but his original, that of a bloated, disgusting monster, is handily the best representation of his true personality.
 * In Krypton, Brainiac, known as the Collector of Words, is an android who travels through the galaxy to abduct cities and shrink them for his collection often resulting in the destruction of their planet. While he publicly claims to bring immortality for the people he takes, in actuality they are put into a paralyzed stasis while remaining conscious forever. Having already inflicted this fate to a thousand of cities and setting sight on Kandor from planet Krypton, Brainiac sends a sentry that possesses and kills an innocent woman before infecting the Dictator of Kandor whom Brainiac remotely controls. After defeating a coup, he brainwashes the rebels into his loyal guards and forces chief magistrate Daron-Vex to execute his co-conspirators including Daron's own daughter Nyssa. To replenish his forces, Brainiac regularly feeds on the birth facility draining embryos as batteries. He then slaughters any opposition with his psychic powers and turns a little girl into a living bomb he sends upon her friend Seg-El. Defeated and cast away into the Phantom Zone, Brainiac drags Seg along in his doom.
 * Vaughn Du Clark, the Big Bad of the first two seasons of IZombie, was indirectly responsible for the zombie outbreak in the series. When word got out that his drink, Max Rager, had deadly side effects, he covered this up. When he found out about the zombies, he ordered Major to hunt down and kill all known zombies to keep quiet, and threatened to kill Liv if he didn't comply. He tracks down people that give negative feedback on his product, no matter how obscure the review is, Vaughn videotapes himself killing them. At first, it seems that that Vaughn's daughter, Rita, is his Morality Pet, but when a zombie in his custody broke free, he left Rita for dead, only for her to become a zombie too. As a result, he has her detained for the rest of the season. During the season finale, Vaughn finds out that Major was only hiding the zombies he ordered dead, but was using them as guinea pigs for a potential cure. All of the cure prototypes fail and cause the subjects to become feral. Liv, Major, and Clive manage to infiltrate his secret lab, so he tries unleashing the feral zombies on them. When that fails, he decides to unleash a poisonous gas on them, the remaining sapient zombies, and even Rita, after claiming to be remorseful for letting her get zombified.
 * Cracked: "Ghost Dance" had Reginald "Reg" Slater, a trucker, a racist, a misogynist, and a Serial Killer of First Natoins' women, who slowly bleeds his victims to death before dumping their bodies along the highway. Murdering Ellen Owens at the start of the episode, Reg returns to her sister Kaya Grey's truck stop to sexually harass Kaya, and ensure that she is maintaining his collection of photograph decorated mugs; unknown to Kaya, each photo depicts one of his victims. Snapping a photo of Kaya—and thus announcing his intent to kill her at a later date—Reg subsequently runs Lucy Mack and her children off the road, kidnapping Lucy and murdering her the same way he did Ellen. Linked to ten murders, and planning far more, Reg's killing spree is finally halted when Kaya Grey and Lazarus Keefe take the law into their own hands and put him out of action.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Cutie Honey: THE LIVE: Chief Shirakawa from “Second Girl!” is the seemingly kind, recently hired director of the Kanto Girls Rehabilitation Center, but is soon revealed to be a sociopathic bioweapon from Panther Claw. Setting up a series of rules for the girls to follow, he punishes those who break them by kidnapping them and having Tomohiro and Zuimaru electrocute them to death, making the corpses look like dead runaways, having done it to Hitomi. When warden Kitou tries to escape with Mami, Shirakawa catches them and electrocutes Mami to death while keeping Kitou barely alive. After capturing Miki, he proceeds to electrocute Kitou to death at her request before attempting to do the same to Miki. When Sayo searches for Miki, Shirakawa grabs her and orders Zuimaru to electrocute her. When Miki transforms into Sister Miki and kills Zuimaru, Shirakawa runs away, later attempting to murder Miki when she’s busy killing Tomohiro.
 * Dr. Van Holtzman, from Castle season 7's "Hollander's Woods", is a masked Serial Killer who has been active for over thirty years. With at least nine victims to his name, Holtzman abducts young woman whom he believes won't be missed, carves crosses into their faces, then cuts their throats. When an eleven-year-old Richard Castle comes across Holtzman disposing the body of one of his victims, Holtzman threatened to kill him if he told anyone what he saw, only sparing him to avoid drawing attention to his own crimes. Years later, when the adult Castle and Detective Kate Beckett investigate another of Holtzman's murders, Holtzman attempts to frame one of his mentally ill patients for the killings. While searching the barnhouse where Holtzman murdered his victims, Castle discovers a scrapbook filled with pictures of Holtzman's victims. When Holtzman arrives, he expresses regret for not having killed Castle as a child, then promises to kill both Castle and Beckett before attacking Castle and trying to slowly cut his throat. Taking pride in his crimes and regarding his mask as his true face, Holtzman is a vicious killer who left an impact on Castle for his entire life, and who stands out in a normally lighter series.
 * Scott Dunn from the season 2 two-parter "Tick, Tick, Tick…"/"Boom!" was a Serial Killer who, prior to the events of the episodes, killed prostitutes, framed another man, hung him and made his death look like a suicide. Later on, he kills a businessman just to live off his identity. When he becomes obsessed with Kate Beckett through Nikki Heat, he learns about a man named Ben Conrad and then proceeds to hold him hostage in his own apartment. Pretending to be Conrad, Dunn murders three people seemingly at random, each one connected to Conrad's dead dog, and each time calls Beckett to taunt her. He takes the body of the third victim and leaves her at Beckett’s apartment as another threat to her. When shooting the third victim, Dunn didn’t kill her right away, letting her bleed out. Dunn then kills Conrad and stages him as shooting himself to frame him as the killer. Dunn later sneaks into Beckett's apartment, leaves a bomb and then sets it off while she's there. Enraged when Beckett just manages to survive survives, Dunn calls her to vent and while he does, kills a random woman out of anger. Dunn's revealed to have privately written about his killings to immortalize and take pride in them. When his identity is uncovered, Dunn takes FBI agent Jordan Shaw hostage, threatening to kill her unless Beckett gives herself up to him. He leads the FBI team astray to the wrong building where he plans to blow them up with another bomb. When Beckett tricks him into thinking they saw through his ruse and he failed, he angrily lashes out by attacking and nearly succeeding in shooting her.
 * The Man in the High Castle: In the live-action adaptation, Oberstgruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich is the second-in-command of the SS, the paramilitary organ in charge of enforcing Nazi Germany's ideology of 'racial purity'. He organized the total genocide of the Jews within Europe and Nazi-occupied America and participated in the enslavement of the entire African continent, boasting of having personally hunted down "tribal subhumanoids". Heydrich's faction is opposed to Hitler's policy of détente with the Empire of Japan, wanting to exterminate the Japanese so the Nazis can have the entire world for themselves. He orchestrates a public assassination of the visiting Japanese Crown Prince in an attempt to provoke the Empire into declaring war. When remorseful Nazi spy Rudolph Wegener passes on nuclear technology to his Japanese contacts to preserve peace, Heydrich flies to New York City to retrieve Wegener. He makes it clear that the only reason he hasn't already had Wegener tortured to death for high treason is because he needs him for his access to the Fuehrer, threatening to have Wegener's family murdered if he doesn't comply. Heydrich wants to assassinate Hitler so he can take over the Reich and destroy the Japanese Home Islands, mocking loyalty as a weakness that greater men lack. When Obergruppenfuehrer John Smith discovers Heydrich's scheme, he invites Smith to a hunting party so he can have him quietly killed. Feared even by his fellow Nazis as the Reich's foremost hatchet man and expert in mass murder, Heydrich enjoys every part of what he does and is known as "The Man with the Iron Heart", a name he admits to wearing with pride.
 * Jia Sidao, Marco Polo Season 1's Big Bad, is the Evil Chancellor of the Song Dynasty. He is first introduced brutally beating the army's general in front of his soldiers before killing him upon hearing rumors that he was insulting his style of kung fu. He also shows utter distain for the Mongols, and when he hears Empress Dowager Xie Daoquing was trying to negotiate a peace treaty with the Mongols, he has her and those who agreed to it murdered, along with her already dying husband, so that their son could become emperor, someone easier for him to control, thus leading to him becoming the true ruler of the empire. With his influence, Sidao has every Mongolian village near the Song Dynasty capital, Xianggang, destroyed, with their people all killed. He also holds his sister's daughter hostage so that he can blackmail her to go assassinate the Mongolian emperor and empress. When he finds out she failed to kill them, he tortures her daughter by binding her feet and threatens to kill her if she fails again. When the Mongols attempt to invade Xianggang he uses gunpowder to attack them, with the entire army massacred, causing the Khan to retreat. When the Mongol army succeeds in breaching the walls in their second attempt, Sidao finds Marco Polo, the man who orchestrated this siege, and he makes him suffer, before trying to kill him.
 * Comte de Rochefort, the Big Bad of The Musketeers season 2, is a former agent of Cardinal Richelieu, who, realizing how unhinged Rochefort was, abandoned him to the Spanish. Introduced being sentenced for murder, Rochefort kills the judge and escapes. Initially appearing to have been turned and now working for the Spanish, Rochefort quickly proves to be working for no one but himself. Building himself into the king’s favor through fake charm and cunning, Rochefort uses everyone as pawns to pave his way. Taking over as the king’s advisor, Rochefort spends the season creating/manipulating situations that make the increasingly paranoid king progressively more dependent upon him, while also destroying his faith in the Musketeers; secretly he plans to murder the king and steal the throne. Rochefort murders numerous people for his self-serving cause or sometimes simply for fun, six in his first episode alone. His bloodlust is only matched by his lust for the Queen, which started when she was 13. Following his attempt to rape her, he reveals her secret affair with Aramis, to have Aramis, the Queen and her baby executed. To incriminate her, Rocherfort poisons the king, just enough that it leaves him in agony, and frames then murders the innocent Doctor Lemay to complete the ruse. Rochefort tries to force the King to sign the Queen’s death warrant, before finally trying to personally strangle her. A deranged sociopath driven purely by ambition and ego, the Musketeers know this madman as their most vile enemy.
 * Murdoch Mysteries: James Gillies Detective William Murdoch's Arch Enemy and one of the most dangerous men he's ever met. Initially coming into conflict with Murdoch after he murdered his professor as part of a way to test a theory of Applied Physics, Gillies was defeated when Murdoch tricked his weak-willed partner, Robert into turning on him. After escaping the noose by bribing a dying man into taking his place, Gillies murders Robert by sawing his head off while he's still alive. He then initiates a twisted mind game with Murdoch that culminates in him burying Julia alive, with Murdoch only narrowly getting there in time to save her. Unfortunately, Gillies escapes and one year later frames Julia for the murder of her husband, all as part of a plan to lure Murdoch into a Sadistic Choice of either saving his own life or that of Julia. Fortunately Murdoch is able to alert his fellow officers, who arrive in time to save him before the poisonous gas floods the room. Finally, he arranged for several criminals to break onto the train transporting him into prison, causing chaos which he used to try to escape, all the while taunting both Murdoch and Julia that they "owe him" for killing Julia's husband and allowing them to be together. Sadistic and defined by pettiness, Gillies remains Murdoch's worst foe.
 * Person of Interest: Alex Declan, from "Proteus", is a Serial Killer who kills his victims and steals their identities. After recently murdering Special Agent Alan Fahey, his eighth victim, he steals his identity as well and later assists Finch and Reese in trying to uncover the killer on Owen Island to divert any suspicion from himself. During the investigation, Declan murders the island's deputy, framing a marine in the process and endangering several civilians. When Finch discovers that Declan is the imposter, Declan takes Finch hostage and attempts to murder him so he can steal his identity like he did his other victims. Although Declan believes the identities he stole were being "wasted" and that he "did them justice," Finch ultimately deduces that he kills people because he enjoys it.
 * Roots (2016 Series): The Big Bad of Part 4 is Frederick Murray, a proud Confederate major who is defined by his Lack of Empathy for his family, slaves, and subordinates. When Chicken George visits his family at the Murray family's plantation, Frederick plots to have George re-enslaved by refusing to notify him of North Carolina's 30 day limit for freedmen. A vehement racist even by Southern standards, especially compared to his father, Frederick accuses Chicken George's son Tom of lying when a failed cannon test kills some of his men, and later lets his men gang rape Tom's wife. While Frederick supposedly loves Nancy Holt, he sends men to die in Nancy's and Jerusalem's trap despite knowing Nancy was an abolitionist spy for the Union. After Jerusalem is captured, Frederick orders his men to slowly lynch him even after Nancy reveals the truth about her and her friend's backgrounds. To his father's despair, Frederick then brutalizes and lynches Nancy after she puts Jerusalem out of his misery. A deluded sadist even after the war, Frederick declares that blacks will never be equals before he tries to kill Tom in front of his own family.
 * Secret Smile: When Brendan Block, a seemingly kind and polite man, is dumped by Miranda Cotton for his possessive nature, he reveals his true, monstrous, colors. Known to have committed crimes such as assault and money laundering in the past, it is implied Block had something to do with a house fire that claimed the lives of his parents when he was 9 years old. Seducing Miranda's sister, Kerry, Block integrates himself into the Cotton family, slowly manipulating them all into hating Miranda through various means, all the while psychologically tormenting the woman. After growing close with Miranda's teenage, clinically depressed brother, Troy, Block manipulates him into stopping his depression treatments, while also convincing him Miranda hates him, leading to the boy committing suicide, something Block subtly taunts Miranda about at Troy's funeral. After dumping Kerry on their wedding day to inflict maximum pain, Block hooks up with Miranda's best friend, Laura, and when Laura, realizing Block's vicious nature, tries to contact Miranda for help, Block arranges for her to drown in her bathtub. Later having a new girlfriend, Naomi, who he regularly abuses, Block uses her to try and get Miranda arrested for stalking him, and, when Miranda saves Naomi from him, Block attacks and rapes her, before trying to kill her with his bare hands. What Block lacked in body count, he more than made up for with sheer wickedness and depravity, nearly driving a woman insane and ruining her entire family as revenge on her for dumping him.
 * The Deliberate Stranger: In this TV mini series, Ted Bundy, who is a seemingly nice, handsome man, is really a manipulative Serial Killer. In Seattle, Bundy grabs a woman off the street and kills her. Bundy later goes to the beach and lures a woman to his car and kidnaps another woman at the beach and kills them. Bundy goes to Salt Lake City to pursue a law degree and picks a female hitch hiker and murders her. Bundy also stalks an a high school student and kills her. Bundy then goes to a ski lodge in Colorado and ends up kidnapping and killing a random woman. Bundy pretends to be a cop and tries to lure another woman into his car, where he tries to murder her, but she escapes. The police eventually capture Bundy and build a case against him. Bundy escapes from prison and escapes to Florida. There Bundy goes on a killing spree, going to a Sorority and murdering four women there. Bundy also kidnaps and murders a 12 year old girl. Bundy is soon recaptured and put on Death Row.
 * 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.
 * The Man with A Beard but No Hair and The Woman with Hair but No Beard, from Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events, are the arson loving heads of the dark side of V.F.D. who are the ones who orchestrated the schism from behind the scenes. Years prior to the events of the series, they manipulated an vulnerable Olaf into becoming the arson-loving madman he is today so he can accomplish their goals. Years later, they would burn down V.F.D. Headquarters to prevent anyone from learning its secrets and to eliminate an potential survivor of an recent fire. After making an introduction by attempting to kill Kit Snicket and steal the Sugar Bowl from her, they would proceed to murder the Circus Freaks just so to see if Olaf would care. After criticizing Olaf for his antics and failures, they would then order him to throw Sunny Baudelaire off of an cliff just to prove his villainy. They would then proceed to kidnap an group of Snow Scouts so they can force them to work for them and steal their fortunes, while also killing their parents by burning down their homes in an city-wide fire. They would later appear at Olaf and the Baudelaires' trial as judges where they try to have the Baudelaires declared guilty and have them arrested for the murder of Dewey Denouncement. An pair of cruel, emotionally abusive arsonists whose aura of menace frightens even Olaf himself, The Man with A Beard but No Hair and The Woman with Hair but No Beard played an major role in Count Olaf's descent to villainy.
 * Ash vs. Evil Dead: Baal, Big Bad of season 2 and the Bigger Bad of the entire franchise as a whole, was the demon responsible for the Deadites as their creator and father. Intending to allow evil to dominate earth and enslave or slaughter humanity, Baal has his children turn on their mother and sends them to Kill All Humans they can. Baal then infiltrates the town of Elk Grove by skinning and impersonating multiple people before capturing Ash and subjecting him to Mind Rape where he traps him in a fantasy, making Ash believe that the entirety of the past 30 years have been an elaborate delusion, intending to use Ash to murder his own friends to destroy a threat to Baal. Upon being sent to the past, Baal has his ex-wife Ruby murdered by her still-evil 1982 incarnation and attempts to kill Ash in a duel, mocking Ash for ever thinking he would have intentions of honoring the deal should Ash win. Responsible for the loss of countless lives thanks to the Necronomicon and the actions of the Deadites, Baal stands apart from the other Deadites for his ambition and cruelty.
 * In American Gothic, Sheriff Lucas Buck is a devilish corrupt lawman in the town of Trinity who kicks the plot off by raping a woman, later murdering her after she gives birth to his son, and then murders her daughter, framing and killing her husband before trying to claim the boy Caleb for himself to raise in his image. A charming, charismatic man, Lucas is responsible for frequent disappearances of 'outsiders,' in one instance keeping a pesky reporter tied up and tortured until the man dies, and shows no hesitation in destroying the lives of those who defy him on what he wants. In one such instance, a man who refuses Lucas's request to employ his sixteen year old daughter is steadily driven insane and tricked into murdering his own wife while a radio host who tries to blackmail Lucas finds his career and life utterly destroyed. Lucas attempts to corrupt Caleb, murdering people on seeming whims or to achieve long reaching goals, and even tries to trick the ghost of Caleb's sister into killing a baby so she can return to life and destroy Caleb's faith in her.
 * Gold Digger has Brendan, former werewolf patriach who makes a pact with dark powers to achieve incredible powers which he tests by murdering his own wife. Engineering a 'peace' between the werewolves and werecheetahs by creating a drought that kills many of the latter, Brendan betrays the werecheetahs and commits utter genocide on them, massacring the men, women and children. He is only prevented from killing a single baby thanks to the sacrifice of her mother and the intervention of archmage Theo Diggers. Brendan also plans to sell his own people into slavery to fulfill his own end of the deal, and mocks his own daughter for adhering to any standard of honor before she defeats and imprisons him. Escaping later, Brendan tries to murder his own children and mocks the only surviving werecheetah Brittany "Cheetah" Diggers for her clan and biological parents' deaths, intending to use his powers to freeze her as living stone and keep as a trophy for all eternity.
 * In Pretty Little Liars Lyndon James, an Arc Villain from seasons 2 and 3, is an obsessive and psychopathic stalker who met Maya St. Germain at a juvenile detention camp. After a brief relationship, she returned home to rekindle her relationship with Emily, at which point Lyndon stalks her and eventually murders her. He then plots to murder Emily next, expressing a desire to kill anyone close to her. Pretending to be Maya's cousin Nate, Lyndon lures Emily with a false friendship and and briefly considers letting her live when he thinks he has a shot, before finding out she's a lesbian. At which point, he abducts Emily's girlfriend and plots to force Emily to watch as he kills her for his perceived rejection. It's also implied Jenna Marshal is next when he learns she witnessed Maya's murder. While attempting to kill Emily, Lyndon is fatally stabbed, and while Caleb is comforting Emily, Lyndon gets a hold of the gun and shoots Caleb before he dies, although Caleb ultimately survives. Despite having nothing to do with the "A Game", Lyndon is one of the most evil characters on the show for his ultimately selfish motives and deranged personality.
 * The Profiler: The Jack Of All Trades is a sinister Serial Killer who functions as the nemesis of FBI Profiler Samantha Waters. After a killing spree with no set MO (hence his moniker), Jack became obsessed with Sam and murdered her husband, later targeting people she knew to isolate her when she returned to the FBI. Murdering more people, Jack proceeded to frame Sam's mentor Bailey for a murder, drugged Sam and tricked her into committing murder, thinking she was killing Jack in self defense. Abducting a fangirl of his, Jack tortured and brainwashed her into the Jill of All Trades, initiating a new killing spree with her. When Jill was captured by the police, Jack arranged her death and had a man he'd brainwashed into believing himself to be Jack of All Trades arrested by the police before later revealing his true identity to Sam and kidnapping her to make her a killer like himself. When this failed, he attempted to kidnap her daughter Chloe to turn Chloe against Sam forever and make it so Sam truly had nobody left. Sadistic, manipulative, and committed to making Sam his own, Jack sets the standard for killers on Profiler, with a body count few killers can even dream of.
 * Poirot: Michael Garfield is a very handsome man who is actually the lover of Rowena Drake and the caretaker of her garden. Together, the two are responsible for murdering six people, however, whereas Rowena actually did love Michael and her two children from her deceased husband, Michael seduced her so as to get at her garden and her aunt's money, expressing disgust with her appearance to Poirot, and is shown to be a shameless flirt. In the past, Michael had killed Rowena's husband, which she blamed on reckless teenagers, and helped Rowena poison her aunt, who is revealed to have disinherited her because of the affair, instead leaving everything to au pair Olga Seminoff, when her will is read. To remedy this, Michael had Leslie Ferri to clumsily forge a will, killing him afterwards, which Rowena switches with the real one before she kills Olga when confronted, Michael burying her body. When he realises that Miranda Butler, his daughter from his affair with her mother, had seen him, he told her it was a sacrifice, making her think of it as a pagan ritual sacrifice. He returns after Rowena drowns young Joyce, Miranda's friend, when she says she saw a murder at a Hallowe'en party, Michael drowns Joyce's brother Leopold when he starts blackmailing Rowena after he realised who had killed Joyce. When he realised that Joyce had altered the details of a story told to her by Miranda, he tries to poison her under the guise of a pagan sacrifice. When she refuses, he tries to force her to drink the poison, Poirot barely preventing him from succeeding. When Poirot reveals his and Rowena's crimes, Michael shows himself to be a greedy narcissist who planned to run off with Rowena's money to purchase an island and create his own garden, caring only for his own desires and showing Rowena his true feelings about her.
 * Lethal Weapon (2016 Series): Gideon Lyon is a cold-blooded CIA agent turned attack dog for cartel leader Tito Flores. Described as Flores's most brutal enforcer, Lyon pursues Flores's mistress Maria and her infant son into Los Angeles, killing an informant in the process. Cornering Martin Riggs, his partner Roger Murtaugh, DEA Agent Palmer, Maria, and her baby in a motel, Lyon attempts to kill them all with a rocket before murdering two responding officers. Upon his arrest, Lyon is revealed to be linked to the death of Riggs's wife Miranda, and when interrogated by Riggs, Lyon boasts that once Flores commissioned the hit, he deliberately waited for Miranda to go into labor before ordering the car crash that killed her, just to hurt Riggs. Escaping, Lyon kidnaps Riggs and Murtaugh, torturing Murtaugh with a defibrillator and bragging that after the crash, he personally suffocated the still-alive Miranda to death. A psychopath who simply enjoys hurting others, Gideon Lyon significantly darkens the tone of this action-comedy series.
 * In the world of True Blood, filled with all manner of horror, monsters, murder and even darkly comedic elements, Lilith stands out as villain above all the rest. The primordial vampiric "god" worshiped by the Sanquinestas, Lilith is the personification of the evils of vampirism. Believing vampires to be above humans who are nothing more than food to them, the Sanquinestas commit atrocities in Lilith's name to prevent any peace with humans, with Lilith directly influencing members of the Authority to her own ends and the subjection of the human race. Under Lilith's influence, the Authority has massacred numerous people and committed terror attacks on Tru Blood factories, abducting and imprisoning numerous people to feed on in an effort to start a war. Lilith appears to members of the Authority convincing them they are to be her vessel, with Bill killing all of them before she possesses him. When Godric's spirit reaches out to Eric and Nora to warn them of Lilith's true nature, Lilith appears again and decapitates Godric. Lilith has Bill conduct experiments with fairy blood to further empower the vampires; its revealed Lilith's previous attempt was when she raped and turned Mackyn Warlow into a vampire, turning him into the monster he is today and resulting in the massacre of his village and family. When Bill's experiments work and he's successful in saving captive vampires, Lilith sends her sirens to take Bill's life, now that he fulfilled his purpose. While Lilith claims to be above morality and other vampires, others who see her for what she is claim she's little more than a false god and even a devil figure, with Bill laying the blame on Lilith for the death and suffering in their world directly and indirectly with her religion and war.
 * Maryann Forrester, from the last 3 episodes of season 1 and the Big Bad of season 2, is a maenad, a hedonistic creature devoted to bringing about the god Dionysus, and enjoys spreading violence and lust in her wake with ritualistic orgies and mass brainwashing. Posing as a caring and wealthy social worker, Maryann takes Tara in from her mother, trying to keep Tara dependent on her and brainwashing her into an abusive relationship with her other patient Benedict, who has been unwittingly brainwashed into killing people and carving out their hearts at Maryann's behest; Maryann would then bake these hearts into her food and serve them to her guests. Years ago, Maryann raped a teenage Sam Merlotte, and in the present sets her sights on him as her sacrifice. Maryann sends a shapeshifter named Daphne to get close to Sam and lure him, but when she fails, Maryann has her killed to frame Sam. Maryann uses her influence to brainwash all but a few of the town of Bon Temps into a hedonistic cult. When Sookie and her friends arrive to save their town, Maryann deflects a bullet intended for her into her henchmen Karl's head, dismissing his death before brainwashing Sookie's human friends. Maryann tries to use Sookie to lure Sam to her, and when Sookie foils the ritual, Maryann tries to sacrifice all her followers and kill Sookie in a mad rage.
 * Beast Master TV Series:
 * King Zad is the Big Bad for the first two seasons. The barbarian king of the violent Terrons, Zad is the man who destroyed The Beastmaster Dar's home city and killed his father King Eldar. Zad routinely has innocent villages massacred with the women taken for entertainment and other survivors forced to fight monsters and wild animals for Zad's amusement. Taking Dar's lover Kyra as a slave, Zad psychologically torments her while lusting after her, intending to break her and make her submit to him "willingly" for the pleasure of taking away Dar's beloved. Zad also kills his men on a constant basis for petty or imagined reasons with his other crimes including trying to kill the final unicorns, trying to murder children who may one day grow up to oppose him and even murders his own sister when she betrays him for her own power. Revealed as a servant of the demonic lord Balcifer, Zad plans to assist Balcifer in his conquest of the world and the extermination of everything besides Zad's own territories so Zad can reign over the last remnants of humanity.
 * The aforementioned Balcifer, Lord of Darkness, contacted King Zad years ago and convinced him to become his agent on Earth, and gave him his first task: The genocide of the entire Sula Tribe to eradicate the only bloodline that could actually harm him. At the start of season 3, Balcifer casually kills the Ancient One and returns to check on Zad's progress, with it being revealed that all the crimes of the Terrons were at Balcifer's bequest. In the finale, Balcifer arrives in person, promptly devours an innocent woman's soul. Balcifer tries to corrupt Dar to become his new Dragon, seeing as he finds Zad to have outlived his usefulness. Balcifer then reveals his attempt to cover the world in darkness and exterminate all that lives save for himself.
 * Friday the 13th: The Series:
 * Lewis Vendredi made a pact with The Devil himself to spread evil throughout the world. Responsible for the events of the series, Lewis locates and acquired multiple old items before he would personally curse them and distribute them, often in ways that showed a sadistic edge and made it so they would always result in death and chaos to gain hell more souls. When Lewis realized his pact with Satan was resulting in his immortal body aging too much, he tried to break the deal, resulting in his own death at Satan's hands. Returning as a ghost, Lewis attempts to return to life and murder his family members who are trying to regain the cursed objects so they can do no more harm. Eventually, Lewis tries to get back in Satan's good graces by opening the very gates of hell and allowing Satan access to Earth to consume or torture all of mankind.
 * Winston Knight, from season 1's "Double Exposure", is an ambitious news anchor who uses a cursed camera to make a duplicate of himself that he must destroy within five hours by destroying the negative print. Winston, to boost his ratings, sends his duplicate out to murder women with a machete so he can cover the murders and portray himself as a hero, killing at least ten innocents with no sign of stopping. When the hero Ryan's girlfriend Cathy catches Knight with his duplicate, Knight makes her a victim as well. Realizing Knight is guilty, Ryan snatches the negative print, meaning Knight risks death if the five hours lapse. When the group offers a trade, Knight attacks their friend and mentor Jack and creates a double of him, intending to have the double murder Ryan and his cousin Micki so he can frame Jack as the murderer and continue his own rise into stardom.
 * Alex Dent, from season 3's "Mightier Than the Sword", is a Serial Killer posing as a true crime author. Dent uses his magic pen to turn unwitting victims into serial killers, targeting whoever Dent chooses. He disposes of them by bringing them to justice for crimes they can't remember committing. Dent is introduced using this power on Clint Fletcher, whom he used to kidnap and murder 18 women. Dent sadistically reveals to Fletcher that he is about to be executed for Dent's own crimes, and enjoys watching him die. At a writers' talk, Dent taunts Clint's enraged brother Jerry just to revel in his own emotional cruelty. Dent then uses his pen on the priest who oversaw Fletcher's execution and uses him to tie up loose ends. He murders Jerry and a detective who grew suspicious of him, before leaving the priest amnesiac and ruining his life. He captures Micki and has her target his ex-wife Marion, who is attempting to blackmail him. He plans on making her death the worst he's ever done purely for her slight against him, and comes along to watch her murder personally. When Marion fights back, Dent throws her down the stairs to try and cripple her, so that she will be paralyzed and conscious as she is carved up.
 * Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries:
 * Sidney Fletcher, from season 2, seems to be a charming man, but he actually runs a white-slavery operation wherein he scouts out "sinful" young women held at a convent and buys them, only to smuggle them out of Australia and into sex slavery. When one young woman escapes, Fletcher decides she's not worth the trouble and has her murdered before having her dumped in the river. When Phryne Fisher investigates, Fletcher catches her and demonstrates willingness to kill her and her friends in order to keep his sickening trade going.
 * Nicholas Mortimer, from season 2's "Murder Under the Mistletoe", is the most prolific murderer in the series. When he discovered that a mine which he partially owned had gold in it, Mortimer sent in miners who were trapped in a cave-in. When a ten-year-old boy escaped and told Mortimer, Mortimer personally murdered him and rigged a second cave in to kill the miners so as not to have to tell anyone else about the gold. Years later, Mortimer learns that Phryne's aunt Prudence wants to sell her stake in the mine and begins murdering everyone at the hotel they're at to deal with Prudence and any witnesses. Just for a sadistic flair, he bases his murders around the 12 days of Christmas song, knowing the song tormented Prudence when she thought she heard the trapped miners singing it. Mortimer even murders his own wife as not to share the wealth with her, admitting that he did it all for money and fun.
 * She-Wolf of London:
 * Dr. Hatchard, from "Moonlight Becomes You", is a scientist who discovered the existence of werewolves and decides to get rich off of it. Kidnapping an innocent werewolf, Hatchard keeps him in horrible conditions, forcing a change on him that results in extreme agony. Hatchard proceeds to take other prisoners and inject them with the serum he's made from the werewolf prisoner's blood to create a "Super Soldier", a process which inevitably results in agonizing death when the victims' muscles self-destruct. Hatchard has done this to many people, and when he captures the heroine Randi Wallace and her partner Professor Ian Matheson, he decides to murder his prisoner and replace him with Randi, before attempting to subject Ian to his serum, intending only to profit off the deaths of as many innocents as it takes.
 * Samantha Stevens, from the "Can't Keep a Dead Man Down" two-parter, is the dean of Ian's college who is obsessed with reclaiming the Staff of Gilgamesh to grant herself dominion over the dead. She begins by raising the dead, resulting in the zombies devouring innocent people. Stevens is seemingly stopped and killed, but turns out to be alive and stabs Ian to death, later raising him as a freshly dead zombie to use his still-intact intellect. Stevens sends her zombies after another piece of the staff at a crowded museum, resulting in a security guard being eaten alive and many other people nearly killed as well. Intending to sacrifice Randi to complete the power of the staff, Stevens plans to revive the dead all over and use them to overwhelm the living until she reigns supreme over the world.
 * The Strain (TV Series):
 * The Master is the youngest of the Ancient vampires with a legacy of death going back millennia. Killing and feeding at his whim, The Master ends up in New York after stowing away aboard a plane, killing and turning everyone on board before sending the newly-made vampires after their own loved ones to spread his new strain. In the past, the Master also used concentration camps as a feeding ground, and when the carpenter Abraham Setrakian tried to kill him, the Master broke his hands to leave him to suffer and die now that he would be useless to the Nazis. Using his vampires to kill and convert countless innocents in New York, the Master directs a number of blind children to be turned by his right-hand man Thomas Eichhorst to serve as "hunters" before attempting to overwhelm entire neighborhoods with his armies. When his ally Eldritch Palmer annoys the Master, the Master kills his lover Coco just to prove a point. Finally having his "brothers" killed, the Master and Eichhorst attempt to use a nuke to blot out the sun to allow the vampires to completely overwhelm New York.
 * Thomas Eichhorst is a former Nazi-turned-vampire who acts as the right-hand man of the Master. Even prior to his transformation, Eichhorst was a despicable human being who crossed the Moral Event Horizon when he declined to help a Jewish, former co-worker he had a crush on, and instead lied to his superiors about her being a thief and allowed her and her family to be hanged. During the war, Eichhorst offered Russian POWs a special assignment in exchange for better living conditions, but neglected to tell them that their new job was executing Jewish prisoners too old or infirm to work. When one POW, Fetrovsky, performs the execution only after Eichhorst threatened his and his friend's lives, Eichhorst murders Fetrovsky's friend anyway as punishment for hesitating. Eichhorst was eventually made the commandant of a concentration camp, and at some point became aligned with the Master. In order to find a carpenter to craft his master's coffin, Eichhorst threatened to kill a workhouse full of prisoners unless the one who carved a Jewish Talisman he found stepped forward. Unlike the animalistic vampires that make up the Master's army, Eichhorst retains his mind and his sense of sadism, which he displays through actions like vampirizing Setrakian's wife to force Setrakian to kill her, and attempting to rape/eat Dutch with his stinger. In addition to setting nukes and vampirizing blind children for the Master, Eichhorst also oversees the creation of slaughterhouses to drain humans of blood as efficiently as possible. When one of his employees doesn't see the difference in using a dummy to test the system instead of a live person, Eichhorst illustrates his point by impaling another employee on a meat hook, then timing it as he's subjected to the draining process. A fanatic who aspires to greatness through serving the Master, Eichhorst is instrumental in helping bring about the vampire apocalypse.
 * Stranger Things:
 * The "Mind Flayer" is the eldritch horror lurking within the Upside-Down. A thinking, vindictive entity that subsumes other realms into itself, the Mind Flayer uses horrible monsters like the Demogorgon to capture and massacre several people from Earth once the gate between there and his domain is opened up, at one point using the Demodogs to initiate an utter massacre in the Hawkins Laboratory, which included the death of the good-hearted Bob Newby. The Mind Flayer also had a piece of itself take hold of young Will Byers so that he can take possession of his mind and do his work through him, threatening to kill the boy should anyone attempt to drive him out. In the third season, the Mind Flayer "flays" several more people, overtaking them in mind and body while possessing Max Mayfield's older stepbrother Billy Hargrove, using him to corral up to thirty people—elderly and children among them—to melt down their bodies and amalgamate them into a crude, monstrous body he can use to walk on Earth. The Mind Flayer proceeds to try and slaughter El and all of her friends out of nothing more than spite for being denied entrance to Earth the first time, gleefully mind raping her and telling her he won't stop until he's ended everyone on Earth. When his hold over Billy is loosened and Billy fights back to protect El, the Mind Flayer skewers him to death for daring to defy him. Possessing sinister intellect but utterly lacking in any conscience to speak of, the Mind Flayer is this series' vilest creation.