One thing that bugs me is when a character in fiction does something really horrible. A crime or a deed that should put him/her in prison or at the very least be shunned forever by all the other characters. Instead, the character gets yelled at or in the worse case scenario gets slapped, and then everything gets back to normal. Usually the character betrays his friends, but repents at the last possible moment and saves them <cough>Lando Calrissian!<cough>.
Some examples:
In the latest episode of Eureka, a woman who’s obsessed with the town’s deputy stole top secret technology from a government facility to create a device which she used to steal the deputy’s identity and appearance.
List of crimes she committed:
Impersonating a police officer
Inserted a tranquilizer device in the deputy so she would pass out on command (don’t know what law this specifically breaks, but I bet it’s a real doozy.)
Falsely accusing an innocent of a serious crime and illegally imprisoning him
Exposing the deputy to mortal danger
Now I fully expected her to spend the rest of her life in prison, but instead she gets put on “probation” and is going to be a love interest to one of the series regulars.
As bad as that was, at least nobody died. In the first series of Torchwood, Ianto, one of the main characters, decides to try and help his half-cyberwoman fiancee become human again without telling anyone. As a result, two people died and humanity came close to annihilation. Jack (the leader) should have put a bullet in Ianto’s head, but instead only yells at him. Ianto even has the gall to give Jack shit about killing the fiancee, right after she had killed a young woman by removing the woman’s brain.
Star trek. The prime directive. Everybody. Nobody got demoted or fired for breaking it.
What characters do you think got away too lightly, and what kind of punishment should he/she have gotten instead?
Let’s not forget Henry from Eureka, who very nearly destroyed the UNIVERSE via time rifts after trying to bring back his dead fiancee and is now the MAYOR of the town.
The problem with that one is the way it worked out, no one remembers he did it. (Jack did, but he erased Jack’s memory of the entire thing - with Jack’s permission.)
Yeah, Eureka is a repeat offender on that kind of thing, though.
[spoiler]It turns out that Xander summoned the musical demon, thinking that it would cheer everyone up. Instead, everyone’s secrets end up being revealed to each other (which could be good or bad, depending on each case), and several people end up dying from too much dancing. It’s never mentioned again.
Of course, Xander has actually single-handedly saved the world before, and received no recognition at all for it. He’s just kinda Xander that way.[/spoiler]
I find Torchwood works much better if I assume that Jack is meant to be a lousy boss. And you forgot that Jack goes right back to the sex games with Ianto in his office.
Yeah, but that was a stupid rule. It existed only to be broken.
[spoiler]Willow turning evil in season 6. Now I’ll give her a pass for killing Warren, but she tried to kill the Scoobies and destroy the world. Nobody brings this up in a negative way in later episodes. Yet everybody gave Andrew shit about killing Jonathan, and he had the excuse of being influenced by the ultimate evil. Willow did her evil deeds out of her free will. I’m not saying Andrew did not deserve the shit he got, but it’s strange that Willow gets a pass for doing worse.
PS. I’m sure there’s a couple of cops in intensive care after the police station rampage, and at least one truck driver out of his livelihood.
[/spoiler]
Oh yeah - My contribution. The fact that Picard, not only get another ship, but a bigger, better one in the Star Trek: TNG movies. He basically allowed the Enterprise D to run aground after it had been taken over by a pair of two-bit Klingons
Melrose Place is one of my great guilty pleasures. My wife got me into the watching the DVDs a few years ago.
Anyway they were really bad about letting off characters easy for infractions that would have gotten a real person thrown in the can or at the very least embroiled in the legal system for years.
But one that stands out is Kimberly blowing up the apartment building. She successfully pled insanity - that part doesn’t bother me too much as I could actually that see happening in real life - but then she gets out of the sanitarium after only a couple of weeks. She then goes on to get a job as a mental health counselor, and eventually winds us as a director of a mental hospital, where tries to lobotomize her ex-husband of course.
In real life, even if she did somehow get released from the sanitarium, she would be completely osctracized from the medical profession. If you look at the details of the storyline leading up to her blowing up the building - love triangles, tales of stolen babies, well-heeled Beverly Hills medical practitioners - the tabloids would have been all over this. Even if the hospital administrators still had faith in her abilities and felt that she had genuninely overcome her mental illness, no reputable medical facility would have touched her (employment-wise) with a 100-foot pole for fear of all the bad publicity that would rain down on them.
As much as I enjoy watching him do his stuff, Dr. Gregory House, M.D. should have lost his medical license, or at least his job, dozens of times by now. Usually, Cuddy punishes him by making him work extra hours in the clinic. Where he has the opportunity to endanger even more patients.
Note: I’m not using spoilers to discuss events in shows that went off the air years ago!
After Willow returns from England, she & the gang are invisible to each other. Then she’s captured by a hideous creature who begins flaying her, one strip of skin at a time. Very slowly. It’s a weird echo of what she had done.
Angel wasn’t really guilty of the crimes Angelus committed after the night with Buffy–including Jenny’s murder. But he does get dispatched to a hell dimension for a couple of centuries–by Buffy.
In Angel, Gunn takes Lindsey’s place in Wolfram & Hart’s “holding dimension” & has his heart ripped out every day for two weeks. Although he said that “life” in that soul-killing suburb was as bad as the more obvious torture. Was he working out a bit of his guilt for his role in Fred’s death?
These hideous, painful events seem like Whedonesque penance–a bit stronger than Five Hail Mary’s.
I thought that was pretty ass-y of him, too. Though I guess a lot of the characters got away with stuff they shouldn’t have. And a lot of them died, too, as was the nature of the show.
ETA: Actually, though, I think this is something I still wonder about. A lot of times, I’ll wonder, why was Tony so lenient with Richie over that? It was just so pointless.
