A) A plan to solve one of the world’s major problems (hunger, disease, etc.) leads to near disaster. The heroes consider abandoning all hope of improving things, when one of them says “Wait. Let’s just figure out everything that went wrong the first time, and try a small pilot program after we’ve corrected all the flaws that we could find. That way, we can still help the world, without as much danger as the last time”
B) The mad scientist’s device for destroying the world is destroyed by the heroes, who celebrate their victory. Meanwhile, agents from every world government, having learned that such a device is possible, immediately start working on their own version…
In the sequel, he is faced with a bomb that he has no idea how to disarm. He helps evacuate the area while the bomb squad remotely disables it with a robot.
There’s always one guy in the platoon. He doesn’t want to follow orders, he has his own way of doing things, his boots aren’t polished as well as the other soldiers, he was once found around back smoking a cigarette instead of working on the detail he was assigned. The unit gets called up into action and everybody gets their gear together to move out. The captain and the first sergeant briefly discuss what to do with that soldier and come to the conclusion that they don’t need someone who can’t follow orders in this situation so they leave him behind to watch the shop.
The county department of beaches and harbor shuts down a popular beach for a few days after reports of a large shark in the area. Marine biologists capture the animal, tag it, and release it a hundred miles out to sea and the beach is reopened.
The medical forensics team finds traces of something odd in a body brought in that may tie the victim to a local serial killer and a string of unsolved crimes. They note that on their report to their superior and let the detectives do the investigating while they move on to the next body.
A bunch of guys are driving somewhere on the highway, and they get off on an exit to fill up; when they are going back to the highway, one of them is looking at an old paper map. He says “Hey, y’know what…if we take this gravel road, we’ll have to drive slower, but it’s so much shorter, we’ll still get there a couple of hours earlier.”
“Nah,” says the driver. “I forgot to check the air pressure on the spare, and I have trouble getting cell service in the woods.”
A woman embezzles a large sum from her employer and leaves town. That night she checks in at a run-down motel, but she’s so disturbed by the weird owner that she immediately leaves and goes instead to the new, clean Holiday Inn near the main highway.
A young woman is in a foreign country on vacation where a scruffy looking man convinces her to take a package back to the united states for him for a small amount of money. Turns out that the package contains a very nice picture frame that he bought for his mom as a gift.
This was an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, except, someone convinced her to take the package from the US with her to Mexico where she was going on vacation, and I think the gift was for the guy’s brother, not his mother.
The highly trained killer soldier, emotionally tortured by his years in Vietnam, is picked up as a vagrant in a small town in the Northwest. The sheriff’s deputy makes the mistake of mistreating this former soldier, drawing blood first.
Fortunately the sheriff is a highly trained and professional law enforcement officer who steps in immediately to halt the mistreatment, fires the deputy, arrests the former deputy, and release the soldier with apologies and a promise to cooperate with any legal actions he wishes to bring.
This happened (more or less) in an episode of Chicago P.D.
Here’s one:
A high school student is bitten by a (choose one: radioactive; genetically modified) spider and suddenly has superpowers, which he uses to his advantage as a (choose one: stuntman; wrestler). He sees someone running towards him, and someone behind him shouting, “Stop that thief!”, which he does. He ends up being one of the top men in his chosen craft, and whatever supervillains New York has are dispatched by the Fantastic Four and the X-Men.
Well, except for the twist; it turns out that the thief was responsible for a string of robberies, and there was a reward for his capture. “There’s good money for crimefighting? With great power comes great responsibility…and great rewards to boot!” Imagine what Peter Parker could do with something even close to approaching Tony Stark money.
A male stranger washes ashore at Paradise Island. The Amazons listen to his tales of warfare and the evil of the Nazis and the Japanese and nod. Then they kill him and go on about their business, their opinion that men are just plain evil and best left alone totally confirmed.
A Fedex employee survives a plane crash and washes up on a small, uncharted, tropical island. After six weeks, he dies from no fresh water, no food, and sunstroke.
The FBI promises leniency to a dangerous madman currently in jail for his help in tracking down the guy’s former terrorist organization who are now on the run after stealing a nuclear weapon and threatening to detonate it on American soil. They find the group and recover the nuke with his help and his sentence is reduced from life to only 50 years.