RealityChuck, you seem a good sort, and I like your posts. But good God, man, you’ve the most irresponsible sig since Gipper80 joined up with his “The bombing begins in five minutes” sig. Use some judgment!
Terrible, terrible decision you made there, sir. Can't see how you could've done any better, though.
The Fourth Doctor in Genesis of the Daleks has an opportunity to end the Dalek menace once and for all but decides he has not the right to do so.
The Tenth Doctor in The Christmas Invasion disagrees with a decision Harriet Jone PM makes and decides to bring down the goverment. No golden age for
Britain and Harold Saxon becomes PM. Not his best decision.
How about Peter Parker? He wasn’t a cop, or even really a super hero. He was a kid with suddenly developed spider-powers. He had no obligation to stop the thief, but he had the ability to do it. Later, the thief murders Gentle Uncle Ben, and rice was never the same thereafter.
This book was the one I immediately thought of. I read eons ago there was to be a movie version starring Brad Pitt; but it never came to be because the special effects that would be required, at the time, weren’t advanced enough
This was the book that I came in to post about. On the surface, every decision made by the lead character seems reasonable, until you learn that many important aspects of the alien society have been misunderstood. In fact, there’s even a quote in the book about this:
The mission, he thought, probably failed because of a series of logical, reasonable, carefully considered decisions, each of which seemed like a good idea at the time. Like most colossal disasters.
Good reading.
I think her title is CEO, not PM. ISTR the AIs motivations were more nuanced than that; I remember it being a little ambiguous because their plans were revealed by a rogue AI who was probably lying.
In the third and fourth books of the series, the civilization is a theocracy, and everyone is basically immortal. The fastest form of transport involves ships that basically liquefy the human body, and they are reconstituted upon arrival. It turns out that the immortality is given by the aforementioned AIs, and the heroes cut humanity off from this to topple the AIs. Again, probably doesn’t fit the OP per se.
Came in to post The Sparrow because it’s such a kick-ass book but I see I’ve been beaten several times over, so instead I’ll offer up the behavior of Naomi Watts’ character in The Ring.
Tortured soul? Wreaking vengeance? What could be a better way to put things to rest than to find the body of the poor girl and give her a proper burial, right? Except not.
Harry Potter not making a concerted effort to tell someone in authority what was going on in any book. There was always some excuse like Dumbledore kept dodging him or some other reason. Of course, if he talked to an adult there wouldn’t have been much of a story.
You only brought that up for the rice joke. I should think a bear wisecrack would have worked better.
Anyway, Pete’s not quite what I was looking for. He should have stopped the thief, but, especially in the movie, no one but the promoter would have blamed him for letting the guy go if someone else hadn’t died as a result.
How about Baltar at the beginning of BSG? I’ll grant that industrial espionage isn’t exactly an honourable thing to do, but what’s the worst that could possibly happen?
Should I change the color to yellow?
In James Tiptree, Jr’s, “Your Haploid Heart,” humans follow a particular policy for characterizing alien races: they’re considered human if they’re interfertile with human. This is not unreasonable – if the genes can mix, the species will mix, with various issues that causes. However, in the story, it nearly causes aliens to perform self-genocide.
In Fredrick Brown’s “Nightmare in Blue,” the protagonist does act reasonably – his son is drowning, but he can’t swim to save him so he goes for help. As in all of Brown’s “Nightmare” stories, there’s a twist and things go terribly wrong.
In the Temeraire series, the main character makes an honorable (but treasonous) decision that results in the successful invasion of England by the French with all the attendant tragedies of looting, murder and rape. Actually, I’m not quite sure how the series is going to recover from this one – the last book was pretty much a complete downer and the next in the series which is just about to be released doesn’t sound any more sprightly.
In the book The Firm by John Grisham, upon graduating from law school, Mitch McDeere has his pick of law firms and makes the fairly astute choice of going for the law firm that offered most money (and which seemed to have a nice, family-friendly work culture).
Big mistake.
Maybe Peter Parker doesn’t count, but what about Bruce Wayne? Early in his careerhe accidentally knocked the man in the red hood into a vat of acid. Result: the guy turned into The Joker and started slaughtering thousands of people. Arguably, Gotham would have been better off if Bruce had never donned the cowl in the first place.
It’s the bread and butter of horror novels. Take Cujo off the top of my head - the mother makes every perfectly reasonable decision, but she doesn’t have perfect knowledge so first she doesn’t know the rabid dog leaves the area when she can’t see him and then when she finally goes for it, he hasn’t left and then it doesn’t really matter because her son has died already from being in the car for several days. Nothing better she could have done with the information she had at the time.
I didn’t say Parker didn’t count; just that I wasn’t sure. I can see the argument for stopping the robber and for ignoring him. In the movie, it would be almost unbelievable if he HAD stopped the robber.
As for the Joker: I’m not convinced he wasn’t headed that way no matter what happened to him. Bats, at most, pushed him into a particular manifestation of his homicidal psychosis. If it hadn’t been that night, it would’ve been the next; if he hadn’t become a murderous clown, it would have been a murderous dentist or something.
Star Wars - “Hold your fire. There are no life forms. It must have short-circuited.” Poor guy is just trying to save some credits and turbolaser maintenance, and winds up bringing down the Empire.
Don’t forget putting a band of genocidal maniacs into power.
The ghosts of all the dead Ewoks spit on that guy.
NO, it fits the OP, at least the original comic book version. In the (canonical, all bow before Ditko) Book, Peter thinks that he might run out of these new powers-- why waste them on a random hood?
And-- Uncle Ben had already lent his name to the rice. His death didn’t change this at all.
And the bear was named for him (ironically, inspired by an editorial defending bears by JJ Jameson in the Daily Bugle) after his death anyhow.
Wesley in season 3 of Angel.
Every thing he read, everything he found out told him that the prophecy WILL coem true and Angel WILL kill Connor (and, to an extent, this is true…Angel (sort of) kills him at the end of season 4 as a catalyst for the reality-altering spell.) He felt he was doing what was best, both for Connor, to save his life, and for Angel, to spare him from killing his own son. Then, in his own words, had his throat cut and all his friends abandon him. 