Complete Monster/Live Action TV

""And the good thing is, he's not dead for long - I get to kill him AGAIN!""

- The Master on Captain Jack Harkness, Doctor Who

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
 * Criminal Minds
 * Doctor Who
 * Kamen Rider
 * Power Rangers
 * Super Sentai


 * A couple psychos make the extra effort to stand out in Breaking Bad.
 * "The Cousins," Marco and Leonel Salamanca, are ruthless enforcers for the cartel. We get a hint of their viciousness when they decapitate an informant for the DEA named Tortuga and for a touch of black comedy put his head on a tortoise rigged with a bomb to catch the Federales. After arriving in America after the death of their cousin Tuco, the two slaughter every immigrant they arrived with, then kill an old woman to take her house as a base, and the police officer who comes to investigate. The two later stalk and attempt to murder DEA agent Hank Schrader, treating everything with nothing more than emotionless, single-minded ruthlessness.
 * Jack Welker, leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, is just as nasty as any of the Mexican Cartel. Jack starts off using his prison connections to arrange the murders of ten prisoners Walter White is afraid will turn State's witness. Jack later kills DEA agents Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez with his gang and steals the money Walt had buried for his own after personally executing Hank. Jack keeps Walt's old partner Jesse Pinkman enslaved and chained in the meth lab to cook for the Nazis under threat of murdering his loved ones. A threat that turns out not to be idle when Jesse attempts to escape. After Jesse is forced to witness the murder of his beloved Andrea, Jack informs him her son will be next if Jesse tries anything again. Even when Walt returns, Jack decides to kill him rather than bother with any other step and only stops to parade Jesse's poor treatment in front of him.
 * By the end of the show, Walter White himself has crossed the line straight into this trope. And he doesn't regret it one bit.
 * 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.
 * 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 the trope.
 * When they aren't Sympathetic Murderers, at least a third of the killers on Cold Case fit this description.
 * A particularly horrific one-shot villain, serial killer John Smith, who would abduct women who were perfectly happy with their lives and hold them captive in a dark, cramped chamber, where the isolation, coupled with psychological torture, would eventually break their spirits, at which point he would seal them in and leave them to die. The guy seemed to have no Freudian Excuse whatsoever and did this simply to recreate an event from his childhood; while out hiking, he found a woman who had fallen down a well and, as she begged him for help, he leered down and spat on her, then waited and watched as she drowned from exhaustion. He described the sight of every last shred of hope in her eyes dying as "the most beautiful thing I have ever seen" and became obsessed with replicating the moment. Additionally, to make absolutely sure his victims were dead on the inside, he would offer them the chance to leave before entombing them, but no one ever acted on the offer. "Once hope is gone...dying is just a formality." Cold Case Pedia probably said it best when they listed his MO as simply "Mind Fucking".
 * Josh Freely from season 1's "Fly Away" is a brutal pedophile that uses his position, as a social worker working with emotionally unstable parents, to find new victims. Freely piles emotional abuse onto the parents, making them feel as though they're worthless, so they surrender their kids to him, and if that doesn't work, he's more than happy to fudge his own records so his superiors order the children removed. His abuse eventually reaches the point that one such mother attempts to kill herself and her daughter rather than let Freely take her.
 * The season 1 finale, "Lovers' Lane, " brings us Jim Larkin, a slovenly glutton and serial rapist. Too lazy to even abduct victims himself, he instead badgers his abused and weak-willed son to do so for him, usually unattractive teenage girls he pretends to befriend. His assaults are brutal, reaching the point at which he murders one of his victims simply for calling him "disgusting."
 * Roger Mulvaney, of season 3's "A Perfect Day" ruthlessly beats his wife and two daughters and uses his position as a police officer to get away with the abuse. Once his wife decides to leave him for another man he resolves that if he can't have them, nobody could. He kidnaps the three of them and makes his wife watch as he throws one of the girls from a tall bridge.
 * Rayanne Leland from season 5's "Spiders" is a sugary-sweet stay-at-home mom who also happens to run a Neo-Nazi coven out of her basement. When her son Truitt murders a Hispanic woman, Truitt's girlfriend, Tamyra, turns to Rayanne for help, only to find to her horror that Rayanne wholeheartedly supports her son's actions, and calmly tells Tamyra that all Hispanics should be exterminated, her warm, loving smile never leaving her face. When Tamyra threatens to go to the police, Rayanne browbeats the most insecure and sympathetic member of the coven, Elliot, into murdering her.
 * Daniel Patterson from season 5's "Slipping" is the ultimate gaslighter. Insanely jealous of his wife's skill at poetry, he hatched a plan to both steal her work for his own and get rid of her. With the aid of his slavishly devoted housekeeper, he did everything in his power to drive his wife insane and ultimately to suicide, maintaining a façade of a caring husband all the while. When he failed to break her, he murdered her himself. To prevent his stepdaughter from knowing the truth he sent her to a notoriously harsh boarding school, believing his story that her mother committed suicide for 45 years.
 * Law and Order SVU had Victor Paul Gitano, a notable suspect that completely topped anyone else Benson and Stabler have ever encountered. Gitano was a sadistic pedophile, and, as you find out later, absolutely proud of it. He lures kids in, then rapes, tortures, and kills them. He doesn't discriminate by gender either. On top of that, when trying to hunt Gitano down, things don't quite go as planned. Not only does he kill one of the two kids he had with him in a subway station full of people by slashing his throat, he almost killed Benson the same way. And then, when they corner Gitano in a warehouse, he manages to get behind Stabler and hold him at gunpoint with a shotgun. Gitano, despite knowing he'd get caught or killed at this point, outright boasts that he killed the other child he had (who was a girl) and bragged that she was a "slut" and a "real little whore" before killing her, even though he never got the chance to molest her. Fortunately for Stabler, Gitano gets killed by a police sharpshooter. Compared to any of the other serial killers on TV (even on Dexter and Criminal Minds), Gitano tops them ALL on the creepiness factor. By the end of the episode, you're glad he's dead. Oh yeah, and he's based on a real guy.
 * SVU had another one in the episode "Dominance" in the form of one Charlie Baker: by the end, he has murdered And he's played by dear, sweet, clueless Boone, of all people. WHAT.
 * SVU is swimming in these. In fact, the first episode featured one - as the VICTIM! Ostensibly an innocent cab driver brutally murdered, "Victor Spicer" turns out to be Stefan Tanzic, a particularly Sociopathic Soldier and a perpetrator of the Serbian genocide. We receive anecdotes about him killing a little boy with a hatchet, as well as having all the men in a certain village killed, presumably so he and his cronies could have the women to themselves. He was indicted for raping 67 women. His killers turned out to be two women whose lives were ruined and families slaughtered by him; after one is Driven to Suicide, the ADA decides that pursuing charges against the second would be an absolute joke since nobody would convict her, and they simply elect to send her home.
 * Larry Moore from "Signature" would torture his victims through every conceivable means, meticulously record the sessions, and constantly play the tapes on a loop to torment current and future captives, and occasionally abduct more than one woman at once so he could have a captive audience. His Torture Cellar was pure Nightmare Fuel, and they implicate pretty heavily that he raped his aunt while still a teenager.
 * William Harris from "Behave". He rapes Jennifer Love Hewitt's character, tracked her down whenever she was on the verge of putting her life together.....and repeating the process again and again. He did it with other women as well. Fortunately, the team nails him on kidnapping, ensuring that he will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
 * Henry Messner from "Born Psychopath." He has his parents wrapped around his finger for a while, he abuses his sister, he lies about everything, he ties her to a bed while trying to set the house on fire to see if she could "melt from the inside out," he shot a cop, he slashes his mother's hand, he locks a kid in a closet, threatens to kill another one, blames everyone else for his own transgressions, and kills his neighbor's dog. He has no emotions. No empathy at all. What makes him special? He's ten years old.
 * While the original Law and Order certainly wasn't lacking in complete monsters, perhaps the most striking one was the character of Mark Bruner from the episode "Bodies"; a cab driver who, over a few years, brutally raped and killed over a dozen teenage girls and kept their bodies in a secure location where he would go to admire them as he left them out to rot. But what makes him more monstrous than that is his amusement at the suffering of the hundreds of mothers of the missing girls who he may have killed, and his utter refusal to disclose the location of his victims so that they may be identified and their parents given closure -- he wanted them to suffer not knowing, and he wanted Jack to suffer knowing that he couldn't move him to tell and couldn't give the parents the closure they so needed.
 * Let's not forget Jacob Lowenstein, from the 1st season episode "Indifference". Using his job as a psychotherapist as a cover to sell cocaine, the man would routinely beat his wife on a daily basis, then watched as she got high on his product and turned her anger towards their children. Beating her six-year old daughter and burning their young son's hands was the only the tip of the iceberg for this woman. Their father did nothing, coming home one night and ignoring the fact that his daughter was unconscious on the floor, with her head sitting in a pool of her own blood. And when she finally succumbed to her horrendous injuries, he tried to get off scott-free by pinning all the blame on his wife. Class act. The scariest part of this little story is the fact that it was based on a real-life monster
 * Matt Bergstrom, a sadistic serial killer who tortured and killed at least six women in New York, and probably more in Texas and Washington State. Also based on a real-life monster, Ted Bundy.
 * And the true Monster of the Week: a woman with a serious case of the Green-Eyed Monster, who had her brother brutally and sadistically torture her boyfriend's ex-husband. The brother pathetically states he meant to make it look like a psycho did it, and Abbie's quip is spot on: "Guess what - a pyscho did do it".
 * Constantin Volsky, the Russian mob boss in the two-parter "Refuge". He ordered an innocent man murdered and dismembered because he had a relative who wouldn't go along with a money laundering scheme. When he finds out that the key eyewitness for the prosecution is a six-year-old boy, he sends assassins to kill him. They murder his mother and an A.D.A. The boy lives, but only because they didn't cut deep enough into his throat. In the second part, he orders the bombing of the precinct where the police protagonists work, just for giggles. He makes most of The Mafia seen on the show look like pikers.
 * "Deadlock": Leon Vorgitch was given a death sentence for massacring a restaurant and killing five people. But the law changes, so he gets to live. He uses this to kill two guards and escape from prison. The detectives hunting for him results in even more deaths, including a classroom of children. When Detective Green asks Vorgitch why he killed the kids, he laughs and says "Why not?" He also treats the justice system as a joke; his plea at arraignment was "kiss my ass", he said he would only plead guilty if he could get a cool new television, and he bragged to Jack and Connie that he would escape again and kill both of them. All the while laughing, since he knew the worst thing that the justice system could do to him was put him in jail. All this makes it particularly satisfying when the father of one of the dead kids gives him that death sentence anyway. The man freely pleads guilty, but only after discovering his attorney was manipulating him for headlines, which he should have figured from the start since she helped orchestrate Vorgitch's murder.
 * The Good Wife had a rare non-murderous example of a Complete Monster in TV talk show host Duke Roscoe. A Glenn Beck-esque political shock jock, he accused a woman whose child had been kidnapped of murdering her, hounded her until she committed suicide, then mocked her grieving husband to his face while continuing to insist that the dead woman was a murderer. When the network was sued for libel, he threatened to quit if they settled, and went on the attack against the opposing attorneys. This story was Ripped from the Headlines based on an incident with Nancy Grace.
 * The worst the CSI team faced were probably Mandy and Cameron Klinefeld from the episode "Assume Nothing". They're a married couple of serial killers whose M.O. is abducting other couples and making the husbands kill their own wives. How do they accomplish this? By threatening to torture and rape the wives in front of the husbands, putting them in a position where a Mercy Kill seems the only way out. And then they kill the husbands too. Their motives are only hinted at, but it seems to be what they get off on.
 * What about Nate Haskell? Creepy bastard, absolutely obsessed with Ray Langston, killed sixteen people during his time as the Dick and Jane Killer (and was grooming a replacement), and didn't really have an ounce of remorse about it. His attempts to pass it off as being due to genetics or upbringing fall flat due to Ray having the same genes and a similar family life. He was an evil son of a bitch, plain and simple.
 * (who sells military-grade weapons to the mob, drug dealers, and whoever bids the highest, not caring about who gets hurt in the slightest, then ), and.
 * 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.
 * Two episodes of Without a Trace had Emil Dornvald, a mercenary working for an African dictator. The missing person of the week is in love with a rebel opposing said dictator and knew where he and his friends were holed up. So Dornvald.
 * Another episode had a conman preying on families who had adopted children from Africa; he'd claim to be the kid's birth father and guilt the parents into surrendering the kids to him, whereupon he'd take them and sell them on the black market. He also manipulated a Sudanese war orphan into helping him by claiming that he was only stealing the children to get them back to their birth parents, the young man having lost his own mother to militants..
 * From Jonathan Creek: . Granted, the man had a motive: as a fundamentalist Christian, he was furious that his ex-wife had an abortion. But what he does afterwards leads another character to claim that his "soul rightfully belongs in Hell". After discovering that his ex-wife had a child out of wedlock in her teenage years (one that she's befriended, but neglected to tell of his maternity), he approaches the now-grown son and convinces him to murder his own mother (without informing him that she is his mother; the son was actually in love with her and - being a bit mentally disturbed - couldn't understand why she didn't reciprocate). The son dutifully carries out the murder, and the woman dies reaching out for him. The scene in which she breaks down in front of her ex-husband, sobbing about how her own son wants to kill her, contains a moment in which the killer smiles to himself as he comes up with his plan, cementing his position as a Complete Monster.
 * 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.
 * NCIS has its fair share:
 * Special mention must go to two men who forced a young boy to try to suicide bomb a high school. Their reason? A petty vendetta over something the boy's mother did 18 years ago.
 * Ari. After, he later . He casually manipulates innocents (giving a doll with a guided missile tracking signal inside it to a little girl)/sacrifices his mooks (who, given their affiliations, aren't terribly sympathetic either) just so he can get close enough to the team to hurt them directly. It is worth noting that (as foreshadowed when Ducky wonders what could create such a person) Ari does have a fairly elaborate Freudian Excuse, if even falls under that category. There have been more than a few worse criminals on the show, but Ari is mainly set apart in how he got to the NCIS team itself.
 * Kyle Boone from the episode "Mind Games"; he kidnaps and tortures women (and cuts off their tongues)! Think that's bad enough? He also snaps pictures of their suffering and keeps them in a journal (though he said he doesn’t need that; they will always be in his memories). His first victim was his own mother!
 * NCIS: Los Angeles has recently gained one as well in Season 3 in the form of "the Chameleon." To elaborate, this is the guy who often runs several cartels from behind the scenes, and the closest thing to an MO that he has is that he acts as the driver. He gained a wound on his mouth via G. Callen, who at the time believed him to merely be the driver. He then proceeds to kill a lot of people by incinerating them alive inside their cars, often covering himself by using various dialects. Afterwards, he plays a dangerous game of "hide and seek" where he forces people to act as him to lure them to dead ends, which often results in their deaths in the process. Oh, and he also kidnapped and killed a Russian police officer so he could pose as him and infiltrate the NCIS headquarters to "aid" them in finding him. His final appearance was his most monstrous depiction: He arranged to have Agent Roarke join up with a family of illegal Arms Dealers (and arranged for a fake exchange with some dealers he hired without informing them of the packages) with the intention of setting him up to be caught and for NCIS to get involved. Turns out, the family did fall for the trick against his expectations, so he sent anonymous tips to both the dealers and the NCIS agents revealing that he was an agent, and that his cover was compromised, respectively. After the NCIS team killed most of the family at the area (and arresting the accountant) to rescue him, he then sniped Roarke across the jaw, forcing him into ER before he died from a heart attack, and he kills the Red Herring sniper member of the family in order to leave a message to Callen, and he later kills Agent Hunter via Car Bomb in front of NCIS before he lets himself get arrested. He also arranged for Hunter to leak a video to NCIS via password about what he wants, and even the password while also making it seem as though he didn't want her to get it in order to lure Callen's team into a death trap while Callen kept watch over him (which they only survived after Callen deduced his plan), and he forces them into a Sadistic Choice to release him in exchange for an American agent who was caught in Iran and had valuable information of security weaknesses in the United States, and killing his allies at some point earlier (and it is also strongly implied near the end that the Iranians were going to be informed by the Chameleon anyways about the security weaknesses even if the prisoner exchange went off without a hitch). Even when he died, he ended up having Cullen's life potentially stigmatized anyways via a breaking news report when Cullen decided midway through the prisoner exchange that he simply cannot let the Chameleon live after the atrocities he committed, even if it meant disobeying his superiors and getting himself arrested by the LAPD.
 * 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?"
 * Vic himself is kept out of this territory for much of the series because he mainly goes after other Complete Monsters such as the above mentioned characters, though he has plenty of Kick the Dog moments to his credit, such as his murder of Terry Crowley, which was the crossing of the Moral Event Horizon for a lot of fans. But his behavior near the end of the series definitely qualifies, particularly when he becomes an informant in the last season and lets Ronnie take the full heat for his crimes, showing him for what he truly is: a violent and unrepentant bully who only looks out for himself. His Humiliation Conga in the final episode is very, very much deserved.
 * 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. "Adam: What am I?
 * Psych: While a comedy/drama, it has a few notable monsters:
 * Mr. Yang - taunted Shawn over the course of a day in his first introduction, culminating in the kidnapping of his mother and strapping her to a bomb while threatening to blow her up if Shawn didn't have a heart to heart chat with the psycho.
 * Yin - created elaborate games, again for the purpose of taunting/tormenting Shawn to the extent of kidnapping Shawn's then girlfriend Abigail as well as Shawn's ongoing love interest, Juliet, and forcing him to choose which would survive. He also murdered a recurring character and acquaintance of Shawn's while Shawn and Gus watched helplessly. He later kidnapped both Shawn and Gus and prepared to murder Gus with a poison injection while explaining to Shawn that he had something special planned for "him".
 * Rollins - along with his partner Garth Longmore, aka McQuarry, shot and kidnapped Shawn, locked him in a car trunk, threatened him repeatedly with death through the night, and took him away in a truck with intents of disposing him.
 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Angelus is one of these, particularly so when contrasted with every other vampire in both series. He's explicitly referenced numerous times as THE worst vampire ever. By way of examples, Spike and Drusilla had a genuinely loving relationship, Spike looked up to Angel as a friend and mentor, Darla was devoted to the Master and loved Angel (even though it's implied she knew he was incapable of loving her back), Wishverse Willow and Xander seemed to truly care for one another (notice how overjoyed evil Willow is when she finds Xander alive after seeing evil Xander killed), and the Master was rather fond of Darla (and, in the Wishverse, Xander and Willow) and mourned her death. In contrast, Angelus was utterly devoid of all human feeling (to the point that a demon sent to burn humanity from the Earth was incapable of harming him) and considered Mind Rape to be an art form. One can also see a strongly abusive streak to his relationships with Darla and Drusilla, who in turn practically worship him for such cruelties inflicted on them as much as anyone else. In his spinoff, he is also shown mercilessly manipulating Spike in a flashback.
 * It puts things into perspective when the Master (an ancient and demonic vampire head of an order which worships Eldritch Abominations and seeks to bring about the end of the world) refers to Angelus as "the most vicious animal I have ever known".
 * Similarly, the Judge was a demon who sought to kill anyone with a shred of humanity. Spike and Drusilla were nearly killed because of their love for one another and a side character was killed because he had a love for knowledge. Angelus, on the other hand, was deemed "clean of humanity". He had no redeeming values.
 * Besides countless tortures, rapes, and murders for his own amusement, two incidents truly stick out...posing as a priest, he made an innocent, chaste girl his 'project,' where he slowly tempted her to evil, then brutally murdered her family. He hunted her down to a convent and slaughtered everyone in the day she was to take her vows before turning the now insane girl into a vampire to preserve his masterpiece. Second incident...Jenny Calendar. After brutally murdering her, he put her corpse in her love interest's bed...before sending him love notes, champagne, leaving flower petals strewn along to make it look like it'd be a romantic encounter...right until he found the body.
 * Perhaps more than physical torture, though, Angelus enjoys psychologically tormenting people. In season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he stalks Buffy, never hurting her physically, but making her terrified for her own life and that of her mother and family. He turned Buffy's classmates and friends just so they could deliver a message when she came to stake them, so she would be absolutely sure that he was the one who killed them. He would also draw pictures of Buffy, and also Willow and her mom, while they were sleeping, and leaving them there to be found when the person woke up. The fact that he was a really good artist just made it a thousand times worse. Angelus also constantly taunted her about their former relationship and exactly what his emergence had entailed. And most of all, Angelus mocked her when she couldn't kill him, because he had Angel's face.
 * "The Wacther's Guide", a book on the series written after the second season was over, even states word-for-word that "Angelus is a complete monster."
 * Considering he only appeared in a single episode, the vampire Zachary Kralik did a remarkably good job in appearing as one of these. At this point in the show, vampires in general were seen as being a fairly low-level threat, but Kralik managed, partially through a quasi-Diabolus Ex Machina and partially through his own utter hideousness, to be thoroughly terrifying and completely monstrous. It's impressive that even when given a Start of Darkness story involving the abuse he suffered from his mother, the viewer still cannot like him in the slightest.
 * There's also Adam. the fourth season's Big Bad. As if the fact that he's assembled from various robotic and demon parts combined with his first act of stabbing his creator in the back isn't a big enough clue that he's a bad guy, we are hit over the head with a clear message by what he does next.

Boy You're a monster.

Adam: I thought so. What are you?

Boy: Me? I'm a boy.

Adam: A boy? How do you work?

Boy: I don't know. I just do. [Referring to his arm which has a hidden spear] What's that for?

Adam: [Evil grin]


 * We are later told on the news that the boy was found stabbed and mutilated."

"Phelan: "Everyone has needs. Some settle for cigars and liquor. You wanted Shevon. Others are more...demanding.""
 * Season 7's Caleb, whom the insurmountably wicked First Evil considered his true disciple and who enjoyed asking the First to take the forms of the innocent women he killed, so he could do it all over again. And snapping several women's necks and ripping out Xander's eye. Caleb - unlike most of the other example mentioned here, he's completely human, presumably with a soul. It's suggested that he was completely evil even before he fell under the influence of the First and used to use the implicit trust people had in him as a priest to torture and kill women. Oh, and there was never any Freudian Excuse in sight.
 * Three words about Caleb: scarier than übervamps.
 * Apart from Angelus, Angel also features an episode in which Angel and his gang tries to exorcise a demon from a young boy that had been causing the child to start fires and attempt to murder his own sister...the twist comes when
 * Darin McNamara, the main bad guy in "The Ring". After tricking Angel at the start about his brother Jack being kidnapped by demons (he and his brother were doing the kidnapping), he has Angel captured and forced into participating in an underground fighting ring, where demons are forced to kill each other for the humans' entertainment - they can't escape, because the wristbands they wear disintegrate them if they cross the red line separating them from their captors. When Angel attempts to hold Jack hostage, Darin simply shoots him in cold blood.
 * Among Angel's villains of the week, it's hard to top Billy Blim for clearly falling into this category. While appearing to be a normal young man, he was actually a demon filled with an extreme power of misogyny and had the power to turn any man he touched or who came in contact with his bodily fluids into someone extremely savage and brutal toward anyone female. And he had no real reason to be doing this; rather, he appeared to do it only for his own sheer amusement. The fact that it was actually the normally very cold and amoral Lilah who took him out says volumes as to how horrible he was.
 * It gets worse than that. According to Word of God, they personally believe that Billy was conceived when a demon woman - a good demon woman - was raped by an evil human man. This is just as screwed up as it sounds - Billy was doomed to be a fucked-up man since he came into existence. This only justifies his power, however, and not why he uses it, which definitely makes him fulfill the role of a Complete Monster.
 * 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.
 * 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 two stand out in particular. First is Hearn, who . He is then sent to kill Paul Ballard's neighbor, Mellie, which he appears to enjoy. Then there's Nolan Kinnard, who, when his various Dollhouse-assisted attempts at seducing Priya Tsetsang fail,   A throwaway shot of his drawer of Polaroids of   is a Crowning Moment of Squick, no mean feat in a series whose entire premise is designed to make you squirm.
 * 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.
 * Oz has Vernon Schillinger, Simon Adebisi , and Malcolm Coyle . Spoilered for the weak-stomached.
 * TIMMY KIRK. He is a two-faced and 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 Stanfield was nothing more than a power-hungry sociopath whose mere presence managed to darken an already pessimistic show known for its Grey and Gray Morality.
 * 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.
 * Madan Senki Ryukendo has Baron Bloody, a demonic robot scientist. In his first appearance, he sets up the death of Noble Demon Jack Moon to use his body in his own experiments. Later, it is revealed that he is responsible for the death of the Sixth Ranger's parents...who tried to stop him from blowing up Europe. When confronted by said Sixth Ranger, he proudly takes responsibility and casually refers his parents as 'foolish couple'. Where the other villains still have some sense of humor in their plans, Bloody's plans are downright vicious. Luckily, he's no Karma Houdini, since his death involves screaming in fear, having an axe shoved into his mouth, and releasing a painful scream when he falls down to his death.
 * 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).
 * 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 Admiral 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:

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

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

Apollo: *BOOM*"

"Fajo: "Murder me - go ahead, it's all you have to do. Fire! If only you could...feel...RAGE over Varria's death - if only you could feel the NEED for revenge, maybe you could fire...But you're...just an android - you can't feel anything, can you? It's just another interesting...intellectual puzzle for you, another of life's...curiosities."
 * 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. He eventually.
 * 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 has William Herrick, John Mitchell's sire, is a truly nasty piece of work. Initially hiding under a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire facade, Mitchell learns the truth when he sees that Herrick has kept a larder for the vampires consisting of homeless people and teenage runaways where they are fed on relentlessly with no time to recover. When Mitchell protests, Herrick puts him firmly in the 'minus' column and decides to kill him and everyone he loves. Later, Herrick casually slaughters a police station save one woman...then kills her as well because he doesn't want anyone to think he's gone soft. Even before he became a vampire, Herrick was a piece of work and was turned by his sire Hettie while trying to sell her to a brothel. Hettie looks ten.
 * Kirby is the ghost of a serial killer whose favoured method of killing was to seduce women by pretending to be great with kids and then murder the families once they trusted him. He turns the housemates against each other through manipulation and shatters Annie the ghost her into pieces, before performing a celebratory Happy Dance and immediately trying to kill a baby.
 * Finally, we have Mr. Snow, the de facto leader of The Old Ones, the ruling class of vampires. Snow is so ancient he claims to have looked upon 'pharaohs and the son of the carpenter.' First introduced when he forces a ship's crew to feed him a luckless young man with the chilling tonight "Someone Or Everyone," Snow planned to launch a full war to enslave humanity and in the timeline where he isn't stopped, personally drained the British Prime Minister on live TV. Snow would preside over a regime where humans were enslaved and drained, all with nothing more than cheery good humor.
 * That mad psychiatrist from the Mission Impossible episode "Mindbend", who works for The Syndicate and Mind Rapes petty crooks, brainwashing them into single-use hit men who kill themselves once they have killed their target.
 * An example from Blakes Seven (which is not lacking in Complete Monsters) is Raiker from the very second episode. He's a sadomasochistic dictator to the prisoners and keeps a keen eye on female convicts who can pass muster to be his sex slaves (the latter of which get dumped out of the ship when they reach the prison planet...or en route, at any rate). Unsurprisingly, . 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.
 * Data's brother Lore, from Star Trek: The Next Generation, is a thoroughly unsympathetic android who.
 * does not make up for all the other stuff he did. If he had succeeded, on the other hand...Oh yeah, he also.
 * He also
 * Kivas Fajo from "The Most Toys". At first, he seems to be just another guy who thinks Screw The Rules, I Have...well, something anyway. Then he talks very matter-of-factly about how he'd like to try out a particularly cruel Death Ray called a Varon-T Disruptor -- illegal in The Federation because of how it slowly and painfully destroys the body from the inside out -- . When your actions, you're a Complete Monster.
 * Oh, and his aforementioned "girlfriend" was really more of a broken, codependent slave whom he treated like property.
 * His "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Data afterwards is particularly devastating. Data's response is to override his own ethical programming, because he knows he cannot desire justice and so must enact it for those who do.

Data: "I cannot allow you to continue." *fires*"

"Data: "You are capable of great sadism and cruelty. Interesting. No redeeming qualities."
 * Armus, the disgusting, hateful thing that killed Tasha Yar. It was actually made of hate -- he was formed from the evil emotions cast off by a race of aliens that Ascended to A Higher Plane of Existence. He kills, torments, and tortures -- and it's all For the Evulz.
 * Once again, even Data, who has no emotions, sees Armus for what it truly is.

Armus: "So, what do you think?"

Data: "I think you should be destroyed.""

"I wanted her bike."
 * Also from Star Trek, specifically Deep Space Nine, Gul Dukat. Sure, he had some amount of "sympathy for the devil" when he went rogue to fight Klingon occupation and in his interactions with his half-bajoran daughter; however, even that doesn't stop him from selling out his people and the rest of the Alpha Quadrant to ally with the Dominion. Even that is presented as somewhat morally grey: he claims it was to save Cardassia from dissolving into complete chaos after the Maquis and Klingon attacks and to restore them to their rightful glory. But after, he goes off the deep end. He manages to pull his mind back together in some (loose) semblance of sanity again and has it out verbally with Sisko about why everyone hates him (finally getting called on all his hypocrisy and evil to his face). He ends the conversation by beating an already battered Sisko to a bloody pulp and deciding to just embrace his role as an all out villain. By the finale, it is made very clear why the Pah-Wraiths chose him over Kai Winn as their Emissary. Originally, Dukat starts as almost a Noble Demon, but his development? By the final season, he is this trope. An Omnicidal Maniac (who gloats about how his evil gods will soon be setting the universe on fire) with no affection for anything but his own desires and cruelties.
 * Gul Darhe'el, after being caught, openly bragged about working his labourers to death and sending his men to commit atrocities.
 * The Borg Queen from Star Trek: Voyager, first introduced in Star Trek: First Contact. She is the personification of the Borg Collective, the cybernetic pseudo-race in the process of conquering the galaxy through "assimilation". This consists of absorbing all of a civilization's technology and raw materials and then injecting the people with nanoprobes that submerge their individual identities into the mass Hive Mind so that they become Borg themselves. Their cyborg transformation is completed through surgery without anesthesia. And why does the Queen do this, you ask? She wishes to bring them to "perfection", of which she sees herself as the embodiment. It's been implied that she's been at this for thousands of years.
 * Despite a significant amount of Villain Decay on Star Trek: Voyager, her appearance in "Dark Frontier" is probably one of Trek's most chilling. She forces Seven of Nine to watch the assimilation of a helpless planet. We hear the screams of the victims brought to the Borg ship and see a half-assimilated man on a surgical table. And the Borg Queen actually seems aroused by this, breathing in deeply and rhapsodizing about how she can feel the new Borg "becoming one" with her.
 * MANY villains on Supernatural come very close to this trope. After all, they are, for the most part, monsters, and that's what they do. As a result, it takes a special kind of evil to actually qualify. Here are the assorted bastards:
 * Alistair. Hell's Grand Inquisitor, he gets a real kick out of torturing the innocent and trying to turn good people to the dark side. He regularly torments Dean about what he made him do in Hell and enjoys his job far too much. And that's without getting into the crap he pulls while hunting Anna.
 * Lilith, the Queen Bitch of all of Supernatural. Just for starters, she enjoys possessing little girls and tormenting their families on her days off, convincing them their child has gone mad and then killing them one by one. "Grandpa, you made me mad." She spends the entire season tormenting Sam and Dean, doing her best to break them and force them to open the final seal imprisoning Lucifer to bring about the end of the world. She's creepy. She's sadistic. And, oh yeah, she Eats Babies. Cannot repeat that often enough. She eats freaking babies. Not for power or anything, but to Kick the Dog. A truly heinous, vile piece of scum.
 * The leader of the Leviathans, commonly known by assumed name Dick Roman, wasted no time in establishing himself as one of the worst Supernatural's ever had to offer. Not content with simply lurking in the shadows to feed on humanity, Roman planted his minions in key positions, murdering and devouring every human in the way. Taking control of a major company, Roman began to place chemicals in corn syrup so humanity would be rendered helpless as cattle for the Leviathans to feed on. The Winchesters, who he knew could prove an issue, he framed for a nation-wide killing spree. Other monster species were seen as 'competition,' with Roman planning to exterminate them as well after manipulating them into helping him. A Bad Boss even by the show's standards, Roman was known to devour his minions in a fit of rage or 'bib' them: forcing them to devour themselves. Few villains on Supernatural have managed to inspire the same fear or hatred as Roman did, and his killing of Bobby Singer only deepened the hatred the Winchester brothers had for him.
 * Captain Selto Durka of Farscape. A Peacekeeper captain legendary among the ranks for "getting results", he spends a good deal of his appearances torturing people; not only did he torture Rygel for years long before the story began, but during his second episode, he also left the comm channel open so the rest of the crew would hear him burning Aeryn's face off. Oh, and then there was that attempt to abort Moya's child just so she would be capable of Starbursting to safety. Which makes  very satisfying.
 * Natira. As if being Scorpius' ex-girlfriend wasn't bad enough, she clearly gets off on torture and mass-murder: when an unwanted shipment of slaves ends up in her hands, she has all but one of them executed for her own amusement. Then she takes aside Rorf and Crichton for a little game of "I love your lying eyes", and you begin to realise just why Scorpius doesn't want her around (apart from the assassination attempt).
 * Kaarvok would probably outdo every other Farscape example here if he'd had any more screentime. As a cannibalistic Mad Scientist with a hand-held cloning machine on standby, he's willing to do anything to ensure that he has more food...or family; he's forgotten that there's a difference. This includes cloning his victims (before killing one in front of the other), keeping Rovhu's traumatized Pilot alive so his regenerating limbs can be harvested for meat, and forcing members of Moya's crew to breed with his degenerate clone army just so he'd have something tastier than clone-brains to look forward to.
 * Captain Jenek earns this title when he incinerates a test subject's unborn child when it shows no sign of unique development.
 * Commandant Grayza, who spent her second episode date-raping John Crichton before going on to sell out entire sections of inhabited space to the atrocity-prone Scarran Imperium. And when she screws up, she's not prepared to go down unless she takes everyone aboard her command carrier with her - men, women, and children.
 * 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.
 * The Cigarette Smoking Man on The X-Files is supposed to be a Knight Templar, but he veers into Complete Monster territory on several occasions. Trying to burn Mulder alive after Mulder finds the mass grave where the CSM and his associates threw the bodies of aliens that had been vaccinated and experimented-upon to death is just one example. There's also the Crew Cut Man, who murders Deep Throat in cold blood after making a trade with him.
 * CSM's cold-blooded murder of his own son, especially as he probably had many other means to neutralize him, certainly cements his status.
 * Oh, it gets worse than that: in the final season, we discover
 * Cecil L'Ively from "Fire" in the first season is one of the Complete Monsters that actually belong among the paranormal beings. He's a pyromaniac who can ignite things with his mind and who himself cannot be hurt by fire at all. He's a creepy stalker and pursues women in powerful positions, burning their husbands and other family members, including children, to death. He seems to genuinely enjoy torturing people and shows no remorse.
 * Donald Pfaster from "Irresistible" and "Orison" is a necrophiliac who collects hair and fingers of his female victims after he's done with them. His fetish escalates into becoming a Serial Killer. He has some kind of twisted, sick affection for his victims which is utterly scary. He's a horribly menacing killer who shows no regrets for his deeds, looking surprised when he's caught. As if it was his right to treat people as he pleases.
 * Colonel Wharton who appeared in "Fresh Bones". He's a sociopath that tortures people from Haiti who are held at an immigrant camp he's in charge of. It's revealed that he's responsible for several deaths: a small boy, a Haitian prisoner who knew voodoo and several of his soldiers that tried to stop him. He thought it's good to kill emigrants, better than sending them back home.
 * Jack Franklyn from "Sanguinarium" is a demonic doctor and a narcissistic warlock who makes human sacrifices by taking over the minds of various surgeons and having them kill patients in horrific ways (draining a patient's blood via liposuction, nearly cutting a patient's head off with a laser, and melting a patient's face off) so that he can retain his youth and looks. Oh, and he escapes in the end without facing any consequences, and finds another hospital where he can do the exact same thing.
 * John Lee Roche from "Paper Hearts" is an utterly evil child molester and Serial Killer who killed 16 little girls. He manipulated their parents to trust him, and then came back and kidnapped the girls at night. He plays sick mind games with Agent Mulder and tries to convince him that he took his little sister Samantha (whose disappearance was not explained), even though it's not true. He manages to escape from prison during the re-opened investigation and tries to take another girl. When Mulder catches them, he nearly shoots her. He doesn't regret his deeds at all and would continue if he only could.
 * 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.
 * In the new V series, the Big Bad is the Visitor leader Anna, who definitely qualifies as a Complete Monster. So far, she's ordered fellow Visitors to skin other Visitors alive, . She is as completely emotionless as all other non-Fifth Column Visitors as she does these things, and in one scene, she casually expresses her intention to eviscerate some Fifth Column members. Even her sidekick Marcus - himself mostly emotionless - occasionally seems mildly uncomfortable with how cold-hearted she is.
 * It was the sheer casualness of Anna turning to her minion and telling them to "break her legs" (referring to ), then cheerfully walking away afterwards that sealed the deal on just how monstrous this woman (read: genocidal alien queen) is.
 * Let's not forget her habit of !
 * In Season Two, Anna has become even more vicious. Within two episodes, she's casually slaughtered one of her own fleet captains in front of a crowd just to prove a point and . Total, absolute monster.
 * She becomes still worse later in Season Two - especially the finale, "Mother's Day".  No Karmic Death would be good enough for her by now.
 * 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.
 * BOB from Twin Peaks. The rape and murder of Laura Palmer is just the tip of the iceberg, as he's a demonic entity who feeds on the fear and pain he inflicts through Demonic Possession of hapless people. Also doesn't help that he's a Complete Monster and an Eldritch Abomination rolled into one.
 * Lie to Me had Andrew Jenkins, a serial rapist who kidnapped, tortured, blinded, and raped 12 women, and then let them go explicitly because he wanted them to live on to think about him every day. His copycat is almost as bad, first seeking out and marrying one of the victims to "be close to what he did to [her]" and then starting his own crime spree himself.
 * Martin, the titular psychopath in the aptly-named episode "Beat the Devil", a psychology student who gains Lightmans' notice when he is aroused by pictures of women being tortured; Cal correctly surmises that he has probably already killed people, and it turns out that he is, in fact, a Serial Killer, whose M.O. was water boarding young girls repeatedly, then killing them after forcing them to dig their own graves. The water boarding thing is part of his pathology - he does it because, when he was a boy, his sister drowned in their swimming pool; he didn't murder her, but he saw her drowning and decided to not raise the alarm. The reason?

""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."" "Mustafa Atef: (to Chegwidden) Want to know what I say about September 11? Every single person who died that day got exactly what they deserved!"
 * The Oliver Stone-produced sci-fi miniseries Wild Palms has two flavors of Complete Monster: Evil Matriarch Josie Ito and Creepy Child Coty Wyckoff.
 * The League of Gentlemen is full of undesirables, but Papa Lazarou takes the cake as the worst of all. His actions include but are not limited to capturing women and locking them in a cage to have water sprayed at them by his dwarf minions and stitching people up inside his circus animals.
 * The Mentalist has some criminals who are flat out irredeemable and unsympathetic.
 * One is obviously Red John, the serial killer that was responsible for Patrick Jane's involvement with the CBI. Red John's sexual perversions and sadism led him to torturing and murdering women. Early in his career, Patrick Jane, then a phony psychic, said he would use his "powers" to help the police catch Red John. Unfortunately Jane made the mistake of insulting Red John on the air, which caused the killer to murder Jane's wife and young daughter. Years later, Red John is mostly "retired" from serial killing, but he still kills many, either to silence loose ends or to play mind games with Jane. Some of Red John's most notable crimes include murdering a teenage girl and kidnapping her twin sister to lure Jane into a trap; having Sam Bosco's entire CBI team killed; kidnapping Kristina Frye and brainwashing her into believing she's dead, all because she empathized with him on television; having Madeline Hightower's cousin tortured to death to get information on where she was hiding, then later sending a mole to murder her and her kids; trying to get Jane to murder his best friend and Love Interest, Teresa Lisbon; murdering a woman because Jane had a happy memory of her as a child; and decapitating the therapist who helped Jane recover from his psychological breakdown following his family's death. Red John is also the mastermind of the Blake Association, a criminal conspiracy and protection racket for corrupt law enforcement officials and controls them from behind the scenes. In addition, Red John has his own devoted followers, usually comprised of psychotics and killers, that help him in his crimes or vice versa. However, their lives mean nothing to him, and he either kills them when they outlive their usefulness or drives them to suicide in order to protect himself. Overall, Red John is a raging narcissist with a massive ego and a god complex. He is driven by an intense need for attention and gets off on the power he has by holding thousands of lives in his hands.
 * Tommy Volker is a Corrupt Corporate Executive responsible for the slaughter of over three hundred Amazonian tribesmen when they refused to relinquish their land so he could use it for development of his geothermal project. When a journalist finds evidence Volker was behind the massacre, he manipulates an old friend into sabotaging her car. While his friend believed it was only a prank he was pulling, Volker intended her to die and had his assassin, Charles Milk, trail her. After her crash, Milk suffocated her, stole the evidence that implicated Volker, and Volker left his "friend" to serve as the fall guy for his scheme. At the same time, CBI Agent Teresa Lisbon convinced Volker's secretary, Rebecca Shaw, to provide evidence against him. In response, Volker visited Shaw that night with his assassin, and watched, smiling, as he strangled her to death. This apparently is a habit of Volker's, as he's also shown attending the strangulation of another employee who intended to reveal Volker's involvement in the Amazonian tribe massacre. Loyal employees fair little better with Volker as he has Charles Milk assassinated in a drive-by shooting, along with two innocent bystanders, when Lisbon got too close to Milk, and later promised to kill another of his hired goons just because the man was interrogated by the police. When Volker discovered a little boy had witnessed one of his crimes, he had no reservations in personally trying to execute him when other hitmen of his refused to do so. A cold-blooded sociopath, Volker was driven by nothing other than a disturbing mixture of greed and sadism.
 * Alastair Crane. Just Alastair Crane of Passions. His list of crimes seems completely endless. He has forced his, 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.
 * Dr. Foster from Skins, 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 every villain in Legend of the Seeker, which is based on Sword of Truth, the book series. Darken Rahl commits mass infanticide, murders for kicks and for ink, horribly tortures people to gain magical powers, etc. He has his own sister beat violently and lies to her so she will betray her other brother and bring him the tools to take free will from every living thing in the world. He also unleashes a plague on his own people (killing hundreds of them, including a meek looking boy we are shown) for the sole reason of trying to turn people against Richard, and when all of this fails to win him victory, he kills a kitten with his BARE HANDS . Bonus points come from the fact that all of the above happens in one episode. Nicholas Rahl from the Bad Future is even more evil. He is shown to kill both of his parents and later enslaved the whole of humanity. Princess Violet manages to become a Complete Monster despite being a child, as she already orders beheadings, keeps a "playmate" who she regularly slaps and punishes for no reason other than her own enjoyment, enjoys torturing prisoners, and makes plans to have women she does not like gang-raped by the castle guard. Her mother, Queen Milena, is even more horrible as she executes anyone who annoys or upsets her! It is clear that she is the reason for why Violet is who she is.
 * The demons in the Spanish series Angel o Demonio are unbelievable bastards whose only purpose in life is to wreck lives with More Than Mind Control For the Evulz. They don't have the slightest bit of empathy; in fact, they laugh at the death of OTHER DEMONS. One of them, Alexia, releases a virus with the intention of destroying the most part of humanity, and when she fails, the others punish her, not because she had gone too far, but because she had been dominating them. Monsters indeed.
 * The Nazis in the Spanish series El Internado, being, well, Nazis and all that.
 * Karl Fleischer 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, you'll feel a lot better 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
 * 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.
 * And . What a bitch.
 * 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.
 * 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 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 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, 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, 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. In the end, all Jafar truly wanted 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 random girls at the local parties, creating a panic on the campus. He rapes the girls and shaves their heads afterwards just to humiliate them further. His reasoning amounts to "getting into a girl's pants the normal way takes too long".
 * Highlander has many:
 * Early villain Felicia Martins appears at first to be a Damsel in Distress, a young Immortal on run from the run from the brutal, obsessed Claude Deveraux. It is revealed that Martins is far older than she claims and Deveraux is hunting her because Martins murdered his wife and their adopted baby daughter. This is her MO: she ingratiates herself into the lives of her victims and murders everything they love, making it so they're off their game and she can easily take their heads. She attempts to murder hero Duncan Macleod's loved ones after she takes Deveraux's head and is last seen vowing to return and murder who Duncan loves after he spares her
 * Kalas, the Big Bad of Season 3. Kalas used a sanctuary for immortals as a trap to hunt them down and kill them as they exited. When Duncan MacLeod exposed him and had him exiled, Kalas retaliates, centuries later, by trying to strangle a girl Duncan might be having a fling with. In the present, Kalas is a ruthless manipulator and murderer. He can destroy someone's life easily and shows no remorse for those he uses as pawns in his game to hurt MacLeod.
 * There's Kern of Line of Fire. We first see Kern in the past, taunting Duncan over the death of his Lakota village...with their scalps. By his own admission, Kern gleefully tortures, rapes, pillages, and kills with no remorse.
 * Ernst Daimler is the only Immortal seen who's a former Nazi. A firm believer in fascism, Daimler sought to help 'purge' all lower races in World War 2 and ordered the slaughter of hundreds of innocent people, as well as wounded prisoners, until he was stopped by a young boy who stabbed him in the back. Thinking he was dead, the boy and his cousin wrapped Daimler in chains and threw him into the Seine where he remained for decades. In the present, Daimler leads a white supremacist movement and finds the little boy who stabbed him, now a kindly old priest. Daimler gleefully guns him down after terrifying him off holy ground, and then attempts to murder a pregnant woman who tried to stop him before Macleod intervenes and takes Daimler's head.
 * Kronos, an Immortal whose legacy of death dates to the Bronze Age. Kronos was the leader of the Four Horsemen, a band of Immortals who led armies to Rape, Pillage, and Burn across continents. Kronos was the most sadistic of all of them, slaughtering the innocent and raping who he desired, including a slave girl for no other reason than his sworn brother Methos had taken a liking to her. In the present, Kronos recruits Methos, now The Atoner, back into a scheme to reunite the Horsemen and create a plague to destroy all of humanity, viewing himself as the end of time itself.
 * Morgan Walker is unique amongst other Highlander villains in that he's been a slaver for centuries. While Walker once dealt in the Atlantic Slave Trade, in modern times he uses his job as a modeling agent to capture young women for the sex trade. In prior years, Walker had an attachment to a slave named Charlotte, but after he suspected she had an affair, he killed her throwing her out of a high window and displays no remorse for her death. When hunting Methos, the immortal she had the affair with, Walker also kidnaps the daughter of Methos's good friend with full intention to kill or sell her should her father not betray Methos.
 * Gunther Lutze, the Villain Protagonist of "Death's-Head Revisited" from The Twilight Zone, as described by the episode's Opening Narration:
 * He walks around his old abandoned concentration camp, thinking about the atrocities he committed and smiling as if those were the best years of his life! This made his ultimate fate all the better as he is forced to mentally relive all the pain he inflicted on his subjects by the spirit of Becker, one of the inmates. And Becker implies its only going to get much worse from there: "Your final judgement will come from God."
 * Due to its morally ambiguous nature and realistic tendencies, Homicide: Life On the Street didn't have many of these, preferring to keep their villains as pathetic figures. But a few do stand out. The most prominent is Luther Mahoney, a Drug kingpin who has complete control over the Heroin deals in Baltimore. He escapes justice time and again and just loves rubbing his wealth and Karma Houdini status in the face of the Detectives. He's also very smart, making himself a pillar of his community that no one wants to think anything bad about. His crimes include murdering rival dealers and anyone who stands in his way, intimidating witnesses, and ordering murders. It's mentioned at one point that he is responsible for dozens of murders.
 * 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.
 * 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 from the episode "The Soul Of The Winter", where they assault 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, they worship Hitler and Nazi Germany, making them the closest counterpart to the Nazis in the series.
 * The satanist cult from halloween episode "The Children of Halloween". They kidnap innocent children and plan to kill them all on Halloween night, and one of cult members even suggested killing one of the children befor Halloween. They also sacrificed goats and killed one of their own men. The leader of the cult even calls himself Lucifer.
 * Johnny Blade from "The Lost Boys" organizes the heist and kills a cop. Then he gives a gun to one of his accomplices and the same accomplice hides it in his friend's house. After learning this, Johnny Blade threatens an innocent young teenager Jesse (the friend of his accomplice and Carlos' nephew) to remain silent about his crimes or else he will kill his mother and later forces him to take all the guilt fdr his crimes or else he will kill his mother, whom he kidnapped, but Blade planned to order his lawyer and his accomplices in the prison to kill him, even after he took all the guilt, and planned to make Jesse's mother to commit suicide. This was so evil that a few of his henchmen looked like they were disgusted by it.
 * Reccuring villain Victor La Rue is also incredibly nasty. He attempted to rape Alex and in the episode "The Trial of La Rue". He takes the courtroom hostage, kills the judge, and taunts Alex and his actions range from death threats for a sandwich, televising his crimes, terrorizing a divorced couple at a custody hearing, and killing people at random, and the worst of it is when he said that he would kill an innocent little girl.
 * Luis Guerro, abusive father of Juan Guerro from the episode "Golden Boy". He beats his own wife, because she didn't make him dinner, even though she left a note that she did and brutally beats Juan repeatedly, because he was protecting her, giving him a lot of injuries in his face. He doesn't care about his own son and wife but cares about himself, and his irresponsible driving is one of the reasons why he and his wife later died in a car crash. His abusive treatment is also the reason why Juan tries so hard to study and provide his mother with a better life. What makes him worse is that he is just a minor character, yet manages to be more despicable than the drug dealers, who were the main villains in that episode.
 * 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.
 * JAG: Mustafa Atef a.k.a. Mohandesh, the in-universe number 3 in Al Qaeda was captured by U.S. Army Special Forces in Afghanistan and given the death penalty by a military tribunal.