Cruel Twist Ending

""It's not ironic, it's just mean!""

- Bender, Futurama

A Twist Ending that serves no purpose other than to be excessively cruel.

The Cruel Twist Ending is basically the Evil Counterpart of the Karmic Twist Ending: in the latter, the twist is a form of divine justice, a bad thing happening to stop a bad person from getting away with it (or a good thing happening to someone who deserves it). In the former, it's just Finagle's Law: the universe is a mean place and wants to hurt you. Often, a Cruel Twist Ending is what happens when a writer attempts a Karmic Twist Ending, but fails to carry it off.

Most common in genre anthologies with a darker tone than The Twilight Zone: Tales of the Unexpected, Tales from the Darkside, Monsters, One Step Beyond, etc.

Lighter-weight versions come up very often in shows where Failure Is the Only Option, especially when the show has run for a long time, and the writers need to contrive more and more extravagant reasons why the protagonists can't win. It can also be used as a shock subversion of a stereotypical happy ending. If it's overused, it becomes a Mandatory Twist Ending. If the ending makes you wonder what the point of the story was, it can come across as a Shoot the Shaggy Dog. The Diabolus Ex Machina also often gets involved. And Then John Was a Zombie is a subtrope.

As this is an Ending Trope, beware of spoilers.

Advertising

 * An awareness campaign about child dyslexia showed a young boy sitting listlessly through a prizegiving ceremony at school, aware that he hasn't done well enough in any of his classes to receive a prize. Suddenly, his name is called, and he discovers he's won a prize for art and design (the only subject that involves little reading and writing) - then finds out his prize is a book token.

Anime and Manga

 * Paranoia Agent. Just one example: Have a nice day!
 * Many episodes of Kino's Journey follow this. One episode where Kino helps a stranded group of people survive a harsh winter, we found out Another episode has Kino visiting neighboring countries who used to constantly be at war. When Kino asks how they achieved peace,  In another episode Kino finds a country so likable that Kino nearly breaks the three day rule of staying in one place, yet the townsfolk mysteriously refuse to let her stay longer.
 * Turn a Gundam:  It makes every ending of every Gundam season a Shaggy Dog Story
 * Narutaru ends with  And this is AFTER they've defeated the Big Bad.
 * Most chapters of Nightmare Inspector generally seem like they'll end happily, with the client apparently getting over their nightmare's troubles, until some reveal or twist comes out of nowhere and sends things into a Downer Ending, or a bittersweet one at best.
 * The three-chapter manga School Mermaid ends with
 * Hell Girl: Midsummer Chart.
 * The Fist of the North Star OVA Legend of Kenshiro ends with this. The Big Bad who was thought to be dead turns out to be Crazy Prepared and in his last breath destroys the city Kenshiro was trying to save. In the final moments of the movie, Kenshiro is the only survivor and can't do much but cry and scream.

Comics

 * Tharg's Future Shocks from 2000 AD typically end with these twists. Some of the more interesting ones include:
 * A werewolf on a virtually eternal space flight to an off-world colony looking forward to feasting on everybody else on board whenever the spaceship passes a lunar body finding out the hard way that every passenger and crew member on the vessel is also a werewolf and was hoping to do the same thing (and Earth's space command post happy to know that they've finally figured out a way to get rid of all of the planet's werewolves).
 * Earth's military not bothering with too many security precautions during first contact with aliens who have expressed having strict humanitarian interests at heart.
 * A war in space between humans and another alien species big enough to threaten the "destruction of all known space" is interrupted by an Eldritch Abomination who holds a fight to the death between the military leaders of both species to determine which race is worthy enough to continue to survive. Humanity wins the fight to the death, and the Eldritch Abomination then proceeds to destroy all humans, claiming that since humans have thus proven themselves to be the more aggressive and war-like race, the universe would be better off without them.
 * In an issue of the Disney Adventure magazine, there's a Choose Your Own Adventure story that takes place during the voyage to Treasure Planet. The worst of three endings results in
 * One issue of Star Wars Tales featured the story of a Jedi Master who ignored her orders to return to Coruscant at the start of the Clone Wars, having become embroiled in the pursuit of a Dark Jedi named Kardem, a serial killer who targets Twi'lek women and also murdered her secret lover. Eventually she comes face to face with Kardem and engages him in a lightsabre duel. As it transpires,.

Eastern Animation

 * In Time Masters, a ragtag bunch of space travels are thrown back in time 60 years by an Omniscient Council of Vagueness made up of space aliens.

Fan Fiction

 * One arc of You Got Haruhi Rolled ends with It's retconned away in the next chapter due to Negative Continuity, but still... ouch.
 * The Powerpuff Girls fic Immortality Relapse which actually gave two cruel twists, one for the first story Immortality Syndrome and one for its own But that pales in comparison to

Film

 * The last survivor in Night of the Living Dead is mistaken for a zombie and shot dead.
 * As is the last non-infected survivor in Cabin Fever. Hilariously, his last words are "I made it! I fucking made it!"
 * Even worse: in Night of the Living Dead, it's deliberately left unclear whether the protagonist was actually mistaken for a zombie, or if the rednecks saving the day just saw a good opportunity to shoot a black guy without a fear of punishment.
 * It wasn't originally deliberate, since Ben's part was written for a white man. George Romero is fine with taking credit for the alternate interpretation now, though.
 * And in the remake, the black guy really was a zombie, while the Jerkass who'd left the others to die spoke when the heroine found him, proving himself to be alive.
 * Screamers :
 * The movie was based off of Philip K. Dick's "Second Variety", where, but that story straddles the line between Cruel Twist Ending and Karmic Twist Ending, with its closing revelation that.
 * The sequel reveals that the last survivor
 * Oh, and the sequels ends with
 * Time Bandits You think it's all over with a nice Was It All a Dream? The Wizard of Oz type ending- then the parents open the microwave
 * In The Orphanage, it turns out at the end that
 * In The Mist the main characters leave the doomed grocery store in a car. When the car runs out of gas, the father
 * What makes it worse was the realization that one of the objects in the background of the reveal scene is a army-standard temporary housing. They weren't being followed by the military, they were driving through a military outpost!
 * In the original novel, it ends
 * One film critic was so bothered by the ending that he spoiled it (with ample warning) in his review to keep people from being blindsided by it.
 * Canyon is a similar example.
 * And in the Our Werewolves Are Different flick Mulberry Street, the protagonists discover that  just minutes after.
 * In Dresden the main character (a British pilot) manages to laboriously
 * In Right At Your Door, the main character spends the entire film scrupulously keeping his home sealed from the toxic ash outside his house, only to be told by The Government that
 * In Fallen, Denzel Washington's character sacrifices his life to destroy the eponymous villain.
 * The ending twist in Murder by Numbers seems a heckuva lot like one of these.
 * Count Yorga love these in its movies despite all the heroes efforts and even killing the title character. Endings are as followed...
 * In the first movie
 * The sequel
 * Carnosaur. The protagonists manage to defeat all the dinosaurs threatening their town and kill the mad scientist who unleashed them.
 * Return of the Living Dead. The protagonists evade the zombies and send a message to the military, asking for help.
 * Worse yet, it's implied that
 * The UK Ending to The Descent. Sarah merely hallucinated escaping the cave; there is no exit. All along the characters have only been descending further down, without any way out. Waking up right where she lost consciousness, Sarah goes on to imagine her dead daughter sitting in front of her with a birthday cake, as the crawlers are homing in on Sarah to eat her alive.
 * The Descent: Part 2. One character escapes the caves alive, but then out of nowhere, a minor character appears, knocks her out with a shovel, and drags her back to the cave. The best explanation critics have come up with for this Shocking Swerve is that it's a Sequel Hook.
 * The Crazies. By the time the movie's over, have been through hell and back just to survive the events of the movie, watching every single one of their family and friends die.  It's even worse than if the movie had ended with Kill'Em All.
 * The original ending of Clerks:
 * Of course, your mileage may vary. According to the most common interpretation, it's fitting as a homage to The Empire Strikes Back. Dante chose it as his favorite movie specifically because 'it ended on such a down note'.
 * The Bruno Mattei killer rat movie Rats: A night of Terror. It seems the protagonists have been rescued at the last moment by other people who survived the nuclear holocaust
 * The French black comedy The Red Inn is about a family of 19th century innkeepers that kill their guests to steal their money. The only guest that knows the truth is a priest that can tell nothing because he got the information during a confession he was tricked to perform. The plot devolves in a series of progressively wackier shenanigans as the priest tries to get the other guests out of the inn alive, leading said guests to think first that the priest is crazy, then that he is the serial killer. The police are called and they arrest the priest. Thankfully, they discover an older body, free the priest and arrest the innkeepers instead. In the final scene,
 * The ending of Troll 2 was probably trying for this, but it ended up not really making any sense.
 * Final Destination 5. So the movie sets up the main couple overcoming a breakup and surviving Death's design and coming through stronger than ever... Pretty much all the films end this way, but this one burned, considering it was a Surprisingly Improved Sequel.
 * Remember Me, if not for the ending, is a heartwarming tale about a man's path towards rekindling his connections to his family. What happened to him? Well, he was told by his father to go to his office one Tuesday morning and he stood there and waited.
 * Das Boot, already a pretty horrific and depressing movie pulls a really bad case of this at the very end.
 * Identity, it appears that Ed has managed to
 * While no surprise now, the ending of The Empire Strikes Back was  possibly the cruelest twist ending in film history, at the time.

Literature

 * Many Goosebumps books end with this, although most of them are merely Twist Endings.
 * Ray Nelson's short story "Eight O'Clock in the Morning" (loosely adapted into the movie They Live!) tells the story of a man who singlehandedly saves Earth from a huge alien conspiracy. Then he drops dead at eight o'clock the next morning thanks to an implanted hypnotic suggestion by the aliens.
 * However, the guy did manage to save the world from an extraterrestrial conspiracy on his own. Takes a bit of the sting out of it, and it was set up everywhere in the story, and obviously by the title.
 * Hans Christian Andersen's The Shadow. Probably not the best example since there is no huge twist in the story, only a series of small ones as it's heading towards the Downer Ending, but it definitely belongs to the Cruel Twist Ending school of storytelling.
 * Many of the volumes of the Vampire Hunter D novels have Downer Endings, but the end of the longest story, the 4-part Pale Fallen Angels was downright sick. Although many died, D has slain the evil vampire lord, the children are safe from the evil Guide, Taki is safe from being sacrificed and the good, evolved vampire Baron Byron Balazs is planning on forging the first links of friendship between the Nobility and mankind. Apparently you just can't have a happy ending in this series.
 * Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, almost. She gets lucky.
 * Never Let Me Go ends with This is never foreshadowed at all prior to The Reveal, and thus could qualify for Shocking Swerve as well as this.
 * In the short story collection, The Dark Side of the Earth, every single story ends with an Cruel Twist Ending. The story Silent Pursuit easily takes the cake: The lead detective rides the subway one night and, out of sheer luck, sees the murderer knocking a woman unconscious on the last train. He races to get there before he can get off and a fistfight ensues, culminating in the detective throwing the murderer out of the window and into the river. He helps the victim up and, when they get off the train, they are surrounded by policemen pointing their guns at him and ordering him to let her go. Because the real murderer is dead in the river, the woman is unconscious, and he can provide no genuine alibis for the dates of the other murders, all present evidence points to him being the real murderer; and he will never be able to prove otherwise.
 * In Jeff Long's The Descent, capsules containing a deadly bioweapon are seeded through the sub-Pacific underground world by a genocidal Corrupt Corporate Executive. Just as it appears the capsules will remain unactivated, averting the annihilation of both the hadal natives and their defenseless human captives, their contents are unwittingly released by the only two human characters in the novel who want to spare hadal civilization.
 * Very common in the short stories of Charles Birkin. Examples:
 * The Lesson: A couple leave their young son with his uncle while they are hosting a party. The child ties up his uncle (who is drunk) and puts a plastic bag over the man's head to pretend he is an astronaut. When the parents find him, they are angry that he got drunk while taking care of their son. They decide to "teach him a lesson" by leaving him tied up while they go out - but then they get into a car accident. The badly wounded mother tries to tell hospital staff that the uncle needs help, but can only manage to say the word "bag", making the nurses think that she wants something from her handbag. Meanwhile, at home, the little boy is wondering why his uncle doesn't want to play any more ...
 * Marjorie's On Starlight features orphan Marjorie going horseriding with her adoptive sister, who is a cruel bully. It's hinted that something bad will happen to the sister - but instead she torments Marjorie about her dead parents, causing Marjorie to react, her horse to bolt, and throw Marjorie straight into the path of a steamroller that runs over her head.
 * The Mouse Hole: In occupied France during WWII, an incompetent Resistance fighter known as "The Mouse" causes an innocent man to get shot by Nazis. The Nazis soon arrive at the man's door, and his mother is forced to hide her wounded son inside the oven. However, the soldiers think she is actually hiding The Mouse in there, and light the fire. The Mouse doesn't care and just chalks it up as another death for the cause.
 * Hard to Get begins as a comedic story about an army officer trying and failing to seduce a beautiful woman in a restaurant. Then it's revealed they belong to a race of bloodsucking aliens that have taken over the earth, and their meal is a still-living human woman who has been tortured and trussed up to be served at the table.
 * T-I-M: A woman collapses in an accident at home and begs her young son to call for medical help. However, he gives the operator the wrong name, and ends up being connected to the speaking clock (a recorded service). He doesn't realize who he is talking to, and his mother lies dying on the floor unaware of what's really happening.
 * Spawn of Satan: A woman moves to a town where gangs have been stirring up racial hatred. There's an initial twist when we discover that her husband, who soon arrives to join her, is black. The real Cruel Twist Ending is when the woman suffers a fatal heart attack while driving, causing her to run over and kill a white child. Her husband is brutally and gruesomely lynched in revenge by the gangs.
 * Fairy Dust appears to be a sweet little tale about a woman reading Peter Pan to her young stepson. At the end, she convinces him that he can fly like Peter Pan, and lures him into jumping off an 80-foot balcony so that her own child can inherit the family estate.
 * Old Mrs Strathers: An elderly woman is paralysed and unable to speak following a severe stroke. She discovers that her son is about to be murdered by his wife, who is cheating on him. The son is poisoned, and the old lady struggles to her feet. There's a brief Hope Spot ... then she falls head-first into the fireplace. The wife and her boyfriend get away with the murder, while Mrs Strathers is horribly mutilated and is sent to a work house because there's no one left to take care of her.
 * In the short story Coffee by Simon Bestwick, an overworked employee is Driven to Suicide through sleep deprivation caused by drinking too much coffee and then being unable to sleep at night. However, the employee (never given a name or gender) is forced to stay at the company as a zombie, because they are not allowed to leave without an appropriate notice period. They're also disciplined for spending too much time at the coffee machine, and can't have any more coffee.
 * "Slowly" by Fay Woolf: A six-year-old boy has been trapped under the wreckage of a collapsed fairground ride, and rescue workers fight to free him. They do manage to get the machinery off him, but then they discover it's cut him into a pile of severed body parts, which rain down onto the rescuers.
 * "Megan's Law" by Jack Ketchum has this ending. The story revolves around a concerned father turning vigilante when a convicted rapist/child molester moves to the town. Eventually, the father murders the guy - and then we discover the father himself is abusing his own daughter, he just didn't want any "competition" for her.

Live-Action TV

 * The 90's revival of The Outer Limits was so fond of this ending that this trope used to be named Outer Limits Twist. Some notable examples: (Depressing spoilers ahead!)
 * "Tempests": In order to save a space colony, a man must figure out which of the two realities he's switching between are real, the seemingly perfect one or the darker one. He makes the "right" choice - and we find out that both worlds are Lotus Eater Machines. His real situation is much worse, he's cocooned by giant spiders and slowly being eaten, and as a result of his failure everyone presumably dies.
 * "The Deprogrammers": A group of humans beat alien brainwashing and eventually manage to take down the Big Bad -- just as a rival alien had arranged, as it turns out. Once they've done his dirty work for him, they're turned into his Brainwashed slaves.
 * "Hearts And Minds": A group of soldiers fight the good fight against bizarre invading insectoid beasts, only to find that the "medication" given to them by their leaders is making them see their actually-human enemies as bugs. They lay down their weapons and try to talk to the enemies... who promptly kill them all, being under the influence of similar drugs and seeing our protagonists as monsters.
 * "Straight And Narrow": An exclusive private school brainwashes its students for use as mercenaries, similar to the movie Disturbing Behavior, which it predates. The one student who is immune to the process manages to escape and tell authorities—who prove to be alumni, and drag him back to undergo the procedure (now corrected to work on the likes of him) as the assassination he'd tried to prevent is successfully carried out.
 * "Quality of Mercy": A captured space pilot comforts the girl he's imprisoned with when the aliens start turning her into one of them. To give her hope, he says there's a secret reserve force waiting to strike at the aliens. Just what she wanted to hear, because she was a spy, and they're changing her back into an alien.
 * Apparently that wasn't enough of an Cruel Twist Ending for the writers, so they continued it in a later episode just to squash any hope the viewers had. Due to the aforementioned episode, the aliens begin winning the war. In a last-ditch effort, humanity tries to surprise attack the alien homeworld with a planet-killing WMD. The fleet is ambushed and the ship carrying the device is crippled, and everyone is killed immediately or knocked unconscious and given a fatal dose of radiation which will kill them soon. The hero manages to unmask a traitor, get to the destination and drop the bomb before his ship can be boarded. Unfortunately, the ship had been turned around whilst everyone was unconscious - the hero has just heroically ensured that the bomb was dropped on Earth! (In a bit of possibly-intentional irony, the actor playing this poor sap was Wil "Wesley Crusher" Wheaton.)
 * The sequel's title should also be noted - "The Light Brigade". Quite the Meaningful Name, isn't it?
 * "Dead Man's Switch": A fleet of alien spaceships are seen heading toward Earth. Being Genre Savvy and knowing they might be evil, a Doomsday plan with a Dead-Man Switch is prepared, with 5 people in individual bunkers sharing the responsibility to prevent the doomsday plan from being enacted (should it become unnecessary) by regularly pressing a button to keep the doomsday device from turning on. The 5 people in bunkers are slowly dying because of how poorly the bunkers were made. The brief hope for peace is extinguished when a second fleet of colonization ships is found and the button pressers lose all contact. They die in their separate bunkers one by one until the last one remains. He finally decides to let it happen when he gets a message from his commander telling him they defeated the aliens with a new weapon. He stops the Doomsday Device at the last second and is told to keep pushing the button until they can disarm it. The last scene shows the aliens who used the commander as a puppet eating his brains over the glowing red ruins of DC.
 * "Mind Over Matter": A man creates an AI machine to reach into a female coma patient's mind to help wake her up. It's a living dream and he falls in love with her cute avatar in the dream. Occasionally during this therapy they are attacked by a grimy evil looking version of the woman he believes is the AI attempting to take over. In the end he strangles the evil woman. The patient then dies because the cute avatar was the AI all along.
 * This could be a justified but depressing Aesop about not assuming that physical beauty extends to spirit and personality.
 * "In Our Own Image": An android programmed to be a soldier who wants to live a life of peace escapes from the lab and gets a ride from a random lady he carjacks. She helps him escape and attempt to get the items he needs to remove his safeguards and be free. At the last second before he's truly free, she reveals she was one of his programmers and shuts him down. She wanted to see what he could do before she stopped him. Unfortunately for her and humanity, he had identified her beforehand, turns himself back on, kills her, and starts a robot uprising.
 * "Nightmare": A team for special mission is captured and interrogated on their mission to place a Doomsday Device on their foe's home planet. The aliens are interrogating them about the mission and the device and attempting to reverse engineer the device. The creator is one of the persons being interrogated, and in going over how the device is triggered activates it with an override to prevent it from being disarmed. At this point it's revealed it's all been an elaborate simulation to see how they would stand up under stress and they've been on Earth the entire time. Since they've trained so hard with the bomb they had to use the real bomb with an inactive trigger to simulate it correctly. The creator noticed and fixed it as part of her manual override. Earthshattering Kaboom.
 * This example shows the contrast between the original series and the revival. "Nightmare" is a remake of an episode from the original series which had a similar plot with the "it was a simulation" twist at the end, but didn't have the whole thing with the bomb.
 * "The Surrogate": A woman becomes a surrogate to a family via a private medical facility. She joins a support group for surrogate mothers there and becomes suspicious. Standard Town with a Dark Secret plot, right? Suspecting her baby will be a monster or something else she contacts an FBI agent who at first thinks she's crazy. The actual babies are never seen, and the surrogate mothers don't like to talk about them afterwards. When the big day comes and the FBI agent busts in to stop the evil birth... Only to discover the entire thing was a breeding operation for aliens. The alien's birth occurs when the alien growing in her womb eats all of her except her skin. And it's still hungry for more, ending with the FBI agent getting eaten too.
 * "Gettysburg": A time traveler sends three young men at a Battle of Gettysburg reenactment back to the actual battle. One of the young men was a Southern fanatic who thought the South should have won and the battle was glorious. Being in the real battle under an insane commander dying of meningitis disabuses him of the notion. The time traveler sought to teach him that Aesop, because otherwise he would shoot the first black U.S. President in 2013 when the president spoke at Gettysburg due to his Southern sympathies. The time traveler, however, dropped his device and the insane commander accidentally activated it, causing him to be transported to the future where he then shoots the president while he attempts to shoot the Lincoln reenactor.
 * "A New Life": This episode's premise may remind some readers of Shaymalan's The Village. Two married couples join a cult that resembles Puritanism, because their lives have become unfulfilling. The problem is, no one remembered how they reached the forest they were brought to, because the cult leader knocked everyone unconscious en route. At first, the protagonist seemed okay with his new life until the cult leader borrows his child and brands him. After the protagonist gets his son back, he panics and convinces his wife to flee from the village with him. Soon, they realize the forest's edge is blocked by a force field, and stay on the run, but their branded child was used as a tracking device. As a result, the couple was discovered by the cult leader and captured. For fleeing, the protagonist would be executed, so he helped convince his male friend (played by Jeremy Sisto) to help him escape and de-activate the force field. The plan goes well at first until the two of them find a teleporter. The protagonist's volunteers to enter, while his friend protects his wife. After entering the teleporter, the protagonist was transported to a dark room with several robed people. The people in robes? Oh they're aliens. They also claim that the forest is inside a spaceship, they've already left Earth, and they plan to use religion to encourage people to breed for the next 500 years...which is when they'll reach their destination and use the humans as slave labor. Of course, the protagonist gets killed for knowing too much, though his partner met a grisly end. The cult leader burns him at the stake to urge people not to rebel. Even better? His wife watches him get roasted.
 * "Breaking Point": A guy makes a time machine and travels a few days into the future, but finds out his wife is dead. Horrified, he returns to the present and tries to protect and warn her. His wife refuses to believe his stories of time travel, and eventually, he loses his temper and accidentally kills her. Anguished, declaring himself a monster, he decides she would have been better off without him, so he travels back to the day they met and kills his past self before he met her, erasing himself from existence. It was all for nothing. In the new timeline, it turned out that his wife had been contemplating suicide and meeting him that fateful day had saved her.
 * "First Anniversary": Two best friends are both married to kind, loving women who look like supermodels, so they think life is good. But one day, one of them goes nuts, claims that the women are monsters, then commits suicide. After the funeral, his friend is baffled, until he starts to feel revulsion whenever he's around the girls (when he tries to kiss his wife, he smells and tastes something nasty). He fears that he's losing his mind, until the girls feel they have no choice but to confess. They are really aliens that crash landed on Earth. Since they can't leave, they decided to blend in and live the rest of their lives peacefully as human women. The reason his friend called them monsters and that he's feeling disgusted by them is that prolonged contact with them causes the person to develop an immunity to their Glamour. His wife tries to persuade him that no matter what they look like, they are still the nice women they befriended and fell in love with. Sadly, when he becomes completely immune to the illusion, their true form is so hideous that he suffers a complete mental breakdown. The women move on and seduce two new guys, meaning the cycle will repeat itself roughly once a year.
 * "The Grid": A man on a roadtrip stops at another city and finds that an evil organization has installed the buildings with antennas that emit a mind-controlling signal as a sort of Take Over the World plot. Since the protagonist is immune, the brainwashed citizens are ordered to kill him. He escapes and returns to his hometown, intending to call the cops, only to find more antennas. His brainwashed wife shoots him.
 * "The Human Factor": On the first ever colony on Ganymede, a robot suddenly rigs the reactor to blow up. The robot explains that since Humans Are the Real Monsters, its logical course of action is to destroy the colony and prevent humanity from expanding beyond Earth. The crew manages to deactivate the robot and save the reactor, though all but one die in the process. The survivor receives a message from Earth. World War III broke out, and nukes have wiped out a lot of the planet (including the survivor's family). A shuttle carrying the President and other officials is heading for Ganymede and will arrive in a few months. In despair, the survivor re-rigs the reactor to blow and turns the robot back on. He tells the robot it was right, then offers to play chess to pass the time until the colony is blown to kingdom come (though this one skirts Karmic Twist Ending a bit).
 * It turns into an outright Cruel Twist Ending if you accept it as a true sequel to "Phobos Rising" instead of just another Clip Show episode attempting to Arc Weld unrelated episodes. Said previous episode had a true Karmic Twist Ending, as the Martian colonies destroyed each other thanks to rampant paranoia in the wake of a catastrophic event.
 * "Ripper": In Victorian London, a man goes on the trail of notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper. He eventually discovers that the Ripper is actually an evil Body Surfing alien. While it is in the body of an old woman, he fights and stabs it, only for the alien to exit the body and escape. The police arrive and arrest the protagonist, assuming that he is the Ripper. The alien, in a new body, visits the protagonist in the asylum and promises to find his family and kill them before leaving.
 * "Blank Slate": A man with amnesia is pursued by mysterious agents for the device he's carrying. A woman is caught up in the events and teams up with the man. While on the run, they slowly fall in love. Unfortunately, when his memories come back, it turns out that he was working with the bad guys before. Reverting to his original evil personality, he betrays the woman and returns the device.
 * "Birthright": The protagonist believes he has thwarted an alien invasion... only for the taxi driver to reveal himself as one of them and capture him. The infiltration was more widespread than he thought.
 * "The Voice of Reason": A man appears before a government committee to warn them about alien infiltrators. They dismiss him as a nut. Suspecting the official who opposes him the loudest is an infiltrator, the man shoots and kills him, hoping to expose his alien nature. The official was human and a complete Muggle, and the man is arrested. Nearly everyone else in the committee is an alien, and they silently thank the man for getting rid of that guy, allowing them to take full control and further their invasion plans. (And this was the Clip Show. Even the clip show has a nasty ending.)
 * "A Special Edition": A guy appears on a talk show to present evidence that the government is performing illegal cloning experiments. The government cuts off their signal and sends armed thugs into the studio. The guy, cast, and crew try to escape, but are eventually captured. A clone of the guy appears and gives a fraudulent report that "disproves" the guy's evidence. The clone mocks the protagonists, claiming that the masses are stupid sheep who believe anything they hear, so his fraudulent report is already making them forget the truth. The guy, cast, and crew are all shot to death by the clone.
 * "Human Trials": A group of soldiers sign up for a top secret mission. To "weed out the wimps", the soldiers are placed in virtual reality simulations (the kind where you can feel everything) of battles, natural disasters, etc. Those who die, crack, or give up in the simulations are eliminated and sent home. In the end, only one soldier makes it. After the round of congratulations, he eagerly asks what his mission is. He is then informed that there was no mission; For Science!, they were looking for someone really tough so that they could use him as a guinea pig to test the limits of human endurance and willpower. He is forcibly plugged back into virtual reality and subjected to nightmarish tortures as the technicians and military officials look on with Lack of Empathy.
 * "Manifest Destiny": A spaceship investigates a distress call from an abandoned spaceship. While exploring it, the crew begins to grow paranoid and insane, one by one. The doctor tries to figure out what is going on, but is too late and succumbs as well. The alien virus that caused this is unknowingly sent to Earth.
 * And Many More...
 * Pretty much every story from Night Visions ended this way.
 * Perhaps the best illustration of the difference between the two twists are two episodes of The Twilight Zone with virtually the same plot: a man manages to apparently become the last man on Earth, and finds he finally has time to read all the books he wants—until he breaks his glasses. It's the same twist in both episodes, but in one, the man is a general misanthrope who wills everyone else away, making his eventual fate karmic justice and a Karmic Twist Ending. In "Time Enough at Last", however, the man is a timid man who is ridiculed by his wife and boss for reading books, and who only survives a nuclear holocaust because he locked himself in a bank vault as the only way he could get some peace. In this case, the world just screws him over to be mean, making it an Cruel Twist Ending.
 * Futurama specifically references how cruel "Time Enough At Last" is by taking a parody of the episode to comically extreme lengths (e.g. his head eventually falls off) after which Bender comments that he was "cursed by his own hubris".
 * In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Mirror, Mirror", Kirk convinces the Spock of an alternate universe (in which the Federation is The Empire) to work for peace. In Deep Space Nine, that world is revisited, and it turns out that Spock took Kirk's advice, and succeeded... leading to the destruction of the Empire by its enemies. Humans, and presumably Vulcans, are now slaves. Later canon about the time in between the two episodes, however, explains that Spock fully expected his empire to crumble and for Vulcans and Humans to become slaves. It was all part of the plan, because he knew that Humans needed to be reminded of what it was like to be slaves, so that when they inevitably led a successful rebellion, they would become more benevolent, like the Federation he was told about.
 * Word of God is that the original Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode was specifically intended to mock Kirk by changing Kirk's triumph in the TOS episode "Mirror, Mirror" into an Cruel Twist Ending, thereby vilifying Kirk as the man singularly responsible for ruining the lives of all humanity in another universe. Later episodes in the mirror universe de-emphasized (or ignored altogether) this motive, making it more of a Karmic Twist Ending and then more of a standard rebellion-against-alien-oppressors situation.
 * Speaking of DS9, there is "Duet." A Cardassian brought to the station for treatment is identified as a possible war criminal, because his condition is directly linked to a mining accident at a labor camp. He tells Kira he was just a file clerk, and had nothing to do with the actual atrocities.
 * It further served as harsh Character Development for Kira, who routinely let her resentment toward her former oppressors push her from The Determinator into a full-fledged Knight Templar. Even among a Planet of Hats full of Smug Snakes and Complete Monsters, chances were at least one person would manage the decency to feel shame at their empire's blatantly evil actions, even if they made a huge, Cardassian, spectacle of themselves in the process. This would prove useful when she had to deal with the inner workings of Cardassian politics later in the series.
 * Goosebumps stories made heavy usage of the Cruel Twist Ending, while Are You Afraid of the Dark? were more prone to the Karmic Twist Ending. It is perhaps the reason why the former is considered to be scarier.
 * The Goosebumps episode "Calling All Creeps" plays with this. The main character flat out gives in to the villain's orders and turns his entire school into monsters because all throughout the story, he had been picked on by virtually everyone at school. Even as he was about to warn his classmates, they still made fun of him. The monsters had earlier promised he would be the kids' leader after the change, so he allows it to happen out of revenge, before turning himself into a monster. Still a Cruel Twist Ending for the main character's one friend and classmates, just not for him.
 * A notable exception is the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode "The Tale of the Chameleon", featuring Tia and Tamera Mowry as the protagonist and her evil clone. The episode ends with the girl's friend being forced to decide which one is the real person - and choosing wrongly. The clone keeps her human body, while the girl is changed into a chameleon and left to drown at the bottom of a well. This episode always rates highly in fan polls.
 * Fear Itself heavily favored the Cruel Twist Ending route during its short run:
 * "The Sacrifice": A man manages to kill a vampire, freeing the last survivor of an isolated town whose inhabitants have been sacrificing their own happiness to keep the vampire at bay for centuries. Then at the last minute, it turns out that he was bitten. (This is perhaps foreshadowed, however, with the fight that shows the vampire's power to teleport and turn invisible—or, at the very least, move so fast that it might as well be—meaning that it could have bitten him at any time.)
 * "Spooked": A Rabid Cop confronts the childhood trauma that led him to be such a monster, and refuses to cross over the line to become an actual murderer, and, now aware and able to deal with the trauma of his past, swears to live a better life and do the right thing from now on. Then he's accidentally shot dead by his partner. Arguably a case of Redemption Equals Death.
 * "Family Man": An accident somehow switches the souls of an auditor and family man and a fleeing serial killer called "The Family Man", trapping them in each other's bodies. The protagonist finds himself staring down the death penalty and a world that despises him, while his family is in the hands of a monster (who, while he claims he wants to look after "his" family, is clearly a ticking time bomb from his psychosis). When the protagonist finally escapes, he makes his way to his house and engages in mortal combat with the impostor... But wait...!   And then... . He's escaped one level of hell only to plunge headlong into an even crueler one, and there's no escape from this. One of the proposed titles of this trope was the "Family Man Twist", by the way.
 * Which one "New Year's Day" falls under is really up to the individual viewer. The twist: Our heroine, who has been spending the entire day trying to survive a zombie apocalypse and get to her friends' apartment, while being followed by her zombified boyfriend, turns out to
 * At least "Community" gives us a warning at the start with an In Medias Res scene of the protagonist running away in fear. However, this doesn't even come close to justifying (let alone explaining) his legs being cut off by his inexplicably brainwashed wife!
 * Tales from the Darkside:
 * "The Cutty Black Sow". A young boy's dying grandmother instructs him in a rite to ward off an evil Celtic demon that claims the souls of those who die on All Hallow's Eve. The boy obediently performs the rite, putting stones in a fire marked with the names of his family members. His Bratty Half-Pint little sister knocks the stone with his name out of the fire, which according to the myth, means that his soul will be taken by the Cutty Black Sow. The rest of the episode consists of him jumping at every sound and seeing a pair of yellow eyes through windows... until the end, where his parents come home from Grandma's funeral and his father comes up to tuck him into bed. Where's the twist? He embraces his father, relieved that it's over... and his father turns into the Cutty Black Sow. The boy is paralyzed with fear as the demon leans over him... Yeah, that's what you GET for trying to save your grandmother's soul, kid!
 * In another episode, an aging hippie with a broken leg and her boyfriend witness the world's chaotic nature coming to a head, with things spontaneously happening, appearing and disappearing at random. They're both amazed, but she is really excited to be seeing the nature of the very universe. So... what does the universe do? Spontaneously change around the furniture as she walks around, causing her to fall and land on her broken leg, spontaneously cause some events that make the cops come to her house, spontaneously turn on the gas on the stove, and cause the broken doorbell to cause a spark and blow up the house while she can't do anything but watch it all unfold. Pretty vindictive for random chaos.
 * The 2002 Twilight Zone was much more into Cruel Twist endings than Karmic Twist ones. The very first ep featured a rebel-lite teen girl literally destroyed by the above-mentioned sealed-off modern community with the obligatory nasty secret, and along the way helps her younger sibling become an accomplice to a fairly grisly act. There was no sci-fi in her fate, more Sopranos, and the sick twist is, in her depiction, she was no more a 'true' rebel than the oldsters in the original TZ's "Kick The Can" were really all that old. The would-be rebel many RL parents would be happy to get has some tattoos and some 'tude, and that's really about it.
 * There was the time travel episode where a woman decides to kill an evil dictator as an infant by posing as his nanny. . Which would have been a good episode, if it weren't for a very bad case of Did Not Do the Research. The is the cherished son of his proud and well-off father, who is able to afford a nanny in the first place. In fact, . He didn't grow up in a city, either. His father tried farming for several years, although he eventually failed.
 * Plus, she could have just brought Christmas Lights with her instead.
 * The 1985-1987 Twilight Zone has "A Little Peace and Quiet", in which a woman finds a watch that can stop time, like in the old TZ, but.
 * Tales from the Crypt. Elderly millionaire spends money to get a face transplant to look younger to attract a wife, from whom he's hiding his money to make sure she's not a Gold Digger. There are problems with this so he gets a full upper body transplant for more money. In the end he goes for the rest of them and now looks like a 22 year old bodybuilder at the cost of his wealth. Then the woman turns out to be a Gold Digger after all, and marries the bodybuilder who sold his body for the man's money.
 * Two brothers are doctors. The younger brother pranks the older brother with a scare, but the shock causes a heart-attack that paralyzes the older brother's arm, ruining his career. Years later the older brother, seething for revenge, attacks and injects the younger brother with a drug he claims can keep a brain functional after death. The younger brother awakens, only to find that he cannot move or feel anything. The older brother decides to use the younger brother for demonstrating anatomy to his class by extracting the younger brother's brain. Right as the procedure happens it's revealed to have been an elaborate prank on the older brother's part and the drug only paralyzed the younger brother for a short while, and he was never in any real danger. The prank causes the younger brother to have a heart-attack, which the older brother tries to stop by using a larger dose of the drug. The drug is then revealed to actually work; it DOES keep the brain alive after the body has been pronounced dead. Only now this time it's for real and the younger brother is now fully conscious, aware, and helpless as a pair of medical technicians are about to cut open his head to remove his brain. A kicker: it's revealed that the sense of touch is the LAST sense to go, not the first, as the older brother stated earlier on.
 * Season three of Heroes ended such a note, with Angela's prophetic dream that Matt Parkman would save her son turning out to have an entirely different meaning . Then, to make things worse, the teaser for season four hints that.
 * RL Stine's made-for-TV-movie, R. L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: Don't Think About It, had this ending. The protagonist reads a poem out loud that, when done so, awakens a murderous, man-eating monster. After it captures a popular girl from school, a pizza man, and the protagonist's brother, she and her male friend pour blood on it, causing its multiple heads to kill each other in hunger, and free the victims. She and her brother then burn the poem in the fireplace before going up to her room to sleep. Later that night, the parents discover the poem, having reconstructed itself, in the ashes, and read it out loud. As they laugh about how silly the poem sounds, there's a creaking noise on the porch...the protagonist opens her eyes in terror...and all the lights in the house go out. Cut to black. Voiceover: "Happy Halloween..."
 * The TV series had it's fourth episode end with one of these. In it, the main character strikes a deal with a new kid in school to help him prank a couple of bullies. Afterwards, the new kids insists that the main character "owes him". It turns out,
 * The Doctor Who episode Journey's End gives all but two of the protagonists a happy ending: The Doctor Did Not Get the Girl and loses his best friend, winding up alone again, and Donna's memory must be wiped to save her life, undoing all of her Character Development and self-confidence and causing her to lose even the memories of the best time of her life.
 * Examples from Lost:
 * "Exodus": The raft crew are found by a nearby boat. They've finally found rescue! Oh, wait. It turns out The Others are in fact REAL and "the boy" they were coming to take was Walt, not Aaron! Within the next few minutes, the raft is destroyed, Jin and Sawyer's fates are left unclear, Walt is taken, and Michael is left alone in the dark waters screaming for his son. Wow.
 * "Exposé": The episode begins with the deaths of Nikki and Paulo. As the other survivors try to discover what killed them, we are treated to flashbacks, gradually approaching the present day. It turns out that they're NOT dead, just in a severe state of paralysis from a spider bite. Their friends don't know this though, and bury their fellow castaways alive! Okay, they weren't the most popular characters, but their end was downright cruel.
 * "Through The Looking Glass": The survivors have made contact with the approaching freighter, ten Others are dead and Charlie has avoided his predicted death. Then, one of the Others turns out to be Not Quite Dead, the freighter is revealed to have not been sent by who they think it was, Naomi is back-stabbed by Locke (literally!), and Charlie dies in a Heroic Sacrifice. On top of all that, the episode's Jack-centric flashbacks showing him broken and suicidal are actually flashforwards, showing that he does eventually do what he's been attempting for three seasons and escape from The Island ... only for it to be a poisoned chalice and completely destroy his life. So much so that he manically attempts to return! To say that the final scene completely changed the show for good is an understatement.
 * House had several:
 * In "Saviors",
 * In "Both Sides Now",
 * In "Fall from Grace",

Video Games

 * In the second part of Left 4 Dead's comic for The Sacrifice, Zoey discovers that the carrier gene which has allowed her to avoid the infection is passed on by the father. She then recalls that at the start of the zombie ordeal,
 * Eversion fits this all too well.
 * Terranigma: After
 * Doom: The valiant space marine has just cleared both Phobos and Deimos of demons, before descending to the surface of Hell itself to battle almost insurmountable odds and kill the Spiderdemon who masterminded the whole invasion. It's arguably subverted, however, in that the above leads him to just continue kicking ass in Doom II.
 * Arguably, the whole Knights of the Old Republic arc is this. The True Sith set up the Mandalorians to go rampaging. Revan and Malak defy the Council's cowardice and inaction by trying to stop the invasion. He Who Fights Monsters kicks in, they start falling to the Dark Side, and whip out a Colony Drop weapon so horrific that even the Mandalorians are shocked by its brutality. The one Jedi who refused to go Sith with them is brutally cut off from the Force, and comes back to the Council to offer an olive branch, only to get spit on and told "get out." Revan goes on a rampage through known space, ostensibly to "unite it" against the bigger threat (Nice Job Breaking It, Hero), only for the Jedi to set up one hell of a Xanatos Gambit in response. No matter how you play it, It Gets Worse in the second game, where you're now playing that outcast Jedi. The Sith and the Republic are in complete ruins, Revan's vanished to force-knows-where, everyone either distrusts you or wants to use you for something, and no matter HOW Exile works the angles, the Council is still dead, the Republic is still a mess, and you're still about as popular as an X-Man at an anti-mutant rally. Kreia rubs it all in with her last speech. And the new game, 300 years later? The big threat Revan was trying to stop emerges from hiding, beats the crap out of the Republic...and it's stated "on panel" that Revan and Exile were never seen again after their respective games, meaning they likely died horribly and pointlessly.
 * Star Wars: The Force Unleashed's dark side endings are this.
 * The first game has.
 * In the second game.
 * Subverted in No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle.
 * In 7 Days A Skeptic you survive the murderous rampage of an unstoppable killer, and get to reach the rescue ship in time. You reach them only to find
 * The best part? 6 Days a Sacrifice implies
 * In the 2008 Prince of Persia,
 * At the end of Soldier of Fortune: Payback, Alena Petrova hits you with a fire extinguisher and steals the secret device you just recovered. Apparently, she was The Mole of another terrorist group. The Shop intercepts a conversation between her, some unknown person, and the Not Quite Dead Moor, but the signal is lost midway. It is doubtful that this Cliff Hanger will be resolved, due to the game's poor reception and performance. Or maybe it was meant to be Left Hanging.
 * Cyber-Lip, a Neo-Geo sidescrolling shooter, has the time honored plotline of 'Humanity builds super-computer to fight evil aliens, super-computer itself turns evil and destroys Earth, one/two guy(s) must shoot everything including berserk computer.' In the rather sparse ending, it turns out that the super-computer was NOT evil, just reprogrammed. As the heroes fly back to their home base, their leader congratulates them on a job well done - and mentions how there are no more obstacles in their way just as he gives a nasty smirk while his eyes glow red. That's when it hits you that you've done just as the aliens wanted...
 * Fantasy Zone: aGuess what? The commander of the enemy soldiers was actually Opa-Opa's dad!
 * The Ninja Warriors (and its remake The Ninja Warriors Again) has your prototype ninja robots kill an evil dictator who has taken over the country using evil mutants and robots... only for your ninjas' leader to make them self-destruct to blow up the dictator's estate, and then he takes over the country with completed versions of the robot ninjas. It turns out that the new government was no better than the one you overthrew.
 * Congratulations, you've finished Nie R, destroyed the Shadowlord and rescued your daughter. Even if it did turn out Then you read Grimoire Nier and realize that
 * Mass Effect 3: So, you've built the Crucible, forced the arms of the Citadel open, and now you're ready to shut down the Reapers once and for all?

Webcomics

 * Torg's "Greatest Comic Book of All Time"—Gunman Stan McKurt, the guy who shoots evil in the face, vows to kill anyone in order to keep the Gates to the City of the Damned shut. It turns out he's already inside the city and doesn't know it, because he can't read.
 * The Platypus Comix story "Vess MacMeal Starring in: The More You Know!" has an ending evoking those of cautionary stories written during the Cold War. The comic traces the introduction of an electronic tablet called, "The Kimwon". As the tale progresses, the Kimwon develops new apps that do everything from streaming movies and TV shows, to scanning groceries, to synthesizing food. If that doesn't sound bad enough, it also turns out . If that doesn't sound bad enough,  !