From Bad to Worse/Live-Action TV


 * In season 5 episode 2 of Dexter, Astor says the trope name to discuss what happened in her life since the title character joined their family.
 * Most of season 2 involves this trope. The entire season essentially revolves around the department trying to find a serial killer who is branded as the "Bay Harbor Butcher." Dexter realizes that the victims of the Bay Harbor Butcher are all his,  and he ends up trailing Dexter. And later he finds Dexter's trophies. Which leads to   Dexter captures   and realizes he doesn't fit the code, this leads to Dexter trying to frame  . It all goes downhill from there.
 * In a Season 4 episode of Battlestar Galactica, recurring character Cally is on the edge of a nervous breakdown due to stress, mixing medications, and the fact that her husband appears to be having an affair. Then, she learns that  which provokes her   She's talked out of it by the very woman she suspects her husband of cheating on her with, but then
 * And it gets even worse in Sometimes A Great Notion,
 * Let's face it. Most of the show could be summed up as "It got worse." I recently rewatched the first episode of the TV series. The crew was ragged and exhausted. Everyone was still in a state of total shock from the destruction of their entire civilization. And to top it all off, they were forced to destroy a ship that may have had thousands of people on it (when the total known human population was only 50,000 or so). And yet all this time, my main thought about the situation was "enjoy it while you can, because it's going to get a lot worse from here."
 * In a Season 2 double episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Surprise and Innocence, the premise is that Spike and Drusilla have resurrected an unkillable demon called "The Judge", who can burn a whole crowd of people with a gesture. But luckily, we have Angel on our side... then, Angel loses his soul and goes to join the baddies. Oh Crap.
 * A girl is walking home with a werewolf on the loose in Sunnydale. It's a creepy night and she hears someone behind her. She's scared but runs into a nice guy named Angel who offers to walk her home... oh wait he's the ruthless soulless Angelus now.
 * Also, the two-part season 2 finale, Becoming, where Buffy's life is basically ripped to pieces. First, Angelus gets his hands on Acathla, a demon that will suck the world into hell if awakened. Except that Buffy arrives after the police, and ends up a murder suspect.  Long story short, it gets worse in so many ways.
 * The ending of Season 6 exemplifies this. Buffy gets shot. But wait, it gets worse! Tara got shot too, and fatally! But wait, it gets worse! Willow can't bring Tara back. But wait, it gets worse! Willow's got black hair and she's totally evil now! But wait, it gets worse! She just murdered someone in cold blood! But wait, it gets worse! Giles is dying! But wait, it gets worse! She's going to blow up the world!
 * After almost every Supernatural episode everyone thought that Dean was going to recover from his nervous breakdown and gain some peace and some self-worth. After venting his frustration out on his car? No. After acting like a Jerkass before telling Sam how he was feeling? Nope. After being tempted but deciding not to sell his soul to bring his father back? Nah. After letting out the traumatizing secret that's been eating him apart for a good portion of the season? Hell no. After finding out just how deeply self-loathing he is but forcing himself out in "What Is and What Should Never Be"? God no. When Sam dies in his arms, the breakdown finally culminates in selling his soul like it's a worthless piece of tat in "All Hell Breaks Loose." Even after he makes the revelation that he doesn't deserve to die in "Dream A Little Dream Of Me", we're still reminded that it's too little, too late and he's going to hell whether he likes it or not. And let's face it, has anything ever got truly better on this show?
 * In general, this series does a great job of turning it up to eleven in strange ways. Not Darker and Edgier enough? add demons. Still not? add Angels. Still not? add the absentee existence of God, and The Devil walking around, and the Four Horsemen. Still not as dark and Edgy as you want...?
 * And in Season 7 it just keeps getting worse:
 * In Babylon 5, the Shadows have been manipulating events behind the scenes, leading to an outbreak of war between the Narn and Centauri, followed by Centauri attacks on other neighbors after the fall of the Narn. Then, it gets worse when the Shadows become openly involved, using their highly advanced ships to attack most of the other races. Then, it gets even worse when, after the main character drops a nuke on the Shadow homeworld, the Vorlons whip out their Planetkiller ships, using them on any world under the Shadows' influence, regardless of population or how many people were under Shadow influence (even if it was only one person). Yes, it gets even worse; the Shadows respond with their Planetkillers, which happens to be a frickin' cloud the size of a planet which envelops worlds before nuking them to hell and back. They wipe out planets under Vorlon influence, again, without regard to population.
 * There's also the sub-arc regarding Clark and Earth. The first season ends with the assassination of the President of the Earth Alliance. Then, his V.P. slowly turns out to have been behind the assassination, as part of a plan to become a totalitarian dictator. This escalates to the point where the eponymous space station is forced to declare independence from the Earth Alliance. Then, after they defeat the Shadows, B5 becomes the lynch-pin of a Civil War against Clark, ending with
 * The pilot episode of Veronica Mars embodies this trope as Veronica lays out her backstory. In the space of a few months, her boyfriend dumped her, her best friend got murdered, her mother left the family, she became a social pariah in her school, her father got recalled from his job as sheriff, and then, just to top things off, she got drugged and raped by someone at a party. And this is all before the show even started.
 * In the NCIS season 6 finale, Ziva . It gets worse when the last shot of the episode is
 * She gets better.
 * Helps that Gibbs' Big Damn Heroes moment was pretty much a defining Crowning Moment of Awesome
 * Doctor Who: every nuWho season finale.
 * Series one: So we're on a game show where "voted out" means "disintegrated." Bad. It turns out that what's going on is deeper and part of a conspiracy that's hundreds of years long. Worse. Then
 * Series two: In the Doctor Who episode "Army of Ghosts," the Cybermen have crossed the dimensions from a parallel world, infiltrating five million advanced cybernetic soldiers into every city on Earth - . It is, as the Doctor noted, not a invasion, but a victory, so complete and sudden is the conquest. But then, in the bowels of the Torchwood institute, the Void Sphere opens, and
 * To make it clearer,  might not sound like much, but they are the bigger threat and could easily defeat millions of Cybermen. One would probably win.
 * "This is not war, This Is Pest Control!"
 * And then It Got Worse - some more.
 * Not to mention the 3 part finale of season 3 in which Basically, it was a sequence of it getting even worse every time you'd thought they'd hit Rock Bottom.
 * Next year, the prelude to the finale is "Turn Left," taking place in an alternate universe where ...and in the first 10 minutes. You know this can't end well.
 * Next year, the prelude to the finale is "Turn Left," taking place in an alternate universe where ...and in the first 10 minutes. You know this can't end well.

And it doesn't. It ends with The Stars Are Going Out. And we find that it's no different from what's happening here, just in a different order. All those one-off references to missing planets?
 * The season 4.5 specials end with the Doctor finding out that even  isn't the real problem.   And it got worse than that: Their own plan is to do what the Daleks were going to do: erase the entire universe and start over.
 * In the fifth series episode Cold Blood. was bad enough. Then the situations was made rapidly more depressing when   Later comes the finale: the resultant  in The Pandorica Opens was nastily subverted when it turned out that  Oh, then the universe
 * Most of that episode and the next one was one big It Got Worse.
 * Every season of 24 has examples of this trope. For example, in season six the heroes are chasing an evil terrorist. It is then discovered that the terrorist is in possession of a small nuclear weapon. Then . Then we're told that the terrorist.
 * Pretty much happens anytime there is a positive and/or stable moment in Jack's life.
 * Dollhouse: Okay, so there's a technology that allows you to hollow out another human's mind, then reprogram it with whatever memories, skills, personality traits, etc you like. People in a variety of hardluck situations are being pressed into service as "dolls" by a secretive organization and rented out to the highest bidder. Oh, but some of the dolls have a tendency to hang on to bits and pieces of various people they have been programmed to be, potentially driving them mad, potentially resulting in a dangerous lunatic impossibly skilled in an impossibly diverse array of abilities.
 * The first episode of Lost is a good example: around 40 people are crashed onto an island: they're dying, burning, getting ripped up by engines, and overall mayhem is going on. At the end of the episode, as all the trauma seems to be settling and the people are ready to start to go search for the black box from the cockpit in the jungle, what better time to find out that a tree-ripping, machine-noise-making monster lives right next door?
 * Season 4-5 was basically based around this trope, and with season 6 it seems things got worse, again.
 * In Season 6, this culminates in the Series Finale when.
 * It Got Worse is probably a good way to describe Hawkeye's numerous breakdowns on MASH, going from just making stuff up in a Season One episode to a massive one that he doesn't exactly recover from in the Grand Finale.
 * Law & Order: SVU is made of this trope. The show is about a crime unit that investigates sexual crimes, so the story almost always starts with some sadistic and horrible crime. As the twists and turns of the mystery unfold, the scenario almost always gets worse. More victims are found, the runaway turns up dead, the victim commits suicide -- whatever. There's one thing that's certain about every episode: no matter how bad it starts, it will get worse.
 * Any, like, really ANY episode of House.
 * But matters usually improve.
 * The season two finale is a good example. It opens with House getting shot, then ending up in the bed next to the guy who shot him. The patient of the week develops more symptoms (some very nasty) and no approach seems to work. Meanwhile, House begins to fear that his own health is deteriorating as he experiences hallucinations and blackouts. Everything works out when . The patient was real, having been introduced earlier; we never find out what happened to him, but it's implied that the real case wasn't a great mystery.
 * The penultimate episode of season 4 and the finale which it leads into are also great examples. An episode that starts with a bloodied and disoriented House realising he's been in a terrible accident manages to get worse, and ends with a tragic reveal. The finale gets even worse and doesn't get better.
 * Criminal Minds has several episodes in which the unsub they think has killed a limited number of people actually has killed dozens more ("The Fox", "Open Season", "To Hell..."/"...And Back"), or the unsub escalates the violence ("Omnivore"), or the crimes themselves turn out to be even more horrific than first imagined ("Legacy"). In "Lucky", what seems to be just another serial killer turns out to be, and then it really gets worse:
 * It Got Worse is pretty much the catchphrase of this show. Don't forget that
 * And guess what? It Got Worse again. You'd think that  is the end of it, but it's not. In the episodes that follow,
 * One of the more prominent instances is in the two-part plot, The Big Game and Revelations. The first episode begins like any other and gradually becomes just a touch more horrific with every passing scene, until it gets personal at the end of the episode. From then on, it just gets worse and worse until  actually  . The horror pretty much just reaches a plateau at that point.
 * Many character and plot arcs in Oz invoked this trope...too many to mention, except one of the examples from Criminal Minds above brings to mind a killer on death row whom Glynn wanted to confess his crime before he was executed. He eventually does, and Glynn starts to walk away, satisfied. The killer then proceeds to name almost thirty other women he has killed, or claims to have killed; we never find out which. In you're in favor of the death penalty (or you're not, but you have different standards for fiction) it's worse, because it meant possibly years of red tape to cut through before the killer could be executed.
 * Torchwood: Children of Earth. It's like the universe was watching and secretly planning, "how can we make this even more of a living hell for the Torchwood staff?"
 * Also "How can we make what they're doing to the kids any worse?"
 * You forgot to mention how It Got Worse:
 * Not just the Torchwood staff.
 * The West Wing episode "18th and Potomac" involves the staff desperately trying to plan their response to a public relations nightmare about to snap the Bartlett presidency in half. And then  Cue cheerful credits music!
 * Again, The West Wing. Toby describes the consequences of defaulting on the national debt in a calm monotone: "You know, the immediate collapse of the US economy, followed by Japan sinking into the sea, followed by a worldwide depression the likes of which no mortal can imagine." and then the punchline "... followed by week two."
 * In an episode of The Big Bang Theory entitled "The Vengeance Formulation," Sheldon devises a plan to get back at Kripke for humiliating him on NPR. He concocts a solution that will slowly expand and turn foamy and puts in it the ceiling tiles of Kripke's office. The plan backfires when the foam falls not only on Kripke, but on the president of the university and the board of directors. Then, it gets worse. Just as Leonard says "At least they don't know it was us," we see a video come on Kripke's computer screen. It contains Sheldon gloating about his masterful work, and naming Raj and Leonard as accomplices.
 * In a more recent episode, Sheldon is watching the results of his first drink ever (okay, his first five or six drinks ever, taken consecutively just before giving an acceptence speech), and comments something to the effect of how this could not be any more humiliating. Leonard, who is clearly enjoying this, says, "Keep watching."
 * In the Stargate SG-1 Season 4 cliffhanger and Season 5 opener, 'Exodus' and 'Enemies', SG-1 is planning to move the Tok'ra to a new base (annoying, but not overly problematic) when Tanith escapes and calls Apophis down to attack them. Apophis arrives with a massive fleet, but not before Sam Carter devises a way to blow up the planet's sun to take out Apophis's attacking force. Of course, Teal'c is more interested in killing Tanith than getting out of the system before the sun explodes, and so he and O'Neill end up stranded on the planet. And then Teal'c gets captured by Tanith. Jack gets rescued in barely the nick of time, but as they're leaving the system, SG-1's ha'tak gets blasted into another galaxy by the energy wave from the supernova. At this point, things are looking pretty grim... and then Apophis' flagship shows up too. Things look like they might be getting better for a bit when a mysterious ship attacks Apophis, but It gets worse AGAIN when they discover that this ship happens to be full of . And then, in trying to get away from THEM, Teal'c shows up again... , and all of SG-1 gets thrown in a holding cell. ...oh, yeah, and he brought a few of the   with him, so now the ha'tak is entirely infested. Just to recap, by the climax of this episode, SG-1 is   Yeah. It got worse.
 * The plot of Breaking Bad can be described this way: "In the pilot, he finds out he has terminal lung cancer. After that, things get worse".
 * Specifically:
 * Word of God says that it will absolutely get much worse.
 * Played for humor on Top Gear's "cheap car challenges," where they start out with wretched bangers and things go downhill from there. Played for drama on a couple of specials, particularly the Polar Special (truck vs. dogsled to the magnetic north pole) and the Bolivia Special.
 * In the How I Met Your Mother episode "Of Course" Marshall makes a comment to Robin about how many women Barney (her ex-boyfriend) has been sleeping with lately. Later, when Lily tells him Robin wasn't taking her breakup with Barney as well as she let on, Marshall has a flashback to that conversation. Now, not only do we see his comment in a different light, but we also see what we didn't get to before: that after talking about all the women Barney's been banging, Marshall started singing an impromptu song about it in front of Robin as well.
 * Think that can't get worse? When Ted (who is also Robin's ex-boyfriend) was later told about how hard Robin's taking her breakup with Barney, he has a flashback to when Marshall was doing his "Barney bangs women" song, and now we see that, after where Marshall's flashback left off, Ted jumped in and joined Marshall in singing it, too. And still in front of Robin.
 * Then, finally, when Barney himself is told about how hard Robin's taking the breakup, it's his turn to have a flashback, and, sure enough, with this we found out that he also joined in. Singing a song about how he's having sex with dozens of women. In front of his ex-girlfriend. The sheer It Got Worse factor actually makes Barney throw up in his stormtrooper helmet.
 * Just prior to the Maddigan's Quest episode Laketown, Towards the end of the episode, it's revealed to the others that
 * Explorer: 24 Hours After Impact, a National Geographic documentary about the K-T extinction, embodies this trope for dinosaurs. What with the 12-point earthquakes, crematorial heat, global wildfires, mega-tsunami, oxygen deficit and nuclear winter, you'll be astounded that anything got through it alive.
 * Heroes: Every. Single. Volume. No, really. To the characters, the villains keep getting more and more horrifying, the events more traumatizing (how much pain can we put Claire through before she finally withers into dust like a normal teenage girl? How many times can Nathan betray his own kind before someone FINALLY manages to kill him, ?), and things of that nature. Everything just keeps getting worse for them. If only they'd left it at Season 1. It would have been entirely and completely epic. Carrying on, the plots themselves seemed to degrade after they managed to (YMMV) Jump the Shark in Volume 3. Even Volume 2, but Volume 2 wasn't that great anyway. If it had gone on, it would've been either epically awesome or horribly, horrifyingly fail: either Adam would get to show us more awesome plotting or Sylar would hijack the plot like he did in every other volume. Every one of them. The only thing that hadn't completely and entirely been exhausted was the cast of characters, and even then it would be debatable, what, with all the character derailment and semi-rerailment they'd gone through. As far as I know, though, the funding was cut, so...yeah...
 * The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Night Terrors" is one long example of this, showing the crew as they encounter a Negative Space Wedgie that suppresses REM sleep, causing everyone on the crew to gradually suffer Sanity Slippage save for Troi and Data. As the episode progresses, crewmembers go from erratic to terrified to suicidal, but it doesn't really hit home how badly things have gotten until the final parts of the episode, in which a scene opens with Data reporting on the log as "Acting Captain" - the warning that the shit is really hitting the fan and even Picard himself is succumbing.
 * It would have been a lot worse if Troi was Acting Captain, especially if the episode took place before she got her Commander pip. Data was Second Officer on the Enterprise, making him 3rd in the chain of command (just after Riker).
 * The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Civil Defense" is also a long example of this. The station's computers malfunction and believe its many years ago when it was a mining station under Cardassian control. It considers the current inhabitants (you know, the good guys) to be slaves under revolt, and threatens to flood the place with poison gas if they don't surrender. Everything they try -- bypassing the computer, climbing through access shafts, and even saying "We Surrender!" -- makes things worse. At one point, the former station head and current villain Gul Dukut arrives on the scene: he'd received a distress call from the computer, and would be willing to shut it down if Kira lets his soldiers move onto the station. When he tries to leave and let them think it over, the computer assumes Dukat is abandoning his post, stops him from transporting out, and revokes his access -- trapping him with the others. And then...
 * Degrassi the Next Generation did this in season 4. In season 3, Rick's just an abusive boyfriend. He comes back in season 4, appears to have reformed, but the kids bully him, and then he goes Ax Crazy.
 * Despite being home improvement shows, Holmes On Homes (and its spinoff Holmes Inspection) hit on this trope all the time. The crew usually shows up to fix relatively mundane issues such as leaky basements or cold drafts, only to find out the home in question also has serious problems with structure, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, mold, asbestos, or termites (or in some cases, all of the above). They inevitably proceed to fix these problems in order to "Make it Right".
 * Ms. Parker from The Pretender embodies this trope. First she gets . And then she finds out her Mom's as she had been led to believe her entire life--though this is not confirmed until late in the series. Mr. Parker constantly plays with her emotions until he ultimately . Jarod doesn't help matters either. He hints in the second season that . That point in particular gets much, much worse in the last movie when it's revealed . Ew. Jarod also leads her to find out her brother is . When she finally finds love and  And in order to keep the trail from leading back to the Centre, . As it turns out, the person who actually  was the woman  in Season 3. . Ouch.
 * Jarod has his share as well. He . Once he escapes, things go downhill as he searches for his family. His is a killer in his own right, and just after they're reunited,.
 * Actually, you could take pretty much any character from The Pretender as a prime example of It Got Worse.
 * The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Scorpion": Borg nearby: bad. Borg Space with millions of cubes ahead and no passage (remember that Space Is 2 D)? Very bad. A species that eats Borg for breakfast and is intent on destroying all lifeforms in the galaxy? Horrible! How, then, will you feel when we see that
 * From Power Rangers RPM: The season's Teen Genius, Dr. K, has spent her most of her life in a government think tank named Alphabet Soup for weapons research and development, and has never gone outside since because they tell her she's allergic to sunlight. She finds out that this, of course, is a lie, and then proceeds to escape the compound with her only two friends (Gem and Gemma) by uploading the Venjix computer virus she had been working on for the think tank. Before she can install the firewall to prevent the virus from spreading beyond Alphabet Soup, two guards detain them. What proceeds afterwards is the eventual destruction of planet Earth by the Venjix virus, except for the domed city of Corinth.
 * Lampshaded in an episode of Malcolm in the Middle. After getting screwed over by their brother Francis, Malcolm and Reese report his car as stolen to the police. When he gets pulled over, he finds a note in his wallet that says: It gets worse . . . . As if on cue, a banging is heard from the boot of his car, revealing Malcolm and Reese have somehow bound and gagged themselves to make it look like a kidnapping.**
 * In Weeds, this trope applies to almost every aspect of the main character's lives.
 * The first-season ER episode "Love's Labour Lost," in which Dr. Greene does his damnedest to save a due-to-give-birth mother and her baby and whatever can go wrong does go wrong.
 * The second season finale of the 2009 V series. Oh, God. Anna's gloves come off, and the result is a Wham! Episode beyond even the series' usual level of HSQ, which can get kinda high.  No, that's not all.   No, that's not as bad as it gets. Anna can't use her "bliss" trance on humans, else she'd broadcast it worldwide and control the world simply by thinking happy thoughts at it, so thankfully, we're not that screwed... what's that you say?
 * Then it got even worse: The show was canceled, so we'll never know if they got out of that mess. The Bad Guy Wins?
 * Repeatedly in an episode of The Red Green Show, as a battered Red and Harold recall their attempt to preserve the original, historic Possum Lodge building, without professional help, on a dozen pickup truck beds.
 * After Sen. John McCain emerged as a lead opponent of the repeal on openly gay people serving in the US military, The Daily Show ran a parody of the The "It Gets Better" Project ads that actually use the phrase "It Gets Worse".
 * In the short-lived ABC-TV series Darkroom (1981-82), the episode "Stay Tuned, We'll Be Right Back" uses a variation of Godwin's Law of Time Travel. A Cleveland resident finds that he is in contact with the U-boat that sank his father's troop ship during World War 2 forty years earlier. He contacts the sub and gives them phony instructions. The next day he wakes up to find that his father is alive and the Nazis now control America.
 * Sherlock Series 2. If your Stalker with a Crush strapping a bomb vest to your best friend wasn't enough, get a load of his second act: