And I Must Scream/Live-Action TV

"Jack O'Neill: Okay, it's official; this is the 'worst way'."
 * In the series finale of Alias, Big Bad
 * Angel had a baddy ending up like this. After he'd died, his ghost survived by sending other people to Hell in his place. After using phlebotinum to bring him back to mortal life, and realizing they can't kill him without starting the whole thing over again, the heroes instead imprisoned him in a life-extending "cell": a locked closet in an empty basement hallway. Forever.
 * But then again
 * Also happens to Angel himself, when Connor, believing Angel killed his adoptive father Holtz, decides that death is too good for him. So he seals Angel in a metal box and drops him in the ocean, knowing that hunger won't kill him, but it will torment him endlessly. He was rescued a few months later.
 * Angel was actually inspired by his time under the ocean to punish the previous guy listed above.
 * Also, at one point Gunn was trapped in a hell dimension where he was strapped to a table, and every single day a demon would rip his heart out only for him to wake up the next day and go through it again.
 * He got to scream, it just didn't matter. He also got to spend the non-heart-removal time with a fake life in a fake suburb. But he knew...once a day, it was time to go to the basement...
 * He was thankfully saved...because there had to be someone whose heart was ripped out by the demon every day...there had to be a replacement. And it was actually...the very demon himself.
 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "The Witch." Amy's body-swapping witchy mom has one of her spells turned back on her, and seemingly vanishes. At the end of the episode, it turns out she's been trapped in one of her old cheerleading trophies. She presumably died when they blew the school up at the end of season three.
 * Which is later referenced when Oz is looking at the trophy case. "This may sound weird, but no matter where I move, this trophy's eyes seem to follow me."
 * A season four episode, "Doomed", where the high school ruin was revisited, was apparently meant to show the statue remaining in the rubble, but the shot never made it past the shooting script.
 * Angelus was also trapped in a "Hell dimension" for a subjective five hundred years.
 * What makes it more tragic is that
 * In another episode in Season 3 Hell is explained as 100 years passing in the space of a single day on Earth, and seeing as Buffy  that's a long time in Hell.
 * There is more than one Hell Dimension. The one that  had the 100-years-per-day time difference, but there's no indication that   ended up there in particular (and it's stated there's more than one Heavenly Dimension as well ...), but it's never out-ruled, either. He definitely spent quite some time there, though.
 * School normally ends in mid to late May and starts in late August or early September.
 * Another season four episode, "Hush" is about demons who steal the voice of everyone in Sunnydale. They then proceed to break into college dorm rooms, cut their victims open and remove their hearts, all while the victims cannot scream.
 * Warren. Dear god, Warren. But then she gets bored.
 * The season seven episode, "Same Time, Same Place." Willow is trapped and paralyzed in a cave with the demon Knarl, who paralyzes his victims and then proceeds to eat their skin. One strip at a time.
 * Doctor Who has a disturbingly large number of examples.
 * In the serial "Planet of the Spiders," spiders from another planet sink their fangs into people's spinal cords in order to tap into their nervous systems and control them like meat puppets, while the victims' minds remain conscious as powerless prisoners. And this was back when many people considered Doctor Who a children's show.
 * The serial "Mawdryn Undead" features a group of scientists who attempted to steal the secret of regeneration from the Time Lords. Caught by the Time Lords, the scientists were condemned to perpetual regeneration while also being trapped on a ship that is almost completely isolated from the universe.
 * In the serial "The Five Doctors," anyone who claims Rassilon's Gift is granted true immortality, as an unmoving (but still aware) stone carving on Rassilon's tomb.
 * Between "Destiny of the Daleks" and "Resurrection of the Daleks," Davros was frozen in a cryogenic chamber for 90 years while the powers that be debated what to do with this criminal. When awakened, he reveals that he was conscious for "every agonizing second." He is considerably less sane from this point onwards.
 * In "The Mark of the Rani", some poor fool accidentally steps on a mine planted by the Rani, turning him into a tree. Initially this just looks stupid, but a few moments later one of the tree's branches suddenly moves to prevent Peri from standing on another mine, thus making it clear that the guy's mind still lives on inside the tree. In fact, a sarcastic comment by the Rani about how he's better off because trees live longer than humans makes things worse, as he could end up tree-ified for decades, if not centuries.
 * As far as the Doctor is concerned, just being a Dalek falls under this trope, although they can (and do) scream. "From birth to death, locked inside a cold metal cage, completely alone..."
 * In the new series, the Doctor did this in a different way to each member of the Family of Blood in the episode of the same name. (Moral of the story: never, ever piss off the Doctor.)
 * He throws the mother into the orbit of an event horizon of a black hole, to be trapped there forever. He wrapped the father in unbreakable chains. He trapped the sister in a mirror-- every mirror in existence. And he suspended the son in time, covering his face with a sack and sticking him upright as a scarecrow to watch over the fields of England.
 * In "Fear Her", victims are turned into drawings that are somewhat mobile while on the page. They can scream. Silently.
 * The Carrionites from "The Shakespeare Code" are trapped in their crystal ball. "The Unicorn and the Wasp," a year later, has him taking the ball out as part of a Rummage Fail scene, and they can still be heard inside, shouting.
 * This also happens to the Weeping Angels in "Blink". They turn to stone when looked at by any other being, including their own kind. They get tricked and end up standing facing each other, turning them to stone forever. The newest Doctor mentions that the Angels in that episode were starving to death, which suggests that none of them have long to go anyway (although that makes it worse, being trapped as stone while starving. But it's not like they don't deserve it.)
 * The Doctor himself in "Midnight" falls under the control of a malicious alien and can't move... except for being forced to repeat everything she says, leading the others to think he's the malicious alien and try to kill him.
 * In "The Pandorica Opens," the Doctor is contained inside a super-prison built exactly to his specifications, unable to move at all and preserved for eternity. He's even screaming as it closes- this trope to a T.
 * Weeping Angels are fiends that can only attack you if you aren't looking directly at them. If you are, they're statues, if you aren't, well, nobody ever survives long enough to find out. In "Blink", the Tenth Doctor tricks a pack of them by surrounding the TARDIS and telling his two allies to activate it, sending it into the past; when it disappears, the Angels are looking at each other, and are frozen in place - forever. Not that this fate is undeserved for these creatures, of course.
 * In the Torchwood: episode "Exit Wounds", Jack Harkness is buried alive under Cardiff, constantly suffocating, reviving (painfully), and dying again... for 1874 years. He was buried in 27 AD then dug up in 1901, then cryogenically frozen (yes, in 1901, Torchwood could do that then) to bring him back to the present, paradox free.
 * When he wakes up, he is mildly annoyed (guess you can get used to Fates Worse Than Death).
 * Attempted by the government villains in Day Two of Children of Earth, as they try to contain Jack by
 * This is after, having blown up Torchwood base (to try to wipe out Torchwood), they find only a few of Jack's bones. They cart them off to their headquarters, only to then find that Jack's regenerative abilities are still active, and he is completely regenerating from just those few bones they had found, growing into a horribly mangled-looking corpse, with bloody bones and a few internal organs, at which point he starts screaming.... nonstop. He only stops many hours later once the rest of his muscles, skin and various other body tissues have finished regrowing.
 * Also done by.
 * Owen Harper's personal story arc in Torchwood, Season 2:
 * The premise of season four of Torchwood, "Miracle Day," is that no-one dies or heals after what would have killed them, making this trope apply to everyone who had a particularly violent almost-death in that season. 's fate at the end of episode four of 'Miracle Day' is merely one of the most extreme examples, see also the 'survivor' of the explosion in the first episode and everyone who ...
 * CSI featured a serial killer that would pose his victims as they were dying so that rigor mortis would freeze them into "whimsical" poses. They found the last victim trapped in a complicated rig, just barely alive.
 * The very first episode (excluding the Poorly-Disguised Pilot) of CSI New York involved the phenomenon of "Locked-In Syndrome." "Locked In Syndrome" was also used in episodes of both Scrubs and House (See Real Life Examples.)
 * Tin Man: The eponymous lawman was trapped in an iron maiden and forced to watch a hologram of his family being tortured and killed until DG and Glitch let him out.
 * Presumably, the "iron maiden" also provided full life support, possibly including muscle-toning since he can move easily even right out of the box. He's not even hungry or thirsty. It may be some form of stasis that does not shut down mental function. A Wizard Did It.
 * See the "Literature" section - Wyatt's "predecessor" Nick Chopper (the original one), really didn't fare any better. The 1939 movie Bowdlerized things big time.
 * The low-budget horror anthology series TerrorVision has a 15-minute episode (referenced here) in which a pair of elderly clothing store proprietors lure young women inside on the pretext of giving them modeling auditions, then use their "special camera" to turn them into mannequins. The special effects are very bad, but at least the concept is still scary.
 * In the season 2 finale of Heroes, Hiro Nakamura takes revenge upon Adam Monroe this way by sealing him in a coffin, buried deep underground. Since Adam is immortal, he's likely trapped in there for eternity. In the graphic novels, it is shown that he is repeatedly dying, presumably of suffocation, only to be brought back to life by his regenerative powers again and again. Beware the Nice Ones indeed...
 * And in season three, Angela is temporarily.
 * And later in Volume 5, when Sylar asks Matt Parkman to remove his abilities so he can live normally, what he does instead is read his mind to discover his worst nightmare, which is being completely alone, and then trapping him in a telepathic illusion where one hour in the real world equals a year in the nightmare. Sylar is immortal, and there're a lot of hours in eternity. Matt even says "Enjoy Hell" to Sylar before vanishing into thin air.
 * In a situation similar to Adam Monroe's above, another immortal on Highlander: the Series once sought out Duncan for revenge. Why? Because Duncan had left him stranded on a tiny, barren island, where he'd died of starvation every day until rescued.
 * A few characters suffered this way in Highlander the Series, including one, a Nazi, who'd been bound with weights and thrown into a river, resulting in him drowning, reviving, drowning, reviving...
 * If I remember right, there was also an episode where a pair of immortals were doing a Bonnie and Clyde routine for kicks and/or money, with Duncan as their helper. Their M.O. was to rob banks until they were killed in the inevitable shootouts, then Duncan would dig them out of their graves to do it all over again. This worked fine for them until Duncan got fed up with their Jerkass ways, and left them in their graves the next time they died.
 * Yet another was locked in an insane asylum for seventy years. No wonder these guys hate MacLeod.
 * In the Flash Animations staring Methos, we learn that prior to taking his first head, Methos did this to the pharaoh that had been mentoring him after learning that the pharaoh had been the one that had ordered the death of Methos' wife and her family. The pharaoh was mummified alive and buried until his tomb was discovered under water 5000+ years later.
 * Star Trek: The Next Generation:
 * Lore is burdened with this sort of fate after his first appearance. In order to get rid of him, Data beams his evil brother into outer space, where the Nigh Invulnerable android will be cursed to drift around aimlessly in the endless vacuum, completely helpless. It's downplayed, since he's rescued after a "mere" few years when the crew of an alien ship discover his body floating around in space at a thousand-to-one odds.
 * In the episode "Skin of Evil", the creature called Armus fits the trope. The result of an alien race's attempt to transcend evil, Armus is a self-loathing creature with no redeemable qualities, filled with emptiness, and living on a dead planet with no way off or any company. Picard even rubs this in, making a speech to Armus where he informs him that he's arranged to have Armus trapped on his empty planet "forever, alone and immortal". Although it's hard to feel pity for a literal pool of evil who kills for fun and really does have no redeeming qualities. The only thing one can feel pity for is that Armus had no choice in the matter of his creation.
 * To say nothing of those that the Borg assimilate. As Picard implied shortly after being removed from the Collective in "The Best of Both Worlds", they're privvy to everything the Borg-them is doing, but are helpless to do anything about it. That Picard was able to break through his "Locutus of Borg" personality and tell Data how to defeat the Borg was nothing short of a miracle.
 * Moriarty -- the self-aware hologram intended to outsmart Data -- is still conscious when he is deactivated, and speaks of "Brief, terrifying periods of consciousness . . . disembodied, without substance." In a subversion (?) of this trope, he is eventually trapped in a small device running a permanent simulation in which he thinks he has escaped into the real world. Geordi couldn't get him into the real world, but this is still an ignominious and condescending end.
 * Supernatural:
 * Sam and Dean bury Doc Benton (who's immortal) alive, chained up in a refrigerator. Another thing to consider: although he can't die, his body parts wear out, so eventually he'll rot away into a sentient and forever conscious pile of dirt.
 * The episode "The Rapture", in a slight subversion, has the good guys bestow this kind of fate upon another good person. Jimmy, the vessel for angel Castiel, begs Castiel to possess him to save his daughter from having a similar fate. It's essentially the fate for every human possessed by an angel or demon. Even the "good guy" angels like Castiel, Anna and Gabriel have been pulling this stunt for countless millennia.
 * Also intentionally given by the good guys to the H.H. Holmes, the USA's first recognized serial killer. They left the ghost underground, encircled by rock salt. And barricaded the place. And for good measure, sealed the entrance up with concrete in case of earthquakes. That ghost is NOT going anywhere anytime soon.
 * In the fifth season finale, was the only way they could think of to prevent a global apocalypse.
 * In the season 3 finale of True Blood, Eric and Bill trap vampire  wrapped in silver and encased in concrete, because true death would be too merciful for him. He swears to spend the following hundred years to plan his revenge.
 * And the vampire council threaten Bill with this punishment in the first series.
 * Early in Stargate Atlantis, a Living Shadow that was trapped in the lower levels of the city for thousands of years starts stalking the expedition. As Sheppard said, "I know I'd be pissed."
 * In Stargate SG-1, hosts to the Goa'uld are subjected to being stuck within their own bodies unable to communicate or control themselves.
 * Marduk, an ancient Goa'uld was, after a revolt by his people, locked in his sarcophagus (which can heal anything up to and including apparent death) with a carnivorous beast. The sarcophagus kept both him and the beast alive for decades, if not centuries, with the beast eating him alive the whole time until the body finally died (as even the sarcophagus has its limits), with the symbiote jumping into the beast.
 * In Stargate SG-1, hosts to the Goa'uld are subjected to being stuck within their own bodies unable to communicate or control themselves.
 * Marduk, an ancient Goa'uld was, after a revolt by his people, locked in his sarcophagus (which can heal anything up to and including apparent death) with a carnivorous beast. The sarcophagus kept both him and the beast alive for decades, if not centuries, with the beast eating him alive the whole time until the body finally died (as even the sarcophagus has its limits), with the symbiote jumping into the beast.

"You've cost me much, and I do not suffer disappointment well. I condemn you, John Crichton... to live. So that your thirst for unfulfilled revenge... will consume you. ( Beat ) Goodbye. (He exits, leaving Crichton screaming in impotent rage.)"
 * Subverted in Farscape: the crew stops on a planet where the newly-declared Empress and Regent are customarily turned into living statues for the eighty years it takes for the current rulers to die. However, rather than being viewed as a punishment that drives them insane, it's a duty that makes them wiser by allowing them to observe royal court proceedings; also, people can talk with the couple via a psychic headset, which no doubt helps lessen the monotony somewhat.
 * Played horrifyingly straight in "Eat Me." Crichton, D'Argo, Chiana and Jool dock at a barren Leviathan in search of replacement parts for their transport ship. The ship is infested with zombie-like creatures (actually Peacekeepers whose mental capacities have been rendered primitive thanks to the episode's main villain). Their only source of food is this Leviathan's Pilot, who gets his arms ripped off. Unfortunately, his species has a Healing Factor, so the trapped creature has his arms repeatedly re-grown and ripped off. By the time Crichton finds him, this Pilot is understandably border-line insane.
 * In the second season finale, Crichton is undergoing surgery to remove  Unfortunately, halfway through the episode, the doctor reports that the offending object is dangerously close to Crichton's speech centres; removing it will mean that he will be unable to speak coherently until a suitable donor can be found. Crichton wearily agrees. No sooner has the operation been completed, when Scorpius strolls in, kills the doctor, and retrieves  ; seeing Crichton strapped to the operating table, unable to speak and with no help arriving for quite some time, Scorpius provides this little speech:

"Clark: What'd you do with Knox? Martian Manhunter: Your father and I had a "don't ask, don't tell" policy when it came to crime and punishment. I suggest we abide by the same rules. Clark: You didn't kill him, did you? Martian Manhunter: Knox is immortal, Kal-El. You can't kill him."
 * Juken Sentai Gekiranger: At the end,.
 * In the X-Files episode "Fresh Bones", a corrupt Marine general learns the secret of voodoo immortality... just in time to be buried in a coffin before he revives.
 * In the same vein, the episode "Soft Light" has the Mot W trapped in a government test lab because he's "lightning in a bottle".
 * In season three of Desperate Housewives, the question of how to punish the season's Big Bad when doing so would lead to a main character going to jail was solved when she stroked out and ended up with Locked-In Syndrome. Her son then twists the knife a little further: "I'm going to turn your head now so you can watch me walk away. It's the last time you'll ever see me."
 * The Smallville episode "Forever" features this trope with the Monster of the Week, whose touch can turn people to wax. They clearly remain conscious during this, though, as the camera shows their eyes still moving. Shattering the wax statue, however, is implied to be fatal.
 * Implied to be the fate of another immortal:


 * Lana Lang suffered a temporary case of this when Brainiac placed her in an "anasthesia awareness" state during the last few episodes of Season 7. According to what Brainiac told Clark, Lana was fully aware of her surroundings and in a constant state of excrutiating pain, but she was also fully paralyzed so that she could do nothing to try to ease her pain or communicate with anybody else in any way. She was left in this condition for over a month until Clark finally defeated Brainiac and freed her. Brainiac could have been claiming this just to emotionally torture Clark as Lana did not seem to be suffering any psychological aftereffects from the experience when she returned as a guest star the following season.
 * An episode of ER featured Cynthia Nixon as a stroke victim who could perceive what was happening to her but not communicate with anyone.
 * In Babylon 5's incredible second episode we meet the 'Soul Hunters', a brotherhood who capture the spirits of the dying in little globes. Problem: They don't ask permission first. The Minbari at least consider this a fate MUCH worse than death.
 * The Soul Hunters themselves view it as the highest compliment, as they believe souls die with the body without their attentions.
 * The Soul Hunters' story goes to extremes in the TV-Movie Babylon 5: The River of Souls, where they do it to a world. Reality Ensues when the entrapped population becomes Sealed Evil in a Can, because they weren't dying... they were evolving.
 * For much of season 4,
 * House:
 * There's an episode featuring a patient with Locked-In Syndrome. Most of the episode was shown from his perspective.
 * In another episode of House, one scene shows the patient of the week rendered unconscious by her ailment. House enters, frowns, and approaches her, putting his ear near her mouth to better hear the nearly inaudible, whispery gasps she is making. It is then that he leaps into action, revealing to the rest of the team that she has been screaming in agony the entire time, only she was too weak to make much noise.
 * A particularly dark example was in Crossing Jordan, which, for those of you who didn't know, is a show about a coroner's office. The victim is shot and spends the most of the episode paralyzed. He used to be a prosecutor and Macy's friend, but underwent a Face Heel Turn to Amoral Attorney when Macy refused to falsify evidence to put away a serial killer. He keeps pleading with Jordan and Macy not to autopsy him, promising he'll change. He's only saved when Macy digs the bullet out and realizes he's still bleeding. Turns out he and his two guests (who were killed) had improperly prepared Fugu, and his secretary shot him. On his way out of the hospital, Macy gives him a bell, and tells him that people used to be buried with strings attached to bells in case they were buried alive. The lawyer points out that Macy just effectively admitted the coroner's office is at fault, and he'll both be suing and representing to woman who shot him. Then he walks outside and gets hit by a bus. The last shots of the episode is the team looking down into his body bag, and their evaluator asking if they're sure he's dead. The bag is closed up, using the same POV shot from the lawyer's perspective as earlier, and then we hear a bell tinkling.
 * In part seven of Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King, "Autopsy room four", the protagonist is bitten by a venomous snake and falls into a paralytic state extremely similar to death, except he's fully aware. When he's taken to the hospital, the doctors prepare for an autopsy...
 * Tales from the Crypt took that theme Up to Eleven, letting a character face such a fate twice. The first time, he'd been injected with an experimental anaesthetic by his medical-researcher brother, who knew the protagonist was still conscious and staged the "autopsy" as a prank (!), paying back how his sibling had picked on him for years. After being revived, the protagonist dies for real, and the episode ends with him -- consciousness prolonged by the residual drug in his system -- facing a second trip to the autopsy table, this time with the capacity to feel pain.
 * In Lost, get bitten by Medusa spiders, which paralyzed them into a death-like state where they were fully aware, but pale, cold, and unable to move. This culminates in them being buried alive by the rest of the Lostaways (who think they're dead), and slowly suffocating to death underground. The dog is the only one who realizes something is wrong.
 * In "Stiff", a season-ten episode of Law and Order, a woman is found comatose because her husband has been injecting her with near-overdoses of insulin (with her consent) in their sex games to render her immobile but conscious. It turns out that
 * On Fringe, areas exposed to rips in space-time are isolated by quarantining them in amber, even with people still inside. It's revealed that quarantine amber causes a state of semi-aware suspended animation for those encased inside, rather than death, as had been previously thought.
 * On Charmed, there was a magic school that was enchanted so that you can't die as long as any part of your body is on its grounds. You can be beheaded, and you're still-conscious, talking head will stay alive, even outside the school, as long as your body remains at the school. Now, think about what that means for that one guy Gideon blasted into a pile of ash while there.
 * On Dead Like Me, George, the main character is a Reaper who must take people's souls out of their bodies at specific times. On an early episode, she decides to not show up to take a soul. It then shows the person trapped in their dead body receiving an autopsy and screaming in horror.
 * An Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, "Breakdown", involves a man getting paralyzed in a car wreck and mistaken for dead.
 * Are You Afraid of the Dark?: The Tale of the 13th Floor. At the end, Karin is stuck frozen on Earth for ten years in her natural (faceless/mouthless) alien forma.
 * At the end of "The Super Specs", the protagonists from the "normal" universe are trapped in a crystal ball.
 * The pilot episode for the Swamp Thing TV series showed the title hero fusing the still-living body of one of the bad guys into a tree, leaving him a half-man, half-tree hybrid, in very much the same fashion as the Doctor Who example above - although in this case the effect is even more disturbing, as the bad guy's face is left frozen in a way that very much brings Munch's The Scream to mind.
 * In one of the later episodes of Dinosaurs, Earl is struck by lightning, causing him to switch places with a tree. Earl's face is sticking out of the tree's trunk.
 * MythBusters has done a few torture myths in which this trope was in effect:
 * In "Chinese Water Torture," being shackled to a board and unable to move more than an inch drove Kari to the brink of her composure, causing her to burst into tears at least once on camera, and abort the test in less than an hour (both due to the emotional distress, and due to near-fatal physical stress levels).
 * Conversely, Adam, who was simultaneously undergoing the same test sans restraints and in a rather comfy recliner, was hardly bothered at all; the worst he had to endure was the water drops keeping him from taking a nap.
 * In "Bamboo Torture," they tested a myth of a WWII torture technique in which POWs would be stretched out and tied down over a budding bamboo shoot, then left there as the shoot grew into their back and through their abdomen. It only took four days for the bamboo to grow through the torso, but when you're strapped to the ground for hours with the hot sun beating on your face, a plant growing into your back, and maybe some occasional harassment from your captors...
 * The Twilight Zone had the famous "Time Enough At Last", where, now that the rest of humanity has been destroyed, Burgess Meredith can finally read all he wants. Unfortunately, his coke-bottle glasses slip of his head, and shatter. "A Kind of Stopwatch" has a man discover a stop watch that stops time, and using it to rob banks, and things like that. Until it falls out of his pocket and breaks while the rest of the world (and presumably the universe) is still frozen.
 * The 1985 remake was "A Little Peace and Quiet" in which an overstressed homemaker can stop time to escape the pressures of everyday life, until
 * In another episode, "The Long Morrow", an astronaut is sent into space for forty years. He is to be put into suspended animation, so he will be the same age when he returns, and won't have to deal with the loneliness of space. However, he releases himself from suspended animation early in the flight, so that he will be the same age as his girlfriend when he gets back. After forty lonely years in space, he returns, only to find that she froze herself to wait for him, and she is still young.
 * In a season one episode of Carnivale,
 * Dollhouse's Attic.
 * Well, goodness gracious, but it is good to be out of doors...
 * Recurring baddie Frank Breitkopf from Criminal Minds injected his victims with a drug that left them paralyzed but fully awake while he vivisected them. As he's been active for around thirty years, its implicated Frank's done this to around two-hundred people.
 * The UnSub from "The Uncanny Valley" kidnaps women, drugs them with a paralytic, and keeps them as dolls in a hellish tea party.
 * From Wizards of Waverly Place of all places! In one episode, Alex brings a mannequin to life to be her boyfriend. But when it becomes unmanageable, Alex has to turn it back. The mannequin is terrified of having its face turned back into a "featureless knob." After a few moments of life and mobility, his new life is cruelly snatched away and he is stuck as a frozen plastic doll in a store window.
 * This is what "bronzing" is implied to do to people kept in Warehouse 13. According to, they're fully aware, but immobile. seems to have come out of it fairly well, if more than a little angry.
 * In the second season finale, . The actual reveal in season three is debatable on whether it is worse as
 * In the show "1000 Ways to Die" season 3 clip Early Harvest, a driver wrongly declared dead who just so happens to be an organ donor has his organs harvested while he's still alive.
 * In the Canadian TV show The Collector, a woman tries to evade death and eternal damnation by placing her mind into the body of a robot. The transfer was a success. The only problem is there is a malfunction, causing the robot to be stuck in place. She can see and think, but is stuck forever. The devil notes that she is the first client to create her own personal hell. In admiration he decides to keep her running for the next millenia, but seals off the door so no one can ever find her. It ends with showing her robot body endlessly chanting "I will move now. I will move now. I will move now"
 * Misfits - Season 2, episode 6.
 * Al Bundy is constantly begging for the sweet release of death. After selling Louis Cypher his soul Al gets his wish, and finds Hell much nicer than his life.
 * Night Visions, a short-lived "Twilight Zone"-type series hosted by Henry Rollins, had one particular half-episode called "Switch." In it, a woman seeing a psychiatrist to find her alternate personality and eliminate it found that she WAS the alternate, created by her child-like real self after her parents died when she was 5. The real twist?  The episode ended with this woman - trapped in her mind, unable to speak, and unable to move - encased in 8 big hollow bricks that spelled out "ETERNITY," with holes only for her forearms.
 * Season 5 episode "Déjà Vu" from the 1995 version of The Outer Limits deals with a failed teleportation experiment that traps the main character in a shrinking time loop. While he manages to break free in the end, the antagonist isn't as lucky. He gets caught in another time loop that forces him to relive the last few seconds preceding a nuclear explosion at point blank range, most likely for all eternity.
 * Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: There are a few examples. A monster called Pineoctopus (who could disguise himself as a clown) had the ability turn people into cardboard cutouts, the Rangers were turned into pachinko balls on one occasion and bricks on another...
 * A particularly ironic Fate Worse Than Death befalls an escaped Nazi war criminal in an episode of Night Gallery. He discovers that he has the power to wish himself into paintings (or at least, into one particular painting at a local art gallery, which features a lone figure in a serene fishing scene). Near the end of the story, when he's on the run from the authorities, he escapes to the museum and tries to wish himself back into the painting-- only to discover that it has been replaced with a scene of the crucifixion of a death-camp inmate. He then gets to spend the rest of eternity trapped in the painting, undergoing perpetual torture as the figure of the inmate.