Storyboarding the Apocalypse

"Darkseid goes all out. A lot of villains tell everyone about their plan, but Darkseid filmed an elaborate dramatization of it. Look at those special effects. He didn't just have a computer rendered picture of what his battle station will look like, he got actors to run around on an airfield while planes were getting vaporized."

- Seanbaby

Sometimes, it's enough to just say "The World Is In Danger!" and hope the hero (and the audience) may understand the urgency and risk and answer The Call. Sometimes, though, a little more is in order. Story-Boarding the Apocalypse is a disturbingly detailed narrated account of the impending Gotterdammerung and rise of the ultimate evil, accompanied by a montage to give plenty of Nightmare Fuel inducing visions of the end to all parties involved.

Story-Boarding the Apocalypse is used on a few different occasions: The hero might refuse the call, forcing his Mentor to show him how the Big Bad can hurt him, by turning his secluded hometown into a Doomed Hometown. Or the Big Bad might give a Motive Rant and expound at length on how they'll turn the world into Mordor, or bring about a new Eden via utter destruction because Utopia Justifies the Means. Especially detail oriented villains will have prepared dioramas, movies, and even commission an Earth-Shattering Poster or two to help hammer it in. Or they might just beam it into the hero's skull with a laser. Occasionally this is given as a warning by less direct conventional methods; Cassandra Truth can deliver it, or via Psychic Dreams for Everyone, or Time Travel in the hope of driving the point home to the hero and the audience.

Compare Just Between You and Me, Villain World and Bad Future, which can be the Storyboarded Apocalypse given form. See also Unspoken Plan Guarantee. Contrast Apocalypse Wow, which is also a narrative depiction of the apocalypse, only used for very different dramatic goals.

Anime and Manga

 * Just before making his wish, Emperor Pilaf of Dragon Ball takes a moment to visualize himself as emperor of the world, and we get a sequence showing him as emperor. (He spends the entire fantasy standing on a podium doing nothing but laugh while a crowd hails him.) Oolong uses this time to ruin the whole thing by wishing for panties.
 * X 1999 (also known as "The Shoujo Armageddon") not only features a lengthy vision by dreamseer Hinoto-hime on how the apocalypse will proceed, it also flashes forward and flashes back to that dream sequence many times throughout the series.
 * The Anti-Spiral in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann explains exactly how and why the Earth will be destroyed, complete with a helpful 3-D simulation. Simon realizes through instinct that it's the truth, going briefly into a Heroic BSOD.
 * Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie. When it becomes clear that Metal Sonic intends to destroy the world, Knuckles explains to the skeptical president how exactly a single robot could accomplish this: by puncturing the lava veins that flow through the giant mountain/glaciar that holds the various Floating Continents that make up the Land of the Sky together, the planet's own rotation will hurl them off into outer space (though this won't affect the Land of Darkness, which is the actual planet's surface). Unfortunately, Sonic overhears this conversation, and due to the Psychic Link, Metal knows everything that Sonic knows...
 * The major driving force of the Zettai Karen Children's plot is a prophecy of the devastating war between espers and normal humans, completed with realistic visions that several characters has experienced.
 * Done twice in Naruto by the two masterminds of Akatsuki regarding their individual plans for creating a lasting peace.
 * had developed the design for a massively powerful weapon using the bijuu. His intent.
 * intended to use the chakra of the bijuu for an incredibly powerful jutsu..

Comic Books

 * During the Sons of Empire arc of Fables, Lumi A.K.A. The Snow Queen details her plans to to wipe out life in the mundy world (our world). They consist of, then finally leaving us to wither and die without crops or any means of producing anything. When they're done the Empire will use our devastated, uninhabitable planet as a prison world.
 * Subverted almost immediately afterward, however, by the Adversary's son, who's lived in Fabletown until recently Storyboards the Aversion of the Apocalypse. The big problem with Lumi's plan is that.
 * At the end of the arc, the Adversary decides to hold off on the invasion until they have the Fables living among us all killed so they can't intervene.
 * Done in Angel: After The Fall:
 * The Ultimate Galactus trilogy has a scene where Reed Richards lays out Gah Lak Tus's M.O.: . Reed ends up using a holographic projector.
 * In the original Galactus Trilogy, The Watcher gives a similar description of just what will happen if Galactus eats Earth, though it's projected into the characters' minds as opposed to being holographic.
 * In Saga of the Swamp Thing, the resurrected Anton Arcane rants about how he's going to bring the worst of the damned back into the world, inciting chaos and a literal Apocalypse. Scenes of havoc wrought by those he's already unleashed provide a literal "storyboard" of the kinds of hell Arcane would've spread around the world, had he not underestimated Holland Swamp Thing.
 * Hellboy did it on a number of occasions, most memorably in "The Right Hand of Doom". Hellboy wonders what might happen if he cuts off his Evil Hand, and we see a splash page of a hooded man standing in a burning ruin, holding up the severed hand and chanting, "Anung un Rama..." (Hellboy's true name at the time).
 * Justice League: The New Frontier features a particularly creepy example, where the Big Bad's genocidal plans for Earth are communicated via the writings of a children's author—specifically, a Dr. Seuss Expy.

Film
"Truman: Damage? Ah, total, sir. If this asteroid hits, nothing would survive. Not even bacteria. Truman: So when the rogue comet hit the asteroid belt it sent all these pieces spinning off. Next fourteen days, the Earth's in a shooting gallery. Now, if it's a Pacific Basin impact, which we think it will be, it'll flash-boil millions of liters and set off earthquakes when it hits the ocean bedrock. Half the Earth's population will be incinerated by the heat blast and the other half will freeze to death in nuclear winter ... this is as real as it gets. It's coming. Right now, at about eighteen thousand miles an hour. Not a soul on Earth can hide from it."
 * In the James Bond movie Moonraker, The Diabolical Mastermind Hugo Drax had such an exposition.
 * Armageddon contains two examples of this. One is at the beginning of the film, as Charlton Heston's voiceover about what happened to the dinosaurs threatens the same consequence for Earth later on. Truman later makes it explicit:

"Judge Doom: I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on, all day, all night! Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations; inexpensive motels; restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food; tire salons; automobile dealerships; and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see! My God, it'll be beautiful."
 * A possible parody of this occurs near the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, referring to the interstate bypass, and eerily foreshadowing the modern stripmall.

"Keyes: As the electromagnetic field becomes more and more unstable, we'll start seeing isolated incidents - one plane will fall from the sky, then two. Then, in a few months, anything, everything electronic will be fried. Zimsky: Static discharges in the atmosphere will create superstorms with hundreds of lightning strikes per square mile. Keyes: After that, it gets bad."
 * Hellboy: "I will give you a brief, brief glimpse into the future..."
 * The Terminator movie gave us a glimpse of the future where humanity is being hunted down by SkyNet.
 * The second movie also showed us Sarah Connor's nightmare of a city being destroyed, just to remind us of the nuclear holocaust, quite disturbing for those who remember the Cold War days.
 * The third showed the apocalypse happening as nuclear missiles rained down on cities
 * The Core has the lead character explaining the Earth's ultimate fate with a peach and a aerosol can flamethrower.

"Dominic: So do you know what's gonna happen? Finch: No. It was a feeling. But I can guess. With so much chaos, someone will do something stupid. And when they do, things will turn nasty. And then, Sutler will be forced do the only thing he knows how to do. At which point, all V needs to do is keep his word. And then..."
 * Galadriel in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring shows Frodo a vision of The Shire as an industrial work camp. In the book it turns out she was bang on; in the movie Saruman gets shanked and that side of the conflict ends.
 * In V for Vendetta, Finch describes the upcoming revolution with shots spliced in of an overeager enforcer killing a kid with a Fawkes mask and then getting lynched by the angry neighbors:

"Dominic: I went by Parliament. Never seen anything like it - tanks, antiaircraft, infantry - it makes you wish that no one would show up tonight. But if they do, what do you think will happen? Finch: What usually happens when people without guns stand up to people with guns."
 * He finishes his guess a bit later.Fortunately, he was wrong.


 * In Superman Returns Lex Luthor shows Lois Lane a series of maps detailing exactly how his plan will destroy pretty much the entire Western Hemisphere.

Literature
"Lord Downey: Well, we can get along without magic for two years, can't we? Ponder: No. The sun will crash and burn. The seas will dry up and vanish. The turtles and the elephant might cease to exist altogether. Downey: All that'll happen in two years? Ponder:, No, all of that'll happen in the first ten minutes. Magic isn't just coloured lights and balls; magic holds the world together."
 * In The Lord of the Rings, Galadriel memorably storyboards what would happen if she were to take the Ring for herself when Frodo offers it to her before ultimately refusing it.
 * The Knights of the Word in Terry Brooks's overarching meta series have these occur to them every time they fall asleep.
 * In the Star Trek: The Next Generation giant novel 'Metamorphosis', Data learns the fate of the galaxy should he choose to.
 * Although the hero of the Pendragon books is always trying to prevent whatever world he's in from falling apart, Bobby gets a good, long, disturbing look at what will happen if he fails in the third book.
 * Subversions abound in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, where such visions often lead to the very events they depict. Jacen Solo's are the most specifically apocalyptic; his visions of what the future will be like turn him to the Dark Side in order to prevent the galaxy from lapsing into unending war. Ironically they all involve him killing Luke Skywalker, but it never occurs to him to kill himself.
 * An early Animorphs book has the Ellimist showing the heroes a supposedly inevitable Yeerk-dominated world, and then actually giving them the opportunity to Refuse The Call. However, this wasn't a message of doom, an easy out, or even a possible future, but a Batman Gambit on the Ellimist's part to show the heroes where the location of a generator that will cripple the alien invasion for a short time is.
 * Later on, an entire book is devoted to this, when Jake wakes up in a future where the Yeerks have won.
 * There's also a Megamorphs based on the idea that they never walked through the construction site and got their powers (a deal that Jake agreed to in a moment of weakness). Suffice to say it doesn't end well.
 * Parodied in Science of Discworld II: The Globe, in which Ponder Stibbons has set up an elaborate presentation to show the danger to the Roundworld Project, only for Rincewind to sum things up in one sentence when he still has "a dozen slides and a flowchart" to go.
 * A straighter example is from The Last Hero. Ponder Stibbons has said that unless an explosion at the Hub is prevented, the magical field will collapse for up to two years.


 * This is followed by a hypothetical illustration showing the Discworld After the End, with the turtle and elephants reduced to skeletons and the disc itself turned reddish and dead.
 * The Bible's Book of Revelation is pretty much the ur-example of this trope, meaning it's Older Than Feudalism. Unfortunately, as no one can agree on which parts are symbolic and which parts are literal (even entirely literal interpretations can differ from one another due to the original work's obtusely poetic language), there's a myriad of interpretations as to what each part of its storyboarding means.
 * Revelation itself was an example of apocalyptic literature, an entire genre of turn-of-the-common-era artwork in which this trope was the whole point. Going back even further in The Bible, the Book of Daniel is another example.
 * During Ragnarok, how many steps backward will Thor take after slaying Jormungand before keeling over from the poison? The Poetic Edda can tell you.
 * In The General series by David Drake and S.M. Stirling, the computer secretly advising Raj Whitehall can show him detailed audiovisual scenarios of the most likely results of various courses of action. Sometimes, just to rub in for us what a World Half Empty they're in, it'll show him situations he can't do anything about.
 * The journal from The House on the Borderland recounts a vision (?) of the end of the solar system.
 * Stoically averted in Good Omens: while a good bulk of the book revolves around the prophecies of Agnes Nutter, who predicted the apocalypse down to the slightest detail, and one of the protagonists knows all of them by heart, nothing is ever revealed in the text before it actually happens.

Live Action TV
"Xander: "Hmm. Feeling the impact again.""
 * 24 will often feature a Presidential adviser or a CTU analyst using a Power Point presentation to literally storyboard what will occur if the terrorists' plot succeeds. A memorable second season episode shows President David Palmer staring in shocked silence at a computer projection of the death toll if the nuclear bomb goes off in LA.
 * Heroes does this once a season, usually via Time Travel or precognitive paintings.
 * The season opener for BattleStarGalactica 1980 gives us simulation what a Cylon invasion of Earth would look like. For some reason promotional material for the movie that was made from that opener seemed to draw almost exclusively from this attack.
 * In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Doomed", after Giles reveals that the Monster of the Week wants to open the Hellmouth and end the world, everyone groans "Again?" and Xander comments that it's lost its impact. At which point Giles proceeds to remind them exactly what that means. In detail.


 * In the seventh season the First Slayer gives Buffy a vision of the inside of the Hellmouth. An entire army of the Ubervamps that are nearly impossible to kill.
 * Only they're strangely not, anymore.
 * In the finale of Mahou Sentai Magiranger / Power Rangers Mystic Force, the Rangers are zapped by the Big Bad to a barren world where he has taken control. Its precise nature wasn't exactly clear - we never saw much of it beyond a small cave - but it seemed to be less of an outright Alternate Dimension than a mere taste of what was coming.
 * In Magiranger, N. Ma claimed to be "devouring time", aging the entire planet except himself and the Rangers.
 * A few 1970s Doctor Who examples:
 * "Inferno" sends the Doctor into a Dystopic Mirror Universe where Project Inferno (ongoing in his reality) has progressed a few days faster and proceeds to destroy the world, thus giving him extra motivation to shut down his world's Project Inferno.
 * "Day of the Daleks" has a future Alternate History where a Nuclear Holocaust happens and the Dalek take over. Hearing about the averted timeline gives additional incentives for various diplomats to get it right.
 * In "Pyramids Of Mars", the Doctor takes the TARDIS to 1980 to show Sarah Jane the lifeless Earth that will result if Sutekh isn't stopped in 1911.
 * Seven Days operate similarly to the Doctor Who examples above: show what happened, then use Time Travel to go back and fix things.
 * Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles begins with a scene of a terminator killing John Connor, triggering The End of the World as We Know It. Fortunately, it was All Just a Dream.
 * The last story arc of the first season of Stargate SG-1 began with this. Even though it had been less than a season, the Goa'uld might have already been looking a bit harmless. Their foot soldiers had apparently attended the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy and wore Useless Armor. The SG-1 team was threatened inadvertently by Human Aliens, Starfish Aliens and Negative Space Wedgies as often as by the Goa'uld intentionally. But in the episode "There But For the Grace of God", Daniel visits an Alternate Reality and learns that if the Goa'uld ever made it to Earth in ships (at least, ships without saboteurs inside) Earth would be screwed. Apparently, the Goa'uld don't need good aim when they are bombarding Earth's cities from orbit.
 * Although the deadliness of the Xindi threat was stated often in Star Trek: Enterprise; the episode "Twilight" demonstrates EXACTLY what would happen if they made it to Earth.
 * In the aptly named Supernatural episode "The End", the angel Zachariah shows Dean a Bad Future where Sam is possessed by Lucifer, the angels are all either fallen or missing, and Dean himself has become harder and more cynical because of the ongoing Zombie Apocalypse.
 * Sometimes happens on The X-Files when the Arc Words "the timetable has been set" come up. Particularly memorable are Dr. Kurtzweil's ramblings in The Movie, where he reveals the first steps in.
 * Burt on Tremors: The Series did this a few times, describing how failure to eliminate a Graboid or shrieker quickly will snowball into mass destruction if they breed and/or metamorphose.
 * The series Life After People examines what would happen to our cities (and everything else) if all humans were to suddenly and simultaneously vanish.

Tabletop Games

 * The 3.5 Dungeons And Dragons supplement Elder Evils is basically a How To guide for ending your group's campaign world in a spectacularly apocalyptic manner via Eldritch Abomination. Naturally, it gives detailed scenarios of such, including things from the Zombie Apocalypse to the magical equivalent of the runaway greenhouse effect.

Video Games

 * A scene in Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness has the main character experiencing a hallucination and seeing the Dark One's rise to power. (Near the end, if the player loses the game, the Dark One does rise, mirroring the sequence exactly.)
 * A convoluted example appears in Sin and Punishment. In an effort to motivate the Action Girl to shoot her transformed-by-The Virus partner, the Mysterious Waif shows her a vision of a future in which he has become evil. This vision becomes a stage, complete with the chance to get a Game Over. Yet, despite her mowing down hundreds of enemies during the dream sequence without any noticeable effect, the final shot she makes against the corrupted hero somehow causes her to shoot him in the present as well.
 * Chrono Trigger has a more literal example:.
 * You'd think she'd be okay with it,.
 * 's incredibly long Info Dump in Mother 3, which
 * The story of Earthbound involves alien invading the future as we see it in the title of the game. This sends Buzz-Buzz to the present day to find the 4 heroes who can stop Big Bad before that happens. The team never go to the future for an observation of the Bad Future,
 * Alexandra Roivas receives a vision of the potential apocalypse in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem caused by the Ancient.
 * Noticeably missing in Drakengard. Everyone loves to talk about it, but no one seems to know precisely what will happen. The hierarch Verdelet flip-flops from thinking the Seeds of Resurrection will cause untold catastrophe to thinking it involves ascending to a higher reality. And the Big Bad has more important things to worry about, like dancing.
 * Done in Mass Effect, where you're treated to a detailed lecture on how the last Apocalypse occurred, and then reminded in no uncertain terms that the next one is just around the corner.
 * The Big Bad in Under a Killing Moon storyboards his planned apocalypse for the Earth, which is to be cleansed of all mutant contamination and prepared for the return of his "pure" people from his space station (under his leadership, of course).
 * In Star Craft 2: Wings of Liberty, an embittered Jim Raynor is dead-set on killing the zerg-infested Kerrigan. Then Zeratul appears and shows him a (playable) vision of what will happen if Kerrigan dies. It isn't pretty.
 * In a trailer for the World of Warcraft content patch: Rage of The Firelands, Thrall is begging the elemental spirits for guidance... when one answers. Ragnaros rises from the Maelstrom and brings Thrall on a ride to the end of the world, culminating in Ogrimmar being destroyed by a sea of fire, which is about to engulf Thrall himself. Thrall screams as loud as he can before being interrupted by Aggra, realizing that the events he witnessed were a vision of what is to come if Ragnaros is not stopped.
 * The ending of Assassin's Creed Revelations, true to its title, reveals the full scope of the plot of Those Who Came Before to save the Earth from the second coming of the same catastrophe that destroyed their First Civilization. The scene where this is communicated has a FMV sequence showing in lavish detail just exactly how that first catastrophe happened.
 * The intro sequences of Fallout games.

Web Comics

 * Done hilariously in Penny Arcade, here.
 * Done (in crayon format) by Redcloak in The Order of the Stick's prequel, Start of Darkness. Rather than destruction, however, he expects his plan to use a god-killing abomination to blackmail the deities of his world to result in a modern-style utopia for his people.

Web Originals

 * This Chairman Nuke video.
 * This thing on deviantart. With giant suicidal sea serpents. Also, the author apparently reads TV Tropes.

Western Animation
"Batman: But that will cost countless lives! Ra's al Ghul: Actually, Detective, we have counted: Two billion, fifty-six million, nine hundred and eighty-six thousand! A most impressive plan, would you not agree? Batman: Yes... I can see it clearly now for the first time. You are completely out of your mind."
 * When Batman archvillain Ra's Al Ghul lays out his plan to destroy humanity in Batman the Animated Series, it is accompanied by a series of detailed stills showing the world being saturated by the Lazarus Pits, in chaos, and finally at "a blessed peace."

"Slade: Skies will burn. Flesh will turn to stone. The sun will set on your world, never to rise again!"
 * At the end of the first episode of the 1994 Fantastic Four cartoon, Puppet Master takes one last stab at ultimate power and imagines ruling the world, complete with montage.
 * In a fifth-season episode of The Batman, Lex Luthor uses one of these (in sepia tone) to describe his vision for the world.
 * Teen Titans used this at least twice. In "Revolution", Mad Mod - who has control of the city and most the Titans on the run - gives a captured Robin a look at what he calls "coming attractions" (possibly a subtle reference to a scene in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which the episode takes much of its inspiration from). On a more serious note, in "Birthmark", Slade transports Raven into a devastated world that she is destined to bring about, a vision which actually comes true in the season finale.

"I hope you appreciate, Kal-El, everything that happens from this point is on your head. The skies will rain fire, the oceans will boil, the streets run red with the blood of billions. Only then, when your last pitiful hope has been vanquished, will I end your life. Let's go."
 * A similar, but longer and considerably more elaborate speech is delivered to Superman by in the final episode of Justice League Unlimited.

"Seanbaby: Darkseid goes all out. A lot of villains tell everyone about their plan, but Darkseid filmed an elaborate dramatization of it. Look at those special effects. He didn't just have a computer rendered picture of what his battle station will look like, he got actors to run around on an airfield while planes were getting vaporized."
 * In the second season finale, The Question has images of the end of the world projected directly into his mind as a form of interrogation.
 * And in the Justice League Grand Finale, there's a brief image of what'll happen to Earth when - basically, the planet implodes. Worryingly, Batman's response is "Ingenious!"
 * In an episode of Galactic Guardians, Darkseid - in a plot to hijack the space station of Star City and outfit it with weapons - almost literally Storyboards The Apocalypse in a scene made relatively well-known by Seanbaby's website:

"Max: Tell me, Sam, why the heck are we doing this, again?! Sam: It's simple, Max. If this so-called "Thing" could somehow find its way into our world, devouring unsuspecting citizens who have no natural fear of frozen entrees, they would surely cause a nationwide mistrust of pre-manufactured foods of all kinds, forcing producers of salty, overcooked, man-sized portions to go bankrupt! To safeguard American businesses, Max! That's why the heck we're doing this!"
 * A tongue-in-cheek Storyboarding appears in the first episode of Sam and Max Freelance Police, "The Thing That Wouldn't Stop It", showing the fate of the world's frozen-food industry at stake due to a monstrous mutated TV dinner.


 * In the Rankin Bass production of The Return of the King, Samwise becomes the bearer of the One Ring, which tries to corrupt him with a vision of a world in which he has become all powerful. Of course, it being Samwise, this vision involves innocuous things like turning all of the orcs into cute animals and the entire world into a flower garden. Samwise realizes how silly the idea of him being an Evil Overlord would be and is able to resist the allure of the Ring.
 * "BEHOLD THE GARDENS OF MY DELIGHT!"
 * When the kids on Ben 10: Alien Force first meet Paradox (from their P.O.V. anyway), he shows them what the future will be like if a time-distorting entity isn't stopped. He does this by taking them to the Moon of the future and letting them look at the long-dead Earth from there ... and then warning them that it's their best possible future. Brief, but an effective demo.
 * After the Time Police capture the Warden, the Judge of Time Court shows him the consequences of his plans to make Superjail a franchise. The phrase "property of me" is used by Overlord!Warden. Present!Warden thinks the nightmare scenario he's presented with is a movie.
 * The American Dad episode "Rapture's Delight" includes Stan and Francine being shown a videotape intended to explain the Rapture to children, which includes graphic, Warhammer 40000-esque depictions of demons and angels doing battle on earth. Later, the episode shows those very things actually happening.
 * During the series finale of Roswell Conspiracies, plans to blow up earth's moon. Before actually carrying through with their plan they play footage of large chunks of said moon raining down all across the planet and estimating what the death toll with be.
 * In Invader Zim, ZIM slapped alien video goggles onto everyone to show them the horrors that would befall the earth if they didn't buy candy bars from him. The scene was only aired in full once, shortly before 9/11, and was subsequently edited to no longer show New York City in ruins.

Real Life

 * Any time scientists mention either the death of the Sun and Solar System and/or the universe.