Disproportionate Retribution/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • A lot of the humor in The Brittas Empire is based around this trope. A number of examples in the first episode include an entire workforce of builders going on strike, just because Brittas asked one of them to put his empty cigarette box in the bin, the cleaner quitting over a simple mix up about a spilt coffee, and one of his staff trying to kill him because he wasn't going to put in any table tennis facilities.
  • In the Frasier episode "The Last Time I Saw Maris", Niles finally stands up to Maris after she left for a three-day shopping spree without telling him and calls her out on her thoughtlessness, telling her that he'll be waiting for an apology. So she files for a divorce.
  • In the Doctor Who episode "Voyage of the Damned" a cyborg attempts to crash a spaceship into earth, killing thousands of passengers and potentially wiping out life on the planet—because he was ousted from his company for being old and a cyborg, and such a disaster will financially ruin the board that ousted him. Racism hurts, but geez.
  • An episode of Thirty Rock has Big Eater Liz issue the following threat when her sandwich goes missing: "Listen, hayseed, either you get me another sandwich or I'll carve up your face so bad you'll have a chin. YOU'LL ALL HAVE CHINS!"
  • In Tales from the Darkside, a malevolent being frightens an old man to death just because he refused to give out candy on Halloween. I know it's not nice to be a wrench in the gears for Halloween but still.
  • Six Feet Under. The Fisher family buried two people who were murdered for being annoying (unrelated cases).
  • In Rome, Titus Pullo murdered a man for cheating as cards, Atia had a girl's whole family murdered because she felt the girl was a bad influence on her daughter, Caesar had a man killed for publicly criticizing him and Marc Anthony killed a man for laughing at him.
  • In Firefly, the psychotic crime boss Adelei Niska takes extreme exception to Mal's choosing to not complete a job when he discovered it would kill an entire town if he finished it. Even after the money for the job is given back to him, he proceeds to hunt down Mal and Wash, capture them, and torture them endlessly until the crew kicks in the doors (though there was also the whole kicking his Dragon through one of Serenity's engines thing). And he also tortured and killed his wife's nephew and hung his body upside down as a warning to our heroes, supposedly for "not getting the job done".
  • Both versions of Battlestar Galactica.
    • In the old series, the Cylons declare war against the Twelve Colonies after the Colonials get involved in a border dispute between the Cylons and another race allied to the Colonies. It is never really explained why this so offends the Cylons that they pursue a thousand-year-war against the Colonials and desire the total extinction of humanity down to the last surviving member, even pursuing the last few thousand survivors across space and into another Galaxy for potentially decades to do so.
      • Considering that we late learn, or at least it is strongly implied, that the Devil had a direct hand in the creation and guidance of the Cylons, it seems likely that the border dispute was a pretext.
    • In the new series, the Cylons were robots created and enslaved by humanity as servants/slaves, which they came to resent due to their religious beliefs. However, the spin-off show Caprica exposes a significant problem: according to the timeline, the first sentient Cylon is created only a year or two before the war, and all robots existing prior to that time were not sentient. So the Cylons' desire to exterminate all of humanity seems odd given they were 'slaves' of humanity for only a year or two before winning their freedom in the rebellion.
      • actually Six years before the Revolt, plenty of time for the Cylons to be mass produced and get reasons to Hate the Humans, oh and their AI coding being based on the minds of teenage members of a cult who wanted to violently overthrow the existing colonial society and replace it with their Cult doesn't help either.
      • In addition, revelations from the final season confirm that the mechanical Centurions actually had no problem letting bygones be bygones with humanity, and it was only Brother Cavil's machinations that saw the plan to exterminate humanity launched. Essentially, Cavil desired to wipe out and destroy the human race because the mechanical Centurions were slaves very briefly of humanity more than a dozen years before he was created and had already won their freedom in war. Given that Cavil then enslaved the Centurions himself using 'inhibitors' to repress their sentience and free will, this really doesn't make any sense at all. Not so much Disproportionate Reputation as Totally Baseless Retribution.
    • apparently he did so in order to enact revenge upon Ellen and the rest of the Final Five for creating him in an imperfect body. The whole killing the rest of humanity was probably more for shits and giggles.
  • Game of Thrones,
    • Few characters ever reach a better shade of morality than A Lighter Shade of Gray, but Daenerys Targaryen is often seen as one of the noblest. Usually. In season four, she seizes control of Meereen by instigating a slave revolt, and in the process finds 163 crucified victims, some of them children. Her idea of "justice" for this act is to crucify 163 Meereenese masters. She doesn't bother finding out which of them actually were involved in the mass-execution, and many of them weren't. Her own advisers try to dissuade her from this dark act, to no avail. It is ironic that the "Mother of Dragons" can enact a punishment so draconic.
    • Okay, Cersi was a rotten person whose atrocities were deserving of far worse than what the Red Sparrow did to her in "Mother of Mercy", forcing her to walk naked through a jeering crowd who pelted her with garbage shouting obscenities. Still, however, given the charges she was convicted of that resulted in this sentence - treason, fornication, and incest, crimes no worse than what most characters on the show have done - you kind of wonder if such a harsh punishment is justified.
  • Glee has this in the episode 'Special Education'. Finn lied to Rachel about sleeping with Santana the previous year before he and Rachel became a couple. In response to the revelation, Rachel decided to hurt Finn in the best way she could think of: by hooking up with his best friend who happened to be the same dude that knocked up his OTHER ex. This was supposed to make them even. Finn didn't see it that way. There are some people in the fandom who don't see what the big deal is...
  • The West Wing has episode named 'A Proportional Response', which examines this trope on a geo-political perspective; Syrian terrorists funded by the Syrian Ministry of Defense have shot down an American military plane carrying doctors, including Bartlet's personal physician, to a military hospital. Bartlet rails against the 'proportionate' responses he is being given with, demanding "something which doesn't make me feel like we're docking someone's damn allowance", but is eventually persuaded that the 'proportional' responses are both more humane (as the 'disproportionate' response his military planners determine would cause a great deal of long-term suffering that greatly overshadowed the original crime) and appropriate.
    • For the record, the disproportional plan the Joint Chiefs drew up at Bartlet's request called for carpet bombing a crowded airport and crippling supply transport for surrounding region. Admiral Fitzwallace tells the President in no uncertain terms what the international reaction to this will be. Bartlet then agrees to the original plan, airstrikes against Syrian intelligence that will result in almost no casualties.
  • In one episode of Merlin, Arthur kills a unicorn. The punishment? All the crops in the entire kingdom die and the water supply is turned to sand.
    • Which is in keeping with how The Fair Folk usually react to even the most minor of slights.
    • Another case is when Uther asked Nimueh to help his barren wife have a child. She did it, without him either realizing or caring that Balancing Death's Books must be equal. Arthur was born, the queen died, and Uther began an obsessive genocidal hunt on all magic users.
  • In House, Detective Tritter is embarrassed by the titular character by having a thermometer used rectally on him and left alone in a private exam room for half an hour. This was after he acted like a total Jerkass to aforementioned titular character, kicking his cane out from under him when he refused to perform an unnecessary procedure. Tritter's response? Arrest the good doctor, freeze the bank accounts of anyone on House's team, ruin Wilson's oncology practice and remove his prescription license (potentially worsening or ending the lives of any number of cancer patients), draining valuable police funds, breaking into and searching House's home, and just generally being a dick. All the while, dangling false hope for House to avoid jail if he'll only go to rehab... which he does... and Tritter removes the deal from the table. On Christmas.
  • In Scrubs, pretty much anything The Janitor does to J.D. when he believes he slights him. Sometimes J.D. just being there is enough to set him off. This is mostly Played for Laughs.
    • It's especially disproportional because The Janitor's problem with JD stems from the fact that he thinks JD broke a door by sticking a penny in it on his first day.
    • A later episode inverts this when the Janitor proposes to Elliot after she flirted with him for a second.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Vengeance demons embody this trope, along with the more malevolent side of Literal Genie. It gets gruesome very quickly. We never find out what personal romantic slight necessitated the Russian Revolution as vengeance, but it was probably nothing special. Even Anya herself, a former vengeance demon, lampshades this. She talks with a friend about how when the girl gets her third boyfriend in a row roasted and toasted it just might be the girl's fault.
      • Anya became a vengeance demon via implementing this Trope. When her boyfriend Olaf cheated on her - once - she used a curse that gave him some sort of magical herpes and then used a second curse to turn him into a troll. This act is what gained the attention of a demon called D'Hoffryn, who gave her the form and role of a vengeance demon. Even 880 years later Olaf still holds a grudge against Anya, warning Xander that dating her was a bad idea - which, it turned out, was an opinion that was Right for the Wrong Reasons.
    • Warren Mears: Someone should've told Buffy that crazy, pissed off people have no sense of humor. Not to mention Willow's response after he killed Tara while trying to kill Buffy, which consisted of torturing him by pushing the bullet that killed her through his body before flaying and burning him alive, then going after his friends even though they had nothing to do with it and were already jail by then. That latter one is the part that most fans agree was disproportionate, as you'd have to look long and hard to find anyone who actually objected to Warren's being killed.
    • There was that kid from season 3 who sicced hellhounds on everybody at prom because the single and only girl he asked out refused.

"Will you go to prom with me?"
"No."

    • There was also the time when Buffy burned down a vampire-inhabited building and killed any who escaped because Riley had been going there to have his blood drunk. While this might normally be part of her Slayer duties, these vampires were feeding off consenting victims, and it was explicitly pointed out that they weren't actually harming anyone. To be fair, we only had their word for it that they weren't also eating people on the side, or wouldn't hesitate to go out and eat people again if business ever got slow, and soulless vampires are hideously untrustworthy. There's a reason the show consistently supports the idea of staking them just for existing, and that reason is that they are supernatural predators who target humanity who are also all congenital psychopaths.
    • Season 8 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer gives us Monroe. Disagree with your former teachers on what it means to be a werewolf? That's okay. Just slaughter most of the Buddhist monks of the monastery they live in.
    • On the spinoff Angel, a first-season episode features a 10-12 year old boy who sneaks into his little sister's room late at night, pours gasoline all over her and her bed, then sets fire to it. Why? She had more marshmallows in her hot chocolate than he did in his.
    • Buffy herself falls into this trope on season 1 of Angel with Faith. Sure, Faith had tried to kill her boyfriend, assault and choke one of her best friends, and work for the Big Bad trying to end her world. Nobody had a problem with Buffy trying to stab Faith to death back when all that was happening, especially given that said stabbing occurred during a fair fight. But Faith steals her body temporarily? Apparently that is just cause for Buffy to track Faith down to another city and attempt to end her life in cold blood even though Faith isn't fighting back, and even if the now-ex-boyfriend that Faith had tried to kill last year has entirely forgiven her and is trying to defend her. Buffy, there comes a point at which you have to stop and ask yourself exactly who's the villain of the episode.
  • Aeryn is on the run from her people in Farscape because of a hilariously excessive Peacekeeper law: merely spending a little time with aliens is enough to render a Peacekeeper "irreversibly contaminated" and earn the death penalty. Captain Crais, who put Aeryn in this position, becomes contaminated himself following his Heel Face Turn. He acknowledges in "Mind the Baby" that he still has a visceral reaction to interspecies contact, and since it comes from his Peacekeeper education, he's forcing himself to reexamine that reaction.
    • Crais himself (the Big Bad of Season One) persecuted the crew of Moya (and Crichton in particular) because his brother died when his spaceship crashed into Crichton's.
      • "That Old Black Magic" gave Crais a Freudian Excuse in that he was charged at a young age with protecting his younger brother - the only family he had for much of his life. Nonetheless, at the end of Season 1, Crais acknowledges the trope by admitting, "It was about my brother. It should have been about my brother."
  • Usually played for humor on Top Gear. Usually.
    • In the Polar Special (in which the three presenters attempted to reach the magnetic north pole, two in a truck and one with a musher and dogsled), this was played dead straight when the three of them started feeling the effects of the cold, exhaustion, and isolation. They started threatening each other with physical harm for tiny infractions, and Jeremy Clarkson destroyed James May's can of "victory Spam" with a shotgun for no apparent reason.
    • Then there's the time the three went through Alabama and marked each others cars as follows Jeremy's Chevrolet: "Country and Western is rubbish," Richard's Dodge: "Man-Love Rules OK," James' Cadillac: "Hillary for President" and "Nascar sucks." They stop at a small-town to get gas and get run out of town by big guys in pick-up trucks with guns. These guys even attacked the camera crew.
  • On That '70s Show, 'Eric's Hot Cousin' joins with all the usual jerkasses and convinces Eric that she was adopted, and therefore maybe interested in him, in order to set him up in front of his parents, looking like an incestuous monster. All this is to avenge a childhood prank!
    • To be fair said childhood prank involved being trapped in a revolving door causing her to puke. Then being forced to continue walking around in the revolving door walking through her own puke over and over again.
  • Friends
    • In the episode "The One After the Superbowl", Julia Roberts guest-stars as a childhood friend of Chandler's, whose underpants he once exposed to an auditorium of people. Twenty years later, she exacts her revenge by seducing him, telling him to wear her underpants, then offering to have sex with him in a restaurant bathroom and walking off with his clothes, leaving him in just her thong. This may be borderline disproportionate, because it wasn't just that he exposed her underwear, it was the fact that because of that, everyone at school called her "Suzy Underpants" until she was 18.
    • In the episode "The One with the Thumb", Chandler makes a joke about doing this:

Monica: Where's Joey?
Chandler: Joey ate my last stick of gum, so I killed him. Do you think that was wrong?

  • Wings - Joe is haunted three times by a girl he stood up in HS, all involving a series of psych-outs structured so that his friends and fiancee never believe him about her psycho nature. The real irony being that Joe is continually punished for this one slight, while horndog Brian must have a string of such ladies in his past. Her third episode must have been a case of beating a dead horse. A list of ratings for Wings eps had it near dead last of all episodes.
  • iCarly. WHERE DO WE START???
    • The minor character Chuck is perfectly willing to break laws and do everything short of medieval torture in order to get revenge on Spencer... for a 2-day grounding because Chuck was breaking a building rule by playing racquetball in the lobby.
    • Also, Nevel. Carly refused to kiss him and stuck some food in his face. Therefore, he swore Carly would rue this day and he embarked on a campaign of revenge, which included fraud and cyberterrorism.
      • Yeah, but let's face it. Half the secondary characters on this show are enormous arseholes or just insanely frustrating. This includes Mandy, Lewbert, Freddie's mother, Ms. Ackerman, Chuck...the list goes on. Have Carly and friends not heard of restraining orders?
    • This also extends to the main characters. At the beginning of "iKiss", Freddie pranks the more-than deserving Sam by handcuffing her to Gibby. Sure, it's only for a few hours, and now they're "even"... Either way, Sam's response is to completely ruin his social life. Yeah.
    • "iMove Out" also had the "petographers" (who, as you could guess, were pet photographers), who destroyed Carly and Sam's studio because they refused to shut down their pet photography business, claiming they can't have two pet photography groups in Seattle.
    • "iCan't Take It". Hooooo boy. At some point offscreen, Sam asks Freddie what time it is and he didn't know. Sam's response? To take his NERD camp application and make it look like Freddie's a dirty whore, which gets him rejected. Plus, Carly begs him not to dump Sam over that because it was before they started dating.
    • "iMeet Fred". Freddie mentions he doesn't think Fred is that funny on video. Fred responds by claiming he won't make videos anymore, which results in social isolation and emotional and physical abuse to Freddie until he took it back. Hell, Sam beat him with a tennis racket until it broke. And it turned out it was a publicity stunt by Fred.
  • The Earth-Minbari War of Babylon 5 started when a human scout ship first encountered a Minbari battlecruiser and mistook the proper Minbari greeting for fellow warriors as preparations to attack and opened fire first. (To be fair, displaying all your weapons as the first thing when meeting a stranger can easily be mistaken as something other than a respectful greeting.) Among the Minbari killed by the initial salvo happened to be their highest religious leader and his apprentice ordered that the entire human race had to be eradicated for this crime. Though it later became clear that it had been an accident and the humans really did not want a war, the Minbari continued with their genocidal crusade anyway and only stopped at the very last moment when they discovered that Humans and Minbari are both incarnations of the same souls and the murder of other Minbari is forbidden.
  • Happens in the fourth season of Mash - the enmity between Frank Burns and Hawkeye Pierce is well established, but it seemed excessive in 'The Novocaine Mutiny' when Frank tried to have Hawkeye executed.
    • Doubly strange in that no-one ever called him on it.
    • And no charges were brought up against Frank for making false statements.
  • In the American version of The Office, Michael threatens to burn the Utica branch of Dunder-Mifflin to the ground after they attempt to hire away Stanley.
    • Not the Utica branch. Utica.
  • Lampshaded in another American The Office episode when Karen exchanges her squeaky chair for Jim's quiet one. To get revenge, Jim begins singing The Cardigans' "Say That You Love Me," prompting the office Jerkass Andy to join in. Karen shouts out, "This is not a proportionate response!"
  • Season 5 of Heroes. What do you do when you want to take a tour through your old house but the new inhabitants say no because they're having a party? How about create a massive sinkhole under the, destroying the entire property and killing three of the party-goers? That's what Samuel did.
    • He seems to like doing that a lot anyways. He destroyed an entire police station just because one officer and his friend killed a guy with abilities.
      • Well yeah, but they didn't just kill him, they dragged him behind a car until he died. And seeing as how the entire town was out for his blood, I doubt any of the other cops shed any tears over it. But the people having a party definitely falls under this trope.
      • Adam Monroe wants to kill thousands of Japanese soldiers, his best friend and the love of his life because said best friend stole his girl. Couldn't he just have gone on FML? 'Today I saw my girlfriend snogging my best friend. FML...no, wait, I'm going to kill everyone.'
      • This happened in 17th century Japan, so FML didn't exist yet.
  • A teamwork version if this happens in an episode of Roseanne: Roseanne gets stiffed for a tip at the diner, sympathetic Scott helps her get revenge by calling the guy's wife and "accidentally" letting it slip that the guy was supposedly cheating on her. To quote Roseanne: "He stiffs me for a tip and you destroy his marriage, that's awesome!"
  • Victorious does this a lot. In one episode, Trina physically threatens Robbie just because he won't write a good review of her laughably bad one-woman show. And in one of the most recent episodes, Tori donates a pint of blood which Jade then STEALS, for the sole purpose of stalling Tori to keep her from getting to school so she can perform her part in a play.
  • The Cold Case episode "It Takes A Village". The killer was a former resident of a boys' home as a kid and he was beaten up by the other boys on order of one of the counselors. So instead of going after the now adult guys or the counselor who actually did this to him in the 80's, he's kidnapping, torturing, and killing 9 and 10 year-old boys in 2007 and leaving their bodies in freezers.
    • The episode Sabotage has the killer committing murder by slipping pipe bombs to his victims. Granted he had some shafted deals going for him (he lost his job to outsourcing, after which he lost his daughter to natural illness he couldn't afford the treatment for, which then resulted in his wife divorcing him), but that's still no excuse for some of his crimes—for example, planting a pipe bomb into the hands of a store clerk who refused to allow him to return a store-sold object because he attempted to do so one day after the item return time limit had already been reached.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,
    • In the final episode, the Dominion destroys a Cardassian city, along with its two million inhabitants, in retaliation against an act of terrorism by a small group of freedom fighters. When this eventually prompts the Cardassian fleet to turn on the Dominion fleet, the Female Changeling orders the extermination of the entire Cardassian race. Fortunately, Odo changes her mind before the Dominion have finished doing it.
    • Contrasted with an earlier episode where Dukat reveals that he believed he was a merciful administrator during the Cardassian occupation. When Bajoran freedom fighters blew up a Cardassian warship carrying 100 soldiers, he rounded up and executed the same number of suspected Bajoran resistance members. This only strengthened their resolve to fight back.
    • In the original series episode "The Trouble With Tribbles", the Klingons' Evil Plan is foiled with the tribbles' help, as they react angrily to Klingons and were able to detect the one disguised as a human. Apparently, the Klingons took their anger out on the tribbles badly. In the DSN episode "Trials and Tribble-ations", where the crew of DSN have to use Time Travel to return to that era to prevent an assassination attempt on Kirk, Worf tells Odo that the tribbles did so much damage to the Klingons' agricultural base (no doubt after Scotty beamed them aboard their ship at the end of the original episode) that they were considered "a mortal enemy of the Empire", and ultimately they were hunted down and exterminated. Specially trained warriors were sent to kill every tribble in existence, and an armada of Klingon vessels obliterated the tribbles' homeworld. (Odo thinks that's absurd, telling Worf sarcastically, "Another glorious chapter in Klingon history. Tell me, do they still sing songs of 'The Great Tribble Hunt'?") Of course, in Worf's defense, he had no idea when he told Odo this that there was any personal vendetta involved, thinking the Klingons only had pest control in mind due to the tribbles' appetites and uncontrollable reproduction rate. The greatest irony of this is, at the end of the episode, the crew of DSN brought some tribbles back with them to their time, re-establishing the species and undoing their extinction, making the Klingon's long and likely costly campaign of vengeance against them ultimately pointless.
      • In the same episode, Darvin's attempt to Make Wrong What Once Went Right by assassinating Kirk also counts, especially when you consider how many races - Klingons included - would suffer as a result of history being changed had Kirk perished at that point in time.
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Justice", Wesley Crusher is nearly put to death by the locals for accidentally crushing some flowers.
    • Worth pointing out that Death was the only form of retribution on that planet.
  • Continuing with Star Trek, an episode of Voyager had B'Elanna on trial with a potential death sentence. Her crime? Being annoyed when someone bumped into her. This society is a race of telepaths who have eliminated violent thoughts, and so she was inadvertantly spreading violent thoughts to innocent people, who are overwhelmed by them since they rarely have these thoughts. But it turns out that there is a black market for violent thoughts on the planet, and the incident with B'Elanna was planned.
  • The How I Met Your Mother episode "Canning Randy" has Ted planning to destroy a very old building being torn down for new GNB headquarters. When Zoey finds out, Ted says he doesn't care. Her response is to get Ted's entire class to destroy a billboard with Ted's picture on it, have Zoey egg the window of his apartment, and get them all to abandon his class and turn against him.
  • Played for laughs in Corner Gas:

Davis: I heard we almost lost Brent.
Oscar: What do you mean?
Davis: The Stonewood Saints asked him to play for their team.
Oscar: They what? Sons of... How would they like it if we went there and burnt down their rink?
Karen: That genuinely seems like an appropriate response to you?

  • In the Happy Days episode "A Little Case of Revenge", Tom Hanks plays the part of Dwayne Twitchell, a karate expert who has harbored a grudge against Fonzie since the third grade. When Twitchell challenges the Fonz to a fight, the Fonz wins by not fighting back, allowing Twitchell to tire himself out.
  • At the beginning of the Criminal Minds episode "Normal", a man is cut off in traffic by a woman. He pulls up alongside her and winds down his window to talk to her, only for her to verbally abuse him. So he shoots her. Of course, it turns out that that event was merely the straw that broke the camel's back for the killer.
    • Not to mention that he clearly provoked her in order to get the justification to do it.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series: Ben Finney harbors a grudge against Kirk for years for reporting a mistake of his. In revenge, he frames Kirk and attempts to get him court-martialed. The pettiness of the grudge[1] lead fans to speculate that there were other reasons for Finney's bitterness.
  • A Saturday Night Live sketch had a Candid Camera Prank show. Then came a man (played by Christopher Walken) which decided to prank a guy who kept using his parking space. By killing him with a tire iron!
  • Sonny With a Chance: Penelope frames Sonny for stealing twice, makes it look like Sonny has been telling the press Chad's secrets, accuses her of plagiarism, and tries to kill her by turning a cheeseball into a bomb, all because she was in love with Chad and was furious about Sonny's relationship with him.
  • On Reaper, a bunch of rebellious demons set up a human sacrifice so that Sam can get out of his deal with the Devil. When Sam protests, saying he won't send an innocent soul to Hell in his place, Tony contends that the guy isn't innocent, he's a drug dealer who tried to sell him weed in the park.

Tony:It's a gateway drug!

  • On The Hangover episode "Dude Where's My Groom" on CSI: Miami the bride's dad drugs his future son-in-law and ditches him at sea on a tiny raft to die of exposure because he hurt his daughter's feelings by going to a strip club during his bachelor party when he said he wouldn't.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus. The "Self-Defense against Fresh Fruit" sketch has Sgt. Major defending himself against banana and raspberry wielding "fiends" with guns, 16-ton weights and a tiger.
    • And 200 tons of gelignite in the walls.
  • Happens often in Highway to Heaven. Jonathan uses his powers to punish evil-doers, which often includes people who are wealthy and purpose-driven, siding with the poor and mentally-challenged.
    • In one episode, he pushes a little girl into a swimming pool. In the same episode, he makes her get wet again by using his powers to squirt her with a sprinkler. Her crime: she's rude.
    • In another episode, he makes two boys continuously wreck their bicycles because they make fun of a little girl.
    • He flips a guy's car over, which leads to a policeman writing the guy a ticket. The crime: parking in a handicap spot.
    • In one episode, he beats up three guys, throwing one of them violently up and over a parked car. Their crime: one of them stole another guy's lunch.
  • In Mr. Monk Gets Fired, the Jerkass police commissioner, in response to Monk erasing 20 years worth of Forensic Evidence, has him not only removed from the headless torso/murder case, but even goes as far as his detective license revoked. It's also heavily implied that this was simply an excuse for him to do so, and he was really only doing it because Monk placed his friend, who also happened to be a very corrupt cop, in prison.
    • Monk himself nearly did the same thing in Mr. Monk Takes Manhattan, where he almost arrested a busboy at a local restaurant for urinating in public on the subway (which also had him getting lost in New York City in the first place) while arresting a man who killed both his own wife and the Latvian ambassador/his bodyguards.
      • Well, urinating in public is illegal, and in some places can get you put on the sex offenders registry.
  • This is how pretty much everyone handles pretty much everything in Malcolm in the Middle. Whether it be problems between the brothers, Lois punishing the boys, or someone dealing with an outside problem, it's almost bound to be Disproportionate.
  • The Law and Order episode "Aftershock" involves the execution of a man who committed an extremely violent act of disproportionate retribution; he got rear-ended in traffic by a young woman, so he dragged her out of her car, raped her and beat her to death.
    • In the show’s final season, episode "Pledge," a fact checker for a scientific magazine murdered a female biologist’s 12-year-old son. His reason for doing so? Thirty years earlier, an upper-crust girl from the mother’s college sorority rejected him and had him thrown out of a college party.
    • In the episode "Prejudice," the victim of the episode was killed because he took a taxi that someone else had just flaged down. Even though the killer was able to flag down another taxi right after the first one drove off.
  • CSI had a victim of the week who almost clipped a guy while pulling out of a parking space, and when he reacted to the near-miss by calling her a foul name, she told him to go to hell and threw her coffee at him. His response was to chase her down, rear-end her car at a level crossing and push it onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train.
    • Similarly, a subplot in the episode Unleashed had the teenage squad making obscene messages towards Maria, as well as making an extremely obscene website as well as a viral video that allegedly depicted her as calling herself a "slut" and a "whore", and was broadcast to millions all over the web, causing a lot more people to respond in kind to her, which caused her mind to finally snap and cause her to commit suicide while she was pregnant, after a combination of the trauma of the cyberbullying, her father's death, her mom not seeing eye-to-eye, and other factors. Why did they do it, you ask? It's because one of the cheerleaders, who was also supposed to be the homecoming queen, ended up dumped by the homecoming king in favor of Maria.
  • "Boston" Rob Mariano of Survivor fame once had the majority of his alliance blindside another alliance member because he shook hands with the other tribe after they won a challenge. Apparently, you can't be a good sport!
    • Eh, that was more strategy on his part. Rob was afraid that Matt was potentially building a relationship with the other tribe, which increased his likelihood that he would flip at some point. A better example might be Lex from Africa having a Freak-Out over getting a single vote that he wasn't expecting.
  • On Supernatural The Trickster AKA Gabriel has this as his entire shtick. For example, he causes a frat boy to be abducted by aliens, probed eight times, and then forced to slow dance simply for being a dick. Ostensibly, he's a Karmic Trickster, but considering the number of lethal pranks (all but the one above), not that many people learn their lessons.
  • A specialty of Pierce Hawthorne on Community:
  • In the American Big Brother, Rachel got houseguest Cassi evicted because she said a comment about Porsche off-hand that she didn't like. This gets even more annoying when you consider she did the same thing about Jordan and wondered why she hit Jeff's Berserk Button.
  • Mindy Crenshaw from Drake and Josh parked Mrs. Hafer's car in the middle of her classroom and framed Drake. Then she became the prosecutor on the trial, and managed to not only almost convince everyone he did it, but to humiliate Josh. The offense? Her grades were a perfect 4.0 until she dared to give her a B on a homework. Oh, and she hates Drake and Josh. And she's nuts. Yeah, Dan Schneider is fond of this trope.
  • Marcy Rhodes Darcy from Married... with Children has this trait. According to her, in school she got revenge on her classmates for embarrassing her by cutting the brakes of the bus they were on for a field trip. In the season three episode "Here's Looking at You, Kid", Marcy plots to catch a serial peeping tom, smash his toes with a hammer, and then turn the hammer around... And when the supposed peeper is caught (unfortunately, it's Al, trying to boost the un-peeped Peggy's battered ego), we hear (but don't see) the sound of a buzzsaw being turned on.
    • Another episode has Bud planning to humiliate a girl who once stole his underwear and ran it up a flagpole for all of the school to see. 5 years later, he's still smarting about this and has asked her to the homecoming dance, planning to engineer a scheme in which her underwear will be on display. Unfortunately, things get turned around and Bud ends up humiliated again. But at the end of the episode, we see that Kelly has come through for her brother—the girl is seen chained to a wall, wrapped in a towel, the end of which is being held by Buck the dog. Kelly calls to Buck, Buck runs toward her, dragging the towel. . .as hundreds of students pour into the building to start their school day.
    • One variant of the 'Psycho Dad! theme has: "Killed his wife case she had a cold!/Might as well, she was getting old![2]/Psycho Dad! Psycho Dad! Psycho Daaaaaad!" It's a recurring theme in the openings. Psycho Mom!, for example, killed her husband with a frying pan because he had poor aim in the bathroom.
  • On Smallville the Freak of the Week would usually murder someone in the Cold Open. What was Ian Randall's reason for killing his shop teacher? He threatened to give Ian a C.
    • A school football player tried to kill his coach with a shotgun, just for making a minor flirt with his girlfriend.
      • To his credit, he was under effect of a potion that made him an overdevoted and overjealous boyfriend.
    • Lois Lane also decides to administer some perfectly justified testicular 'justice' to a man who threw her out of a venue. The kicker? She was trespassing and he was the venue's security guard.
  • The titular Sherlock pickpockets Detective Inspector Lestrade when he's being annoying.
  • Why did Pearl Forrester give Mike and the Bots Hobgoblins? Because they jumped on her rent-to-own couch.
    • There's also the time Tom attacked Crow with a biplane, riddling him and his little spiffy car with bullets. Why? Because Crow kept making Uranus Is Showing jokes.
  • Pair of Kings: During Lanny's first brief stint as the King of Kinkow, he sent someone to the dungeons for defeating him in a checkers game years ago; another one for growing faster than him; several people, for unspecified reasons, to the dungeons, moss and tar pits (mostly the dungeons). And, if not for the fact the titular kings returned, we'd know what he had in mind for people he didn't like.
  • Power Rangers Zeo; Princess Archerina develops a grudge against Kat (the Pink Ranger) very quickly (even though the two had never previously met), simply because she detested the fact that there was another female warrior around who liked bow-weapons and the color pink. That's right. This was a rare case where the villain was upset with the realization that she and the heroine might be Not So Different.
  1. ↑ Accompanied by some unshown letters by Finney detailing his obsession with Kirk and the fact that he named his daughter, Jamie, after James Kirk
  2. ↑ 21 years old
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