Serial Escalation/Live-Action TV

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Examples of Serial Escalation in Live-Action TV include:

24

• How bad a day can Jack Bauer save us from this season? What plots will the terrorist pull this season? Assassinate the president? Steal a nuclear bomb? Unleash a devastating virus? Or many canisters of nerve gas? How will Jack Bauer kill them? Shooting them with a gun? Two guns? Run on the wall while simultaneously snapping their necks? With a cell phone?! Biting their necks out?!?!
• All that, and Jack never has to eat or go to the bathroom. Ever.
  • And how many traitors can appear in these 24 hours?

Doctor Who

• The season finales of the new series seem determined to top the previous ones every year. They've gone from having the Daleks invading Earth, to the Daleks and the Cybermen invading Earth, to the Master and a race of devolved humans from the end of time itself actually conquering Earth and massacring a tenth of the population before enslaving the rest to construct an army of warships that would invade the rest of the universe.
• The fourth season finale tops even this, putting every single universe in peril. If that weren't enough, it features all three of the Doctor's main companions from the New Series returning, plus Sarah Jane Smith, her son, computer, and robot dog, Captain Jack Harkness and the Torchwood crew, plus Rose Tyler's mother and ex-boyfriend (i.e. around 80% of all returning characters from the New Series, probably excepting only those who couldn't fit filming into their schedules). And let's not even get into which villain from the Classic series returns, or which ship finally sets sail.
• The next Christmas special tops even this, with the master turning every single human on earth into a copy of himself, which is only the warmup to the Time Lords coming back from with the intent of destroying the entire fabric of space/time, to allow themselves to "ascend" and become creatures of pure consciousness. The only mercy is that Russell T. Davies is stepping down after this, so he won't be tempted to top even this next time.
• The Fifth season finale (before the example after this) has a great example.

"Hellooo Stooneheeeenge! Who takes the Pandorica, takes the universe! But bad news everyone, 'cause guess Who! HAH! You lot, you're all whizzing about, its very distracting. Could you all stay still for a moment, because I! AM! TALKING! Spaceships freeze in their tracks Now the question of the hour is who's got the Pandorica? Answer: I do. Next question: who's coming to take it from me? Come onnnnnn! Look at me, no plan, no backup, no weapons worth a damn. Oh, and something else: I don't have anything. To. Lose. So! If you're sitting up there in your silly little spaceships with all your silly. Little. Guns, and you've got any plans on taking the Pandorica, tonight, just remember who's standing in your way. Remember every black day I ever stopped you. And then, AND THEN, do the smart thing. Let someone else try first. Cue shot of spaceships flying away

• • The Fifth Season Finale tops even all those with Daleks, Cybermen, Silurians, Judoon, Sontarans, Sycorax, Autons and more. In an alliance. To trap the Doctor. Which leads to most of time and space never having existed in the first place! Then, the universe gets better, but at the cost of the Doctor never having existed at all. (Okay, he gets better too. But barely!).. It is very unclear how Moffat can possibly top that next year, though he will probably try. And succeed, of course.
  • Considering the reason for those Cracks that lead to the finale is still out there, it's almost guaranteed.
  • As an accompaniment to the aforementioned Fifth Season Finale, one particular exchange stands out:

Dalek : "You will be EX-TERM-INATED!" River Song : "Not yet. Your systems are still restoring, which means your shield density is compromised. Draws Pistol and adjusts it. One alpha meson burst through your eye stalk would kill you stone dead. Dalek : Stops moving : "Records indicate you will show mercy! You are an associate of the Doctor's!" River Song : "I'm River Song. Check you records again. A pause. Dalek : "...Mercy." River Song: "Say it again?" Dalek : "Mercy!" River Song : "One more time." Dalek : Shaking "MERC-Y-Y-Y!"

• Hell, the Moff made the opening episode of Series 6 a Wham! Episode! If that's not Serial Escalation, I don't know what is!
• Season 6's finale involved River Song changing a fixed point in time. History itself collapsed.
  • The Doctor managed to change the same moment safely through some Loophole Abuse He just had to be at the lake at the time, so the "Doctor" shot was actually the Tesselecta from a previous episode. The Doctor was inside it. Fixed moment? changed. History? intact. And then we get to what they were worried about. the Question? Doctor Who? Yes, the show's name is a plot point now.

Stargate

• What horrible new Sealed Evil in a Can will our heroes stumble into and fight for all of the next season? What absurd new weapons will they jury rig to destroy them? How many more times can we kill Jackson? How much more can the Ancients screw up? How powerful can the millennia-old weapons get, and how quickly can the heroes find them right next to the villain's headquarters where nobody bothered to look before?
• Oh, and remember when they blew up a sun?
• And then a Solar System, and then (nearly) a whole Alternate Reality.
• Fact is Stargate knows how to make sweet sweet love with this trope and apply just enough Rule of Cool, Lampshade Hanging, and Continuity Nods to keep it up for eight years, (ten with the reboot).

Supernatural

• How much worse can everyone's Daddy Issues get? And how much more emotional torture can the boys take before they top themselves?
• How much worse can the world get? Can the angels be even bigger dicks this week?
  • On that count, how will either brother be able to out-dick even the angels in the later episodes?
  • Also please note that they are several seasons past fighting LUCIFER. The Crapsack World has been getting progressively worse from there.
• How much more people can die (and be resurrected)? How many more times will Dean die? Him dying has almost become a Running Gag.

Top Gear

• What ridiculously hard task can the producers set the three presenters this week? They've gone from buying used cars and driving from Florida to New Orleans, to buying used, two-wheel-drive cars and driving across Africa from one border to the other. And what about the episode where they attempted to turn a Reliant Robin into a functioning space shuttle?
• A space shuttle that almost worked. The only reason it didn't? One single bolt did not come loose.
• I know. Let's drive to the North Pole!

Other Works

• MythBusters: What ridiculously complicated automation are we going to construct to test this myth? How much crap can we blow up? How badly can we totally maim the show mascot, Buster? How the hell are we going to talk the next poor sap into donating his motorcycle/car/motorboat/747 jetplane to us, knowing it's going to end up scattered across California in a bazillion microscopic pieces? Just how are we going to completely sandwich that compact car between two fully loaded semitrucks like the myth says? How much dakka can we use? What other novel ways can we find of destroying things? How many ways can we repurpose Grant's one-time sword-swinging rig?
• The Middleman: How many awesome pop-culture references can they fit in this week? How much stranger can they get? Can they possibly top trout zombies? Yes, yes they can.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: How horrible can the people in get?
• Psych: How much more brazen can Shawn get? How much more ridiculous can the truth of the next crime be? The latter is a necessity of the format in this case, since due to Shawn nearly always being right, the only way to keep the police from believing him right off, is to commit incredible crimes... and we're a season two seasons past the victim being killed by a tyrannosaur.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • How much more emotional trauma can we inflict on Buffy? How many times can the Scoobies prevent the end of the world?
  • Lampshaded several times in the show, once by the entire Scoobies who respond to Giles saying "It's the end of the world" with (in chorus) "Again!" and later by Riley, who says to Buffy "Before I met you I never needed to know the plural of apocalypse".
  • And how much more dangerous can each season's Big Bad get?
  • What kind of sadistic trauma can we inflict on Dawn this time? Her mother and sister dying within months of each other? Her sister coming back from the dead and ignoring her? Her mother figures breaking up, one of them trying to kill her, the other dying, the first one trying to kill her again and then leaving for months? Her sister treat her like shit again? Turn her into various mythical creatures? It's a wonder the girl didn't snap and slaughter them all.
• Heroes:
  • How dumb can Peter/Mohinder/Hiro get? How many times can we get Claire to cry? How much darker can this show get? How many powers can Peter have? How many of those will he actually remember? How many overpowered characters that nothing can kill can you put into one show?
    • Infinitely, often, loads, virtually all of them, virtually none of them, and six.
  • How are they going to kill Nathan again in the next Season Finale? We assumed in the first season that he was disintegrated by Peter exploding; the second season had him getting shot several times by Peter who came from the future (don't ask); the third had him getting his throat slashed by Sylar, which threw in a new twist by having Matt mindbend Sylar into permanently transforming as Nathan (Again, don't ask). It appears that they will be stopping this- Nathan has been Killed Off for Real as of the latest episode.
  • How much Sylar can we inject into this week's storyline...just because?
• Madan Senki Ryukendo: What act of heroism will Kenji pull off? How much further can he be powered up?
• Tomica Hero Rescue Force: How needlessly cool can this show make the Rescue genre? What kind of Wave Motion Gun will be used to save the city this week?
• Tomica Hero Rescue Fire: What can we set on fire as the Monster of the Week? What's the new finisher? Projectile cars? A hurricane? Rainbow Road?
• Lost: What Arc Words are going to come up? Can Ben Linus be even more of a Crazy Prepared Magnificent Bastard? How many more questions can they create by answering one of them? Who can they give A Day in the Limelight to (I mean, we have to get to the dog eventually)? Will they drop hints on a Alternate Reality Game? What type of Flashback Twist can they do, how about a Flash Forward, now how are they going to outdo that, wait, how about a flashback and a flashforward at the same time and they don't tell you until the end!? How can they, what? Slaughterhouse Five!?!
• This basically encompasses Bill Brasky's life. How many horrifying and magical things can he do? How many things can he destroy? How many people can he kill? How many people can he rape? How much gin can he drink? And how can we not love him for it? To Bill Brasky!
• The Red Green Show: is there any limit to what can be cobbled together out of old parts, lawn mowers, duct tape, K-cars, and the Possum Van? In the Series Finale, he made a perpetual motion machine. With corn.
• Battlestar Galactica: How could things possibly get worse? Who hasn't had anything life-alteringly horrible happen to them recently?
• How exuberant and disturbingly ambitious can Carmen Sandiego's crimes get? What priceless relic/building/country will she steal next?
• What crazy unrealistic situation will happen next week on The Secret Life of the American Teenager? How stupid and unrealistic will the characters' behavior be? How much longer can they talk about sex before they'll be forced to address another issue of teenage life? Who's the next girl to get knocked up?
• Ninja Warrior, also known as sasuke in Japan, is one of the most absurdly difficult strength/balance/skill competitions ever. Some of the most notorious obstacles in the 4 stages are the Warped Wall (Stage 1) and the Salmon Ladder (Stage 2). There are 100 competitors in each competition. In the 19th, a particularly evil event, 98 people, including ALL of the "All-Stars", failed the first stage. The remaining two failed the Salmon Ladder, which is only the second obstacle in Stage 2.
  
  The show goes Up to Eleven. In the 25th competition, the two obstacles that were already arguably the most difficult, the Salmon Ladder and the Cliff Hanger, were both upgraded. The Salmon Ladder now has a second Ladder to climb up, and the Cliff Hanger(stage 3)... well, just look at it.
• Michael Irvin, American football legend, has a TV show on Spike where people who couldn't make the NFL due to external factors are given a chance to compete for one spot in the Cowboys training camp roster, which is basically a shot at having a shot at making a team. After a series of already absurdly difficult practices, they are given a night on the town, which is basically an excuse to get them as far off-rhythm as possible. The next MORNING, he puts them through an Unwinnable practice, where the only way out is to quit the show. They are expected to last 30 minutes. Instead, they last FIVE HOURS of practices, in the middle of Texas, in September (around 80 degree weather), in what several pro football legends called the most extreme practice they had ever seen. Had the episode been filmed in the month when it had aired (June, 100+ degree weather), the creator/host acknowledged someone absolutely would have died. The only reason why the practice was stopped at 5 hours was because Irvin had to prevent this from happening, as it became apparent the competitors absolutely would not give up.
• Pushing Daisies:
  • How hilariously cartoonish can could the murders be? (Lampshaded by Emerson in "Smell of Success")
  • How awful could Ned's childhood get? He's like an onion of trauma, you just peel away one damaging event after another.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: How awful can the movies get? How obscure can the references be? How many jokes can we pack into one and a half hours? The last is particularly impressive, as most episodes have over 700 jokes, which is to say a joke every '7.15 seconds.
• Leverage. What improbable thing can they steal this week? (A hospital? A mountain? A miracle?) How much more terrible can the villains get? (In with the mob? Financially ruining innocents? Kidnapping orphans to use as a cover for their gunrunning operation?) How crazy can Nate's plan be? Who will have a morality crisis this episode? Who can Eliot beat up? How much can they get away with?
• The Goodies:
  • While the show itself is not an example, one episode has Graeme start up a pirate radio station outside the five mile limit of Britain for Bill and Tim, then getting the idea to run a pirate post office on the side. He starts going mad with power, adding on a pirate bus station, then a few other ideas, until finally he tries dragging Britain outside the five mile limit for a pirate country.
  • The show itself could be an example. What new assignment will make hilarity ensue? How many Incredibly Lame Puns can be worked into an episode? What new insane gadget will Graeme think up? Can Bill Oddie's background songs be catchier? What next overblown monologue will Tim lead about England while playing his record of Land of Hope and Glory? And most importantly, (how) can the episodes set in one place really be as good as the others, if not better?
• How much more offensive can Frankie Boyle get? Since he's left the show, not very.
  • But then came Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights.
• Carl Sagan in Cosmos used this to explain the concept of eternity and infinity: He described the Googolplex as a really big number (10^(10^100)) and then compared it to the number of atoms in the universe (something around 10^80), and yet he states that infinity is bigger and the googolplex is as far from infinity as it is the number 1. To put the immensity of the googolplex into perspective, if you tried to write it out (a 1 followed by a googol zeros), you'd run out of atoms to put your zeros on before you finished. Googolplex is one of the smaller examples of a Really Big Number. To put the insignificance of googolplex into perspective, most people's concept of infinity is much, much smaller than, say, the first (of 64) terms used to describe Graham's Number.
• Win, place and show must go the second season of Lexx, in which the Big Bad managed to convert every piece of matter in the universe into one of his robots (except the Lexx and its passengers.) Our heroes still managed to defeat him, by causing the universe to collapse and create a wormhole through which they escaped. And to top that? In season 3, they destroy Heaven and Hell. As in, actual Heaven and actual Hell.
• The Thick of It: How much darker can satire get? How much harder can Malcolm's veins throb? How much more baroque can the swearing get? How much more shit can we pile on Glenn every single character?
• |Double Dare How much more messy could this show get? How much more ridiculous can the stunts get? How much more can the host who suffers from OCD (!) take before even showing it on camera?
• iCarly: How many more things can Spencer set on fire? Exactly how sadist can you make a Sadist Teacher? How long can the Word of God continue to Ship Tease both sides? How neurotic can Mrs. Benson get? How much abuse can be heaped on poor defenseless Freddie? How much more Fetish Fuel and Les Yay can they pack into a children's television show?
• Warp Factors in Star Trek can get a little out there in how fast something is supposed to be going. And then you get to Warp 10, which according to the Technical Manual is so fast that you are occupying every point in the universe SIMULTANEOUSLY.
  • Ironically, saying warp 10 was impossible was supposed to rein this in. However, they merely made warp ten go from meaning "ten times faster than warp one" to "infinite speed" (whatever that's supposed to mean) and ships are still Traveling At the Speed of Plot.
    • This actually makes perfect sense, since warp speed is a parabolic function (see below). Warp 2, for instance, is about 16 times the speed of light, whereas Warp 3 is about 67 times the speed of light. Warp 4: 235c; Warp 5: 711c; Warp 6: 1979c; etc. When you exceed Warp 9, which is about 46,883c, you have to start using decimal values, such as 9.1, 9.5, 9.8, etc., with each increase of .1 being a greater increase in speed than the previous. Starships are not meant to travel at such high warp factors (we finally surpass 100,000 times the speed of light at around Warp 9.72) for more than a short period of time. Warp 10 is, quite literally, impossible to achieve, as it is the terminal limit of the parabolic function and represents infinite speed.
    • And then Trans Warp was faster.
• Super Sentai, from 2006 onward: "How many mecha can we cram into a single formation, and in doing so how many Mecha Expansion Packs can we introduce?" Fans in the Periphery Demographic aren't exactly pleased.
  • Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger has finally outdone themselves with regards to team-ups, just look at the page image for it. God only knows what'll happen in the next anniversary...
• In Kamen Rider, it's "how many more forms?"
• The A-Team: How many rounds of ammunition can they pointlessly waste today? How many cars/jeeps/trucks will flip over? Will they destroy more property than in the last episode? Can Murdock's latest delusion be any funnier and/or more ridiculous than the last one?
• Bones: In what ridiculous location or circumstance will the next mangled mystery corpse be discovered? How terribly can we mangle it and still show it on-screen, before the censors tell us to knock it off with the gorn, already?
• Mind Freak is pretty much based on this trope. From Criss Angel being Buried Alive twice to him predicting someone trying to kill the president with a grenade.
• Deadliest Warrior: how much gorier can the tests get? How much trash talk can the groups dish out ot each other? How Badass, Evil, and Savage can the warriors get?
• In Survivor, about 15/20 of the players were stupid beyond all belief, never learning to keep an eye on the idol hunting Russell and practically lining themselves up to be voted out one by one. It was assumed there'd never be such a stupid cast ever again...but Redemption Island takes the cake for dumbest cast ever. When you're playing with someone you already know from the show, that puts a pretty big target on their back. When you're playing with people who have played the game multiple times, were known as the best players in the show when they played, have been the sole focus of their seasons, and managed to get shows slanted to keep them around as long as possible, that doesn't just put a target on your back. That basically straps a huge billboard lit with neon to your back reading, "Vote me out - I'm a threat! I'm gonna win!". The ometepes literally ignore that "vote me out!" billboard on Rob's back and, not surprisingly allow him to win. After the foolish players in Samoa, that amount of sheer stupidity really says something.

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