Diabolus Ex Machina, when the bad guys only win thanks to ass pulls and contrivances

Heroes and their continued refusal to kill off Sylar because they didn’t bother to create any other supervillains that fans enjoyed.

euron was such bullshit lol, dude went from having like 3 boats to commanding entire armada in what felt like 2 episodes. the dragon sniping was ridiculous too - apparently ballistas have aimbot when plot needs it but can't hit anything during actual finale reminds me of how many shows do this with their big bads, they'll have villain escape through most contrived methods just to keep them around for finale showdown

Somehow Palpatine returned.

The Pokémon anime did this to keep Ash from winning the league multiple times.  Especially egregious were gen 4 with Tobias pulling out multiple legendaries (and Ash still managed to ko two of his mon), gen 5 with the infamous Lucario and gen 6 with Alain's Mega Charizard X winning against Greninja. Remember kids, type match ups only matter when it's convenient!  You could also make an argument for generation 1 and Charizard not obeying after  the rest of his team was already exhausted by Team Rocket shenanigans. Also not a tv show yet but soon: JJK's Sukuna. It even became a meme between "nah I'd win" and "my old heian era X" 

The Boys must have Homelander as the villain.  Season 3 had a contrived curveball to prevent his death, though honestly that was probably poor writing. I didn't watch season 4 but have heard similar comments about that season finale.

Azulas plan in ATLA season 2 could, and probably should, have failed at multiple points throughout, and only didn't due to luck. The gang weren't in a rush, they could have gone and met the Kyoshi warriors before splitting up. Long Feng could have decided to just throw Azula in prison and not team up with her. The Dai Li could have decided to not betray their country and Long Feng in favor of a 14 year old girl they just met a day ago. Katara could have found out Azula and her gang were pretending to be Kyoshi Warriors in a way that didn't result in them instantly capturing her, etc.

“Somehow manages to ambush..” Uhhh sweetie. She “kinda just forgot” about them.

Law Abiding Citizen, where the bad guy, Nick Rice, played by Jamie Foxx, uses teleportation to cheat and win. This is not a movie that previously had any magic or demonology so it really felt lazy.

“Young Justice”. The Light always won, even when it looked like they lost in that show. Everything was always part of the grand plan.

Every season of 24 was like this. The bad guys had so many double agents planted at every level of government and law enforcement that you wondered what they even needed secret nuclear devices or biohazard-tainted drugs for.

Baron Zemo in Captain America: Civil War. So many things outside his control fell the exact right way for his plan to come together.

as great as the Breaking Bad finale is, I always felt like Walt had got away from more dangerous situations during the show, and that he died there only because it was his time to.

Game of Thrones did this a lot in later seasons after they ran out of book material. Ramsey succeeds for 3 seasons due to dumb luck, contrivances and forced convenience.

This happened all the time in The Flash. Most notably the Reverse-Flash kept finding different ways of coming back because Tom Cavanagh was such a good actor and they wanted to keep him on, but even when they moved on to other villains this happened. Team Flash would swear up and down that they've finally got the Big Bad of the season with whatever new contraption they made only for the Big Bad to develop some new power out of nowhere that allowed them to escape. A few times it seemed like Barry Allen on the rest of the heroes would just stand around and watch as the big bad escaped. Then they'd have to come up with some ridiculous reason to explain how Barry could defeat them in the end despite having made the villain extremely powerful. It became so frustrating to watch.

Self-aware example. In *The Emperor's New Groove*, the villains straight up lose a race to be at the climax. They still just show up. It's pointed out by the heroes and the villains admit that it doesn't make sense. 

I’ll probably get killed for this but pretty much everything Christopher Nolan’s joker did was a product of this. From the opening scene where he drives a school bus into a perfectly sized gap in an identical line of buses that were passing at the perfect moment, to pretty much everything else he did in that film, his success was based entirely on unimaginable luck.

Not a TV show, but the game Persona 2 was infamous for this back in the day. As a prefix, the game was originally released in Japan as a duology - "Innocent Sin" was the first half (which never got released outside of Japan due to one of the villains being a magically-wished Hitler) and "Eternal Punishment". The first game has the heroes fighting desperately to prevent an end-of-the-world prophecy so that they can prevent Earth from being destroyed. They manage to defeat the villain and stop the plan. Hooray! Then out of nowhere, a deranged woman stabs the main heroine with a cursed spear, fulfilling the prophecy and destroying the world. So to undo the entire end-of-the-world scenario, the heroes agree to a very bad deal with the devil, erasing the current timeline and trying again but being cursed to forget each other so as to not cause their memories of the old timeline to leak through and cause the world to potentially end again. End of part one. Then it's revealed in Eternal Punishment that this didn't stop the demonic creature that caused the first game's plot - the first storyline in the game, about a serial killer murdering by request if you perform a magic ritual, was because said demon forced a villain from the first game to remember and drove him insane and he's trying to destroy the world because of it, putting the heroine in danger once again.

Reiner, until S4 redemption arc.

The Joker from The Dark Knight Returns has a plan that requires many specific things to turn out just right. This is sometimes justified by saying that he had a "chaos plan" where would just adapt to any given outcome, but it comes down to much the same thing.

Not quite a perfect fit, but really [all the tropes were in the the Captain's favor here, until they were subverted.](https://youtu.be/o8_9gHzW8vo?si=otyZlQI6AgnT04Bc)

It’s a book but will soon be a TV series - most of the back half of the Stormlight Archive books

The last season of Star Trek: Discovery saw the seasoned crew of the Federation's most advanced ship, with a drive capable of teleporting them anywhere in the galaxy near-instantanteously, consistently outwitted by two petty criminals in a regular shuttlecraft using information they shouldn't know, resources they shouldn't have access to, and technology they shouldn't be able to afford. Our brave protagonists would leave them dead in space, steal the piece of the MacGuffin they're after, nuke the site from orbit, leak false information about the season-long treasure hunt and then arrive at their next destination to find those fuckers had already been there for three days. Twice! These are also the *only* two recurring villains of the season despite the insurmountable stakes of the MacGuffin they're pursuing, so it *really* stretched credulity that we need to keep running into this random angsty mall goth and her nepo baby slime boyfriend. It wasn't all bad, of course; in the last episode the show *ended forever.*

William Lewis (Pablo Schreiber) from Law & Order: SVU was this in each and every episode. A monstrousous serial rapist whose only hobby in life seems to be hurting women, by his own admission. Before hitting the show he has gotten away with r*** through technicalities, clerical errors, or just plain old incompetence. The man always found a woman naive enough to convince her that he's innocent. First his lawyer, who convinced the jury that the cops had a vendetta. Not helping that Lewis raped, tortured and killed a witness, an elderly lady who saw him. Then, when he is being tried for kidnapping Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), a juror falls for Lewis, and later she bakes him poisoned brownies to escape jail in an ambulance. No matter the situation, Lewis always found a way to hurt women, and when it seems Benson finally has cornered him, Lewis pulls one final 'f*** you' and plays Russian R******* with her. Except he doesn't kill her, he kills himself in way that frames Benson (i.e. with his non-dominant hand) so that he avoids more jail and ruins Benson's life. Only silver lining is that the last one didnt work, but it was still infuriating that Lewis got away with all the horrors he put people through. If you see the show you will understand, Lewis was transparently evil that you'll find hard to believe anybody would eat his act.

I have seen several light hearted comedies where this happens. On a more serious note Young Justice comes to mind. On a positive note I am going with the second arc in Green Lantern TAS. It really made it feel like the villains were predestined to win and destroy the universe. This tied to the themes well.

> In Game of Thrones for example, Euron Greyjoy somehow builds a massive fleet out of nowhere even though the Iron Islands have no wood, then somehow manages to ambush Daenerys and kill one of her dragons from an absurd distance. That is not a flaw in writing; that is the flaw that is cinematic media, where TV cannot always put in 20 mins of *exposition*. The books and TV episode already point out that Euron has been an exile for years, and that he has built up a fleet off the screen. That's how he has that massive fleet (another flawed illusion stemming from cinematic media). He did not build it from wood that did not exist in the Iron Islands, where he was not spending his time at, while in exile.

The Batman TV series was great for this.

The end of Ozark, just generally the cartel in any tv show, it’s always this simultaneously all powerful and completely unpredictable force of nature that works in mysterious ways. First you get kidnapped, often in broad daylight, then you are brought to a cartel boss who makes ridiculous demands while speaking in riddles and then they disappear only to show up out of the blue a few episodes later doing the same thing.

I call it the "Giant Eagle phenomenom" originating from LotR. Because whenever something seemed too dire, the Eagles came. And this concept is in every movie/series that has the concept of enemies i think. I always laugh when the plot tries to kill someone but the "Eagles" arrive in whatever form necessary.