Villains, morally ambiguous individuals, and soulless Mega Corps have a nasty habit of trying to obtain MacGuffins, Artifact of Doom / Artifact of Death, and various Applied Phlebotinum that are inherently dangerous. Usually, and unimaginatively, for the purposes of creating a new weapon, be it a biological weapon, an energy weapon, or something unique. Once in a rare while, they might actually simply be looking for a new way to obtain something good, and consider the consequences of fiddling with such things to be Worth It. Likely to be an example of Stupid Evil and/or Too Dumb to Live as well.
Whatever the case may be, invariably this will fail. Power sources prove to be too unstable. Biological specimens prove to be uncontrollable and often demonstrate that It Can Think.
In the end, a scant few survivors, sometimes even including a Final Girl, will decide that The World Is Not Ready or These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and destroy or hide any such information or objects.
Sometimes overlaps with Admiring the Abomination, Evil Is Not a Toy, Failure Is the Only Option, It Must Be Mine!, Just Think of the Potential!, and Self-Disposing Villain.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Final Fantasy: Unlimited: Earl Tyrant is determined to recover the crystalized pieces of Omega in a bid to become all-powerful. Omega is a dimension-eating monster who is about as discriminating as a nuclear bomb when it comes to carnage, and his power is such that even his "heart" Clear can't safely use it. As a fellow Eldritch Abomination by the name of Chaos, the Earl actually comes surprisingly close to getting Omega's power, but his antics make him cross paths with the heroes that defeat him.
Comic Books
- New Gods: Darkseid has a habit of going after massive power sources in his drive to take over the universe, but the one object of his desire is the Anti-Life Equation, which is said to allow anyone to dominate sentient beings if they knew the full equation. Some continuities have shown Darkseid getting the equation and turning out to be a big mistake, such as in DCeased, where he was the first victim of the equation when he freed it from Cyborg, turning him into a raging zombie-like monster than ended up destroying Apokalips.
Films — Animated
- Heavy Metal: The sinister mobster Rudnick aims to attain the Loc-Nar, a mystical green orb, by murder, thuggery, or clandestine purchase. Rudnick does indeed acquire the Loc-Nar, which proceeds to disintegrate him on the spot. Others who come into contact with it meet a similar fate, or they get transformed into zombies.
Films — Live-Action
- Alien: The Weyland-Yutani corporation is determined to obtain either a live Xenomorph or a sample of the black biological agent responsible for their creation.
- Alien (1979): The company instructs the android, Ash, that the entire crew of the Nostromo is expendable to obtain the xenomorph. The crew, save for Ripley, is wiped out. Ripley manages to jettison the creature out of the airlock and escape.
- Aliens: Carter Burke learns of the xenomorph from Ripley's accounts, so many years having passed that the original company heads who were obsessed with the creature are gone. He decides to have the colonists on LV-426 investigate. Within a few days, the colonists are dead, and a hive has been established. So he gets a team of Colonial Marines sent to the planet, with the intention that one or more of them will get infected with a Xenomorph egg that he'll then be able to smuggle back to Earth while the marine is in cryogenic suspension. In less than a day, all but one of the marines (and Burke himself) are wiped out.
- Bright: Everyone is obsessed with getting possession of the missing wand as soon as they find out about it, despite the fact that if you're not a mage, simply touching it will not only kill you, it will also kill everyone within a rather large radius around you. While the Big Bad is a mage and can therefore make use of the wand, a number of other criminals try to get it as well and only succeed in killing themselves.
- Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Nazis are obsessed with finding various occult artifacts, and are seeking the Ark of the Covenant. Throughout the film, much is made about the dangers the Ark poses, that an army that carries the Ark before it is unstoppable. And Indy's rival, Belloq, suggests that it's a transmitter for talking directly to God Himself. However, the Nazis failed to realize that God would not allow His power to be used for evil purposes, and so when the Ark is opened, every Nazi on the island dies, while Dr. Jones and Marion Ravenwood are spared. In the end, the Ark is crated and housed in a massive warehouse.
Live-Action TV
- Babylon 5: Infamous war-criminal Deathwalker is captured aboard Babylon 5. She hasn't aged a day since her disappearance, many years ago. It is revealed that she learned the secret of eternal youth and immortality. For this reason, the various worlds agree to keep her alive and share that information. She smugly reveals before being taken away that the secret to her formula involves taking a component from another living, sentient being, and that they'll soon turn on each other to obtain what they want. Before that can happen, though, her ship is destroyed and she is killed by the Vorlons, with Ambassador Kosh explaining, "You Are Not Ready for immortality."
- Star Trek: Voyager: The Borg are obsessed with the Omega particle, seeing it as perfection, and despite knowing how dangerous the particle is, even since they first learned about it from assimilating various Starfleet captains. By comparison, Janeway is so determined to prevent the Omega particle from being used that she is willing to violate orders by sharing the information of its existence with her crew so that they'll assist her in her quest to destroy it.
Tabletop Games
- Hunter: The Vigil: The Cheiron Group is a multinational corp dedicated to capturing and experimenting on the various supernaturals of the World of Darkness. Those supernaturals include angry Werewolves, small bits of anti-reality, ravenous, super-powerful ghosts and other nasty things.
- Vampire: The Masquerade: The bane of the Toreador clan is an intense fixation on something they find beautiful, which overtakes all else and takes great will to resist. The unluckiest Toreadors can find beauty in the sunrise, which leads to a predictably-short unlife.
Video Games
- ANNO: Mutationem: Over the course of the story, C explains his desire to obtain The Dypheus' Breath, an Ancient Artifact that has the power to open and link pathways to other dimensions that are hidden deep within Hinterland. Despite the rest of The Consortium's top brass directly warning him that opening any pathway would result in massive destruction, C's Sanity Slippage causes him to take any action necessary to achieve it. C solely seeks the artifact just to utilize it in finding an opportunity to revive his lover, D, but he's already self-absorbed with his goal so much, he believes having the world destroyed will be a necessity.
- Final Fantasy XIV: The Heart of Sabik is seen as this. Having obtained the Omega Weapon, the Ascian Lahabrea cons Gaius van Baelsar into powering it up, the latter unaware of the Heart's existence until Lahabrea unleashed its power to weaken Hydaelyn. Years later, in the Pandaemonium raid series, it's revealed that Lahabrea's wife, Athena, had possession of the Heart eons ago and and it drove her mad.
- Indiana Jones and the Great Circle: Big Bad Emmerich Voss and the Nazis under his command spend most of the game hunting for the stones which make up the Great Circle, which by the climax of the game is revealed to be the steering wheel for none other than Noah's ark itself. The stones grant the Ark the ability of Teleportation- which, according to Voss himself, is how Noah was able to travel around the world collecting every animal he could find before God sent The Great Flood- and Voss and the Nazis want to use this power to effectively convert the Ark into a weapon, teleporting it around the world to major cities and conquering them in the name of the Third Reich. Indy, having previously experienced how dangerously unpredictable using the power of just one of the stones is, and realising that Noah could only use all of them because God deemed him worthy, desperately tries to convince Voss not to put all the stones together, but Voss doesn't listen. Lo and behold, instead of teleporting the Ark, Voss ends up provoking God into starting a second great flood, and the Nazis are all either electrocuted to death by lightning or swept away by the wind and water. Voss, meanwhile, too proud to admit his mistakes, undergoes a Villainous Breakdown, blaming both Indy and Brother Locus for somehow "ruining" his perfect ritual, and starts trying to kill both of them, to the point that by the end, when Locus is taking control of the Great Circle to teleport the Ark away and stop the Flood, Voss refuses to move out of his way, screaming, "I WILL NOT LET A DEGENERATED ANIMAL LIKE YOU TELL ME WHAT TO DO!! THIS IS MY ARK!!! MY ARK!!! MY ARK!!!!" To which Locus quietly replies, "You were warned," before a beam of divine lightning shoots out of the Great Circle and goes through Voss' chest, burning him alive from the inside while he screams horrifically and ineffectually, before finally falling to the ground, destroyed by the same power he sought to control.
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: The Happy Mask Salesman is a shady traveler who went to great lengths to obtain Majora's Mask, despite having heard of the sinister legends about it and knowing full well what would happen if it fell into the wrong hands. The plot of the story is kicked off when the Skull Kid steals the mask, forcing the Happy Mask Salesman to recruit Link to get it back. The manga adaptation pushes him into Ambiguously Evil territory, although even then he's presented as something of a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants to make sure the mask is safeguarded and contained.
- Resident Evil: First the Umbrella Corporation and later Tricell are obsessed with developing and using various biological agents like the T-Virus and G-Virus for the purpose of both creating a powerful Bioweapon and also developing a more "evolved" human being, such as the enhancements given to Wesker, or the attempt by Alexia Ashford to evolve herself using the T-Veronica Virus. Typically the result of these efforts is a Zombie Apocalypse, usually with the deaths of all researchers involved.
- The Secret World: The Orochi Group is notorious for attempting to capture supernatural artifacts, creatures, individuals, and sources of power that invariably blow up in their faces. The most prominent examples involve the Filth and the Gaia Engines: no matter how many times the search ends up killing their soldiers, destroying their bases, turning their operatives against them, or almost kickstarting the apocalypse, they will not stop trying to harness the infinite power of the Gaia Engines and the Dreamers imprisoned within. Most egregiously of all, CEO Samuel Chandra and Chairwoman Lily Engel both know this is a bad idea, having been trying it since the end of the Third Age - and indeed, Lilith's attempts to control the Dreamers caused the end of the Third Age and forced the Engines to reset the universe to factory settings just to repair the damage - but they just keep trying.
- Sonic the Hedgehog: This became Eggman's modus operandi since the hop to 3D as he'll discover some ancient power, decide to unleash it, only to realize too late that it's too much for him to control and needing Sonic to stop it.
- Star Trek Online: When the Solenae Dyson Sphere is opened up, everyone's computers freak out as they detect Omega Particles. It goes From Bad to Worse as they find out that the Voth, a reptilian Delta Quadrant species with a hatred for mammals, is collecting them to use against the Borg, forcing them to stop the Voth.
Webcomics
- Sluggy Freelance: Hereti Corp, a textbook example of a soulless MegaCorp, have done this at least twice that we know of. They attempted to take control of Aylee (or rather, create an indestructible spider-crab-like clone of her) and also spent literal decades trying to capture Oasis.
Western Animation
- Miraculous Ladybug: In the Shanghai special, Hawk Moth travels to Shanghai in order to steal the Prodigious, a powerful jewel that predates the Miraculous, which he believes will give him an advantage over Ladybug and Cat Noir. Nooroo repeatedly warns him not to seek it out, as its guardian, Mei Shi, is extremely protective of it and the power it provides has a lot of safeguards on it, but Hawk Moth ignores his warnings as usual and tries to dispatch Mei Shi by Akumatizing him. This ends up backfiring terribly, as Mei Shi becomes the monstrous YanLuoShi and goes on a rampage through Shanghai. When Hawk Moth tries to direct his wrath towards Ladybug and Cat Noir instead, the guardian is offended at the idea of taking orders from a human and thus vaporizes Hawk Moth before continuing his rampage.
- Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In the eponymous episode, fighting on Malastare unearths the last Zillo Beast, which was thought to be extinct until then. Chancellor Palpatine has it moved to Coruscant, the Republic's capital, in order to use its indestructible scales for military purposes. Predictably, it goes on a rampage and has to be put down.
