Heroic Sacrifice/Live-Action TV

Examples of s in include:

"Get out of the way."
 * Joss Whedon examples:
 * Doyle in Angel's first season.
 * Darla on Angel as well, in order to allow her son to be born.
 * in the grand finale of Angel.
 * Spike's ultimate sacrifice in the Buffy series finale.
 * Buffy in the season 5 finale, sacrificing herself to stop the ritual and close the portal, saving the world.
 * Simon Tam in Firefly was a very good one. He does not just die quickly as in most Heroic Sacrifices. He quite literally gives up his entire life, fortune and safety and lives the life of an outlaw just to be able to comfort his little sister in her distress.
 * Topher has stepped up to join the ranks by going out with a very literal bang to save the world in Dollhouse.
 * Buffybot does this twice. In the season 5 finale, she confronts Glory first so the real Buffy can ambush Glory from behind; Buffybot is decapitated, but being an android, she is repaired. She does it again in the season 6 premier, standing up to Razor to buy the Scoobies time to complete the ritual to restore the real Buffy, but this time is truly destroyed, the fight damaging her beyond repair.
 * Londo Mollari, one of the most complex characters on Babylon 5, saves his people from complete annihilation by allowing himself to be implanted with a mind-controlling alien symbiote.
 * Years later, in the future of the Time Travel sequence, Londo, under the control of the symbiote, has the heroes at his mercy. In a moment of lucidity, he lets them go, then asks G'Kar -- either his sworn enemy, his best friend, or both -- to kill him so the symbiote won't alert anybody to the escape. This G'Kar does, in a manner which Londo had foreseen decades earlier in a prophetic dream -- which at the time he took to mean G'Kar would eventually murder him in cold blood. Londo is therefore an example of Heroic Sacrifice, Redemption Equals Death and Prophecy Twist.
 * The symbiote then wakes up, kills G'kar, and fulfills the rest of the prophecy.
 * He'd also done it at the end of the Shadow War. In order to save his planet, Londo destroys the Shadow presence on Centauri Prime by blowing up their island base (including a number of Centauri who knew they were being asked to sacrifice themselves). When the Vorlon Planetkiller takes station above the planet, his sidekick Vir points out that there's still one person on the planet who's been touched by the Shadows... Londo himself. Londo orders Vir to kill him.
 * Near the end of the fourth season,  dies so that   can live.
 * Kosh deserves a mention. By getting the Vorlons to strike at the Shadows, he opened himself up to be assassinated by them.
 * To end the, Delenn manages to trick the leader of the Warrior Cast to join her in a ritual which will decide the   by whoever lasts in a wheel of fire the longest.
 * John Sheridan pulls one of these when he detonates a nuclear warhead in the capitol city of the Shadows ... using his own position to guide it in.
 * At the beginning of "Acts of Sacrifice", an unnamed Narn cruiser does this to allow a civilian transport to escape from a war zone, interposing itself between the attacking Centauri and the jump point.
 * During the Battle at Coriana VI, the Shadows attempt to destroy Sheridan's White Star with two missiles. A Drazi Sun Hawk and a Minbari Sharlin interpose themselves between the White Star and the missiles, not only saving Sheridan but also showing the Shadows and the Vorlons that the younger races will no longer take their crap.
 * And to lure the Vorlons and Shadows into the battle, a shipfull of Rangers (led by Bryan Cranston!) have to die protecting a piece of misinformation, so it will be convincing enough.
 * Star Trek examples:
 * Star Trek: The Original Series has a rather heart-wrenching subversion. Commodore Decker and his crew are facing an unbeatable foe, so he beams his crew down to a nearby planet and intends to go down with the ship. Except it doesn't play out like that. The enemy in question is a Planet Killer, and his ship isn't what it's after. However, since Decker is a Four-Star Badass, he still gets his Heroic Sacrifice. But in a roundabout fashion.
 * Two different starships Enterprise get this in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise". Short version: A Captain Picard from a timeline where the Federation is losing a war against the Klingons pulls a You Shall Not Pass against a squadron of Klingon battlecruisers, sacrificing the Enterprise-D in order to allow the Enterprise-C to return to her own time and get destroyed defending a Klingon outpost from a Romulan attack, cementing the Federation's status as a Fire Forged Friend to the Klingon Empire.
 * Also in Next Generation, in "Face of the Enemy", Troi is persuaded (well okay, forced) to act as a double agent for a member of a Romulan underground resistance movement named N'Vek, who uses surgery to disguise her as a Romulan officer of the Tal Shiar. At the climax of the episode, when Troi is about to escape back to the Enterprise after completing the mission - helping three high-level dissenting members of the Romulan government defect to the Federation - the Romulan Commander is onto her, and N'Vek threatens the Commander to buy Troi time. The angry Commander vaporizes him using a disrupter, but the stalling works, and Troi manages to escape.
 * Non-lethal Played for Laughs example in the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Prophecy". In the B-plot, after Harry Kim breaks up a fight between Ch'Rega, (a Klingon woman) and a male Klingon, she becomes determined to mate with him (as any Trekkie knows, Klingons are aroused by shows of strength and power) and won't except "no". Kim clearly does not want to, but then Neelix offers to takes her off his hands and causes the same arousal in Ch'Rega by threatening to disembowel Kim if he takes more than his share of food again, causing Kim to cower and appear weak. (Engineered Heroics, by the way - they planned this.) Given the screams Tuvok hears from Neelix later, this was very much a noble act of sacrifice on Neleex's point.
 * Done in a recent episode of the 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot: after having her criminally shady past revealed, the pilot Kat voluntarily exposes herself to lethal levels of radiation while guiding a passenger ship through a star cluster. The episode was well-written and actually made sense, as well as providing an unexpected degree of depth to a heretofore slightly two-dimensional character. Kat had already taken too much radiation when she made the decision; for her, it was a choice between staying behind and probably dying anyway, or going out there and definitely dying, but making a difference - atoning not only for her past, but for losing the other ship earlier in the episode.
 * Also, in the BSG DVD movie Razor,.
 * The Fifth Doctor at the end of "The Caves of Androzani", which is seen as one of the best Doctor Who stories. Both he and Peri (a Damsel Scrappy if there ever was one) were suffering from fatal poisoning, and the Doctor gives the antidote to her. He then collapsed, and willed on by his past companions, regenerated into a new body in the best such sequence in the series.
 * The Ninth Doctor performed a similar feat in "The Parting of the Ways", when he absorbed the energies of the spacetime vortex from his companion, Rose Tyler, so that they would not kill her. Instead, they killed him, forcing him to regenerate. (Actually, this episode has lots of Heroic Sacrifices, including the one made by the Doctor's other companion, Jack Harkness. It's kinda a cool moment as he stands there and flips off his enemy before giving a "come and get me" type gesture (he gets brought back to life, though.)
 * Brought back to life, yeah, but also Came Back Wrong. The event made him physically incapable of death . He has it tough after that.
 * death in the Doctor Who episode "Earthshock".
 * his actions prevented the entire population of the earth from being killed. Well, the human population, anyway.
 * In "The Family of Blood", so that the Doctor can save the day.
 * Gleefully subverted, however, in a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip; the Eighth Doctor is about to make a heroic sacrifice by crashing a military helicopter filled with canisters of gas into a slime creature, and makes a moving farewell speech to his friends. One of them -- the spymaster whose helicopter it happens to be -- sardonically points out that, whilst he appreciates the nobility of the gesture, if the Doctor just looks up he'll see a button that will allow him to eject to safety, thus negating the need for said sacrifice.
 * Doctor Who has developed a very specific sub-trope of its own in which an (often unwilling) agent of the Daleks betrays them and tells them off, only to get exterminated, of course.
 * in the New Season 4 episode "Poison Sky".
 * The new series of Doctor Who has used this trope to the point where there seems to be more episodes with it than without. actually calls the Doctor out on it in the NS 4 finale.
 * There's also Harriet Jones, Former Prime Minister, (WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE !) whose personal timeline and career are destroyed by the Doctor and
 * In "Father's Day", after Rose destroys the timeline by saving his life, Pete Tyler to restore it.
 * In The Daleks' Master Plan,
 * in the second part of 'The End Of Time'..
 * And incredibly,  But then again, we should have seen it coming...

"The Doctor: I don't want to go... (regenerates)"
 * Possibly justified: "Get out of the way" means "My prey. Scram." He's too pissed off to care about anything other than
 * It has been debated whether Time Lord sacrifices count, since they can regenerate up to 12 times; at any rate, several of the Doctor's incarnations regarded it as death.

"Vincent: "Seriously, how do you plan on getting out of here?" Abby:"
 * The Doctor in general tends to go out with a bang: most of his regenerations were heroic sacrifices of some kind or another. As well as the previous examples, honourable mentions go to Three (walks into a radiation-drenched cave to confront the Great One), Four (unplugs a cable with an effort that throws him off a tower and incidentally saves the Universe) and possibly Eight (something off-screen during, or ending, the Time War).
 * , who takes a shot meant for the Doctor in "Cold Blood". It Gets Worse though, because . Even worse, forgets all about him.
 * Similarly, takes a bullet for the Doctor in "The Doctor's Daughter", causing Ten to flip out to the point where he actually threatens the killer with a gun.
 * River does this in 'Forest of the Dead"
 * The writers may get rid of The Scrappy in this way, in an attempt to change him from annoying pest to fondly remembered hero. Irritating one-shot characters may also receive this treatment.
 * Doctor Who:, as mentioned above, and in "The Poison Sky".
 * In Revenge Of The Cybermen, one of the men carrying a boobie-trapped bomb deliberately sets it off as a weapon against the Cybermen.
 * Eden, of Heroes, who kills herself to prevent Sylar from gaining her influencing abilities.
 * Then subverted. D.L. takes a bullet from Linderman to save Niki. Enter season two: he is dead, and we are lead to assume that that is how he died. But then a flashback to four months ago has him make a full recovery from the hospital, and is indeed well enough to go fight fires and stuff...only to get shot by some random crackhead with the hots for Niki.
 * In the third season finale of Lost,  and decides to go out doing something helpful. He manages to undo the jamming signal, but his real contribution is alerting Desmond to the fact that.
 * In the fourth season finale, the helicopter flying from the island to a ship waiting offshore is rapidly leaking fuel. To reach the boat, it has to lose a lot of weight.
 * In one of the last episodes of the sixth season,
 * The indisputably biggest Heroic Sacrifice in the series is
 * In the Criminal Minds episode, "Ashes and Dust,"  Somewhat falls under Redemption Equals Death, since

"Samantha: Oh, yeah. (Holds up grenade.) And I also wish to blow us all to hell."
 * On 24, George Mason (the former director of CTU) is accidentally exposed to radiation early in the second season, and slowly begins to die. He secretly stows away on a plane that contains a nuclear bomb, and is being piloted into the Mojave Desert by Jack Bauer. He ends up convincing Jack to let him fly the plane on a suicide run, letting Jack parachute out and live, as well as saving millions of innocent people.
 * In Season 7, a chemical plant manager called John Brunner attempts to cut off supply, when terrorists attempt to release it into the atmosphere. He instead releases a large dose into the chamber he's in, to minimize damage. Subverted, slightly, in that the attack is stopped by events elsewhere, but still, pretty damn heroic.
 * A moment of silence for
 * Jack is a fan of this trope, too bad he never gets to pull it off.
 * And now we can add
 * Farscape -- two words:
 * A bit of a subversion in that the sacrifice, while incredibly moving and sniffle-worthy, isn't purely selfless, and  Truly, he was a megalomaniac to the end. And we loved him for it.
 * Don't forget when
 * At the end of The Peacekeeper Wars, Crichton arguably knew that both the universe and he might not make it if
 * Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future: In the series finale, Corporal Jennifer "Pilot" Chase sacrifices herself to manually activate the Power Base's self-destruct mechanism, taking The Dragon and its invading horde down with her.
 * In Stargate SG-1, Dr. Jackson exposes himself to a fatal dose of radiation to deactivate a nuclear device and dies. Of course, dying has never actually stopped anyone in the Stargate universe (and most especially not Daniel Jackson, to the extent that other characters joke about it while he's alive and wait expectantly for his return when he's not), so one year later, he was Back from the Dead.
 * This isn't the only time Daniel's sacrificed himself by far. He took a staff blast for Jack in the original film, pulled a You Shall Not Pass at the end of the first season (but managed to make it back), entered the virtual reality where he keeps getting "killed" to save Teal'c in Avatar, got killed by RepliCarter after stopping the Replicators long enough for the rest of the team to kill them all, prepares to send himself to the Ori galaxy with the Sangraal in order to destroy the Ori (although his friends intervene and beam him off the ship before it goes through the supergate, leaving the Sangraal onboard to activate after it gets through), and so on. This guy really likes his heroic sacrifices.
 * Gerak, who chose to heal the Prior plage from Earth despite having been made a Prior himself, also qualifies. Especially when you consider that his last words were, "If I do this, I will die. But I... will die... free!". "I die free!" was practically the rebel Jaffa's Catch Phrase.
 * The entire team pulls this in 2010 in an alternate future. In Moebius, they all sacrifice themselves in an alternate past. Both times, they fixed it.
 * Samantha Carter in the alternate universe in There But for the Grace of God has a particularly awesome sacrifice, which allowed Daniel to get to the gate and back into the normal universe and stop the Goa'uld there.


 * She also pulls one in the alternate reality episode The Last Man where the 'Phoenix' is critically damaged in a battle with 3 hive ships. With most of the systems offline, she beams the remaining crew down to the nearby planet, then rams the Phoenix into the nearest of the Hive ships, destroying both vessels, and with the blast destroying the other 2 hive ships.
 * Dr. Janet Fraser in the series 7 episode "Heroes". She absolutely will not leave the side of a badly injured soldier on a battlefield. It saves his life, but she loses hers in the process.
 * In the pilot of Stargate Universe seals a damaged shuttle through which they were losing oxygen, though doing so means being trapped inside and asphyxiating. His daughter got to watch.
 * Supernatural: In the second season, John did this for his comatose son, Dean (who was surely about to die, or at least never wake up), causing the fandom to actually like him for once. Dean also did this for Sam, who died in the finale, so he would get better - but the fanbase are torn between this being a true Heroic Sacrifice or something to do with being Driven to Suicide. In a subversion, the show treats these as destructive, selfish acts instead of noble sacrifices.
 * Beyond those two big ones, Sam and Dean offer themselves up as Heroic Sacrifices on multiple other occasions. One example is Dean with the djinn in season 2. He sacrificed the ability to stay in his "dream world" - one where he doesn't have to "be a hero" and can have a normal life, including having his mother alive and his kid brother happy and not demon tainted - after realizing that in that world, all the people who the Winchesters have saved over the years are instead dead. The means for "returning" to the real world? He had to die. (Which could very easily tie this one back into Driven to Suicide, but this is * Dean* we're talking about; the two often aren't exactly far from each other when it comes to his motivations!)
 * Not to mention Sam's season 4 Heroic Sacrifice which is averted when his own attempt to sacrifice his soul to save Dean is rejected. His resulting decision to damn himself slowly by using his powers seems like a noble act - until you get to the end and realize that Sam's efforts have been fueled by demon blood that intensifies pride in his own abilities and a sense of superiority to the point where he believes he is The Only One who can stop the Apocalypse. While Sam is genuine in his desire to help his brother and save the world (see When The Levee Breaks for his huge inner conflict), he goes about it in a very destructive (especially self-destructive) way. He can't know that The goal is noble, even with the horrible outcome. It's part of the show's deconstruction of this trope that everything turns out so badly.
 * No Gabriel?!
 * Sam in season five finale Swan Song:
 * In Prison Break,, who spent the first two seasons as a main antagonist and the third as a pain in the arse before joining the heroes in season 4, sacrificed himself to ensure the grand plan would be completed. They make a point to show the character's dead body by the time the episode is out, just to be clear.
 * The series finale has sacrificing himself so the final prison break can succeed and  can be free.
 * Sons of Anarchy has  trying to stop a van with shooters at Half-Sack's funeral... But unfortunately, they run over his head.
 * Zordon, who, after being held hostage and drained of energy for a year, begged the man that had finally arrived to rescue him to stab his can, which was done after some convincing. The resulting magical explosion destroyed the enemy army throughout the universe, turned three villains human, and brought the rescuer's recently deceased sister back to life.
 * In Flash Forward, FBI agent Al Gough learns from his flash forward that his actions at some point result in He also knows that fellow agent Demetri Noh had no flash forward and has been told he will be murdered. He chooses to sacrifice himself by
 * In Stargate Atlantis Alternate Reality Episode "Vegas", Sheppard takes the Wraith's cash, quits his job, and leaves to live the life of a rich man (or lose it all in the nearest casino). However, on the way, he has a change of heart and manages to find the Wraith and radio his location in time for the alien to be destroyed by an airstrike before he can call in the others. Unfortunately, he himself is shot in the process and is shown bleeding severely in the middle of nowhere.
 * In The Outer Limits episode "A Feasibility Study", aliens who have been immobilized by disease abduct a whole neighborhood of humans. The people are informed that if they can survive the harsh environment of the aliens' home world, then the rest of the human race will be abducted and turned into slaves. The humans decide to deliberately infect themselves with the alien disease to save Earth, causing the aliens to cancel their plans for mass abduction.
 * In the episode "Better Luck Next Time", the two protagonists defeat two evil Body Surfing aliens by killing the host bodies and then themselves. Too far away from any other people, the aliens die.
 * "Summit" has an almost literal example when the sole survivors of a peace summit offer to kill themselves to prove their sincerity and ensure that the peace treaty they negotiated before terrorists murdered the other representative party was accepted.
 * "The Voyage Home" has the protagonist blow up his spaceship to prevent an evil alien from reaching Earth.
 * Deconstructed in the Smallville episode "Lazarus". Clark Kent finds himself in the afterlife after dying in the previous episode to stop Zod. Jor-El calls him an idiot for not realizing that even though he did save the day, he's now left Earth vulnerable to future threats. Fortunately, Lois manages to revive him.
 * Horatio Hornblower: in the episode "Retribution," Archie Kennedy takes sole blame for a mutiny in order to save Horatio from being hanged. Interesting in that it wasn't his life he was sacrificing -- he had been wounded in a battle shortly before and was dying anyway -- but his reputation and his good name, which would have meant a great deal at the time. Also, in the first episode "The Duel," Midshipman Clayton takes Horatio's place in a duel and as one episode guide described it, "becomes the first in a long line of people to cheerfully die for Horatio."
 * Jamie Bamber must love this trope, as his Matt Devlin of Law and Order UK was shot protecting his friend Alesha Philips (along with the young witness in their case) from a hail of gunfire.
 * In the Sliders episode "The Exodus", Professor Arturo steps in front of Quinn Mallory and takes a bullet meant for him. Of course, at this point Arturo is already severely brain-damaged thanks to Colonel Rickman, but he still sacrifices himself so that Quinn can live to get the others home.
 * In Community episode "Epidemiology" Abed allows himself to become infected in order to allow Troy time to escape.
 * On Burn Notice,  sacrifices himself to stop a rogue diplomat.
 * A few episodes later,  to make Anson's leverage over Michael worthless.
 * In Primeval, Series 5 Episode 6, Phillip Burton realises that his anomaly chanelling power station is out of control. Matt is with him in the control centre when Phillip tells him to leave, and that he will shut down the machinery holding the artificial anomaly open. He says "Hey, I'm the bad guy." He shuts down the machine, but the artificial anomaly no longer needs it, and it is large enough that it destroys the building. Phillip is killed as the building collapses. This is distinct from a Redemption Equals Death because Phillip neither intended the destruction, nor did he die following rather than during it.
 * Game of Thrones: "What do we say to the God of death? Not today! Now go!"
 * Power Rangers in Space: Andros destroys Zordon's tube so Zordon's energy will be released, stopping the attacks on the world by destroying the villains or turning them good.
 * Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue had a villainous example (meaning, that is, a villain sacrificing himself to aid the other villains) where he stole the Omega Megazord and put it on a collision course with the Mobile Armor Vehicle to protect Queen Bansheera, destroying it with him inside. Sadly, being the Ungrateful Bitch she was, Bansheera barely seemed to notice.
 * Power Rangers in Space: Andros destroys Zordon's tube so Zordon's energy will be released, stopping the attacks on the world by destroying the villains or turning them good.
 * Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue had a villainous example (meaning, that is, a villain sacrificing himself to aid the other villains) where he stole the Omega Megazord and put it on a collision course with the Mobile Armor Vehicle to protect Queen Bansheera, destroying it with him inside. Sadly, being the Ungrateful Bitch she was, Bansheera barely seemed to notice.