A Death in the Limelight: Difference between revisions

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* [[Reality TV]] does this often. If an episode is focusing on a contestant, chances are they are [[Catch Phrase|auf'd]] that episode. This is particularly true if their confessionals emphasize 1) How much winning the competition would mean to them; 2) How much they have come to appreciate their teammate/showmance partner; 3) How much they have learned / grown / matured because of their participation; 4) How wonderful the experience has been or how many new friends they've made; and 5) How much better / stronger / more skillful / better-liked / more in control of the game they are than one or more of their fellow competitors.
** ''[[America's Next Top Model]]'' is an [[Egregious]] offender. Whenever a girl shows up who isn't one of the handful of prominently featured girls in each cycle, she's either getting called first that week or being sent home. Expect her to be suddenly struggling with the judges' critiques, even though she's never been shown doing so before that point.
** ''[[Survivor (TV series)|Survivor]]'' has a bad habit of doing this to its more under-the-radar players, particularly in later seasons.
*** Once a contestant is revealed to the audience to be a homosexual in the same episode he is voted out. One of the most famous examples would be the episode of Tocantins where Coach is voted out, after being sent to Exile Island, finding a "Dragon Slayer Cane", and (presumably) faking a back injury when losing the immunity challenge to JT.
* This has become a way for ''[[The Amazing Race]]'' fans to determine who will be eliminated at the end of the episode.
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* In ''[[Burn Notice]]'', Victor died almost as soon as we found out what his deal was.
* In "[[Desperate Housewives]]", the episode where Martha Huber dies begins with saying how much she wanted her life to be exciting and to be famous, and at the end, she was famous for her horrific murder.
* ''[[Law & Order: Special Victims Unit]]'': While Alex Cabot occasionally had episodes in which her legal case was bigger than the investigation, the absolute crowner was "Loss", at the end of which she dies. (No, [[Not Quite Dead|not really]]. She goes into Witness Protection.) And as one of Alex's main roles on the show was to have [[Unresolved Sexual Tension|UST]] with Olivia Benson, this episode was also a crowner of [[Les Yay]].
* In ''[[FlashForward]]'', the character of {{spoiler|Al Gough}} receives this as his send-off episode. In fact, it is the first time that {{spoiler|more than a few moments is devoted to his flash-forward and the mental turmoil he is experiencing}} although it is hinted at every so often in the previous episodes.
* Claude on ''[[Degrassi High]]'' plays this trope completely straight; he had appeared in a couple episodes in the first season (though he did have a significant amount of screen time in them) before [[Driven to Suicide|committing suicide]] near the end of Season 2.
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** Seeing as season two of ''Beast Wars'' had 12 episodes, those three episodes do form 1/4 of the entire season, so it may not be a negligible amount of time.
* ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'' used this trope in Season Six's episode "'Round Springfield". Bleeding Gums Murphy, the jazz musician who Lisa met in an early episode in the first season, faded into the background quickly (showing up here and there in crowd scenes for a while) and was almost forgotten until he appeared in the hospital in this episode. There, he tells Lisa his whole [[Belated Backstory|previously unrevealed back story]], about how he was a successful jazz musician who made a guest appearance on the Cosby show, and doing a saxophone duet with Lisa. Lisa goes off to school and wins a talent competition, and then returns to the hospital to be told Bleeding Gums has passed away. This occurs in the middle of the episode, and the rest of it revolves around Lisa's quest to arrange a tribute to him. After she succeeds, Bleeding Gums Murphy's ghost appears in the clouds in a parody of ''[[The Lion King]]'' ([[James Earl Jones|Mufasa, Darth Vader, and the CNN announcer briefly interrupt]]), and they have one last saxophone duet over the end credits before Bleeding Gums heads off for his afterlife date with Billie Holiday.
* The ''[[Justice League (animation)|Justice League]]'' episode "The Terror Beyond". Beforehand, Solomon Grundy was [[The Brute]] and [[Dumb Muscle]] with no motivation beyond greed. In this episode, Grundy's backstory is revealed, and he's given a very sympathetic motivation to fight alongside the good guys. Naturally, he dies fighting Icthultu and many tears are shed over him.
** Then again, one of his powers is the ability to come [[Back from the Dead]]...which was the whole reason he agreed to come along, as a [[Human Sacrifice]] was needed to defeat Ichthultu and someone like Grundy was going to present less of a moral dilemma to that end. He returns for an episode of ''[[Justice League Unlimited]]''...but has [[Came Back Wrong]] and devolved into [[The Berserker]] and has to be killed by [[Anti-Magic]], again [[Played for Drama]]. Given the manner of his death, its not clear if he will again return from the grave or was finally [[Killed Off for Real]], but regardless he does not reappear in the series again.
* Nabu was introduced in Season 3 of ''[[Winx Club]]'' as Layla's love interest [[Shallow Love Interest|...and that's all]]. However, the final episodes of season 4 focused on him a lot, showing his sheer badassery, to the point of beating one of the four [[Big Bad]]s all by himself. Shortly after that, he performed an [[Heroic Sacrifice]].