Dead Star Walking: Difference between revisions

* ''[[Soukou no Strain]]'' kills the lead character's two love interests, best friends, enemy, most of the cast of the first episode... in the best example of [[Dead Star Walking]], the series actually kills off Tanaka Rie's character''twice''.

* Yet another anime example is Seki Ray Shiroe from ''[[Toward the Terra]]'', played by [[Marina Inoue]]; it seems as though he might even become the protagonist's protege, and failing that, he begins to cultivate a relationship with the antihero as well - however, he is heartlessly (and, in the manga and original movie, a bit abruptly) snuffed out. (Savvy fans may predict this trope when they observe that [[Cross-Dressing Voices|Inoue]] is the only voice actor credited for Shiroe, indicating that he's not going to live long enough for his voice to change.)

** For those of you who do not pay close attention to Japanese seiyuu, the character is Claire Stanfield.

* Kamina in ''[[Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann]]''.

* Tomoe Mami in ''[[Puella Magi Madoka Magica]]''.

* Ken Watanabe was cast (with much publicity) as Ra's Al Ghul in ''[[Batman Begins]]''. Turns out he's an imposter who dies very early in the movie - an intentional deception to set up the twist to the mystery of exactly who the [[Big Bad]] was toward the end.

* [[Morgan Freeman]] gets killed halfway through ''The Sum of All Fears''.

* Arguably [[Val Kilmer]] and Christian Slater in ''[[Mind Hunters]]''.

* ''[[Alien]]''. Tom Skerritt is top-billed during a period in his career where audiences would naturally assume he was the main character. The Xenomorph (and the scriptwriters) disagreed.

* [[Bruce Campbell]] in ''[[From Dusk till Dawn]]: Texas Blood Money''. He received top billing, but not only does he die very quickly, his "death" is part of an in-film movie that a character is watching.

** Likewise, in ''[[Congo]]'', Campbell plays a researcher who is brutally killed by an ape in the first few minutes of the film. The main group of characters later stumble upon his body.

* [[Tom Hanks]] in ''[[Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close]]''. He is top-billed and yet the trailer reveals early on that he dies.

* Gwyneth Paltrow in ''[[Contagion]]'', who is first introduced sneezing and coughing at an airport in Chicago, and, when she arrives home minutes into the film, she is rushed to a hospital, where she convulses and dies. The only footage seen of her afterwards is an autopsy scene (where doctors [[Gory Discretion Shot|cut her skull open]]) and a flashback at the end of the film to how the virus was transmitted to her. Likewise, Kate Winslet appears for a few minutes as a CDC researcher working to investigate the cure, but she gets infected and is rushed to a quarantine zone, and is only seen some time later when she tries to give a patient a blanket before dying.

* Angie Dickinson in [[Brian De Palma]]'s ''Dressed To Kill''. She's top-billed in the credits alongside [[Michael Caine]], but gets brutally murdered less than halfway into the movie. It's appropriate, since ''Dressed To Kill'' is an overt homage to Hitchcock.

* Aaron Eckhart plays the redneck boyfriend of the title character in the 2001 comedy ''Nurse Betty''...for all of 20 minutes, until he gets half his scalp ripped off and is shot as he pitifully tries to run away from the contract killers played by [[Chris Rock]] and [[Morgan Freeman]].

* Robert Patrick in ''Safe House''.

* [[Olivia Wilde]] in ''[[In Time]]''.

 

== Live-Action TV ==

** The first example, genuinely surprising and gruesome: Lisa Faulkner on ''[[Spooks]]'' was being set up as a major performer on the show, playing a Spooks employee moving from a desk job to field work. She got deep fried in the 2nd episode. Literally. Her head was shoved into a deep fryer. It worked for surprise on this show because of the lack of any kind of credits. It also established early on that any character could be killed at any time which made the program much more suspenseful. The spin-off ''[[Spooks: Code 9]]'' also killed off the apparent team leader at the end of the first episode.

** [[Freema Agyeman]] was heavily involved in the promotion of the remake of ''[[Survivors (TV series)|Survivors]]''. She dies halfway through the first episode. To add to the impact, the character she played was, in the original, the only one to survive for the entire show.

** In ''[[Torchwood]]'' Suzie Costello, played by Indira Varma, is the second-in-command of Torchwood Three...for most of episode one. Then she explains how she can't live without the job but is going to get fired when they find out she's been killing people for Resurrection Gauntlet test subjects and [[Driven to Suicide|puts a bullet in her skull]]. She comes back, though, and is revealed to have had a goddamn amazing [[Xanatos Gambit]] going ''which planned for her death and resurrection as a crucial stage'', in the episode "They Keep Killing Suzie". She was also featured heavily in the promotional material. ''Torchwood'' is an odd example in that its leading man and star gets killed several times a season. He [[Resurrective Immortality|doesn't stay dead]] for long, though.

*** In ''[[Torchwood: Miracle Day]]'', we get Dr. Juarez, who is killed off (as much as someone can die in ''Miracle Day'', anyway) the very episode where she joins the Torchwood team.

** [[Jamie Bamber]], period. Hoban is just one of ''many'' of his characters to be killed off, to the point where two of them ([[Horatio Hornblower|Archie Kennedy]] and [[Law and Order UK|Matt Devlin]]), died in an eerily similar fashion ([[Blood From the Mouth]], [[Heroic Sacrifice]]), and two others (on ''[[Cold Case]]'' and [[Ghost Whisperer]]) bit the dust even faster than Hoban did, being killed off [[Posthumous Character|within the first few minutes of the show]].

* Tom Skeritt was the father in ''Brothers and Sisters''. Although the father died in the pilot, he has appeared in flashbacks since.

* John Goodman portrays the main character of ''Now and Again'' for about thirty seconds of the first episode before he's hit by a train and has his brain placed in an artificially engineered body, thus setting up the rest of the series.

* Jon Seda's character on ''[[Oz]]'', Dino Ortolani, was set up as the (or at least a) main character, only to be burned to death at the end of the 1st episode.

* Detective Terry Crowley in ''[[The Shield]]'' seems to be set up as one of the main characters of the series in the pilot episode when he's assigned to the Strike Team as a mole with the intention of exposing their corrupt activities, and gets more than his fair share of screen time in the process... until the final minute of the episode, where Vic Mackey and Shane Vendrell kill him and frame an also-deceased drug dealer as the killer. Crowley's death isn't brushed aside, though, as it haunts the Strike Team for the rest of the series and the character himself appears in flashback episodes.

* An unusual variation: in the fourth season of ''[[Star Trek: Voyager|Star Trek Voyager]]'' (Trek itself having numerous examples played straight), Jennifer Lien, cast regular for the first three seasons, is billed as a "special guest star." Her character [[Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence|violently evolved into an energy being and abruptly left the show]] in the second episode of that season, once her [[Suspiciously Similar Substitute]] was settled.

* In ''[[Stargate Atlantis]]'', [[Terminator|Robert Patrick]] plays Colonel Sumner in the pilot. He's supposed to be the head of the military unit attached to the Atlantis team, and naturally is killed off before the end of the second episode.

** Fans expected the same trick to be pulled in the premiere of ''[[Stargate Universe]]'' with Lou Diamond Phillips, who didn't seem to have an appropriately large role for a name-actor. However, his character lived, and the one who actually died in the pilot was [[Hey, It's That Guy!|that guy who played]] [[Jerk Jock|Shooter McGavin]] in ''[[Happy Gilmore]]''.

* William Hurt gets top billing as Duke Leto Atreides in [[Sci Fi]] Channel's ''[[Dune]]'' miniseries, despite his character getting killed at the end of part one (of three). Similar thing for Susan Sarandon in the sequel, but they did elevate her character more from the books.

* About 20 or so characters introduced in volume three of ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]''.

* Ingo Fischer, one of the two top-billed stars in ''[[Alarm Fuer Cobra 11]],'' died in the second episode.

* For the first few seasons of ''[[Lost in Space]]'', Doctor Smith (Jonathan Harris) got billed as a special guest star in the title credits. [[Word of God]] has it that he was supposed to escape the ship (or die) early on, but that never came about.

** Although, to be fair, Sean Bean does make it almost to the end of the first season before dying (episode 9 out of 10). Jason Mamoa's character, doesn't die until the last episode. Other cast members who are stars make it through the season.

* [[Callum Keith Rennie]] as Don Morgan in ''[[Alphas]]'': the team's original government liaison, who is present in the pilot episode, [[Put on a Bus]] for the second, and then violently killed off in the third.