Dead Star Walking: Difference between revisions

'''As a [[Death Trope]], all spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.'''

 

 

== Anime and Manga ==

* 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 (TV)|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.

* Like ''[[Spooks]]'', FX Network's ''[[Series/Thief|Thief]]'' had a 6-episode first season. Like ''[[Spooks]]'', it bumped off a name performer by the 2nd episode: Linda "Terminator 1 and 2" Hamilton as the handler. Unlike ''[[Spooks]]'', Hamilton was just the latest in a rather misogynistic streak. Including the handler, there were three surprising deaths in the first two eps -- all women. Unlike ''[[Spooks]]'', ''Thief'' was not renewed beyond its initial 6 ep run.

* 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.

* The ''Doctor Who'' TV Movie actually brought back Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor, just so he could be killed off to regenerate into Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor.

* 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.