Dramatic Space Drifting: Difference between revisions

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[[File:spacedrift 3526.jpg|frame|link=http://www.kellysears.com/Video/TheDrift|Nothing to do now but count the stars.]]
 
{{quote|''"It's cold outside/There's no kind of atmosphere/I'm all alone/More or less..."''|'''Ending theme''', ''[[Red Dwarf]]''}}
''There's no kind of atmosphere
''I'm all alone
''More or less...''
|'''Ending theme''', ''[[Red Dwarf]]''}}
 
So you're watching a good old [[Space Opera]] or your favourite [[Cyberpunk]] tv series. There's been a grand battle and within all the excitement, you forget that in an intergalactic space war so big there must have been at least a few casualties. It is of course, the writers' jobs to remind of this eventually so as to add to the drama whilst slowing the pace a little.
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{{examples}}
 
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]''
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== ComicbooksComic Books ==
* "The Short, Happy Life of Roons Sewell", a comic arc in the ''[[Star Wars Expanded Universe]]'', ended with Roons' death; the front of his Y-Wing exploded, sending shrapnel through his flight suit and ejecting him into space. There's an image of him still out there during his eulogy, frozen dead with a manic smile on his face. Unusually for this trope, it's a relatively uplifting thing - he gave his life, he saved people in doing this, his sacrifice had meaning. If we cannot celebrate the moments we hold back a dark tide, why fight it at all?
** In [[Rebel Leader|Rogue Leader]], an ''[[X Wing Series]]'' comic, it was shown that a week after the Battle of Endor, the sanctuary moon's skies are still crowded with ships and bodies. Some pilots, including Wedge, signed up for salvage duty, because even Imperials deserved a proper funeral.
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* ''[[Alien (franchise)|Alien]]'' had a rather Narmy example where {{spoiler|Kain's dead body}} is shot from an airlock as if out of a cannon.
* Parodied in ''[[Spy Hard]]'', where General Rancor is launched into space aboard his rocket, and then floats around until he slams into an Apollo-type spacecraft, prompting a voiceover of "Houston, we have a problem".
* At the beginning of ''[[You Only Live Twice]]'', the attack by SPECTRE's rocket severs the safety line of an American astronaut who was doing a spacewalk. It was apparently a communications line as well, because his description of what he sees happening is [[Killed Mid-Sentence|cut off]] the instant the cord is cut — and he goes drifting away, presumably still alive ... until his oxygen runs out.
 
 
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{{quote|"Well, here I am."}}
** Also in the Firefly episode "Bushwhacked" when ''Serenity'' encounters a derelict ship and then a dead body smacks into the cockpit windshield, startling Wash (and the audience).
* ''[[Battlestar Galactica Reimagined(2004 TV series)|Battlestar Galactica]]'' had Lee floating through space after the destruction of the Blackbird, watching ''Galactica'' and ''Pegasus'' tear two Cylon basestars to pieces. Ron Moore got the idea from the story of Ensign George Gay, the only survivor of his squadron who watched the climax of the Battle of Midway while floating in the Pacific.
* ''[[Star Trek]]'' does this pretty often, but one of the standouts is in ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation|Star Trek the Next Generation]]'', "The Best of Both Worlds", part II, where we see an incredible amount of debris after the battle with the Borg at Wolf 359 - nearly forty Federations ships all blasted to pieces, amounting to ''11,000'' deaths. Of course, many would have preferred [[Offscreen Moment of Awesome|actually seeing the battle]].
 
 
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* ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'' had this, though it wasn't after a battle.
* ''[[Quake 4|Quake IV]]'' brutally featured this in its [http://youtube.com/watch?v=bMRBb00z8bg intro].
* ''[[StarcraftStarCraft]]'' had a scene in the Terran ending, showing an arm drifting amidst debris, blood trailing from the stump on one end, and smoke trailing from the cigarette still held between its fingers on the other.
** Chemistry takes a back seat there (No oxygen to sustain the combustion). It's just pure ''[[Rule of Cool]]''. Or perhaps, the cigarettes are loaded with oxygen. This is how all those non-space marines are breathing on alien planets.
*** Or possibly not: [[Fridge Brilliance|smoke is a sign of incomplete combustion due to a lack of oxygen]]. It wouldn't last long, but residual heat and the thin atmosphere around the debris might just be enough to keep a trail of smoke going.
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[[Category:Tropes in Space]]
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:Dramatic Space Drifting{{PAGENAME}}]]