Dropped a Bridge on Him: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

When a character is permanently written out of a show, especially killed off, in a way that is unexpectedly anti-climactic or mundane, they Dropped a Bridge on Him.

[[Trope Namers|Named for]] the death of Captain Kirk in ''[[Star Trek Generations]]'', which was expected to be a key, climactic event after 30 years of adventuring. Instead, they almost literally Dropped a Bridge on Him, when such deaths are usually reserved for [[Red Shirt]]s.

 

 

{{noreallife|We're in a universe where [[Anyone Can Die]].}}

 

{{deathtrope}}

{{examples}}

== Media in General ==

** Cotton was [[Ascended Extra|promoted to a major character]] in the second film, only to become the [[Sacrificial Lamb]] of the third.

 

* Although ''[[Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin]]'' manages to make most of its deaths impressive in one way or another, the manga-only wolf arc manages to make some exceptions:

** Suiga's death, being [[Taking You with Me|taken into a pool of lava]] by one of [[Big Bad|Gaia's]] [[Child Soldier]]s, seems rather quick and unimpressive by the series' standards. Made all the worse by the fact that his comrades pay next to no attention to his death due to Akame getting tackled into the crater next... and surviving by using his ninja skills.

* In ''[[Queen's Blade]]'', Shizuka is brutally [[Stuffed Into the Fridge|fridged]] in a [[Family-Unfriendly Death|cruel, drawn out manner]], literally for no other reason than for Tomoe to get even ''more'' powerful than she already was.

* Offscreen, but in [[Fullmetal Alchemist (anime)|the 2003 anime version]] of ''[[Fullmetal Alchemist (manga)|Fullmetal Alchemist]]'', Izumi dies somewhere between the end of the series and [[The Movie]]. Justified that she was quite sickly but still.

 

== Comic Books ==

* This happens to Ethan Rayne in the comic adaptation of ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]''. He's shot by the bad guys while imprisoned, prompting him to disappear from a dream sequence he's helping Buffy with. She walks into his cell, taunting him, only to find him dead.

 

* In [https://web.archive.org/web/20160125011158/http://www.fimfiction.net/story/49113/researcher-twilight Researcher Twilight], {{spoiler|Luna}} makes the lethal mistake of standing in the wrong place while fighting a very desperate opponent and is killed by a [[Teleporter Accident]].

 

== Films -- Animation ==

* ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles|Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze]]'' strangely combines [[Anticlimax Boss]] and Dropped a Bridge on Him by having Super Shredder drop a dock on himself. Close enough.

 

== Films -- Live Action ==

** He isn't listed in the credits. [[Fanon Discontinuity|It isn't Blofeld, it isn't Blofeld,]] [[Madness Mantra|it isn't it isn't it isn't...]]

* [[Luis Bunuel]]'s final film ''That Obscure Object of Desire'' features a May–December romance couple where in the young girl keeps on breaking the old man's heart, but he keeps winning her back over and over again. The final scene sees them walking happily only to start arguing again and suddenly the screen is consumed by a random explosion that kills them.

* ''[[Scott Pilgrim vs. the World]]'' had a strange one when rival rock band Crash and the Boys were unceremoniously killed off by Matthew Pattel (in fact they were the only non-villians killed off) even though they had a larger role in the [[Scott Pilgrim|comic]].

* Particularly blatant example of both this and [[Kick the Dog|"Kick the Dog"]]: Sarah's death at the end of ''The Crow: City of Angels''. A highly sympathetic ''child'' character in the previous film, ostensibly returning as a [[Love Interest]] for [[The Hero]], killed in passing by the [[Big Bad]] in a meaningless, pointless anticlimax that added too little to the plot to even be called a [[Senseless Sacrifice|"sacrifice"]], and without even the closure that would be provided by, say, showing her spirit [[Together in Death|joining]] the [[Resurrected for a Job|temporarily-resurrected]] protagonist's when he's shown [[Died Happily Ever After|returning to the afterlife and rejoining his murdered son]].

== Literature ==

* Possibly the Ur Example is Shakespeare's Falstaff, the fan favorite [[Butt Monkey]] of his two ''Henry IV'' plays. Falstaff unceremoniously dies offstage in ''[[Henry V]]'' without uttering a single line. Readers and critics speculate that Shakespeare was probably worried about Falstaff upstaging his main character (as he arguably does in the other plays).

* [[Alastair Reynolds]]'s ''[[Revelation Space]]'' series is frequently accused of this. In one case, a minor arc of one novel involved one of the protagonists falling in love with another character, who was subsequently killed off ''between'' novels in an apparently random accident.

* Something similar also happened in ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'' series between ''So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish'' and ''Mostly Harmless''. Arthur Dent's love interest Fenchurch is taken from him because of some technicality that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense even in context. The author later apologized for this and blamed it on the fact that he'd been having "a thoroughly miserable year" when he wrote the latter book.

* A literal bridge dropping happens to Shane in ''[[Degrassi Junior High]]'' - while a bridge fell on Kirk, Shane falls off of it while tripping on LSD. Shane survives but is brain-damaged, his parents pull him from the school, and the kid who gave him the drugs (and watched him fall off the bridge, doing nothing) [[Karma Houdini|suffers no consequences]]. Shane is basically ignored and forgotten by the rest of the cast, and the show implies that this is poetic justice for how he (mostly) ignored and forgot a girl who he got pregnant. In ''[[Degrassi the Next Generation]]'', his daughter tracks him down, and it turns out that he spent the rest of his life in a wretched [[Bedlam House|sanitarium for the mentally retarded]], abandoned by his family, and weeping over the girlfriend and child he never did enough for and never got to see.

* ''[[Blake's 7|Blakes Seven]]'' killed regular character Cally out of shot in an explosion during the opening seconds of the fourth season, with only a dubbed-in scream reused from an earlier episode to indicate it. This was reportedly because the actor had left it until after the previous season had been completed to announce that she wanted to leave.

** However, this is a total subversion of the trope: even though it was a senseless death, it was perfectly in line with everything that the show was meant for, i.e., war is hell, and people die indiscriminately, regardless of whether they are important people or not. So his death, though anti-climactic in theory, was not inappropriate or unsatisfying, but very appropriate, well-done, and respected by viewers. Of course, it wasn't respected by viewers in the '70s when it actually ''happened'', but that was because it is the [[Ur Example]] of this trope in TV comedies.

* James Wistler in ''[[Prison Break]]'', who got killed ''out of nowhere'', just so the [[Post Script Season]] plot could be extended even further. Granted, it does give some cool impression of [[Anyone Can Die]], but still...

 

== Professional Wrestling ==

** Vince McMahon himself would later fall victim to this trope, as the 6-11-2007 episode of Monday Night Raw, which the chairman had dubbed "Mr. McMahon Appreciation Night", ended with a stricken, dejected Vince entering a limousine, which promptly exploded. (Perhaps, in a medium known for phony "firings" and "retirements", Vince felt he needed a more dramatic method of writing himself off of television).

*** Ironically, they were going to resolve the "who killed Vince McMahon" storyline on the RAW after the Vengeance: Night of Champions pay-per-view, if I recall correctly, but then Chris Benoit died in real life. The storyline was quietly dropped, with Vince admitting the whole thing was faked.

** Sounds like a [[Shoot the Shaggy Dog]].

** Plus, actually ''beating'' this boss is downright [[Nintendo Hard]].

* A version of this is in the pseudo-ASCII game ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'', where one has the ability to construct drawbridges. If you lift the drawbridge and then send it back down over ''anything'', it will be vaporized - and I mean ''anything'', from small inanimate objects to dragons and colossi. (Lovingly referred to as the "dwarven atom smasher".)

** Though in later versions, certain enemies, like demons, are actually immune to the drawbridge effect, causing the bridges to break.