Last-Minute Reprieve: Difference between revisions

* One installmentinstalment of ''[[Golgo 13]]'', "One Minute Past Midnight", plays with this trope; the target is a Death Row prisoner who is remarkably calm about his upcoming execution. For good reason; he's a corrupted ex-CIA agent who has enough blackmail material on the CIA that they're arranging for the state governor to grant him a last minute reprieve. A friend of one of his victims hires Golgo to kill the prisoner, he accomplishes this by {{spoiler|assassinating ''the governor'' in his mansion, just before he can grant clemency. The CIA agent in the room with the governor can't give the failsafe code on his behalf, and despite the prisoner's suddenly frantic pleas, the execution is carried out on time.}}

* Done in [[Big Damn Heroes]] style in ''The Player''. One movie within the movie is an art film in which the heroine dies in the gas chamber at the end, even though innocent. By the end of the main movie, the director of the art film has become so corrupted by Hollywood that his little art film with a downer ending now has [[Bruce Willis]] rescuing [[Susan Sarandon]] from the gas chamber complete with snappy one liners.

* Subverted in the beginning of the [[Discworld]] book ''[[Discworld/Going Postal (Discworld)|Going Postal]]''. As Moist von Lipwig is about to be hanged, when the Patrician's carriage pulls into the square. As Moist desperately stalls on his last words a messenger comes out, and struggles to make his way through the crowd as the hangman starts to become annoyed that he doesn't have the decency to keep it short. Eventually Moist points out the messenger, who does bring a message from the Patrician. Which is that they haven't got all day, and that the hangman should get on with it already. {{spoiler|Fortunately for Moist the Patrician has work for him, and the hangman was already under instructions to fake his death.}}

== [[Live -Action TV]] ==

* Subverted in the Cycling Tour sketch from episode 34 of ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]''. Mr. Pither is about to be executed by a Soviet firing squad. An officer is shown running toward the execution site yelling "Nyet!" (No!). He hands a paper to the firing squad officer.

* In the live action ''[[The Flash (TV series1990)||The Flash]]'' series, it was a genuine race against time to clear an innocent man before he was electrocuted in an hour. In the end, the Flash actually outruns the governor's telephone call and unties and pulls the man out of the chair before the volts zap him.

* During a late point of the 1840 time line of ''[[Dark Shadows (TV series)|Dark Shadows]]'', Quentin Collins I and his cousin Desmond were about to be executed on charges of witchcraft, in fact Quentin's head was on the block, when Valerie Collins {{spoiler|(really the extremely long-lived witch Angelique)}}, the wife of "cousin from England" Barnabas Collins {{spoiler|(really a time-traveling immortal vampire)}}, arrived to stop the execution by producing a box containing {{spoiler|the head of warlock Judah Zachary, who had been her master almost 200 years earlier and whose spirit was possessing Quentin's friend and main accuser, Gerard Stiles, in order to see Quentin killed so that he could gain control of the Collins fortune}}.