There Is Another

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Obi Wan: That boy is our last hope.
Yoda: No. There is another.

—Star Wars Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

So, you are a writer, and you establish, for the purposes of building up drama and depth, that a character is the Last of His Kind. However, this severely restricts the options available to you, especially if we have previously seen others of his kind, who are now, obviously, gone.

Therefore, very often, at least for the heroic sort, it will eventually turn out that he's not really the Last of His Kind after all, and his fellows have either been secreted away or ascended to a higher plane of existence. Unless this is revealed in the Grand Finale or when the character is Put on a Bus, this revelation will either prove a MacGuffin (as the character will now be driven to actually find and reunite with his fellows), or be conveniently removed by a Reset Button (for example, these other survivors will be killed, or permanently sealed away in another dimension for their own protection, turning out to be a dream, Chuck Cunningham Syndrome or whatnot), as being reunited with his people pretty much cancels out the character type. See Sailor Earth for when a fanfiction writer creates this type of character.

Compare: The Chosen Many, The Last Man Heard a Knock.

Examples of There Is Another include:

Anime and Manga

  • Michel in Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch is kept from realizing the existence of other Ancients by Fuku, the real Man Behind the Man (as opposed to the fake, the Great One), as they would spoil his delusions of turning the world into a flying fish-ridden Mordor.
  • In Bleach, Ishida is supposedly the last living Quincy after the death of his grandfather because his father never became a true Quincy. Later on, it is revealed that his father actually is a Quincy and had just been lying about his lack of skills.
  • Death Note features an unusual mundane use of this trope. After L's death, Light assumes he now has free reign to be the God of the new world, as L was the only detective smart enough to outmaneuver him. Indeed, he was one step away from proving Light was Kira before his death. Light's plans are ultimately wrecked by the appearance of Mello and Near, who had been raised as L's potential successors, and who quickly deduce that Light is Kira because his increasingly complex plans could only possibly have been executed by the head of the Japanese Task Force.
    • A better application of this trope would be the introduction of Misa, the second Kira.
  • Averted in Dragon Ball if you ignore the non-canon movies. When the author says Goku, Raditz, Nappa and Vegeta are the last Saiyans, they really are, and no new ones pop up to replace the ones who are killed off.
    • While it would hardly be shocking if others had survived in the same way Goku did (if one slipped through the cracks decades ago, why not two, or three, or fifty?), from the time the Saiyan race is introduced the manga has only 4 story arcs. None of them introduce new Saiyans (aside from Half Human Hybrids), and then the series ends, leaving no possibility of the issue ever coming up.
    • Yo! Son Goku and His Friends Return! introduces Vegeta's younger brother, who comes to Earth seeking help against his enemies. If it sounds like a fanfic, he was sent to a distant planet for being unpardonably weak by Saiyan standards and Vegeta is more embarrassed by him than anything else. He's also a pretty nice guy, shorter than Vegeta, and married to a friendly humanoid-but-not-humanlike alien, which weirds Vegeta out. Oh, and the main cast are so ridiculously powerful post-Buu Saga that his enemies are a joke to them.


Comic Books

  • Superman and the Kryptonians. This got to ridiculous levels in the Silver Age. Post-Crisis, it became editorial policy that Superman must be the only Kryptonian, ever at all even for a moment. So we got Supergirl the Earth Angel, Superboy the human clone with grafted powers (because Kryptonians couldn't even be cloned) and Power Girl the Atlantean. They changed their minds.
    • The Martian Manhunter was likewise the last Martian. However, it turns out that he was the last green Martian, and there's a race of Exclusively Evil white Martians that are very much alive. Go figure. Eventually they're all killed, except for the good aligned Miss Martian.
      • Which has changed again in the new Martian Manhunter retooling. Not only are there other White Martians, but another Green Martian... and female. But she's evil.
      • After another apparent retcon in Brightest Day, this is still the case. It's a different Green Martian. Who is also female. And insanely evil.
  • Subverted in Y: The Last Man. About ten issues in, it's revealed that two male astronauts avoided the Gendercide because they were in space at the time. A bare bones effort to ensure a safe landing ensued... but both male astronauts died on reentry. The only one to survive was their female cosmonaut partner... who was pregnant with the (male) baby of one of them.
    • In the penultimate arc we find another survivor: Dr. Mann's father, who blames his cloning experiment and/or efforts to sabotage his daughter's for the disaster... and decides that the world would better off with the menfolk out of the way completely since his daughter(s) can continue his work.
  • Elf Quest does this with the Wolfriders, who believe they are the last of their kind. Imagine their surprise when they find out not only are there more tribes (three [later four] to be precise) but a High One survived as well.
    • It's just as much of a surprise to the Gliders, one of the other tribes, when they discover there are elves out there who can still have children. Their leader, Winnowill, also discovers that she has a non-evil counterpart in Savah (of the first tribe the Wolfriders encounter).
    • In Wavedancers, there is an inversion. Wavelet is an elf who was raised by humans, and does not know there are tribes of elves in this world. She is introduced in a side-plot after other elves discover her, rather than being treated as a protagonist.
  • Lobo in his first own series "The Last Czarnian" has to discover that another Czarnian survived his genocide on his own race, and worse, it's his fourth grade math teacher (probably one -if not the one- member of his race he hated most). And he has to bring her to Vril Dox unharmed. However after his contract with Vril Dox is fulfilled he quickly fixes that mistake by snapping her neck.
  • Cerebus did this with aardvarks. Cooler than it sounds.


Films

  • The trope name comes from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, where after Luke Skywalker is rushing off to an obvious trap Vader has set for him, Yoda cryptically dismisses Obi-Wan's suggestion that Luke was the last hope for the Jedi. The "another" is Leia, as implied in the ending to Empire Strikes Back and confirmed in Return of the Jedi.
  • At the beginning of Ice Age 2, Manny the Mammoth is led to believe he's the last of the mammoths. Later, he finds a female mammoth who was living with her possum brothers (...), and at the end he found out a herd of mammoths, and had to make a "Friend or Idol?" Decision about staying with them or his friends.
  • The ending of the first Highlander film explicitly said that Connor MacLeod had won "The Prize" and was the last Immortal. Subsequent films (and the TV series) changed that.
  • The ending of Gojira states that the titular monster cannot be the only member of his species, and that nuclear bomb testings will only bring about more. Cue the sequel....
  • Hancock had the titular character suffer from amnesia only to be reminded once again, by saving her current husband, that he once had a wife who had the same powers he did.
  • In King Ralph, the title character discovers he's not the only distant relative of the royal family still alive. His advisor, Sir Cedric is too. He had been offered the position first, but he turned it down.
  • This was the premise for The Tigger Movie, in which Tigger thinks he's received a letter from another Tigger. It turns out that the letter was from Roo. The whole movie is an Aesop about the Power of Friendship.
    • And has anyone else on this list declared "I'm the only one!" so triumphantly?
  • Both protagonists of The Dark Crystal believed themselves to be the last of the gelfling race, then invoked this trope when they met.
  • Dogma: Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born. The last of her and Joseph's descendants, though, is Bethany. She also developed uterine cancer and had a hysterectomy. At the end of the movie, God regrows her womb, with the new Last Scion in it.


Literature

  • In Eragon, we are led to believe that Eragon and Gallbatorix are the only Dragon Riders left in the world, Gallbatorix having slaughtered every Rider and Dragon, with only two eggs and one dragonless Rider left in the world besides them. In Eldest, we find out that Gallbatorix missed one. The elf Oromis and his dragon Glaedr are crippled but alive, and become Eragon and Saphira's teachers. And at the end of the book, we find out that another of the eggs has hatched...
    • The last egg (a green one) is expected to hatch in book 4. In this universe, eggs wait to hatch until they sense the proximity of a worthy rider, so ... three guesses who's likely to hatch it. * cough* Arya* cough*
  • The first book in the Deathgate Cycle makes Alfred out to be the last Sartan alive. Two books later we find out there are others. Many, many others, living on other worlds.
  • A variation. Grand Admiral Thrawn died in The Thrawn Trilogy. He was far from the only one of his species - Chiss are isolationist but not endangered - but there's only one Thrawn. Luke and Mara found his clone floating, asleep or not yet alive, in a Spaarti cylinder underneath his hidden fortress in the Hand of Thrawn duology. They sort-of-accidentally killed it while escaping. But the incredibly elaborate Chiss gambiting in Survivor's Quest has enough elements of Thrawn's style to cause Mara Jade to wonder if he had another clone. Timothy Zahn has said that he'd be interested in writing a book involving Thrawn's clone, who, unusually, would not mentally be Thrawn (while he'd have Thrawn's memories, he'd still know they were just copied memories) and would feel tremendous pressure to live up to the original.[1]
  • Arthur Dent discovers his entire planet has been rebuilt in So Long And Thanks For All The Fish. Then he discovers a parallel version in Mostly Harmless. Then, once the Guide Mk2 has ensured that every parallel Earth in the Whole Sort Of General Mish-Mash has been destroyed, he discovers an Earth colony in And Another Thing.
    • Trillian. Sure, Arthur runs into her only a few hours after the Earth is destroyed, but up till then he believed himself the Last of His Kind.
  • Shelmerdine in Virginia Woolf's Orlando.
  • The protagonist of How Like a God thinks he's the only person in the world with Psychic Powers. Wandering a Mental World, he looks out into an ocean, filled with tadpoles that represent the minds of all the people in the world. Then he sees a whale.
  • A prophecy in Percy Jackson and The Olympians refers to a child of one of the Big Three (Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades) under the age of sixteen that will decide the fate of the Gods. Due to the nature of the prophecy, after World War II the Three signed a pact not to have any more children, because those children were too powerful and warped the world. Percy is thought to be the necessary referent, since only he and Thalia had been born since the oath and Thalia pulled a Heroic Sacrifice several years ago. Then Thalia comes back to life, and then it turns out that yet another two have been trapped in a Lotus Eater Machine since before the pact.
    • Eventually Thalia chooses to stop aging right before her 16th birthday, the daughter of Hades is killed, and Nico is younger than Percy, so he doesn't qualify, so it refers to Percy after all.


Live-Action TV

  • Doctor Who did this a few times.
    • Every time you think the last surviving Daleks are all but gone, another one (four, one million) pop up from an Alternate Universe, an evil-sealing can, or somewhere else.
    • In the third season of the new series, it was revealed that the Doctor himself was not the last of the Time Lords as he believed, as the Master also survived the Time War, unknown to him. The Master, being the Master, has since died, come back to life, and "died" again in less than three years.
    • The fourth season introduced an Opposite Gender Clone "daughter", although the Doctor was reluctant to consider her a "real" Time Lord. She's still alive, he just doesn't know it.
    • In the 11th Doctor's second series, Doctor River Song was confirmed to be part-Time Lord.
  • In the Stargate Verse, the original movie mentioned that Ra's race was dying, leading many to believe he was the Last of His Kind. In the series, this is apparently ignored: the Goa'uld are numerous, and are the dominant galactic power. This was partially reconciled with the movie later on, when it was established that the Goa'uld were indeed dying out at that time, desperately looking for a host species (which they found in the Tau'ri.) The nature of Ra's species was also changed (from The Greys to snake-like symbiotes), among the many retcons in the transition from the movie to the TV franchise.
  • In Power Rangers SPD, the Sirian Anubis "Doggie" Cruger was thought to be the last of his kind after the Troobian Empire destroyed his home planet. At the end of the series, it's learned that his wife, Aisinya, was kept alive within the Troobian Emperor's personal chambers. The logic behind this has yet to pass a cursory examination.
  • In Red Dwarf, Lister is believed to be the last human, with his companions being an evolved cat, a hologram, and an android. In the books and the series, an alternate universe version of Christine Kochanski is added to the cast (though how she arrived is very different between the two media.) He also loses the status as last human native to this universe in different ways:
    • In the series, Kryten's repair nanites go a bit too far, rebuilding the entire crew of the Red Dwarf, including previously Put on a Bus cast member Rimmer (who didn't experience "our" Rimmer's adventures with them and had no qualms about double-crossing them.)
    • In the Red Dwarf novel Last Human, Michael McGruder, the child of Rimmer's one night stand, arrives, having been in stasis a really, really long time.
  • Angel was, for a long time, considered to be the only vampire with a soul, to the point where prophecies referring to the 'vampire with a soul' were assumed naturally to refer to Angel. But then Spike got his soul back.
  • Arguably, a form of this occurred in Charmed with Pru's death, which broke the power of three - until the fourth sister, Paige, turned up.
  • A version of this trope appears in both the old and new versions of Battlestar Galactica: the twist being that another battlestar has survived the genocide: the Pegasus.
    • Also in the newer one, another Earth. Or something.
  • Smallville has Clark's cousin Kara show up. And then a Kryptonian army led by Colonel Zod.
  • Steve Austin thought he was the first and only Bionic man ... until the second season when he ran into OSI's "failed experiment": Barney Miller, the Seven Million Dollar Man.
  • In The Sarah Connor Chronicles, John Henry delivers the line, implying that Skynet is already starting to develop into a complex AI.
  • Until season 4, Kilgarrah was the last dragon in the BBC's Merlin . But now another dragon, Aithusa, has been hatched.


Videogames

  • Ratchet was discovered to be anything but the Last of His Kind. Lampshaded in A Crack in Time, where he meets Cool Old Lombax.
  • Rexxar and the Mok'Nathal in the Warcraft universe.
    • Also, the uncorrupted furbolgs. Apart from Krolg in Ashenvale, the Timbermaw tribe at the farthest reaches of civilization was portrayed as the last uncorrupted furbolgs in Azeroth. That is, until the expansion added the Stillpine... on the draenei starting island. The island did sport Alliance, however, they had recently shipwrecked there, something which seems to happen often on that island.
  • Red XIII from Final Fantasy VII. You never actually see another member of his race anywhere in the canon, but in the Flash Forward ending, he's shown with a pair of cubs. The compilation reveals he did have a mate, named Deneh, who he lost contact with in one of the prequels, and presumably finds again after the events of the game.
  • According to the documentation in the Halo games, Master Chief is the last surviving SPARTAN II super-soldier, and that the rest of the unit died in the Battle of Reach. The Expanded Universe reveals, however, that about a dozen Spartans survived the fall of Reach, including three who weren't even at Reach at the time, and one who was actually present through the events of the first game (but couldn't help because she was clinically dead and in stasis). These fellow survivors are never mentioned in the rest of the main game series. Although one's existence is referred to in the Anniversary Edition of the first game: when the Chief goes through the stasis control room, one of the readouts shows a Spartan still in stasis, and her name (Linda) barely legible on the screen. It's so subtle that it may be considered an Easter Egg.
  • Knuckles according to Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood.
    • The same game reveals that, inside the Twilight Cage, there are far more gizoids than we were led to believe.
      • Emerl was just the last Gizoid on earth instead of in existance.
      • Except Word of God has stated that Chronicles isn't canon at all, therefore this trope is subverted, as Knuckles and Emerl are still the last of their kind in the canon game universe.
    • Knuckles also is considered this in the early Archie Comics.
  • Happens all the time in the Breath of Fire games. In the first, you start in the last village of the Light Dragons, but you're supposedly the last warrior capable of harnessing the ancient clan's power. You're not, and you have to kill your sister, who also had that power. In the second, you find the last village of the dragons guarding the Big Bad. In the third, much is made of the fact that you're the last dragon. No, really, you are. Like, the last one. Except for this village over here. And Teepo. But you're the last.
  • In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, it's initially established that Reyson is the last survivor of the heron race, due to a genocide by Begnion. However, throughout the game and its sequel, a couple more turn up... including Reyson's sister, and later his elder brother.
    • Actually his father was stated to be alive not to long after Reyson was introduced. But he's so sick that he can't do anything so he never appears in the game itself.
  • In Homeworld, the Kushan discover that there are other exiles from Hiigara in the galaxy only after they kill them all in self-defense.
    • In Homeworld 2, meanwhile, there's an example with spaceships rather than people. After going through a lot of trouble to acquire the last known Progenitor Dreadnought, the key to reaching the mysterious Sajuuk, a final line of dialogue is delivered quietly at the end of the mission: "There is another Dreadnought. Makaan has it." (This is especially scary since a Dreadnought is much more powerful than anything the player can build at that point in the game, and about 50% stronger than the most powerful ship the player can ever build.)
  • Very similar to the original Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic 2 states the player character to be the "last of the Jedi". Except for all the others. It's rationalized as the player character to be perceived as the last of the Jedi, as few others self-identify themselves such and those that do, aren't.
  • The Legend of Spyro: Spyro is thought to be the only purple dragon (since they're only supposed to be born once every ten generations), but the second game reveals that The Dark Master (aka Malefor) is also one.


Webcomics


Western Animation

  • The Gargoyles. In the beginning of the series, it's implied they're the last. Then they find out the eggs from their Rookery were saved, and raised in Avalon. Then they find a bunch of other clans around the world that survived.
    • Though to be fair, given the Manhattan Clan rather limited world view, they weren't exactly exposed to other clans much less those half-way around the world. So as far as they were concerned, when their clan was destroyed, that was it.
  • In The Venture Brothers, Dr. Venture has a dream in which his dead father warns him "There is another Venture!" in a spooky, dramatic voice. When asked why he said it like that, he answered "Don't ask me; it's your dream." It turns out he was right, the "other Venture" being the twin brother that Dr. Venture swallowed in the womb.
  • Futurama has one not-so-straight example: Leela finds someone who seems to be part of the same alien race she thinks she's a part of, but turns out to be a shapeshifter who happened to have a thing for women who are the last of their kind. The whole situation was just an excuse for Actor Allusion.
      • Better than that Leela isn't an alien, she's a mutant.
  • One episode of the The Wild Thornberrys had a tortoise that was (almost) the Last of His Kind. Sadly Truth in Television, as he was based on a real tortoise called Lonesome George.
  1. ↑ Which, given Chiss skin tone, would make him a Blue Clone with Cloning Blues
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