We Can Rebuild Him/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A Not Quite Dead character is brought back as a cyborg.

  • Straight: Lazarus N. Destructible gets a Disney Death... but a The End - or Is It? moment shows a Mad Scientist tinkering at his corpse with a welding torch.
  • Exaggerated: The scientist uses Sufficiently Advanced Science to bring a Deader Than Dead character back From a Single Cell, and makes plenty of "improvements" along the way.
  • Downplayed: A severely wounded character is patched up with prosthetic parts, but isn't implied to be superhuman as a result.
  • Justified: The character is highly-trained and extremely valuable, and his employers aren't going to let near-fatal injuries put him out of action.
  • Inverted: A mad cyborg is taken offline, and surgeons take the opportunity to remove most of the soul-destroying cybernetics before reviving him.
    • A damaged robot is repaired by replacing its broken parts with human limbs and organs.
  • Subverted: Lazarus is brought back to life... and he's basically in a walking life-support machine. Far from making him better, stronger, faster!, his cybernetics are barely keeping him alive.
  • Double Subverted: ...but they keep him alive enough to slink away into a remote laboratory, to simmer in his own hatred of humanity and work on upgrading himself. He eventually emerges not just better, stronger and faster, but with a grudge against humanity in general and his "killers" in particular.
  • Parodied: A 15th-century pirate is at risk of dying of gangrene from an infected leg wound. The ship's doctor delivers the "we can rebuild him" speech from The Six Million Dollar Man over a scene of him sawing the leg off and replacing it with a wooden peg.
  • Zig Zagged: Cyberneticisation is a last resort, pulled only on the dying specifically because it's such a crapshoot. Most people are killed, some reject their enhancements, some are turned into vegetables; even of the survivors, most are left feeble shadows of themselves, barely able to move. But every once in a while...
  • Averted: The world has prosthetics and medical technology at about a modern level.
  • Enforced: Given Lazarus' popularity and importance (not to mention his name, the fans simply refuse to believe he's been Killed Off for Real. But since the writers had killed him off in the first place because they found him dull, they decide they have a good opportunity to bring him back in a barely-recognisable form.
  • Lampshaded: "You can rebuild him? How much will it cost?" "$1.1 billion." ""Huh. That's... not what I was expecting." "Yeah, that's inflation for you."
  • Invoked: A Mad Scientist can't get any human subjects for his extremely invasive cybernetics experiment, so arranges for an "accident" to befall someone so they'll have nothing to lose from undergoing his treatment.
  • Exploited: Lazarus' boss orders the scientist to secretly equip him with a GPS tracker, wireless sensor feeds back to Mission Control, a Restraining Bolt and kill-switch... he'd always wanted to have such direct control over an agent, but never had the chance before.
  • Defied: "I'm a doctor, not a... robot... making... person!"
  • Discussed: "Now would be a great time to tell me you can bring him back as an unstoppable cyborg, doc."
  • Conversed: "Do you think they put this in the small print of these agents' contracts? 'Item 666(b)(iii): if the agent is fatally injured in the line of duty, the employer reserves the right to use any and all functioning systems, including but not limited to the central nervous system, in the creation of a cybernetic being...'"

We Can Rebild Him is a broken link. But we can bring it back stronger... faster... We Can Rebuild Him!


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