Bringing Characters Back From Th' Dead (Spoilers Inevitable)

Cafe Society
1

What are peoples thoughts on fictional characters coming “Back From The Dead”? I’m not talking about Patrick Duffy in the shower here.
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Take for example a recent buster of blocks, sequel to a popular movie from a few years back… got a third part coming out next year… anyway, it has a Character back from the dead… and the whole set-up for next years movie is

bringing someone back from the dead…

Does anyone feel that this takes away from the tension of the movie? Because if we can bring someone back, why should we care when someone dies? They’ll be back in a few scenes good as new.

I think that, for the most part, if someone dies, they should stay dead. Gandalf / Obi-Wan style re-appearances I can handle (as in, mutations/ transcendence/ apparitions), but the whole “brought back to life by a kiss” thing gets really old.

as an example of character dies, stays dead, increases dramat/ tension for the rest of the movie, we need look no further than

Serenity

You know the character of which I speak. When he died, you knew he would never be back. It added to the tension because if he was killed, then that could mean that no-one would make it out alive.

So what do you think? Should they have “searched for Spock”, or let him rest?
Should Neo have died in that hallway?
And should Famke Janssen have stayed at the bottom of that lake??

2

There are good ways to do it and bad ways to do it.

I can’t imagine the Legion of Super-Heroes without a resurrected Lightning Lad. The young Legionnaires’ conviction that there must be some way to bring him back, coupled with the sacrifice they were willing to make to do it, made a great story.

Jason Todd brought back as a villain? Unnecessary, badly done.

3

Neo and the Phoenix were atypical cases. For Neo, the whole story was about his transformation into the One. Being able to take control of his virtual self to the extent of defying death was the final, fantastic step in that transformation. For the Phoenix, it’s much the same - Jean Grey’s transformation into the scary creature is one of the fundamental story arcs of the X-Men. While I disagree with their radical alterations of the “traditional” explanation, it was an essential character development.

As for Spock, I think the point cmkeller made about Lightning Lad also goes for everyone’s favorite Vulcan. The sequence of Star Treks II and III was all about Spock making the ultimate sacrifice for the Enterprise, and then Kirk and Co. doing whatever they had to do to get Spock back. “The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few, or the one” vs. “The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.”

4

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wasn’t too fond of Sherlock Holmes- he wanted to write other stories. So in one of his stories, he had Sherlock fall off a cliff and die. There was such an outrage that Doyle brought him back, claiming in his next story that Sherlock had only faked his own death.

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I prefer Karloff’s rule in Bride of Frankenstein: “We belong dead.” It is dramatically much stronger if the dead stay dead. I give DC all sorts of credit and admiration for keeping Barry Allen dead all these years.

As the OP points out, it’s much more affecting if the victim does not come back. That way, the death can be an emotional experience without the feeling you’re being cheated.

The entire post reminds me of an 80s comic book with the question on the cover “What happens when a hero dies?” My immediate reaction to that was, “He comes back to life again,” and it was the last issue of that comic I bought (I forget the title and don’t want to bother digging it up; it was a DC title about a group of space explorers).

It was an issue in The Wrath of Khan. Spock dies, but everyone knew he’d be back in a sequel, so the death was pretty unaffecting.

The absolutely worst example of this was Philip Jose Farmer’s The Dark Descent, written as the final “Riverworld” novel (he later wrote a few more). In the first novel in the series, everyone who ever lived on Earth was resurrected on Riverworld. That actually wasn’t all that bad. And if you died, you were resurrected again somewhere else on the rivier. Again, a pretty good concept. But somewhere along the way, the resurrections stopped; if a character was killed, that was it.

Farmer started The Dark Descent off with a line saying that by the end of the novel everything will be fixed – which clearly meant people would be resurrected again. So he goes through all these death scenes of nearly all the main characters of the series that were completley unaffecting since you knew that they’d be back at the end.

This isn’t to say it can’t be done. Doctor Who’s regenerations are a nice idea (essentially, his old persona dies first). Something like the Spectre (not to mention Deadman), where the dead man is a walking ghost works in a fantasy environment. Any story about a ghost is not an issue because the character remains dead. Deathlike sleeps like Snow White are also OK.

But most of the time it’s better to leave the character dead (I wasn’t particularly enamored of Gandalf coming back, either). To paraphrase Howard Chaykin, better to have people clamoring to bring him back.

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My feeling: either fake-ressurect him once to screw with Batman, or really bring him back via a Lazarus Pit. The way they did it with the Crisis was horrible.

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I suspect the Frankenstein movies would have been fairly boring if this rule had been applied to them.

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Final Fantasy X-2

Tidus should have just stayed dead. It belittle’s the sacrifices of the first game and makes Yuna’s growth as a person seem irrelevant. I prefer to think she told Bahamut’s faith no. Tidus is gone, but the memories and experiences aren’t. He’s still in her heart. That’s what the theme real Emotion is all about. Jeez. But, from the epiloge in FF X-2: International, it looks like the Good ending really DID happen. Oh, well…

The same goes for Final Fantasy IX. Garnet Von Alexandros Til XVII should have reigned alone. And if they had to have a sugar-sweet ending, they could have just made a FF IX-2, rather then FF X-2.

I think IX was more deserving, anyway. Meh.

I can’t believe that no one’s said the Bible yet.

9

Maybe, maybe not. It would be like Waiting For Godot, except it would be Waiting for Frankenstein’s Monster.

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Centauri, The Last Starfighter.

Next dimension, my ass.

11

It depends on how much I like the character, and how skillfully the writers ressurect them.

Or, at least, how much I like the character alive. For example, if you have an awesome villain, but he keeps coming back from the dead to torment the heroes…after awhile, it’s just going to start pissing me off. Well, unless I don’t actually like the heroes. In which case, screw 'em. Send in the zombie villains.

I think it depends on how the character died to begin with, too. Some deaths, the viewer or reader comes away thinking “Whoa, what a great way to go.” Others…you just end up thinking “geez…asshole director/writer/publisher. Probably just wanted to put in a “shocker” to drum up sales. Corpsey was the best character of the bunch…and they went and killed her in the lamest possible way…I’m never watching this, again.”

And, of course, how the character is revived matters, as well. Here, I muse that the execution (no pun intended) matters as much as the method. A really talented storyteller might take some hoary, overused plot device and still make a decent ressurection story out of it.

12

Did they? I saw TWoK and I’ve read “I Am Spock”, and I don’t believe it was established at the time that Spock was going to be back. Nimoy says he went into the film intending Spock to be killed off, and there was a last-minute change of heart during the filming that left a possible get-out clause. Of course, now we know Spock comes back in the next movie, but it was a bit more impactful back in 1982 or whenever.

13

Can’t have a thread about people coming back from the dead without mentioning soaps. NOBODY is EVER dead in a soap. Even if they died on-camera and thie relatives held a two week funeral with an open casket. It was either a fake or a look alike relative. Alister Crane and Stephano DiMera have come back fromt he dead so many times they should be vampires.

One of the recent plots on All My Children has Erica Kane’s aborted son showing up. Apparently the fetus was put into another woman’s womb.

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By “they,” I mean the audience. One article of the time discussed talking to fans as they left the theater and how they felt about Spock’s death, and they were all saying, “Oh, he’ll be back.”

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Which was successfully lampooned, I thought, in the movie Soapdish. Kevin Kline’s character was brought back to the soap in the movie, even though he was beheaded and the head was squashed by a truck or something. Robert Downey’s character explaining away the things that would normally prevent a resurrection is hilarious, and you just know that the writer’s of soaps have said all those things.

16

I think that a particularly egregious example of this was Blade 2. Bringing back Kris Kristopherson’s character was just a terrible, terrible idea.

17

Wow, I can’t believe I am the first one to bring up Buffy on a SDMB thread. :smiley:
I loved the way Joss Whedon handled that, with all the trauma that would occur if somebody would be yanked from the afterlife to return to Sunnydale.
I love the fact he also didn’t immediately explain everything, but took almost an entire season to show that no, it isn’t always a good idea to bring somebody back from the dead.

18

My understanding of the movies was this: they called the first movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture because that’s exactly what it was supposed to be. It was THE motion picture based on the TV series. And it was intended that there be only one at the start, because the principals weren’t all that keen on doing movies anyway.

Problem was, “The Motion Picture” made a lot of money. So, since the producers like money, they made Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Bring back an old villain, tell a good story, make some more cash. But, no one wants to keep making these things, so this time they kill Spock. Now there is a note of finality. Spock’s dead, no more movies.

But that one made a lot of money too. So, they make a third one, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock. Spock comes back, so Nimoy gets a paycheck. But this is getting ridiculous, they think, we can’t just keep churning out sequels. How can we end it for sure? Let’s blow up the Enterprise! Aha! No more sequels!

But that one made a lot of money. Finally, the studio execs resigned themselves to churning out sequel after sequel, until the cost of storing all their money pushes them into bankruptcy.

And on the subject of bringing back the dead, here’s one from the book series I’m currently going through on audio, Stephen King’s The Gunslinger:

Jake. Plummets to his death in Book 1, comes back in Book 3. From another “when.”

19

I thought Spock should have stayed dead after the end of Khan. That was the one & only good Star Trek movie and in my own little happyland the series ended there.

PS - I generally don’t like characters coming back. So I don’t know why Gandalf’s death doesn’t bother me. Perhaps because all the pieces of that story fit together so well; they weren’t just gerrymandered back in to make more money.

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This whole approach probably would not work with Titanic…