Or, things I think about when the sleeping pills aren’t doing a damn bit of good.
It’s fairly common in movies and television for a group of characters to be put into a situation in which death seems inevitable, but not immediate. Under such circumstances, one character usually takes a moment to tell the other one how he feels about the other, or to reveal a long-kept secret, or to simply say good-bye. Sometimes these scenes are done really well; sometimes they’re done really badly. What examples stand out in your mind, for either extreme?
I’ll start with two:
Wonderfully done: Signs.
About two-thirds of the way through the second act, the Hess family is sequestered in their house while they await the alien invasion. They’ve intended to board up all the windows and doors but find they haven’t sufficient time or supplies to do so. After an emotional dinner that Graham (Mel Gibson’s character) clearly thinks is their last meal, they realize that the aliens are trying to force their way in. He tells each of his two young children the story of their birth, which has the effect of reminding them, in a good way, of their recently-deceased mother, whom they are all grieving over. It’s simply wonderful.
Wretchedly done: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
I can’t remember the exact episode, but it’s from very late in the show’s run. Miles O’Brien and Julian Bashir have used some Trek technobabble device to go into a secret agent’s mind to garner vital information for saving another character’s life. They have a definite time limit beyond which they will both die, and it seems apparent that they’ve failed…so O’Brien notes guiltily that he likes Bashir more than he does his wife, and Bashir makes the same confession about liking Miles more than his girlfriend. Meanwhile, DS9 fans all over the world thought, “So, these are the two gay characters they’ve been promising us all these years. Couldn’t at least one of them be cute?”
You can’t beat the scene in Almost Famous when the small private plane containing the fictional rock band Stillwater is in trouble during a storm, and the band members think the plane is going to crash. So some of them reveal various things, in particular an otherwise silent band member who takes the opportunity to reveal that he’s gay. So it’s a little awkward when the plane lands without any injuries.
Anyway, the only one I can think of is in a series two (?) episode of BtVS in which Willow is caught and trapped with Xander and they talk about the feelings they had for one eachother. One thing leads to another and the tentatively kiss right as Buffy, Cordelia and Oz arrive to save the day. Cordy and Oz totally overreact about the kiss, despite the fact that Willow’s, like, impaled on this metal pole and perhaps fatally injured, so they run off in a huff. Except I think that maybe only Cordelia ran off. Oz stayed and helped.
Or, at least that’s how I remember it goin’ down. The whole thing seemed quite silly to me at the time. Rather wretched even, IMHO.
“There’s . . . something . . . I have to . . .tell you” hack, cough “Come closer . . . closer . . . Once . . while you were sleeping . . . I put myself in your mouth and had a friend take a picture.”
In The Nanny, when the plane appears likely to crash and:the father (whatever his name is) tells the nanny that he loves her.Of course the plane doesn’t crash and he regrets having said it.
Close. Cordelia got impaled on a rebar. The next scene shows Buffy and a Scooby or two in the graveyard with a funeral in the background, and we’re briefly made to think it’s Cordy’s funeral. It isn’t. Later, Xander tries to bring Cordy flowers in the hospital, but it’s too little too late. Just another reason why it’s vital that Xander never know the relief of a good woman’s touch.
Tom Paris and B’elanna Torres had some godawful “I’ve always loved you!” moment on Voyager when they were trapped in open space and their air was about to run out.
Amusingly, on Next Generation, there were two seperate occasions where Dr. Crusher and Picard were faced with imminent death. In both situations Dr. Crusher said something like, “Jean-Luc, there’s something I want to tell you in case we don’t get out of this,” but both times they were abruptly rescued and she never actually got to tell him anything.
Galaxy Quest (which I’ll ‘spoiler’ just in case there’s still someone out there who hasn’t seen “the greatest Star Trek flim ever made”)
Jason (Tim Allen) and Gwen (Sigourney Weaver) are trying a ‘nick of time’ defusing of the ship’s self destruct. As the time ticks down Jason starts to confess his true feelings, in which, altho death seems imminent, Gwen delights. When the timer stops with one second to spare, and they both breathe a sigh of relief, Jason runs off to continue saving the day, and Gwen runs after him saying “Wait, Jason, you were saying something important…”
In the excellent Open Range, Kevin Costner & Robert Duvall share each of their Christian names with each other, since they’ve ridden together for years but never shared this info. And for good reason, since Duvall reveals that his real name is Bluebonnet
