So, I was wondering, what are some examples of TV shows where the majority (if not all) of the protagonists end up dead by the end of the series? Needless to say, spoilers abound here.
The thing that made me think of this is my recent rise of interest in Space: Above and Beyond. When the show begins, we see the forming of the 58th Reconnisance Squadron of the USMC Space Cavalry (slight tangent, is it ever called the “Space Cavalry” again after the first episode?), with, in addition to the central characters, various minor characters filling out the rest of the ranks of the squadron to serve as semi-developed cannon fodder. By the end of the last episode, most of the squadron has been killed off, with the only remaining members being West and Cooper, with everyone else dead, missing, or in serious condition.
Neon Genesis Evangelion, of course, ends with just about everyone (as in main characters, minor characters, villians, extras, people not appearing in the movie, all of humanity) except for the main character dying by the end (or more specifically, at the End).
So Doper connoisseurs of the televised arts, any other good examples here?
The last scene of the last episode finds the surviving cast members in a rainy alley facing a demon horde. Two of the main characters died earlier in the season; one more died a few minutes earlier in the episode. Of the four in the alleyway, one is mortally wounded; all of them know that they have no chance of surviving the coming fight. They step forward to face their enemy. The main hero - Angel himself - raises his sword, says, “Let’s go to work”…
…and the series ends.
Sure, there’s a lot of conjecture that some of the characters survived, that some deus would come out of some machina as soon as the credits finished rolling, but we can just write that off as wishful thinking. Besides, it would defeat the whole purpose of the ending.
La la la la I can’t hear you I can’t hear you they weren’t shown dead on-screen they’re still alive la la la…
There are the various Blackadder series, in which some or all of the main characters end up dead in the last episode.
If the characters don’t have to stay dead then you have something like Drawn Together, in which the main characters often die once or more in each episode.
The final episode has them falling through time to escape another alien trying to kill them, and the last we see of them is a prehistoric cave drawing. Cool.
This is much the same as the ending to Blackadder Goes Forth, in the last episode of which
the main characters all climb out of the trenches and lead an infantry charge against the Germans under heavy machine-gun fire.
Of course, the fate of the characters is left open-ended, as
they may actually have survived “The Big Push”, especially given Blackadder’s talent for extricating himself (and, by extension, Baldrick, and George) from dire situations…
The final episode of Red Dwarf was also somewhat unusual, in that
Everyone else abandons ship, leaving Rimmer alone on the doomed Red Dwarf.
In the final episode of The Young Ones,
The main characters drive off a cliff in a double-decker bus, which bursts into flames at the bottom,
and finally, in Mostly Harmless (The Fifth Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy book)
The Vogons manage to destroy Earth- again- this time killing all the major characters (except Zaphod) and completely eliminating every single “alternate” Earth in the process. Marvin died some time earlier, of extreme old age- he was several times older than the universe itself, because of all the time travel he had done.
Interestingly, in the radio adaption,
There’s an epilogue to the ending of Mostly Harmless in which, at the last minute, the Babel Fish (fishes?) in Arthur and Ford’s ears activate a unique self-preservation ability and transport the main characters to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, where they are re-united with many other characters (including Arthur’s girlfriend, Fenchurch), and there are also other endings in which everyone generally lives happily ever after, having escaped the destruction of the Earth by the Vogons yet again.
The Brits seem to have a thing for killing off the protaganists at the end of a series, don’t they?
In the same vein, Aqua Teen Hungerforce often kills off one or more major characters in each episode, and several episodes of Sealab 2021 ended with the death of the entire cast.
I’m curious as to exactly why you said this. It’s pretty clear that Gunn is hurt seriously… it isn’t just a scratch. But do we really have evidence that it was mortal??
I suppose a lot depends on the likelihood of him getting to medical help in the next hour, and how competent the medical help is. Looking at the situation, I have to say that his chances of that don’t look too good… but unlikelier rescues have happened in epic fantasy I think.
That could be taken a number of ways, even if Illyria is correct. Maybe she meant he’d be able to actively fight and defend himself ten minutes before being helpless and needing to rest. That’s bad in the situation, but still not what I’d define as a ‘mortal’ wound.
Blake’s Seven, already mentioned, is a classic example of this - the final episode (which aired in 1981 and has been much discussed, so I’m damned if I’m going to bother with spoiler boxes) ended with all the main characters being shot dead, one by one.
A previous series by Blake’s Seven creator Terry Nation was Survivors, and a main character in that is dying painfully by inches on my DVD player even as I type … Set after a mutant virus has wiped out most of the human race, Survivors is a memorably bleak show, and a number of regular and semi-regular characters don’t make it all the way through its thirty-eight episodes.
Unless the Enterprise beams them up, or the Justice League arrives, Charles is toast, I’m afraid. he was bleeding pretty badly, and the remaining Fang Gangers could not possibly have gotten him to help in time given that they also had to fight the Senior Partners’ forces. I can envision Angel & Co. escaping, yes, if Willow, Faith, and a hundred Slayerettes showed up to reinforce them, but I can’t see Gunn making it out.
Gunn showed up alive in a comic book series entitled Angel: Old Friends which is set after the series finale, although he lost an eye in the final battle. Angel, Spike, and Illyria survived as well. It’s debatable whether the comics and novels are canon, but I tend to think that even though they’re licensed products, if Joss Whedon or the other show writers didn’t write 'em, they’re just fanfics.
The 1980s series “Crime Story” with Dennis Farina ended in a cliffhanger with all the major characters, good and bad, on a plane that was plunging towards the ground with the pilots either dead or incapacitated.
The series was not picked up for the subsequent season so they could very well have all died.
Similarly, the first season of Sledge Hammer! ended with a nuclear bomb going off. They weren’t expecting it would be picked up for another season. Then they were but everyone was dead, so they did the next season as a prequel.
