History HeroicSacrifice / LiveACtionTV

Two non-fatal examples in ''Series/ResurrectionErtugrul'':

*** [[spoiler:The 10th Doctor]] in the second part of [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E17E18TheEndOfTime "The End of Time"]]. [[spoiler:He switches places with Wilf in a box-thing which was going to fill with radiation when opened. Cue TearJerker as The Doctor comes out dying, and then proceeds to say goodbye to all his friends and/or companions from throughout the series]]. And incredibly, [[spoiler: The Master!]] But then again, [[FoeYay the viewers should have seen it coming...]] "Get out of the way!" Possibly justified, as it might means "''My'' prey. Scram." He's too pissed off to care about anything other than [[spoiler:making the Time Lords pay dearly for what they did to him, in the sense of TheOnlyOneAllowedToDefeatYou. This is BigDamnVillains. This is the Master. And they NeverFoundTheBody...]]

** [[Recap/DoctorWhoS27E10TheDoctorDances "The Doctor Dances"]] subverts it: Captain Jack places a bomb in stasis on his ship and takes it away from the place where it was supposed to land in order to save the lives of the people at the site, including the Doctor and Rose. However, the stasis is decaying, and after getting to space Jack discovers that there is no way to jettison either the bomb or himself from his ship before it explodes. He has the ship make him a martini and sits back with [[GoOutWithASmile a smile on his face]]… and then the Doctor and Rose arrive in the TARDIS to rescue him.

%%** Season 5, [[spoiler:[[GoOutWithASmile Opie]]]]

** In Series 2, Michael claims to have solved the philosophical thought-experiment 'The Trolley Problem' by saying that rather than choosing who should die, the right thing to do is sacrifice yourself. He shows this by [[spoiler: giving Eleanor his badge to escape from [[Hell The Bad Place]] and staying behind to be tortured]].

* ''Series/TheOutpost'': Talon's mother saved her by distracting Toru, slashing his leg as he attacks Talon, then being killed by him as Talon escapes.

** In "The Reichenbach Fall", [[spoiler:Moriarty issues Sherlock an ultimatum: commit suicide and be remembered as a fraud, or doom his three closest friends to death by sniper. Sherlock manages to fake his death convincingly enough to both call off the snipers and walk away. However, the public disgrace remains, and he spends the next two years in exile to avoid further endangering his friends.]]
** In "His Last Vow", [[spoiler:the only way to stop Magnusson from blackmailing Mary Watson is to kill him. Acting alone, Sherlock shoots Magnusson in front of multiple credible witnesses so that John cannot possibly be accused of the murder, knowing that he is risking arrest at best and a virtual death sentence at worst.]]
** In the third season, [[spoiler:Mary returns the favor by taking the bullet for Sherlock]].

** In "Fracture", Chloe uses her healing powers to bring Lex, who is pretty obviously a villain at that point and has done her great personal harm previously, back from the brink of death at the cost of her own life. Luckily, she has ResurrectiveImmortality, although she remained dead for 18 hours. Clark is worried the next time she won't be coming back.
** {{Deconstructed}} in the episode "Lazarus". [[spoiler:Clark Kent finds himself in the afterlife after dying in the previous episode to stop Zod. Jor-El calls him an idiot for not realizing that even though he did save the day, he's now left Earth vulnerable to future threats. Fortunately, Lois manages to revive him.]]

** One episode has a rather heart-wrenching inversion. Commodore Decker and his crew are facing an unbeatable foe, so he beams his crew down to a nearby planet and intends to go down with the ship. Except it doesn't play out like that. The enemy in question is a PlanetKiller, and his ship isn't what it's after. However, since Decker is a FourStarBadass, he still gets his Heroic Sacrifice. But in a roundabout fashion.
** In "The Alternative Factor", the crew is menaced by a time-traveling madman named Lazarus, who is constantly being forced to switch places with his more benevolent counterpart from a parallel antimatter dimension, where the natives learned how to pass through one universe to the next. The evil Lazarus threatens to destroy both universes by bringing himself and Anti-Lazarus into the same one; Anti-Lazarus, however, instructs Kirk to destroy his spaceship when he tries, which will seal him in the tiny "corridor" between the two dimensions. This, however, will also destroy Anti-Lazarus' ship, and he knows it; he won't die, but is willingly condemning himself to a FateWorseThanDeath, trapped forever with a madman to save both universes. Having no other option, Kirk complies.
* Two different starships Enterprise get this in the ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' episode "Yesterday's Enterprise". Short version: A Captain Picard from a timeline where the Federation is losing a war against the Klingons pulls a YouShallNotPass against a squadron of Klingon battlecruisers, sacrificing the ''Enterprise-D'' in order to allow the ''Enterprise-C'' to return to her own time and get destroyed defending a Klingon outpost from a Romulan attack, cementing the Federation's status as a [[FireForgedFriends Fire Forged Friend]] to the Klingon Empire.

** The episode ''"The Quality of Life"'' has one for one of the Exocomp droids (who had just been established to be self aware). Three of them enter a highly dangerous radiation field in order to allow Picard and Geordi to be rescued. However, in order to rescue the Exocomps, one chooses to stay behind to prevent the radiation from killing the other two, and it is destroyed in the process.
** In the episode "Face of the Enemy", Troi is persuaded (well, forced) to act as a double agent for a member of a Romulan underground resistance movement named N'Vek, who uses surgery to disguise her as a Romulan officer of the Tal Shiar. At the climax of the episode, when Troi is about to escape back to the ''Enterprise'' after completing the mission - helping three high-level dissenting members of the Romulan government defect to the Federation - the Romulan Commander is onto her, and N'Vek threatens the Commander to buy Troi time. The angry Commander vaporizes him using a disrupter, but the stalling works, and Troi manages to escape.

* The GrandFinale of ''Series/StarTrekEnterprise'' ends with [[spoiler:Trip]] sacrificing [[spoiler:him]]self to stop a group of boarders who were threatening the ship. However, many fans dislike this and believe it to be a StupidSacrifice, since all [[spoiler:he]] had to do was stall for time until the [[SpaceMarines MACOs]] intervened. Franchise/StarTrekExpandedUniverse {{RetCon}}s this into a cover-up: [[spoiler:Trip was recruited by Section 31 and was doing black ops missions after his death was faked. The impossibility of the "pirates" catching and boarding the warp 5 Enterprise with a warp 2 ship is also addressed - Archer hired them to fake Trip's death]].

* ''Series/AFrenchVillage'': Daniel offers himself in place of civilians who have been taken hostage by the Germans. This is rejected by the German HQ, but Kollwitz admired him for his offer nonetheless.

* ''Series/{{Caprica}}'': In the finale, the monotheists carry out a terrorist attack on the Caprica City stadium, but most of them are taken out by Cylon foot soldiers controlled by the Graystones. In the panic, one of the suicide bombers manages to slip away, forcing the Cylons to run up to him en masse and dogpile him to shield nearby humans from the blast.

*** In [[Recap/DoctorWhoS29E01SmithAndJones "Smith and Jones"]], the Doctor allows the Plasmavore to drain his blood in order to save the hospital from eradication by the Judoon. Luckily, Martha is on hand to revive him.

*** In [[Recap/DoctorWhoS32E06TheAlmostPeople "The Almost People"]], the Doctor's Ganger (who is exactly the same as him and has all his memories) sacrifices himself to stop another Ganger who has turned into a monster.

*** The Fifth Doctor at the end of [[Recap/DoctorWhoS21E6TheCavesOfAndrozani "The Caves of Androzani"]], which is seen as one of the best stories. Both he and Peri (a DamselScrappy if there ever was one) were suffering from fatal poisoning, and the Doctor gives the antidote to her. He then collapsed, and willed on by his past companions, regenerate into a new body in the best such sequence in the series.

*** The Eleventh Doctor gets two. First one is in [[Recap/DoctorWhoS31E13TheBigBang "The Big Bang"]], when the Doctor triggers a second big bang to reboot reality and restore everything erased by the cracks in time, at the cost of his being erased from existence himself. Fortunately, Amy brings him back at the end. The second time is probably one of the most prolonged examples of this trope to date, when he spends NINE HUNDRED YEARS defending the planet [[spoiler:Trenzalore]] in [[Recap/DoctorWho2013CSTheTimeOfTheDoctor "The Time of the Doctor"]] from entire armies and fleets of his enemies, including the Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels, Ice Warriors, Sontarans, Judoon, Silurians, Slitheen, Krynoids, Mara, Krotons and Nestene to name a few. All this to protect the residents of a little colony called Christmas, and [[spoiler:Gallifrey]], which sits on the other side of [[spoiler:the very last crack in the universe]], on the wall of the town's clocktower. The reason this counts as a sacrifice is since he spends SO long defending the place he starts dying, not of injuries, but OLD AGE. Even more profoundly, he's using up all this time with the full knowledge that [[spoiler:he is out of regenerations, and when he dies this is death will be his last.]] [[spoiler:Fortunately, Clara convinces the Time Lords to chip in and grant the Doctor a new cycle of regenerations.]]
** It has been debated whether Time Lord sacrifices count, since they can regenerate up to 12 times; at any rate, several of the Doctor's incarnations regarded it as death.

* This is discussed in ''Series/StarTrekPicard'' after Picard's HeroicSacrifice, where his consciousness ends up in Data's simulation once he died. Since Data did not remember his own death, having [[Film/StarTrekNemesis uploaded his memory to B-4 before sacrificing himself]] during the ''Enterprise''-E's battle with the ''Scimitar'', Picard told him about it, and expressed [[HowDareYouDieOnMe fury that he had done it]], [[TakeMeInstead and regret that it wasn't himself instead]]. Data countered that if Picard didn't regret sacrificing himself for the synths (Soji and the others), then he shouldn't expect Data to regret her own sacrifice, nor should Picard regret Data's sacrifice either.

* In the Canadian series ''Ghostly Encounters'', a man working at an allegedly haunted hotel finds out about a fire that occurred there a long time ago. The fire broke out at night and the guests were unaware of it because hotels did not have fire alarms at that time. A woman working at the front desk started phoning room after room to alert them to the blaze and give them a chance to escape. Her fellow employees tried to make her leave the building, but she refused and ended up dying in the fire herself.

* Joss Whedon examples:

*** Sento/Kamen Rider Build attempts to use an incomplete genius bottle to increase his danger level to lure him to evolve out of Banjo's body, then attempts a suicide attack to eliminate him. It ends up backfiring Sento, because Evolution manages to survive and possess him.
*** Kazumi/Kamen Rider Grease after transforming into Grease Blizzard and knowing that he wouldn't survive it, decide to use his body to complete the final Lost Bottle, which cause his ultimate demise.
*** Gentoku/Kamen Rider Rouge manage to broke Evolto's Evol Trigger in exchange of causing his death.