As an audience, we know that a doomed character can be saved at the last minute. There's always an Eleventh Hour Superpower, Deus Ex Machina, or Big Damn Heroes moment to rescue them. Other times, we get an on-screen death, or even a Fate Worse Than Death. Very rarely, though, characters can be left in a limbo; there's still a last minute, but we never see what happens after that.

This trope is the fate of any character whose ending is never told. This can happen at any point in a story, but happens so frequently at the end that we have tropes devoted specifically for them. Rule of thumb: if it is the ending of a work, it's one of the Bolivian endings.

When the audience doesn't even know if the characters are in danger, see also Chuck Cunningham Syndrome and What Happened To The Mouse.

Subtropes:

• Never Found The Body, when a character is announced dead, but no body is around to prove it.
• Our Hero Is Dead is for the end of an episode (or just before a commercial), when The Hero is announced to be dead.
• Bolivian Army Cliffhanger, when a season ends with one or more of The Heroes in an uncertain fate.
• Bolivian Army Ending, when the entire work ends with The Heroes in a blaze of glory.

Examples

Anime And Manga

• One Piece has one befall a certain character at the end of the Impel Down Story Arc. Mr. 2 stays behind in the eponymous prison to imitate the warden Magellan, in order to open the Gates of Justice, allowing the prison breakout to be a success. Mr. 2's deceit is discovered, and Magellan, a powerful Devil Fruit user, unleashes all his fury on him. A lot's happened since then, including a second breakout that left Magellan defeated, but there has been no word of Mr. 2's exact fate yet.
  Magellan: Do you have any last words?
  Mr. 2: I have no regrets.
• Battle Royale 2: Requiem; The two male protagonists are holed up in a cellar while the Japanese Army invades the island (and with an airstrike on the way). They make peace, resign themselves to their fate, and charge out, guns blazing. Subverted when they inexplicably appear later, unharmed.

Comics

• Marvel Zombies vs. Army Of Darkness ends with Ash escaping the zombie-infested dimension via Dr. Doom's portal only to end up in a dimension inhabited by werewolf superheroes, and the last frame is a shot of them running after him. Qualifies as a Bolivian Army Ending for Ash, but the crossover is a prequel for the entire Marvel Zombies universe.
• Another Batman case, the Legends of the Dark Knight character Cavalier chooses a Bolivian Army-esque Suicide By Cop as an honorable end.

Film

• Alien. Brett and Dallas are taken by the title monster but we never see them killed nor are their bodies ever found, except in a deleted scene.
  • Ripley finds them- Dallas is in the process of mutating into an alien egg, and Brett has already nearly finished doing so.

Live Action TV

• The last time Doug Murphy is seen in Scrubs is being locked in a morgue drawer. After this, he disappears and no mention is made of it.
• Stargate Atlantis; Lt Ford, who went rogue during season two, was last seen on an exploding Wraith ship. It was never explicitely said he was dead, and he never appeared in the series again.

Literature

• Discworld played with this in Thief Of Time; on the Disc, characters know what awaits them after death. But in this story, the Glass Clock will kill you if you get near, but what will happen to you afterwards is uncertain. One of the characters gets too near...

Western Animation

• Artie Ziff's ultimate fate in The Simpsons is a classic Bolivian Army Ending. "Somehow, I don't think we've seen the last of Artie Ziff!"....squirt, squirt..."Kids, take a last look at your Uncle Artie..."
• Played for laughs and lampshaded in the Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon Gee Whiz-zzzzzz; as Wile E. Coyote falls for the last time, he holds up a sign asking that the cartoon end before he hits. As the screen begins to Iris Out, he holds up a second sign saying "Thank you."
• South Park: The episode Trapped In The Closet ends with Stan, after revealing that he isn't the reincarnation of L Ron Hubbard and that "Scientology is just a big, fat, global scam!" getting threatened to be sued by all of his former followers, a threat Stan proudly accepts.
• Avatar The Last Airbender examples:
  • Because of the network the show aired on, they couldn't be as blatant as they'd have liked about Jet's death (they implied pretty heavily, though). This is referenced in the lampshade-filled episode "The Ember Island Players", when the characters see a play of their lives:
    Zuko: Did Jet just...die?
    Sokka: Y'know, it was really unclear.
  • Along the same lines are Longshot and Smellerbee, who are left alone with him. This is a much straighter example; they are never seen or mentioned again after this scene (note that they are left in an enemy base).
• American Dad: Played with. Steve and his friends are trapped by an angry mob in a van. "We're going to die," they say, "but at least we can take a few of them with us." They leap out of the van and the image freezes. The noise, however, continues, with blows landing and a cry of "We're not taking any of them with us!"