Half The Man He Used To Be / Live-Action TV

• In 12 Monkeys, this is how the Witness meets their end in the Grand Finale, pushed into a beam of Splinter energy, which sends their upper half into a different time period than their lower half.
• A relatively common way to kick it in 1000 Ways to Die:
  • "Semi-cide" aka the first case of the whole series features a dude called Frank, who got accidentally cut into two while working on his car in a parking lot in Las Vegas while a huge truck was around and then hit his lower half. Made worse by how both halves were sent to different hospitals by mistake.
  • "Shafted", a bossy office manager is cut in half while trying to escape a malfunctioning elevator.
  • "Forked Up": A pothead who went on a joyride got bisected on some rope tied to his waist.
  • "D-Parted": A flirtatious and recently divorced Femme Fatale tried to seduce a group of construction workers, one of which is so taken by the woman that he loses control of a concrete saw and ends up slashing the woman in half.
  • "Half-Offed": A Jerkass businessman cuts the line for a taxi, only to get cut in half by a steel cable from a passing truck that gets caught in the taxi's trunk lid.
  • "Ex'D Ex": A jealous ex tries to wreck his ex-girlfriend's date, only for him to get run over by the tractor she and her new boyfriend were driving in.
• In the finale of Beef, Naomi closes the panic button room doors too early, resulting in Jordan getting bisected by them.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The final fate of Caleb, via the slayer's axe. From the groin up.
    Buffy: He had to split. [laughs]
  • Anya meets the same fate in the final episode. Not from the groin up, though.
• The victim in a Castle episode, "Heroes and Villains". Castle even says "he's Half the Man He Used to Be". Noteworthy because the victim was sliced vertically in a single clean stroke.
• The CSI: Miami episode "Die by the Sword" starts off with a male victim halved at the waist by a katana-wielding motorcyclist.
• CSI: NY: In "Blood Out", the Victim of the Week is cut in half with a chainsaw, after being subjected to Electric Torture.
• One of the mooks in the murder scene at the beginning of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency has been chomped in half.
• Firefly: Niska’s Torture Technician is bisected on the way down a long shaft after Wash,Zoe and Jayne riddle him with bullets.
• In the first season finale of Fringe, David Robert Jones builds a portal to crossover to the Alternate Universe, but Peter manages to get there in time to close the gateway and portal-cuts him in half.
• With one swing of his sword, Stannis Baratheon cuts a guy clean in half during the Battle of Blackwater in Game of Thrones. And keep in mind, that sword is not even made of Valyrian steel.
  • The episode of House of the Dragon ends with Daemon dragging the Crabfeeder's disemboweled upper body out of his cave. Daemon's sword is made of Valyrian steel, which can do that sort of things without much efforts on the part of the wielder.
• Uncle Marty in the first episode of Harper's Island, in a particularly gruesome fashion: he falls through a sabotaged footbridge, and while he's struggling to pull himself back up, the killer hacks him apart from below with a big knife. While he tries to shoot him through the bridge. It looks for a minute like he might win out, but... No. Many episodes later they find the body strung up in a tree... In two pieces.
• Not quite severed altogether, but a luckless man (played by Vincent D'Onofrio) in the Homicide: Life on the Street episode "Subway" gets trapped under a train car, which crushes and mangles his body from the waist down. It's understood by all — paramedics, police, and the poor guy himself — that the train's weight, compressing arteries in his crushed torso, is the only thing keeping death by blood loss in check.
• In a The Kids in the Hall sketch a man told of how a shark bit him in half. It really did. His wife measured.
• In the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "Mis-Labeled," the victim is bisected and stuffed in a suitcase.
• Life (2007), Charlie Crews and Dani Reese investigate a corpse like this in the episode "Farthingale". The weirdness of the man's death turns out to be one of the least odd aspects of the case.
• MacGyver (1985) uses the trope name verbatim... In the series' first two-part episode, Mac is strapped into a fiendish torture device vaguely inspired by The Pit and the Pendulum, and told by the Big Bad that he's about to be half the man he used to be.
• The titular character from The Mandalorian does this to a Quarren mook by shooting the control panel of a Dilating Door in the Batman Cold Open of the first episode.
• A throwaway character in Monty Python's Flying Circus suffers this when Genghis Khan does an impression of a sales assistant in Freeman, Hardy, and Willis.
• In Part III of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Obi-Wan shoots a Stormtrooper during a fight. Said trooper falls down and over a red laser barrier, which cuts him through the waist.
• In Power Rangers Samurai, Serrator is killed like this thanks to the Samurai Shark Gigazord. He even takes the time to hang a lampshade on it before exploding.
  Serrator: NO! I WAS SUPPOSED TO SPLIT OPEN YOUR WORLD! YOU WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO DO IT TO ME! (*BOOM*)
• In Robot Combat League's Commander vs. Scorpio match, Scorpio damages Commander so badly, it breaks in half at the waist; resulting in a KO. Scorpio does this again in their next match against A.X.E.
• Gavan Dynamic does this to the villains in Space Sheriff Gavan.
• One of the early victims in Stag is dragged away from the campsite by the killer's harpoon — when the others find the body, it's been cut in half leaving just the legs and hips. They carry them around for a bit, hoping to find the rest.
• In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "In Theory", a Negative Space Wedgie is causing portions of the ship to randomly dematerialize and then rematerialize. This happens to the floor below one hapless supernumerary, who falls through only to have it reappear midway through and bisect her. Ouch.
• At the end of Stranger Things Season 4, this happens to Jerk Jock Jason, courtesy of the opening rifts to the Upside Down. No tears were shed.
• In the Tales from the Crypt episode "Split Personality", a con man wishes to marry a pair of beautiful twins because they are both rich, but they share everything equally. No problem. He pretends to have a twin brother, and further pretends that they are both traveling salesmen, and marries each of them in separate ceremonies. Understandably, the twins are not happy when they discover the subterfuge, and proceed to execute their own version of Solomon's Judgment. With a chainsaw. In the end, each twin has half, and both are happy. Him... not so much.
• Hunters from Teen Wolf will cut captured werewolves in half to guarantee that they won't be able to heal themselves.
• In episode four of The Terror, the monster does this to two sailors on the expedition, before returning them to the ships, with the top half of one being stacked on the bottom half of another.
• Alex Taylor, in the fourth Season Finale of Third Watch. Whilst attending a road traffic accident, the car she is sitting on explodes and chops her in half. She doesn't die until a few moments later, meaning she is painfully aware of what has happened.
• Timeless: When Wyatt asks why the group doesn't just use the prototype to go back in time and stop Flynn from stealing the machine, he's informed they tried... and the pilot came back in pieces.
• Older entries of the Ultra Series featured a lot of it, especially Ultraseven and Ultraman Ace. Some of them could get pretty gory for guys in rubber suits. There's in fact enough to fill up a whole massive sub-page!
• The Walking Dead (2010):
  • One of the early zombies is the rotted upper half of one, who continues crawling about by pulling itself along with its hands.
  • And then there's the "Well Walker" — after the heroes spend quite a bit of time and effort trying to lift it out of the well without killing it in hopes of not contaminating the water by shooting it, some exposed bone gets caught on the well's lip, causing the walker's entire bottom half to rip out, dumping it and the walker's innards back into the well.
    T-Dog: Glad we didn't do something stupid like shoot it.
• War and Peace (2016): The soldier who accompanies Pierre to the ammunition cart at Borodino is promptly blown up, resulting in Pierre crying over the top half of his body.

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