Last Stand / Live-Action TV

• Game of Thrones:
  • Yoren refuses to surrender his charges even in the face of certain death.
  • In the backstory of Robert's Rebellion, the Kingsguard at the Tower of Joy was the last stand of the Targaryen forces who refused to surrender. Ned Stark managed to slay them and then found out they were protecting Rhaegar Targaryen's last surviving son.
  • Barristan Selmy goes down in an almighty blaze of glory saving Grey Worm from the Sons of the Harpy.
• Stargate SG-1:
  • Any time SG-1 goes to an alternate reality and it isn't a Crapsack World that tries to imprison/kill them, expect the alternate SG-1 to do this. As Sam Carter (in an alternate reality) elegantly put it, "I also wish to blow us all to hell," just before dropping a live hand-grenade. But then again, we don't really care about any reality but ours.
  • Notably subverted in the season 2 premiere. O'Neill has just disabled the Ha'tak's shields with a grenade to the generator.
    O'Neill: What now?
    Bra'tac: Now we die.
    O'Neill: Well, that's a bad plan. Where's the glider bay?
• Two Starships Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation in the episode "Yesterday's Enterprise". The first is the displaced USS Enterprise-C under Capt. Garrett, which is doomed to be destroyed defending a Klingon outpost from Romulans. Then there's the alternate Enterprise-D under Capt. Picard which has to allow itself to be destroyed by Klingons so that the first Enterprise can make its move. Picard's Pre-Asskicking One-Liner in this timeline is pure epic win:
  Jean Luc Picard: Let's make sure that history never forgets... the name... Enterprise.
• An alternate NX-01 Enterprise does this in order to reverse a timeline in which humanity is destroyed in the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Twilight".
• The Grand Finale for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "What You Leave Behind", has a doozy. With Cardassia changing sides mid-battle, the rebellion working its way to the capital, and the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans on the Dominion's doorstep, what does the Female Changeling do? She orders her troops to go across Cardassia and kill every last man, woman, and child. Then, she orders the remaining forces to form a wall around Cardassia, intending to bleed all three powers dry. It takes Odo linking with her to finally get her to give up.
  Female Changeling: I think they'll find the cost of victory very high indeed...
• Angel's finale is a Last Stand against hordes of demons.
  Gunn: OK, you take the thirty thousand on the left...^note he is talking to the memory of his friend and rival, Wesley, with whom he made a similar sarcastic deal in an earlier season
  Illyria: You're fading...you'll last ten minutes at best.
  Gunn: Then let's make it memorable.
  Spike: And in terms of a plan?
  Angel: We fight.
  Spike: Bit more specific?
  Angel: Personally, I kinda want to slay the dragon. Let's go to work.
• A recurring theme in Lexx, starting with the opening scene of the first episode.
  • The fan-beloved Brunnen-G Fight Song was traditionally sung by the Brunen-G on just such occasions: a hopeless battle which is being fought anyway because it's better to go out fighting than to give in to despair. The last line translates to "We will fight AND die, forever Brunnen-G"
• In The Wire episode "Final Grades", we have Bodie when Chris and Snoop come to kill him for snitching. Unfortunately he's killed by a guy who comes up behind. But he dies fighting like a true soldier in his own Dying Moment of Awesome.
  Bodie: Yo this is my corner, I ain't runnin' nowhere.
• Blake's 7: In "Blake", Avon realizes the others are dead, Blake himself is dead by his own hand, and he's surrounded by Federation troops...He put on his best Slasher Smile and raises the gun one last time before the scene fades to black.
• Red Dwarf has one in "Out of Time", which is a cliffhanger for the end of Series 6. The cast's future selves attack them (knowing they would also die) because they refuse to live as the current cast do because they have become corrupt and seduced by power. They kill three of the characters, leaving only Rimmer, the most cowardly and weaselly one of the lot. He immediately sets off to destroy the time drive that allowed them to time travel and become corrupt in the first place, before Starbug is blown up in a last-ditch move. Series 7 claims that it was the act of Starbug blowing up that meant the future selves couldn't attack them as they'd not exist. However, some people believe Rimmer was successful, so he can be a hero.
• Jenny Shepard of NCIS, trapped in a diner with four Russian hitmen and the prospect of a painful death from a debilitating disease ahead of her...four against one doesn't look so bad when you have an incentive to not make it out alive.
• Subverted Spartacus: Vengeance: After fighting their way through a forest Spartacus, Mira, Naevia, and Nasir finally make it to Mount Vesuvius, only to hear an army approach them from behind. Nasir is too wounded to fight and Naevia is too traumatized, so Spartacus tells Mira to take them and run. She refuses to abandon him, and the two prepare to make their final stand, only for the approaching forces to be revealed to be their own.
  • Later played straight in the finale of War of the Damned, with Spartacus and the remaining warriors making a final stand against the Roman army, even though they know they have little chance of winning, to give the non-combatants in their ranks a chance to escape over the mountains. Almost all of them are killed in the process (or captured and crucified later), but no one could say they didn’t go down fighting. They also succeed in helping at least some of the rebels to escape to freedom.
• Both the classic and revived series of Doctor Who often feature variations on The Siege plot, leading to numerous examples of these moments occurring when Red Shirt characters end up performing a Heroic Sacrifice. The Doctor and his companions can also attempt to perform these on occasion, although they (usually) tend to be averted.
  • During "The Parting of the Ways", Jack and the rest of Satellite 5 attempt a futile last stand to buy the Ninth Doctor time to complete a weapon that will wipe out the Daleks. Jack only survives after Bad Wolf!Rose brings him back to life.
  • "The Name of the Doctor" reveals that the Doctor would ultimately die performing one at Trenzalore against countless armies. This nearly comes to pass in "The Time of the Doctor" when the Eleventh Doctor maintains the Siege of Trenzalore for centuries until he starts dying from extreme old age, revealing that he's lost the ability to regenerate because this was his final body. This fate is only narrowly averted by the Time Lords, who grant him a new regeneration cycle for saving Gallifrey in "The Day of the Doctor".
• Near the end of Day Four of Torchwood: Children of Earth, we're led to believe that this will happen. Then the trope is horribly, horribly subverted.
• Babylon 5's backstory has The Battle of the Line, the last stand of humanity against the Minbari in the hope of getting as many refugees off Earth and into neutral territory as possible before the Minbari glassed the planet. Humanity suffered 90% casualties while inflicting minimal losses and were about to break when the Minbari, mysteriously, withdrew and sued for peace. Why they did it is a recurring mystery for the series' first season.
• Space: Above and Beyond was all about this trope: humanity banding together against the evil "chigs". In the pilot, the Secretary-General of the United Nations makes a very Churchillian speech about "the coming storm", then quotes Churchill directly (the Battle of Britain "Never has so much been owed by so many to so few" speech) after the Wildcards' first major victory.
• The Stargate Atlantis episode, "Poisoning the Well," subverts this when the SG team helps the Hoffans develop a treatment to make them unpalatable to the Wraith. When it is discovered that not only does also kill Wraith who attempt to feed, but also kills 50% of those treated, the SG team are horrified to find that the Hoffans consider that acceptable even if the Wraith would likely strike against them as a threat. When the SG team leave in disgust, they mention it is reminiscent of the Churchillian spirit of victory at any price, but they are forced to disagree.
• Discussed in Wizards vs. Aliens:
  Lexi: Still! We stand together at the end, Tom Clarke. Facing impossible odds, on a ruined spaceship, above a planet doomed to die. What a wonderful way to go!