Follow TV Tropes

Following

Made Of Iron / Live-Action TV

Go To



  • 24:
    • Jack Bauer shouldn't be able to walk by the halfway point of a typical season, and that's before you take sleep deprivation into account. By the time a season is over, it's not uncommon to have seen him bleed from the mouth, forehead or arm at least once. Here are some of the worst ones. If this doesn't prove how much of a badass Bauer is, then nothing will:
    • Day 1: Grazing bullet wound to the gut. Overall it's one of the more minor ones on this list. Also had to contend with Nina after this.
    • Day 2: Survives a plane crash in the first half of the season. Is later captured and tortured nearly to death.
    • Day 6: More torture (at the start of the season no less). Later on, Jack gets cracked ribs.
    • Day 7: Infected by a biological weapon. Quite possibly the worst one.
    • Day 8: Superficial knife wound early in the season. Serious stab wound in the final hours. Didn't seem too bad at first but as Jack walks away from the wall he's leaning on there is a very serious bloodstain on the wall. Shot in the final episode and even survives a serious car wreck before the end. Somewhat subverted there as all these injuries actually do keep him from successfully fighting off some hired killers out for his head and responsible for said car wreck, and it's only the intervention of his best friend that saves him.
  • The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.: The pilot episode features a comic relief Mook named Pete, who ends up getting shot. The producers liked the actor's performance so much that they brought him back, explaining that he had recovered after getting hit in the gut. Then they decided to just go with it and had him survive the likes of Chinese throwing star and pitchfork attacks.
  • Angel:
    • Wesely is the foremost example, he's been beaten bloody by vampires and demons, viciously tortured by Faith and was still able to stand immediately afterward, shot in the gut by a zombie cop and remained conscious for several hours and had his throat cut open but still survived. It's almost ludicrous that just getting stabbed was enough to kill Wes in the Final Battle, compared to what he withstood before.
    • Charles Gunn has survived things that would certainly kill even the supernatural characters. At one point in Season 5 he gets trapped in a Hell Dimension where he has to get his heart cut out god knows how many times, The Dragon Hamilton comes in and offers him a Deal with the Devil and Gunn like a true badass refuses instead choosing the torture as punishment for his actions i.e inadvertently getting Fred killed, even Hamilton is somewhat amazed. In the last episode Gunn fights an army of vampires and shows up later bleeding to death but still able to stand.
    Spike: Supposed to wear the red stuff on the inside Charlie Boy.
    • Cordelia is no slouch either, in Buffy she was impaled by a rebar and in Angel, she's been beaten, slashed and burned. There is a limit to how much she could take though, and Cordy had to become part-demon just so she could keep helping Angel with her link to the Powers That Be.
    • Lindsey is a effective villainous example as he's survived being beaten repeatedly by the the titular vampire and at one point had his whole hand cut off by him, but in the moment he looked more pissed off than pained.
  • Arrow: What Oliver Queen is able to survive sometimes stretches the limits of credibility. While he takes a lot of injuries in his normal Vigilante Man routine, the time he survived being impaled through the chest, kicked off a cliff, and lying shirtless in the snow for hours has to take the cake.
  • Banshee: The main character, Lucas Hood, has a fighting technique that seems to consist partly of "let my opponent wear himself out hitting me, then take him down". He keeps using it for four seasons straight. On at least two occasions he wins fights by making his opponents break their own knuckles punching him.
    Job, to Hood: "It's just a concussion, man. You get them every day. The inside of your head must look like a Jackson Pollock"
    • Hood is outdone by Chayton Littlestone, a man who walks off a bullet to the chest, only responds to Tasers when several are used at once, and at one point is woken up by having a knife stabbed into his leg and twisted 180 degrees, and responds by calmly conversing with the person stabbing him. His eventual death is appropriately Rasputinian.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • A very common trope. Justified for Buffy, Faith, and the assorted vampires and demons and other beasties, who are supernaturally tough and can take insane amounts of punishment without blinking. However, Xander, Willow, and especially Giles should be quadriplegics several times over by now.
    • Roden survives getting stabbed in the back with a pair of garden scissors.
  • Chuck has Fulcrum's sauvage agent Vincent Smith who was in direct order blown up, shot, poisoned, shot again, ran over by Chuck, knocked out by Sarah, and finally blown up again in an airstrike.
  • Criminal Minds:
    • In the two-parter "Lo-Fi"/"Mayhem", Aaron Hotchner gets blown up and is still together enough to attempt first aid on a severely wounded colleague and help get her to hospital even though no first responders will help him for fear of being the target of a second wave of attacks; he collapses briefly at the hospital, but is soon heard from fretfully demanding his clothes, after which he goes with the rest of his team to hunt down the bombers, even though he's still half-deaf from the first blast. The Reaper should have done a little research: if a bomb couldn't slow Hotch down for long, severe exhaustion plus a dozen or so stab wounds were never going to do more than keep him in bed for a few days...
      • This is made even more impressive by the fact that the series' tough guy, Derek Morgan, gets knocked unconscious twice, by The Reaper in "Omnivore" and by Billy Flynn in "Our Darkest Hour". If Hotch can do better than Morgan...
    • Morgan recovers later in the series. In "Supply and Demand", he gets tackled by a much bigger security guard and despite taking several big blows (and getting some in himself), after getting rescued by teammate David Rossi, Morgan shakes off the attack as nothing happened.
  • Deadliest Catch: A Real Life example with Freddy Maughtai, deckhand aboard the Wizard. It's opilio crab season — February on the Bering Sea when the water is literally freezing cold. The crew was having trouble tying line onto a dead walrus. Freddy jumps into the water after stripping to his skivvies. Most people would go hypothermic within moments of doing that. He was in the water for over a full minute, and he wasn't even shivering when he was pulled out. That is a level of toughness you don't see even among most crabbers, and a remarkable tolerance for the cold that you certainly wouldn't expect from someone who hails from the South Pacific.
  • Doctor Who:
    • The companions, almost all of whom are human, are put through the physical and emotional wringer nearly every single time they step out of the TARDIS, yet are perfectly fine the moment they step back in. The Doctor himself partially justifies this by being a Sufficiently Advanced Alien, but considering the things he's been through, it's amazing he can still walk.
    • "The End of Time": Never mind the fatal radiation poisoning that actually did it, the fall from a spaceship through a glass window and straight into the ground should have had the Doctor ready for his next regeneration (i.e. kill him).
    • Clara Oswin Oswald, one of the "echoes" of Clara Oswald, manages to be revived despite falling thousands of feet to earth from a cloud. Yes, she is actually supposed to be dead before future tech brings her back, but the fact she doesn't resemble a pizza suggests this trope is in force.
  • Dollhouse: Played somewhat inconsistently. Sometimes, people go down really fast. Other times, well, watch the fight between Boyd and Ballard (particularly the part where one bashes the other's head with a rock).
  • Fargo: The Gerhardt crime family in Season 2 seem to be this, as many of their family members are able to take an obscene amount of damage. Notable examples include Rye being able to survive getting hit by a car head-on, and Bear surviving two gunshots to the chest and one to the head.
  • Farscape:
    • The series has an entire race of Made of Iron's, the Scarrans. To drop just one takes a whole lot of firepower: God help you if you run into more than one of them.
    • Ditto Scorpius: not only is he half-Scarran, but he also wears body armour for anything his body can't deal with. Add to that his own impressive willpower, and he's damn near unstoppable. And even if it looks like you've somehow managed to kill him, well, chances are he planned ahead enough to be back again in a fortnight. Although there is his coolant system, which has been attacked by both Crichton (who sabotaged it) and Emperor Staleek (who tore the whole mechanism out of Scorpy's skull with his bare hands). To their mutual annoyance, Scorpius survived both.
  • Firefly: Malcolm Reynolds can take insane amounts of damage; in the episode "War Stories" he gets tortured to death, only to be revived and then get up, stick the torturer with his own weapon, and start beating up the Big Bad. His actor Nathan Fillion comments on this in a featurette, saying he based the way Mal fights on Indiana Jones: You can tell he is seriously hurting, but he just shrugs it off and keeps coming.
  • Forever: Henry is injured just as easily as anyone else, and only heals naturally or when he dies and vanishes, but he occasionally pushes through injuries that should have been incapacitating.
    • In the pilot, after getting shot, Jo is left barely conscious. Henry gets shot, and is able to not only get up, but charge the killer and tackle him hard enough to break a railing and send them both over the edge of the building doing so.
    • In "The Frustrating Thing About Psychopaths" Henry is stabbed from behind by the killer, puncturing his lung and vena cava, and he's left on the front steps with the blade still going all the way through him, bleeding to death internally. Henry can't reach the hilt enough to remove the blade or even stabilize it, but he struggles to his feet and staggers inside and down a hallway to attack the killer, who is in the middle of strangling the Frenchman. In the ensuing struggle, Henry is thrown back against a cabinet, then flung sideways across a door such that the doorframe slams into the hilt sideways, presumably swinging the blade through his thorax even further, but even that doesn't stop Henry. Only when they both tumble down a flight of stairs is Henry taken out of the action, by a broken neck.
  • Fringe: If there's anything that will take Olivia Dunham down for more than about half an episode, some very determined people haven't found it yet. Although when she was in a car accident caused by William Bell pulling her into the Alternate Universe, she did take a few episodes to recover fully, even needing to walk with a cane for awhile.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • Sandor Clegane will not be put down whether it be being burned stabbed repeatedly or getting his eyes gouged by his zombified brother. He also walked off the wound that put him down in the books.
    • Jon Snow has been beaten bloody, stabbed multiple times, got his head smashed on an anvil, and in the Battle of the Bastards he survives getting trampled by an army of allies and enemies and comes out dirty and bloody but no worse for wear.
    • Arya has survived more things than a girl her size reasonably should, at one point she's shanked repeatedly in the side and gets better. At one point Arya gets back up from a strong kick to the chest from Brienne which shocks and impresses the latter immensely.
    • A mountain clansman hits Rodrik Cassel with a weapon. He shrugs off the wound and kills his attacker, telling Catelyn he'll be okay.
    • Euron's stamina and pain threshold are as insane as he is. During the raid on Dany's fleet, he takes dozens of serious hits from Yara and the Sand Snakes, but doesn't even seem to do so much as acknowledge them.
  • GARO:
  • Gotham:
    • Jim Gordon. At least twice in the series, he's been riddled with gunshot wounds, some to the abdomen, and he still has enough fire to tell his attackers to go to hell. Even though he sometimes bears visible injuries over consecutive episodes, he's always back up on his feet by the next one, no matter what was done to him previously.
    • Alfred. The guy's been stabbed at least once a season, and even tortured a few times, but he never stops being a badass Battle Butler. It takes Bane breaking his back to be a Career-Ending Injury, and that's still impressive he even survived.
    • Penguin might be the show's outstanding example; Joker Immunity may as well be called Penguin Immunity when it comes to this series. He endures an astonishing amount of physical abuse – stabbed, electrocuted, leg shattered by a bat, shot at least four times - once even straight through the gut at point-blank range - and he just keeps limping stubbornly through it all. The only injury that seems to give him any lasting trouble is his leg, which he deals with by using a cane and later a brace.
    • Fish Mooney. The woman can sustain a lot of damage - from being able to stand for a few seconds with a victorious smile after scooping out her own eye, to being shot in the stomach mid-taking off in a chopper and still being able to operate it. In the season finale, she's shot across the waist and still manages to stand her ground before being pushed off the building by Cobblepot.
  • Hannibal: Series creator Bryan explicity compared Chilton to Kenny from South Park. While Chilton somehow manages to recover looking relatively back to normal, he still suffers the consequences of his injuries. His vivisection leaves him down a kidney, and toting a cane to help with his walking. Being forced to go vegetarian might not be such a bad thing though, considering who this series is about.
    • Season 2 has Chilton being framed for Hannibal's serial killings and he gets shot in the face by an FBI trainee Hannibal abducted and brainwashed using Chilton's voice.
    • Season 3 proves even worse. Chilton's prideful ego and his misguided trust in Will and the FBI get the better of him when he's kidnapped by a killer he publicly besmirched with Will. Francis glues Chilton to a wheelchair, bites off his lips, douses him with gasoline and sets him ablaze the same way Freddie Lounds appeared to be in Season 2.
      • Also worth taking into account that Hannibal has been in one-on-one fights with Tobias, Jack, and Mason's Italian goons, was cut open and almost hung by Matthew Brown, is branded with a hot iron and stabbed with little to no facial recognition of pain, and fights Francis Dolerhyde with Will to the death even after he had been shot in the stomach.
  • House: To provide just one example, after the events of "House's Head"/"Wilson's Heart", House should either be dead or suffering serious brain damage by now.
  • iCarly: Freddie endures what sounds like a brutal beating from Sam in the episode "iMeet Fred", being hit hard enough with a tennis racket to cause it to break. A blow of such severity to the head (say from Sam wanting to knock some sense into him) would likely result in loss of consciousness, a concussion, and severe bleeding from cranial lacerations. Striking any part of the body that severely would be intensely painful and would result in definite physical trauma, and likely broken bones. However, at the end of this, Freddy walks out looking somewhat mussed and scared, a little bruised but no worse for wear. Moments later Sam pushes him out of a tree house, and yet he is still able to actively take part in making Fred videos afterward.
  • Charlie from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is considered to be "nearly indestructable" by his friends, especially when it comes to eating. This is justified, as, among other things, Charlie has literally been shot in the headnote  with no repercussions.
    • Let's not forget Agent Jack Bauer, the cat that Dennis and Frank bought at the junkyard with the police car in the episode "Bums: Making a Mess All Over the City", where the junkyard seller claimed the cat jumped through barbed wire into a vat of hot tar and survived, and was said to have been born in a pool of gasoline on a piece of rusty scrap metal. At the end of the episode, the cat jumped into the cop car, which has been doused in gasoline from the inside with a molotov cocktail thrown in there by Charlie, the car explodes and the cat jumps out virtually unscathed.
    • Mac's dog, Poppins, is seemingly immortal despite being ridiculously old and hangs out in the streets and eats trash most of the time. He's named Poppins because one of his eye sometimes just almost pops out and Mac has to jam it back in.
  • Kamen Rider: These shows are just as bad. Just ask Kamen Rider Ichigo, Nigo and Riderman, who survived nuclear explosions to the face and come back just in time to aid other Riders! Then there's Kamen Rider Fourze, who, in his cameo in a Kamen Rider OOO movie, made his arrival by crash landing from low orbit HEAD-FIRST, and just hopped up from the ground, dusted himself off and went to aid OOO. All he got out of that was a mild headache.
  • Tati on Los Espookys describes herself as "indestructible", which is why her job in the Los Espookys business is that of a test dummy.
  • The Mandalorian: The eponymous character himself aka Din Djarin is easily one of the toughest non-Force sensitive humans in the Star Wars universe. Mando tanks all manner of punishment throughout the series (helped by his Beskar armour) including getting electrocuted and falling from a Sand Crawler, getting thrashed by a Mudhorn (alien Rhino), getting a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from a Devaronian and much later a Dark Trooper. The only thing that’s succeeded in mortally wounding Mando is Big Bad Moff Gideon shooting a turret generator that blew up in Mando’s face, requiring IG-11 to give him first aid to save his life. Though soon after that Mando is healthy enough to use his Jet Pack and bring down Gideon in his TIE Fighter. Possibly Hand Waved, given how effective the medicine is in Star Wars.
    • Mando’s Cool Starship the Razor Crest is just as durable as its pilot. It recovers from getting pulled apart for parts, shot by X-Wings and even getting smashed by a Giant Spider on a ice planet isn’t enough to stop the Razor Crest from “limping” to another planet for repairs. It takes a Orbital Bombardment from a Star Destroyer to destroy the Razor Crest completely.
  • Married... with Children: The main characters demonstrate this: Marcy has been electrocuted, Kelly been bitten by deadly poisonous insects, Bud suffered various injuries in his futile attempts at romance, and Al suffering everything from electrocution to shooting himself in the foot to setting himself on fire to industrial accidents while trying to build a workbench with Jefferson to repeatedly falling off the roof with Jefferson and his other buddies while trying to install a satellite dish on the roof.
  • Merlin (2008): There's a debate in the fandom whether or not Merlin is immortal like his mythological counterpart. Thus far in the show, he has taken a fireball to the chest and got up unscathed, gotten hit by a freezing cold spirit that had killed all previous victims and disabled his magic (although he was dying that time and had to be saved by brook spirits)note , and had a mace slice across his chest that most likely left a huge, open hole, and he still had enough energy to carry on a conversation with few winces.
  • Mr. Robot: Elliot survives multiple injuries throughout the series, which could've otherwise killed him. These include jumping out of the window, being beaten to a pulp, getting shot in the stomach and critically wounded as a result, heroin overdose and getting stuck in a power plant being destroyed.
  • Ms. Marvel (2022): Given that the first episode mostly happens before anyone has superpowers, and that she is clearly shown as able to be hurt, it is remarkable that Kamala Khan does not get hurt falling out of her window. It also strains credulity that Zoe Zimmer is not pulverized by the giant replica Mjolnir swinging across the convention floor.
  • The Muppet Show: Beaker regularly gets electrocuted, set on fire, has body parts fall off (his nose once, and his hair twice), and other such comedic accidents, but every time, he survives it and comes back without a scratch on him. On one occasion, he survived being turned into a ghost.
  • NCIS: Los Angeles: Averted Trope in the episode "Personal", Marty Deeks is shot at the beginning of the ep and while he does manage to struggle out of his hospital bed near the end, he's bleeding through his bandages, and collapses once the danger is past.
  • Neighbours: Paul freaking Robinson. He's probably had more attempts on his life than any other character in Soap Opera history, and he just refuses to die. He has survived, in chronological order: getting shot by his wife; falling off a cliff (though he did lose a leg after that one); his plane being blown up by a bomb and crashing into the sea, whereupon he nearly drowned; being strangled by Harold Bishop (who lost his son and granddaughter in the aforementioned plane crash); being trapped in a collapsing mineshaft; getting shot again (he was wearing a Bulletproof Vest that time); a brain tumour (whose removal gave him Laser-Guided Amnesia); being pushed off a roof; having his car struck by sizeable debris during a tornado; being given chemotherapy for a cancer he didn't actually have (which gave him pneumonia); crashing his car into a tree; getting run over; and getting beaten up while in prison. That's thirteen near-death experiences, and he's still standing.
  • Once Upon a Time: Red Riding Hood, of all people, comes off like this in her Day in the Limelight episode: her grandmother shoots her with a crossbow while Red is in wolf form, and it takes her down long enough for Granny and Snow to put the red cloak that keeps her human over her. Once she's back in human form, she isn't injured at all, even though she was clearly shot.
  • Person of Interest: Reese and Shaw, both former operatives for the U.S. government, take a fair amount of punishment throughout the series. For instance, Reese is dying from an injury sustained in crashing a vehicle to take down an enemy. He then proceeds to mow down a building full of U.S. Marshalls to get the ringleader. While dying from his wounds. Shaw is near-fatally shot, then proceeds to give herself emergency medical care (digging out the bullet) with only alcohol for anesthetic.
  • Power Rangers:
    • Commander Doggie "Boss" Kruger in Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger was a bit inconsistent with this trope: During his first on-screen brush with death, he was shot in the chest and survived with nary a scratch (though he was wearing a Bulletproof Vest); much later, he attempts to stop an old friend of his gone mad and was hurt enough (even through his Dekamaster armor) to need a few days in bandaged hospital care. During the season finale, however, he's not only beaten and slashed with swords repeatedly (without his Dekamaster armor on) but slammed through at least three walls, one of which he was stuck in for a half-second, but this only rendered him unconscious for a little while with little more than battle fatigue and a few somewhat minor scrapes.
    • His counterpart in Power Rangers S.P.D. was even tougher: the finale had him and his wife drop several stories from an exploding alien Humongous Mecha, and still have enough fight left in him for one final match with the series' Disc-One Final Boss. And his first onscreen brush with death was in an episode that was nearly a Shot-for-Shot Remake of the original... minus the part where there was a vest. The old dog is just that tough.
      Doggie: *waking up just as they're discussing how bad his wounds are* "Who are you calling an old dog?"
    • While all series are guilty of this to some extent, Time Force is particularly egregious with this. The red ranger repeatedly fell from heights that should have shattered him. One episode, in particular, stands out: the red ranger was recruited to be a stuntman for a scene where not only he's cut with real swords, but he falls at least five stories onto concrete after the cushion is taken out from under him. He's "lucky to be in one piece" indeed.
    • The Quantum Ranger also showed this in one scene where he's shot in the arm as he falls several stories off a bridge into a river. Plus there is a climactic scene where he and the red ranger swing out through a window, fall several stories out of clocktower, and manage to morph and land on their air speeders with nary a scratch. In real life, these two guys should have been dead several times over, but all is forgiven because of the Rule of Cool (and that last stunt, in particular, was pretty damn cool).
    • Ninja Storm's Grand Finale may be the worst offender: The Big Bad has absorbed all of the Rangers' powers, so they, as civilians, must fight a much, much, much stronger version of their foe. Somehow, being blasted full-on is shrugged off, less than Only a Flesh Wound.
    • Heck, there are plenty of times when unmorphed Rangers take abuse they shouldn't be able to withstand. For example, in Episode 13 of Wild Force, Taylor gets distracted by Zen-Aku's hold on Princess Shayla, leaving her back unmorphed and unprotected from the motorcycle org. Said org fires two shots at her, which explode very close around her, knocking her to the ground. She's sitting on the ground "injured" for less than five minutes (or until the other Rangers show up), and is then walking around is if she's completely unharmed, only holding her arm in a way one does when they accidentally walk into a door. You're awesome, Taylor, but there's no way you should've healed that quickly.
  • The Purge: Being stabbed in the eye, shot in the chest while wearing a bulletproof vest and kneecapped have little effect on Angry White Man Joe in the first season finale, whereas in real life most people would be incapacitated by the pain.
  • Red Dwarf:
    • Played for Laughs among the crew who are all Iron Butt Monkeys. Justified with Kryten and Rimmer in later series with the former being a Mechanoid and the latter being made of Hard Light but Lister and Cat have survived things that would reasonably kill any normal person. Lister in particular often gets sent flying by explosions, electrocuted, smacked into walls and clobbered by the Villain of the Week, Rimmer at one point fondly recounts the time Lister fell into the cargo bay and broke his spine in three places. Out-of-Universe Lister’s actor Craig Charles was subjected to all kinds of hurt as he did all his own stunts in the show, and almost drowned during the filming of “Backwards”.
    • More traditionally badass example with Ace Rimmer who gets his arm broken while landing his ship but uses said arm to support Lister’s entire weight and pull him up (in the middle of a storm) and only takes a moment to briefly faint or in his words “Do something a bit sissy”. Later we see Ace casually sew his arm up with the only painkiller being a bottle of alcohol at his side. In later episode, Ace gets shot in the chest and after wincing, complains that it was his best top subverted though as it turns out he’s a Hard Light hologram and the bullet did do damage his light bee and is slowly killing him.
    • Starbug unlike other fictional spaceships has no Deflector Shields and crashes, over and over again but always manages to fly again. Well at least until Season 8 where it gets destroyed for real... ironically by Red Dwarf.
  • Revolution: Charlie, in episode 7 where she literally shrugs off being beaten into unconsciousness twice and getting branded, to boot and comes back swinging. Episode 9 tops this by having Charlie Matheson shot in the side of her head and hitting her head on concrete. Even though she has a near death experience, all she has to do is wake up from it, get back on her feet and she is as fit as a fiddle.
  • Rizzoli & Isles: Detective Jane Rizzoli jumps off a bridge in order to save the Driven to Suicide suspect who had just fallen off, not two seconds after she talked him out of jumping (she'd found proof he was being framed). The next episode, they are rescued and aside from some mild hypothermia, are perfectly fine. Even if the fall wasn't enough to kill them, it's highly unlikely that they wouldn't have sustained some considerable injury.
  • Smallville:
    • Every single character who isn't Clark suffers from this, easily recovering from beatings, gunshot wounds, and blows to the head. Jason Teague, The Dragon from Season 4 might be the best example though. He's shot by Lionel Luthor and falls off of a cliff and into a waterfall. He somehow recovers enough to arrive at the Kent farmhouse, take them hostage, and then doesn't go down until he's been hit by a meteor. Who'd he think he was, the Terminator?
    • Chloe Sullivan once took a Super-Strength punch from Clark directly to the face and is completely unscathed.
    • Lana was once beaten up by Zod and is up and about in no time.
    • Lois once had her and her car thrown high into the sky then crash down courtesy of a very jealous Maxima. She barely had a scratch on her.
    • Yes, he spent a few weeks in the hospital, but Jimmy Olsen still looks pretty good for someone who has been mauled in the chest by freaking Doomsday.
    • Chloe was once knocked down and showered by shattered glass, which doesn't leave a single scratch on her. The odd thing is, Oliver is covered in small cuts in the same scene.
    • A special mention also goes to Tess, who was voluntarily killed by a defibrillator and then brought back to life with atropine. She wakes up, sits up, looks weak for about five seconds, and then walks out of the room as if she wasn't dead ten seconds earlier.
    • Slade is probably the very worse case. He took a couple of hits from Hawkman's mace and somehow survives not one, but two huge explosions. The first one took one eye. The second one doesn't seem to even scratch him. Lampshaded on the second occasion — a possible explanation might be that he is under the influence of Darkseid.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series: In several occasions with Spock, whose Vulcan physiology was used as a kind of armour. For example, in the Season 2 episode "The Apple" he is shot full of poisoned thorns and later struck full on by a bolt of lightning, both of which killed Redshirts instantly. Not justified, as on many other occasions he is shown to be fairly vulnerable.
    • Kirk, frequently in TOS gets brutalised by the villain or monster of the week but besides the Clothing Damage, a few bruises and bloody lip can always stand up afterwards.
    • Constitution-class starships. They simply cannot be killed. Even if something kills every member of their crews, the ships themselves almost always survive — usually intact enough to be brought back into fighting form within a few hours. The various series and films repeatedly demonstrated that an attacking vessel can pound away at their unshielded hulls for minutes at a time, and never really manage to take them out of the fight. The starship Constellation once took a hit from a planet buster, which blasted huge chunks of the ship into scrap, but she still managed to provide fire support for Enterprise after Scotty got his hands on her.
  • Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation had his moments as well, with his Klingon physiology allowing him to take significantly more of a pounding than his human crewmates could. (It's not all external, either; one episode reveals that Klingons have redundant organs to help them survive injuries.) Justified with Data since he isn't a biological life form, making him an almost literal version of the trope.
  • Also justified for Odo in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, since, as a changeling, he doesn't have a normal body with bones and organs. When he's briefly forced into one in Season 5, one of the things he has to adapt to is that he's a lot more vulnerable to injury.
    Odo: "Solid." I don't know why my people use that term. Humanoid bodies are so fragile.
  • Despite being relatively grounded Stranger Things has a bit of this.
    • Hopper gets the piss beaten out of him several times (especially in Season 3 when he's up against an Implacable Man) but it's never enough to put him down.
    • Jonathan gets knocked around by the Demogorgon and in Season 3 gets brutally beaten by the Flayed Tom Halloway by still manages to survive and even kill Tom.
    • Steve also gets the shit kicked out of him many times, the impressive example being when those wacky Russians subject him to prolonged physical Cold-Blooded Torture and instead of falling unconscious Steve comes back to senses shortly after.
    • Eleven shows she's not quite a Squishy Wizard at times like when she gets a Flayed parasite crawling around in her leg and in pure Nausea Fuel uses her Mind over Matter powers to rip the creature out of her skin. She remains conscious and is able to stand afterward.
    • Grigori the aforementioned Implacable Man is truly ridiculous when it comes to this trope (not surprising since he's a Shout-Out to The Terminator) not matter what Hopper throws at him he just won't die. At one point he hits his head on the spinning mechanism of Hadron Collider-looking device at the end and is only stunned, Hopper has to push him into the rotors to kill him for real.
  • Supernatural: In "Born Under a Bad Sign", Dean got pistol-whipped, shot in the shoulder (and later had a thumb digging into his bullet wound. Ouch), nearly got beaten to death and was left to drown in icy water. And after all that, he still manages to drive? The boy is super-human!
  • Super Sentai:
    • This show is of course just as bad, if not worse. Unmorphed Rangers and bystanders are often seen simply sent flying by explosions and landing without a scratch, severe cuts heal far faster than they ought without special healing tech, etc.
    • Special mention goes to Captain Marvelous of Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger and Rookie Red Ranger Kiryuu Daigo of Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger. These two Red Rangers show early on just how much they live this trope. To put it in perspective, Marvelous used his own body to intercept an attack that would have hit Joe. This act of Taking the Bullet knocked Marvelous out of his henshin, but he still was able to get in a shot from his Gokai Gun on Warz Gil before he had to be taken off of the battlefield, and in the next episode he was ready for more action even though it was pointed out by the others that he hadn't finished recovering yet. And Daigo takes the level of durability that Marvelous demonstrated in the above example up to eleven by Taking the Bullet for Torin without even morphing first, but at best the attack he took only gave him some Clothing Damage. If that's not Made of Iron, this troper doesn't know what is.
  • Trailer Park Boys: Ricky has been repeatedly shot, often by accident, although always in a non-vital area. The worst damage he usually suffers is to his pride.
  • The Umbrella Academy:
    • Among the Hargreeves siblings: Five, Diego and Luther can take punishment that their sisters Allison and Vanya and other brother Klaus cannot. Five despite having the body of a young teenager survives getting shot in the side and doesn’t succumb to blood loss until later on, in Season 2 he gets buried under a pile of bricks and gets up again. Diego gets all manner of injuries including stabbed in the chest, strangled with garrotte wire and has a tractor fall on his leg but none of it is enough to kill him. Luther tanks a chandelier falling on him, letting himself get beaten bloody by an opponent boxer until he falls unconscious and in the Bad Future he withstands a missile getting launched into his back, though this may overlap with Super-Toughness.
    • The Quirky Mini Boss Squad Hazel and Cha-Cha or the Swedes in Season 2 are definitely Made of Iron too with the amount of damage they receive. The Swedes in particular shrug off getting knives in the foot, thrown through windows and getting an eye gouged out.
  • Vikings: Bjorn Ragnarsson receives the nickname "Ironsides" because he survived a long battle without a single injury despite always being in the thick of fighting. The nature of the fighting meant that even the most badass and experienced warriors ended up with some injuries but Bjorn did not have a single scratch on him. When Bjorn is nearly killed in a battle during the next season, however, he half-jokingly reprimands his father for having given him the nickname, saying that it was Tempting Fate.
  • The Walking Dead (2010): Rick has feet Made of Iron. He hobbles out of a hospital loading dock down metal mesh work stairs, wanders around a city, and rides a bike (pedals have some pretty big protrusions and ridges for traction) all completely barefoot. Granted, he probably has other things on his mind, but still... ow.
  • Walker, Texas Ranger: The prototype soldier, a muscle man and enforcer of a supremacist bent on ruling the world by the end of the episode "Warriors." The soldier — whom the supremacist intends to clone thousands of copies of — is genetically enhanced, thanks to a researcher being forced to do so at gunpoint (she had created a quick-heal formula to help the ill and injured). The soldier's invulnerability is clear when Walker and Trivette are unable to so much as even make him flinch during their early encounters ... not even a machine gun full of bullets or Walker's roundhouse kick can beat the soldier. (Eventually, Walker does beat the man-mountain soldier, thanks to some help from the researcher, a flaming torch and a little gasoline.)
  • The Witcher of course has Geralt of Rivia who can endure: multiple stab wounds, bites from monsters, getting smashed through stone, and bounce back from magic attacks. However, worth nothing unlike the games where Geralt has healing potions at ready, TV Geralt has no such luxuries and ends up bloodied at end of almost every fight to the point of being bedridden and bandaged. He's also Covered in Scars as one prostitute notes. Ironically, the other Witchers we see in the series (with the exceptions of Vesemir, Lambert and Coën), die pretty easily.
    • Actually, a lot of characters besides Geralt seem to be Made of Iron, recovering from being stabbed, shot with arrows, struck by lightning, and having their spines straightened.
  • Wonder Woman (1975): Major Steve Trevor is punched, struck, clubbed over the head, and knocked unconscious so many times that the time he'd have to spend in a hospital recovering from just the blows to his head would far outstrip all of World War II. For example, in "Wonder Woman meets Baroness von Gunther", Steve is knocked out in a barn with a beam so large that it was a significant demonstration of Wonder Woman's strength that she could lift it off of him and toss it away. That's right, this massive beam was still crushing the back of his neck when Wonder Woman arrived but he recovered without a problem.
  • The Young Ones:
    • At one point, Vyvyan sticks his head out a train window, which leads to Off with His Head!. His reaction? His body stops the train and walks out to get his body while his head yells at him for taking too long. Another time, he eats a television set to hide it from the bill collector, only for it to be plugged in and him to be electrocuted. Result: minor shock.
    • Mike too. One episode had him nail his legs to the table, and his only response was some wincing as if he stubbed his toe.
    • All four boys are this when at the end of one episode the house explodes, and the credits show them all standing in the middle of the wreckage, with ash and astonished looks on their faces.


Top