Death Takes A Holiday - Television Tropes & Idioms

So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,

And death once dead, there's no more dying then.

Something happens to the personification of Death such that the very concept of death is suspended. Maybe Death just decides to quit, or maybe someone "captures" Death.

People don't die anymore.

At first this seems wonderful, but eventually the Aesop rears its (sometimes ugly) head. People injured beyond repair and in excruciating pain aren't given release, or the threat of overpopulation is mentioned, or people abuse their newfound immortality, or the writers just flat out say reality itself will collapse. The heroes either ask Death to return, or else free Death from whatever force has contained it. Occasionally, Death may do this to specific people as punishment for some crime against the natural order.

Examples

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This commercial shows a man surviving fatal incidents because death is busy enjoying a cold one.

Comic Books

Comic book example/subversion: In the first issue of The Sandman, a cabal of mystics attempt to capture Death and thus become immortal, but screw up and trap her brother Dream instead, leading to worldwide sleeping disorders. When he escapes captivity several decades later, he berates his captor (the son of his captor, at least) that he has no idea what kind of chaos would have resulted had they succeeded.
- Also played straight later on, though it isn't really Death that takes a holiday; it's Lucifer Morningstar, who literally closes Hell. Because of this, the universe is thrown out of whack, and everyone who's ever died (or at least died and gone to Hell) returns to walk the Earth and interact with the living. There are numerous examples of Nightmare Fuel, among which are the ghost of an undeveloped stillborn being cradled by its mother and a boy who's recently died watching his dead body.
  - On the other hand, it also led to The Dead Boy Detectives, so that's all right.
- Death did actually take a day off and live as a mortal during Death: The High Cost Of Living. Of course, the rules of mortality weren't distorted much during her absence.
This becomes a worldwide problem in the Marvel Comics series Paradise X, an unforeseen side effect of the destruction of Death at the end of Universe X. This also happens in the Secret Wars II Crisis Crossover, when the naive Beyonder kills Death because "nobody wants to die".
In an issue of Fables, Jack of the Tales traps Death in a sack to secure a roll in the sheets with a wealthy but terminally ill southern belle. Lets just say it makes breakfast awkward when it refuses to stay still after slaughter. When released, Death is actually grateful for his first day off, ever, and will forgive Jack on the condition that he gets a day trapped in the sack every year or so.

Film

The trope name comes from the title of a novel, that was later adapted into a film of the same name in 1934, starring Frederic March and Evelyn Venable, remade as a telemovie in 1971, and remade again in 1998 as Meet Joe Black.
- Meet Joe Black actually avoids the trope by having Death explain that for him, killing people is just like "making a decision while shaving in the morning". The film Death Takes A Holiday leaves the trope intact.

Folk Lore

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus captured Thanatos, the Greek personification of death, making this Older Than Dirt. (He only wanted to prevent his own death, but ended up preventing humans from dying at all.)
- His punishment for doing so was...a bit harsh.
Another folk tale variant is "Death in a Nut", in which a boy traps death to save his mother, but then can't get bacon, cabbages, etc. His mother explains that death is natural, and he releases the Reaper.
"Death gets stuck in a magic tree" is the idea behind the folktale Tia Miseria: an old woman traps Death in her pear tree and only agrees to release him when her oldest friend begs to be allowed to die of old age.
In one of the Appalachian "Jack Tales" (derived from English folktales), Jack, through magic, is able to see Death perched above the bed of a dying person and traps Death in a sack. Many, many years later, he meets a very old woman who complains of being so old and not able to die because some fool has Death trapped in a sack. Jack thinks about this, goes home and unties the sack and Death resumes his duties, "and Jack was just about the first one Death got, I reckon."

Literature

The trope name comes from the title of a novel that was adapted into a film of the same name in the 1930s, remade as a telemovie in the 1970s and remade again in 1998 as Meet Joe Black.
Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels has several:
- In Mort, Death takes on an apprentice (the titular Mort) and then leaves him in charge whilst and goes wandering around the Disc trying human pleasures such as fishing, partying, and getting drunk. Naturally, Hilarity Ensues...
- Reaper Man features Death being "laid off" by the Auditors, with quite a bit of chaos resulting, including a wizard coming back as a zombie, a rash of poltergeist activity, and, strangest of all, the city of Ankh-Morpork being threatened by a living, parasitic shopping mall. Again, Hilarity Ensues.
- In Soul Music, Death has run off to forget his troubles and his granddaughter Susan must fill in, much to her annoyance. Yet again, Hilarity Ensues.
- Death literally takes a holiday in the novel Hogfather. The titular character (Discworld's version of Santa Claus ) is incapacitated, and Death takes on his role in order to make sure Hogswatch proceeds as normal. However, he does take the time to supervise the death of a small creature at the bottom of the ocean. Hey, guess what ensues?
  - Mortality?
In Piers Anthony's On a Pale Horse, Death goes on strike in an attempt to combat Satan. However, he fully understands the consequences of this, as does everyone else.
- And Word Of God indicates that this novel is the (distant, assuredly) inspiration for Dead Like Me, mentioned below.
In Paul Robinson's book Instrument Of God, the people in the Welcoming Department quit seeing newly dead people ("Incomings"); this causes queue backups. If the queue backups get really bad, people on earth will stop dying, and someone is bound to notice.
This occurred in a short story this troper read a few times, years ago, but can't remember the name - only that it involved a bet, Death getting stuck in some sort of special tree he needed someone's permission to get out of, and that somehow, it led to the origin of all the world's "no-good gamblers.
- The "Death stuck in a magic tree" plot is the basis of the folktale Tia Miseria (an old woman traps Death in her pear tree, and only agrees to release him when her oldest friend begs to be allowed to die of old age), but gambling doesn't figure into the tale.
Ray Bradbury's short story The Scythe features a man who becomes the Grim Reaper. When he learns what he's been doing he refuses to work, only to find that if he doesn't take the souls of people who are supposed to die they end up in an unconscious limbo state between life and death.
On Borrowed Time, a 1937 novel that was made into a play and film. Gramps wishes that anyone that climbs up his apple tree will have to stay there until he lets them down. Death comes for Gramps. Gramps tricks Death up into the old apple tree where he must remain until Gramps lets him down.

Live Action TV

Xena Warrior Princess episodes "Death in Chains" (loosely based on the above myth) and "Mortal Beloved".
Charmed episode "Styx Feet Under".
"The Soldier and Death", one of the "Storyteller" segments on The Jim Henson Hour, features a man that keeps Death imprisoned. It was adapted from an old folk tale.
- This Troper believes it is based on the same story as the above mentioned "Jack Tales", though with a different ending
George is less than enthusiastic about her duties at the beginning of Dead Like Me and tries to shirk them... with highly negative consequences. Later in the first season however, as the basis for a Clip Show, the group gets a day off from reaping in the aptly-titled episode "Vacation". The beings that cause the "external circumstances" (accidents, mostly) which the group handles take a day off "every few years". Rube takes the opportunity to catch up on paperwork... from the last seventy or eighty years.
One episode of Night Court had this when a middle-aged man was held for examination when he claimed to be Death. After the usual Aesop, he was released and people resumed dying.
This is the premise of a Supernatural episode, also called "Death Takes A Holiday" where the boys stumble upon a village where no one is dying. In this case the village's Reapers were captured by a demon so one can be sacrificed in order to open one of the seals imprisoning Lucifer.
One of the, oh, three good stories ("One Night At Mercy") in the UPN Twilight Zone basically was this. Death (Jason Alexander. Yeah) took a holiday, and Doctor Main Character was thrilled. This was looking optimistic and hopeful right up until the point where a guy who was immolated was brought into the emergency room, still alive because Death had quit. Naturally, the good doctor found Death and convinced him to return to work, after seeing this, and gets taken as Death's first victim, as a result (he had been suffering "headaches" up until then, in reality the symptoms of an oncoming aneurysm).

Theater

In the Broadway play On Borrowed Time, the protagonist traps death so he won't die with no one left to take care of his orphaned grandson.

Video Games

In the Discworld novel Soul Music, Death has run off to forget his troubles and his granddaughter Susan must fill in, much to her annoyance. A similar plot occurs in the Discworld computer game Discworld II: Missing, Presumed...? (Mortality Bytes in the US).
How the 9th Touhou game Phantasmagoria of Flower View happens, basically. What makes this interesting is that it happens every 60 years, and some of the characters have no clue despite being older then that.
- Well, what actually happens every 60 years is a surge of death for whatever reason, which presumably requires the shinigami to work overtime. Komachi just happened to be slacking off this time around, leading to all the souls she wasn't escorting to the afterlife to start manifesting as flowers.
  - The atomic bombings of you-know-where and the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami?
  - A-bombs get way more press then they really deserve together they killed a bit over 200,000 people in total. Sounds bad, but it’s nothing but a drop in the bucket against the estimated 70 million the war claimed in total directly or indirectly. World War II was a slaughter on an almost ungodly scale, nothing since has held even a pale candle to it.
Played with in Jade Empire. With the shepherd of the dead incapacitated, people still die, but their souls don't go to the underworld to be reincarnated, causing ghosts to crop up EVERYWHERE, and eventually go crazy from not being able to find where to go.
Played with in the online game Adventure Quest, Death has taken on a policy of sending adventurers back in exchange for being owed a favor. The characters are all very aware of this effect, comment when Death fails to send back a soul he desires, and have, if I recall correctly, noted the immense number of favors Death has been accumulating but never called in. It has also been blamed for the lack of dragons as powerful as existed only 5 years earlier in the prequel game Dragonfable: once adventurers stopped dying, many more of them were able to get powerful enough to slay the rather rare most powerful dragons, leaving only the more common weaker ones.

Webcomics

Irregular Webcomic nearly had this: the Deaths did not go on holiday, but rather on strike for better wages. Their strike failed when they attempted to form a picket line across the infinite featureless plane they reside in, mainly because several Deaths just couldn't help collecting souls and broke the line. Also, they realized that the picket line was useless for blockade purposes, as the infinite featureless plane of death is (allegedly) infinite, while the picket line was finite in size.
Played with in JACK. The titular personification of Wrath and Death goes on vacation for two strips. Played for laughs, ironically, considering that this is one of the few comics that would blatantly show the horrors of no Death.

Western Animation

Gargoyles episode "Grief" when a man traps the god of death (Anubis) by summoning him and nothing is able to die until he leaves. Interestingly he got his happy ending, he trapped Anubis to try and force him to return his dead son, in the end he was happily reunited with his son, in the afterlife. A pretty sensible solution for a verse with an explicitly true afterlife.
A funny version appeared on Family Guy, as the first of many appearances by Death, as voiced by Norm MacDonald. (In future appearances, Adam Carolla played the role.)
The status of death in the universe of The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy may or may not be suspended while Grim is in bondage to the kids. He's shown reading an obituary page in one episode, lamenting that nobody has died for a while. In another episode, Mandy sternly orders him "No Grim Reaping!" If nobody can really die anymore, that would certainly explain the show's Negative Continuity. On the other hand, he's shown on several occasions to, in fact, be reaping. (In one episode where he and Billy switch roles, Billy ends up having to reap; the "Big Boogy Adventures" movie also showed Grim trying to reap someone.)
In a Simpsons' Halloween special, Homer kills Death after trying to save Bart from him. Lisa mentions that there is now a world without death, and then cue scenes around Springfield of people not dying when they should. Homer then puts on Death's cloak for fun and accidently becomes the new Grim Reaper (Possibly an Affectionate Parody slash Hallow'een version of The Santa Clause). Hilarity Ensues