Descent into Limbo by Andrea Mantegna note depicting the Ur-Example
If you've lost all your hope, if you've lost all your faith
I know you can be cared for and I know you can be safe
I know you can be cared for and I know you can be safe
— Johnny Cash, "Down There by the Train"
The heroes have won! The villain of the story is finally killed and gets plummeted headfirst into Hell.
Except... one can't help but feel a bit sorry for them. Maybe they were Affably Evil and sympathetic in the eyes of the audience or even the characters. Maybe they were Driven to Villainy, having never known real kindness in their life. Or maybe their death was a Heel–Face Door-Slam and they could have eventually turned good. Whatever the case, the villain doesn't seem to deserve to rot in a fire pit for ever and ever.
Well, fear not! As it turns out, their soul still has a chance. Usually it's somebody on Earth and/or in Heaven who helps with the rescue of the damned character via prayers and/or good deeds, but occasionally, if the soul in Hell isn't completely incapacitated, they can work to save themselves.
Sister trope to Rescued from the Underworld and Escaped from Hell, which are about the dead coming back to the world of the living. These tropes can overlap with this one, if, for instance, the damned person is brought back to life and advised to reform to achieve Heaven.
Rerouted from Heaven can precede this trope, but it's not a rule: while Rerouted from Heaven deals exclusively with heroic characters who have no reason to land in Hell in the first place, this trope encompasses characters who are in Hell for a reason as they have done things to deserve punishment.
As this trope undoes the Moral Event Horizon (or declares it to not have existed in the first place), it's way more often implied or downplayed than fully shown onscreen, especially in works that usually state there is such a horizon. It's not talked about openly in works that have both tropes - curiously enough less to avoid the endless philosophical quagmire that effectively nixing a once established moral event horizon would open up: but rather as the tropes contradict one another this one is glossed over much as someone grown-up who'd lost control of their bodily functions needing help with the cleanup wouldn't be talked about, and Moral Event Horizon is left in full force generally while still playing this trope for once.
Put another way: if you want to stay in the relativistic physics' picture of the (moral) event horizon, this trope would be the equivalent of quantum physics' wave-mechanical tunneling - and the two tropes are just as difficult to reconcile as their physics model counterparts.
Compare Purgatory and Limbo, Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, Circles of Hell (if the rescue is done gradually, the soul can move through different circles), To Hell and Back (can be played straight for the person doing the rescue). Contrast Defector from Paradise, Hell Seeker, Only One Afterlife.
As it is a Death Trope and often an Ending Trope, expect unmarked spoilers.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- In The Sandman (1989), the "Seasons of Mist" arc sees Dream travelling to Hell in order to free Nuada, whom he banished there thousands of years earlier when she spurned his advances. Unfortunately, he happens to arrive at a time when Lucifer has grown tired of ruling Hell, and thus before he can free Nuada, he suddenly finds himself forced to arrange the handover of Hell to a new ruler. In the end, Nuada is finally freed, and he arranges for her to be reborn in a new life.
- In Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose, Hell is presented as just a construct for guilt-ridden Christians to punish themselves for their perceived failings in life, and thus when Jon the Skeleton Man ventures down there to rescue Crypt Chick, he only has to convince her that she doesn't deserve to be in Hell in order to gain her release.
Fan Works
- In And the Giant Awoke, wicked souls go to Ironic Hell (Littlefinger is tortured by his victims, Cersei becomes a warrior who fights and gets killed over and over again, Robert, who used and abandoned his lovers, becomes a constantly pregnant woman). However, these punishments are meant to make the people see the error of their ways. If they do, they get a chance to go to a better place.
- In A Better Man, Vernon Dursley is killed by a Death Eater and ends up in Hell. However, as Harry Potter says he wishes his uncle had been a better man, Vernon's soul is sent back in time for a second chance. The story ends with Vernon, a much better man than in the original timeline, getting killed by a Death Eater and going to Heaven.
- There is an entire Fandom-Specific Plot in A Christmas Carol fandom that centres on freeing the chained soul of Jacob Marley, with fanfics such as Marley's Carol
ending with him being saved.
- Downplayed in The Fairy Sapphire. It's not a full deliverance, but Lady Marguerite's wicked mother had just enough goodness in her to have a Heel Realization when she saw her saintly daughter ascend towards the heavenly ancestors' abode. It saved her from being damned to eternally fall into an abyss, and she was able to climb to the abode herself. She still looks ugly and sickly and is forced to drink bitter water as punishment for being an Abusive Parents case, but at least she now lives in a lovely vale with beautiful houses with her daughter by her side.
Films — Animated
- In All Dogs Go to Heaven, it was constantly said that due to Charlie Barkin winding his life watch back up, he "could never come back" to Heaven, and as such, had to keep the watch safe at all times. During the climax, Charlie is forced to choose between saving Ann Marie or keeping his watching from falling into the water. He chooses to get Marie to safety before going back for his watch, but failed to reach it before it filled with water and its gears stopped working. As a result, his soul is condemned, and returns to Marie's house to say good bye one last time before his eternal torment. However, the devil dog is then shooed away by the whippet angel, who tells Charlie that his Heroic Sacrifice to save Marie has redeemed himself and he's allowed back into Heaven.
Films — Live-Action
- Constantine (2005) has the title character enter into negotiations with the Devil towards the end of the film, in order to, among other things, get the soul of a woman condemned to hell for the sin of suicide permitted to enter heaven. This act of self-sacrifice ends up saving his own soul (he was on heaven's chopping block for a suicide attempt in his youth, and he committed another one to engage in said deal). Unfortunately, Satan, being a sore loser, brings him back to life and cures his lung cancer so that he'll have another chance to mess up.
- The Prophecy: Gabriel is taken to hell, then in the sequel is kicked out because even Lucifer can't stand him. He is then made human, and finally, after atoning, restored to being an angel and allowed to return to heaven.
- In What Dreams May Come, the deceased protagonist Chris learns his wife Annie is in Hell after committing suicide; it's explained that she didn't go to Hell because what she did was 'sinful', but because those who die in a state of extreme suffering and despair tend to unintentionally create horrible afterlives for themselves. Chris sets out to rescue her from Hell even though he's told it probably won't work. Annie appears too far gone to be able to leave Hell, but when Chris says he will stay with her forever regardless, her desire to save him allows them to both return to Heaven.
Literature
- Attempted in The Fable of an Onion, a Nested Story in The Brothers Karamazov. A wicked woman is sent to a lake of fire after death, but her Guardian Angel remembers that she has one good deed to her name: she gave an onion to a beggar. God allows the angel to pull the woman out using that onion: if the latter doesn't break, she can go to Heaven. The angel brings the onion to the lake, gives it to the woman, and starts pulling her out, but then the other sinners in the lake grab at her legs, hoping to get out as well. The woman pushes them away, saying it's her onion and it's she who's being rescued, and the onion immediately breaks.
- Retold by Ryunosuke Akutagawa as The Spider's Thread, with the good deed now being sparing a spider and its thread being used as the means of pulling the sinner from hell. The sinner is just as selfish, however, so the result is the same.
- The parable is also mentioned in When Mystical Creatures Attack! by Kathleen Founds, with one of the narrators describing the story (albeit with the onion replaced with a turnip) in relation to her childhood, wondering if her father could make his way out of hell by his small kindnesses, while also mentioning that he would probably be one of the people to kick at the others. The last chapter of the book has a possibly-symbolic scene where she herself is dragged from hell via an apple she once gave her hungry student, and allows everyone in hell, including Lucifer himself, to be brought to heaven with her.
- In The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf, the eponymous girl Inge is ultimately saved from Hell thanks to the prayers of a virtuous woman (the only one who has pitied Inge since childhood).
- In the Nested Story in Vladislav Krapivin's The Glass Secrets of Simka the Plover, a boy named Mik travels To Hell and Back, attempting to rescue the soul of his Jerkass friend Louis. It turns out, though, that Louis's heroic death in battle made up for his minor jerkassery, and Louis has been in Heaven all along.
- The Great Divorce features an Afterlife Express that can bring damned souls (the Ghosts) to the outskirts of Heaven, where they can stay if they like (if they like being the key words, since many of them don't). The Narrator watches one of the Ghosts, a lustful man, turn to God and go into the Deep Heaven, and he is told that Emperor Trajan likewise chose to stay.
- In Nikolai Gogol's The May Night, or the Drowned Maiden, Levko decides to pray for the soul of the eponymous drowned maiden (a kind girl Driven to Suicide by a Wicked Stepmother) so that she might be delivered to the Kingdom of Heaven from her bleak existence as a water spirit.
- The Master and Margarita: a minor character at Woland's ball is Frieda, a tormented spirit of a young girl who had been seduced by a rich man and then killed her newborn child. Margarita takes pity on her and asks Woland to free her from her torment as her payment for being the queen of the ball.
- My Posthumous Adventures:
- Anna meets her ancestor Helga, who committed suicide but found God and was brought to Heaven during the Harrowing of Hell.
- Downplayed for Georgy who, thanks to Anna, manages to get from the lower Circles of Hell to its outskirts, where the demons can't reach the souls and it's possible to pray.
- Attempted in Shewing How an Old Woman Rode Double, and Who Rode Before Her by Robert Southey. The old woman in question is so wicked that she has a fit at the sight of the Holy Sacrament, and though her pious children try to pray for her, at her request, after she dies, they are only able to keep the fiends away from her for two nights, and on the third night she is dragged off bodily to Hell.
Live-Action TV
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer In becoming 2, the newly re-ensouled Angel is sent to Hell to save the world. In Season 3...it's unclear if the First Evil or Jasmine pulls him out of Hell, but somebody did, and he continues in the world to try to earn his redemption, one way or another.
- Hercules: The Legendary Journeys:
- Iolaus is tricked into allowing the God of Evil Dahak into his body, which leaves Iolaus trapped in hell, until Hercules rescues him and he goes to heaven.
- Downplayed with Iolaus's father who wasn't evil, just an Old Soldier who never talked about anything except the battles he fought. This was apparently a common phenomenon. Hades kept such people outside the gates of paradise trading war stories with each other so that they wouldn't spend eternity boring everyone else in paradise. After spending a little time talking to his son, he admits he hates talking about old battles and is allowed into paradise.
- Lucifer:
- Corrupt Cop Malcolm Graham is dead for thirty seconds before being rescued from Hell by Amenadiel. In return, Malcolm is to kill Lucifer, forcing him to return to Hell. This is a big mistake, because Malcolm is increasingly unstable from his memories of Hell and becomes the Big Bad of Season 1. He's killed in the season finale and returns to Hell, and the whole plot causes Amenadiel to fall in Season 2.
- When Amoral Attorney Charlotte Richards is murdered, her body is possessed by the Goddess of All Creation, Lucifer's mother and the Big Bad of Season 2. When the Goddess leaves her body, Charlotte returns and suffers Sanity Slippage until she realises the "nightmares" she's plagued by are in fact her memories of Hell. Terrified of going back, she becomes The Atoner in the hopes of getting into Heaven. She dies at the end of Season 3 after Taking the Bullet for Amenadiel, who regains his wings to fly her soul to Heaven.
- In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Klingons are shown to have a tradition of winning great battles in the names of dead loved ones to grant them entry into Sto'Vo'Kor when they otherwise wouldn't have been worthy of entry. Worf did this for his late wife Jadzia (who died in a rather anti-climatic manner) by destroying a sizable Jem'Hadar base.
- Supernatural: The angel Castiel pulls Dean out of hell in the Season 4 premiere, where he ended up after selling his soul to a demon. That episode introduced angels as a uniquely powerful Outside-Context Problem, but, as the series went on, travel to and from the afterlife became a more common occurrence.
- Xena: Warrior Princess: When Xena dies and becomes an angel, she gives her light to Callisto so that she can leave hell and enter heaven as the person she would have been if not for Xena. Xena herself is then rescued from hell when Eli brought her back from the dead.
Music
- JohnnyCash's Down There By The Train, a song Tom Waits wrote for him, about a train that takes dead souls to heaven heavily implies this trope by its examples of passengersnote , by how it describes the process of getting them ready to board, and the fact that the train explicitely waits for them to be able to get on. Waits later recorded his own version.note
You can hear the whistle, you can hear the bell
From the halls of heaven to the gates of hell
And there's room for the forsaken if you're there on time
You'll be washed of all your sins and all of your crimes
[...]
So if you live in darkness, if you live in shame
All of the passengers will be treated the same
[...]
If you've lost all your hope, if you've lost all your faith
I know you can be cared for and I know you can be safe - Until the End of the World by U2 is sung from the perspective of Judas Iscariot, who is in hell after his betrayal of Jesus Christ and subsequent suicide out of guilt. The song takes place on Holy Saturday (see the Mythology example below), and is sung to Jesus who is descending into Hell after the Crucifixion to rescue the souls trapped there. It is heavily implied that Jesus takes Judas out of hell and along to heaven in the end.
In my dream, I was drowning sorrows
But my sorrows they'd learned to swim
Surrounding me, going down on me
Spilling over the brim
Waves of regret and waves of joy
I reached out for the one I tried to destroy
You, you said you'd wait till the end of the world - Into the Fire by Vixy and Tony has the singer travel to hell to rescue the soul of their partner, who made a Deal with the Devil and was damned for it, and in the end delivers her to heaven before returning to earth.
Mythology and Religion
- Christianity:
- Probably the Ur-Example is Jesus Christ descending into Hell after the Crucifixion to rescue the souls trapped there. In the Epistle of St. Peter, it is mentioned that not only the righteous people of Old Testament who just got Rerouted from Heaven were rescued but the sinners (such as Noah's contemporaries killed in the Flood) as well.
- In several denominations of Christianity, prayer for the dead is practised (the Eastern Orthodox service on the Day of the Holy Spirit includes a prayer explicitly "for those held in Hell"). The main idea is that if the departed soul is in Hell, the prayer can ease their punishment or even bring them to Heaven, and if the soul is among the saved, why, it wouldn't hurt them to get even better than they are already.
According to the Orthodox teaching, it is possible to be freed from the torments of hell: the practice of praying for the departed and even for 'those in hell' at Pentecost vespers is based on this.— Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev), Eschatology (in: The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology)
- The Sacred Tradition has many examples of the trope. For example, St. John Damascene recounts a story of an old monk with a rather lazy pupil. After the pupil died, the monk began to pray for him fervently, and in his dreams, saw the pupil first engulfed in fire, then partially engulfed in fire, and then finally completely free.
- The Book of Psalms has an example in Psalm 107:
For He hath satisfied the longing soul,
And the hungry soul He hath filled with good.
Such as sat in darkness and in the shadow of death,
Being bound in affliction and iron
Because they rebelled against the words of God,
And contemned the counsel of the Most High.
Wherefore He humbled their heart with travail,
They stumbled, and there was none to help
They cried unto the Lord in their trouble,
And He saved them out of their distresses.
He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death,
And broke their bands in sunder.
Let them give thanks unto the Lord for His mercy,
And for His wonderful works to the children of men!
For He hath broken the gates of brass,
And cut the bars of iron in sunder.
Theatre
- Ambrois Thomas's opera Françoise de Rimini is a Lighter and Softer adaptation of the fifth canto of The Divine Comedy. The unfortunate lovers Paolo and Francesca are in the second circle of Hell, where they tell their story to Dante and Virgil. However, while in the original poem they are doomed to suffer eternally, in the opera a heavenly choir led by Beatrice announces their souls have been pardoned in the finale (the key difference is that in the poem, Paolo and Francesca merely feel lust, but the opera turns it into true and genuine love).
Video Games
- Dante's Inferno makes this an actual gameplay feature: along his travels in Hell, Dante can find various sinners (often historical figures), whom he can either condemn (essentially reaping their soul with the scythe) or absolve them of their sins, allowing them to ascend into Heaven.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has a variation: Kodlak dreams of going to the Warrior Heaven of Sovngarde, but fears that, as a werewolf, his soul has been earmarked as the property of Hircine, the God of Hunting. Kodlak is killed when his home is attacked by werewolf hunters, but the Player Character finds a way to posthumously break the werewolf curse on his soul, allowing him to flee Hircine's realm.
- Neon White: Every year, Heaven plucks sinners from Hell and dubs them "Neons", then gives them a chance at salvation via a competition to slay The Legions of Hell. Whichever Neon wins the ten-day demon assassination extravaganza receives utter forgiveness from God and a place in the heavenly host.
- Pinstripe: The game's developer has described it as "an emotionally charged adventure through Hell", and the ending reveals that that descriptor is entirely literal. The main character Ted killed himself and his young daughter in a drunk driving accident, and all the other characters represent his inner demons and vices. The game ends when Ted rescues his daughter from Pinstripe (himself a manifestation of guilt) and forgives himself, and the two wake up in Heaven, reuniting with her mother.
- Implied for the player character in the best ending of Planescape: Torment, where the Nameless One dies and goes to fight in the Blood War, but Fall-From-Grace promises to search for him in the Lower Planes.
Web Original
- One entry in The Shortest Story has a Non-Action Guy of a Proud Warrior Race become his people's healer because he doesn't like fighting. He ends up killed by an arrow wound he can't treat (and neither can anyone from his tribe), and so he ends up in hell... before the warriors he'd saved mount a rescue to pull him out and take him to Warrior Heaven.
Webcomics
- In Gaming Guardians, Scarlet Jester, having been revealed to be a future version of Graveyard Greg, tries to break his friend EDG out of hell the moment he spots him there. This turns out to be a ploy by EDG to save him by proving there's still some good in him.
- In Jack, a damned soul who recognizes their sins (something Hell tries to keep from them) can be reincarnated and try again for Heaven in their new life.
- In The Order of the Stick, Thor's attempt to distract Hel from cheating in a voting process has the pleasant side effect of freeing all the dwarven souls who died last year from her realm.
Western Animation
- Futurama: Played with in "Hell Is Other Robots." Fry and Leela journey to Robot Hell to save Bender when he's damned for sinning against his new religion. During a scuffle with the Robot Devil's winged minions, Bender steals a pair of wings and uses them to save his friends instead, also catching an energy ring fired at him that spins around his head like a halo as they ascend, implying that he redeemed himself by rescuing them.
- Robot Chicken: Darkly Played for Laughs in one sketch where a guy who goes into heaven is surprised to see Hitler there. Hitler says that despite everything he did, he's surprised that all he had to do to be let in was say he repented.
- A major plot point in Hazbin Hotel. Charlie, the Princess of Hell, is sick and tired of seeing countless damned souls being culled by Heaven in yearly purges due to overpopulation, so she decides to solve the problem by having sinners try and redeem themselves in a rehab program of her own design.
- Multiple episodes are spent showing how both sides see this as impossible, with only Charlie's girlfriend, Vaggie, genuinely believing in it. However, the end of episode 8 does show it is possible when Sir Pentious appears in Heaven after dying in an attempt to protect the hotel.
