In stories where Anyone Can Die, there is often a protagonist who mysteriously (or not-so-mysteriously) seems to be very knowledgable about how to survive the situation. That character is often paired with this one; a Commander Contrarian who argues or disagrees with nearly every sentence he utters. It's rare that the Commander Contrarian survives the tale. If this character finally leaves the group in disgust, taking others with him, it's common that not one of the separated group survives.
Though this trope is classically associated with Disaster Movies, it can apply to any genre where Anyone Can Die. In stories with a lower body count, some or all the Commander Contrarian's supporters may survive, but only after being subject to such misfortunes that they realize that The Complainer Is Always Wrong. Compare Doomed Defeatist. Compare and contrast Ignored Expert and The Cassandra.
This is a Death Trope, so beware of spoilers.
Examples:
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Comic Books
- A little-remembered DC Comics character is the 90's Justice League of America recruit Triumph, who quickly became something of a Hate Sink for readers (and many writers) due to his habit of Challenging the Chief and, more often than not, being right. Of course a new character disagreeing with the likes of Superman and the Martian Manhunter didn't earn many fans, and after his creators left DC writers gleefully hit Triumph with a string of Humiliation Conga incidents before having him be Killed Off for Real.
- The Kryptonian Science Council who dismiss Jor-El's warnings about their planets instability as "the unscientific ramblings of a madman".
- Senator Robert Kelly of the X-Men books, noteworthy for being the only anti-mutant character who is not a frothing Strawman Political, has probably been targeted with more assassination attempts than you've had hot dinners. For about a decade and a half he was locked in a predictable cycle of being targeted by some mutant extremist, being saved by the X-Men and being an Ungrateful Bastard which started the whole cycle up again. He finally learned gratitude when Pyro saved him and made a heartfelt plea to him with his dying breath to end human/mutant hostilities, only for the law of averages to finally catch up with him. Ironically, the killer who finally got lucky and iced Kelly wasn't even a mutant.
Film — Animated
- Resident Evil: Degeneration: Downplayed with Greg Glenn, who doesn't pay attention to Leon's instructions that the only effective way to kill the zombies is to shoot them in the head, goes guns ablazing wasting ammo and time, and needs to be saved (and lectured) by Leon. He later ends up getting bitten anyway while the group escapes, and decides to stay behind and hold the zombies off as long as he can before turning into a zombie himself.
Film — Live-Action
- In the made-for-TV Disaster Movie Ten Five Apocalypse, a bunch of people get stranded in a tower after a massive sinkhole swallows Las Vegas, and the geologist tells them to climb towards the roof because the building is going to sink. The other party thinks he's crazy, and you never hear from them again.
- In The Day After Tomorrow, this is played straight with the big group of people that ignores Sam's warnings and leaves the safety of the library. We learn later that they froze to death. It is then averted with the Dick Cheney-esque Vice President who believed that taking action to stop global warming would destroy the economy. He is seen alive at the end of the movie, giving a speech apologizing for putting short-term economic benefit ahead of the health of the planet.
- Roy Nord in Daylight. He decides to be a Big Damn Hero and climb out through a ventilation shaft. Then, Rocks Fall, Roy Dies (causing a Special Effects Failure, while we're at it).
- Judson and Crimp from Five Came Back, which is about a plane that crashes into the Amazon jungle. Crimp doesn't want to follow orders from the pilots, tries to leave on his own, and gets killed by the local headhunters, alerting the headhunters to the white people in the jungle. Judson also doesn't want to follow orders, spends his time drinking, tells everyone that they'll never be able to fix the plane, and wants to make an almost certainly futile trek over the Andes. He dies in a Gun Struggle at the end.
- In Jurassic Park (1993), Genarro first disagrees with the scientists, then abandons the party. Averted in Jurassic Park III: The Commander Contrarian grad student turns up alive in the last scene.
- In The Last Outlaw, Potts constantly argues against whatever Graff and later Eustis say and challenges their orders. While he actually makes a few good points and nearly manages to make it across the border to Mexico, he's fatally wounded by Graff right when he and Eustis are about to cross the Rio Grande and dies seconds later.
- The black lawyer neighbor in the 2007 movie The Mist, based on a Stephen King short novel. As you can imagine, he didn't last long. We get a few minutes of characterization that show he's not a total jerk, but insists on leaving the supermarket against the lead's informed warnings. He and everyone in his group are politely and promptly introduced to things that were not meant to be. This is later subverted by the woman who leaves the convenience store and is seen at the end to have been picked up by the military, her and more importantly her children, alive and intact.
- The Trope Codifier (if not the Trope Maker) is very likely the original The Poseidon Adventure, where Commander Contrarian doesn't believe that the boat has been submerged upside down and won't follow the party in what he believes is a suicide climb towards the hull. They disappear from the plot after that, and they're implied to have never been found. The 2006 remake had them explicitly get drowned, the lounge singer and captain even embrace tenderly as the liquid death rushed at them.
- Star Wars: In A New Hope, Grand Moff Tarkin refuses to believe that the rebels could take out the Death Star and won't let anyone evacuate. He got to carry one big Idiot Ball…
Literature
- Stephen King's The Mist has a group that the protagonist dubs the Flat Earth Society. They refuse to believe that the mist is full of Eldritch Abominations, even in the face of concrete evidence. They eventually walk out into the mist and are never heard from again.
Live-Action TV
- Doctor Who:
- Done with a twist in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" when the Doctor, Ian, and another man are locked in a cell on a Dalek spaceship. There's some random objects left lying around inside the cell that the Doctor immediately deduces to be a means of escape. The other man flatly refuses to believe it, and turns out to be right, since the whole thing was an intelligence test by the Daleks to see if they were suitable to be turned into mind-controlled servants.
- A few episodes have had the classic horror-movie "that creature is no threat to us!" character who immediately gets eaten or whatever, but often the Doctor saves the contrarians along with everyone else. The 2007 Christmas special "Voyage of the Damned" subverts it with a plot where nearly every likable character dies, but rude, unhelpful, selfish coward Rickston Slade not only survives the disaster, but turns out to have financially benefited from it.
- Lost had the good Dr. Artz. He pointed out everything the main characters were doing wrong, then promptly exploded.
- Played With in The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "The Old Man in the Cave". Following a nuclear war, the land was so badly posioned that the ground only yields burned or mutated crops. Despite this, one run-down village has managed to survive for ten years due to the titular old man. While nobody has seen him firsthand, his representative, Mister Goldsmith, regularly visits the cave and brings back news of what they can or can't eat. All this changes when a trio of armed soldiers arrive and take over the village, mocking Mr. Goldsmith for believing in somebody he's never seen himself. One of the soldiers eats an onion that has been deemed contaminated, briefly pretending to drop dead on the spot before revealing he was just faking and encouraging the villagers to follow his lead and feast. The next day, the army men force Mr. Goldsmith to open the cave so they can destroy the machine hidden inside. Afterwards, everyone who ate the contaminated food is dead, with Mr. Goldsmith as the Sole Survivor, who laments that their faithlessness led to the town's downfall.
Web Original
- C0DA, written by former The Elder Scrolls series writer/designer Michael Kirkbride, takes place in the far distant future of TES universe. Numidium, the Reality Warping Humongous Mecha of Dwemer construction, presumed destroyed following the events of Daggerfall, returns after having been caught in a time warp. It is the literal embodiment of the Dwemer idea of refutation, and Jubal calls it a "serial contrarian to the last". As Big Bad, it is ultimately defeated by Jubal Talking the Monster to Death.
Real Life
- Tragically, something similar happened on September 11, 2001, though not quite in the "contrarian" sense: information had spread about a possible air evacuation from the roof of the at-that-point-not-yet-collapsed towers, so many of the people on the top floors headed up, rather than down. The air evacuation was eventually deemed impossible as the towers became increasingly unstable.
- Some people left Spartacus's merry men to start pillaging. They were quickly obliterated by the Roman legions.
