ZAP!
McMurphy: And you say it don't hurt?
Harding: I personally guarantee it. Completely painless. One flash and you're unconscious immediately. No gas, no needle, no sledgehammer. Absolutely painless.
Harding: I personally guarantee it. Completely painless. One flash and you're unconscious immediately. No gas, no needle, no sledgehammer. Absolutely painless.
You wouldn't know it from fiction, but getting an electric shock will not normally render you unconscious.note If you've ever tried sticking a fork in an outlet, you already know this. If not, do not try it. You will not fall asleep, you will just get a nasty shock. You might lose consciousness if struck by lightning... but it's unlikely you will ever wake up. Electricity in the right amount to incapacitate you without killing you will do so not by making you unconscious but by causing muscle contractions.
ECT is done under general anaesthesia, so people who didn't know about the drugs and saw unconscious patients might have assumed the electrical shocks were responsible. Compare Electroconvulsive Therapy Is Torture for another misconception about electricity.
Supertrope to Static Stun Gun. Often happens with Shock and Awe. Compare/contrast Lightning Can Do Anything. Another unrealistic depiction of electricity is Slow Electricity. A character might give a goofy grin just before they pass out. Subtrope of Harmless Electrocution.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Double subverted in an episode of A Certain Scientific Railgun. After being tased, Misaka Mikoto cheerfully explains that electric stun guns don't work on her and then uses her powers to render the person who tased her unconscious.
- Hei in Darker than Black uses his electricity power to render people unconscious at times. In one case he actually pretended to have a taser, because he wasn't disguised at the time. In the finale, he learns that his power is actually quantum manipulation of matter, so it might have worked that way because he expected it to.
Comic Books
- The first appearance of the Ultra-Humanite in Superman had him use electricity on Superman in an attempt to kill him, but it merely knocked him out.
Fan Works
- Flowing Star: Stella's electric bat can knocks out her opponents unconscious by hitting them hard enough. This is shown with Chandler.
- Vow of Nudity: In one story, Haara stabs a gauss engine with a wet spear to zap the slimes dogpiling her, and it knocks all of them out (though she manages to remain awake herself despite taking massive damage).
Films — Animated
- The Iron Giant follows a panicked Hogarth into an electric substation and the robot gets tangled in the high-voltage lines and screams in pain as the electricity starts frying it. Hogarth is able to trip the circuit breaker, shutting down the substation but the power surge shorts out the Iron Giant and he collapses. As Hogarth starts examining the huge robot, it reboots and sits upright, startling the boy. The trope is played with because as a mechanical device, the robot does not get knocked out per se, but rather shuts down and reboots.
- Rio: Nigel the Cockatoo chases the leads into the slums of Rio de Janeiro, where Nigel collides with an electrical transformer, botching his attempt to catch them and blacking out the whole city of Rio in the process including a stadium which held a soccer game that Armando and Tipa were watching. After regaining consciousness, Nigel heads back to the smugglers' hideout.
Films — Live-Action
- Frequency: The Nightingale killer tracks Frank to a police station interrogation room just as Frank sets off the building's fire sprinklers. When the killer steps through the door, Frank throws a stripped live wire into the puddle he's standing in, shocking him into unconsciousness while Frank escapes. Ironically, the killer is woken by the sprinklers about a minute later and gives chase.
Literature
- Discussed in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. While the two are discussing electroshock therapy, McMurphy asks Harding if it's painful, but Harding claims that people who undergo EST go unconscious immediately after being shocked once.
- In the Warrior Cats book Lost Stars, Shadowpaw is struck by lightning and knocked unconscious. He is otherwise unharmed, however.
Live-Action TV
- The Brittas Empire: In "Opening Day", Laura is asked to bring her black friend Michael to function as a Token Minority for the Royal Opening of the leisure centre. Unfortunately, he gets trapped in the malfunctioning automated doors of the building and in his attempts to get out, uses a rod against the opening mechanisms of the doors, giving him an electric shock and zapping him unconscious.
- The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: Towards the beginning of the episode "Truth", Bucky Barnes ends up being thrown into a power grid during a fight. After the power grid shocks him with electricity, he is knocked unconscious for a brief period of time. However, the trope is downplayed in that it was also the force of the impact that knocked him out, not just the electrical shock.
- Forever: Done multiple times in "The Ecstasy of Agony." Henry is knocked out by a prolonged shock from a cattle prod as part of kidnapping him. When he starts to wake up tied up in the van, he's knocked out again with another zap. When he wakes up chained to a Saint Andrew's cross, he stays conscious while being choked, but is knocked unconscious again by more electric charges. The one on the cross might be excusable since the killer was described as using a persistent low charge to make his first victim's diaphragm seize up and suffocate him, but there's no indication he was trying to do anything to Henry but cause him pain.
Video Games
- In all Bioshock where electric attacks were present, they had the propriety of knocking out enemies, allowing for combos involving melee attacks against weakened adversaries.
- Chrono Trigger: Mentioned tangentially by one of the Ioka cavemen in 65,000,000 B.C. as a hint to the player:
"Lightning stun dinosaur! You know?"
- In Divinity: Original Sin and Original Sin II, many Shock and Awe powers and electrical Geo Effects can inflict the status effect "Stunned", which costs the target their next turn.
- The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening starts with a lightning bolt knocking Link unconscious and destroying his ship, leaving him stranded on an uncharted island.
- At the start of the first Persona, the main characters perform the Persona ritual; after seeing an apparition of a girl appearing, the main character, Nate, Yuki and Mark are all struck by lightning — while indoors — and have a dream of a butterfly while they're unconscious.
- Yandere Simulator: Electrocution can be done in different methods using water and an electrical source, but all of them have the same outcome: kill the other students or render Yandere Chan unconscious.
Webcomic
- In Bob and George, Bob claims that his electrical attack does this to the ninjas sent by NA Mynd. It turns out that the ninjas really did get killed and the other characters just went on pretending otherwise for a while.
Web Video
- Screen Rant Pitch Meetings: While pitching Wonder Woman 1984, the Screenwriter says that during the fight between Barbara—"who, by the way, is a cat now"—and Diana, Barbara will get electrocuted and go to sleep. When the Producer assumes Barbara dies, the Screenwriter says no, when cats get electrocuted, they just get "a little sleepy". He recalls when his childhood cat chewed through an electrical cord, his dad said that the cat went to sleep and then went to live on a farm and he never saw him again.
Western Animation
- In the DuckTales (2017) episode "Let's Get Dangerous" Megavolt zaps Bradford Buzzard unconscious when he objects to Tauras Bulba's plan to use the ramrod.
- Kid Cosmic: In the first episode, Kid is trying to activate his "Rings of Power" and one of the methods he tries is charging it with electricity. He just ends up electrocuting himself, leaving him out cold for an extended period of time.
- In an episode of Regular Show, Muscle Man and High Five Ghost are knocked out by lightning while high fiving each other.
- In The Spectacular Spider-Man, Electro zaps Gwen Stacy into unconsciousness so that the Vulture could take her to his lair for the Master Planner.
- Underdog tries to thwart Electric Eel during a robbery. However the Eel lures Underdog into an electric field, which saps his strength and leaves him in a heap, though conscious. Underdog weakly begs not to be thrown into a lake, so the Eel does exactly that. This was some Briar Patching by Underdog, as the electric charge in his body gets dissipated by the water, restoring him to health.
