An episode of a show where a main character wakes in the morning to find everyone but themselves has vanished. Sometimes the episode revolves around the character trying to find everyone, other times it may be them just enjoying the benefits of having a world to themselves, or alternatively it will have the character suffer varying levels of psychological trauma from their isolation, up to and including slowly going insane due to their solitude.
Typically something will happen at the end to make everyone reappear, whether it be the remaining character rescues them from a kidnapper, it turns out to be All Just a Dream, or that everyone just comes back from a bus. Almost always has the remaining character not aware of where anyone went or what happened to them. If it turns out everyone is fully dead and won't come back fine at the end, then it would cross with Sole Survivor.
In extreme cases where the entire species or planet is gone, it would also mesh with Last of His Kind. The remaining character would also be a Genocide Survivor if the reason everyone is gone is because they were murdered, and in those cases it could mesh with Everybody's Dead, Dave. By the nature of this trope, it always exists alongside either Ghost Town or Ghost City, and possibly even Ghost Planet in extreme examples. It also goes without saying that the main character is then the Mayor of a Ghost Town. Will sometimes have the remaining character drop an It's Quiet… Too Quiet. Usually an episode of a cartoon or show or issue of a comic, but does not always need to be.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Doraemon has one chapter where Nobita is given a device that can erase someone's existence, and accidentally uses it to erase everyone else while taking a nap. At first, he's overjoyed to be able to do anything he wants with no repercussion and quickly goes to raid various stores for food and toys. However, he soon gets lonely, and when there's a power outage, Nobita very quickly realizes that he couldn't survive on his own. Thankfully, the device's effect is apparently not permanent, and by the end of the chapter, everything is back to normal.
- In episode 13b of Tamagotchi, the Spacy Brothers find that everyone in Tamagotchi Town besides them has inexplicably disappeared and assume the rest of Tamagotchi Planet's population is gone too, giving them a chance to finally achieve their goal of conquering the planet. After some time, though, the brothers become worried about having to repopulate the planet. Eventually, they find out everyone else was actually at home, celebrating "Roll on the Floor Day" like they do at the beginning of every new year.
Comic Books
- Futurama: Following on from the previous issue, the first part of the Time Bender Trilogy has Fry, Bender, Leela, and Cubert returning to Earth only to find everyone missing and the planet deserted. It is revealed at the end of the said issue that everyone had actually been sucked into a Time Vortex.
Comic Strips
- Garfield had one mini-arc
◊ in 1989 where all of a sudden he woke up alone in an abandoned house. After several days, it was revealed that it was All Just a Dream of Garfield stuck in an Alternate Timeline where he never existed, and he woke up overjoyed upon seeing Jon and Odie again.
Films — Live-Action
- 28 Days Later: Jim awakes in a situation like this. For reasons he does not know, the majority of people are gone and very few remain, and those who remain are feral and aggressive. For a while he thinks everyone really did vanish into thin air, as he does not know the truth of what occurred.
- In Five, Roseanne, Michael and Eric all believed they were last person on Earth until they encountered the others. Charles and Barnstable survived the apocalypse together but thought they might be the only two. The film opens with a distraught Rosanne staggering along the road past abandoned cars and through empty towns.
- Ghosts of Mars. When the police arrive at the mining town of Shining Canyon, it appears to be completely deserted. They say "Where is everybody?", note that the place should be packed with miners and compare it to a graveyard. They later find that half of the town has gone insane and killed the other half.
- In Home Alone, Kevin McCallister gets into a fight with most of his family on the eve of a Christmas vacation, and angrily declares he never wants to see any of them ever again. The next morning, he wakes to find his family completely gone, and the huge house deserted aside from himself. Kevin thinks he's magically made his family disappear, but the audience already saw that the family departed for their trip to Paris and accidentally left Kevin behind.
- The French movie Seuls Two is about a cop and a small-time burglar finding out they're completely alone in Paris. Which doesn't make actually catching the burglar any easier.
Literature
- Mary Shelley's The Last Man has this finally kick in at the novel's climax after The Black Death kills off all humans but the main protagonist, Lionel, plus Adrian, Clara and Evelyn. Evelyn, Lionel's son, dies of an illness (not the Plague, but typhus), then Adrian and Clara drown when a storm in the Adriatic wrecks the three's boat. Returning to shore and making his way to the deserted city of Rome, Lionel realises he is likely the last human left alive, and after another year passes without the evidence of any other humans, he resolves to live the rest of his life as a wanderer, motivated by the prospect of someone, or anyone, for that matter, still being alive on the now-decimated Earth.
- This is the premise of Anne Schaff's The Day The World Went Away. The protagonists, rural teenage students, arrive at school only to find no one there. Even the bus driver who brought them has mysteriously disappeared.
- The 1942 picture book Palle alene i Verden ("Palle Alone in the World") is so famous in Denmark that it's easily the Trope Codifier in Danish culture, to the point that "being/feeling Palle" is a very common and casual term for feeling alone. The book is essentially just about a young boy named Palle who wakes up and finds the entirety of Copenhagen completely void of people no matter where he goes. It's revealed to be All Just a Dream in the end.
Live-Action TV
- The Bionic Woman: In the episode "The Vega Influence", when a plane lands at an old Air Force base to refuel, the crew finds the place completely deserted. As the crew searches, some of them start to disappear as well. It turns out that almost all of the inhabitants are under alien control and are in hiding.
- The Last Man on Earth: The series premiere, "Alive in Tucson" begins with Phil all alone and desperately searching for others. After giving up hope, he tries to commit suicide, yet stops his car at the last moment when he sees smoke from another survivor's fire.
- LazyTown has the episode "The First Day of Summer", where everyone except Robbie goes to the beach, and Robbie thinks that everyone else has disappeared.
- The Leftovers: Various episodes show flashbacks to the inciting incident, where a small but significant percentage of the world's population simply disappeared, and deal with the trauma of people literally disappearing in front of others' eyes.
- The Prisoner (1967) has the episode "Many Happy Returns" where Number Six wakes up not only to find The Village deserted, but all the utilities shut off as well. With no one to stop him, he manages to escape the island and get home to London. As the name suggests, he eventually ends up back at The Village. The reason The Village was deserted? Summer holiday. Either no one informed Number Six, he was exempt, or his escape attempt was meant to be his vacation.
- Red Dwarf is an Everyone's Gone series. In both the TV series and the novels, Dave Lister is placed in suspended animation as a punishment for breaking the ship's rules. While he is in stasis, a catastrophe hits the ship and wipes out the crew. Red Dwarf, formerly almost a small town in space, carries on under autopilot and computer control for three million years until the ship's AI judges it safe to awaken Lister. Holly the computer has a long frustrating time getting this through to Lister:
"Everybody's dead, Dave. Everybody. Is. Dead. Dave, everyone's dead. Everybody except you is dead..."
- The Sarah Jane Adventures: In "The Empty Planet", Clyde and Rani find themselves the only ones left on Earth, except for a boy named Gavin and two colorful alien robots.
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Original Series: In "The Mark of Gideon", Capt. Kirk is being beamed down to the planet Gideon, only to find himself apparently still on the Enterprise but with the entire crew gone.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "Remember Me", Dr. Crusher wakes up on an Enterprise that is progressively losing its crew. Once a person has disappeared, no one believes they were ever there in the first place. Eventually, she's left completely alone. It turns out that she was trapped in a pocket dimension due to one of her son's experiments. Luckily, she and the others figure out what's going on and manage to extricate her before it collapses.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): In the pilot, aptly titled "Where is Everybody?", a man wakes up to find himself completely alone in the world. He finds a town perfectly in order with no inhabitants. Eventually, the experience causes a breakdown. The episode ultimately reveals that he was an astronaut in a sensory deprivation tank, and he recovers once he's taken out. Of course, the unaired twist has him find a stub from the town's movie theater in his pocket.
- The Walking Dead (2010): In "Days Gone Bye", the very first episode, Rick awakes from a coma to this. All but a small amount of people are gone, and those that remain are clearly mindless zombies. It takes him a while to realize what has happened, so for a while he thinks everyone did just vanish.
Web Originals
- SCP Foundation, SCP-451 ("Mr. Lonely"): While pursuing a dangerous entity, an SCP Foundation Agent lost his ability to perceive the existence of other people. He made his way to Site 19, where he tries to figure out why he's all alone.
Western Animation
- Adventure Time: In "No One Can Hear You", Finn is badly beaten by an evil stag, and wakes up in an empty Candy Kingdom Hospital to find out that everyone except Jake has disappeared, and Jake is insane. It's eventually revealed that the evil stag has all the Candy People trapped in the sewers, where he plans to eat them.
- The Amazing World of Gumball: "The Downer"'s entire plot is that Gumball accidentally wished away everyone, much to his horror. At the end, it is revealed it was all a hallucination of his.
- Craig of the Creek: In "The Last Kid in the Creek", after refusing to eat hot cabbage and clam chips that JP offered him, Craig declares that he'd rather be alone than surrounded by "weird snack-loving kids", then shouts "YOU HEAR THAT, UNIVERSE!?". Some days later, he finds he's the only kid left in the creek after everyone else got sick (because Kit refused to take a sick day from running the Trading Tree).
- The main trio of Ed, Edd n Eddy collectively experience this in "Laugh Ed Laugh", in which all the other kids in the neighborhood simultaneously come down with the chicken pox. Without anybody to scam, Eddy quickly goes a little nuts, attempting to scam squirrels out of their nuts and start eating fire hydrants, thinking they're jawbreakers.
- The Family Guy episode "Forget-Me-Not" has Peter, Brian, Joe and Quagmire waking up in a hospital to find they are the only people around. It turns out to be a simulation Stewie is running in an effort to prove that Peter and Brian are only friends through circumstances.
- The Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episode "Squeeze the Day" starts out like this. Bloo wakes up one morning to find out that everyone who lives at Foster's is gone. It's revealed very early on that everyone went to the beach without him to keep him from ruining their day. Unfortunately, at the end of the episode, it turns out that Fosters doesn't need Bloo for something bad to happen.
- I Am Weasel: In the finale "I Are Legend", Weasel wakes up to find that he and Baboon are seemingly the only people left in the world, they were actually all at home watching the show itself as it was ongoing.
- Jimmy Two-Shoes: In the episode "I Am Jimmy", everyone in Miseryville goes into hibernation, leaving Jimmy completely alone and eventually causing him to lose his mind.
- OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes: In "Plaza Alone", K.O. celebrates his birthday with a wish that he could spend a day with just himself and his co-workers/best friends Enid and Rad. When the trio arrives at Lakewood Plaza, literally every other store is abandoned, and the two decide to spend the day slacking off and fooling around together. Unfortunately, after they accidentally lock themselves in the breakroom they start to go crazy, worrying that K.O.'s wish made everyone else in the plaza disappear. It turns out everyone else was off preparing a surprise party for K.O.
- In the Recess episode "Omega Kids", every student at Third Street School except for the Recess gang is home sick from tuna fish taco poisoning.
- SpongeBob SquarePants:
- "Gone"'s entire plot is that SpongeBob wakes to find he's the only Bikini Bottomite left. The episode ends with everyone coming back and explaining they were all celebrating "National No-SpongeBob Day", a holiday where they collectively take a break from his wacky antics.
- "Whatever Happened to SpongeBob?" serves as the exact opposite. SpongeBob has gone, and it's up to everyone else in town, who are all still there, to find him. The shorts based off "Whatever Happened to SpongeBob?" fit the trope even more, as in those, SpongeBob has vanished, and it is never explained where he is or what happened to him at all.
- The Fairly OddParents!: "Escape from Unwish Island" starts with a large amount of town members being kidnapped by an unseen person, and Timmy gets up and enjoys for a little bit the lack of people, before ending up on a rescue mission.
- The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: "Tastes Like Chicken" starts off with Billy trying to call Irwin but receives no response, and his parents are missing too. At first, he thought they were adopted by aliens, then he assumed Grim killed them, and finally, both of them believe that Mandy ate everyone. Subverted when it turns out everyone was just planning a surprise birthday party for Billy.
- The Loud House: In the episode "Last Loud on Earth", Lincoln and Clyde find Royal Woods completely deserted and they think they're in a zombie apocalypse, but in reality, everyone in Royal Woods was taking shelter at the mall during a storm.
- The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack: The episode "Wishing Not So Well" involves K'nuckles wishing on a wishing well that everyone in Stormalong Harbor would just disappear, and it apparently works much to his delight.
- Kaeloo: In Episode 201, Kaeloo heads out to play with her friends in the morning, only to find out that none of them are there. She initially panics that something might have happened to them and tries to get in contact with them, but finds out that they're all fine but have different plans for the day; Stumpy is babysitting his sisters, Quack-Quack is at the yogurt convention, and Mr. Cat is at a party. The rest of the episode revolves around Kaeloo trying to figure out how to have fun by herself.
