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Sevarius: I was particularly proud of my death scene.
Xanatos: Frankly, Sevarius, I thought you overplayed the part.
A character's death is faked, for one or more of the following purposes:
Often the audience will think the character has been Killed Off for Real. Extra points if a fake crime scene photo or Staged Shooting is used. Sometimes a John Doe's remains are substituted and destroyed beyond recognition, or everyone is simply told 'They Never Found the Body.' The person faking his death might attend his own funeral.
When the method of faking actually temporarily turns the character into a realistic-seeming corpse, this is Faux Death.
Death Faked For You, Playing Possum and Fake Kill Scare are subtropes.
A play on the common turn of phrase "waking the dead." Contrast He's Just Hiding. Not to be confused with Fake Weakness.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
Comics
- In the What Ever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Superman fakes his death by exposure by gold kryptonite (removing his powers), and walking to his death into the frozen Antarctic. In reality, he only removed his powers, and became Jordan Elliot, a regular working class guy.
- In the DCU, the Outsiders led by Nightwing fake their death to be able to work undercover. The stratagem is blown in the One Year Later storyline, and the team then has to deal with the various consequences for their actions.
- In an issue of Batgirl, Batgirl once fakes the dead to get the villain to trust Robin, who's supposedly taken her down. That includes staying still when Robin shoots her on the villain's orders, who's Dangerously Genre Savvy.
- Occasionally pulled by Batman when he needs to lure a villain into a false sense of security.
- Tintin does this a few times. Once, he goes into a nose-dive while flying so his pursuers think he's been hit.
- Iron Man once faked his death when he was suffering from nerve disintegration. It was a ploy to get healed. Unfortunately, Rhodey didn't know about it and was pissed off.
- Professor Xavier faked his death so as to counter an alien invasion. A dying shape-shifter named Changeling replaced him as atonement. Only Jean, of all his students, knew the truth.
- In X-Men Noir, Jean Grey fakes her death by killing Anne-Marie Rankin, cutting off/out any distinguishing facial features, and dyeing her hair. She them assumes Rankin's identity by dyeing her own hair. Why? She wanted out of the X-Men, essentially - and to collect Rankin's trust fund, of course.
- In Fear Itself, Bucky Barnes, the current Captain America had apparently been killed off while fighting Sin, the Red Skull's daughter. However, as revealed in a post-series epilogue....Bucky did survive the brutal attack and his death was faked by both Black Widow and Nick Fury in order to convince Steve Rogers to become Captain America once more, as well as to allow Bucky to deal with remaining Winter Soldier-esque sleeper agents without any trouble. How? A well-placed Life Model Decoy and the Infinity Formula did the trick.
Film - Live Action
- This is the setup for Double Jeopardy. A husband frames his wife for his murder so that he can run off with his wife's friend and the life insurance money while evading his creditors. When confronted, the husband has the audacity to claim that he intended to fake his suicide. That may have been believable, except for the blood and knife and the radio message claiming his wife was trying to kill him.
- Happens in The Dark Knight with Jim Gordon; the Joker also pulls this off at one point, but the audience knows it's clearly a trick from the beginning.
- Also near the end when Two-Face was about to shoot Gordon's son, Batman convinces him to shoot him instead. Which Two-Face does. And just when he was going to turn the gun back on Gordon's son, Batman tackles him.
- James Bond does it to himself in You Only Live Twice (hence the title.)
- The movie Eraser is about a federal agent who fakes people's deaths for the Witness Protection Program.
- In Red Dragon, Dolarhyde fakes his own death using the body of a man he shot to make his blind girlfriend think he shot himself.
- The Lady From Shanghai (1947) has a faked death that turns out to be real.
- Balin Mundson (Gilda's husband) in Gilda.
- Both Robert Redford and Paul Newman in The Sting.
- Raw Deal (1986). Arnold Schwarzenegger (playing an ex-FBI agent turned sheriff) fakes his own death before going undercover as a mob hitman. He drives his squad car into an oil refinery, opens a few valves then blows it up with a flare pistol.
- Jackie Chan playing the villain in Killer Meteors fakes his own death early on, and then later reveals to the hero (played by Jimmy Wang Yu) "You didn't see me die, you only saw me fall over". Makes perfect sense.
- The villain's master plan in Bruceploitation film Game of Death 2.
- Jigsaw does this in the entirety of the bathroom trap in Saw.
- And Agent Perez in Saw VI, who faked her death two movies before
- The Soldier (1982). A hot Mossad chick head-shoots a terrorist after he's identified by an informer. She goes into the next room after the interrogation where it's revealed via Latex Perfection that the terrorist is actually a Mossad Double Agent.
- X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Kayla Silverfox conspires with William Stryker to win Logan's heart and then fake her death in exchange for her abducted sister's safety.
- In Revenge of The Pink Panther, Inspector Clouseau is targeted for assassination. After one of the (unsuccessful) attempts leads to the public mistakenly thinking he's been killed, Clouseau decides to maintain the ruse in order to find out who's behind the plot.
- In The Negotiator, Roman, the hostage negotiator-turned-taker, pretends to shoot one of the hostages in order to convince the police to take him seriously so that he can figure out who framed him via computer files. It's also used at the end, when Saban shoots Roman and he falls to the ground, motionless and with blood pooling on the gloor. He convinces Frost he wants a cut of the money at stake in order to get him to spill the beans about setting Roman up.
- It's part of the profession of the titular pair in TheBrothersBloom. They're con-men.
- Such an incident leads to most of the plot of Mega Mind.
- Laurie Strode fakes her death after Halloween 2 to escape her evil, murderous brother.
- In Bullitt, the police investigation ultimately uncovers a mobster's plot to fake his own death and escape scot-free. Johnny Ross embezzles money from The Mafia, then cuts a deal with a senator to testify against the Mafia in exchange for a pardon and witness protection. Ross then tricks an innocent man into going to San Fransisco in his place, where he's killed by the mob hitmen sent to silence Ross.
- Extreme Prejudice (1987). A govt black ops team is made up of people who supposedly died in action or training accidents. Unfortunately they go up against a sheriff in the United States who can access military records — this is something of a Fridge Logic moment, as a more plausible means of establishing deniablity would be to have the ex-soldiers fired under made-up disciplinary charges.
- In Easy Money, Rodney Dangerfield's mother-in-law fakes her own death to trick him into changing his lifestyle in compliance with the terms of her will.
- In The Quick and the Dead, this is done by the Lady to gain an advantage on Herod, who cannot be beaten in a straight fight by anyone except for Cort, who is handcuffed most of the time and unwilling to kill except to save his own life.
- In The Usual Suspects, it's part of Dean Keaton's Backstory (and one of the reasons Agent Kujan has such a hard on for him). He was presumed dead long enough to dodge a murder rap. And while he was dead, every witness against him died under suspicious circumstances.
Film - Animation
- In Cars 2, secret agent Finn McMissile uses a set of decoy tires to pretend that he's been torpedoed by the enemy.
- The Incredibles: Mr. Incredible hides behind the skeleton of Gazerbeam to escape Syndrome's seeker robot - the robot scans the skeleton, assumes it's him, and flies off to report his demise.
- Finding Nemo: Nemo pretends to be dead in order to get flushed down the toilet and back to sea. Not only does it almost not work, it happens just as Marlin arrives, leading him to think his son really is dead.
Literature
- The Judge in Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None
- This is how Arthur Conan Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes back in "The Adventure of the Empty House" (1903) after previously attempting to permanently kill him off in "The Final Problem" (1893).
- David Gerrold's The War Against the Chtorr. Colonel Ira Wallachstein, head of the covert Uncle Ira Group, is reportedly killed by an escaping Chtorran worm in the first novel of this sci-fi series. However he comes back "apparently suffering only a mild case of death" in the fourth book. It turns out his death was faked. Given the way the Uncle Ira Group operates this is not particularly surprising.
- Caine does this in The Chronicles of Amber — by murdering the version of himself from one of the closer Shadow worlds.
- Happens in the X-Wing Series time and time again. Mostly, it's the Rogues managing to escape death and taking advantage of everyone's assumptions until they can come back triumphant, but Asyr Sei'lar instead goes back to her homeworld to fight her species' Hat of political treachery, and then there's Isard. The survival of the Rogues is believed by one minor Imperial character to be a fake - he believes that they really have died each time, and were replaced by clones.
- Another book in the Star Wars Expanded Universe has a birdman who really wants to quit the criminal business and return to his homeworld, but he's fairly high up in the criminal syndicate Black Sun, and Resignations Not Accepted something like that. His underlord even hints that if he tries, his world will suffer. In the same book, Darth Vader gives a character the terrible choice of betraying his friend, one of the last surviving Jedi, or having the plateau where his people live bombed from orbit. Both of them are eventually thought to have been caught in a nuclear blast, and both of them take advantage of being thought dead.
- In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry pretends to be dead after surviving yet another Killing Curse from Voldemort. He pretends to be dead until the height of the battle, during which he leaps into the fray to save Mrs. Weasley from being fried by old Voldie.
- Not completely... It actually killed one of Voldemort's last horcruxes, which was in Harry, permitting his final defeat.
- Janus Thickey disappeared leaving only a hasty Oh Crap A Lethifold's Killing Me note. His family went into mourning until he was found living with the landlady of a local inn. It may be related that the hospital's ward for long term spell damage is named for him.
- Rowling is fond of this trope. As early as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, she reveals that Peter Pettigrew was killed in a magical duel with Sirius Black, destroyed so utterly that only a single finger remained. Black was sent to Azkaban for the crime. Except Pettigrew faked his death in order to frame Black, get him out of the way, and promote his master Voldemort's agenda.
- In The Leper of St. Giles by Ellis Peters, Brother Cadfael discovers that a mourned crusader is still alive, but had his Saracen captors falsely report his death from battle-wounds. In reality, the unfortunate warrior had contracted leprosy and didn't want anyone to see or pity his disfigurements.
- A tactic employed in self-defense by the Count in A Night In The Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny, to avert a potential assassination.
- In Les Misérables, Jean Valjean fakes drowning in order to escape prison without being searched for.
- Cao Cao spreads rumours of his death in Romance of the Three Kingdoms in order to set up an ambush for Lu Bu. Invoked/subverted by Zhuge Liang, who uses the fear of this (and a rather lifelike carving of himself) to keep Sima Yi from pursuing the Shu army when it retreats upon his death.
- In Annals of the Black Company, Raven pulls this — twice.
- In the Claire Malloy mystery Tickled To Death, a character presumed to have died turned out to have had this trope applied to them without their knowledge. She'd quietly left town after embezzling a fortune from a wildlife-protection charity, and rather than admit what happened and see future donations dry up, her associates from the foundation faked her death in a boating accident.
- A favoured plot device of Christopher Pike - used in Falling, Chain Letter (Neal), Slumber Party (Nicole/Celeste), Weekend (Bert), Gimme a Kiss (Jane), Scavenger Hunt (Joe/Tom), Fall Into Darkness (Ann).
- The Westing Game: Sam Westing
- In the Foundation series, the entire Second Foundation pulls this off.
- Animorphs did this more than once. When Marco's father is targeted by the Yeerks for nearly discovering Zero-space, Marco has Erek and Mr. King, two of their android friends, use their holograms to impersonate him and his dad for when the Yeerks come to shoot them with their Dracon beams.
- Earlier than that, one was pulled on David: He killed a red-tailed hawk that stumbled into his path, but believed he had killed Tobias, who is trapped in red-tail hawk morph. Even though this wasn't intentional on the heroes' part, they're quick to play it up and take advantage of it.
- A major plot twist early in the series is Marco discovering that his mother was actually the host of Visser One, who faked her death when she left Earth to pursue other missions.
- Untold Story by Monica Ali focuses on a fictional princess, based on Princess Diana, who fakes her own death and escapes abroad because she is convinced she's about to be assassinated by the Secret Service.
- One of the alternative endings for The Dandee Diamond Mystery features the benefactor of the Will alive and telling the reader/protagonist he just faked his death so he could see how far his relatives would go to find the Dandee Diamond.
- In Detectives In Togas, his family fakes Caius' burial. (But the Romans cremated their dead...)
- In the Knight And Rogue Series Michael get's Rosamund listed as officially dead so his father won't interfere with her love life.
- In the Sword of Truth, this is called a "Death Spell". It's used to make people think someone is dead. Go figure.
Live Action TV
Theater
- Older Than Feudalism: In Electra, Orestes' plot to murder his mother and step-father relies on lulling them into a false sense of security by sending a messenger stating Orestes died in a chariot race. Electra is devastated by the loss until the moment her brother reveals himself.
- Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Henry The Fourth Part 1 and Much Ado About Nothing.
- A Winter's Tale in which Hermione apparently fakes her own death for sixteen years just so she can pose as her own statue (voluntarily or otherwise) and come back to life in front of her husband and now grown-up daughter.
- Notably used in Antony And Cleopatra: Cleopatra tells a messenger to tell Antony that she is dead. This results in Antony killing himself and Cleopatra hitting the Despair Event Horizon.
- Wicked the Musical, where Elphaba pretends to melt, but goes down a trapdoor instead to wait for Fiyero... who, by the way, is the Scarecrow. She sings a final refrain with Glinda and vanishes to another land with Fiyero, leaving Glinda to beleive that she died for real. (Glinda did not realize she had back-up on the refrain) As Fiyero says "She can't know. No-one must know." Oh, by the way, before she carries out this charade, she makes Glinda promise to never try and clear her (Elphaba's) name so that Oz will stay peaceful under Glinda's rule and the people won't turn against her. Whew.
- Note that this is not what happens in the book version of Wicked. In the book, Elphaba meets exactly the same end as in the original Wizard of Oz movie — Dorothy flings a bucket of water at her, and she dies.
- In Angels In America, Roy Cohn pulls this trick on the ghost/hallucination/whatever of Ethel Rosenberg, who happily pushes the nurse's call button?only to have Roy spring back to life and gloat at her about falling for it. Subverted almost immediately, when the monitors Roy's hooked up to flatline, and he dies for real.
Video Games
- World of Warcraft has Feign Death as an ability of the Hunter class.
- Moreover, in classic EverQuest, the Feign Death skill was the hallmark of the Monk class (though some other classes eventually received weaker versions of it) and was the most effective countermeasure for a number of the game's more tedious and frustrating mechanics.
- In Suikoden II, the main character's not-quite-biological sister fakes her own death in order to avoid distracting him from his important task of ending a war — she's tired of all the fighting and wants to leave the war behind, but knows that he'd never leave her alone if he knew she was still alive. All this only happens in the good ending, however — if you make even the slightest misstep, before or after her apparent "death", she was actually Killed Off for Real.
- In BioShock Atlas is actually mobster Frank Fontaine who supposedly died in a shootout with Rapture police forces 2 years before the game is set.
- Solid Snake fakes his own death in Metal Gear Solid 2, in order to escape being witch-hunted as a terrorist. Interestingly enough, he does this by dressing up the corpse of his identical twin and presenting him to the authorities. Thus, later in the game, when the body is exhumed for a DNA test, it passes as genuine.
- In Metal Gear Solid 3, Snake carries a Cyanide Pill he can use to fake his death in front of enemies. "Dying" will fool every enemy and boss once, and popping back to life in front of them will scare them enough that you can get a cheap hit in; the only boss this doesn't work on is the one that taught you this trick.
- In Metal Gear Solid 4, there is the corpse camo and the Big Boss mask to complete it that allows Snake to play dead which can fool even the machines.
- Pulled by the entire Global Defense Initiative in the first Command & Conquer, goading the Brotherhood of Nod into going on the offensive. Even the player gets suckered into it.
- In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, Oliver is presumed dead after battle. In Radiant Dawn, he turns out to have been hiding for three years.
- Ditto the Black Knight, although to be fair, they Never Found the Body. Still, they dropped a fucking tower on him; No One Could Survive That!
- Actually Oliver really did die. Recruit him then talk to him with Ike and he mentions visiting Death's villa. Somehow he was brought back then hid.
- Earlier in the series, Prince Zephiel is poisoned in an assassination attempt by his father, King Desmond, but survives. He arranges a fake funeral and stabs his would-be murderer to death when Desmond approached the coffin to view the body. The exact details of this incident are revealed in Fuuin no Tsurugi, but they are mentioned in the epilogue of Rekka no Ken suggesting that they happened around that time (15 years after the events of Rekka no Ken; five years before Fūin no Tsurugi).
- In Curse of Monkey Island, Guybrush Threepwood needs to convince a local inkeeper that he is a member of the Goodsoup family and then feign death in order to cash in his life insurance policy (which only requires him to present his death certificate, regardless of whether or not he's actually alive) and gain admission to the Goodsoup family crypt, which technically isn't the cleverest way to go about doing either of those. His means of faking his death aren't that clever either: he mixes medicine with alcohol and passes out. And then the credits roll. Okay, not the REAL credits.
- This trope is a major gameplay element in the mediocre shooter Haze: Mantel Corporation mercenaries have a drug called Nectar injected into their bodies which gives them superhuman abilities and alters their brain chemistry to make them more useful for Mantel. One way they do this is trying to avoid PTSD by making Mantel troops incapable of seeing dead bodies. Once a soldier, friendly or enemy, dies, they become incapable of perceiving them. This is extremely easy to abuse once you make the inevitable switch to the anti-Mantel rebels; with the push of a button your character pretends to die, and the bad guys literally forget that you're there.
- The original Unreal Tournament had the feign death feature. This would later return in Unreal Tournament III. This was taken from Team Fortress.
- Team Fortress 2, on the other hand, doesn't have this feature; what it does have is the unlockable pocket watch for the Spy, the Dead Ringer. It creates a fake corpse the instant any damage is done to the user, and immediately makes the user completely invisible for a short period of time (not even bumping into other players reveals him, unlike the other two watches), at the expense of a really, really loud "becoming visible" sound effect. Naturally, like all of the Spy's tricks, it was useful for about a few days before players wised up.
- Played straight in Team Fortress Classic: Spies could drop to the floor (much like dead players' ragdolls) at any time, quietly or otherwise, and go into third-person view.
- Army Of Two allows you to use the "Feign Death" command if your mercenary is getting hammered with a lot of incoming fire. This generally causes the enemy to direct their fire at your partner, giving you either time to (slowly) heal or a chance to spring up and go for cover. Naturally, the enemy will only fall for this once per encounter, and keep shooting you if you try it again.
- In Halo, The Flood will try to pull this on you. Dropping dead to the ground only to jump to their feet moments later. It can be difficult to tell when they are genuinely dead due to this, and the only real way to ensure they are is to watch them for a moment or punch/pump them full of lead.
- The starting novice class of Ragnarok Online can learn a Play Dead skill that renders all monsters non-aggressive by making the player out to be dead. They lose this skill when changing to a first class or supernovice, however.
- Similar to the above Hitman example, one of the Dark Brotherhood missions in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has the player "kill" an NPC with a special poison and revive him later to throw other assassins off his trail.
- The Nancy Drew game Lights, Camera, Curses! reveals that a famous actress's long-ago death was faked, to ensure that she wouldn't suffer the stigma of having done such a horrible acting job.
- This plays a key role in Steins;Gate: to prevent the Bad Future from unfolding without sacrificing anyone, the heroes have to replicate a grisly scene that Rintaro glimpsed in a vision right at the start of everything. It's a bit of a Mind Screw how it all unfolds.
- In Kingdom Hearts II, Goofy gets hit in the head with a rock and knocked unconscious. The rest of the main cast thinks he's dead, but of course, he gets better.
- In Hitman Blood Money, the Agency sets up a false death for 47 so that he can get close to the mastermind of the plot to kill him that drives the main plot of the game. When Diana gives him a kiss, she's administering the antidote for the drug that she used on him (though if you let your life bar go down all the way during the "credits," it's Game Over for you).
- This also happens to Smith earlier on in the game, in order to sneak him out of rehab.
Webcomics
- Veithel of Juathuur, before the beginning of the story.
- Agatha in Girl Genius. The unusual part is that given both circumstances and the habits during lifetime, it may double as a bizarre form of the funeral honours to the unfortunate who became their substitute corpse. Scamming the overlord of Europe into thinking she's the Heterodyne heir would be really hard to top.
- In Zeetha's opinion, however, this "perfect plan" had a flaw.
- Renard/Reynardine in Gunnerkrigg Court, as he phrased it himself, "had the perfect disguise". Whether this happened mostly by coincidence or was planned by the mythological trickster himself is perhaps the biggest point of disagreement in the fandom.
- In Beyond the Canopy, Greliz and Jojo plan to do this as part of a confidence scheme. They organize a prize fight and serve as bookkeepers for the gambling. Their plan is to fake a fire before the fight ends, escape to the caves underground with all the gambled money, and then blow up the building after them—convincing all onlookers that they and the money went up in smoke.
Western Animation
- Bugs Bunny does this on a regular basis. Usually this causes his pursuer to feel remorse and go into a crying fit, only to have Bugs "come to life" and give him a kiss on the nose or something equally impudent.
- The most unique form of faking death was in "What's Opera, Doc?", with Elmer Fudd using a Magic Helmet to strike the rabbit with massive lightning. Elmer Fudd felt remorse for killing the rabbit, but Bugs showed he was alive by breaking the fourth wall.
- Pepe Le Pew did this in one of his skits. Penelope the Cat that he regularly chases decides to lock herself in a reinforced glass safe that he can't get into, and being his usual self he acts as if she is playing hard to get and jokingly asks why she won't come out. Her response is that Pepe stinks, in despair he pulls out a gun, smiles, and then waves goodbye to Penelope as he walks behind the safe and a gunshot is heard. Penelope in despair rushes out of the safe to see if he really went through with it, and to her surprise Pepe is waiting for her, "I missed... Fortunately for you."
- Gargoyles has Sevarius faking his own death as part of Xanatos' plan to turn Talon into an Unwitting Pawn.
- In one episode of Family Guy, Quagmire marries a woman he barely knows, realizes he made a terrible mistake, and tries to break it off. When she reveals herself to be unstable, the guys help him fake his death so as not to end up with a Fatal Attraction case on their hands.
- Justice League Unlimited did this as well with Green Arrow taking a nerve relaxant so that he appeared to have been killed in the illegal Metabrawl at Wildcat's hands, to show the aging fighter what he could unintentionally do if he continued fighting in it.
- The second season of Avatar: The Last Airbender ends with Katara pulling Aang back from the ragged edge of death after the latter was struck down by Azula. Come the third season premiere (three weeks of unconsciousness later)...
Sokka: Yep, the whole world thinks you're dead! ( stands up and raises his arms triumphantly) Isn't that great?!
- There's also Zuko at the end of the first season—he survives an assassination attempt in which his ship is completely destroyed, but he and Iroh pretend that he did die so that he can stow away on one of the ships to the North Pole and catch the Avatar there.
- In The Simpsons, Homer has a dummy of himself made and tosses it off a cliff into a river where it falls over a waterfall, has its limbs crushed by rocks, is attacked by beavers, and ultimately is sucked into a turbine while his coworkers watch in horror... in order to get out of an afternoon of community service. "Best 600 bucks I ever spent!"
- What makes the scene hilarious is the Comedic Sociopathy of it all: rather than thinking to help Homer, all his co-workers think that all they have to do is say "Oh no! He's hit the rocks!" "Don't worry, those beavers will save him." "Oh no! The beavers are taking his clothes!" No one thinks to, you know, move and help him.
- Bart tried something like this, as well, but the Blind Without 'Em Milhouse unintentionally shoves the real Bart off of the cliff instead of the dummy. He, of course, didn't suffer the fate of the Homer dummy.
- The episode "Bart the Fink" has Krusty the Clown faking his death to collect on an insurance policy after the IRS strips him of his assets.
- In fact, he faked his death twice in that episode. First to escape his IRS debts and start a new life as "Rory B Bellows" and second to escape his new life, commenting as he does so that "The life of Rory B Bellows is insured for a surprisingly large amount".
- The boys force Butters to do this in the South Park episode "Marjorine".
- In The Spectacular Spider Man, Norman Osborn (AKA Green Goblin) pulls this off in the final(?) step of his 2 season long Xanatos Gambit.
- It was just revealed in Metalocalypse that Charles Ofdensen did this, for reasons currently unknown.
- Mr Herriman does this in Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends during Halloween, in a group prank to get back at Bloo for pranking them all the last Halloweeen.
- When the Teen Titans are first attacked by the HIVE (Jinx, Mammoth and Gizmo), Robin falls to ominous doom, and the others only find his utility belt. He resurfaces after his teammates get kicked out of their own home.
- And at the end of season two, Terra seemingly killed the Titans, only for them all to somehow survive and later attack her when her guard is down. Needless to say, Slade was not pleased with her.
- In Johnny Test, Johnny and Dookie get overworked as their alter egos, Johnny X and Super Pooch. Ultimately, the only way to get out of the mess is to convince the town they're dead. They try once on their own, only to fail, so they get Susan and Mary to help them, disguising themselves as alien supervillains and making it look like they've vaporized the two. Susan and Mary actually seem to enjoy this...
- Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats: When it seemed Mrs. Vandergelt's butler would finally get her fortune, it was revealed she had faked her death.
- In the Pilot Movie for Justice League, J'onn J'onnz telepathically prevents everyone from noticing Batman, leading to the villains (and heroes) not realizing he was there until it was time for him to attack. Of course, being Batman, this was a plot he was used to; see the episode in his own series where everyone thinks a minor crook offed him.
- Rhinox/Tankor does this for a while in Beast Machines in order to be able to further his own agenda. Too bad for him that Megatron figured it out...
Other
Truth In Television
- This is an actual crime, called "pesudocide" (literally 'pretend murder').
- reported by Talking Points Memo.
- Also the recent John Darwin case. Found out after a Google search.
- A woman in Des Moines faked her own death to avoid paying traffic tickets. Her scheme fell apart when she got pulled over for yet another traffic offense.
- The police sometimes use this tactic to nab suspects. In one case, a woman hired a contract killer (actually an undercover cop) to kill her husband. The police then faked his death, providing photos and "evidence" in order to fool the wife into incriminating herself.
- In Russia where political and business-related assassinations are unpleasantly common, this is a very common tactic for the local police.
- In matters of national security, or if the person's life will be in ongoing danger because of their testimony, the FBI may go as far as staging a closed-casket funeral for someone who is going into the Witness Relocation Program.
- Christopher Marlowe, sometimes theorized to be the "real" Shakespeare, is also sometimes theorized to have faked his own death. Even though a coroner confirmed the knife in his skull.
- People have been claiming since April 3, 1882, that Jesse James and Bob Ford faked James' murder. There was a two hour special on History International about this, albeit with very shaky reasoning on the "he didn't die" side. (At one point, a photo of a 20-something James is compared to the official post-mortem photo. The two photos have different hairlines, which "proves" they are of two different men. Because no male ever suffers from receding hairline.)
- These theories were largely put to rest after after an exhumation proved that the man in Jesse James' grave was a descendant of Jesse James' mother.
- Agatha Christie faked her own disappearance after the husband dumped her for another woman and her mother died. Her Genre Savvy made the situation rather pulled of one of her own novels, and in the end the police found her ten days later in a nearby hotel, pretending to be amnesiac. People still wonders if this was true or just the media having fun with creativity...
- Many kinds of animals fake their own death as a last resort to protect themselves from predators. For some reason, many hunters won't eat what is already dead.
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