Faking The Dead - Television Tropes & Idioms

A character's death is faked, for one or more of the following purposes:

To throw the villains off the trail.
To allow said character to be taken into Witness Relocation.
To make a criminal commit Just One Little Mistake.
To allow two characters to live happily ever after.
As part of a con.
To gain a temporary advantage in combat - generally considered less than sporting.
To prevent a Time Paradox.

Often the audience will think the character has been Killed Off For Real. Extra points if a fake crime scene photo or Fake Gunshot is used. Sometimes a John Doe's remains are substituted and destroyed beyond recognition, or everyone is simply told 'They Never Found The Body.'

When the method of faking actually temporarily turns the character into a realistic-seeming corpse, this is Faux Death.

Death Faked For You is a Sub Trope.

A play on the common turn of phrase "waking the dead."

Examples

Anime and Manga

Happens in Rurouni Kenshin, where Enishi is forced to kidnap Kaoru and fake her death, because Enishi can't bring himself to harm or kill any young woman, due to being traumatized by his beloved sister Tomoe's death. Enishi was very Genre Savvy, though, so he hatched a plan in base to this... and it worked horrifyingly well on Kenshin. By making his Mad Artist henchman build a flesh mannequin looking exactly like Kaoru beforehand, kidnapping Kaoru, replacing her with said doll *and* impaling the mannequin to a wall with Enishi's sword before he leaves it for Kenshin to find, he pretty much destroys Kenshin's will to live for quite a while.
In the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, Colonel Mustang helped Maria Ross fake her own death when she was framed for murder. It was pretty convincing, too—he created a phony corpse with alchemy and burned it beyond all recognition, then faked the dental evidence to remove any doubt that the body was real.
In Yu Yu Hakusho, Toguro faked killing Kuwabara by stabbing him just around the heart, barely missing it, in order to give Yusuke the motivation to defeat him. Kuwabara played along for the same reason, only revealing himself to have been faking after the fight was finished.
Aizen Sousuke of Bleach. Notable in that he later reveals himself to be not just alive, but the Big Bad as well, and that the death was merely one part of his elaborate Xanatos Roulette.
Matsuda in Death Note.
- Not to mention L Lawlliet in the live-action movie.
Rokudo Mukuro from Katekyo Hitman Reborn pretended to have suicided by shooting himself in the head. Turns out he shot himself with a special bullet that allows him possess others, and tries to surprise attack Tsuna using other people's bodies.

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.

Film

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.
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
James Bond does it to himself in You Only Live Twice (hence the title.)
- Alec Trevelyan in Golden Eye.
- And Tan-Sun Moon In Die Another Day
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.

Literature and Theatre

Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing — thereby making this Older Than Steam.
- Not forgetting 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.
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.
This is how Arthur Conan Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes back after previously attempting to permanently kill him off.
The Judge in Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None
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 You Can Never Leave 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.

Live Action TV

Numerous people in Alias, so much that fans are suspicious of those who are supposedly Killed Off For Real.
Jack shooting Nina in season 1 of 24, and Jack himself at the end of season 4.
Alex in Law And Order: Special Victims Unit. (This was a slight variation, in that the bad guys really did shoot her, but the Feds let everyone think it killed her.)
Mulder stages his own suicide at the end of a season, only to return several episodes into the next, on The X-Files.
Captain Kirk on Star Trek The Original Series in "Amok Time" (where he has apparently been killed by Spock, but we learn that Dr. McCoy has actually given him a shot to knock him out), and in "The Enterprise Incident" (where Spock uses the fictional Vulcan Death Grip on Kirk so he can return to a Romulan ship in disguise).
The Dresden Files uses this to throw a demon off the trail, so an ex-demon and his girlfriend can go into the High Council's witness protection program and live happily ever after.
- This particular death-fakery is done for all the reasons listed above, as Harry manages to get the demon in question arrested to boot.
Done by George Senior on Arrested Development.
House does this when he hires an actress to die as a patient Kutner was advising as House. We figure this out at the end of the episode when House pretends to resusitate her and she wakes up in a Holy Shit moment.
Hustle did this several times, referring to the practice as 'pulling a cacklebladder'. Mickey pulled one in the premiere, and a later episode had Celebrity Guest Richard Chamberlain pulling a double-bluff cacklebladder, actually killing himself. It was then revealed to be a double double-bluff cacklebladder, and he really was alive. Damn.)
- It almost ended in tragedy in the second episode when Mickey shoots Danny in front of the mark using a blank, then the mark pulls out his gun and shoots Danny for real. It took some quick thinking to save Danny's life while making the mark believe that he had killed Danny and go into hiding.
PC Nick Klein in The Bill (The UK police drama).
Stroker and his son do this in an episode of Stroker and Hoop to throw ninjas off their trail.
This was done at least twice on Monk, the first in Mr. Monk Meets the Psychic, where Monk and the police pretend that the suspect killed his old girlfriend in order to get him to admit that he really killed his wife. More notably, in the Season 6 finale, After Monk has been accused of murder, Stottlemeyer pretends to shoot Monk to death in order to keep him under the radar while he looks for the real murderer.
Chuck in Pushing Daisies... sort of. At one point, she was really dead.
Tracy in Firefly
- Along with Kaylee in the pilot, as part of a psychotic joke played by Mal on Simon.
In the final episode of a season of Smallville Lana Lang fakes her death and substitutes the corpse with one of her clones (it's complicated)
On Bones, Booth takes advantage of being shot by a Stalker With A Crush to fake his own death and nab some criminal he'd been waiting years to get.
Animorphs did this more than once. When Marco's father is targeted by the Yeerks for nearly discovering Zero-space, the Ani-verse's way of explaining where their mass goes when they morph and how the aliens can travel faster than the speed of light, 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.
Heroes: When Angela Petrelli poisoned her husband Arthur in an attempt to kill him, Arthur survived, though in a paralyzed state, where he telepathically gave commands out to his minions and planned his revenge.
- Later used by Sylar, with the unwilling help of of a shapeshifter, supposedly to throw Noah Bennet off of his scent. However, Noah pulls it apart in record time... and runs headlong into a sadistic Xanatos Gambit.
Jimmy's girlfriend in Doctors, who was an undercover cop had to fake her own death at the hands of another undercover agent to make it seem like her partner was willing to kill cops and thus get closer to the heart of a drug smuggling ring.
On character in Eastenders faked his death to find out how his girlfriend really felt about him.
Kyle XY, of all shows, recently used this: as part of a Batman Gambit to get Kyle into Cassidy's trust, after having Kyle pretend to kill Jessi in self-defense for trying to kill Cassidy (it's complicated), Jessi slows her heartbeat down to two beats a minute. This is enough to fool Cassidy, who checks her pulse and declares her dead. She wakes up a few minutes after Kyle and Cassidy leave, completely unharmed.
Lost: Locke's father fakes his death in order to avoid the wrath of some men from who he stole money. Locke helps, after the fact.
A Three's Company episode has Jack doing this after he's threatened by a man who thinks he's trying to steal his girlfriend.
The title character, in the first series of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin.
Happy Days: A two-part episode has Fonzie running afoul of a bunch of comic gangsters after he discovers a stash of Counterfeit Cash inside a hearse he's repairing. He stages his own death and funeral to try and throw them off his trail.

Video Games

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.
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.
Pulled by the entire Global Defense Initiative in the first Command And Conquer, goading the Brotherhood of Nod into going on the offensive. Even the player gets suckered into it.
- Kane also pulls this off in Command And Conquer 3; announcing his return by flipping out and ordering the player to nuke Sydney, Australia. And at the end of Kane's Wrath, Nod apparently pulled this off until Kane's Xanatos Roulette finally pays off.
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!
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 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.
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 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 UT3.
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.

Other

Martin Gardner (renowned recreational mathematician - yes, it's a real job) did this to the character Dr. Matrix in his column in Scientific American. Dr. Matrix, an agent for the CIA, was disguised as an Arab named Abdul Abulbul Amir in order to assassinate a KGB agent named Ivan Skavinsky Skavar. They dueled on the shores of the Black Sea, and fired simultaneously; Ivan died instantly, but "Abdul" was only knocked out, and the CIA paid two natives to confirm his death.
Dr. William Griffin in KateModern
Parodied in The Spider Cliff Mysteries. After surviving an explosion, Barlow suggests doing this. Crystal tells him it's a stupid idea.
Pulled with appropriate magnificence by Dr. Blackgaard in the Adventures In Odyssey episode "A Name, Not a Number". The scene where he reveals himself to his unwitting accomplice is priceless.
Blackgaard: Actually, once I got out of the morgue, I'd never felt better in my life...

Truth In Television

reported by Talking Points Memo.
- Also the recent John Darwin case. Found out after a Google search.
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.
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.

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.
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.
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.
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 premier (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?!
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.