Left For Dead - Television Tropes & Idioms

"You were DEAD!"

"I got better!"

Captain Sheridan, Babylon 5

A character is so obviously dead that the attacker just leaves him there instead of putting one in his brain and finishing the job. Inevitably the character is Not Quite Dead and will come back to seek his vengeance on the original attacker, who will say "You're alive!" in shock.

One of the lowest degrees in the Sorting Algorithm Of Deadness. See also No One Could Survive That. Not to be confused with the video game Left 4 Dead. However, an en masse version this is sometimes used as a build-up to a Zombie Apocalypse, in which people begin dying due to a strange new disease... But then they come back form the DEAD!

Not to be confused with Left 4 Dead.

Examples

Disney's The Lion King: Simba is Left For Dead in the middle of a burning desert, only to be later rescued by Timon and Pumbaa.
- Simba was supposed to have been finished off by the hyenas, but they blundered this (as usual) — and of course weren't going to tell Scar about their failure.
Peter Griffin's fights with the giant chicken in Family Guy end with Peter finally triumphing over the chicken and leaving. Then the camera zooms in and the chicken opens one eye over a sting.
- Peter never thinks to wring its neck and make a chicken dinner.
Happens too many times to count - and too many times to tolerate - in Bleach. If any villain had ever had the good sense to go back and cut off Ichigo Kurosaki's head, the series would be over. No, they just walk away satisfied that the point was proven.
- To be sure, this is a Magnificent Bastard we're talking about. It may well be that he HAS an use for Ichigo alive.
In Revenge of the Sith, Clone troopers shoot at Obi-Wan — who falls into water and is left for dead (despite knowing that Jedi can both fall any distance and breathe underwater (via what Kevin Murphy calls "his trusty 'air-monica'" in Rifftrax). The clones simply remarked (literally): "No One Could Have Survived That." Their Genre Savvy commander told them to continue searching.
- Had Obi-Wan just force-pushed the limbless Vader into that lava pit, the entire original Star Wars trilogy would never have happened. Of course, that would be worth several Dark Side points for Obi-Wan, so it's somewhat justified that he wouldn't.
  - Though that could've just been seen as putting his padawan out of his misery.
Freeza in Dragon Ball Z survives an exploding planet after being left for dead by Goku, after which it's RetConned that he survives, and comes back to Earth (with a mechanised body) to exact revenge. In the end, however, he is easily killed by a super powerful Kid From The Future.
Morto does this after a round with the titular hero in Birdman.
Rob Dougan's song, Left Me For Dead, is quite naturally an angry ballad from the point of view of a victim of this trope.
Sandor Clegane, of A Song Of Ice And Fire, might apply here — it's still not for certain if he's alive or dead, though there is evidence for either.
In the Lost season 4 finale, the Others, who really ought to know better, leave Keamy for dead, not taking into account the body armor he's wearing. Of course, he fakes them out with Dies Wide Shut.
In Supernatural - Born Under A Bad Sign, if Meg!Sam had actually checked that Dean had actually drowned instead of checking and then leaving, s/he could have enjoyed Sam's body for a hell of a lot longer.
In the Heroes season 1 finale, Sylar is Left For Dead after being run through with a samurai sword... and at the very end, no one seems to notice his body has suddenly disappeared, with a trail of blood leading to an open manhole nearby.
- This happens again in the Volume 3 finale, after he gets stabbed in the back of the head which supposedly nullifies his regeneration powers. Even though there is no sign this time that he escaped, (trapped in an exploding building, after all) No one (in the audience) believed this death would stick. The fact that just seconds before they had just built up a storyline for Sylar to track down his true parents helped reinforce this belief in the audience.
The Dark Knight:
Corrupt Cop: "Dent! I thought you were dead!"
Harvey Dent: "Half."
Kill Bill has the Bride being Left For Dead after a truly vicious No Holds Barred Beatdown courtesy of her four former partners, followed by a bullet in the head from Bill himself. She survives the entire thing, though it takes her four years of lying in a coma to recover from the ordeal.
- Kill Bill 2 likewise features the Bride being Left For Dead — literally, by being Buried Alive in an actual grave and coffin... apparently many, many more than 6 feet underground; but she is somehow able to break out of her coffin and burrow upwards through apparently 20-30 fee of solid earth, to come back and Kill Bill.
  - This is parodied in Drawn Together, Season 2 when Wooldor Sockbat is likewise buried in a coffin, and is likewise able to escape ala the video game Dig Dug. One character responds "THAT requires no further explanation!" to underscore how it's never explained how the Bride's feat was possible, since her martial arts training had never involved being a human oil-drill.
Kusari leaves Oasis for dead after their first battle in Sluggy Freelance. Oasis actually does die from her wounds, but dying has never slowed her down much.
This happens to the main character at the beginning of Fable 2. The rest of the game is, of course, a quest for revenge.
Managing an intentional version of this is a Crowning Moment Of Awesome for (Sir!) Horace Harkness in the Honor Harrington series. As a result of hacking an entire enemy battlecruiser, he sends out a decoy shuttle ahead of their actual escape shuttle, which is destroyed with a nuclear warhead. Between the sensor blindness of the nuke's EMP and the fact that after they leave, Harkness arranges for the Tepes to tear itself apart when he activates a nearby pinnance's gravity wedge inside the boat bay remotely, Haven notably assumes that he, his fellow captives, and most importantly his commanding officer Honor Harrington are all dead.
- Notably, the Peep tactical officer on the scene, Shannon Foraker, is good enough that even this doesn't fool her entirely. Both she and her commander, Vice-Admiral Tourville, simply fail to voice any suspicions to their superiors, and delete the data in question that might lead to a more in depth investigation.
  - Closer to the trope, Haven's leadership as a whole has a colossal backfire from this when not only does Honor come back, but comes back after they broadcast her faked execution over every major network. It's hard to say whether the people she rescued or her own survival hurt Haven more.
Inverted in The Matrix. Smith empties more or less an entire magazine from his Desert Eagle into Neo's chest before checking he's dead and leaving. THEN Neo gets back up and hands Smith his ass, marking the point at which he becomes the one.
In the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, the turtles leave Shredder for dead for the good and sensible reason that they had just cut off his head. Unfortunately for them, that still didn't do the job.
Lampshaded in Fate Stay Night with Kotomine. He doesn't come back and finish off Caster himself, but her anxious reaction when Tohsaka flatly disbelieves that she could have killed Kotomine was amusing.
Season 1 finale of Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Master catches Buffy deep in his subterranean vampire lair, drains her, and dumps her face-first in a pool. What more needs to be done? Besides making sure Xander doesn't man up, go into an underground vamp playpen, and perform CPR on the Buffster, that is. The Master lives to regret it. About half an hour.
Obligatory Whateley Universe example: evil sorceress Hekate puts an enchanted athame into Generator's chest, and rams it in so hard it goes all the way through her chest and gets stuck in the table underneath. Hekate then has to leave the corpse and her athame, and focus on Fey. Major mistake. Generator has the right powers to recover from this.
Parodied in Homestar Runner. Strong Bad says he glued Marzipan to Homsar and "left them for dead" but gives no reason why he expected them to die from this (the scene also cuts to the pair, glued together, and very much not dead).
Happens TWICE in Gundam SEED Destiny, first when the Archangel is blown up just as it goes underwater and Kira's Freedom is run through by the Impulse and dumped in the ocean, second when the GOUF that Athrun and Meyrin were escaping on is sliced in half by the Destiny and also dumped in the ocean.
- To be fair, usually when Shinn stabbed someone through the cockpit (and the suit exploded), they don't usually (read: NEVER) live. On top of that, the Freedom had a friggin nuke engine that went critical. The two were not so much left for dead, but rather lived through an extremely lucky scenario. I mean, who lives through a point-blank Nuclear Explosion!?
In The Film Of The Book of The Lord Of The Rings, Aragorn plunges off a cliff during the warg battle in the Two Towers and is left for dead by his companions since No One Could Survive That.
Final Fantasy IV places the Not Quite Dead blunder on the heroes' shoulders - when protecting the Dark Crystal in the Dwarven Castle, Cecil and company are taken out one by one from Golbez's Shadow Dragon. Rydia, previously thought dead (not uncommon in this game), appears and takes out the dragon just before it can kill Cecil, allowing them to turn the battle around and fell Golbez. The party is so overjoyed that Rydia is still alive that they start to leave without checking how alive Golbez is - he manages to get up, grab the Crystal, and warp out.
Subverted in Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie. Metal Robotnik shoots a bridge out from under Sonic and Tails. They grab bridge girders just out of sight, and make gurgling sounds to convince Metal Robotnik that they're drowning. Metal Robotnik isn't fooled, and mocks them for thinking that the ruse would work. And resumes shooting at them.

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