Magical Defibrillator - Television Tropes & Idioms

In One Piece, after a severe system-wide shock from a Reject Dial stops Eneru's heart, he uses his electrical powers to restart it.
- Which is surprisingly both very wrong and right at the same time. Normally traumatic cardiac arrest cannot be overcome by shocking, however due to the way the hearts leaky calcium channels are designed the heart can be induced to beat by tapping it. Tap it hard enough and you can disrupt the rhythm entirely and cause fibrillation. Which can be shocked.
Surprisingly averted in the Pokémon anime, when Nurse Joy resorts to defibrillators when Pikachu's heart rhythm lowers (it had been seriously injured in battle with a Raichu)... and it takes a few tries to get it back on the right pattern, implying that it might not make it after the third attempt. Of course, Pikachu is the mascot of the franchise, so we know better.
- An interesting variant of this trope appears in another Pokémon episode where Pikachu is taken to a hospital and defibrillated. In this case it seems to act more like smelling salts, although it may have to do with the fact that the paddles were placed on the "electric pouches".
- Of course, it's hard to say what effect a defibrillator would really have on what can only be described as an electric rat.
A literally magical example: Hei from Darker Than Black uses his electricity-based powers to reset his heart after it's been affected by a resonance-disturbing sonic scream. Just in case we hadn't figured out that he's a Bad Ass yet.
- Like the above one piece example this is actually quite plausible, even more so given that the power explicitly shakes the heart into fibrillation. Now the question of whether he could stay conscious long enough to use his powers when his brain and body are devouring oxygen and glucose in full combat arousal is another question.

In one issue of DC Comics' Power of Shazam, Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel summon their magical lightning to act as a defibrillator. It's made clear that they have to both be involved, using the opposite Transformation Sequences so the lightning is channeled correctly. Because otherwise, exposing a flatlining man to magic lightning could be dangerous.
- Also used in another comic, JSA, where their evil counterpart Black Adam attempts to do something not-so-evil and revive his teammate Atom Smasher with his magic lightning. To be fair, Atom Smasher's powers revolve around increasing his size and he was a giant when he went down, so traditional methods probably wouldn't work. Plus it's always dramatic to have one of the Marvel family repeatedly yell their code word. ("SHAZAM! SHAZAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!". Really, it works).
Storm uses her lightning this way once in X-Treme X Men, to save the life of Davis Cameron, the future Dumb Rookie Slipstream.
Part of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, the Legacy comics. Cade Skywalker, latest bearer of the Skywalker name, has an uncanny gift for bringing people back from the brink of death. It looks rather like Force Lightning, he has to tap the Dark Side to do it, but it has managed to save instead of harming.
How'd this page get so far without mention of Polite Dissent? The good doctor ranks it at number 3 in his list of Top Five Most Common Comic Book Writer Medical Errors.

First seen in the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage.
Pretty much the entire premise of the movie Flatliners. They are even able to revive someone clinically dead for up to 12 minutes, and have them instantly come to with no brain damage whatsoever.
In the film Short Circuit 2, the robot, Johnny, is given a battery charge from a defibrillator.
- Which is at least plausible, given incredibly heavy-duty electrical parts.
  - ...which Johnny 5 would almost certainly have, being a multi-million dollar military-grade super robot and all.
Used in an important role in the film The Abyss. The only thing that saves the scene from a Did Not Do The Research smackdown is the fact that the defibrillator is an early-80s model that wouldn't have had a "quick look" ECG function, and hence the Deep Core crew had no way to tell if the victim was in asystole (hosed) or pulseless VT/VF (recoverable). All they knew was that the victim had no pulse.
- And in the Novelization, it was really an intervention by the ETs that saved her.
In the film There's Something About Mary, Pat Healey tries to revive a dog with a cut lamp cord. He winds up setting it on fire instead.
In the James Bond movie Casino Royale, Bond uses a defibrillator from his Aston Martin DBS to revive himself after being poisoned with digitalis during his poker game. Averted in that digoxin does cause a number of arrhythmias, and treatment consists of administration of an antidote and an anti-arrhythmic agent (the two syringes from the kit); defibrillation isn't indicated unless the patient tips over into V-fib, which Bond did. Previous to that point, the MI6 medical staff were using Bond's AED as a quick-look ECG rather than as a defibrillator.
In Diary of the Dead, one was used unconventionally — as an anti-zombie weapon. It was only partially successful.
In the movie In Like Flint, Derek Flint manages to revive a man from near-death by using an unorthodox defibrillation procedure. He has one man stick his finger in an light socket, then uses a human chain to apply the electricity and shock the victim's heart back into working.
- In Like Flint is a James Bond spy thriller parody, well before Austin Powers ever came out. These sorts of things are expected.
In the made-for-TV Disney movie The Thirteenth Year, the main character, an electricity-generating merman, revives a friend after he almost drowns by shocking him.
In the first Mr Bean film (in the words of the Literary Agent Hypothesis "novelisation"), "all you have to do is put the round things on someone's chest, yell 'Clear!' and then they come back to life!... But I thought I'd better try the round things on my chest first." — which launches him through the air to land on the comatose patient and accidentally revive them.
Done for laughs in Eraser. A character fakes a seizure to create a distraction, and while he's in the building infirmary, pulls out the cable monitoring his heart rate out of curiosity. This causes the flatlining alarm to go off, so the nurse immediately starts zapping him, with him furiously struggling. She actually gives it to him three times with no ill effects.
Messed up horribly in Mission Impossible 3. They need to use a defibrillator to shock someone's head in an attempt to overload the electronics inside an explosive pill (no, really), but fail because the defibrillator (which, it should be reminded, is a tool that might be needed at a moment's notice) has a warmup time (with large-font countdown), which just so happens to be a few seconds longer than it takes for the pill to go off.
In Police Story, thieves literally jump-start a woman's heart with a car battery.

Area 7 by Matthew Reilly has a Magical Defibrillator. In it, a character is executed by lethal injection. The book goes into detail on how an overdose of multiple chemicals induce unconsciousness, paralyze his lungs, and stop his heart. Several minutes later, he's revived by a defibrillator. From that point on, he's fine. Apparently it cures poison, too.
Artemis Fowl used one of these to save Butler in The Time Paradox after he had a heart attack due to overexertion when trying to resist the Big Bad's Mind Control. Notably, the book does mention him having burns on his chest later.

In a Mr Bean sketch, the bumbling character revives someone with the bare cable method, but then accidentally electrocutes him soon after.
Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger has Tetsu use his Lightning Fist attack as a defibrillator to save Ban.
An episode of ER had a perfectly-conscious character who simply had an arrhythmia telling the doctors to use a certain energy level, as he had had the problem a number of times before and 200 joules was always what fixed it before. The doctors follow procedure, shocking the patient multiple times at increasing energy levels, but 200 is still what sets his heart rate to normal.
Inverted in Scrubs, in which the appearance of defibrillators is a sure sign that the patient is a goner.
In House, Kutner sets fire to a patient with a defibrillator, earning him the name of "professional defibrillist" from House. He also shocked himself unconscious when he used a defibrillator on a wet patient. He seems to like his nickname though. Despite being promoted as a less-drama-more-medicine medical show, House's team has about a 50% chance of incorrectly trying to shock a flatline instead of administering the proper medications.
- Is it? While the monitors usually do show flatlining, when the paddles are brought out, the doctor asking for them almost always calls out, "She's going into v-fib," or "We've got v-tach," or something to that effect.
Played for laughs in Bottom where, in the episode "Gas", Eddie tries to revive a presumably dead gas-man with some electrical wires. He first lodged them in his chest to no effect, then tries them on his crotch before sticking them in his nostrils. He considers this conclusive proof that he's dead (and probably would be anyway after that). Shockingly the gas-man actually wakes up later on alive and only quite dazed and suffering from slight amnesia, despite having been attacked and brutalized in all manner of ways in an effort to revive him or hide his body.
Used in a sketch on Scottish comedy show Chewin the Fat where doctors are using defibrillators on a patient to no effect except the usual cliché muscle spasms you would expect. One doctor then suggests "Try his nuts!" at which point they use them on the patient's crotch, which revives him immediately.
Defibrillators often appear in Stargate SG-1, but strangely, the patient either always revives on their own before the pads are applied, or just dies anyway. One wonders why they bother keeping them around.
- Averted once in SG-1, in "Singularity"; the Goa'uld bomb causes Cassie to develop a fairly serious arrhythmia, which is successfully treated by one round of defibrillation. (It doesn't stop the bomb, though.)
Averted once in Stargate Atlantis, where a defibrillator was actually used to stop John Sheppard's heart. And then was used to try to start it up again...
- Also, in a later episode, Dr. Keller uses a defibrillator to short out an implanted tracking device. However, she notes how risky it is and using it could kill the subject.
Angel: In the episode "Ground State," Gwen Raiden not only uses her electrical powers to kill and then revive Gunn, she also manages to shock Angel's 200-plus-years-dead heart into beating temporarily.
In the MacGyver episode "The Enemy Within", Mac juryrigs a defibrillator out of two candlesticks, a floor mat, and an electrical power cord. The idea was not to reverse fibrillation, but to counteract some kind of magnetic field that was causing bubbles to form in the victim's blood... somehow. Whatever that meant, it worked.
In one episode of Holby City, the annoying new anaesthetist is messing around with the defibrillators while in surgery... and shocks himself. He dies, not that many of his colleagues mind too much. Of course, being set in a hospital, there are plenty more boring versions of the Magical Defibrillator.
Parodied in That Mitchell and Webb Look; in a poorly-written medical drama written by a pair of lazy writers who can't be bothered doing the research, a doctor bursts into a theatre jabbering about how he's going to use "the electric paddles that can make you better if you're really sick but can make you sort of ill if you're fine!" Moments later, after giving the poor sod a fatal electric shock, he muses that the man "was fine, but is now poorly from too much electric."
NUMB3RS averts this altogether in the season 5 episode "The Fifth Man". While in the hospital, Don's heart goes into fibrillation, and the defibrillator is used to restore a normal rhythm. You can actually see the monitor displaying an erratic heartbeat. When he flatlines, they use a syringe filled with a drug to attempt to revive him, not the paddles.
In the Firefly episode "Ariel", Zoe uses a defibrillator to knock someone out when they break into a hospital.
- And that's a contrast to the previous scene, where Simon uses a defibrillator to save a patient.
During the opening of one episode of The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, Jazz, Will's idiot best friend, stumbles upon a defib and applies it to himself. Cut to him being blown down the corridor.
In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles the titular character zaps herself with defibrillators in order to short out a tracer inside her breast, even asking from a doctor if it'll kill her before doing it. It should have stopped her heart temporarily, along with the tracer, but she's up and about in a couple of minutes, max.
An episode of M*A*S*H has Hunnicutt building a defibrillator from improvised parts after reading about the theory in a medical journal, though the episode has it used in a realistic fashion.

In the games Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142, the defibrillator is a tool available for medics. It can revive the injured or kill enemies.
- In both games the medics use the defibrillator as an instant cure from death. Unless you were blown up by a direct artillery hit, anti-tank (or anti-air) weapon, a C4 charge, or killed inside a vehicle, you will be revived by a shock with the pads, if a friendly medic can reach you within about 15 seconds after your fatal wound. Considering the pace of gameplay, probably an Acceptable Break From Reality.
- Less acceptable are those medics who choose to teamkill you and immediately revive you. However, it is much faster than whipping out the medkit.
Parodied in Warcraft III. If you click repeatedly on the Priest unit, it will eventually respond with a "Clear!" followed by the sound of an electric shock.
- This was also a joke line is WC3's precursor, Star Craft. The medic said the line.
- Now, in World of Warcraft, there are engineer-crafted items called Goblin Jumper Cables that can be used to attempt to revive dead players. With a good chance of instead failing and ''exploding''.
Justified in the Star Wars game Republic Commando. In it, the commandos can use what appear to be defibrillator paddles to revive each other almost instantly and regardless of damage received or time incapacitated... however, dialogue reveals that what the paddles actually do is activate cybernetic implants that release bacta, the setting's miracle cure-all.
- To add to that, the commandos are not killed after their health bar runs out, they are simply paralyzed and are unable to move. (Possibly a stun mechanism built into the armor to keep the commandos from dying like typical grunts.) You only die when all commandos are incapacitated.
In inFAMOUS, Cole's healing hands work a lot like Magic Defibrillators, complete with charge up and zap, and will bring anyone not-quite-dead back to life. Except when they're Killed By Plot, then it only brings them back long enough for a tearful last words.
In Saints Row 2, the ambulance missions allow you to use a defibrillator or CPR to revive people in car accidents. Once all missions are completed, the defibrillator is unlocked and can be used on anyone that you see outside of cinematics, including people suffering from headshots, severe burning, ingested explosives, katana impalement, etc. The magical properties of ambulances makes one wonder why you can't just use it when Aisha is beheaded, but perhaps that's where Zombie Carlos comes from (and explains why it wasn't used).
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has a defibrillator as a revive tool for downed allies and a one-hit-down for teammates and enemies. Acceptable Breaks From Reality It revives you with half health, recharges almost instantaneously, and requires no timing. Some people will shock you to down you and immediately revive you if you're noticeably below half health.
In the game Ever 17, a defibrillator is used in a attempt to revive Sara, who had just drowned. Even disregarding the fact that the paddles are supposed to be applied to bare skin (a somewhat forgivable omission, as Ever 17 is one of the rare Visual Novels that doesn't hold an AO rating), the wisdom of attempting to send an electric current into somebody who is wearing wet clothing is truly to be questioned. (Although it did fail...)
The Wii versions of Trauma Center sometimes have defibrillators used in operations. When the EKG/health meter begins to fibrillate, the player is supposed to stop operation and wait for it to pass, if it doesn't, the defibrillator is used. The sound effect implies that the player waits until the patient flat-lines before defibrillating, which is really too late, although this may just be a stylistic choice. If it is a situation where defibrillation is impossible (such as when the heart has bullets lodged in it), the heart is massaged by hand instead.
In zOMG!, the Defibrillate ring lets a player revive another player that has been dazed. The icon even includes an EKG heartline.
In Amateur Surgeon, you can use the car battery to restart the patient's heart, if it stops. The reason it stopped was probably because you used the car battery on it the first time, though; so death by excessive bleeding is can't be undone by the car battery.
Left 4 Dead 2 has a defibrillator that can revive a dead Survivor.
- Dead by BLOOD LOSS, probably still having many open wounds! This troper can't think five seconds about it without seeing a giant bloody POOF in his mind.
  - Or having several major organs pulverised after falling off the top of a building.
An MMO called Requiem:Bloodymare has items in the game called AED's. Automatic External Defibrillators. They work by ressurecting the player on location instead of at a designated spot.

Boo tries to revive Largo with a hamster-sized set of paddles in this Megatokyo comic.

In the Gaia Online MMORPG zOMG!, the Defibrillate ring is used to revive "dazed" allies. Granted, this is Gaia Online we're talking about...

In an episode of Justice League, Hawkgirl uses her electrical mace this way. Although at least she just lays it gently on the victim's chest, instead of pushing down with it. That probably wouldn't have helped matters.
- Batman The Brave and the Bold pulls something similar when Black Lightning pulls and a Heel Face Turn and revives Wildcat after he has a heart attack.
In Sealab 2021, Stormy tosses his high powered hair dryer to a swimming Quinn, shocking him. When Quinn regains consciousness, Stormy tries to revive him by shocking the pool with a defibrillator, knocking out Quinn again.
In Assy McGee Da Chief revives a clinically dead Assy by shocking him over and over.
Played for laughs in The Fairly Oddparents. Timmy is injured, and Cosmo poofs up a defibrillator. Off screen, we hear the machine charging up, Lightning strike, and Cosmo screaming in pain, saying "I shocked myself!"
Used on Aelita in the Code Lyoko episode "Common Interest", when her heart stops beating because the Supercomputer's uranium battery is failing. They use the defibrillator on her, without gel, and leaves her underwear on. Yup. Then again, this is also the hospital that, in the same episode, let a known and extremely dangerous criminal inside, then didn't notice when he kidnapped Jérémie, so who knows? It wasn't the defibrillator that restarted her heart, though; the battery turned on again.
Averted, suprisingly enough, on The Simpsons. When Homer uses a defibrilator on himself after he starts having chest pains. Obviously played for Rule Of Funny.

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