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Riff is too genre-savvy to count out Oasis
Nick Fury, Ultimate Spiderman
A character is Killed Off For Real and assumed by all other characters to be dead, but the death occurs in such a way that no body is recovered. No matter how all laws of physics and biology indicate No One Could Survive That, this old rule trumps all: " Never count someone dead unless you have the body in front of you." (And in some cases, not even then.)
The day time soap opera frequently uses this trope combined with Put On A Bus. The actor is leaving the show and the producers want to take advantage of the opportunity for drama. The character is in fact being written out and will be presumed dead indefinitely. However, they leave themselves an out without closing the door in case the actor decides to return.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- A rather sadistic version of this trope was featured in Tenchi Universe, near the end of the series, when it goes from Heroic Sacrifice to Never Found The Body to Ryoko surviving all in the course of three episodes.
- Averted in a rather frightening way in Loveless, for while they did find the body of Seimei and even matched dental records — Guess what?
- Subverted in Death Note - Naomi Misora's body was never found, but that was because Light stipulated in the Note that she would kill herself in a way that made her body unlikely to be discovered.
- Not really. He made it so her body would take time to be discovered, which bought him time but made him more suspicious.
- There was some speculation as to the fate of the first Lockon Stratos in Gundam 00, but Word Of God put a stop to all of that.
- Not that it stopped almost anyone else who seemingly perished in the last couple episodes of the season from then being confirmed as alive.
- The final fate of Amon and Robin in the last episode of Witch Hunter Robin. In fact, it is heavily implied that none of their colleagues believe the official story.
- Justified in Fullmetal Alchemist, the body missing is of a person which can regenerate any injury, and the leader of of one of the two allied armies present knows enough to find the body first, or he plans to betray his allies, and grab power for himself, one or the other.
- Nunnally and Sayoko in Code Geass. Justified later on because there were actually two different escape shuttles and Schneizel had arranged the whole affair beforehand.
- A few episodes later, it was revealed that Guilford joined the club.
- The series played quite a bit with this. You could say that if a character doesn't explode inside a Humongous Mecha or isn't shown lying on the ground in a pool of blood, they're probably coming back.
- Unless they're Mao, who, even after shown lying in a pool of blood, comes back the next episode. His excuse? "Britannian hospitals are really something."
- Allen Walker in D.Gray-Man. Lenalee and Lavi watched a recording of him apparently dying, but all that was left was a card and a bit of a bloodstain on the forest floor. Then BAM! Guess who wakes up by the end of the episode?
- They never found Cross Marian's body either. His guards were put to sleep, and his mask was found with a bullet hole in it in the middle of a pool of blood large enough that the blood loss ought to have killed him, along with his Empathic Weapon. However, the circumstances that led to it (and whether he survived) have yet to be explained.
- Subverted in Shaman King; Asakura Hao's preferred method of killing leaves no bodies, but it also leaves no doubt that the victims are dead.
- One Piece did this with Pell, who was seen making a heroic sacrifice by flying a massive bomb out of the range of innocents, seemingly blowing himself up in the process. Sometime later, a limping Pell returns home, only to find his own grave.
- Baccano! has a variation: a certain redheaded conductor was presumed to be dead because they did find the body...well, the horrifically mutilated remains that probably used to be his body, anyway. Of course, the body is really that of that one similarly redheaded and uniformed lackey of Ladd Russo, who made the mistake of assuming that the aforementioned conductor would not be absolutely Ax Crazy. Said conductor cheerfully got off the train with a near-perfect alibi and nary a scratch.
- Occurred in Yu-Gi-Oh 5Ds with Divine, who fell from the highest floor of the skyscraper he was in, after being attacked by Aslla Piscu. Coupled with the fact that the building's interior collapsed due to the damage, and everyone else in the series who lost a Dark Duel crumbled to dust upon defeat ( later undermined when one returned), it seemed at the time like he was well and truely dead. However, as with many examples of this trope, this wasn't quite enough...
- Occurred in Full Metal Panic with [[Gauron. Again, and again, and again, and I think again. He just refuses to stay dead. Let's see... airfield hostage situation? Never found the body. Afghanistan (Helmajistan)? Never found the body. De Dannan's takeover? Never found the body. Before the series started, he was shot in the head. I guess they never found the body on that one, either.
- In Utawarerumono, Hakuoro had Karula destroy a bridge suspended atop a high cliff with Touka standing in the middle of it. Everyone believed she died as the bridge collapsed, but in the next episode she survived unscratched.
- In Kyo Kara Maoh, Conrart and Yuuri are trapped by a bunch of opposing soldiers, and the last thing Yuuri sees before being forced back to Earth is Conrart getting his arm cut off. When Wolfram and Gwendal get to the scene, all they can find of them is Conrart's arm. He later turns up alive (and with a new arm) as a general for the army opposing Shin Makoku, but everyone pretty much thought he was dead.
- Also shown later, when Cimaron General!Conrart turns his sword on Yozak and basically pushes him off the side of a cliff. Everyone witnessing thinks Conrart had just killed his best friend since childhood, but at the end of the episode Yozak shows up with the Shin Makoku army as back-up, and with only minor bumps and bruises.
- It's played with in Simoun, and they seem to enjoy poking the viewer with it. Aresia "dies" in the very first episode, but they never find the body and, perhaps even more telling, she remains in the opening credits to the very last episode. You constantly expect her to reappear, especially when it is revealed that the action that caused her death is also a Time Travel thing-a-ma-jiggy ....except no, she never comes back, you never learn her ultimate fate, and everybody else moves on with their own lives. The end.
- In the Tower Of Paradise arc of Fairy Tail they don't even try to find Gerard's body. They just assume that since since Erza was still alive he must have sacrificed himself to save her (which makes less sense in context), give him a Really Dead Montage, and go on with there lives. When he comes back in a later they're all shocked.
Comic Books
- Pick a comic book character, any comic book character; this trend continues into their animated adaptations.
- Lampshaded by Robin in the animated Teen Titans. Cyborg tries to assure him that Slade is dead, but Robin reminds him, "We can't be sure. He was never captured. Never found."
- Lampshaded in Final Crisis when during the Martian Manhunter's funeral Superman notes that all they can do is "pray for a resurrection".
- Also lampshaded by Batman at the end of A Death in the Family, where the Joker is in a helicopter that crashes into the sea. Batman shouts at Superman: "Find the body!", but he already knows that it won't be found, because the matters between him and the Joker always end up unresolved.
- Lampshaded by Nick Fury in Ultimate Spiderman.
- "There's not too many actual rules to this game of our's but one of the big ones is: if there is no corpse the guy's alive."
- Implied with steampunk cyborg Nazi Kroenen's backstory comic in the Hell Boy movie art book: "In 1956, an unmarked grave was found in Romania. Dental records identified the remains: Karl Ruprecht Kroenen. Many, however, do not believe he is dead... Chief amongst them: Kroenen himself!"
- Considering that he had already removed his own lips, genitalia, eyelids and replaced his bones with steel and his blood with sand or maybe cocaine by then, teeth don't seem like that big a deal, really.
- The Kingpin realized immediately that Daredevil was still alive when he learned that the car he was locked in and thrown into the river didn't contain his body. Sure, he might have drowned trying to reach the surface and sunk into the mud but...
- The Flash has often been one of the more genre savvy superheroes, and this is no exception. In one issue, the villainous Kadabra is caught in an explosion. A cop says, "There's no body. The blast must have incinerated the corpse. Guess that's the last we've seen of him." Flash looks like him like he's an idiot and responds "you're new to this supervillain thing, aren't you?"
- According to writer commentary on the Batman tale The Long Halloween, this is how most readers seemed to zero in on the killer. As it turns out, there was originally a cut scene that did show the discovery of a body that was supposedly Alberto's. It was not, of course.
Film
- Averted in The Invisible, as Nick's body is eventually found, even though he is Not Quite Dead.
- In the third X-Men film, Cyclops' body is never found after the Phoenix takes over Jean's body while she is kissing him. The only mention of him after that scene is when Wolverine finds his glasses floating through the air. And the gravestone, of course. But you never hear anyone in that movie say "Gee, I sure miss Scott; maybe we should have a moment of silence for the freaking leader of the X-Men."
- Brick Top from Snatch guarantees this by feeding the corpses to pigs. In a scene, he describes the animal's eating process.
- Subverted in Star Wars Episode III twice. First, when Order 66 is executed and Obi-Wan is shot off a cliff and falls into the sinkhole, Commander Cody orders his men to keep searching for a body. Again after a battle between Palpatine and Yoda which ends in Yoda falling about 100 feet to the floor of the Senate, Commander Thire reports that they haven't found the body. In response, Palpatine (or at least, one of his advisors) immediately (and rightly) assumes that he is not dead, and orders Thire to continue searching.
- Played straight in Return of the Jedi with Boba Fett falling into the Sarlacc up until his extreme popularity proved otherwise.
- Star Wars actually has a number of these. Mace Windu being another prime example. Generally any Jedi who has a considerable fanbase will have somebody speculating their survival of Order 66 at some point.
- And, of course, Vader in Episode III. He falls right by the lava, short an arm and two legs, on fire, and Obi-Wan leaves him there to die. Obviously, he gets saved and comes back to haunt the galaxy for another 23 years.
- The Bourne Ultimatum ends this way, but the audience is shown the truth; Genre Savvy Nikki knows the truth as soon as she hears the news report.
- Stable Time Loop version: The Emilio Estevez movie Freejack, race car driver Alex Furlong appears to die in a car crash in 1991, but his body is secretly teleported into the futuristic year 2009 by a businessman for use as a transplant host. When Alex escapes and looks up his old friend, the friend is unsurprised to see someone who died 18 years ago, because... they never found the body.
- The original cut of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining had an epilogue in which Wendy is visited in the hospital by the Overlook's manager, Mr. Ullman, who tells her that they never found Jack's body. Kubrick excised this scene shortly after the film's initial premiere.
- That Hun swine Otto von Bruno's plane crashes at the end of Bullshot, and Professor Fenton states that "his body was never found", but after The Hero and his Love Interest get married, we see Otto disguised as their chauffeur. But that is another tale.
- In Transformers, we're repeatedly told that they've found no survivors from the attack on the Soccent base in Qatar (save for that one squad). However, since we never actually saw him die, the base commander shows up for a minor role again in the sequel.
- Wrong. Colonel Sharp (the base commander) and everyone on site was killed. Given that they wiped out their own planet, it's highly doubtful a Decepticon wouldn't be precise in making sure no-one lived through such an experience. The character seen in the sequel (General Morshower) is an entirely different character; different rank and military division. He just happens to be played by the same guy (Glenn Morshower) because apparently the crew liked him alot.
- Max Payne in the movie is shot by the bad guys and falls into the sea. The bad guys don't bother waiting around to see if he gets back up, they simply presume he is dead. All it took Max was some painkillers and the drug and he was good as new.
- Rob Zombie's Halloween 2
- In the TV miniseries of Dune, Genre Savvy villain Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, upon receiving news that Paul and Jessica Atreides were dead after flying into a sandstorm, asks explicitly, "You've...seen the bodies?" He was right to doubt. The interesting part, though, is whether the Baron is truly Genre Savvy or not. In the novel it is more explicit, but his entire plan is based upon the fact that this means of executing Paul and Jessica would not leave bodies. Once his underlings are gone he himself states that they are undoubtedly dead, that nothing could possibly survive a sandstorm, and he was stressing the need to find the bodies as an educational experience to never take anything for granted, not because he actually feels this situation requires a body to be definite.
- Lampshaded in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory.
Marcus Penn: Ryback's gone, Dane.
Travis Dane: Did you see the body?
Marcus Penn: No, but I assumed...
Travis Dane: Assumption is the mother of all FUCKUPS!
- That was probably the most awesome moment (and probably the only one actually worth watching that movie) of an otherwise B flick.
- 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. Naturally he proves to be Not Quite Dead.
- In The Stendhal Syndrome, in spite of all the things she does to him before pushing him over a cliff into rapids, Anna refuses to believe the killer is dead. Turns out, she's wrong. But there's a copycat. And it's her. So Yeah...
Literature
- In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40000: Gaunt's Ghosts novel The Armour of Contempt, Gaunt is shown MkVenner's grave and later told they had erected it as a propaganda tool after his team had been wiped out without their recovering the body. We never see him again. However, the Ghosts' next best scout realizes there is someone nearby that he can't see, which only one person could have done, and Resistance fighters in the hands of the Inquisition nearby mysteriously vanish.
- Also in The Guns of Tanith, a shuttle blows up, but someone onboard namely Mkoll appears later.
- In Watership Down, General Woundwort is last seen furiously attacking a vicious dog which has driven off most of his military. One of his followers later says that since they never found his body, it meant he wasn't dead, just gone to find a more worthy warren.
- Eva, mother of Marco and host to Visser One, in the Animorphs books. Repeatedly.
- Agatha Christie used this several times, usually involving a supposed drowning in which the body was swept out to sea.
- And Then There Were None: The 'Red Herring' death involves a putative drowning which turns out to have been real.
- The Miss Marple short story "The Bloodstained Pavement" has an interesting variation. Person A was supposedly swept out to sea; the body washed up in a very battered condition sometime later. In fact, she had been murdered some time earlier up the coast, and an accomplice had taken her place to confuse the time of death and provide the killer with an alibi.
- In the Miss Marple short story "The Companion", a woman who seems like an obvious suspect for an earlier suspicious drowning leaves a suicide note and herself is presumed drowned; her body is not found. In fact, she had been using a fake identity when she killed the previous victim and stole her identity; the faked suicide allowed her to return to her own identity.
- The faux-death of Sherlock Holmes at the falls left open the means for Doyle to return to the series after the public hue and cry against the seeming end of it all was so loud that nothing else he wrote had a chance of getting published.
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Ichabod Crane, of course. All that was left was his hat and a shattered jack-o-lantern. And they never found the head of the Headless Horseman.
- Subverted in Rick Riordan's The Last Olympian, where Percy knows that Beckendorf could not have survived the fall from a ship into water that is not Soft Water; he survived only because he's Poseidon's son. Poseidon's forces don't find the body either. But later Nico, being Hades's son, has talked to the ghost.
- Peter Pettigrew in Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban. Meanwhile, Order Of The Phoenix and Deathly Hallows involve possibly the only counterexamples in existence. Actually, in Deathly Hallows the magical eye of Moody is found later, but no information about his body.
- Moody's defining character trait was extreme paranoia, and he had given warnings before not to assume a person is dead if you haven't seen the body. Thus the other characters initially expect him to have somehow survived the unsurvivable, and it's not until the magic eye is discovered that they accept his death.
- If this troper is completely honest, she kept expecting him to pop up somewhere until the Trio found his eye...
- And then there's Sirius, who was literally killed in a way that left no body (at least in the book). Fans, however, invoked this trope all the way to the seventh book.
- Can you blame them? He fell through a door and died. When this troper read it the first time, that's the first thing that came to mind. That this death was treated as completely final by Dumbledore left a sour taste in my mouth that prevented me from reading book 6 until book 7 came out.
- Voldemort supposedly died in the Introduction to Book 1. For a dead character, he's remarkably active throughout the Series.
- Approached but averted with Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince. Harry sees him struck with a death curse and tossed from the top of a very high tower, but he doesn't fully realize Dumbledore's actually dead until he finds the body later.
- Looking even further back in time, around 200 C.E Achilles Tatius wrote a novel entitled Leucippe and Clitophone where the titular character Leucippe apparently is Killed Off For Real not once but twice. She is captured by desperados (and given up as Human Sacrifice) and after her miraculous return is later captured by pirates and beheaded. In the first case her body is carried away and in the second this trope is slightly subverted when they find the body... of the other women that got beheaded. This makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.
- Dune expresses it as elegantly as anyone's ever gonna: "We Bene Gesserit have a saying. Do not count a human dead until you see the body; and even then, you can make a mistake."
- Of course in the world of Dune, a dead person has a chance of coming back by "possessing" one of his descendants as Baron Harkonnen does to Alia in Children of Dune.
- I'm pretty sure that chance only exists if your descendant also happens to be Bene Gesserit. And that's assuming Alia isn't just plain insane..
- Another counterexample occurs in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars Trilogy: A major character goes missing and never reappears during a raid in the second book. The other characters speculate that she was captured, interrogated and killed, but just to complicate matters, this character vanished and reappeared during the first book, so it's totally in character for her to just go away.
- Lampshaded and subverted in Forgotten Realms: The Lady Penitent Trilogy. The battle between Vhaeraun and Eilistraee in the first book was witnessed by neither the reader nor the viewpoint characters. In the second book one of the characters cites the fact that no one saw it to argue that Vhaeraun is still alive. By that point, however, the reader has been shown his mangled corpse floating in the Astral Plane.
- Just about everyone in the Star Wars Expanded Universe X-Wing novels, at least the ones written by Stackpole. Of course, counting off, we see... Corran, Mirax, Tycho, Bror Jace, Jan Dodonna, Ysanne Isard, and all of Rogue Squadron (in fairness, that last featured a couple getting Killed Off For Real, but not the main ones). Several characters note that they just won't stay dead; one even theorized that they were actually getting cloned, after the incident where they were all supposed to have died. Fittingly, he gets shot by one of them as they execute their incredibly over-complicated plan.
Mirax: "I could help myself get over this, I think, if I could just finally accept the fact that Corran's dead. Listening to the comlink call when he went in, that was pretty nasty, but we never found a body. I know it's stupid to make anything of that, what with the building coming down on him and all, but my father always said that if you don't see a body, don't count on someone being dead. He did once-"
- In John C Wright's Chronicles of Chaos, the Greek gods assume Trismegistus is dead, merely because he was shot with several arrows by Phoebe, no less and fell into the Abyss. Indeed, ap Cymru justifies talking with him on the grounds it's not disobedience, as he was never forbidden to talk to him.
- Hollyleaf's death in Warrior Cats. Many fans think she is Not Quite Dead because no one bothered to try digging up her body after the tunnels collapsed. Taken even further because we see her die from Jayfeather's POV, and he's blind.
- Played completely straight in State of Fear.
- Defied in the Warhammer 40000 novel Grey Knights: The Inquisition sends the Grey Knight expedition down to Khorion IX instead of simply calling Exterminatus on it because they need eyes on the ground to see Ghargatuloth's defeat.
- A key problem the prosecution has in The Other Side of Midnight with their case against Noelle Page and Larry Douglas for the murder of Catherine, the latter's wife, is that her body was never found. We are led to believe she drowned when she fled the hotel before they could kill her and her rowboat capsized. The Twist Ending reveals that Constantin Demeris, the tycoon whom Noelle was a mistress to, figured out their murder plot long beforehand and had an order of nuns living nearby rescue Catherine — she is now an amnesiac who lives with them. He lets everyone else believe she died so Noelle and Larry will pay for betraying him...and as he's an excellent example of The Chessmaster, it works.
- Referenced in Men At Arms. Because no one ever found Big Fido's body, legends that he's leading a wolf pack somewhere in the Ramtops live on, despite the fact that, as the narration points out, he more than likely got "recycled" by one of Ankh-Morpork's street people into a pair of gloves. May also be a reference to the Watership Down example above.
- In Les Miserables, the recaptured Jean Valjean risks his life to rescue a man who fell from a ship's rigging; in the process he himself "accidentally" falls into the water, from which his body is never recovered. Guess who turns up a month later in Montfermeil?
Live Action TV
- All My Children is a prime offender. Characters go over waterfalls, drive off cliffs, or are lost in wreckage. Rarely is an established longterm character killed off without leaving such an opportunity to return.
- The first death of Dennis "Dirty Den" Watts in East Enders was perhaps the longest gap between killed and brought back, 14 years passed.
- In Heroes, Takezo Kensei pushed Kaito Nakamura off a building. His body is never found. Justified in that Kensei's healing powers have developed to the point where he cannot die.
- Every time Murdoch "dies" in MacGyver. You'd think Mac would learn to stop knocking him off cliffs.
- When Harold Bishop was swept off a cliff in Neighbours
- Neighbours seems to have a fetish for this trope, especially where the Bishop family is concerned. Liljana Bishop and Serena Bishop also supposedly drowned but no bodies were found. Not to mention Dee Bliss. Connor O'Neill was thought to have been murdered by Robert Robinson after his sudden disappearance but he was later revealed to be alive.
- Cigarette Smoking Man on The X Files was shot by a sniper because of his increasing closeness to Mulder and distance from the rest of The Syndicate, early in Season Five. His body was never found, but there was supposedly too much blood for him to have survived the shooting. He wasn't mentioned again until February Sweeps, when he was revealed to be alive and well and living somewhere in Canada. This was perhaps a bit different from the usual way this trope is played out, since it was pretty clear that the writers intended the death to be temporary from the start and the fans knew it; there was, perhaps, one blind five-year old who'd never seen a TV show before that might have believed CSM was really dead.
- Scorpius was shot and buried on-screen in an episode of Farscape but that didn't stop him from coming back anyway. Likely due to his huge popularity with fans.
- The fact that he came back only .....two..... episodes later makes it pretty clear that this wasn't as much of a Ret Con as you make it sound.
- The sixth season of 24 ends with two baddies - Grechenko and Philip Bauer - supposedly dead, but as their bodies are never actually recovered (and Philip may well have the indestructible Bauer gene), they will almost certainly return in future seasons.
- Inverted with Stargate SG-1 baddies where finding the body is a prerequisite for the sarcophagus and resurrection. Apophis didn't die until he was left for dead on a Replicator-infested ship about to crash into a planet. Because of the number of times he actually survived things like this, the scene was complete with Replicators crawling across his Personal Shield, an inarticulate scream of rage and the viewers actually getting to see the ship crash.
- It still didn't stop them from making a Lampshade Hanging in the very next episode, when Jack O'Neill, after claiming that there a 100 percent chance of Apophis being gone for good. He finds himself looking at the unconvinced faces of those around him and changes it to a 99 percent certainty.
- Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis both frequently use this trope, with many of the Big Bads simply "dying" by ship explosion or freezing. See Anubis, a few dozen times, as well as most other system lords at least once, and Michael in Atlantis.
- Given the fact that Anubis has no body, this trope is conspicuously accurate.
- What with the deaths and returns of The Master, Angel, Spike, and Drusilla, the Buffy The Vampire Slayer variant seems to be "never count a vampire dead unless their bodies turn to dust." And even then, there are ways around it (case in point: Darla).
- In Ashes To Ashes, it's said that the protagonist of Life On Mars, Sam Tyler, died in a car accident after spending seven years in 1973 onwards. One year later, when Ashes begins, his body has yet to be found. No sign of him returning yet but the writers are obviously keeping it as an option.
- The Time Lords. All of them. Allegedly, all of them were erased from existence except for the Doctor. And the Master. The Daleks were supposedly also wiped out as well, but that's been proved wrong many times now.
- The Master's Death actually included a scene specifically designed to be used in case future writers ever wanted to bring him back, so they would have some justification.
- Guess what? They used it.
- Lydecker in the early second season of Dark Angel. It's revealed in the last book that he was alive after all.
- Daytime soap As The World Turns has (a lot, like all soaps, but this one in particular is) Colonel Mayer, who jumped into the ocean to avoid being captured by the police. He is presumed dead by the entire cast, but the viewers just KNOW he'll turn up again the second something is needed to drive (another) wedge between Luke and Noah.
- And it is confirmed, the Colonel will be back to Oakdale shortly.
- Days Of Our Lives, with the original "death" of Roman Brady.
- A grisly subversion in Bad Girls - Prisoner Yevone Atkins. Apart from Jim Fenner (her prison officer killer) everyone else thinks she has escaped, which was her plan. The problem: the building plan she and her escape partner had used didn't feature a wall which turned a corridor into a cell because the door to the corridor only opened from the outside. Fenner shut the door behind her and left her there. Her escape partner after spending weeks in solitary confinement (for a different matter) saw the escape route as still being viable as it wasn't discovered by the prison officers. She goes to make her escape only to find the wall blocking her path and Yevone's rotting corpse.
- In Moonlight, Mick stabbed his wife Coraline and left her trapped in a burning building. Taking a No One Could Survive That attitude, he never actually saw her ashes. Turns out she's Not Quite Dead.
- One of the earliest mysteries on Lost involved Jack seeing hallucinations of his dead father on the island. When Jack finally found his father's coffin, the body was not inside. Over the course of the series, Jack's father started appearing more and more often, and to other character to whom he may or may not have any connection, and even began interacting with them, casting obvious doubt on whether or not "hallucination" is really a good term to use.
- Later, Eko discovers his dead brother's corpse in the drug smuggling plane. But when he returns sometime later, the body has vanished. Suddenly, his brother starts walking around and interacting with Eko. Eko finally has a conversation with the "hallucination" of his brother and addresses him as such. The person then replies "you speak to me as if I were your brother" and walks off, leaving Eko rather confused. When Eko pursues the individual, the smoke monster appears and kills him. This scene cemented in many fans' minds the theory that the smoke monster can impersonate others if it has a body to steal.
- Confirmed in season 5, when Alex is quite clearly the Smoke Monster judging Ben.
- This theory ends up being thrown for a loop in season 5. Locke's body is brought back to the island, and keeping with this theory, most fans assumed he'd come back to life. Sure enough, he did. Except then he began acting strange, turning into a Jerkass, and annoying Ben and Richard among others. In the season finale, a group of survivors from the new plane crash bring with them a container...and inside is Locke's body. As it would turn out, the mysterious archnemesis of Jacob (who had never been introduced before that episode) was impersonating Locke in order to use Ben to kill Jacob.
- The original Stig on Top Gear, who drove off an aircraft carrier, leaving only a black glove behind. Word Of God states, however, that he was Killed Off For Real.
- On Smallville, Clark has a routine of x-raying the graves of anyone who's supposed to be dead, like Emily Dinsmoore or Chloe, determining whether or not there's a body.
- Subverted in Sanctuary. Helen spends the entirety of "Eulogy" trying to prove that Ashley is alive... only to find out that, nope, she's history. Confirmed by Word Of God that Ashley won't be back.
- "Your father said you fell into a bonfire, and were swept into the sea, and then your body was eaten by rats." "Well, yeah, but I didn't die."
- This happens to Nicole Wallace in the Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode "Great Barrier." She gets better.
- Victor Comstock is struck and killed by a falling bomb during a broadcast from London at the end of Season 1 of Remember WENN. He shows up alive at the end of Season 2.
Professional Wrestling
- WWE chairman Vince McMahon's on-screen death in a car bombing already had wrestling fans speculating about how long it would take him to come back the day after it aired, both because this trope was repeatedly invoked, and because, even off-screen, McMahon is a Large Ham who has a problem taking himself off TV voluntarily. It eventually became a moot point, as the storyline was largely abandoned in the wake of wrestler Chris Benoit's real-life murder/suicide, with McMahon returning a few weeks later and Handwaving the whole thing.
Tabletop RPG
- Outright suggested to the DM in Shadowrun's fourth edition rulebook, as a story-telling sleight of hand to avoid having to do in important NPCs before their time, regardless of what the rules and dice would otherwise say.
- The GURPS Advantage Extra Life is designed so that "no matter how sure your enemies are that you have been killed you'll come back". Of course, for purposes of game balance you have to pay points of each Extra Life.
- Encouraged for Game Masters in the PDQ-system superhero game Truth & Justice. Where heroes get Hero Points to spend on bursts of luck and desperation-fueled skill, villains get Villain Points to spend on "really" being robot clones (and thus never being in the fight in the first place), to have their body never be found, or to make miraculous escapes from prison. Given the free-form nature of power acquisition in the game, it's entirely reasonable to have "Body Never Found" be a standard power for some villains, as a form of immortality.
Video Games
- Played straight in Freddy Pharkas by Sierra, where at the end of the game it is revealed that Penelope Primm's body was never found within the ashes of the exploded schoolhouse, posing the potential for a sequel that ultimately never occurred.
- Kane in the Command And Conquer series.
- Amanda in Tomb Raider Legend. She apparently drowned during the flashback sequence, but when Lara returns to the cavern in the present day, there are no remains except an untied shoe. Later revealed to be Not Quite Dead.
- Played straight in Call Of Duty 4, where at the end of a special flashback mission the target you are assassinating gets hit in the arm. Your commanding officer congratulates you "Good shot Lieutenant, I think you blew off his arm. Shock and blood loss should do the rest.". Cut back to the present and it turns out that target is Imran Zahkaev who only lost his arm
- Jankowski in FEAR vanishes early on in the game. Although he continues to appear as a ghostly figure from time to time, his eventual fate is left unknown.
- The World Ends with You, averts, inverts and subverts this trope repeatedly. In the game world losers bodies are erased. Averted because despite erasure being a kind of super-death, no trace of the body is found (at most an item of importance to the npc will found post-erasure.) Inverted because Dragon #2's/Sho Minamimoto's body is found intact, some fans speculate he's still alive. Subverted in a previous battle between Joshua and Sho Minamimoto the latter explodes a 'nuke' that presumably erases them both. Although they both turn up alive again, it's only through use of a revival. Joshua is the Composer and using his god powers reicarnates/survives/fakes it, and Sho planned his own death in a Xanatos gambit.
- In The Matrix Online, they Never Found The Body of Neo... leading to several Epileptic Trees and UrbanLegends about his current status. (Alive? Dead? Reincarnated? Assimilated by the Machines? The world may never know.)
- Despite the backstory not being revealed until, well, the final act, the main villain of Killswitch had this happen. When confronted by the protagonist in the backstory, he's told that he's dead, but counters with the question of whether or not they found a body (which they didn't). At the end of the game, after viciously killing the villain, the protagonist's Voice With An Internet Connection asks if the Big Bad is dead, to which to protagonist replies, "I see a body. Mission complete."
- The Ace Attorney series had this happen with Thalassa Gramarye. She turned out to be alive.
- Pulled earlier with Dahlia Hawthorne.
- SNK pulled this with Geese Howard and Rugal Bernstein. Geese's version was more complex: he plummets off of the top floor of his tower in the first game, but manages to survive by the skin of his teeth. Then his next plot involves him achieving Immortality by using the Jin scrolls. It's implied that when he is Killed Off For Real (by getting a second boot off the tower from Terry) that when he falls to his apparent death, the body is not found. Rugal's was more subtle. He self-destructs his own aircraft carrier, and is presumed dead because there were no remains after the crash. This has caused speculation that the Rugal in '95 is an experimental clone used to monitor the Orochi power. It's also implied that he's working with NESTS somehow, as seen in 2002. Also, he doesn't flicker away like all the other "dead" strikers like Goenitz.
- Surprising subversion in Final Fantasy VIII. Squall is impaled by Edea and falls off a balcony; the gang later finds his body, and he has survived the attack nonetheless. Of course, considering Squall is the main character it might be more along the lines of Like You Would Really Do It.
- It probably should be pointed out that it was a shard of ice (Edea's Limit Break) and that he fell about two feet off a Parade Float, not a balcony. It's pretty NARM-tastic with it's over dramatic slow-mo playout.
- Resident Evil does this frequently, the most recent example though has Jill Valentine push Wesker out a window and they proceeded to fall off a cliff. Their body was never found and they're presumed dead. Turns out she was brainwashed and dressed like a Venetian plague doctor.
- Somewhat subverted in Metal Gear Solid 2, where the game's intro has Solid Snake infiltrate a tanker carrying a new Metal Gear, and then watch as a group of Russian terrorists take over. He goes into the hold where the Metal Gear is kept, and then witnesses Ocelot claiming RAY as his own, and then Snake's clone/brother Liquid takes control of Ocelot using the arm that was transplanted onto him after Liquid's apparent death from FOXDIE. Shortly afterwards, the tanker explodes, and Snake is presumed dead. From then on, you play as Raiden, and soon enough you encounter and team up with the oddly-familiar Pliskin, who makes repeated attempts to assure you that Snake is dead. It's mentioned that they did find the body. Although it was missing an arm for some reason. Minor detail.
- Zero in the Mega Man Zero series, after destroying a Colony Drop from the inside. All that remained is his broken helmet.
- Kirei Kotomine of Fate Stay Night in UBW where Tohsaka asks Caster if she made sure Kirei was really dead, and had she made sure to check the body?
- Inverted in a particularly bizarre way in Planescape: Torment. Your character is an amnesiac, regenerating immortal. At one point, you find your own corpse, and can wield your own desiccated, mummified arm as a club.
- Subverted in Devil Survivor. Aya is a major character in the backstory, who disappeared without a trace into the demon world before the game starts. Even when you go there at the game's end, you never find her.
- In Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom, Irene Lew is proclaimed dead after she falls from a cliff and into the sea while being chased by Ryu's evil Doppelganger. It turns out she was just hiding.
- Also, Ken Hayabusa in the first NES game.
- In the Return to Ostagar DLC for Dragon Age Origins Duncan's body is noticeably missing. You can find his weapons still imbedded in the Ogre but not Duncan himself.
- A Dalish Elf Warden can play this card throughout their origin whenever they're discouraged from looking for Tamlen on grounds that he's probably already dead. Well, it turns out he may or may not be, it just depends on what you consider "alive"...
Web Comics
- Oasis, from Sluggy Freelance, has been killed and returned several times; the trope was lampshaded here
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- Subverted brutally with Riff and Zoë. Torg sees their robot burn up, but since there are no bodies, he assures Gwynn it will be okay. They did teleport out, but Zoë was already dead.
- Correction: we saw Riff holding Zoe's limp body, and then supposedly they were both pumped full of automatic gunfire. The second has already been shown to be a case of writer's deception; the former is implicitly ambiguous.
- Subverted in this strip of Narbonic: "I watched the villagers burn you at the stake, chop your corpse into little pieces, and hop all over them!" "There's always an out, Beta. Remember that." (In the "filename story", it turns out that what she actually saw was a video brought by the family lawyer.)
- In Adventurers!, a dimensional distortion swallows Argent and Garshask while they were fighting. Genre Savvy Karn insists that since no bodies were found, they're obviously still alive. He's right.
- Subverted in The Adventures Of Dr Mc Ninja. Though Frans Rayner's body is never recovered, his death is confirmed when Death is heard inviting Frans Rayner to purgatory.
- In The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob, Fructose Riboflavin was presumed dead for centuries before he turned up alive in Earth's solar system.
- Occurs in Far Cry 2 with The Jackal.
Western Animation
- In Batman Beyond: After Blight is trapped in a sinking/exploding submarine, Going Critical, Batman drops by Paxton Powers' office. The Coincidental Broadcast mentions that Blight's remains have yet to be found. Paxton smirks and says "So, he melted with the sub." Batman responds "Sure he did," and walks off. Possibly a subversion, since Blight never showed up again.
- He did return in the comic books based on the series, but was frozen at the end of the issue.
- The situation is repeated in "Inqueling" after Inque's daughter Deanna doublecrosses her mother. In an echo of the previous scene with Paxton Powers, Batman turns up to warn Deanna not to get too comfortable: "She's been dead before." Sure enough, Inque reappears in "The Call, Part 1," proving Terry right. (Deanna's fate is never mentioned.)
- In The Movie, Harley Quinn seemingly falls to her death after her fight with Batgirl. Gordon does point out that a body was never recovered, but doubts Harley would be starting trouble again after decades. She is alive, and is not amused with the criminal activity of her granddaughters.
- A crime in the Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers episode "To The Rescue" has all the earmarks of a crime committed by Aldrin Klordane, who is supposed to have drowned over a year ago. However... he still manages to be the mastermind behind a new crime, in addition to very much alive. Detective Drake points out the possibility of his survival using the title of this trope.
- The finale of Kung Fu Panda is surprisingly silent on this subject. While the Wuxi Finger Hold is never expressly claimed to be fatal, the reactions of Po and Tai Lung (and Shifu's expression when he threatens to use it) all suggest it is at least likely to batter someone to a pulp, if not unsurvivable—and the suspiciously-shaped cloud after Po uses it would suggest there isn't anything left. Whether to avoid the typical Disney Villain Death, as a Sequel Hook, or because the snow leopard is just too Badass to kill off, however, his death—if such it was—happens off-screen...so it all becomes moot, due to this trope. And since Po's excited words to Shifu are "I defeated Tai Lung!" not "I killed him," then...
- In the original Star Wars Clone Wars animation, Asajj Ventress is thrown off a temple on Yavin 4 and is presumably killed. She actually survives in the Expanded Universe.
Real Life
- Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt went swimming and never came back.
- To say nothing of Jimmy Hoffa, Amelia Earhart, Richey James Edwards, the crew of the Mary Celeste, (maybe) Anastasia, and all the other examples.
- Anastasia was never lost. The bones of her siblings Alexei and Maria were undiscovered until 2007, and a DNA test in April 2008 proved them to be Romanov bones. None of the family lived secret lives after 1917, disappointingly enough.
- Well, none of the immediate family. There were some cousins who survived. But their survival was known all along.
- Also John Darwin, whose empty canoe was found in the sea after he disappeared on a canoeing trip. Five years later, he appeared at a police station claiming to have lost his memory- and eventually convicted, along with his wife, of defrauding his insurance company.
- There's also musician Gerry Rafferty, who hasn't been seen since August 2008 when he left all of his belongings behind at a London hospital.
- Although I don't think he's made a public reappearance, according to The Other Wiki Rafferty is in contact with his manager and has sequestered himself somewhere to write and record new songs.
- Adolf Hitler was cremated and his ashes buried covertly according to investigations by the Russians. Of course that is a very fertile ground for a Conspiracy.
- Some have claimed that Osama Bin Laden is dead and the recordings are fakes. Since he is known to be sick and depending on a machine for dialysis, it makes some sense, even if you aren't into conspiracies.
- Kim Jong-Il's mortal existence is also the subject of some debate. He is generally accepted to be in poor health as of 2008 after a stroke, but some have theorized that he's actually been dead for some time, and his recent public appearances are doubles. Given how little is actually known about him, this isn't entirely implausible.
- Natalee Holloway. According to Joran's confession last year, she apparently had a seizure and passed out or died in his arms, then they dumped the body in the ocean. The chance of finding her now is pretty much nil. Hence, no closure.
- A cold case from this troper's home state of Washington: Tracy Elizabeth Brazzel.
- Famous latino lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta, close friend of Hunter S Thompson, and inspiration for the character Doctor Gonzo in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, in 1974 went sailing on the Gulf of Mexico, on a really small boat, right before a big storm. Never been found.
- Spartacus. It's generally accepted by historians that he died in the final battle, but his body was never found.
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