The Last Man Heard A Knock - Television Tropes & Idioms

"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door."

— Fredric Brown, Knock

Whenever there is but a single living soul left on Earth in an After the End scenario, we know that no matter how lonely it seems, there will always be other people left on Earth. Or perhaps zombies. Or a helpful dog. There always are. When it comes to exceptions, there are next to none. And even better: They are somewhere relatively close to him, and will run into him, despite the fact that Earth (or even a major city) is a pretty big place and it should be unbelievably easy to miss each other; generally, however, the second party is making an active effort to find the first, and such handwaves as "I tracked your radio" emerge in short order.

The reason this trope exists, of course, is to take the burden off a single actor. For the most part, stories focused on a single person who never encounters others are boring unless that person is an excellent actor (or the writer is brilliant) - it's interaction that makes for entertainment. Plus, it opens up more potential for conflict, often called the driving force of fiction.

Examples:

open/close all folders

Anime and Manga

In obscure doujinshi series Mythic Quest this is averted in the Empty Earth arc. Anaya really is the sole human left in the dimension of Earth. There are eventually robots powered back up and AIs, though.

Comic Books

In the comic Kingdom, it appears all humans have been wiped out, until we discover that there are living populations (albeit frozen ones) in Antarctica and possibly New Zealand.
Y: The Last Man is both an aversion (Yorrick is the last male mammal besides his monkey, but there's still plenty of women) and a Zig-Zagging Trope. It turns out there are three astronauts aboard the International Space Station, including two men... but an equipment malfunction kills the men on reentry... but the surviving woman is pregnant with a baby boy. Later, Yorrick goes to Japan and stumbles upon another man... but it's actually a fairly lifelike robot. Then he meets Dr. Mann's father, and incorrectly believes it's another robot.

Film

The Quiet Earth was advertised as a drama concerning the last man left on Earth, and how he copes with his loneliness. (Not well.) Of course, less than halfway through the film he meets another survivor, and another soon after...
I Am Legend. In the most recent film, Will Smith's character is discovered by two survivors, a woman and a young boy. And later, an entire town of survivors pops up.
- Justified by the fact that he had a radio broadcast playing 24/7 saying exactly where he would be at exactly what time, if anyone wanted to bother coming for him.
A rare example that is far from After the End: In the film Moon, we spend the first half of the film thinking that Sam has gone insane due to loneliness. It later turns out that there are thousands of clones on the moon.
In Zombieland, we're not really sure if Columbus is that last non-infected human alive. He doesn't seem to be clear on it either. He's not.
28 Days Later is another ~~zombie~~ film that starts with one man thinking he's the only one left alive and staggering around a deserted city. It Got Worse once the sun went down, naturally.
- The Day of the Triffids also starts out this way.
Night of the Comet: After they find a radio station, Samantha starts broadcasting to no one in particular, just for the hell of it. Suddenly, the "call" light goes off. The caller turns out not to be as friendly as they let on.

Literature

In "The Silent Towns", one of Ray Bradbury's Martian stories, a man thinks he's the last human on Mars, but discovers - much to his displeasure - that he isn't.
Averted in Eric. Since the last man on earth is, in fact, Death, he knows full well that no one's left. However, new matter begins to, very slowly, create itself, and he prepares himself to wait the billions of years necessary until he'll be needed again.
Fredric Brown's short story "Knock" begins by quoting in full a short story that has become known as the world's shortest horror story:
"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door."
- Which was shortened by one letter to create something even creepier:
"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a lock on the door."
- This is quoted by Guillermo del Toro in 100 Scariest Movie Moments, when talking about The Haunting.
The science-fiction short story In the Shadow of Bones is eventually shown to be an example. And then the trope is subverted...
M.P. Shiel's 1901 novel The Purple Cloud has a man believing himself to be the sole survivor after the title phenomenon seemingly kills off all other human and animal life on earth, but he eventually discovers a young woman has also survived the catastrophe.
- This story was updated and adapted for the 1959 film The World, the Flesh, and the Devil.
Mau in Nation starts out thinking he's the last man alive, and almost throws himself into the sea until Daphne stops him. As the novel continues more and more people turn up until the eponymous nation is established.
The Brief History Of The Dead is a rare example of a story that averts this, sort of. There is only one person ALIVE in the whole world (a researcher in Antarctica, everyone else having been killed off by an extremely deadly virus), but the story alternates between her and the thousand or so people in the City (the place everyone goes after they die until no one remembers them any more) who are kept there by her memory of them.
Played With in The Chronicles of Narnia—Jadis really is the last person in her world after using the Deplorable Word to wipe out all other life. However, there are other worlds, so she puts herself into a magical sleep until someone wakes her up by ringing a magic bell.
Mentioned in World War Z. While most of the narrators were part of a group during the Zombie Apocalypse, they tell of encountering LMOE's, 'Last Man On Earth' who assumed that they were the only humans left and did not always take well to the army comming to drive the zombies back.

Live Action TV

Averted in the Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last".
The Doctor isn't the last man on Earth, but he is the last of his kind. Except he isn't.
Star Trek: Voyager, "Projections." The Emergency Medical Hologram is activated and told by the computer that he's the last person on the ship. As this is still early in the show and he's stuck in Sickbay, he prepares to shut down his program, but suddenly there's a knock at the door.
Red Dwarf makes this the whole premise of a sitcom. On a mining ship in deep space, a radiation leak kills everyone except one man in a temporal-stasis-field prison cell. He wakes up three million years later, utterly alone. Except for the ship's computer. And a hologram of the one member of the crew he really dislikes. And a humanoid creature that evolved from his cat. And, later, a robot butler. And an alternate-universe version of his ex-girlfriend...
Done literally in The Sarah Jane Adventures episode "The Empty Planet"; when Rani wakes up and finds out she's alone, she checks the neighboring houses for other people with no luck. As she's searching for a working TV signal, there's a knock on the front door... which turns out to be her best friend Clyde. Played closer to the spirit of the trope later, when they run across a stranger who was also left behind, then a pair of killer robots...
- Said stranger turns out to be an ascending prince, and the robots are looking for him.

Music

In the last verse of Benny Hill's (Yes, that Benny Hill) song "What a World" the last man on Earth throws himself off the Empire State Building, and as he's falling he hears a telephone ring.

Video Games

Fragile Dreams : Farewell Ruins Of The Moon starts with Seto burying the only person alive he's ever know, setting off on a epic quest to find any form of life. Somewhat ruined by the fact he finds a girl wandering around almost immediately.
Bastion starts this way, but rather quickly subverts it, though it takes a while for the true scope of the disaster to be understood.

Western Animation

Sort of averted in one episode of Justice League where we're shown a Bad Future in which Vandal Savage is the last person on Earth after inadvertently killing everyone else, but Superman arrives due to unexpected time travel.