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" Waking up on a slab in a morgue. The story of a character who's been processed and discarded by the bureaucratic machinery of the world…"
If you have a character that has regeneration, a great way for them to discover the power is for them to wake up at the morgue. Can also be done if the character is drugged or Faking the Dead. Either way it can be shocking, as the last place a person wants to be is at the morgue.
Naturally, there will be much confusion the first time it happens to someone, with or without amnesia. Compare Rise From Your Grave. Can be a form of First Episode Resurrection.
Believe it or not, this is an example of Truth in Television. Rare today (though there is the occasional, erm, incident...), but more common in ages past when medical science wasn't all it is now. The only thing worse than waking up in the morgue, of course, was to be actually Buried Alive, which could also happen from time to time. And better not think what would happen if you're slated for dissection...
Examples:
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Anime/Manga
- This happens to Hyatt of Excel Saga as a matter of course. Her condition has her constantly dying in an exaggerated manner only to stand up again as she's incapable of staying dead.
- In the first few pages of the manga series Variante, this happens.
- Since it's about an immortal who dies a lot, Mnemosyne has this happen on more than one occasion.
- The Puma Sisters wake up in the morgue in Shirow Masamune's Dominion Conflict 1: No More Noise. But they're not very surprised—after all, they went to sleep there, thinking it was awfully nice of Newport City Police to provide such nice beds for them.
- In Black Butler, Shinigami Grell falls asleep on the side of the road and forgets to breathe. He's mistaken for dead and taken to the local undertaker, where he wakes up after being called a fourth rate body by the undertaker.
Comic Books
- In Preacher Cassidy shoves a knife through his own throat in order to leave a serial killer's house in a bodybag during daylight hours. Once the sun's gone down he pops out of his bag, bums a cigarette from the morgue attendant and goes on his way.
- Hannibal King wakes up in the Morgue after being turned into a vampire in The Tomb of Dracula.
- Crispus Allen during Infinite Crisis woke up in a morgue, but was actually dead and had an autopsy. Turns out he was just chosen to be the new host for the Specter and he's neither alive nor dead now.
- In one issue of Astro City: Local Heroes, mention is made of the time Supersonic simply revived at the morgue despite being to all medical appearances 100% dead. A lawyer uses this as precedent to suggest that the woman his client "killed" could have been still alive before her autopsy was performed.
- After dying from injuries sustained in a battle with Neron, Wonder Woman is transformed into a goddess and wakes up after being autopsied and stuffed into a bodybag.
- Happened to Norman Osborn in a Retcon after his climatic battle with Spiderman following the death of Gwen Stacy- first thing he did was murder a vagrant who vaguely looked liked him and put the poor guys corpse in his place, then made off for Europe to build a criminal empire once he saw that his son Harry was going to take over the Goblin identity.
Film
- Happens in the 2007 movie Rise: Blood Hunter: The reporter Sadie Blake after being attacked and left for dead by a vampire wakes up in a cold box and has to kick it open to get out. after hunting down and killing her attacker, she ends up dead again and the last shot is of her body being shelved into a cold box in the morgue. The very last shot is of her kicking open the box.
- In the first Blade film, a vampire whom Blade set on fire wakes up in the middle of his own autopsy and takes a bite out of the medical examiner. Why did Blade only set him on fire, instead of staking him? Because the M.E. becoming a vampire is important to the story.
- It was justified by that vampire and the Big Bad being exceptionally hard to kill. Apparently, Blade had staked him before and it didn't take. Hence the fire, and the M.E. developing the magic ammo.
- And then Blade kills said vampire as an afterthought in the final fight, using a wire built into his belt as a decapitating garrote. Why he didn't resort to that instead of burning is a mystery for the ages.
- Behind the Mask : The Rise of Leslie Vernon. During the end credits, Leslie Vernon is shown being wheeled around in a morgue. While the lab technician's back is turned, Vernon sits up on the table.
- In the live-action Street Fighter movie, an example that involves Faking the Dead as Guile wakes up in a morgue (scaring Chun-Li in the process) after apparently getting shot by Ryu and Ken during their prison break. Of course, it was all part of the plan to get Ryu and Ken on Bison and Sagat's good side so that they could take them down later.
- Innocent Blood, a recently-vampirized mob boss wakes up at the morgue. He is quite disgruntled to find a thermometer sticking out of his stomach and a man standing over him with a bonesaw.
- A man wakes up at his own funeral - or actually his wake in The Shipping News. The main character, Quoyle, has trouble explaining this to his young daughter, who doesn't quite understand the difference between death and sleep.
- In Death Becomes Her Madeline fainted after finding out that she died. She ended up waking up in the morgue in a body bag.
- Parodied in Fletch Lives. Fletch fakes being dead to sneak into a morgue. He hides in a locker to avoid getting caught and ends up scaring a janitor.
- Sean William Scott's character does this in a post-credits in the movie Cop Out with no explanation as to how he survived
- Conner MacLeod does this as part of the backstory in Highlander. He is an immortal who can only die permanently if his head is chopped off. As a result, other methods of death just end with him standing up again as soon as his body has healed enough to stop being dead.
- Also used in Highlander II The Quickening by Conner and Ramirez to sneak into the shield facility. When they wake up, they snarkily compare how many bullets they took getting 'killed.'
- In Danger: Diabolik, the title character escapes a police dragnet by taking a pill that puts him in a death-like state. His Dark Mistress gives him the antidote just in time for him to stop his own autopsy.
- In Die Nacht der lebenden Loser (Night of the Living Dorks), a German horror comedy, three boys are killed in a car accident while driving home after a voodoo ceremony. They wake up at the morgue as zombies.
- The Doctor in the Doctor Who TV Movie, thanks to the doctors not knowing about his alien nature, even though he tried warning them, he dies when the doctor are performing exploratory surgery. He later awakens in the morgue, having no clue to who he is, thanks to the anesthetic delayed his regeneration process.
Literature
- Michael Stackpole's Fiddleback Trilogy similarly opens with the amnesia variation.
- Betsy the Vampire Queen in the Undead series by Mary Janice-Davidson discovers she's a vampire on waking up in a funeral home after a truck hits her. But having died isn't important to her; what's important is the hideous pink shoes she's in.
- The protagonist of The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones learns of his regenerating power after he accidentally has his skull broken by a cricket bat, and wakes up in the morgue perfectly intact.
- Stephen King's story Autopsy Room Four is told from the point of view of a character to whom this happens after he's bitten by an exotic snake. The story is a homage to, and follows the plot of, the Louis Pollack story Breakdown, first published in Colliers (June 7, 1947), which has a character who is completely paralyzed in an auto accident and must prove that he is alive to avoid being autopsied. The female pathologist checks a scar near his lower parts which gets him kind of... excited
- In Gordon R. Dickson's Necromancer (part of the Childe Cycle), the protagonist transfers his consciousness to a specially prepared body in a morgue.
- In Christopher Moore's Bloodsucking Fiends, the protagonist, a vampire, wakes in a morgue after her body is discovered and her mortal boyfriend is arrested for murder. It is a rude awakening, as she is woken up by a necrophiliac mortician attempting to misuse her corpse.
- Happens to The Stainless Steel Rat after he's ambushed by his Evil Is Sexy opponent Angelina. His life is saved by luck and his bulletproof underwear, so he uses this as an opportunity to fake his death as well as play Musical Identity Tags with the other corpses as a joke.
- The protagonist in a Dark Conspiracy novel wakes up just as they're preparing to harvest his body for organs. He manages to alert them to the fact that he's alive, only to have the doctor order the orderlies to strap him down as he prepares to continue anyway.
- Harry Dresden is injured at the end of Death Masks and wakes up in the morgue with the coroner standing over him. He freaks out and starts yelling "I'm not dead! I'm not dead!" They knew, they just couldn't send him to the hospital with a bullet wound and so had their coroner friend treat him.
- It's on an Igor's table rather than the morgue, but this happens to Nutt in the Discworld series.
- Averted in Men at Arms, but only because the Watch didn't actually have a morgue, so Carrot left Angua's body in a bedroom to await her moonrise revival.
- Avoiding this is the purpose of Granny Weatherwax's "I aten't ded" sign. When she 'rides' an animal or group of animals her body goes into a deathlike state.
- In a variant, the protagonist of Strong Spirits is hauled off to the morgue while engaging in astral projection, and is unable to re-enter his inert body because of interference by a rival medium. He doesn't actually wake up there, but a friend who knows of his paranormal experiments intervenes before he has to watch his own body being autopsied.
- There is a short story by Edmond Hamilton about a man who woke up in his family crypt, after being considered dead. He walked around the city, listened to what people really thought of him - and decided to go back into his coffin.
- Averted by Jack Fleming from The Vampire Files, who woke up on the shore of Lake Michigan instead. Invoked in-character by Escott in the same series, when he tells Gaylen that Fleming had died of food poisoning rather than reveal he'd been worked over and murdered by mobsters.
- Blaze from Silicon Wolfpack woke up in a morgue, cut his way out of a body bag, and was greeted by a reaper, who informed him that he was having a near-death experience.
- Played with in Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery. The crew exploits a Victorian-era fear of this by having a member fake being dead, but give a false positive on the bell attached to his finger in his casket so that the police would be reluctant to search the coffin with the grieving widow right there.
- In James Blaylock's Homunculus, Willis Pule is knocked unconscious during a scuffle with zombies, then hauled away with the bodies left behind when they de-animate. Pule's skin had been stained pale green in an earlier incident, so whomever collected the bodies can't be wholly blamed for mistaking him for yet another corpse.
Live Action TV
- "Breakdown," an episode the television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, based on a story by Louis Pollack (1955).
- An early episode of Heroes, when Claire, a character with a Healing Factor apparently killed last episode, has her regeneration powers only kick in when the branch in her head is removed. She wakes up, looks down, and sees her ribs exposed for autopsy.
- It also implies the medical examiner never bothered to take pictures before she started the autopsy. Else, Claire's photo would surely have been circulated on the news, and the Bennetts would've gotten a visit from the police once someone recognized her.
- Her father, brought back with life with an infusion of her blood, not only goes through something similar, but has the same reaction.
Music
- The music video for Incubus' Anna Molly
- The Irish folk song "Tim Finnegan's Wake", thanks to some whiskey (not a morgue, but close enough)
Radio
Real Life
- Waking up in the morgue does (rarely) happen in real life. A woman named Allison Burchell, who had a severe form of a rare condition called cataplexy, was mistaken for dead on three separate occasions. It was more common in the past, before advances in medical technology made it possible to detect very faint signs of life. This probably led to several people being Buried Alive.
- A really creepy version of this happened with turn-of-the-century magician Walford Bodie. He was prone to severe seizures, and carried a note explaining the care that he should be given if he was found apparently dead. He revived several times after these seizures, but at one point he had a seizure, and the doctor treating him either didn't read the note, or didn't find it, and he was autopsied even though he probably wasn't actually dead.
- Snopes
 has a good list of these, some of which are hilarious, others horrifying.
- Venezuelan dude was being examined in the morgue when the doctors noticed he was bleeding, and decided to stitch the wound without thinking there was anything odd (even if bleeding is a luxury of living beings). Then he sits on the table, screaming.
- A russian woman, Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, suffered a fatal heart attack after waking up during her own funeral, and finding herself surrounded by mourners.
Roleplaying Games
Theatre
- Juliet did the medieval equivalent (waking up in the burial vault) in Romeo and Juliet. The twist is that she deliberately feigned death and expected to find herself there when she woke up. Too bad Romeo didn't get the memo and had already killed himself out of grief.
Video Games
- Planescape: Torment opens with this scene. Mind you, the morgue is three storeys high and staffed by, variously, zombies and skeletons in various states of decay and the death-obsessed. Features amnesia, although the character has instructions carved on his back and a helpful talking flying smartmouthed skull willing to read them out loud to you.
- The Shadowrun game for the SNES opens the Amnesiac Hero Waking Up At The Morgue. And of course scaring the hell out of the morgue attendants.
- While it's not immediately after his assumed death, in Ghost Trick Yomiel uses Sissel's body to infiltrate the police morgue and possess his own seemingly-dead body. Yomiel then gets off the table and walks out the door. The medical examiner promptly quit his job in order to devote his life to finding out what the fuck just happened.
- Nightbreed: The Interactive Movie highlights one of the problems with trying this mid-game. The player has to allow themself to be killed in order to awaken his hidden powers, which obviously isn't preferred. It doesn't help that this only works after a specific, completely un-hidden-power-related event has taken place (which involves another apparent fail condition, by the way). Then again, interactive movies are not known for their logic, self-consistency or quality...
- World of Warcraft takes this to its logical extreme. If you start a new Undead character, you literally wake up inside a graveyard.
- The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion has a quest for the Dark Brotherhood (the local assassins' guild) where you have to help someone fake his own death. You have to deliver the antidote to him personally, and he thusly wakes up in the mausoleum.
- In Prototype, the protagonist does this near the beginning of the game, much to the surprise of the two (presumed) pathologists who were about to autopsy him (while he was still fully clothed, for some reason).
- Though, this could be because he's or perhaps it would be a better description a Shape Shifter who even has the ability to spontaneously create the clothing of the person whose identity he takes.
- Given that the pair of pathologists' reactions to him waking up are "Get the kill team in here!" rather than, say, "Call the EMPs," they might not have been as surprised as you'd think. They were, after all, working for GENTEK, and get themselves killed by yelling at Blackwatch.
- A couple of Legacy of Kain games start this way (including the first one, after a brief intro); fitting, given the nature of the "protagonists."
- Midnight Nowhere opens exactly like this.
- We don't get to see it, but it happens in Batman Arkham Asylum: when you first visit the morgue, one of the bodies stored there is that of Ra's Al Ghul (which you can find out by investigating). Knowing who Ra's is, when you come back later, he's long gone from the morgue.
- In Curse Of Monkey Island 3, Guybrush has to fake his death with a paralysing drink in order to get into a crypt by way of burial. He then has to do it again to get into another crypt.
- In Sanitarium, the act "The Morgue" starts you out, appropriately enough, inside a locker in the morgue. (Since you were just earlier a four-armed cyclopean hero from a comic book, how you ended up there in human form is not explained.)
- It's not technically a morgue, but in Kingdoms of Amalur, you wake up in a rotting pile of corpses which is where the resident Mad Scientist has been storing his failed reincarnation experiments.
- After witnessing The End of the World as We Know It and having a Creepy Child drop a demonic parasite that devours his eye and burrows into his head, the Demi-Fiend's day starts as he wakes up at Shinjuku Hygienic Hospital's morgue. And everything promptly gets worse.
Web Comics
- Tina of Wapsi Square woke up in a morgue with amnesia as part of her backstory. The catch was that the original Tina had actually died, and her demons had taken over the body.
- The titular Sidekick Girl does this once after being captured by The Coroner, a supervillain who wants to autopsy all the world's superheros so he can figure out how their powers work. Her healing factor allowed her to recover from his ministrations. The other super he captured wasn't so lucky.
Jokes
- A funeral service is being held in a church for a woman who has just passed away. At the end of the service, the pallbearers carrying the casket accidentally bump into a wall jarring the casket. They hear a faint moan. They open the casket and find that the woman is actually alive. She lives for 10 more years and then dies. A ceremony is again held at the same church and at the end the pallbearers are again carrying the casket out. As they are walking, the husband calls out, "Watch out for the wall!"
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