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  • Andor: The only keepsake Cassian has from his childhood on the condemned Kenari, of which he is the only known survivor, is the blow gun he had when Maarva and Clem abducted him to save his life from Republic reprisals after they realized the Language Barrier prevented them from warning him. Later Maarva is seen holding it and sitting in Cassian's room as she realizes she'll likely not get to see her adopted son again before she succumbs to her illness.
  • Babylon 5: Commander Ivanova wears a single earring. During the Earth-Minbari War, she'd given the other half of the pair to her brother as a good-luck charm, so he could give it back to her when he came home safely. He didn't.
  • Battlestar Galactica:
    • In Helena Cain's weapon cabinet there are guns, knives and a pitiful dinner-knife that she grabbed when she, just a child, tried to defend herself in the last day of the first Cylon War. The fact that she never put it down, but kept it, symbolized that she never stopped fighting that war.
    • Sharon Valerii has a pair of carved wooden elephants in her apartment on Caprica, a gift from her parents (who died in a mining accident) to celebrate her joining the Colonial military. Except, as Sharon points out to Caprica Six, that whole backstory is a pack of lies because she was a Cylon the entire time. She still has the elephants because she hasn't been able to let go of her "human" identity.
  • Parodied in the first Blackadder, in an episode where the main characters enter the church. Baldrick starts shifting job-lots of saints' relics.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Buffy's claddagh ring, given to her by Angel. After he loses his soul, she throws it in her drawer pretending it isn't there. After he is sent to hell and is presumably dead, she wears it on a chain around her neck as a symbol that she's grieving, but slowly healing. Later, the ring is part of what brings him back to life.
  • Burn Notice - In the Season 2 Finale we find out Victor kept pictures of his family as a tragic keepsake to spur him on to wipe out the shady company that burns spies and then recruits them for black ops missions.
  • Castle - Kate Beckett wears her murdered mother's wedding ring around her neck as a reminder of why she does what she does. Also inverted, in that she also wears her father's old watch as something of an Uplifting Keepsake; she helped him recover from her mother's death by helping him overcome the alcoholism he fell into afterward. Because it's more readily apparent (and unusual), Castle mistakes the latter for the former.
  • CSI: NY:
    • Mac Taylor keeps a beach ball from his last vacation with his wife before her death on 9/11. He can't bring himself to let it go as it has her breath in it, the only physical(ish) thing he still has of her. (Unless you count her son, Reed.)
    • He also had opera tickets from that fateful day that he eventually let wash away into the ocean in the episode that aired around the 10th anniversary.
    • There’s also an episode where a cop is killed and Danny and Lindsay deliver his badge to his son so that his son can wear it when he graduates from the police academy.
  • Doctor Who:
    • Amy's engagement ring in the last few episodes of Series 5. Somewhat subverted, since it's the Doctor who cares for it, even though Amy is still alive and traveling with him because Rory has been wiped from existence, along with all of Amy's memories of him.
    • At the end of "The Angels Take Manhattan", Amy's reading glasses become a Tragic Keepsake.
    • The Badass Bandolier of the War Doctor was from a prospective companion who died rather than be saved by a Time Lord, leading to the Eighth Doctor's regeneration.
    • "Demons of the Punjab":
      • The broken watch Umbreen gives her granddaughter Yaz. It belonged to her first husband, Prem, who was killed the day they were married.
      • Prem's amulet used to belong to his older brother, Kunal, who died in World War II during the evacuation of Singapore.
    • "Kerblam!": Dan Cooper shows Yaz a necklace his daughter made for him, with "DAD" engraved on it. At the end, after Dan's death, Yaz asks the Doctor to help her deliver the necklace to the daughter.
    • "It Takes You Away": It turns out that Graham has been wearing a frog necklace he gave his late wife Grace as a Christmas present since her death.
  • Fellow Travelers:
    • Hawkins Fuller keeps a paperweight that was a gift from his First Love Kenneth Willard that the latter bought during their senior trip. Kenny died during World War II.
    • The same paperweight also becomes a tragic keepsake representing Hawk and his Second Love Timothy Laughlin's relationship. In 1957, as Tim sleeps in the love nest Hawk furnished for them, Hawk leaves the paperweight next to Tim and whispers "I'm sorry" before reporting Tim to the M Unit for being gay and getting him permanently banned from working for the federal government. Tim keeps the paperweight until 29 years later, when he is "organizing his life" and sends it back to Hawk. The penultimate scene of the show ends with Hawk contemplating the paperweight that is now a memento of both of his lost loves.
  • Forever: Jo Martinez wears her wedding ring on a chain around her neck. She tends to fiddle with it when thinking of her late husband, sometimes then pulling out a photo of him to contemplate.
  • Frontier Circus: In "Coals of Fire", Cato is an ex-slave hunting his former master's killer. He carries his master's old sabre, which was the only item he was able to retrieve when the Union officer burned down the plantation.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • In the first season, Ned Stark gives his daughter Sansa a new doll to try and make up for having to kill her pet direwolf. Unfortunately, Ned totally misjudged his daughter's tastes, having gotten a thirteen-year-old the sort of toy she hadn't played with in about five years, and she is understandably dismissive, given the situation. However, after Ned is executed, it's revealed in a short scene in the second season that she kept the doll and the doll has reappeared a number of times in subsequent seasons, clearly valued quite a lot by Sansa as what was probably her father's last gift.
    • Renly's armour fits this trope for Loras. This heartbreaking deleted scene from Season 2 makes it more obvious. It's the only physical object that Loras has kept as a reminder of his lover after he buries Renly's body.
    • Arya's Cool Sword Needle is this. Given to her by her brother Jon, it's the one thing from her old life that she refuses to cast off when she starts anew in Braavos because Needle is Winterfell and Needle is her family.
    • Daenerys's murdered mother, Queen Rhaella's, silver dragon-headed motif ring, which she wears almost constantly on her left index finger and as Emilia says in the Season 3 TV Guide cover-shoot: "This ring is... Ah! Fundamentally, the only thing that Dany has had from: day one, Season 1. It's her mother's ring. But yeah, this is, this is the one that you'll see, forever and ever, Amen!"
  • Shaun from The Good Doctor carries around a toy scalpel that was part of the toy doctor bag that his brother Steve gave him for his birthday just before he died.
  • Hercules: The Legendary Journeys: Iolaus is rarely ever seen without the pendant around his neck. Season 3's "Love Takes A Holiday" reveals that it belonged to his father, Skouros, who was killed some years earlier in battle. It's also stated that Skouros got it from his own father, who is strongly implied to have been killed in battle when Skouros was just a child.
  • Heroes:
    • In Season 3 reformed Future Sylar keeps the broken wristwatch which gave him his name as a reminder of the terrible things he did before he reformed.
    • Daphne holds a knife to Ando's neck to keep Hiro from taking a track medal from her Paris apartment. The online comic "The Caged Bird" shows Daphne's late mother won the medal in high school, and Daphne had treated her mother poorly in the weeks prior to her death.
    Daphne: I wish I could say I made the time as easy on her as possible. But I can't. It's not the only thing I regret in my life. But it is the most painful.
  • In From the Cold: Faina, Anya's youthful Love Interest, kept a pendant whom her deceased mom gave to her as a treasured memento. She lost it while with Anya and is overjoyed to get this back. Anya planted a tracking device inside it though on orders from her handlers, since Faina's father works in the Chinese embassy and they map it out this way.
  • Played for Laughs in Intimate: Actors Bruno and Oskar haven't learned their lines and try to get out of the day's shoot of their show by claiming Oskar's twin brother has died. Everyone is touched, and their co-star Roland Møller even gifts Oskar his late wife's necklace. Unfortunately, Oskar's still wearing it when Møller meets both him and his very alive brother later that day and flies into a rage.
    Møller: [placing the necklace over Oskar's head] You can talk to the dead with it.
    Oskar: Thanks, Roland. [fake crying, to Bruno] That'll help me a lot, won't it?
    Bruno: [also fake crying] Sure, dude!
  • In a Law & Order: SVU episode, a judge keeps the amount of change in his pocket he had on the day his son was kidnapped.
  • In a Deleted Scene at the conclusion of the Law & Order: UK episode "Survivor's Guilt", DS Ronnie Brooks is seen walking off with the cat that once belonged to his murdered partner DS Matt Devlin, effectively telling the audience that even though he'll go on with his life, he'll never forget him.
  • On Lost, Kate robs a bank to obtain a toy plane that belonged to an old boyfriend for whose death she fell she is responsible.
  • In the two-part series finale of Monk a fatally poisoned Monk finally opens the Christmas present that his wife gave him before being murdered, which he kept unopened for 12 years (as noted in previous episodes). It turns out it contained a videotape with crucial information on her killers and why she was killed.
  • Motherland: Fort Salem:
    • Raelle has a few: her mother's war protection totem, her mother's conscription medal, the bird skull corsage she gifted Scylla, and Porter Tippet's scourge.
    • Bridey chooses to keep her eyepatch as a reminder of her failure to save her sister during a Spree attack.
  • NCIS
    • Ziva keeps a Day-Glo orange stocking cap as a keepsake from Lt. Roy Sanders, the young man she connects with while he is dying of radiation poisoning in "Dead Man Walking". It has more significance to her than his other belongings because they had discovered that their morning jogging routes overlapped, so she actually saw him wearing that hat practically every day.
    • A small example in "The Lost Boys": Dorneget accidentally knocks over a cup full of pens in Vance's office, and scrambles to pick them up off the floor. Later in the episode, after Dorneget dies while evacuating a hotel just before/during a terrorist attack, Gibbs is in the same office and gets distracted when he sees one last pen still on the floor. He picks it up and tucks it into his pocket before leaving.
    • The model of a Mallard locomotive that Ducky keeps in autopsy was the last Christmas present he gave to his half-brother Nicholas before his parents divorced and Nicholas was taken by his mother to another country, with the train being accidentally left behind.
    • Ziva's Star of David necklace becomes one. In season 11, it gets left behind in a safe house when Ziva is forced to evacuate it after being attacked. Mossad recovers it and gives it to Tony, who returns it when he finds her holed up in her childhood home. She decides to stay in Israel while Tony reluctantly returns to the US. He finds the necklace in the pocket of his suit jacket as his plane taxis down the runway. It's shown a few more times, stored safely in a box in his desk drawer at the Navy Yard. In season 13, her childhood home, where she is presumed to live, is bombed and it's unknown whether or not she survived. Tony carries the necklace to feel close to her while they wait for news. News comes: she is presumed dead, but Tony finds out they have a daughter together. He passes the necklace onto Tali.
    • Ziva wears a different necklaces as a Tragic Keepsake in season 17. It's one Tali picked out at a market for Ziva to wear. She wears it to feel close her daughter, as she hasn't seen Tali since shortly after she sent her to the US in season 13. One season 17 episode stars In Medias Res of her having chopped off the fingers of a terrorist who had taken it from her. The necklace is still wrapped around the fingers.
  • Never Have I Ever: Devi keeps the voice mails her dad left on her phone, frequently listening to his voice in moments of stress. She's very dejected after thinking she lost them. Later she's saddened after they get erased due to her phone getting wet, but her mother shows Devi home videos of him as a substitute.
  • Nikita features a metaphorical example. Owen, another rogue operative, made drawings reminding him of the people he killed. He eventually has them tattooed on himself.
  • In Once Upon a Time, woe betide the man who dares steal Mr. Gold's chipped teacup — a relic from the fairytale world, where the cup was chipped by Belle. The fact that Mr. Gold is one of two people in Storybrooke who remembers his true identity means that while other characters are seen with their own emotionally-significant objects, only Gold is aware of the significance of his own keepsake.
  • Ordinary Joe: In all timelines, Joe holds his father's badge — damaged in the 9/11 attacks — close to him. In the cop timeline, Frank and Amy cut through red tape to have Joe issued his father's retired detective number.
  • In Quantum Leap (2022), Janis Calavicci wears her late father Al's Navy ring. In the first episode, this is what allows the Project team to identify her as the person who helped Ben leap.
  • In Japanese drama Shokojo Sera, the necklace main protagonist Seira gave her father before he left was given back to her upon his death. And when she would later run away from the school, it was the only thing she brought with her.
  • Smallville Lana Lang wore a piece of the meteor that killed her parents as a pendant. That's right, she wore as jewelry a piece of the meteor that killed her parents. And since the audience needs to understand that it's kryptonite, she just won't stop talking about it...
  • Space: Above and Beyond - The king of hearts (Nathan) has a locket with a voice recording of his girlfriend (fiancée?) that was given to him just before they were forced to part ways (she had to catch a rocket to space).
  • In Gods of the Arena, the prequel to Spartacus: Blood and Sand, we learn that the colored wigs Lucretia rotates between originally belonged to her friend Gaia, who died a violent death in Lucretia's home. She wears them in honor of her memory. Later, in Spartacus: Vengeance she doesn't wear them anymore because she lost her memory but is later forced to wear the red wig by Ashur as a sign of his command over her. When Lucretia liberates herself from Ashur's influence, she throws the wig over the same cliff from which Gaia's body was thrown.
  • In the Star Trek: The Next Generation fan favorite "The Inner Light", a probe downloads the experiences of an alien civilization into Picard. From his point of view, he gets married, raises children, watches his friends pass away, and wakes up to discover that the civilization had been wiped out a thousand years ago. He gets a flute that he had played in that other life, and in a Continuity Nod, the flute appears in later episodes.
  • In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "The Siege of AR-558", Vargas (one of the soldiers stationed on the planet) has a piece of torn cloth around his wounded arm that he won't let anyone remove. He says it was from the uniform of a fellow Starfleet officer named McGreevey, who was killed while tending Vargas' injury. Subverted in that Vargas thought McGreevey was a jerk and disliked him because he "never shut up".
  • Star Trek: Voyager:
    • In "Resistance", an old man named Caylem thinks that Janeway is his daughter and gives her a necklace. Janeway is forced to sell the necklace at one point, but after Caylem is killed, the final scene shows Janeway recovered and kept the necklace.
    • In the "Year Of Hell" two part episode, the villain keeps a lock of the hair of the wife he accidentally erased from time in a special container that shields it from dissipating into nothing because it can't exist in the world he created.
  • Supernatural:
    • After Dean dies at the end of season three, Sam wears his iconic necklace for the four months Dean is in Hell. He gives it back to Dean when the latter is resurrected.
    • After Castiel dies at the beginning of the seventh season, Dean saves his trenchcoat, folding it tenderly into the trunk of the Impala and proceeding to spend the next months bitter and usually intoxicated, just like his father did after his mother died. Unlike most examples of this trope, Cas returns and is given back the coat.
    • Later in the same season, Bobby dies, and Dean keeps a flask to remember him by. Except then they find out that Bobby's ghost is tied to the flask, and he's still hanging around.
  • An interesting example in The Walking Dead. Actor Andrew Lincoln carries in his pocket the prop bullet that was used to kill Lori as a reminder of his character's motivations. It makes a brief (possible) appearance in the fourth season episode "Claimed", sitting on his bedside table along with some of Rick's other tragic keepsakes, including Carol's watch.
  • Taken: In "Jacob and Jesse", Russell Keys gives his son Jesse his World War II medals as a Christmas present. After Russell's death in "High Hopes", they become a Tragic Keepsake. Although Jesse briefly considers selling them for heroin in "Acid Tests", it is revealed in "Charlie and Lisa" that Jesse kept the medals with him with the rest of his life. They were found in his pockets after he died.
  • The Season 2 finale of The Umbrella Academy (2019) has Ben Hargreeves give up his existence as a ghost to save his siblings. A teaser image for Season 3 posted by Elliot Page depicts Viktor subsequently wearing his deceased brother's jacket.
  • Warehouse 13 revealed villain Helena Wells, a person who had just escaped from over a century in the And I Must Scream-prison where history's most evil masterminds are bronzed for all eternity, breaks into the place where they stored her personal belongings. She only takes one thing: A locket. Cue massive speculation what kind of artifact that locket must be. Then a couple of episodes later we learn what kind of locket it is: The normal kind. The locket contained the only remaining picture of her long dead daughter. Affably Evil doesn't even begin to describe it.
  • In the television adaptation of Wolf Hall, the other keepsakes are Adapted Out, except for Cardinal Wolsey's turquoise ring. We see here that Wolsey presents it to Thomas Cromwell in a box engraved with Cromwell's initials. After Wolsey's death, a scene of Cromwell opening the box and donning the ring is inter-cut with him telling George Cavendish not to pray God for vengeance—"I'll take it in hand."
  • In The X-Files, Scully always wears a small gold cross necklace. When she's abducted near the beginning of season 2, it's torn off, and Mulder wears it himself for the three months she's missing. It shows up a few more times when they're separated as a symbol of their bond.

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