YMMV / I Shouldn't Be Alive

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Did Lorenzo in the Sea of Cortez episode know he was about to die, so he chose to get off the raft so he could go down not being The Load? Or did he think he saved up enough energy to try and push his friend and overestimated the state he was in?
• Funny Moments:
  • "Date From Hell" has someone noticing that two of them are missing and says... "Must have taken a cab". While it's very unlikely to have happened, it's funny.
  • "Crashed in the Rockies" features one of the unluckiest-lucky people in the entire world. Justin survived a plane crash virtually unscathed, and then he hiked for miles in waist-deep-snow and managed to get help. He rides in the helicopter to help find the crash site... and then the helicopter crashes, too. To reiterate - he survived two crashes in one day.
• He Really Can Act: The acting in the re-enactments are usually praised for being surprisingly decent for a re-enactment; especially since there's no major actors hired for them, with people picked because of their resemblance to the actual survivors.
• Nightmare Fuel: Given the subject matter, this trope is a given, especially if you have Body Horror issues. The most horrific episode would be "Shark Survivor", where it featured some friends stuck in a dinghy after their yacht sank in a storm. One of them, Meg, got a huge gash on her leg, and the dinghy partially filled with water. Pus and blood from her wounds polluted the water, as well as the group's waste (they were being followed by sharks), so they all started becoming painfully infected, covered with bloody sores. They had no water, and eventually John and Mark started drinking seawater, which can turn you crazy. Sure enough, they soon started gibbering and howling like lunatics (with a warped Through the Eyes of Madness depiction), and eventually just walked off into the shark-infested water (one said he "just wanted to make a run to the 7-11"). Then Meg finally succumbed (Debbie said the night before, she started speaking in tongues), leaving just two, Debbie and Brad, left out of five. By the time they were finally rescued, the survivors were covered in horrible bleeding sores and scabs. They had drifted over 100 miles out to sea, but for some reason had been reported arriving safe into port before the storm, so the Coast Guard was never alerted.
• Spoiled by the Format:
  • Generally, if a person is in the flashback narration but isn't with the rest of the people present-day telling the tale, there's a good chance they didn't make it out alive...
  • A prime example is in "Hell in the Desert". A family of four is the subject of the episode, but the youngest daughter is never featured in the interviews, making it clear from the onset that she didn't survive the ordeal. Except, not really. She actually did survive, and is interviewed, but only after it's revealed in the narration that she survived.
• Squick: The injuries sustained by the show's subjects, as well as x-ray views used to depict how said injuries are crippling their bodies from the inside and slowly killing them.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The end of "Walk into Hell", where David Phillips, The Pollyanna of the group, dies from severe heatstroke even after help arrived.
  • "Hell in the Desert" in which one of the girls falls comatose and her sister screams "MOMMY! MOMMY! She's not moving!"
  • Lorenzo's death in "Death in the Sea of Cortez". The guy's final action is to stop being The Load and let Joe ride on the makeshift raft instead. It seems like a Moment of Awesome that he's doing this with two sprained ankles... but not a few moments later, they look behind them and find Lorenzo face down in the water.
  • Benedict having to kill Cashew. This becomes even worse in that Benedict's malaria means he can barely eat enough of the resultant meat without throwing up, making the decision even more heartbreaking.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Guy and Loren in "Walk into Hell". While the narrative rules the entire incident as an accident, many viewers instead find the counselors responsible due to their incompetence, such as planning a hike in the Grand Canyon during the summer, being over 70 years old, and purposefully going off-trail. What really pushes them into this territory is when said hike would end up endangering a group of 15-year-olds and leading one, David, to his death. The lack of remorse shown aside from a passing mention from the narrator of them learning about the death of David doesn't really earn them any favors either.

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