Death Of A Child / Live-Action TV

Children dying in live-action TV.

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• Often on daytime soaps.
  • All My Children killed off infant Leora (heart defect) in 2003 and Donna's baby (fire) in the early 80's, as well as Gloria's premature infant Anna Claire (one of the saddest daytime scenes EVER), and most notably, Brooke's 6-year daughter Laura was killed by a drunk driver.
  • One of General Hospital's most famous storylines involved BJ Jones being killed in a car accident and her heart being given to her dying cousin Maxie.
  • Days of Our Lives has Hope and Bo's son Zack.
  • Many soaps (As the World Turns, One Life to Live, The Bold and the Beautiful) have featured characters being within weeks of delivery a healthy baby, only for tragedy to strike — car accident, premature labor — resulting in the baby's stillbirth.
  • Even more disturbing is that the likelihood of this often seems to be inversely proportional to the mother's or couple's feelings about the pregnancy — if she's Happily Married (or happily involved with the baby's father), happy about the pregnancy, and looking forward to motherhood, odds are, the child is doomed. If she's miserable and/or the child was conceived under dicey circumstances, such as an affair, the kid will make it. Case in point— on The Bold and the Beautiful Rick and Amber decided to have a child to solidify their reconciliation and were blissfully happy about her pregnancy, only for the baby to be stillborn. Meanwhile, Brooke conceived during her affair with her daughter's husband Deacon and after consciously deciding not to have an abortion, spent months wailing and angsting about the turmoil and havoc that was going to result from the child's birth and promptly gave birth to a healthy baby girl.

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• 24: In Season 5, Evelyn Martin and her young daughter are both confronted by Christopher Henderson after he kills two paramedics. It's highly implied that he killed them both, albeit it happened during commercial break.
• The 100:
  • Twelve-year-old Charlotte dies in the fourth episode. Unlike the usual Children Are Innocent version of the trope, Charlotte a) commits suicide, and b) does so because she had already killed someone else and couldn't live with the guilt of what she'd done.
  • In the Season 2 finale, Clarke decides to irradiate Mount Weather, killing everyone inside. Both Clarke and the audience had been reminded repeatedly, in this episode and in previous ones, that many of the people in Mount Weather are children who had nothing to do with their parents' crimes; Clarke goes through with it anyway. We don't see any of the children's corpses (at least not up close) but we do get an Empathy Doll Shot of the soccer ball we'd earlier seen the Mount Weather kids playing with.
• Adam-12: Several:
  • “I Feel Like a Fool, Malloy”: Malloy and Reed respond to a disturbance call where an older woman claims a strung-out teenager was trying to break into her house, and (given wild party music going on) there surely was a big party going on. Upon investigation, the teenager was a babysitter who was trying to get help after the 4-year-old girl she was watching fell into a backyard swimming pool. It does not end well for the little girl.
  • “Pig Is a Three-Letter Word”: Reed busts his first sex offender, who had brutally raped a young boy. The boy later dies of internal injuries, frustrating Reed to tears.
• Aishiteru's plot starts with the death of a seven year old boy. To make things worse, the murderer is a ten-year-old.
• Babylon 5: In the episode "Believers" when an alien boy is killed by his parents at the end because they believe a surgical operation has caused his soul to leave his body, and in "Confessions and Lamentations" when 99% of an alien race dies of a plague, including a prominently featured girl.
• The Barrier: One of the plotlines involves experiments being done on a group of children. Some of them don't survive the experiments.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003):
  • A baby was killed by a disguised Cylon in the pilot. The scene is ambiguous, with specific directions to the actress playing the Cylon to make it so. Was it just a murder, was it a mercy killing so the baby wouldn't have to go through the nuclear holocaust that would be released in a few hours, or was it an accident with the Cylon not realizing how fragile a human baby would be?
  • The second season opener, in which Commander Adama drowns a baby in Baltar's dream sequence on Kobol.
  • The onscreen death of Cami, the girl from botanical cruiser in the Miniseries.
  • In "The Plan", Cavil coldbloodedly stabs a small child who repeatedly tried to sneak in to his chapel and befriend him. What makes it so chilling is that the kid has been seeking refuge there for the length of the movie. In the end, Cavil seems to give in, sharing his food and learning that they both have the same first name. The whole scene is leading up to a Pet the Dog moment until he kills him and casually dumps his body to the side.
• In Breaking Bad, we see two young boys getting shot dead: Thomas Cantillo in Season 3, and later Drew Sharpe in Season 5. Both of these murders make Jesse Pinkman very furious.
• Brookside:
  • The Farnham children die graphically in a car crash because their squabbling distracts their mother from the road.
  • Sue Sullivan and her baby son are both killed instantly when she's pushed off scaffolding whilst holding him.
  • Imelda is killed by another child she had bullied.
• Buffyverse:
  • Vampires never hesitated to kill or turn children and babies, though naturally this never occurred on-screen. Darla discovers the effect of Angel's soul when he refuses to drink from a baby. Spike, after becoming unable to hurt humans but before becoming ensouled, tells Dawn a story of slaughtering a family, leading up to his discovering the baby in the coal bin, but he quickly revises this story when Buffy arrives, to her evident skepticism.
  • And in the episode "Band Candy", the Mayor orders his minions to steal babies as a tribute (Read: Lunch) to one of the demons he owes a debt to. Guess who the Big Bad of the season turned out to be?
  • In "Triangle", Olaf the troll requests babies to eat. Nobody actually grants this request though, nor does he ever get any babies to eat.
  • In an early Season 3 episode of Angel, one type of demon is said to prefer babies.
  • In the Season 8 (comic), Faith discovers that a mother was turned with all of her children — and Faith has to stake those children, as well! (though we only see "paff" and not the moment of impalement.
  • We do see Buffy's cousin Celia being killed by Der Kindestod in detail in "Killed By Death" in a flashback.
  • Also, Wes once dreamed about baby Connor being fatally bitten by Angel.
  • In "The I In Team", Adam skewers and dissects a small boy. We only hear about it on the news, however.
  • The flashback of Holtz who finds that Angel (going by Angelus at the time) killed his wife and turned his daughter. Holtz grimly forces her out into the sunlight where she burns to death. The scene of the mother being killed also cuts away after the sound of a baby crying is heard and Darla is seen looking hungrily at the cradle.
  • In "Lie To Me" it looks like Drusilla is about to chow down on a young boy, but Angel shows up in time to rescue him.
  • The plot of "Gingerbread" was kicked off by the discovery of two children's corpses. It later turns out they were illusions created by the monster of the week to stir dissent among the people of Sunnydale.
  • Possibly the most notable example is Colin, a.k.a. The Anointed One. He dies as a human in "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date" along with everyone else on the bus after it's attacked by vampires. He rises as a vampire and becomes The Master's right hand man. When Spike shows up in "School Hard", he decides against keeping The Anointed One on as a right hand man, locks him in a cage, and hoists him into a beam of sunlight.
• Charmed: Unlike Piper's unborn son, Phoebe's actually-not-her-child has no such luck: he is burned alive when the Charmed Ones reflect his power back at the Seer, in whose womb he is currently residing. Apparently, this Trope doesn't apply if you're the Spawn of Satan.
• Chernobyl:
  • Lyudmilla Ignatenko is pregnant when the Chernobyl explosion happens. Her baby girl is born alive, but dies of radiation complications a few hours later. It can be argued that, since Lyudmilla is a resident of Pripyat, the baby's death is going to happen either way, but it doesn't help that she insists on getting close with her irradiated husband, Vasily, not understanding that he is harming her and their daughter.
  • There are a couple of children who are in the so-called "Bridge of Death" when the explosion occurs. One of them is being carried by her father while Lyudmilla is searching for Vasily in the hospital. The end of the series reveals that everyone on the Bridge die shortly after the accident.
• Chicago Fire:
  • One episode has the squad rescue a young boy from an air vent, only to later hear of him dying at the hospital. When they discover the boy wanted to be a firefighter when he grew up, they have the funeral procession rerouted past the firehouse so they can give the boy a salute.
  • A rather disturbing example occurs in an episode involving a high-rise apartment fire. While the firefighters are escorting the residents out of the building, Otis notices that a woman who was carrying a baby is missing. He remembers that she had suggested using the elevator and finds out that someone did. When he's finally able to get into the elevator, he's very shaken to find their charred corpses.
• More than a fair share of Chicago P.D. cases revolve around or at least are kicked off by the death of tender-aged victims, often enough that it becomes a Let's Get Dangerous! moment for Voight and the Intelligence Unit.
  • And then there's the tragic miscarriage of Burgess and Ruzek's unborn baby.
• One episode of Chicago Justice involves the murder of a pregnant woman and her unborn baby being cut from her womb. The detectives eventually track down the murderer who's also kidnapped the baby, only to discover that the baby died as well.
• One episode of Code Black has twin babies brought in after a building fire. One of them takes a turn for the worse and dies. It later turns out that the entire thing takes place in Dr. Guthrie's mind while he undergoes a medical procedure for his Parkinson's Disease. The incident did actually happen, though. The babies were his own and he was remembering the incident.
• Chousei Kantai Sazer X: The Crisis Crossover has the Terrible Trio revive Bosquito, who begin sucking up the life energy of everyone in sight, leaving behind only clothes. One report notes that some of the clothes belong to children.
• Several of the victims on Cold Case are young children, the youngest being an infant in "Baby Blues". Quite a few more are teenagers.
  • At least one case ("Sabotage") had this as a major Despair Event Horizon for the doer, playing a large role in why he became a killer.
• In Coronation Street, Zoe Tattersall's newborn baby, Shannon, died from meningitis in 1998.
• Being a child makes absolutely no difference in Criminal Minds. Recurring villain Karl Arnold slaughters at least 8 children in the first season alone, and the second season episode "Ashes and Dust" had a child graphically burned to death entirely onscreen.
• In an episode of CSI, one of the victims is a baby. This then proceeds to move Grissom so much that he gets quite angry at Greg Sanders for working on a gang-related case which happened earlier in the week.
• Played to the hilt in CSI: Miami, when the sole survivors of a murdered family are the murderer playing his wife's postpartum stress as the cause, and a toddler who wandered away from the crime scene in a blood stained shirt.
• CSI: NY had three of these tragedies:
  • A little boy dies of smoke inhalation in an apartment fire in "Corporate Warriors."
  • Danny's young neighbor, Ruben, is shot by a stray bullet while in his care during "Child's Play." It sends Danny into a Heroic BSoD that lasts several episodes.
  • A little girl is accidentally shot by a friend of hers in "Unspoken." They were playing with a gun they saw a criminal throw into a dumpster. The boy removed the magazine, thinking it would be safe, but didn't realize there was a bullet in the chamber.
• In Deadwood, Stubs and "The Nigga general" lose control of a wild horse they were trying to castrate. It runs through the camp and caves in the chest of the sheriff's nephew, who he was raising as his son with his sister-in-law who was living as his wife.
• The Devil Judge: A three-year-old is one of the victims of the Ju Chemical Factory disaster.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "Full Circle", a juvenile Marshman known simply as the Marshchild dies (and is, in fact, the only Marshman to perish in the story). Tylos and Varsh also arguably count, as both are teenagers who die during the Marshmen's rampage aboard the Starliner in the final episode.
  • Varsh's younger brother, Adric, who goes on to become a member of the TARDIS crew, is killed off at the end of "Earthshock" when a space freighter crashes into the prehistoric Earth and explodes — with him on board. According to the story, the explosion is also responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs.
  • In "Survival", the Doctor pursues the predatory Cheetah People to Earth. The first person he meets is a little girl in tears because someone has killed her cat.
  • "School Reunion" opens with a child being eaten.
  • In "The Stolen Earth", we see a family of three, with a child about ten years old, retreat back to their house after being ordered out by the Daleks. And then the Daleks blow up the whole house.
  • The plot of "Thin Ice" sets off when the Doctor and Bill witness a child being devoured by the monster of the week. Bill is understandably distraught by this.
• An episode of the '60s Dragnet featured two parents who were so high on drugs that they forgot they put their baby in the bathtub. Whoops. Another followed the officers as they investigated a case of child abuse; that one ended with them arresting the father after he shook his baby to death.
• Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. A baby dies while in Mike's care. She can't understand why she's so rattled, as it isn't the first time this has happened, until Sully reminds her that she hadn't had a baby of her own as yet.
• Emergency! has two:
  • There’s an episode with a boy who ate rat poison. He had a habit of causing trouble and his mom slowed the paramedics down because she thought he was joking again and he ends up dying. Chet has compassion on Gage and warns him off a booby trapped cabinet at the station. He says the Phantom doesn’t like to strike when a guy is down. Gage thanks him.
  • A teenager dies in another episode from a drug overdose.
• An episode of Empty Nest is shot as a documentary profiling Harry, a pediatrician. It's revealed that he once lost a patient and was so shaken that he went on a trip, bringing his wife and daughters under the guise of a family vacation. Barbara discovers the truth when she overhears her parents talking about the reasons they went. Carol remains oblivious up to the making of the documentary.
• ER. Dr. Carter's son was stillborn at seven months. The horrifying reality of this ruined his relationship with the mother. Also played straight with a handful of pediatric patients over the years. Like the "Quinn" example, Dr. Susan Lewis is rattled when a baby dies, shortly after she's begun taking care of her infant niece.
• Family Affair: An imminent one provides the basis for the plot of the Season 3 episode "Christmas Came a Little Early." The terminally ill patient, stated as being a classmate of Buffy's and not expected to live to Christmas, is played by a pre-Brady Bunch Eve Plumb.
• Farscape:
  • In "...Different Destinations" ends with the mass murder of an entire nunnery, including the eight-year-old novices.
  • And in "Prayer", a Scarran officer aboard a research vessel disposed of a test subject's unborn child by using his heat-projection to fry it alive inside the womb. And the holographic display also shows the fetus writhing and shrivelling in the heat. However as the mother was a mole, hopefully they faked it to scare Aeryn. Hopefully. She got what's coming either way.
• The First Lady: The Sandy Hook shooting makes Barack Obama tear up in a heartfelt speech calling on the nation to take measures against gun violence. Later, he and Michelle learn one of the black girls who visited the White House from South Side Chicago was killed in a drive-by shortly after she'd gone back home. Michelle attends her funeral, and they're both shaked thinking how it could have been one of their own daughters (the shooting took place near where they lived in Chicago).
• Flashpoint never has this on-screen, but a few episodes have this as part of the setup.
  • The subject in "Collateral Damage" is a man accused of murdering his infant daughter, who escapes from jail during his trial and goes to confront the doctor who declared the baby's death Shaken Baby Syndrome, demanding that she test the samples again. A second doctor ultimately determines that the first doctor missed a clue that pointed to meningitis as the true cause of death.
  • Potentially the case in "Never Let You Down", where the subject's teenage daughter disappeared three years earlier. The girl's fate is never established.
  • The possibility of this is a critical factor "First In Line"; a father whose daughter is dying of heart disease takes hostages in a hospital to try and get her a heart transplant.
  • Narrowly averted in "The Farm"; the subject attempts to kill his preteen son because he's dying and doesn't want to leave his son alone. SRU convinces him that his son will be okay, and he eventually releases the boy unharmed.
• In Frank Herbert's Dune miniseries, Paul Maud'dib's baby son is killed in a Sardaukar raid. The scene shows a soldier advancing towards the baby with a knife, then jumps to another scene with a yelp from the baby in the background.
• From: A young girl is brutally murdered by one of the creatures tormenting the town in the pilot's Cold Open.
• The world of Game of Thrones is very dark and gritty, and Anyone Can Die.
  • To drive this home, a child of perhaps 7 or 8 years is shown impaled on a tree, along with the dismembered remains of her family group, within the first two minutes of the pilot. She is unlikely to be the first child to be dead (or die) onscreen.
  • One of Arya's friends is murdered as a scapegoat for the well-deserved mauling of Joffrey. While we don't see the act itself, we do see his corpse being hauled away by the Hound.
  • More children (including an infant) die in the Season 2 premiere, "The North Remembers" as part of a massive purge of King Robert's bastard children.
  • During an attack on the Night's Watch, one of the young orphan recruits ends up getting a sword through his throat when his captors realize that he can't walk unassisted.
  • Two Lannister children are attacked and murdered in their beds by Stark bannermen.
  • Not even unborn children are safe, as the pregnant Queen Talisa learns the hard way.
  • Although Theon can't ultimately bring himself to kill Bran and Rickon, he does murder two orphaned farm children and burns their bodies to fool people into thinking they're the Stark boys.
  • All three of Cersei's children die while they're in their teens. Joffrey and Myrcella are poisoned, and Tommen commits suicide. She was even told of a prophecy where they would have "golden crowns and golden shrouds" as a child.
  • Taken to really dark lengths in Season 5 where Stannis sacrifices his beloved daughter Shireen - via burning at the stake. Her mother Selyse - who up until that point was ashamed of her daughter's disfigurement - has a Heel Realization and tries to stop it but is too late. She hangs herself the next day.
  • Ramsay Bolton shows he's not above this when it comes to securing his inheritance - after murdering his father, he sets his hounds on his stepmother and newborn half-brother.
  • Played very tragically in Meereen, where Danaerys discovers that one of her dragons carelessly burned a three-year-old girl on a farm. She's so heartbroken by this, she chains two of the dragons up beneath the city.
  • Rickon Stark - who is barely a preteen - goes down via an arrow in the back by Ramsay.
  • Jojen Reed - who is a teenager - pulls a Heroic Sacrifice so Meera, Hodor and Bran can get to safety.
  • The Waif in Bravoos is the same age as Arya and meets her end in the finale of Season 6. She was trying to kill Arya, so one way or another, the episode was going to have a young girl being killed.
• Hawaii Five-O:
  • In the two-parter "Once Upon a Time", McGarrett's sister is under the spell of a quack doctor who claims she can cure her cancer-stricken baby. She doesn't — the baby succumbs well before the end of Part 1.
  • In "The Listener" a psychiatrist tormented by a man who's bugging his office and tells the doctor's patients stuff which is supposed to be purely between them informs a young boy that contrary to what the criminal told him, he isn't dying. The good doctor then tells McGarrett that the boy is dying, and that he wasn't about to tell the kid the truth.
• Hercules: The Legendary Journeys:
  • In the very first episode, Hera kills Herc's wife and all three of his children.
  • In Jason's first appearance, it's established that Medea murdered their children at some point before the episode. Jason has a nightmare that recreates some of the events: a baby is seen crying amid a burning house, and an unnamed daughter is heard pleading for help before screaming.
• Highway to Heaven: "Heaven On Earth," where main protagonist Mark Gordon grieves the death of a 5-year-old girl he met just hours earlier (at an amusement park, when he helped the lost girl find her mother). Mark blames himself for the accident and wishes he could be God (so he would prevent the accident), but Jonathan makes him realize there were things outside his control – a drunk driver and the girl not being made to wear a seat belt – that led to her death.
• Homicide: Life on the Street:
  • One of the driving arcs of the first season is Bayliss's investigation into the rape and murder of Adena Watson, an eleven-year old girl. He's ultimately unable to solve the case and forced to let his main suspect go.
  • In "Every Mother's Son", a teenage boy is shot in the head by another teenager who had mistaken him for someone else who he was angry at.
  • In "A Doll's Eyes", a young boy is shot and is left brain dead. The episode ends when his parents, after much debate, decide to take him off of life support.
• Horatio Hornblower: One of the pre-teen powder monkeys is blown up during an engagement in "Loyalty". It's a memorable gory scene when young Midshipman Jack Hammond freaks out because he gets splattered with his blood.
• House: The Patient of the Week doesn't always make it, and this has included babies.
  • A newborn baby dies in the episode "Maternity".
  • "Forever" has a mentally unstable patient murder her child on-screen.
• In I, Claudius, during the purge in Tiberius's reign, both Sejanus' son and daughter were killed, both under age. The boy was given his "manly gown" and the girl was raped before being killed as killing a virgin would bring bad luck to the city. Furthmore, Gemellus, aged perhaps twelve or thirteen, is murdered and decapitated offscreen, his head brought to Caligula as evidence and Caligula's infant daughter Drusilla is murdered in her cradle along with her mother. There are still more child deaths in the book. All in all, thoroughly averted.
• Kingdom (2019):
  • In Episode 1, a boy's corpse is made into stew. At the end of the episode, a young girl is the first to die from the stew.
  • Averted at the beginning of Episode 3. The rooftop survivors save a kid and save a baby even when its mother is a lost cause. Played straight soon enough, with a kid getting bitten by a zombified kid in a game of chase gone wrong and another kid getting attacked by her zombified mother while their sibling watches hidden sight from sight.
  • Played straight again in Episode 4 when the small girl Seo-bi was fond of is struck down by a hail of arrows fired by Cho's forces, who were demanding Prince Chang's surrender at Jiyulheon.
• L.A.'s Finest: Nancy's trauma from serving in Iraq was a result of her seeing a little boy she bonded with killed due to a suicide bomber (his own mother).
• In the Law & Order franchise, there are often episodes where juvenile deaths are investigated.
  • One notable example occurs in a season finale of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. A woman is murdered and the three men responsible are arrested and jailed. At the end of the episode, the victim's teenage daughter visits the jail and shoots the men. She then goes on to shoot up the rest of the department until Stabler is forced to kill her. In the following season's premiere, we find out the incident disturbed Stabler enough to quit the force.
  • Another SVU episode had the detectives investigate the death of an African-American boy who'd been adopted by a white couple. The death is then traced to a Neo-Nazi group and the shooter is put on trial. During the trial, the young son of the group's leader starts a shootout and is soon killed by his father's girlfriend, who's actually an undercover FBI agent.
• Legend of the Seeker:
  • Dennee's son is killed offscreen by her, to keep him from the Mord Sith.
  • Later the episode "Deception" begins as several children finding a mysterious device. The next we see of them is their dead bodies having fallen around the device, along with everyone else in the village.
• Leverage: The insurance company refusing to pay for his son's treatment (killing the boy) was what sent Nate into a downward spiral; getting fired from the insurance firm, crawling into a bottle, and ending his marriage. Becoming a "bad guy" is redemption.
• Little House on the Prairie, in an effort to be true to the infant mortality rates of the harsh frontier, is another show that adhered to this trope. Babies died on several occasions on this show:
  • Ingalls's first son Charles Jr. dies of leukemia before he even turns a year old. This provides the background for the plot "The Lord Is My Shepherd," where Laura is so wrought with guilt over not praying for little Charles' health that she runs away.
  • In Season 6's "May We Make Them Proud", when the school for the blind Mary and her husband run is on fire, they two are able to get all the students out only to realize their baby and another woman (Adam Kendall Jr. and teacher/caretaker Alice Garvey) are trapped inside. They can do nothing but sit helplessly as Alice and Adam Jr. appear at a high window unable to escape and plead for help until they are both overtaken by the flames. (All of this happens onscreen and is quite unsettling. Keeping in mind Adam, Mary and the other children who evacuated safely are, for the most part, spared of seeing Alice and Adam Jr. literally swallowed by the flames. Hester Sue, the only sighted person there, is not so fortunate.)
  • Laura and Almanzo's unnamed son dies during the night after becoming ill a few days before. It is now believed that he was conceived too soon after Laura recovered from diphtheria, later causing his illness and death. This served as the background for the Season 9 episode "A Child With No Name," where Doc Baker is blamed (by a distraught Laura) for the newborn Wilder baby's death when he is unable to diagnose his illness before he can give life-saving treatment.
  • Older children were sometimes victims as well, including of various illnesses and accidents. For instance, "My Ellen" depicts the accidental drowning of Laura's 12-year-old friend, the titular character of this Season 4 episode, when, while skinny dipping in a pond (and trying to hide from several boys who have come to sneak a peek), her necklace becomes entangled in some reef.
• This was is what sent Hawkeye over the edge in the M*A*S*H Grand Finale, the fact that a mother smothered her baby because he told her that she had to keep it quiet^note they were on a bus full of people with an enemy patrol in the area, and the child's crying was at risk of giving away their position. We only see the head fall back but it's obvious the baby is dead. Hawkeye had been so traumatized by the incident that at first he steadfastly remembered the infant being a chicken, until Sydney Freedman was able to draw the truth out of him as the big heartbreaking reveal.
• The third series opener of Merlin (2008) revealed that Uther used to drown the children of magic users in case they inherited their parents' abilities. Though the drowning itself is entirely offscreen, their ghosts appear en masse.
• Messiah: Raeah dies of cancer with her mother Staci by her side. She feels even worse than usual, as she'd stopped Raeah's treatments bringing her to Al-Masih in hopes he would heal her.
• Million Yen Women: Both invoked and averted. The killer's means of killing Minami turn out to have initially been intended for Midori because they considered that the latter still being a minor (as opposed to the person they actually killed) would have attracted more sympathy.
• The Mist: Lila is attacked by a shadow creature that latches onto her face and drains her life until she collapses, all while her poor mother watches helplessly.
• Mouse (2021):
  • Su-jin is just a child when her brother murders her.
  • Min-ji was only six when Byung-tae murdered her.
  • Han Kook is found dead a year after he was kidnapped.
  • Jae-hoon's brother dies when their house is set on fire.
• The Night Agent: It turns out that Maddie's younger sister drowned accidentally while they were both little, as we're shown in a flashback. Her dad blamed Maddie for not watching her, and it damaged their relationship ever after.
• Norsemen: Played to gut-wrenching laughs in episode 4 as Orm the "leader" of the viking raid is pathetically beaten up by a 10 year old girl while his raid members lose it laughing and trying to cheer him on. This happens for a solid minute before he finally bashes her head with a rock. He still makes excuses saying she was strong and quick.
• NYPD Blue: In one episode, the Victim of the Week was a baby which had died from Shaken Baby Syndrome. The babysitter (played by Lucy Liu) did it: the baby's parents were busy people who didn't want to be wakened at night by a crying baby, so the babysitter was tasked with keeping the baby up all day so it would sleep all night. (That particular plot was Left Hanging; it was never shown whether the babysitter, the parents, or both would be charged.)
• In HBO's The Pacific, with the mother on Okinawa, an involuntary suicide bomber, who tries and fails to hand off her baby before she blows up.
• Power Rangers:
  • Power Rangers in Space: Granted, it happens offscreen, but a one-shot character is mentioned to have had a 12-year-old brother who died recently. Not only is it a plot point of the episode, but she's even seen at his grave at one point. These types of occurrences are part of why the show is considered Darker and Edgier compared to most other Power Ranger seasons.
  • Power Rangers Lost Galaxy: The Magna Defender's revenge obsession is due to the (witnessed onscreen) death of his son. However, his son was a Magna Defender in training (despite being ten-ish, if we go by the size and the voice) who was never seen demorphed, making this less daring than some examples. Still, he doesn't ultimately survive, time isn't rewritten, he doesn't Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, or anything like that, and he's small and has the voice of a kid.
• The Pretender:
  • In one episode, Jarod investigates the cause of a deadly plane crash. His primary motivation is the death of a young adult; Jarod had befriended the guy and gave him his plane ticket, so he feels guilty about what happened. However, while looking over some items recovered from the crash, he sees a doll that belonged to a young girl he had played with at the airport. For an added gut punch, he imagines the little girl's final words (crying out for her mother), as the plane was going down.
  • Another episode has Jarod join up with a heist crew who had committed a robbery where a young girl was murdered. He's now trying to determine which of the crew members was responsible.
• Princess Agents: Yuwen Huai locks Hao Er, Lan Shu Yi's toddler, in a box and leaves him to suffocate.
• Claire and Russell's baby died on Promised Land, which was unusual because it was a "family" show, with the characters actually looking forward to the birth.
• In the final Quatermass mini-series, Joe Kapp's wife and children are suddenly killed-off-screen in an alien bombardment.
• In The Refugees, Álex killed a man that had killed his son. Ani dies at the end of the series.
• The Sandman, "A Dream of a Thousand Cats": The central character is a pedigree Siamese cat whose kittens (fathered by a definitely non-pedigree stray) are drowned by her owner.
• The Sarah Jane Adventures:
  • A child Slitheen disguises himself as a schoolboy, and later a child genius. Although it is not explicitly stated or shown onscreen, in both cases the real boy must have been killed and skinned so the Slitheen could assume his identity.
  • "The Day of the Clown" states that all the kidnapped children that weren't taken recently by Odd Bob "fade[d] away".
• Nearly the entire arc of the fourth season of The Shield surrounds the Strike Team trying to help Shane after a vicious gangster executes a young girl and frames him for it.
• Six Feet Under had an episode where the Victim of the Week is a three-week-old baby. This weighed very heavily on Federico, whose wife was pregnant at the time.
• Sons of Anarchy: The first episode of Season 6, Straw, portrays a school shooting occuring at the end. In fact, Kurt Sutter was later compelled to apologise for it.
• Special Ops: Lioness: Neil, Joe's husband, is a child oncologist who has to face the fact that about half his patients will die before turning 18. His job is introduced with him having to tell the parents of a six year old girl with a brain tumor their best option is just spending time with her before she dies, as surgery is only going to extend her life temporarily at best, while she'll be left in constant pain.
• Almost every series of Spooks kills off a child in one of the episodes. Most notably was the episode "The School", in which an entire school was bombed at the start of the episode.
• At the end of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Hide and Q", Riker goes on a rescue away mission where a cave-in has happened. Among the fatalities was a young girl and Riker decides not to bring her back to life as he now has the power of the Q, though that decision weighed heavily on him.
• Star Trek: Enterprise: Trip and T'Pol's daughter, cloned from their tissue, does not survive "Terra Prime".
• Star Trek: Voyager: In "Deadlock", Ensign Wildman finally gives birth to her baby, only for the ship to suffer catastrophic damage, rendering the doctor unable to correct the effects of a delivery complication; the baby dies as a result. Fortunately for all involved, the episode's Negative Space Wedgie prevents that from becoming a permanent state of affairs.
• On The Strain, this trope tends to lead into another: Undead Child:
  • One of the Master's victims on the plane was a young French girl named Emma. According to Nora, she couldn't be more than eight. She's killed again after rising as a vampire and being decapitated by Setrakian.
  • After Kelly becomes a vampire, she visits a friend while looking for Zack and ends up draining both her and her son. They both rise as vampires as well and Eph is forced to kill them again.
  • A Flashback reveals that Mr. Quinlan actually romanced a woman with a young daughter in Victorian England. During their relationship, he discovered The Master was active in the area and set off to kill him. He fails and The Master infects the mother and daughter, forcing Quinlan to Mercy Kill them.
• Stranger Things: The show doesn't hesitate to show kids in danger. Preteen Will is very nearly killed in the first season, (and in fact had stopped breathing and very likely was clinically dead before Hopper resuscitated him) while Barb is killed and her corpse is quite graphically shown later. Season 3 is even worse. El is brutalized in several fights against the Mind Flayer-controlled Billy and subject to several beatings, strangulations, and is nearly devoured by the Mind Flayer. Several children — the eldest being the teenaged Heather with the youngest clearly preteens — are shown to be among the people the Mind Flayer liquefies to create its new body (with Heather's body dissolving on screen) while both Max and Mike are physically slammed into walls by Billy, knocking them cold. Then we reach the opening scene of season four which is the most brutal example of this trope yet with the gory corpses of the other children that had been raised at Hawkins Lab littering the halls after some sort of massacre at what seems to be the hands of a blood soaked Eleven.
• In Tenko the child prisoners drop like flies just like the adult women do.
• That Mitchell and Webb Look:
  • One sketch has a little boy being talked into going on a "river rafting" ride, which starts by jumping off a bridge...
  • The world of the Quiz Broadcast (Remain Indoors), where an unknown apocalypse identified only as The Event has claimed most of humanity. One contestant mention she now wishes she'd took survival tips for children. The unnervingly cheerful host agrees that it would've been a different world if they'd kept even some of their children alive.
• Torchwood:
  • The villain of "Sleeper" had no problem killing babies. Two infants in prams were strongly hinted to have died in unfortunate manners, though they stop short of showing it.
  • Torchwood: Children of Earth: Three children get killed, and many more are placed in great danger. Several suffer a Fate Worse than Death.
• The Twilight Zone (1959): In "You Drive", Oliver Pope kills a 12-year-old boy named Timmy Danbers in a hit-and-run accident.
• The Twilight Zone (1985): In "Examination Day", the totalitarian government gives tests that identify child prodigies... who are then killed before they can grow up to question or threaten the power structure.
• The Walking Dead (2010):
  • The very first zombie kill by Rick Grimes is of a small child, who as part of the zombie transformation had to die first.
  • In one second season scene, T-Dog is searching through cars for supplies, and then he searches through one car with a baby seat in the back. The seat is coated with blood and bits of flesh. He's freaked out by this sight.
  • Later in Season 2 with Sophia, who gets lost and is found later as a walker.
  • Rather brutally used in the Season 4 mid-finale when Meghan is bit after accidentally finding one buried in the mud she was playing in. The episode also very creepily suggests that Judith was bit by walkers, although it is subverted when it is revealed that she was saved by Tyreese.
  • "The Grove" has a horrifying case with Lizzy and Mika. Lizzy actually murders her own sister and then Carol has to shoot her because of how irrevocably messed up she has become.
  • Implied to be averted by the Terminus crew in "No Sanctuary". When Carol is looking through the items taken off of new arrivals, several children's stuffed animals are seen.
  • In Season 6's "No Way Out", Sam is Devoured by the Horde onscreen while Ron is impaled by Michonne. Several Undead Children are also shown amongst the walker herd, and one of them can be credited with causing Sam's panic attack. The whole episode just reinforces how vulnerable children are, especially those who aren't taught to adapt and survive in this new Crapsack World.
• Walking with Dinosaurs and its spinoffs:
  • The first episode of Walking With Dinosaurs has a litter of prehistoric mammals eaten by their own parents.
  • For pure terror, however, the first episode of Walking with Beasts shows a baby terror bird that is still hatching when it is devoured by ants.
• In The Wire, stray bullets kill a child midway through a gang war, and a preschooler is killed to send a message.
• Without a Trace Children of varying ages have often been the Victim of the Week and this trope has occurred just as often as its counterpart.
• War of the Worlds (2019):
  • In Season 1, a French girl Catherine took under her wing is murdered by the scout bots.
  • Tragically, Season 2 sees Theo, the boy who's basically adopted by Sophia, killed by one of the aliens. It's especially hard as she's Forced to Watch, and she'd given up her drug habit caring for him (which was quite difficult). She's devastated by his death.
• The X-Files occasionally killed kids, including Scully's alien hybrid daughter.
  • They killed a toddler in "The Calusari". Perhaps the threshold is learning to walk?
  • They buried a baby alive in "Home", and the uncensored version has it screaming the whole time.
  • Played with strangely in "Invocation". It turns out the child was still dead...so it was his ghost?

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