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Intimate Healing / Live-Action TV

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  • Alex Rider (2020): In one episode, Kyra gets stabbed by a Scorpia Mook when she and Alex (who had already been subject to some Ship Tease) break into the garden of Rothman's villa. Alex has to help her remove her shirt to get to the wound, leaving her in a bralette as he applies a bandage, complete with a Longing Look and Not What It Looks Like reaction when Tom and Jay stumble in.
  • On All My Children, Tanner claims to have done this for Hayley following a plane crash that left them stranded (her memory is fuzzy, but she remembers him taking off her shirt and confronts him about it). In truth, he undressed her in order to sexually assault her.
  • Arrow. In Season 2 Oliver Queen and Slade Wilson have both fallen for the young and beautiful Shado. She has sex with Oliver to snap him out of a Heroic BSoD and in a later episode shares her bodily warmth with Slade who is severely burned, refusing to abandon him to save herself.
  • In the Korean Drama Best Love, Dokko Jin uses his need to 'recharge' by cupping Ae Jung's face in his hands or by pressing their foreheads together.
  • Played for Laughs/Parodied in The Big Bang Theory: when the guys went to the Arctic, and one night the heat went out, they had to sleep together, naked.
  • In the 1990s sitcom Pig Sty, one of the five guys sharing an apartment got frozen while he was barbecuing for a party being held in the middle of winter. The resident physician who examined the frozen guy said that someone has to sleep naked with him in order to restore his body temperature. The other men in the apartment didn't seem so willing to volunteer for this.
  • In one episode of Cadfael, perpetual Butt-Monkey Brother Oswin and a young lady are stuck in a shack during a snowstorm. Poor Brother Oswin spends the rest of the episode fretting over whether doing this has broken his vow of celibacy until Cadfael reassures him that it doesn't.
  • In Chuck, Chuck tries this with Casey once, because he thinks the antidote will be transferred through saliva. Hilariously, it doesn't work that way.
  • On Days of Our Lives, Bo is so desperate to get off the island where he and ex Billie are stranded (he'd raced out there to rescue her from her abusive boyfriend, only to end up stranded when the jerk took the only boat to head back to the mainland) that he tries to swim it. He can't make it, leading Billie to swim out and rescue him. They both end up suffering from hypothermia and have to strip in order to share body heat. Unfortunately, by the next morning, his infuriated fiancee walks in on them and naturally assumes that they're post-coital.
  • Doctor Who:
  • In Everybody Loves Raymond, Frank reluctantly admits that during the Korean War, he and a commanding officer were stuck in a cave during a blizzard and were forced to share body heat.
  • Frontier (2016): While Michael and Sokanon are tracking a hunter through the winter woods so he will lead them to their boss, they have to stop for a moment when he builds a campfire. They can't build a fire themselves because the smoke would give them away, so she tells him to cuddle up to her for warmth. Doubles as a Ship Tease.
  • In Game of Thrones, Jon Snow and Ygritte, the barbarian woman he takes prisoner, do the "sharing body warmth" thing when forced to sleep in the middle of freezing wilderness. She keeps grinding against him, and he gets annoyed by the teasing.
  • Horatio Hornblower: When Hornblower rescued men from a shipwrecked Spanish ship, Kitty Cobham was travelling with them as well and she's among the rescued. She's wet and cold, and cuddles with Horatio to warm herself a bit in their boat.
  • In "Arrivederci, Fiero" of How I Met Your Mother, Marshal and Ted got lost on their road trip and had to cuddle to stay warm when a snowstorm hit. They found out in the morning that they were in the middle of a little town in front of a motel.
  • Iron Fist (2017): Danny Rand and Colleen Wing first have sex shortly after she finishes stitching him up. It's implied they have sex again after Bakuto has Danny use the Iron Fist to cure Colleen after she gets poisoned.
  • Done in an episode of the 2008 version of Knight Rider between Michael Knight and a British intelligence agent.
  • The protagonist of Lost Girl is a succubus who can heal herself by "feeding". And while a kiss alone seems sufficient for her to feed, the writers seem determined to make those scenes as intimate as possible.
  • MacGyver: Mac finds himself as a recipient of one from Natalia in "Trail To Doomsday" after he is caught in a poisoned boobytrap and loses consciousness.
  • Mad Men: When Sally starts her period, she doesn't feel and lies in her bed. Her mother Betty comes to her and lies down as well and keeps her warm.
  • Merlin:
    • Prince Arthur is under the effects of a love spell which only True Love's Kiss will cure. Merlin asks Guinevere to kiss him. It works.
    • Guinevere is shot in the upper thigh with an arrow. Whilst she's unconscious Merlin pulls the arrow out and heals her with a spell that involves placing one hand on her thigh and the other on her forehead. Given that she was rather scantily-clad at the time, and the assortment of moaning, muttering, shivering and sighing from both of them, the scene was giving off signals that the producers probably didn't intend.
  • Misfits:
    • Defied in the sixth episode of the second series by Daisy who refuses to use the power to lay on hands on STIs.
    • In the fifth series, Alex gains the power to remove other people's powers by having sex with them.
  • In the 4th-season finale of Orphan Black, when Cosima and Delphine are reunited, Delphine strips down to her underwear and gets under the covers with a severely weakened Cosima to provide body heat. They are, after all, on a Canadian island in the middle of winter - but it's not as if the fans hated seeing a substantial amount of Evelyne Brochu's physique.
  • A variation occurs in an episode of The Outer Limits (1995), "Caught in the Act", where the way to get an alien that kills men through sex out of the female host's body is by having sex (well, starting to, anyway) with her boyfriend. The explanation is that "love" was what the alien was really looking for in the first place so when it experiences that through the host's contact with her boyfriend, it can finally leave her body.
  • In the dying days of Supernatural Soap Opera Port Charles, the only way Ian could suppress his vampire tendencies and keep from feeding off people was to have sex with Lucy, who was a slayer.
  • Room 104: The woman in the wall suggests to Catherine that her illness is a case of Your Mind Makes It Real and recommends masturbation as a remedy, which Catherine enthusiastically tries. It doesn't work, because she turns out to have Lyme disease.
  • Scorpion: Toby does the 'shared body warmth' version to keep Happy alive when she is at risk of hypothermia after she gets separated from the group during a blizzard in "White Out".
  • In The BBC adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, when Marianne gets a case of hypothermia, Colonel Brandon carries her indoors and shouts, "She must be stripped and chafed all over!" A second later he realizes that that isn't exactly appropriate for him to do, and leaves the work to her sister.
  • In the 2008 Sense and Sensibility, Colonel Brandon carries Marianne in after she collapses from hypothermia in a rainstorm and is so frantic that he immediately begins to unlace her dress before catching himself and jumping back to let Elinor do it.
  • Shadow and Bone. In "The Heart Is An Arrow", Matthias Helvar and Nina Zenik survive a shipwreck and make it to a snowbound shore, but fortunately find a whalers hut. Mattias was raised in a very fundamentalist society where women are meant to be submissive and chaste, and so doesn't handle being trapped in an enclosed space with a beautiful woman insisting that they strip naked to share body heat particularly well, leading to much Belligerent Sexual Tension.
  • Stargate SG-1:
    • A clothed version is used by O'Neill and Carter in "Solitudes". The actual healing bit has actually already taken place; that line is given just because it is very cold (it was supposed to be Antarctica... and the set was made with real ice) and they are huddling together for warmth while they slept. Amanda Tapping and Richard Dean Anderson ad-libbed the next lines, and it's worth noting that was around the time this episode aired that the fans started shipping their characters (which became Ascended Fanon).
      Carter: Colonel...?
      O'Neill: [quickly] It's my sidearm, I swear.
    • In "Menace", when trying to figure out how to activate the android girl, Jack suggests that Daniel kiss her. She then wakes up on her own.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: In "Day of Honor", an episode with heavy Ship Tease between them, Tom Paris breathes on B'Elanna's hands to warm them (so she can repair a phaser) while they're in a subzero environment. She then collapses from hypothermia and Tom tries to haul her with him, whereupon they're beamed into the midst of their grinning colleagues, clutching each other tightly.
  • An episode of Step by Step had J.T. and Sam, his ex trapped in a car in a snow drift. Sam tells him that she used this technique (fully naked) to help keep him alive, but it turns out she tells him she was just screwing with his head. It is implied this might have been to get him to shut up about it.
  • Teen Wolf does this twice:
    • One, after a fight against the Alpha Pack, Derek is found by Jennifer half-dead. They have sex (because of course you'll have sex when he's oozing black goop from his wounds) and the wounds magically heal. Though... This is very likely foreshadowing that Jennifer is the Darach and has that kind of power (and also needed Derek alive for her plan to be successful)
    • Two, Hayden and Liam only seem to be able to take each other's pain through kissing. This strange form of romantic connection may be a way to give the couple something unique to them, since they easily head into the territory of Beta Couple throughout the series.
  • Implied, especially by Slashers, that this was one of the methods Glitch used to revive a hypothermic Cain in Tin Man.
  • Jack kissing Ianto in the Torchwood episode "Cyberwoman" is either this or Kiss of Life. They never actually say whether Ianto was dead or just injured at the time.
  • This happened in one part of the miniseries The Voyage of the Mimi, when the ship's captain had hypothermia. The captain was an old man and his crewmembers were loyal to him. Non-romantic example.
  • In Xena: Warrior Princess Gabrielle cuddles Xena to make her feel better in the series finale.
  • The X-Files:
    • In "Detour", agents Mulder and Scully are stranded in the wood and Mulder is wounded. Scully holds Mulder in her lap to keep him warm. And Mulder jokes about it, too.
      Mulder: I was told once that the best way to regenerate body heat is to crawl naked into a sleeping bag with somebody else who was already naked.
      Scully: Well, maybe if it rains sleeping bags, you'll get lucky.
    • In "Requiem", Scully feels dizzy and gets chills. She comes to Mulder's motel room and climbs into his bed, telling him that she needs to get warm. He tucks her in and lies behind her, and then they cuddle, warm spooning style.
  • In The Tribe, Amber references the trope as a way of propositioning Bray. Symbolically, it distinguishes her from his Unwanted Harem, who have spent the last season degrading morally and mentally because they think doing so will get them Bray's attention. In Amber, he's finally found someone who is strengthened by his affection, not corrupted.
    Bray: (jokingly) You're wasting away.
    Amber: Let's see what you can do about it.


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