As a Death Trope, this naturally involves spoilers.
Times where no body is left behind after death in Live-Action TV series.
By Genre:
- This is very common in Sentai Tokusatsu shows. The Monster of the Week would generally vanish once vanquished with various cheesy effects — or eventually explodes, especially in older shows.
- A good example is Message from Space: Galactic Wars. Every villain of the week would explode (or sometimes liquefy or burn...) with color or visual related to their nature or powers.
- Also generally used and abused in Power Rangers, where monsters tend to explode into a fine powder. But averted in Power Rangers S.P.D., where the villains use mecha rather than growing, and as such leave behind scrap. One early episode featured the main characters assigned to cleanup duty, picking up the massive debris left behind by the giant robot fight.
- Semi-averted in Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue and Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, where exploding monsters do leave chunks of burnt meat, which the villains then juice up to resurrect them at giant size. When they get blown up a second time at giant size though, there are (usually) no remains. Also oddly inverted at the end of Lightspeed Rescue, where Diabolico leaves behind an intact corpse for Bansheera to revive, despite his death explosion visibly reducing him to nothing but a wisp of smoke.
- When the Super Sentai Series and the Kamen Rider Series play this trope straight, it's usually for drama's sake.
- Subverted in Power Rangers Megaforce, where Vrak and his brother Vekar, after being dealt the final blow (Vrak even blowing up) their bodies are still intact with some damage, which make them the first villains to leave behind their corpses.
By Series:
- 666 Park Avenue: It seems the Drake absorbs anyone who dies there in order to hide the fact.
- HYDRA splinter bombs in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. completely disintegrate their targets, leaving no body behind.
- Ashes of Love: When immortals die, their bodies disintegrate.
- In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon explicitly stated that his vampires turn to dust when they die to emphasize that Buffy isn't killing people every week, and to avoid 20 minutes of cleanup at the end of each episode.
- Averted in the third season episode "The Wish". Buffy kills a demon but it doesn't fade away and the Scoobies realise they'll have to bury it. Vampires, as Buffy notes, are so much easier. Stake, dust, no cleaning up.
- In "Hells Bells" a demon attacks Anya during the wedding and is killed by Buffy. When it refuses to go "poof" Willow suggests covering it with flowers.
- Also averted with the Master, who only partially dissolved, leaving a skeleton. Justified because, as an older vampire, he is significantly more powerful (and it allowed a plotline for the second season premier).
- Likewise in Charmed.
- Except in episode 15 season 5, "The Day the Magic Died", all magic ceased to exist for a day, and the demon they killed left a dead body and green blood stains. They had to quickly hide it in a closet, until magic returned. Justified in that it's explicitly explained that the demons deliberately set it up so that their body disappears after they die, in order to maintain the masquerade.
- Lampshaded in episode 8 season 1, "The Truth Is Out There and It Hurts": After a warlock from the future gets killed, he is sucked into a vortex of some kind.
Prue: I love it when they clean up after themselves. - Doctor Who:
- When the Doctor's grave is visited it turns out to contain not a body, but a swirling blue rift in time through which one can access his entire timeline.
- In the episode "Time Heist", the "Shredders" left for the team are assumed to be suicide devices, so called because they seem to "shred" the body with an energy field. They turn out to be teleporters.
- In Dracula (2020), when Lucy dies for good, only a small mound of ashes remains.
- In First Wave, the invading aliens secretly use partially-human bodies as vessels. To prevent them from being analysed by humans and exposed as alien, they dissolve immediately after death, which also means anyone who sees an alien die becomes aware that something strange is going on. Interestingly, even this isn't enough to initially convince Crazy Eddie that there are aliens about. Being a conspiracy nut, he claims that he knows about a body-dissolving compound used by the government to hide their shady dealings. That's right, a conspiracy nut who denies the existence of aliens.
- A later episode shows that the "dissolving" effect is only activated by uploading a Gua consciousness into the husk's brain. A blank husk does not dissolve upon death, which was used to fool the Gua into thinking that Cade is dead. Additionally, the dissolution also melts anything in the immediate proximity, such as their clothes. In one episode, this, unfortunately, results in a secret to a poison that affects on Gua being lost when the pages get dissolved along with the Gua carrying them.
- In an episode of The Flash (1990), Barry Allen's twin Pollux sacrifices himself by throwing himself in front of the bullet that the scientist who created Pollux had fired to kill the Flash, and then dies in Barry's arms, vanishing inside the suit he leaves behind.
- Forever: This is how Henry's Resurrective Immortality deaths work. His body, including everything he's wearing or carrying on him, disappears. We never see this happen directly on-screen, the closest being when a priest helps Henry commit suicide in jail; we see the shadow on the wall of Henry's body swinging in the noose, then there's a bright light, and then the shadow of the noose, now swinging empty. We also see Abigail holding Henry as he dies from a knife wound, then immediately after his Resurrection Teleportation rebirth in the river we see her still kneeling in the street, her hands empty with no sign of any blood on them or her clothes, looking around in confusion.
- After Adam Monroe's powers are drained in Heroes, he dies on the spot and dissolves.
- The Invaders (1967) is probably the most iconic series to feature aliens disappearing upon death. Note that they could inflict the same thing to humans with their Disintegrator Rays.
- There are never bodies left to clean up aboard the Lexx, because said Living Ship "absorbs" them (along with anything else it thinks won't be missed.)
- Love and Destiny: Immortals' bodies turn to smoke and disappear when they're killed.
- In Red Dwarf, the crew are all killed in a radiation leak. After 3 million years there's nothing left of them except small, surprisingly neat, piles of dust. Lister found them very moreish until he discovered what they were.
- Lampshaded on Stargate SG-1 in the Show Within a Show Wormhole X-treme! The lead actor is having trouble in a romance scene because the background is littered with the bodies of dead Mooks his character killed in the previous scene (which is kind of distracting, ya know). The staff remove the bodies and hope no one will notice the change in scene continuity (one writer proposes that they write it so that the alien weapons disintegrate bodies, but his idea is quickly shot down).
- The reason the idea is shot down is because this is a nod to the zat'nik'tel, which was earlier shown to disintegrate bodies (or objects) with its third shot, an idea so despised it was quietly forgotten.
- Star Trek:
- A phaser on a high setting will often completely vaporize its target, as will other weapons like disruptors.
- In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Borg will often do this. One Borg drone is killed, and another will remove certain key components from the body, after which the dead Borg drone simply dissolves out of existence. It is explained that their link to the Collective is similar to a transporter beam; their bodies are transported away so that their components can be recycled.
- In Deep Space Nine suicide pills that dissolve the body are shown. The idea is that this way spies can avoid having their government implicated in failed operations.
- Supernatural:
- Mostly averted with supernatural beings who possess human vessels, such as angels and demons, since obviously the vessels remain intact despite them being gone. The one time this is played straight, when Anna is killed, it is because she is (rather brutally) incinerated, so it is logical that her vessel does not stay intact.
- While there are monsters that turn to dust or don't leave anything to prove they existed (especially ghosts), the hunters know how to cover their tracks, and thus get rid of a body of a monster/demon they killed. Also they don't stay too much in the same place after the "job" for the missing person to be obvious or connected to them. A FBI Bloodhound (note that this implies some greater professionalism than your typical province sheriff/cop they have to deal with) actually "tracks" the Winchesters for a year or so and all he can put on their record are some grave-disturbing crimes and murders on ordinary people they weren't responsible for.
- While Leviathans possess human vessels and most leave a body when they die, their leader, Dick Roman, plays this straight in the season 7 finale. Justified since the method to kill him is peculiar as compared to his mooks.
- In the episode "I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here", Bobby's body disappears after Dean stabs him as he was a figment of Sam's imagination.
- When Dean stabs Death with the latter's scythe in "My Brother's Keeper", his body simply crumbles to dust.
- In "All in the Family", the Darkness kills Metatron by disintegrating him into non-existence.
- For some reason, Lucifer's infamous Badass Fingersnap, which formerly turned others into Ludicrous Gibs, disintegrates them to dust from season 13 onward.
- A villain-of-the-week in Time Trax is a scientist from the future whose specialty is high-energy weapons. One of which, a "sonic demolecularizer", is a One-Hit Kill against any person or object, which simply cease to exist as physical entities, breaking up into constituent molecules. The last time Darien tried to arrest the scientist, his partner was killed in this manner. Somehow, this is more horrifying to him than being shot, possibly because being shot does not necessarily mean he'll die, but being hit in any body part with the "demolecularizer" is fatal.
