Basic Trope: Joggers are either murder victims or the ones who find the body.
- Straight: Alice is out jogging and finds the corpse of Bob.
- Exaggerated:
- Charles is a Serial Killer, who specialises in murdering joggers and leaving their corpses for other joggers to find.
- Every single person who ever jogs dies while jogging.
- Downplayed:
- Alice is one of several people present when a murder victim's corpse is found in a fairly public location.
- Alice discovers a stolen purse, or an injured man who was recently mugged.
- Justified: Alice jogs early in the morning (so she was the first one to pass through after the night of the murder).
- Inverted: Emperor Evulz is a Serial Killer who uses his jogging as an excuse to travel around and select his victims.
- Subverted: Alice thinks she saw a body, but it turns out it's just a dummy.
- Double Subverted: ...a dummy which Claire planted to lure her off the path in order to murder her!
- Parodied: Alice finds Bob's corpse and complains that it's the third corpse she's found this week before phoning the police operator (who she's on first name terms with by now).
- Zig Zagged: There are several fake outs before Alice is either murdered or finds Bob.
- Averted:
- No joggers appear.
- No deaths were found during Alice's jogging sessions.
- The music and pressure builds around Alice finding a body or being attacked, but she finishes her jog uneventfully. The audience breathes a sigh of relief, but once she's back home she finds Bob dead on the floor. The killer struck while she was out and left him home for her to find.
- Enforced: The victim of the week is dumped in a wood (which is necessary to involve the Monster of the Week), so there's only so many people who would find it.
- The killer, Claire, wanted to get rid of rival Bob, scare other joggers away, and interrupt Alice's training for the Big City Marathon, which weeks of questioning will do. All as part of a scheme to boost her odds of winning the marathon.
- Lampshaded: "That's the fifth jogger reporting a murder this week!"
- Invoked: Charles murders Alice's friend Bob and places his corpse on her jogging route to taunt her.
- Exploited: The police encourage officers to take up jogging, keeping them fit and finding corpses at the same time.
- Defied: Alice jogs on a treadmill in the safety of her own home.
- Discussed: "I'm off jogging." "Remember to call the police if you find a body."
- Conversed: "A jogger? Corpse turning up in...3...2...1...and we have the Victim of the Week!"
- Deconstructed: People stop jogging for fear of being targeted or finding a corpse and getting involved in a police investigation.
- Reconstructed: This means previously popular jogging routes have much less foot traffic, making the area more tempting a place to dump a body and the remaining joggers, like Alice and Bob, much easier to target.
- Plotted A Good Waste: Alice is shown jogging through a country lane in the Cold Opening... but nothing happens to her. It's just an establishing shot which leads to the detectives investigating a burglary at a house she happens to run past.
- Played For Laughs: Alice humorously freaks out on finding Bob's corpse.
- Instead of freaking out, Alice goes "Pfft, shyea right" and keeps on jogging; if she stopped every time she found a body, she'll never get to train for the Big City Marathon!
- Played For Drama: On finding Bob, Alice realises the blood's still fresh, so the killer must be nearby. Part of the episode is devoted to finding out if the killer knew who found the body and if he'll try to silence her.
You're jogging along, minding your own business when you find... a link back to Joggers Find Death.
