Basic Trope: A person who is sick in bed is murdered, presumably in hopes that it will be passed off as a natural death.
- Straight: Alice disguises herself as a doctor, visits Bob at a hospital, and gives him a lethal injection.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice disguises herself as a doctor, goes to a hospital and moves from bed to bed giving every patient a lethal injection.
- Alice disguises herself as a doctor and outright bombs a hospital.
- Downplayed: Alice disguises herself as a doctor, visits Bob at a hospital, and gives him a non-lethal injection that will send him into a coma.
- Justified:
- Alice wants Bob out of the way, and the cover of a natural death serves her purposes.
- Bob is normally a force to be reckoned with, so Alice reasons that her best chance of taking him out of the picture is when he is already weakened.
- Inverted:
- Alice visits Bob in hospital, and he kills her.
- Alice disguises herself as a doctor and saves Bob's life, possibly because the real doctor is incompetent.
- Subverted:
- Alice tries to poison Bob while he is on his sickbed, but he gets better.
- It looked to be this, but Bob died of surgical trauma while Alice was visiting in an attempt to show good sportsmanship to her rival.
- Double Subverted: ...then has a relapse and dies.
- Parodied: Charlie witnesses Alice killing Bob and the two have an argument similar to the "Dead Parrot" sketch from Monty Python, with Alice repeatedly saying that Bob's not really dead.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Alice does not kill Bob on his sickbed.
- Enforced: The author wants to show that Alice has crossed the Moral Event Horizon.
- Lampshaded:Bob: (sees the knife in Alice's hand) You're not here to wish me well, are you.
Alice: Nope. - Invoked: Alice hears that Bob is in the hospital, and sees it as the perfect chance to murder him.
- Exploited: Charlie films the murder, and uses the film footage to blackmail Alice.
- Defied:
- Bob kills Alice before she can kill him.
- Charlie sees Alice about to kill Bob and kills her first.
- Discussed: "Bob's in the hospital. It should be easy to finish him off there."
- Conversed: "How did Alice fool all those doctors? This story already made no sense!"
- Deconstructed: The autopsy reveals that Bob was poisoned. Killing Bob in his condition was easy, but evading punishment will be significantly more difficult.
- Reconstructed: Alice already has an escape plan in motion, so killing Bob is a matter of possibility rather than discretion.
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