by Helen Langdon
Someone once said there are only a certain amount of stories in the world. At their most basic, stories can be reduced to one of eight basic structures. It’s the set dressing you place around those structures that make for original stories. But here’s the thing – sometimes those trappings get weirdly specific. Like the trope in TV of finding out that characters have been dead all along. Not shows like Reaper or Pushing Daisies, where the line is never blurred. Instead, these shows feel like the writers saw The Sixth Sense before planning out their plots.
Someone once said there are only a certain amount of stories in the world. At their most basic, stories can be reduced to one of eight basic structures. It’s the set dressing you place around those structures that make for original stories. But here’s the thing – sometimes those trappings get weirdly specific. Like the trope in TV of finding out that characters have been dead all along. Not shows like Reaper or Pushing Daisies, where the line is never blurred. Instead, these shows feel like the writers saw The Sixth Sense before planning out their plots.
The How I Met Your Mother finale aired just a few weeks ago, and instantly polarised audiences with its conclusion. After all, the Mother had only been introduced in the last series, and had been elevated to series regular straight off the bat. But she was dead. Clues had been scattered throughout the series that it was going to turn out that she was dead by the time Ted started telling his story, but it was still a shock. It did kind of explain why Ted’s story was so long, but then Ted’s daughter pointed out that the story was really about how he still loved Robin. In one fell swoop, nine series of HIMYM turned out not to be a bonding moment between a father and his children, teaching them more about their dead mother, but instead an attempt at justifying a new relationship. This storyline was planned right from the start, and filmed back near the start of season two so the children were the right age. What’s going to be interesting is to see whether the “happy ending” coming up on the season nine DVD will change Tracy’s ultimate fate.
The “dead, ha-ha!” twist isn’t always limited to whole series. Sometimes, it’s just the plot of a single episode, and no series does it more heartbreakingly than Scrubs, with the episode “My Screw Up.” Dr Cox leaves JD in charge of two patients, one of whom is his brother-in-law, Ben, and the other one who has a heart condition. When one of them dies, it’s only Ben who can calm Dr Cox’s anger towards JD. Then, at the end of the episode, we find out that everyone hasn’t been preparing for Jack’s first birthday, as Dr Cox had believed. Instead, it’s Ben’s funeral. On the first watch, it’s a complete surprise. Brendan Fraser, at that point, was one of the big-name guest stars, and no other major recurring characters had died. On rewatch, it’s easier to note that Dr Cox is the only one who interacts with Ben, and Ben’s early comment that he’s going to carry his camera until he dies (of course, he doesn’t have his camera in any later scenes). Somehow, deaths in comedies always seem to hurt the most. Even in Scrubs, where melancholy was never too far away, this was a sucker punch.
Ashes to Ashes was the sequel series to Life on Mars, and gave answers and closure to any viewers demanding them. In the original series, the question of what was going on was always left ambiguous – was it another dimension? Had Sam travelled back in time? Was Sam imagining it all? There was evidence for each theory, with Sam’s suicidal leap in the final episode heavily implying the “limbo” theory, but it wasn’t until the final episode of Ashes to Ashes that viewers got a definitive answer. The world Sam and Alex inhabited in their respective series was limbo for police officers. The officers they’d worked with had died in the line of duty, in various violent ways. Gene was a guiding angel, Nelson was basically St Peter, and the Railway Arms was the pathway to Heaven.
Airing around the same time, another long-running series came to an end with the reveal that its characters were all dead. Well, sort of. Lost had been playing around with flash-forwards, flashbacks, and flash-sideways throughout its run. For casual viewers, the final episode seemed to state that the plane crash which started the series had killed everyone on board. After all, everyone met up in a church in order to move onto the next life, and then the credits were followed by footage of the crash site. But Lost was never going to be as simple as that. Instead, the church scene took place in the flash-sideways world visited throughout the final season. That world was purgatory, where the characters had to remember life lessons from their time on the island before they were ready to move on. The mystical tone of Lost meant that the characters had to develop as people before they were ready to move on, reflected in the choice of a church as the meeting place before “moving on”. Ashes to Ashes, by anchoring their crossing-over point to a pub, adds a more prosaic tone. They might have accidentally used the exact same ending, but each one reflected the overall ethos of the series.
This particular trope pops up in other series as well, in series as varied as Angel, NCIS and American Horror Story. And almost invariably, it’s used so that characters (either the dead ones, or the ones still breathing) can learn something, or become better people. As long as audiences keep being surprised by the reveal that characters are dead, it’s going to remain a viable plot point for character development.
This particular trope pops up in other series as well, in series as varied as Angel, NCIS and American Horror Story. And almost invariably, it’s used so that characters (either the dead ones, or the ones still breathing) can learn something, or become better people. As long as audiences keep being surprised by the reveal that characters are dead, it’s going to remain a viable plot point for character development.
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