Why Does Nobody Die Anymore?

Warning: contains spoilers for Star Trek Into Darkness; Iron Man 3; Doctor Who; and Primeval.

I’ve noticed an increasing trend recently in movies and television that is starting to annoy me, and that is how main cast members are no longer being killed off, instead being saved by a random deus ex machina that is undermining everything that comes before it.

Now I appreciate that me criticising movies and television shows involving hyperspeed space travel, a man who builds robotic suits, and a bow-tie-wearing time travel as being unrealistic is possibly a stupid statement, but these shows also need some grounding to keep you involved in the show.

Take some recent examples. When Rory first died in ‘Doctor Who’ it was touching and emotional but, as it kept happening, this effect wore off pretty quickly. We’ve seen in recent films the seemingly inability for writers to kill off cast members. In the trilogy of Spider-man films by Sam Raimi, as one randomly picked example, they were not afraid to kill off key characters to get some emotional impact from them, and this is done in a lot of films, but recently it feels like they don’t bother anymore. In ‘Iron Man 3’ Pepper Potts looked to have died in a fireball, which would have had a huge impact on the character of Tony Stark but, no, she just happened to have been experimented on with the Extremis technology so survived.

In ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ Captain Kirk heroically climbs into the reactor to restart it and save his crew but dies of radiation poisoning because of it, dying in front of colleague and friend Spock. But does he stay dead, thus adding a new element to the series not afraid to turn perceptions on their head? No, he’s saved by Khan’s magic blood that previously brought a Tribble back to life.

Even in this week’s ‘Doctor Who’ closer ‘The Name of the Doctor’ several characters died and were brought back to life, namely Jenny and Clara. Any emotion that would come from these deaths has gone now as you think ‘Oh, they’re dead now, but they’ll be back alive soon’.

This sort of thing isn’t just a modern phenomenon. TV shows have been doing it for years, from ‘it was all a dream’ shower sequences, to Dirty Den walking back into the Queen Vic, but it just feels like recently they’ve been over-doing it, especially when the twists of ‘Iron Man 3’ and ‘Star Trek Into Darkness’ felt very similar as if someone has been comparing scripts.

I’m a big fan of Primeval and that’s one show that was never afraid to kill off characters and Nick Cutter’s death scene was all the better for it. They even had the opportunity to quite easily write Stephen back into it after his death in series two, using the cloning technology, but chose to make that a purely superficially visual thing rather than bringing him back as a person.

I’m not saying I want all characters in films and shows to now die; it’s disappointing when a favourite cast member is written out, but I feel we’re becoming desensitized to it, so much so that touching scenes involving characters breathing their last are overshadowed by the nagging voice in the back of your head that they’ll be coming back.

But if scriptwriters insist on doing this then I’d at least expect Bambi 2, where the young deer finds out his mother was alive all along…