History Main / DoomedPredecessor

!!'''This is a DeathTrope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead.'''

* ''Series/{{Castle}}'': In “Once Upon a Time in the West”, the team find a picture of VictimOfTheWeek Whitney's father Clyde enclosed with letters talking about his quest to find a gold stash that long-dead outlaws stole. Castle and Beckett try to find the gold themselves, partially to solve Whitney's murder and partially because of Castle geeking out at the idea of finding Wild West buried trasure. When Castle and Beckett find the outlaws' cache, the gold is gone and Clyde's body (recognizable by his hat) is stowed inside the trunk that the gold was kept in.

* In the ''WesternAnimation/DuckTales2017'' episode "[[Recap/DuckTales2017S1E9TheImpossibleSummitOfMtNeverrest The Impossible Summit of Mt. Neverrest]]", Scrooge and the triplets find the skeleton of famed mountaineer George Mallardy in a cave on the titular mountain with "Curse you [=McDuck=]!" scrawled on the wall next to him. Leading Scrooge to reveal that he'd made a previous attempt to scale the mountain and hired Mallardy as his guide, and who had cut him loose halfway up the first cliff. Scrooge is understandably bitter about that and emphatically steps over Mallardy's remains to show that he made it further up than him.

* ''Literature/SherlockHolmes'': In "The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb," Victor Hatherly is hired to repair a hydraulic press, with his client (a counterfeiter named Fritz) trying to kill him once he's done with the rather suspicious job. Hatherly only escapes due to the intervention of Fritz's less-ruthless accomplices, one of whom references "the last time" and how Fritz promised "it should not [happen] again." [[ShootTheBuilder After hearing the story, Holmes recalls the disappearance of another engineer who was likely killed by Fritz after either building the press or conducting previous repairs]].

%%[[caption-width-right:348:Dr. Sternard didn't make it]]

* ''Film/JourneyToTheCenterOfTheEarth'', 1959 adaptation: Arne Saknussemm, who both made the MacGuffin and marked the [[TrailOfBreadCrumbs trail]] the protagonists follow, died centuries before the story and his skeleton is found in Atlantis pointing to the DoorToBefore.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheIncredibles:'' As Mr. Incredible is trying to escape from Syndrome's island, he takes shelter in a cave and finds the skeleton of fellow superhero Gazerbeam, [[ChekhovsNews whose disappearance had been noted in a newspaper several scenes prior]]. Mr. Incredible notes that Gazerbeam wrote a word on the cave wall with his EyeBeams: [[spoiler:"KRONOS", which turns out to be Syndrome's computer password]]. And then he hides behind Gazerbeam's corpse to evade detection by a drone, accidentally making Syndrome believe he is dead.

Searching caves and [[AncientTomb Ancient Tombs]] for artifacts is the bread and butter of any AdventurerArchaeologist. During such a mission they are likely to find the remains of a less fortunate explorer who went into the TempleOfDoom looking for the MacGuffin ahead of our hero. The defining element of such a Doomed Predecessor is that they are a tragic example of a ChekhovsGunman (or ChekhovMIA if the character was just noted as missing), as our hero knew about their existence; either they met earlier on or they were mentioned [[AllMythsAreTrue in a myth]] or [[ChekhovsNews the news]] to have gone on but never returned from their quest.

* In the backstory of ''ComicBook/GrantMorrisonsBatman'', the British government sent a superhero team to the Maldives back during the Falkland War to try and prevent one of their former agents from using the war as a cover for his escape from prison. It didn't go well. Years later, Batman, Batwoman, El Gaucho, and the Hood travel to the same place to find the same operative and come across the corpse of the Iron Lady, one of the members of the British team.

* ''Literature/SpyHigh'': In the final act of ''The Frankenstein Factory'', Bond Team is sent on a training mission in the woods and encounters six local hunters who are looking for the monsters believed to be behind a series of disappearances. The next day, Bond Team finds the gory remains of four of those hunters in the ruins of their camp and later witnesses the survivors being forcibly mutated.

* ''Literature/TheCemeteriesOfAmalo'': In the second book, a major antagonist who needs money to flee town forces Celehar to try and uncover treasure in a haunted cemetery. She mentions that many other treasure hunters have vanished in the cemetery through the years, although a few made it out alive but empty-handed. Celehar finds the skeletons of the missing treasure hunters (a dozen altogether) shortly before he and his captor are attacked by the evil spirit that killed them.

* ''[[Literature/TheBooksOfEmber Scott of Ember]]'': Sul gives Doon a helmet that belonged to a pipeworks worker who drowned and mentions the name carved into the helmet was the only thing left to identify him with. It later turns out that the worker was Lina's father. An earlier scene shows Lina and her sister sadly listening to a tape of his voice, with the tape containing a few hints that he and his friends were up to something. As Lina and Doon try to find a safe way out of the city, they realize that Lina's father died trying to do the same thing.

* ''Film/TheCityOfEmber'': Sul gives Doon a helmet that belonged to a pipeworks worker who drowned and mentions the name carved into the helmet was the only thing left to identify him with. It later turns out that the worker was Lina's father. An earlier scene shows Lina and her sister sadly listening to a tape of his voice, with the tape containing a few hints that he and his friends were up to something. As Lina and Doon try to find a safe way out of the city, they realize that Lina's father died trying to do the same thing.

* ''Film/TheHunter'': Sass and Bike’s father Jarrah ventured into the forest in search of the last Tasmanian tiger after being hired by the same company that Martin works for. He told his children that he saw the tiger once, but eventually he abandoned his mission for the Red Leaf company to try and find the tiger strictly for environmental preservation reasons. About a year before the beginning of the movie, he went on another search expedition and never came back. Martin hears about Jarrah's work several times and eventually finds his skeleton, which has a bullet hole through its skull. Unlike most doomed predecessors, it’s never revealed who killed Jarrah. It could have been the company he quit working for, hunters from a rival company after the tiger, the loggers whose jobs he was threatening, or a random hunter who shot him by accident while hunting non-endangered animals.

* ''Film/TheHunter'': Sass and Bike’s father Jarrah ventured into the forest in search of the last Tasmanian tiger after being hired by the same company that Martin works for. He told his children that he saw the tiger once, but eventually he abandoned his mission for the Red Leaf company to try and find the tiger strictly for environmental preservation reasons. About a year before the beginning of the movie, he went on another search expedition and never came back. Martin hears about Jarrah's work several times and eventually finds his skeleton, which has a bullet hole through its skull. Unlike most doomed predecessors, it’s never revealed who killed Jarrah. It could have been the company he quit working for, hunters from a rival company after the tiger, the loggers whose jobs he was threatening, or a random hunter who shot him by accident while hunting non-endangered animals

Compare the less personal ThisWayToCertainDeath when random corpses (or parts thereof) line the way to the TreasureRoom, reminding the hero and the viewer of the apparent dangers ahead. Also compare RedundantResearcher, a foil for our hero, who did all the groundwork to unlock the ancient secrets but fails because, well, he is not the hero. Also compare SendInTheSearchTeam.

* ''Literature/{{Congo}}'': A previous expedition, which sent back some satellite photos, was lost shortly afterwards and the main cast find the body of one in a Nairobi morgue (having been spotted and picked up by a charter plane while stumbling through the jungle with mortal injuries) while another turns up alive, but DrivenToMadness (to the point where some suspect he'll die soon) in a village they stop at. Later still, they find the camp of a rival expedition they've been interacting with overrun by the hostel gorillas, with everyone in it killed. [[''Film/{{Congo}}'' The film adaptation]] also featured them discovering a dying colleague and the bodies of others, although there, the main characters weren't as much trying to complete the original expedition as they were SeekingTheMissingFindingTheDead.

** The avid explorer Dr. Sternhart is first introduced at Tikal (Mexico) where he steals a stone disk from Indy and takes off to discover Atlantis on his own. Irony wants it that Indy later discovers the corpse of Sternhart on Crete where he got locked up inside a cave and starved to death. He leaves behind the worldstone he stole from Indy and a staff, both of which help Indy to advance further in the game.

Sometimes the Doomed Predecessor poses as an EvilCounterpart to our hero, as their objective was personal gain instead of the artifact's [[ItBelongsInAMuseum historical value]], making their death [[DeathByMaterialism inevitable]] and [[AssholeVictim well deserved]].

* In ''Film/{{Pandorum}}.'' Two ColonyShip crewmen are awoken from cryogenic sleep in the middle of a disaster and find their shift-mate Cooper's cryo pod empty, indicating he woke up before them and left to fix or explore the ship. TheHero stumbles across Cooper's skeleton shortly into his own adventure.