History Main / EverybodysDeadDave

-->'''Alex:''' How many starfighters are left?\\
'''Grig:''' Counting yourself?\\
'''Alex:''' Yes.\\

** "The Two Doctors": Everyone the Doctor and Sarah Jane meet dies.

* In ''AIArtificialIntelligence'', the boy robot is [[spoiler: frozen in stasis while the world wastes away and humanity becomes extinct. Eventually, highly advanced robots come and put the boy in an alternate reality, also giving him back his mother for a day before permanently shutting him down and storing his mind as a historical archive.]]
* In ''[[TwoThousandOne 2001: A Space Odyssey]]'', [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Dave Bowman finds out everybody but himself and Frank Poole is dead]] because HAL pulled the plug on the hibernation systems. Later HAL kills Frank Poole by cutting his lifeline during an EVA before Dave can shut him down. In the end, Dave gets zapped by the Monolith and turned into the Star Child. As far as Earth is concerned, until they find out otherwise in ''2010'', literally everybody really is dead. The ''Series/RedDwarf'' premise, which is actually the TropeNamer as opposed to ''2001'', may be a ShoutOut to ''2001''.

* ''[[Franchise/EvilDead Army of Darkness]]'' originally ended with Ash ''starting'' taking his magic potion, which he must take one drop of for each of the four centuries that he wishes to sleep, pauses to glance at a noise, and accidentally overdoses by one drop. When he wakes up, he's the last man on Earth looking over an apocalyptic wasteland screaming "[[BigNo No!]] I slept too long!". The Hollywood studio demanded a more kickass ending.
* ''FromDuskTillDawn'' ends with [[spoiler: only the main character and one girl surviving]].

* Russian film ''The Ninth Company'' ends with all characters but two main ones dead.

* At the end of ''TheEye'', [[spoiler:there is a huge gas tanker explosion, killing almost everyone in sight apart from Mun and Wah]].

* ''{{Gettysburg}}'' has a memorable exchange between General Lee and Pickett after the famous charge by Pickett's division resulted in said division being massacred. (Note that it's also believed to have happened in Real Life).

* In ''Serenity'', when the crew figures out that [[spoiler: "Miranda" is a planet]], the crew makes a perilous journey through reaver territory, to try to find out why [[spoiler:Miranda]] is so important. When they finally land planet-side, they discover the long dead corpses of an entire planet's population. Of course there were once survivors, but [[spoiler:they all turned into reavers]].

* Boyd Crowder from ''{{Justified}}'' gets a big dose of this when [[spoiler:he returns to his camp to find all of his followers murdered by his father.]]

** [[spoiler: [[WhateverHappenedToTheManOfTomorrow Second time.]]]]

* Quite possible in several ending combinations in ''HeavyRain'' [[spoiler: Not saving Shaun alone kills Ethan AND Norman in their epilogues if they hadn't died already.]]
* This is one of the worst endings you can get in the third game of ''{{Splatterhouse}}''.

* In ''SakuraTaisen'' (Sakura Wars) at the end of the game as your party marches through the [[FloatingContinent Seimajou]] they are killed off one by one, until only the main character and your chosen love interest remain. The player then either has to kill the traitor or watch her [[DeathEqualsRedemption sacrifice herself to save you]], then after you beat the big bad he reveals himself to be the devil... the hero dispairs that he can't go on without the rest of the party, then an angel shows up and they get better

** Subverted in DS 2. We can see massive evacuation at the beggining of the game. Its highly propable that many people made it, they were just gone before Isaac woke up.
* This is the fate of the "God of Destruction" Alex in one of the MultipleEndings of NipponIchi's ''MakaiKingdom''. He wants to destroy everything; he succeeds. And is left alone in an empty universe, too powerful to kill himself.
** A very similar thing happens in the Demon Path of ''SoulNomadAndTheWorldEaters''. [[spoiler:Except you're the one who destroys everything, and when the fabric of the world is undone, you go along with it.]]
* Many of the [=NPCs=] in TreasureOfTheRudra die out around day 10 [[spoiler: Due to Sodom's Moonlight. The ones who are smart enough stay inside, away from getting fried by it. The Residents of the Netherworld are completely safe aside from the wandering souls who return to Gafu.]]
* ''Call of Duty 4: ModernWarfare'' does this ''twice''; first, when [[spoiler:the nuclear warhead in Al-Asad's capital detonates, killing Lieutenant Vasquez, most of his squad, the Cobra pilot they were rescuing seconds earlier, and, a few minutes later, Sergeant Paul Jackson, the player character]]. Later on, "Soap" [=MacTavish=] is [[spoiler:disabled by a gas tanker explosion, and forced to watch helplessly as Griggs is shot in the throat, Gaz is executed in the forehead by the BigBad, and the rest of his surviving SAS/Marine unit is gunned down in cold blood by the Ultranationalists, right before Price slides him his Colt M1911 and lets Soap rip the badguys a new one]]. Talk about your DownerEnding. [[spoiler:Soap and Price manage to survive, though their status in the first ''Modern Warfare'' was left up in the air prior to the sequel]].

* This is your character's BackStory if you select the "Sole Survivor" and "Colonist" backgrounds in ''Franchise/MassEffect''. For bonus points, your character can have BOTH. And then BioWare had a lot of fun with this trope in the sequel:

* In ''MaxPayne2TheFallOfMaxPayne'', the only non-Max character of any import to live through to the end of the game is [[spoiler:Jim Bravura, who happened to take a few bullets to the torso first]]. Though, if the player completes the game on the hardest difficulty setting, [[spoiler:Mona]] survives too.
* In ''DeadToRights'', Jack is the sole survivor at the end.
* ''TheWhiteChamber'', regardless of the three main endings, drives the point home that [[spoiler:Sarah murdered the entire crew, and she is the only one still alive, everything that seemed to be alive that she had encountered was a complete illusion.]]
* On the ''Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode Two'', near the end of the game, [[spoiler:The Big Bad comes in and kills everybody at the robotics convention off... even the beloved characters from the first game... even the characters you had JUST finished side-questing for.]] As Gabe and Tycho would probably say, "Shit just got real."

* ''RedFaction'': Only Parker and Eos survive.

* ''{{Theresia}}'' is, in essence, a BeautifulVoid without the beauty. There are an a lot of rotting corpses, but if anyone else is still living (and setting those traps that keep targetting you), they're awfully good at keeping out of sight.

* In FinalFantasyTactics every character in the game who had a name and was ever slightly important winds up dead, with maybe a half a dozen exceptions. Considering the population in this game, that's an impressive genocide. Notable exceptions are [[spoiler: the main character and his sister, who are shown surviving the final battle.]]
* VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft: [[spoiler: On your arrival on the Alliance Gunship in Deepholm.]]
* When you arrive aboard the station in ''MetroidFusion'', every member of the station's crew is already dead or is infested with X parasites.

* In ''StrikeSuitZero'', pretty much the entire Earth fleet has been wiped out, without the single loss of an enemy ship.

* [[FireEmblemTellius Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn]] has this at the end of Part 3. The BigBad's judgement has turned about 99% of the world's [[TakenForGranite population to stone.]] The major characters note how the battlefield they were in the middle of has turned eerily quiet, and [[TheHero Ike]] runs outside, screaming for someone to reply to him.

-->'''GaryGygax:''' Anyone want to play DungeonsAndDragons for the next quadrillion years?

* ''FanFic/LastOneStanding'' contains a particularly [[TearJerker heartbreaking]] moment when [[http://www.fimfiction.net/story/72998/last-one-standingTwilight Sparkle suddenly realizes that she really is going to die,]] just like all her friends before her.

* ''SunsetOverImdahl'' begins with one of these--the main character's mother has just died of ThePlague, and he leaves his house to find the rest of the city has followed suit. Then a strange man with a [[TimeTravel time portal]] gives him a chance to [[SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong make it all right]]...

** Mercilessly parodied in ''RobinHoodMenInTights'':

* In ''DeadRising'', if you follow the plot missions, just before the finale the Special Forces will have killed every single survivor and zombie in the mall except you and Isabella. You make your final run to the helipad alone with the mall completely lifeless.

* In ''DeadRising2'', the clock initially counts down to when the military arrives. Once they do, they're slaughtered by souped up zombies. The only survivor is Sgt. Boykin, who goes insane and believes his squad is still alive. The second clock counts down to a firebombing by the military which presumably kills every living and undead thing in the area, possibly including the player character depending on the player's actions beforehand.

* In ''[[ChzoMythos 7 Days A Skeptic]]'', near the end, [[spoiler: all of the characters are dead except for the player, and the homicidal frankenstein monster that killed the rest.]]

* Eiji Yoshikawa's ''Musashi'' opens with one of these, the two main characters literally the only ones left after a battle. They even wake up to find themselves as such, too.

* The ending of ''Literature/SometimeNeverAFableForSupermen'' is similiar to ''Closing Time'' mentioned above, as the world gets nuke-washed and all the humans are dead, the Gremlins move to the surface but found out when there's no human alive, there is no imagination to keep them existing. [[DownerEnding They fade out]].

* The book ''Literature/TheRoad'' by CormacMcCarthy is about a father and son as they travel south during what is suspected to be a nuclear winter. The father and son are all they have left.

* ''ZForZachariah'' - the only survivor initially is the young girl in the mysteriously unaffected valley, writing her diary.
* ''{{Dragonlance}}'' has this. When Caramon goes forward in time, he find the entire world dead.

* Nevil Shute's ''On The Beach'' describes the reactions of the remaining survivors of an all-out nuclear war that has already destroyed most of the population of Earth. The characters are mostly Australians who are waiting for the fallout to reach them, but they know that they're already doomed.

* In DeanKoontz's ''{{Phantoms}}'', two of the protagonists arrive to find their entire town wiped out by they don't at first know what.
* Creator/StephenKing's ''TheStand'' is about the survivors of a plague.
** King's ''Under The Dome''. Only a handful survivors out of more than a thousand people trapped.
** In his novella ''The Long Walk'', only one out of the original one hundred contestants in the titular endurance competition survives. The others were all killed when they couldn't keep up the pace.
* ''Series/StarTrekDeepSpaceNine'' novel ''Fallen Heroes''. Odo and Quark accidentally shoot themselves three days into the future with an alien artefact to find the station in ruins and everyone dead. There are then a series of flashbacks showing just what happened - aliens attacked the station looking for the artefact, which wasn't there as it had been sent into the future...they end up [[SetRightWhatOnceWentWrong putting everything right]] by figuring out how to time travel back into the past again.
* This is part of Willis Corto/[[spoiler: Armitage]]'s backstory in ''{{Neuromancer}}''. He was part of Operation Screaming Fist, a special-forces raid on a Russian base during The War. After being shot down, he and a few others managed to steal a helicopter and escape to Finland, only to be shot to pieces by the Finnish defense forces while they were trying to land. Corto was the only one to survive the escape. Automatic Jack, a central character in the short story ''Burning Chrome'', was the only other survivor of the operation as a whole.

* Creator/TerryPratchett's ''Literature/JohnnyAndTheBomb'' explores the RealLife example of the ''pal's battalions'' in WorldWarI, which were special units of the British Army consisting of men from a single town. In theory, this increased camaraderie, as people were fighting alongside friends and work colleagues. In practice, they were a fearsomely efficient way to wipe out the entire young male population of a town in a single stroke.

* Isabelle, Alec, and Clary do this in [[Literature/TheMortalInstruments City of Ashes]] when they realize that all the silent brothers are dead.

* ''The Brest Fortress'' is a Russian film depicting the siege of the titular fortress. In the end, almost every charachter is dead , [[spoiler: even Anya is told to be [[BusCrash Executed by Germans]], along with all other women and children]], with the sole exception of the main charachter, who somehow escapes.

* [[spoiler: The fate of the entire "Odyssey" crew except for Julia. Bonus whammy points for this information being given to her by a clone of ''her own husband'']] in ''Film/{{Oblivion 2013}}'' .

* ''[[Literature/TheHungerGames Mockingjay:]]'' [[spoiler: "Katniss...There is no District 12."]]
** Wholly and completely subverted. [[spoiler: Only the city was bombed. Everyone got out in time.]]

** Three million years after a nuclear reactor leak killed the crew of an interstellar mining ship, the only survivors of the pilot episode's disaster are the main characters. Well, one survivor. The other three protagonists are the ship's AI computer, an evolved, humanoid descendant of the main character's pet cat (and, therefore, not actually ''born'' at the time of the disaster) and a holographic simulation of the main character's roommate. Why a hologram? Because he's dead, Dave. Being [[RuleOfFunny a comedy]], the page quote (where Holly breaks the news and [[TropeNamer names the trope]]) quickly spirals into an OverlyLongGag - and the book adaptation's take ends with Holly ranting every possible grammatical combination of the words, "everyone", "is", "dead" and "Dave".

* ''ShinMegamiTenseiNocturne''. TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt takes place within the first ten to fifteen minutes (depending on how fast you read.) In the entire planet, only the five humans at the Shinjuku Hospital (and one IntrepidReporter) escape the horror of the Conception, an apocalyptic event which destroyed the world outside Tokyo and turned the city into [[HollowWorld the Vortex World]]. All other humans, everywhere have died, and they have either become helpless ghosts who can only hope demons don't eat them, or their souls have been reduced to raw emotional energy called "Magatsuhi"... which demons crave to enhance their own powers. By the end of the game, not one true human exists anymore.

* In the pilot episode of ''WesternAnimation/{{Futurama}}'', Fry awakens in the future and realizes that his family, his co-workers and his girlfriend are all long since gone. After a moment of reflection... he lets out a jubilant "Yahoo!"

* In ''[[TwoThousandOne 2001: A Space Odyssey]]'', [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Dave Bowman finds out everybody but him is dead]] because HAL pulled the plug on the hibernation systems. Later HAL kills Frank Poole by cutting his lifeline during an EVA before Dave can shut him down. In the end, Dave gets zapped by the Monolith and turned into the Star Child. As far as Earth is concerned, until they find out otherwise in ''2010'', literally everybody really is dead. The ''Series/RedDwarf'' premise, which is actually the TropeNamer as opposed to ''2001'', may be a ShoutOut to ''2001''.

* In ''[[Literature/{{Homer}} The Odyssey]]'', Odysseus's ship sank, and only he survived to spend seven years with Calypso.

* In "The Yarn of the 'Nancy Bell'" (the first of the Bab Ballads by [[GilbertAndSullivan W.S. Gilbert]]), the sole survivor of the Nancy Bell's crew describes what happened to the others.

* At the end of ''TheChroniclesOfNarnia'', Susan is the only character left alive. This isn't really a happy ending for her though if you think about it, since it ends focusing on the fact that her family and all friends of the family are now in heaven and she is, frankly, not.

* Creator/StephenKing's TheStand is about the survivors of a plague.

* From the ninth Manga/LupinIII special, ''In Memory of the Walther P-38'':[[spoiler: Everyone who wanted to leave [[MurderInc the Tarantula]] is killed, including BrokenBird and potential Lupin love interest Elen. Only Lupin and his gang survive.]]

* Twice in ''Videogame/{{Halo}}'': Before the game even starts, the human military capitol of of Reach is bombed into molten glass with only the hero's ship escaping. By the end of the game, then, the Halo, all humans and all enemies have been utterly obliterated with the exception of the hero, his trusty ExpositionFairy and a handful of stragglers including [[spoiler:343 Guilty Spark, [[SergeantRock Sergeant-Major Johnson]] and the soon-to-be Arbiter]].
** The same thing also happens in the earlier ''VideoGame/{{Marathon}}'' series (which is not in continuity with Halo): [[PlayerPunch after a seemingly happy ending]] in the first game, the sequel reveals that during intervening years, the entire colony was kidnapped into slavery by aliens or nuked to the bedrock, and the good-girl AI dismantled for scrap--however, said AI is revealed to have survived this in a largely irrelevant TwistEnding to the second game. The final game ends with only a few dozen humans from the colony still alive.
** The even earlier ''PathwaysIntoDarkness'' starts with you LateToTheTragedy, everyone other than you having been killed already.
** By the end of the Halo trilogy, humanity's population is reduced to a few hundred million, and the only surviving main characters are Lord Hood, Half-Jaw, the Arbiter, Chief, and Cortana, although the latter two are marooned in space thousands of light years from civilization, and a few of the [[TheyKilledKenny "expendable" supporting characters]] are present in the military funeral scene at the end of number 3.

* The ending of ''Literature/SometimesNeverAFableForSuperMen'' is similiar to ''Closing Time'' mentioned above, as the world gets nuke-washed and all the humans are dead, the Gremlins Move to the surface but found out when there's no human alive, there is no imagination to keep them existing. [[DownerEnding They fade out]].

* This is often the case when a warship is sunk by gunfire. When a ship is torpedoed, it usually gives time enough to organize rescue and leave the sinking ship; but gunfire will either reduce the ship into a blazing inferno with no chances of getting out alive, or cause a catastrophic explosion pulverizing the whole ship in a split second.
** Actually, torpedoes are no less likely to cause a completely loss of the ship than gunfire. The ''immediate'' loss of a ship is due to volatile cargo or a warship's magazines detonating, something both gunfire and torpedo hits (and bomb hits) have similar probability of doing.

* Archeology [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory seems to suggest]] that there was a period around the last Ice Age where the entire human population got whittled down to only a few ''thousand'' people. You can just imagine the number of deaths involved.[[note]]Less than you think, as the number of ''homo sapiens sapiens'' likely peaked at no more than couple hundred thousand beforehand[[/note]]

* Implied in {{Paranoia}} -- [[UnreliableNarrator Friend Computer says everyone outside of Alpha Complex is dead!]]