History Main / UndeathAlwaysEnds

->''[[TheNothingAfterDeath I see... only darkness.]]''

* ''{{xxxHoLic}}'' and ''TsubasaReservoirChronicle'' example- [[spoiler:Yuko Ichihara.]] A full explanation would require an eight paragraph course in semi-made-up-by-CLAMP-mysticism, [[MindScrew confusingness]], [[ThirtyXanatosPileup multiple overly-complex-plan pileups]], and would leave you more confused than educated.

[[AC: {{Anime}}]]

[[AC: {{Comics}}]]

* After Doomsday rips his arm off, BoosterGold bleeds out on the operating table - but contrives to do so during a period in which no one on earth can be born or die. Though clinically dead, Booster fights on with the help of a new suit of armour (incorporating a prosthetic arm) that his BFF Ted Kord rigs up for him. When the stasis period ends and death returns to the DCU, Booster drops dead - only to open his eyes again moments later, the suit Ted built having (unbeknownst to anyone but Ted) incorporated a life-support system that will keep Booster going indefinitely. This long period of undeath - during which Booster is basically a zombie in a tin can - ends when Booster strikes a deal with Monarch to heal his wounds and let him remove the life-support armour.

[[AC: {{Film}}]]

* ''Near Dark'' ends with [[spoiler: the rest of the vampires dead and the main character and his love interest cured of vampirism through a complete blood replacement]].

[[AC: {{Literature}}]]

[[AC: Mythology]]

[[AC: VideoGames]]

[[AC: {{Webcomics}}]]

[[AC: LiveActionTV]]
* ''{{Lost}}'' DoubleSubverted this- It was revealed in season 6 that [[spoiler: the whispers heard throughout the show are the tormented souls of people who died on the Island and couldn't move on. In the DVD-only epilogue, however, Ben and Hurley bring Walt back to the Island, and it's heavily implied they plan to use Walt's powers to help the spirits, which include his father, move on.]]
* ''{{Angel}}'' subverted this; much of the series was spent building up the fact that Angel would play a major role in the apocalypse, after which he would become human. However, he threw it all away at the very end to give two fingers to the demons who secretly run the planet.
** On the other hand, there is only the word of an evil demon that signing it away would really work. Even if it did, there is another vampire with a soul running around and the prophesy is ridiculously vague...
*** The ''After the Fall'' comics revealed that [[spoiler: while Angel did indeed sign away his destiny, Wolfram & Hart never filed it. They still need him to flip out and kill everything.]]
* ''DeadLikeMe'' plays it straight, surprisingly. While the reapers are indeed undead and stay that way for decades, they do eventually get to go to {{Heaven}}-- or a reasonable generic facsimile thereof. So do all the one-episode ghosts throughout the series.
* ''{{Torchwood}}'' had a particularly disturbing variant on this: Owen is turned into a kind of undead in the middle of the series and remains that way for several episodes until the end of the series. He can't feel pain, can't eat or drink (since food just settles in his stomach), any wounds sustained do not heal (and have to be sewn up weekly) and worst of all, he can no longer have sex. [[spoiler:At the end of the series, he "dies" when he is trapped in a nuclear reactor and [[NightmareFuelUnleaded his body literally melts into goo, with him remaining conscious until the very end]]]].
** NightmareFuel: [[spoiler: Or beyond.]]
* In one episode of ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' a student from Buffy's school reanimates the body of his dead brother (who says he shouldn't have been brought back) and stitches together parts of different women to make him a girlfriend. Buffy and company are [[DebateAndSwitch spared the moral dilemma]] of deciding his fate when a fire breaks out in the house and the corpse-brother dies while trying to retrieve his future bride.
** ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' implicitly averted this, given that vampires appear to be very hard for anyone but a Slayer to kill, and there generally being only a single Slayer at a time [[spoiler:until first there is Kendra, and then Faith, and at the very end a few hundred of them]]. Soulless vampires are not depicted as suffering from the sort of remorse or ennui that would lead one of them to embrace being even deader, and they generally don't want to become living or believe they can.
*** On the other hand, the mythology of the show makes it clear that vampires have been around for about as long as humanity, but the oldest vampires we see still count their age in centuries. So either the ennui eventually gets to them, or the ones who are smart enough to live past 500 are pretty much guaranteed to be too smart to go anywhere near the Slayer.
*** The oldest vampire we do see is The Master, who is apparently a few thousand years old (hence why he looks so non-human). He is powerful and seems to find a certain joy in his undeath - which seems to suggest that vampires who live past 500 are simply very rare, and not really affected by ennui. Rare because, if a Slayer is killing several vamps a night, it all adds up eventually.
**** Whedon's script notes put the Master as being a little over 600. I don't recall any reference to his actual age on screen, so I've always taken that as WordOfGod. Has there been anything since?
***** Nothing explicit onscreen, but in the Master's flashback appearance in the Angel episode 'Darla,' set in 1607 (almost four hundred years prior to his death, making him just a little over two hundred at the time), he already had his [[BuffySpeak fruit punch mouth.]] Maybe Angel (in his mid- to late two hundreds) and other vampires just wear their years better, but given that both the Master and Kakistos are said to be very old, to the point where they're taking on more animalistic features, the implication is that the vampire ages and takes on this or that aspect of an animal (the Master was a bat, Kakistos seemed to be a pig), but it takes many centuries. Though this may just qualify as WildMassGuessing.
* Kai from ''{{Lexx}}'' wins a game with the BigBad to restore him to life, but Prince goes back on his word... [[spoiler: or so we think. In the final episode of the series, he makes Kai truly alive - just so he'll lose his MadeOfIron tendencies and become truly dead in the explosion when he takes out the other villains' asteroid-ship. Kai does not survive.]]
* Constable Bob Fraser from DueSouth is able to move on in the GrandFinale, only after Benton brings his wife's murderer to justice.
* Often averted in GhostWhisperer, as there are some spirits that choose to remain Earthbound or to join with the mysterious dark forces [[AbortedArc that the writers seem to have forgotten they introduced back in the first season]].

[[AC:Tabletop RPG]]
* ''TheWorldOfDarkness'' does this on a case-by-case basis. Generally, players of ''Vampire'' are going to want to keep their characters alive as long as possible, individually averting it. In the background material, few vampires are over a thousand or so years old (most of the canon characters are under 300), though this is less from ennui (the cure for that is the deathlike sleep called torpor) than from the backstabbing, predatory nature of Kindred existence. Over in ''Promethean'', the Created want to end their undying, unliving nature by [[HumanityEnsues completing the Great Work and becoming human]], but frankly, [[BlessedWithSuck can you blame them?]] Even then, Mr. Verney, FrankensteinsMonster, is still going after several centuries, much to his regret.
** Although the prometheans are technically not undead (even if their biology functions [[BizarreAlienBiology unusually]]), and the majority can only push it for under a couple of centuries at most. The progenitors of a Lineage (such as Mr. Verney) seem to be an exception, and can live indefinitely (or at least a lot longer than a typical promethean).
*** It's never made clear if Mr. Verney is truly an exception, or if he's just very careful about "going to the wastes" (a process that cleans out a Promethean's Azoth and - more importantly - winds back their internal clocks by a few decades).
* Subverted in Mummy: The Resurrection, where the Amenti can [[BackFromTheDead come back]], but it takes them longer and longer each time.
* As a rule, undead in standard ''DungeonsAndDragons'' are evil because they're animated by "negative energy." Even the completely mindless ones. Therefore, lesser undead tend to fall by the dozen before player characters, and greater (intelligent) undead are also in the queue to be eliminated eventually, usually as bosses of some stripe or another. Individual settings shake things up a bit more, with prominent lich and vampire [=NPCs=] in some, and whole nations that revere or employ undead in others.
** ''{{Eberron}}'' being particularly notable, where one nation, Karrnath, employs intelligent undead in its armies and whose king is secretly a vampire -- and is in fact the most peaceful, caring monarch around (just don't threaten him, his people, or the peace). The elven nation of Aerenal animate "deathless," undead fueled by positive energy, as a living afterlife for their greatest citizens. There's also a semi-popular religion that reveres undeath as the path to immortality.
*** Which is, in an interesting subversion, not quite a ReligionOfEvil or PathOfInspiration: Many, even high-ranking, followers of the Blood of Vol are good-aligned and genuinely believe that undeath is a superior state of existence and the best shot the living have at defeating death once and for all -- and no one can deny that turning undead ''does'' after all make you live forever, in a fashion. On the other hand, the cult was originally founded to help a LawfulEvil lich queen achieve divinity.
** Second Edition AD&D also had a unique form of Elven Liche that 'lived' for the sole purpose of hunting down other undead and destroying them. As this would clearly not be possible simply because they occur more rapidly than the elven kind can kill them, and that such endeavors are innately dangerous, it's not certain whether or not they would live that much longer than a normal elf would, especially in worlds where Elves can count their potential lifespans in millenia and not centuries.
*** Shows up also in a host of Forgotten Realms modules and books, including several moments where the various undead elves complain about being dead for so long, despite canonically only approaching old age as an elf.
**** To be fair, they're spending all that time undead, probably unable to get drunk, have sex, or other more 'mortal' pleasures.
***** When you're a millenia-old wizard(ess) of excessive skill and power, there will be precious little stopping you from casting [[PowerPerversionPotential Polymorph to Slut]] on yourself once in a while. Apart from plot-induced {{wangst}} and moaning about how you're CursedWithAwesome, but even being a mortal won't prevent that.

* ''{{Lost}}'' subverted this at the end with [[spoiler: Claire escaping the island despite the fact that she likely died in Season 4 and has been a zombie resurrected by the "sickness" ever since.]]

*** Shows up also in a host of Forgotten Realms modules and books, including several WallBanger moments where the various undead elves complain about being dead for so long, despite canonically only approaching old age as an elf.

* Subverted in Mummy: The Ressurection, where the Amenti can [[BackFromTheDead come back]], but it takes them longer and longer each time.

* In one episode of ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' a student from Buffy's school reanimates the body of his dead brother (who says he shouldn't have been brought back) and stitches together parts of different women to make him a girlfriend. Buffy and company are [[DebateAndSwitch spared the moral dilemma]] of deciding his fate when a fire breaks out in the house and the corpse-brother dies while trying to retrieve his future bride.

* ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' implicitly averted this, given that vampires appear to be very hard for anyone but a Slayer to kill, and there generally being only a single Slayer at a time [[spoiler:until first there is Kendra, and then Faith, and at the very end a few hundred of them]]. Soulless vampires are not depicted as suffering from the sort of remorse or ennui that would lead one of them to embrace being even deader, and they generally don't want to become living or believe they can.
** On the other hand, the mythology of the show makes it clear that vampires have been around for about as long as humanity, but the oldest vampires we see still count their age in centuries. So either the ennui eventually gets to them, or the ones who are smart enough to live past 500 are pretty much guaranteed to be too smart to go anywhere near the Slayer.

* Zig-zagged in ProfessorLaytonAndTheUnwoundFuture, in which [[spoiler:Claire, was thought to be dead, is alive, albeit 10 years later. But time travel is unstable, so she has to go back to the time she came from, and die.]]

The Undead are neither dead nor alive, nor do they last in that state particularly long. For whatever reason, most media showing an undead character with sentience will have said character not be undead by story's end. Sort of like Schrodinger's Zombie, they can only stay in an 'in between' state until observed in a movie.

* Somewhat averted in the EddieMurphy vehicle, ''Vampire In Brooklyn''. Early in the film Murphy's vampire recruits another character as a "ghoul" (basically a sentient decaying zombie) to serve him. After Murphy has been destroyed, the ghoul finds his ring and tries it on. This turns him into a vampire as well. So he is still undead by the end of the movie, but has received a complimentary upgrade to Undead Deluxe.

* Goes with the territory of the ''KurosagiCorpseDeliveryService'' -- the main character's power allows him to temporarily coax the recently dead to move again in order to finish business they left on earth, but this effect's length can usually be measured in minutes before they're done and pass on again. [[spoiler:Other characters who can revive the dead also exist, but their powers are equally temporary -- though in one girl's case it's because her powers cause the dead enormous pain and they become unreasoning monsters who must be put down.]]

* As a rule, undead in standard ''DungeonsAndDragons'' are evil because they're animated by "negative energy." Even the completely mindless ones. Therefore, lesser undead tend to fall by the dozen before player characters, and greater (intelligent) undead are also in the queue to be eliminated eventually, usually as bosses of some stripe or another. Individual settings shake things up a bit more, with prominent lich and vampire NPCs in some, and whole nations that revere or employ undead in others.

* [[{{Gungrave}} Beyond the Grave]] is an undead protagonist, has been undead for almost twenty years (though most of that time was spent [[SealedBadassInACan sleeping]]), and stays undead throughout both games.

* Happens ''by the wazoo'' in Saintseiya's Hades Saga.

-->--Barbossa, PiratesOfTheCaribbean

-->--Barbosa, PiratesOfTheCarribean

->[[ItsColdSoCold I feel... Cold...]]

->I feel... Cold...
Barbosa, PiratesOfTheCarribean

** And in fact they do. The corpses that revive after buriel in the Pet Cemetary are different creatures than the ones who died, the original owners are gone. The problem of the Pet Cemetary is rooted in the desire to deny the reality of death, it's the 'come on' that enables the demonic power to get at them.