Amputations in live-action TV.
- 24:
- In Season 3 Jack had to cut a guy's hand off with an axe because he was handcuffed to a bomb. It was later said that doctors reattached the guy's hand.
- A bad guy was captured and volunteered to lead them to the bad guy lair, so they put a chip in his upper arm in case he changed his mind. So, he cut his arm off. He later died from this flesh wound.
- In 2 Broke Girls's third-season episode "And the Pastry Porn", Sophie sends a one-armed maid to clean Max and Caroline's apartment. The maid insists she "cleans like she has 3 arms" despite her missing arm, but soon needs Caroline's help to lift Max's mattress.
- Andor: One of B2EMO's wheel housings is yellow and doesn't quite match the stamping and exact shape of the others, while in flashbacks all of his wheel housings are matching red. It's not clear what happened to him but he's in far worse shape overall in addition to having to replace one of his appendages.
- Angel:
- In "To Sanshu in L.A.", Angel does a type 3 with some type 2 (it was in battle but also a deliberate amputation) to Lindsey to get the scroll Lindsey was holding and because Lindsey was threatening Cordelia's life. It later becomes a plot point when Lindsey gets a transplant and it becomes an Evil Hand.
- In "Birthday", Wesley's counterpart in the Skipverse is missing an arm, likely from the same demon who appeared in "Parting Gifts" (but without Angel to help him in this timeline). His fencing skills are still formidable, though.Wesley: Ah, Kungai demon. Couple of years ago.
- Arrested Development: Buster gets his hand bitten off by a loose seal. It's replaced with a Hook Hand, and in Season 5, a full prosthetic replacement.
- Arrow: In Season 4, Nyssa al Ghul offers a cure to save Thea's life if Oliver only kills Malcolm Merlyn so that she may have control of the League of Assassins. Oliver, however, manages to Take a Third Option by cutting off Merlyn's hand in order to get the ring of Ra's al Ghul from him.
- Avocado Toast: Marvin, Molly's housemate in Season 2, is missing both hands and suffered obvious burns over his head due to a fire, although it's only mentioned once.
- Band of Brothers — Bill Guarnere and Joe Toye each lose a right leg during a shelling near Bastogne. (Also counts as real life).
- During the last season of the Battlestar Galactica (2003), Felix Gaeta loses a leg after Starbuck shot him. It becomes one of the reasons he takes part in the attempted mutiny aboard Galactica.
- The Bite:
- After Galen becomes a zombie, Lily handcuffs him to the refrigerator. He escapes by chewing off his own hand. The severed hand comes to life on its own.
- After some prodding, Lily discovers her father is infected with the zombie virus, but the infection hasn't reached his lymph nodes yet. To prevent that from happening, Rachel walks her mother through removing his arm.
- In the Blackadder II episode "Head", when Blackadder impersonates the imprisoned Lord Farrow (whom he's never seen), he guesses wrong about how much of his limb the one-armed Farrow is missing. When Farrow's wife notices the discrepancy, he ad-libs a story that uses this trope, about how he'd lost the remaining portion of his arm in a fight with another prisoner.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
- Pike takes one of Amilyn's arms.
- In "Bargaining Part 2", Razor and his gang chain the Buffybot's limbs to their motorcycles. The bikes take off, and the 'Bot is neatly quartered. Yuck.
- In one of the more gruesome moments of Call the Midwife, Nurse Corrigan tries to help a homeless alcoholic. While trying to remove his boot to examine his foot, the entire foot comes off in her hands, gangrenous from years of ingesting methylated spirits. He ends up dying from blood poisoning.
- An episode of Chicago Hope dealt with a man whose left arm and right hand were severed in a train mishap, leading the orthopedic specialist (played by Mark Harmon) to do a cross-handed transplant, attaching his left hand to his right arm.
- Another episode involved a man who was severely injured in a car crash. The car was so mangled that the victim's leg was stuck, and the victim was so badly hurt he needed to be treated immediately or risk dying. To free him, Dr. Kronk used a chainsaw to cut the man's leg off. It's later revealed that the injured man is an NFL placekicker.
- In China Beach, Boonie is trapped in rising water and has to have both legs amputated below the knee.
- Type 2 in The City Hunter: Jin-pyo loses a leg saving Yun Sung from a land mine.
- CSI: In "Disarmed & Dangerous", the Victim of the Week is beaten to death by an attacker who is in such a steroid-fulled rage that he literally rips the victim's arm off.
- In Defiance, Datak cuts off his arm to get away from an explosion targeted on a beacon in the arm while still leaving the beacon where it needs to be.
- Dexter gives us the Ice Truck Killer dispersing Tony Tucci around the city, limb segment by limb segment. Tucci survives, but needs a new left leg and right hand.
- Doctor Who:
- "Remembrance of the Daleks": Davros gets his remaining hand blown off. When he turns up in the new series, he's replaced it with a prosthetic that shot lightning.
- "The Doctor Dances" manages to invert the trope: Mrs. Harcourt, one of the people converted into gas-mask zombies, only had one leg. When the conversion is undone, the nanomachines responsible had caused it to grow back.Mrs. Harcourt: Dr. Constantine.
Dr. Constantine: Mrs. Harcourt. How much better you're looking!
Mrs. Harcourt: My leg's grown back! When I came to the hospital, I had one leg.
Dr. Constantine: Well, there's a war on. Is it... possible you miscounted? - "The Christmas Invasion": The Doctor gets his right hand cut off while swordfighting the Sycorax leader. Because he's still in the first 15 hours of his regeneration cycle, he can just grow a new one. The severed hand went on to be an important MacGuffin in Torchwood and series 3 and 4.
- "The Fires of Pompeii": The Doctor breaks off the right arm of the meaningfully-named Lucius Petrus Dextrus during the confrontation at Lucius' house.
- Dollhouse gives us a Type 3 (sort of) with the Japanese security specialist in the Attic, whose worst fear is being seated in a traditional restaurant eating red meat. Without having to cross, bend or fold his legs. "I have to enjoy myself."
- ER:
- Romano loses an arm to a helicopter rotor. A year and a half later, after his prosthesis has failed, he is killed by another helicopter falling on him.
- Ray Barnett has both of his legs amputated after getting run over by a truck. He later has them replaced with prosthetics.
- Farscape
- A very disturbing type three is done with one of Pilot's arms by several members of Moya's crew in an early episode. He recovers.
- In a later episode, another Pilot is missing three arms. It turns out the maddened crew of his ship are eating them, repeatedly, as they regenerate.
- The season 4 character Sikozu has the ability to reattach appendages. At various times she loses fingers, a hand, and on one occasion An Arm and a Leg.
- In "Home on the Remains" a guest character gets one of their arms graphically burned off on screen. The effect was deemed so horrifying the British Board of Film Classification gave the episode an 18 rating (not suitable for anyone below that age).
- Friends: When the gang are discussing their worst Thanksgiving memories Phoebe shares the story about how her arm got blown off while serving as a nurse during the American Civil War. Ross snaps her out of the story by reminding her they only count stories from this life.
- Paul Milner loses one of his legs just below the knee during the Battle of Norway in the first episode of Foyle's War. He rejoins the police force after being outfitted with a prosthetic leg. His relationship with his wife was already strained, and his injury causes her to leave for good. It doesn't stop him from kicking ass.
- Game of Thrones: In "Walk of Punishment", Jaime Lannister has his right hand cut off by Locke out of spite.
- House of the Dragon: The late stages of Viserys' leprosy-like condition cost him his entire left arm up to at least the elbow.
- Gotham: Butch Gilzean has his hand chopped off to create a sob-story to infiltrate the Galavans. He later has it replaced with a super-strong prosthetic.
- Grey's Anatomy has Arizona lose her leg in a plane crash, causing lots of angst about it for a long time.
- The Handmaid's Tale:
- Women reading is punishable by them losing a hand.
- Warren Putnam undergoes the surgical removal of his hand as punishment for his sins.
- In the pilot of Helix, Peter Farragut, a research scientist infected with The Virus, kills and maims a member of his research facility's security team, severing his lower arm. Though this initially seems like brute violence it is entirely deliberate. Peter's subdermal RFID chip has been deactivated, and he's deduced that he needs a Borrowed Biometric Bypass to access labs containing other researchers, the better to carry out The Virus' behavioral imperative to infect others.
- Highlander had type 2 with Xavier St.Cloud, while fighting Duncan in a Season 1 episode. When he returned in Season 2, he was wearing a prosthetic arm.
- Joe Dawson. In a Season 4 flashback, it's shown that lost both of his legs after stepping on a mine while serving in the Marines in the Vietnam War. His platoon sergeant, an Immortal, carried him on his back to an aid station. Later, in the hospital, he is approached about joining the Watchers.
- Joe's portrayer, Jim Byrnes, lost both of his legs in a car accident.
- Joe Dawson. In a Season 4 flashback, it's shown that lost both of his legs after stepping on a mine while serving in the Marines in the Vietnam War. His platoon sergeant, an Immortal, carried him on his back to an aid station. Later, in the hospital, he is approached about joining the Watchers.
- In one episode of House, M.D., the hospital staff is called to a collapsed building to rescue and provide medical assistance to people who were injured in the collapse. House goes into a dangerous part of the collapsed building to rescue a woman who is trapped there. It turns out her leg is trapped under heavy debris, and this prevents her from being rescued. After multiple attempts to free her trapped leg fail, House has to amputate her leg with only minimal anesthesia in order to save her life. He does this successfully under very extreme conditions, but she ends up dying en route to the hospital due to complications from the amputation.
- In Justified, Limehouse chops off Quarles' left arm in the season finale. He ends up bleeding to death on the floor, but not before giving away a secret.
- One episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit centers on the abduction and death of a girl who had her leg amputated (she died of complications from the anesthetic). The guy who found her leg found one some time earlier ("two days before the planes hit the towers")... and its owner is not only still alive, but was paid twenty-five grand to have it taken off. The man responsible is a psychiatrist whose mother lost her leg when he was thirteen; once he went into his line of work, he met a girl who lost her leg to bone cancer and came out of the experience with a better outlook on life. The former led him to develop a bizarre attraction to this sort of amputation, and the latter led him to believe it could be to the women's benefit.
- Kingdom Hospital: During Stegman's attempt to kill the main characters in the last episode, he's stopped when Antubis - actually the Egyptian god Anubis in the form of an anteater - intercepts him and bites off his hand.
- Legend of the Seeker: One of the Confessors had her hand cut off by the D'Harans, though thankfully Zedd can restore it with magic.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- Agent Carter
- Daniel Sousa. He lost his left leg in WW2 and uses a crutch and prosthesis combo, but remains a force to be reckoned with in the field. By the time he reappears in Agents of Shield, he's adjusted to the point where he walks with a cain. Simmons later gifts him with an advanced prosthesis that is visually indistinguishable from the real thing. He subsequently takes a level in badass.
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
- Mike Peterson loses his leg below the knee after being caught in an explosion. He later gets it replaced with a super strong metal prosthetic.
- Mack has to cut off Phil's hand to stop the Diviner's effects. Phil gets several replacements, including one that can pass as human and is quite dextrous, as well as a serious of upgraded ones that have a LOT of bells and whistles.
- Elena loses both arms to the Hydra assassin Ruby. She gets them replaced with increasingly advanced versions until settling on an advanced hybrid of Chronicom and LMD hardware, which lets her actually experience full sensations once again.
- The Defenders (2017):
- Stick cuts off his own right hand when Alexandra and Elektra are holding him captive.
- When Alexandra is testing out Elektra's fighting skills, we can see that at least two of the ninjas that Elektra killed have lost limbs.
- In the climax, Misty Knight loses her right arm above the elbow when diving to stop Bakuto from decapitating Claire. This causes her to gain the iconic robotic right arm she sports in the comics, starting in Luke Cage (2016) Season 2.
- Luke Cage (2016): Prior to losing her right arm for real in Midland Circle, Misty had almost lost it from excessive blood loss and damage from getting shot by Diamondback in Harlem's Paradise, but medical intervention from Luke and Claire managed to save it.
- Jessica Jones (2015): Kilgrave gets rid of his father by ordering one half of the gay couple he's enslaved to "remove Dad from the face of the Earth". This means cutting off Albert's arms at the shoulders with a hacksaw, while the other half is forced to inject himself with drain cleaner. Even worse, the sole survivor is himself physically unharmed despite chopping off Albert's arms with a hacksaw and stuffing one of them down a garbage disposal. Meaning he now has to live with not only his husband's death but the horrors he himself was forced to commit. Even worse, Albert is still clinging on to life when Jessica finds him.
- The Punisher (2017): Curtis Hoyle is Frank Castle's best friend and a former Navy SARC. When they were serving in Afghanistan, Curtis lost his left leg below the knee to a pregnant suicide bomber, and now gets by walking around with a prosthetic. Frank has been torn up about it ever since because he was supposed to be securing the area, but he didn't stop or shoot the bomber because she was a woman and she was pregnant, like Maria was at the time.
- Agent Carter
- Several episodes of M*A*S*H dealt with patients who had lost limbs in battle.
- In the episode "End Run", BJ operates on a patient who tells him not to bother saving his life if he ends up having to amputate his leg, as he's a football star and an amputation would mean the end of his career. Of course, BJ performs the amputation and the patient must come to terms with the loss of his leg.
- In "U.N., the Night and the Music", BJ's patient shows BJ a picture of his daughter, and BJ identifies with him so much (as he has his own young daughter at home) that he can't bear to tell him that his infection may end in an amputation. BJ is forced to amputate the leg in order to save the patient, but beats himself up over not emotionally preparing the patient for possible amputation. Fortunately, the patient takes it in stride (as it were) - he figured there was a reason he was getting so much attention from the doctors, and he's glad to have excuse to stay in with his wife rather than go out dancing (he hates dancing).
- "Patent 4077" centers around the doctors trying to create — or find someone to create — a clamp they need in order to perform procedures that will allow them to save a patient's limb, as the artery clamps they have are too strong for the delicate blood vessels involved. They manage to get one successfully made by a local Korean merchant, and their ability to do these types of procedures is referenced a few times over the remainder of the series.
- Monty Python
- Discussed, but not depicted, in the lifeboat sketch, in which a group of starving sailors start out discussing cannibalism and end up horse trading about which limbs they're willing to sacrifice in order to feed each other, and culminating in a series of intermittent vignettes about how there is hardly any cannibalism in the Royal Navy, really... well, there is some, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be, honest.
- In another sketch, Eric Idle is a soldier in Africa whose leg was bitten off by a tiger. He's completely unfazed by it and asks the doctor when he can expect it to grow back again.
- MythQuest: Cleo has her hand cut off when she grabs a pumpkin vine to prevent it from being cut.
- In Neighbours, Paul Robinson loses a leg after taking a massive header into a ravine.
- Nikita: In a second season episode, Nikita cuts off Michael's hand in order to save his life when he's pinned under a car.
- In Once Upon a Time, Dr. Whale gets his arm ripped off by the man he brought back to life. He brings it to Mr. Gold for healing, prompting this line:Mr. Gold: When they say I charge an arm and a leg, it's just a figure of speech.
- The Outer Limits (1995): In "Gettysburg", Vince Chance and Andy Larouche see a Confederate soldier who has had his right leg amputated. Colonel Angus Devine later wants Andy to amputate Major Hinton's left leg after he is shot by a Union soldier. However, he manages to sanitize the wound and Hinton is able to keep his leg.
- Outlander: Fergus has his hand cut off by British soldiers for taunting them.
- There was a type 3 in an episode of Oz. Ryan O'Reilly asked Enrique Morales to make sure Glen Chupe had an accident bad enough to put him out of action for a while without killing him. Morales cut off one of Chupe's arms.
- In Power Rangers Cosmic Fury, Javi loses his right arm in the first episode activating a relic using the Red Morphin Master's staff.
- Princess Agents: Yuan Song has his arm cut off as punishment after he tries to assassinate Yan Xun.
- Princess Silver: Wu You cuts off General Yu's arm after he tries to hold Rong Le hostage.
- Red Band Society features Leo Roth, a cancer patient who had to have his right leg amputated. His new roommate in the hospital is Jordi Palacios, who is initially believed to have a similar case and requires an amputation himself. It turns out Jordi has a different type of cancer, and amputation wouldn't be necessary at that point.
- Played for laughs in Red Dwarf. As Lister is infected with the Epideme virus, it localizes itself in his right hand. Kryten amputates it, but the virus moves up Lister's arm, forcing him to amputate more and more of the limb. Eventually most of it is gone, and it didn't even eliminate all of the virus. The crew were eventually able to use Kryten's self-repair nanobots to grow a new arm for Lister.
- Roots (1977): The front half of Kunta Kinte's foot was chopped off with an axe to prevent him from running away (again). He had been given the choice of that or being castrated.
- In old Saturday Night Live sketches, this happened to Mr. Bill all the time, since Mr. Bill was made of clay.
- Nog from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine loses a leg in "The Siege of AR-558", leading to severe PTSD even though the new artificial limb he's given allows him to continue relatively normally.
- Taken:
- In "Beyond the Sky", when Russell Keys visits the Army hospital in Fort Bliss, Texas, one of the patients is a World War II veteran who lost both of his legs.
- In "Acid Tests", one of Jesse Keys' fellow patients at the Veterans Memorial Hospital in Chicago lost both of his legs in The Vietnam War.
- Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms: Ye Hua loses an arm in a fight with a beast.
- True Detective: In season 4, Night Country, a character is frozen into a "corpsicle" for several days. They only discover he's still alive when one of the police officers accidentally breaks off his forearm and he starts screaming. He later has to have both legs removed, and his remaining arm isn't looking great, either.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): In "The Passersby", the sergeant lost half of his left foot in The American Civil War not long before he was killed.
- The Twilight Zone (1985): In "The Road Less Traveled", the Alternate Universe Jeff McDowell lost both of his legs when he stepped on a landmine during The Vietnam War.
- The Ultra Series tends to use this trope, especially from earlier entries from the 70s. Some of them can get pretty brutal for a supposedly family-friendly show.
- Ultraman Ace: A poor monster get its leg and lower jaw ripped off, ONSCREEN in the most graphic manner ever put to screen.
- A segment of Untold Stories of the E.R. had the patient come into the hospital with a bloody stump and an oddly serene attitude. Investigators found his severed hand in his freezer and he refused to let surgeons attempt to reattach it. It's revealed that he was diagnosed with body integrity identity disorder and referred to a psychologist.
- The Walking Dead (2010):
- Merle cuts off his own hand to escape from a roof where he's been left handcuffed to a pipe. He returns in the third season with a knife attachment.
- Merle also gets two fingers bitten off by the governor right before being killed by him.
- Rick and Carol meet a couple named Ana and Sam in one episode. After they promised to help find medical supplies, Ana (who has a bum foot) failed to turn up at the rendezvous point. Rick and Carol come across Ana's severed leg and walkers feeding on a corpse a few dozen yards away.
- Hershel gets his leg amputated by Rick after it gets bitten be a walker.
- Bob Stookey gets a leg cut off and it is eaten by the Terminus cannibals.
- Walkers lose limbs a lot. One of the more graphic displays of this occurs when Michonne reveals that her undead pack mules can be used to deter other Walkers. Said "mules" are armless and are missing their teeth.
- Tyreese has an arm amputated after it's bitten, but dies from blood loss/infection anyway.
- Aaron has to get his arm amputated when a log pins his arm in place and crushes it. He eventually has a metal arm that replaces the old arm, complete with a mace attachment.
- The Wilds: Rachel has lost a hand in the future (it's later revealed this was the result of a shark attack).
- The X-Files
- One Myth Arc plotline (episodes "Tunguska" and "Terma") has a village of Russian work camp escapees where they amputate everyone's left forearm to remove alien tracking devices implanted by the Government Conspiracy. Mulder manages to get away unscathed; however, Krycek isn't quite so lucky.
- "Kill Switch": Mulder is tortured by chopping off his arms and legs as well. First go his arms, then his legs. It turns out that he's in a Lotus-Eater Machine.
- Yellowjackets: Coach Scott gets his leg cut off by Misty after it's injured during the crash, to save his life.
