And I Must Scream / The DCU

And I Must Scream in The DCU.

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Comic Books

Comic Books

• One of the many and varied punishments of the DCU's Hell is being turned into building materials. Every chance you just might be the fifth brick from the left staring down the line of demon urinals for the next billion and a half years.
• Batman:
  • In the Elseworlds storyline Batman Vampire, Batman fights Dracula and is turned into a vampire to be able to fight him on equal terms. However, eventually Gordon and Alfred are forced to stake him, as he begins to become more and more monstrous. Because they failed to chop his head off, the staking only paralyzes him... Batman remains conscious and aware even while his body decomposes. Needless to say, he's not happy when they unstake him.
  • In another story arc, The Joker does this to Dr. Simon Hurt, who is immortal and has already pissed the Joker off on more than one occasion. Not only does Hurt accidentally slip on a banana peel and break his neck, Joker then injects him with Joker Venom and buries him alive. It gets even more disturbing when you remember precisely what Joker Venom does to its victims besides outright killing them. And since Hurt cannot die and the toxin presumably never wears off, he's stuck Buried Alive while slowly going insane from the effects of Joker Venom, forced to laugh at himself for all eternity despite the pain he's in.
  • During the Mud Pack storyline, Basil Karlo -the original Clayface- uses a formula made from the other villains who used the name Clayface, acquiring all their powers and becoming the Ultimate Clayface. At the end of the story, however, he loses control of his powers, and sinks into the earth, where he remains entombed for months. He eventually escapes, after odd energy from the gemstones in his tomb make him much stronger, reappearing during the Batman: No Man's Land storyline. Batman probably describes what happened to him best:
    Batman: Your ordeal has obviously driven you insane, Karlo. Not that you were exactly lucid to begin with!
  • Batman Eternal: The villain got this. Lincoln March is captured by Court of Owls and is being put into a coffin with cooling tech similar to one that sustained Talon in Batman's cave... this tech completely paralizes him, but he still can see, and hear, and think... and they joke that they may return to him, in a decade or so. Bonus points to horror: as a child, Lincoln was paralized and tormented to see world, while unable to move... and he is going back to this state, only in eternal darkness.
  • Batman: Last Knight on Earth: All Speed Force users have all somehow been merged into a Speed Force storm, rampaging across the wasteland and randomly aging anything caught in it. By all accounts, all of them are not only alive, but fully conscious as they uncontrollably become a weather phenomenon.
• At the end of "Final Ark", Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew! found themselves in a horrific and seemingly inescapable predicament being transformed into regular animals without their powers and unable to communicate with the humans of New Earth. Fortunately, Monitor Nix Uotan makes a point of restoring them fully in Final Crisis.
• Demonic possessors in Clean Room can shift the flesh of their host like clay. One named the Surgeon prides himself on his creativity when he showcases his Pony Man, a man with a horse's head. The Pony Man's Single Tear affirms to the audience that there is still a thinking, feeling person inside the abomination.
• Crisis on Infinite Earths:
  • This is Pariah's sad destiny, being teleported to various worlds as they are erased by the Anti-Monitor. He claims this is his penance for peering back into the beginning of time and causing his world to be destroyed and causing other worlds to be destroyed. Turns out he's only responsible for the former - Anti-Monitor's been doing the others.
  • The Anti-Monitor does this to Psycho Pirate, causing his face to temporarily disappear.
• The Flash
  • Wally unintentionally did this to Zoom, believing that Zoom was just in suspended animation, not fully conscious and constantly reliving the worst moment of his life:
    He won't have a gun. Trust me, Ashley...He won't have a gun. Trust me, Ashley...He won't have a gun. Trust me, Ashley...He won't have...
  • Wally West exacted revenge on teenage supervillain Inertia (the killer and clone of the previous Flash, Wally's cousin Impulse) by essentially turning him into a living statue, putting him on display in the Flash Museum facing a statue of the Flash he killed. Inertia is still perfectly conscious and aware and is unable to even close his eyes. Eventually, he recovered, although it's made him rather Ax-Crazy.
• In Jack Kirby's Fourth World, aka the entire mythos surrounding Darkseid and the New Gods, anyone who attempts to penetrate the great wall that separates the universe from the Source aka God is imprisoned on that wall as a hundred foot (or, depending on how you look at it, one hundred thousand mile) tall 'Promethean Giant'.
  • Metron, the New Gods' boffin, however, states that due to their state, time passes at an incredibly slow rate for the giants, and millions of years pass as minutes.
• Green Lantern:
  • In Green Lantern Vol. 4 #50, it is revealed that Sinestro could still think while imprisoned as pure energy in the central battery.
    Sinestro: Do you know what it was like inside the battery, Jordan? Reduced to less than a thought in that limbo? It's like having a maddening itch you can never scratch... Because there's nothing there. There's no you. That's what it was like, Jordan. And it wasn't... very... PLEASANT!
  • Since villain Major Force is essentially immortal, Kyle puts him into a little green tennis ball and rackets him into the vastness of space.
    Kyle Rayner: Take it from me man, space is big. Really. Really. BIG. Service.
  • A Sinestro Corps member called Maash has three heads. Two are psychopaths while the third is innocent and resents the atrocities his brothers do. Unfortunately, the innocent head has no control over their body.
  • Larfleeze, aka Agent Orange, gains his constructs by killing people. It's implied, and later confirmed that they're not just constructs in the victim's likeness, but their souls forced to do Larfleeze's bidding.
  • In the Blackest Night storyline, this is the fate of all the resurrected heroes who have been claimed by Nekron. They're trapped in their own bodies as the Black Ring uses them as a puppet, forcing them to destroy their friends. And all the while, their living form is being slowly eaten away by the death energy, turning them into a Black Lantern for real.
  • Nekron's ultimate fate also counts. With his link to the living world sundered and cut off from the Anti Monitor's power, he was once again banished to his limbo dimension as a powerless spirit shrieking in the void.
  • Krona tends to end up this way after defeats. Given his godlike powers and utter indestructibility, there's not much else you can do with him.
• Hellblazer: Rise and Fall: During the decades long time Despondeo possesses Billy's body, his soul is still in there trapped with him.
• The stand-alone story "The Death Clock" in House of Mystery #214 featured a young man who comes into possession of a watch that shows what time you will die down to the second, after its original owner is killed right on time. When the man finds that his own date of death is decades into the future (he'd be in his early 90's), he embarks on a career as a daredevil, confident in the knowledge that he can't die before his time. However, his careless stunts causes several fatalities, and a revenge-driven widower attacks him with a grenade, which ends up blowing off his limbs and renders him blind and mute, leaving him helpless, blind and immovable in a hospital bed with nothing to do but count the seconds for the rest of his life. To drive the irony in further, one of his doctors picks up the watch and his time turns out to be the next day at midnight, but the doctor has no idea of the clock's power.
• Justice League of America:
  • After a Time Travel mission gone awry, Plastic Man is left shattered into pieces and scattered across the ocean floor 3,000 years in the past. While the rest of the JLA get a direct route back to the present via magic, Plas has to take The Slow Path. When his teammates finally retrieve him and put him back together, he reveals that not only was he conscious the whole time, but that the only sensation he felt was a constant itching.
  • And in The Dark Knight Strikes Again he was forced into a pressurizing machine that held him in place and prevented any shapeshifting — or escape. This eventually drove him completely insane.
  • The Queen of Fables was a villain who had formerly been trapped in a book of fairy tales, and could reshape reality to her whims using the same tales and other imaginative fantasy, turning Manhattan into an enchanted forest and cursing Wonder Woman with a thousand-year slumber. Wonder Woman recovered, however, and did away with the Queen by trapping her in a very different book, the U.S. Tax Code (The idea was that she'd never find anything to use as a weapon in there, but no doubt she was not very happy.)
• The 11th issue of Police Comics featured Plastic Man battling Cyrus Smythe, a seventeenth-century British chemist whose brain was still alive and conscious after his death. By the story's present time in the 1940s, Smythe's brain ends up being placed in the head of an injured soldier named Tad Wilkins, and he proceeds to finish the growth serum he worked on when he was alive, enabling him to become a towering giant. Plastic Man manages to kill him, but the brain of Cyrus Smythe still lives and promises to return.
• The Sandman (1989): Delirium condemns one man to forever feel the sensation of insects crawling all over his skin. He's seen later strapped to a bed in an asylum, not daring to scream because he does not want the spiders he can feel crawling on his lips to fall in. What makes all of this worse is this isn't some sociopath baddy, but just a random traffic cop who was unfortunate enough to be the one to pull Delirium over.
• In Seven Soldiers of Victory (2005), the third Mister Miracle is trapped in the Omega Sanction, a Pocket Dimension belonging to Darkseid that traps the victim in a life-spanning "Groundhog Day" Loop with each life more horrific than the last. He eventually manages to perform the greatest escape of all time, but not before being beaten, burned, mutilated, and castrated in just his first life within it.
• Superman:
  • Superboy (1994): After Amanda Spence killed his first love Tana Moon, Superboy struggled with his desire to kill her on several occasions. The last time they fought, Spence had been technologically and biologically augmented to essentially be completely indestructible, and now no longer even needed to breathe. After Spence killed a clone created with some of Tana's DNA, and told Kon that she planned to have an endless supply to kill just for kicks, Kon flipped out, and launched her out of the ship they were fighting on and into space at about mach eleventy billion. Given how ridiculously vast outer space is, and the sheer unlikelihood of Spence ever being found by anyone or coming into contact with anything, and the fact that she essentially can't die and that her biology might make it so she can't freeze, it means that she's probably still floating around in the cold, vast emptiness of space alone and might do so for all of eternity.
  • In the Supergirl (2005), Supergirl spent thirty years in suspended animation, curled-up in a tiny pod and trapped in Kryptonite which hurt her and poisoned her mind until she finally landed on Earth.
  • Supergirl (2011): Post-Flashpoint Kara was captured by Simon Tycho and imprisoned in a stasis field near a chunk of kryptonite in Last Daughter of Krypton. She was feeling unbelievable pain, but she could not move away; neither to talk, scream or even cry.
  • In Supergirl (1982), #20, Parasite absorbs Supergirl's powers and throws her in a flying metal coffin which floats about a mile straight up from solid ground. As he uses heat vision to seal her in, he warns that she has a little less than four minutes till her air runs out.
  • In Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade, super-villain Belinda Zee is turned into a crystal statue. She cannot talk or move but she is fully sentient and -worst of all- she can feel pain.
  • The original version of the Phantom Zone fell into this trope. Phantom Zone prisoners couldn't even touch each other; they were condemned just to watch the material world until their sentences expired.
  • In Kryptonite Nevermore, Superman is doused with magma and falls into the ocean. The water cools the magma, encasing Superman in a shroud of stone. He thinks he will be stuck there forever unless he is able to break out.
  • In The Kingdom, Superman, in one of his many deaths at the hands of Gog, was subject to being slowly transformed into Kryptonite after being chained to a planet with a special bomb attached to it that would recreate the destruction of Krypton.
  • In Superman (1939) #282, Superman tells the tale of a Kryptonian named Nam-Ek (no relation to planet Namek since this story was written ten years before the birth of the Dragon Ball franchise) who managed to make himself immortal and indestructible. When Krypton exploded, he survived, and remained floating in lifeless space, alone forever.
    Superman: Slowly, Nam-Ek realized that since he was immortal... he would remain there, suspended in space — alone — forever! And that's when he began to cry... And they say that somewhere in space... he is crying still...
  • In Strangers at the Heart's Core, Lesla-Lar's ghost takes over a Superboy robot to fight Supergirl. Nonetheless, the air pollution has damaged its delicate electronic circuits so badly the robot completely stops moving right away. Lesla spends several months trapped in an useless, immobile metal trap, unable to move or speak, and knowing nobody will come to rescue her because she is assumed to have died many years ago.
  • In The Immortal Superman, the titular hero travels to the year 801,970, and finds five astronauts floating in the space, frozen in life-support spheres. When Superman revives and takes the astronauts to safety, they reveal they have spent five thousand years encased in their preservo-spheres since their spaceship broke down.
  • In Superman vs. Shazam!, Karmang becomes trapped in a featureless pocket dimension where he will be haunted forever by one billion of angry ghosts.
  • "The Super Dog from Krypton": As a puppy dog, Krypto was taken away from his owner, placed in an experimental rocket and blasted off into space. His rocket was supposed to return to Krypton, but it was knocked off course by a meteor, and Krypto spent about fifteen years trapped in a rocket, drifting aimlessly in space, until his vessel crashed on Earth (it is generally assumed that Krypto was placed in suspended animation during the trip).
  • In The Untold Story of Argo City, two Kryptonians called Zan-Tor and were trapped by a gas device while exploring a network of caverns beneath the city of Kandor. They remained paralyzed in suspended animation and trapped in a maze of uncharted caverns for three years.
  • In Escape from the Phantom Zone, villain Xa-Du fuels his armor by boiling other Phantom Zone inmates' bodies and sticking his souls to his armor.
    Mook: Thing is, ya can't die here. But ya can sure change shape. So when we boil ya down an' funnel ya inta Lord Xa-Du's ecto-armor, ya spend yer life as melted jelly. Imagine it. I'd go crazier.
  • "The Super-Steed of Steel": After being banished from Earth by Maldor's evil spell, Biron spent several millennia imprisoned in a lonely, faraway asteroid in the middle of space.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Sensation Comics: Back in the Golden Age a magical wooden bangle is revealed to contain the siren Parthenope, who had been turned into a tree by Aphrodite in ancient times and stuck unable to do anything but aware of her surroundings for thousands of years.
  • Wonder Woman (1942): The Amazons put prisoners on Reformation Island in Aphrodite Girdles, which are essentially a downplayed version of Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul which ensure that they do not attack the guards or try to revolt. These are very much meant to be temporary measures, but Atomica proves such a remorseless, murderous and horrific individual who removes hers and tries to kill the Amazons that Aphrodite herself welds her into one which will force her to act benevolent and never harm another soul without removing her ability to think.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): While a few of the souls beyond Doom's Doorway are free to run around hassling newcomers to their hearts' content so long as they don't try to actually escape beyond the door, most of them are saddled with this as punishment. Special mentions to the following:
    • Polyphemus the Cyclops, starved for eternity in a tiny cave, unable to even kill himself. Oh, and he's still blind from that little gift Odysseus gave him.
    • Hercules, frozen as a massive statue but still able to feel every scratch and peck of the harpies that circle him daily. Oh, and he also has to support all of Themyscira on his shoulders.
  • Wonder Woman (2011): Everything in Hades is built with conscious souls, everything including bricks and trees and the souls there are under Hades' complete control. Supposedly the souls don't mind, but given this is claimed by a member of the Greek pantheon and the only soul there that is able to say anything about their situation finds it torturous it is far more likely very few of them are content with being used as building material and slaves.
• In the last issue of Young Justice, Slobo was transported to the 853rd century by Darkseid's Omega Beams, and turned to stone in the process, so he showed up in the "Young Justice Hall of Statues". The Future versions of Robin, Superboy and Impulse noticed the statue was new, and Robin said they would check it out after their mission. Slobo showed awareness when he thought "Oh frag," to himself. Luckily, Future Robin keep his promise and checked out the statue, used future tech to analyze it, saw that it was actually Slobo, and reversed his condition.
• Zatanna:
  • Zatanna (2010):
    • Fuseli tries to trap Zatanna in his nightmare dimension, preventing her real body from ever waking up, even if she's still conscious in it.
    • Hampel was unable to move but still able to think when he got turned into a puppet by Zatanna's father. Zatanna suffers the same fate for months when he reverses the spell and turns her into a puppet.

Live-Action TV

Live-Action TV

• Krypton reveals that this is the fate of anyone who happens to be in the cities which Brainiac bottles. They're left immobilized and un-aging, but totally aware, all so that Brainiac can study their minds without interference.
• Smallville:
  • "Forever" features this trope with the Monster of the Week, whose touch can turn people to wax. They clearly remain conscious during this, though, as the camera shows their eyes still moving. Shattering the wax statue, however, is implied to be fatal.
  • "Cure": Implied to be the fate of the immortal doctor Knox (An Expy of Vandal Savage).
    Clark: What'd you do with Knox?
    Martian Manhunter: Your father and I had a "don't ask, don't tell" policy when it came to crime and punishment. I suggest we abide by the same rules.
    Clark: You didn't kill him, did you?
    Martian Manhunter: Knox is immortal, Kal-El. You can't kill him.
  • Lana Lang suffered a temporary case of this when Brainiac placed her in an "anesthesia awareness" state during the last few episodes of Season 7. According to what Brainiac told Clark, Lana was fully aware of her surroundings and in a constant state of excruciating pain, but she was also fully paralyzed so that she could do nothing to try to ease her pain or communicate with anybody else in any way. She was left in this condition for over a month until Clark finally defeated Brainiac and freed her. Brainiac could have been claiming this just to emotionally torture Clark as Lana did not seem to be suffering any psychological aftereffects from the experience when she returned as a Special Guest the following season.

Western Animation

Western Animation

• In most adaptations, the Joker's signature venom kills people. However, to keep the body-count down, animated adaptions like Batman: The Animated Series and The Batman, Joker venom "merely" paralyzes people with a huge grin, or leaves them unable to stop laughing. More than one fan has observed that this is far, far more disturbing. As Alfred put it in the first episode of the latter series: "Aside from the ghastly grimace, [he's] fit as a fiddle. The poor soul simply seems to be a prisoner in his own body." Fortunately, Batman is able to find a cure by the end — this time.
• DC Animated Universe:
  • Batman Beyond:
    • In "The Winning Edge", it's revealed that Bane's body has withered away after years of Venom use, and he now lives in a nursing home under 24-hour life support, ironically staying alive only through the continuous infusion of more Venom.
    • Inque can shapeshift by turning into liquid and reforming. After being frozen by Terry and Bruce at the end of "Black Out", she is placed in Gotham Cryogenics. In "Disappearing Inque", Aaron Herbst, a guard at her prison who had a crush on her, is sweet-talked into helping her, but wants powers like hers in exchange. She gives him an incomplete version of the formula, leaving him an immobile half-liquid blob. As it turns out, she was fully conscious the whole time, and did not appreciate the several months Herbst spent talking to her about his sad, empty life and petty troubles. His guard is seen talking to him just as he once did with Inque, hinting that history may repeat itself, but that's unrealistic: he can't move, and doesn't know enough about the formula to instruct her on how to fully Inque-ify him were she to agree.
    • In "Earth Mover", Tony Maychek fused with the Earth itself, for years. His episode centered on his anger at his unjust fate and wanting to see his daughter again. Thankfully, it gets better for him, since he found a way to control the Earth itself, then found release when he was finally killed in a cave-in.
    • In "Sneak Peek", TV personality Ian Peek uses a device to become intangible but later finds that the effect spreads to his body without the device being engaged. In the end, his Power Incontinence winds up causing him to phase through Batman's hands, through the floor, and into the Earth. The best case scenario is that the lack of Required Secondary Powers will mean incineration by the mantle, or death by suffocation, starvation, dehydration, or at least old age. If not, he's permanently phased into the core of the earth. Forever.
  • Batman: The Animated Series:
    • In "Eternal Youth", Poison Ivy does this to a bunch of rich industrialists (alongside Alfred and his girlfriend) who she blames for the destruction of the earth's various plant species, and natural habitats. She lures them to a resort and spa, floods their bodies with a mutagen by tricking them into eating food and water loaded with it, and eventually they turn into human trees. Fortunately, Batman is able to save everybody.
    • In "Showdown", this is the ultimate fate of Big Bad Arkady Duvall; most of the episode takes place in the Old West, following bounty hunter Jonah Hex and his pursuit of Duvall, who is ultimately sentenced to 50 years of hard labor for his crimes. In present day, Batman discovers that the man who'd been kidnapped by Ra's al Ghul is in fact Duvall, in reality Ra's son, and now reduced to an ancient, senile husk. Having bathed in the Lazarus Pit as a young man, Duvall gained an extended life span, but not youth to go with it, and his prison sentence shattered his mind, as any normal man would simply have died of age or exhaustion long before finishing it. As a result, Duvall spent the better part of a century mentally broken and constantly getting older and sicker without dying, and it took Ra's until modern day to find out what happened to him and find him again.
    • Then there's Grant Walker in "Deep Freeze", a Walt Disney-esque billionaire who, in addition to building a "perfect" society on an island of his creation, convinces Mr. Freeze to give him the same mutations as Freeze himself, allowing him to live forever. However, after Batman convinces Freeze to stop Walker from freezing the rest of the world, Walker ends up trapped in a block of ice, lost at sea, completely aware of everything around him, yet unable to free himself or even move for the rest of his immortal life. As is to be expected, the last we ever see or hear of him is his anguished scream of horror, a scream that no one else can hear. A The Batman Adventures comic follows up on his story by showing that he manages to get out ('cause icebergs do melt, ya know?) after several years of imprisonment drove him stark raving mad and tries returning to Gotham to get revenge upon Freeze after finding out that Freeze's condition has destroyed most of his body and the same thing will happen to him eventually. He's captured and imprisoned after Freeze almost kills him. However, these comics are generally considered to be non-canon to the DCAU, meaning he's probably still in there.
  • Justice League is usually nicer to its villains than Batman Beyond, but makes an exception for Mordred: Morgaine Le Fay's spell gave him eternal youth and life, but he's stuck as a child. In "Kid Stuff", when he is tricked into making himself an adult (thus causing him to disappear, as he'd cast a spell that teleported all adults to another dimension) it turns out that by breaking the youth spell, "all he has is eternal life". He's 1500 or so years old and counting, showing every bit of it, and is now essentially immobile in a chair at his (still-youthful) mother's home... and it's only going to get worse. (At least he gets better in the tie-in comics.)
  • Superman: The Animated Series:
    • At the end of the episode "Action Figures", the android Metallo is left encased in lava underneath a volcano. His Inner Monologue reveals that he is unable to see or hear anything (in addition to the loss of taste, touch, and smell from being a robot in the first place). To keep himself sane, he gives us this chilling thought:
      "I am Metallo, I am Metallo, I am Metallo..."
    • ...but he gets lucky and is rescued by a criminal organization. He angrily describes his experience to Superman in the next episode where he appears, "Heavy Metal", the experience obviously having driven him insane and sending him on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
      Metallo: Do you remember how you left me Superman? Buried in rock? I couldn't move! I couldn't see! I couldn't hear! But I could think. And all I thought about how I was going to make you pay!
• In an episode of the Legion of Super Heroes (2006), the wizard Mordru is wrapped in a metal cocoon and sunken to the middle of the planet. Pretty harsh when you consider his eyes were still moving as he was buried, and the planet probably has a molten core... so either he is buried alive or melted. Pretty harsh for a team that works with the police and United Planets.
• In Young Justice (2010), Jaime Reyes (Blue Beetle) experiences a taste of this. Not only was he told that in the future, he would betray the human race for the Reach, he eventually succumbs into this prophecy despite his desperate attempts to avoid his fate. Jaime falls under control of the Reach and as a result, he was trapped in his own mind for months, unable to control is body and could only sit back and watch in horror as the Reach pretended to be him, deceived his family, and betrayed his team.

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