Fatal Family Photo / Live-Action TV

• 24: Played straight several times, but subverted in season 7. Jack & Tony go to a dock to intercept a weapons shipment, where we see a security guard working the night shift and getting off the phone with his wife, who is pregnant with twins. Jack & Tony inform him of the dangerous shipment and convince him to go undercover for them. After the guard leaves the room, Jack feels bad for him and Tony tells Jack that "we both knew he was dead as soon as he walked out that door." But Jack defies tradition and saves the guard's life when he's about to get killed for "knowing too much", even though it jeopardizes the mission.
• The Amazing Race: Generally when a team talks about how much they miss their family back at home, especially early in the race, you can expect them to get eliminated that episode.
• Angel: Given a twist. After Jasmine's spell over LA is broken, Connor talks a depressed cop out of killing himself. He then takes out a picture of his wife and daughter which sends Connor (who has some issues with his parents) into a rage.
  Connor: That's your family. That's your family, and you were just gonna leave them like that? How were they gonna feel if you didn't come back?
  Cop: I don't know.
  Connor: You don't know?
• Arrow has a variation after a cosmic being tells Oliver Queen in the final season that his death is unavoidable. He contemplates a photo of his family knowing he's not going to see them again.
• Babylon 5: Captain Jack insists on showing off a picture of his daughter to a heavily disinterested Doctor Franklin and Marcus Cole. Turns out to be a tragic subversion. Captain Jack was acting under the influence of an alien parasite that was trying to get him to root out the Mars Resistance hideout so they could be wiped out by EarthForce. He committed suicide before this could happen and the picture of his daughter had her contact information on it so the heroes could tell her what happened.
• Battlestar Galactica (2003): In the opening of this re-imagining, on the space station that had been set up to allow for human-Cylon communication there sits a representative of the human race, who has sat there every day in case the Cylons show up wanting to talk. You know he's done for the second you see the framed photograph of his wife and kid.
• Burn Notice: A variant: Victor directs the heroes to a picture of his dead family, serving to humanize him - in the very same episode in which he's fatally shot.
• Cold Case:
  • In the episode "Death Penalty : Final Appeal", as the Victim of the Week is pushed to the floor by her soon-to-be rapist and killer, the camera pans away to a picture of her and her parents stuck to the refrigerator door. What makes this especially heart-wrenching is that the girl's mother had walked out on the family recently, and she and her father had moved to a new town for a fresh start. The picture is the last one taken of them as a happy family. Fridge Horror kicks in full force when you realize that the father will now have to contend with the loss of his wife and daughter within one year.
  • In the episode "Blood On The Tracks", as a woman leaves her husband and friend to die in an explosion (she's rigged a bomb to go off at a certain time), the camera closes in on a picture of them and their college friends, smiling and happy.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Age of Steel": The moment La Résistance member Mrs. Moore tells the Doctor her real name and mentions her family, she's doomed. She isn't killed by the Cybermen in storage they're passing by at the time, but in another encounter several minutes later.
  • Played straight, zig-zagged, and averted in "The Waters of Mars". Three members of the Martian base's team are seen watching video mail from their families. One falls victim to the monster, one voluntarily accepts their fate to avoid disrupting history, and one survives.
  • In "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe", a Lancaster pilot apologizes to a photo of his wife just before crashing into the sea. The Eleventh Doctor owes the widow a favour and decides to help. Things get out of hand and eventually the widow has to enter the Time Vortex to save her children, an alien race, and as it turns out, her husband too.
  • "Cold War": The posthumous version, when the Doctor has to check the vivisected political officer's ID to establish who he was.
  • "Empress of Mars": Played remarkably straight with Vincey showing off a photograph of his girlfriend and talking about his plans to marry her, shortly before Catchlove throws him under the bus.
  • "The Woman Who Fell to Earth": A security guard who has just gotten off a video call with his granddaughter is killed by the Monster of the Week.
  • "Kerblam!": Dan Cooper shows Yaz a necklace his daughter gave him as a gift, and tells her about his daughter, shortly before he is abducted and killed.
• Downton Abbey: William shows his Genre Blindness when he asks Daisy for a picture of her to take with him to the trenches. When he gets back, he's fatally wounded.
• Generation Kill: Mocked. Evan Wright shows off his girl back home picture, and the Marines tease him about it. But it's the picture that suffers the most, as they steal it and use it for "recreation" for the entire tour.
• The Goodies: Parodied and lampshaded in one episode. When one Nazi sentry starts showing his partner a photo of his girlfriend in Dusseldorf, the other starts telling him to put it away and ends up screaming at the top of the lungs to the British commandos he is certain are about to leap and murder them that he is not with this guy.
• Jericho (2006): Averted Trope with Major Beck. His family is mentioned soon after his first appearance but the photo he keeps on the inside of his helmet isn't shown until the final episode. Instead of being killed, he finally completes his Heel–Face Turn. (Also a potential inversion, as it's very likely his family has already been killed.)
• Law & Order: UK: After DS Matt Devlin is shot and killed, as his despondent partner roams about his now-deserted apartment, he comes across a picture of Matt and his sister.
• Legends of Tomorrow: In "Mortal Khanbat", Genghis Khan opens the wallet of a captive police officer to look at a photo of her son. After getting her co-operation by threatening the child's life, he kills her once she has given him all the information he needs.
• Lost: Early in "The Candidate", Jin is talking to Sun about having finally seen their daughter in a photo. Neither survives the end of the episode...
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Daredevil (2015):
    • After Wilson Fisk kills Ben Urich, he steps on a photograph of Ben and his wife that got knocked off a desk during the struggle, reminding us that Ben's Alzheimer's afflicted wife is going to be very lonely.
    • While searching Frank Castle's house, Karen finds a number of photos of Frank with his family. One that gets her attention is one of the whole family posing at the carousel where they were killed and Frank critically wounded in the crossfire of the gang shootout orchestrated by William Rawlins to get rid of Frank. Karen pockets the photo in her purse when she's forced to flee due to a group of Billy Russo's men arriving outside the house, thinking Frank is there. She later gives the photograph to Frank when she, Matt and Foggy visit him at the hospital.
    • In season 3, we see Karen keeps a photograph of her family from her teenage years in Fagan Corners. Her mother had passed away from cancer, and a few years after that, Karen killed her brother Kevin in a car accident.
  • Jessica Jones (2015): Jessica learns in season 2 that her mother, who she thought had been dead for seventeen years, is actually alive and well and now has super strength. Her mom has kept a photograph of Jessica and her brother Phillip on the beach by Playland, where they went regularly in the summer, and where Jessica and Trish had buried Will Simpson a few episodes earlier.
  • Luke Cage (2016): When Rafael Scarfe goes missing (having been shot by Cottonmouth and now bleeding out in a chair at Pop's Barbershop), Misty Knight and her lieutenant search his apartment. At one point, she finds a photograph of Scarfe posing with his late son Earl, who died some years ago when Scarfe accidentally forgot to lock up his gun. Scarfe dies at the end of the episode.
  • Iron Fist (2017): Lawrence Wilkins is a member of the Rand Enterprises board of directors. After ousting Joy and Ward Meachum, Harold decides to strike back by confronting Lawrence in his office. Harold briefly picks up the photo of Lawrence's son on his desk before shooting him in the head and staging his death to look like a suicide.
  • The Punisher (2017):
    • In the opening episode, Frank has a photo of his wife and kids on the dashboard of the van he uses to run down two Dogs of Hell bikers on an Alabama backroad. He also looks at it every night before he goes to bed.
    • Even a year after David faked his own death to protect his family, we see that Sarah still keeps pictures around the house of him with her and their kids up.
    • Karen Page never discusses in this show how her boyfriend died in the climax of The Defenders (2017), even though it's pretty obvious that she's still in great pain over losing Matt. Besides Karen's general sadness, she has a a small shrine to Matt: a photograph of herself celebrating St. Patrick's Day with Matt and Foggy at Josie's◊ on a table in her apartment◊, backlit by a lamp to draw even more attention to it, and positioned so she'll have to look at it whenever she watches TV.
• M*A*S*H: Zig-Zagged, where finding a picture of a dying soldier's family back home makes BJ want to take extrodinary measures to save him, if only for 24 hours, so his kids "won't think of Christmas as 'the day Daddy died.'"
• In My Name Is Earl, when Earl finds out that Joy has been cheating on him with Darnell, he angrily knocks over their wedding picture, and the frame smashes up, thus symbolizing the "death" of their (rather dysfunctional from the start) marriage. It's a much slower death than Earl intended, because his father talks him into staying with Joy and the kids for their sakes. Doesn't stop Joy from continuing her illicit relationship with Darnell and divorcing Earl while he's hospitalized, though.
• At the end of the NCIS episode "Rekindled", an unnamed sailor on a Navy ship accidentally drops his cell phone. Upon picking it up and putting the fallen battery back in, he's pleased to see that it still works, and looks fondly at what appears to be a picture of his wife and two kids. Less than 15 seconds later, he's killed by an explosion. An extended version of the scene is shown at the beginning of the following episode, "Playing With Fire", which shows that he was looking at other family pictures before dropping the phone.
  • In a later episode, "Shiva", there's a phone call variant. An Iranian agent who was recently (and secretly) helping NCIS investigate Eli David's murder is on his way to the airport, and is talking to someone on the phone in a fond manner. He tells the person that he'll be home soon, hangs up, and is killed seconds later by a bomb planted in his car.
• The Night Agent: Erik shows Chelsea a picture of his daughter. He's dead by the end of the episode, killed by Ellen.
• NUMB3RS:
  • "Burn Rate" starts with a Fatal Family Montage: the initial Victim of the Week is seen enjoying a moment with his wife, sone and daughter before heading to work. When he receives a letter bomb, the debris is seen raining on a family photo.
  • "Scan Man" starts with an FBI arrest gone bad and one of the agents gunned down. His last moments were him reaching for his helmet, in which was a picture of his family.
• Person of Interest: In Afghanistan, John Reese stumbled upon a group of dead Rangers and Taliban, all of whom had pictures of loved ones. He decided he'd be good at his job if he didn't have a loved one to hold onto. Yet in the same episode he mentions this, John shows a picture of his former Love Interest to a colleague. This sets up The Reveal that this is a Fever Dream Episode and John is actually dying of blood loss and hypothermia after being shot.
• Revolution: Maggie would've been fine if she had just ditched her cell phone containing a picture of her children. As it is, she dies in episode 4.
• Space: Above and Beyond: Averted Trope. Lieutenant West carries a picture of his girlfriend on his dogtag chain and lives through the entire series. His quest to find her and rescue her after her colony is attacked by the Chigs in the series pilot is his primary character arc on the show.
• Stargate SG-1: Subverted in "Heroes, Part 1". One of the members of SG-13 passes round an ultrasound picture of his unborn child. He then goes on to be the first one to get shot, but he's not the one that dies...
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
  • A rare Justified example in "Field of Fire." The first victim shows a photo of him and his Academy friends and is dead by morning. It turns out that he was murdered by a serial killer who, deranged by the war, was targeting people who displayed photos of themselves in happier times.
  • Averted Trope in "Change of Heart". The episode shows Jadzia and Worf's wedding picture before they go on a mission and Jadzia gets shot. The episode also averts If We Get Through This… and I Will Only Slow You Down.
• Strike: Played with. Anstis shows Strike a photo of his wife and newborn son, moments before their troop transport truck hits an IED in Afghanistan. However, Anstis survives the explosion, thanks to Strike's alertness; it's the two guys in the front seat that get killed.
• Supernatural:
  • In season five, it's only right after a meaningful "family photo" is taken that Jo and Ellen both die.
  • Invoked Trope in that Hunters take group photos just before going out on a big hunt.
  • In "As Time Goes By", Henry Winchester is shown looking at a black-and-white photo of himself and John. Dean finds the photo in his wallet after he dies.
• That Mitchell and Webb Look: Invoked/lampshaded in one sketch, when they decide they need to kill someone off to boost their ratings. Who should turn up but a minor player mooning over his lovely girlfriend's Facebook page..?
• The Tunnel: Subverted with Julie, a French police officer. In Season 2 she happily tells Karl she's had a son, showing him the photos, and then later gets shot twice by a bad guy. Julie survives, but it looks like she hasn't at first.
• The West Wing: In the second episode, an Army doctor giving President Bartlet a checkup tells him all about his wife and their newborn baby, shows him a picture, and says he's leaving them for a while to work in a teaching hospital in Jordan. We had to get to like him in a hurry, because the episode ends with the news that his plane was shot down over Syria, and the entire next episode ("A Proportional Response") is spent convincing Bartlet not to go ballistic and bomb the shit out them in retaliation. (This is all possibly lampshaded when Leo is talking about how he knows Bartlet liked the guy, and Bartlet responds that he did, but he barely knew him, it's not like it was his son.)
  • In the 4th season, when Bartlet is told that his youngest daughter has been kidnapped (which leads him to temporarily step down as president), he has a photo of her as a child in his hands, which he promptly drops. Partially justified in that she had just graduated from college, and Bartlet was reminiscing with some of the parents of Zoey's classmates. This is also an aversion because Zoey does ultimately survive.