Living Is More than Surviving as expressed in Live-Action TV series.
- A recurring theme on The 100 is how far are you willing to go to keep yourself and your society alive, and at what point is survival no longer worth the constant moral compromises needed to attain it?Lexa: You think our ways are harsh, but it's how we survive.
Clarke: Maybe life should be about more than just survival. Don't we deserve better than that? - Barney Miller: In the episode "The Slave" the squad learns that a Burmese diplomat has a slave. They try to convince the slave that he shouldn't be one:Wojo: What do you get outta bein' bossed around all the time?
William: I eat.
Wojo: So?
William: I know many who don't.
Harris: Man, there is more to life than just having something to eat. - Battlestar Galactica (2003): At the end of the opening miniseries Bill Adama tells the fleet he knows the way to Earth and will lead them to safety there. Once they're alone Laura Roslin calls him out on lying to the people. Adama admits that it was a Motivational Lie as the survivors need something to keep them going as they flee the Cylons.Adama: Because it's not enough to just live. You have to have something to live for. Let it be Earth.
- In Game of Thrones, a furious Daenerys confronts Mirri Maz Duur with this trope when her healing methods keep Khal Drogo alive, but in a permanent vegetative state. Mirri throws it right back:Daenerys: I spoke for you. I saved you!
Mirri Maz Duur: Saved me? Three of those riders had already raped me before you saved me, girl. I saw my god's house burn, there where I had healed men and women beyond counting. In the streets I saw piles of heads... the head of the baker who makes my bread, the head of a young boy that I had cured of fever just three moons past. So... tell me again exactly what it was that you saved?
Daenerys: Your life.
Mirri Maz Duur: Why don't you take a look at your Khal? Then you will see what life is worth, when all the rest is gone. - An episode of the Highlander series discussed this. An immortal starts claiming to be Methos, the oldest living immortal, and preaching that all immortals should give up violence and The Game. When the real Methos goes to talk to the pretender, (without revealing who he is) he notes that the pretender is making a huge target out of himself, as a lot of immortals will want to claim the power of a 5,000 year old man. This exchange follows:Fake Methos: Can anyone live for 5,000 years and say they did nothing? Risked nothing? Merely stayed alive with nothing else to show for it? It'd be pointless.
Real Methos: Some people would say that experience was enough. That it was worth saving.
Fake Methos: I'm not one of them. - The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Nori snaps at her mother over the Harfoots’ cowering, fearful, secretive culture, though she’s quickly reminded that stealth is the only reason they’ve survived in Middle-earth the last thousand years.
- Early in season 1 of Lost Jack is too focused on keeping the survivors alive and safe, leading to tension slowly building up to the point of people constantly snapping at each other in the week immediately following the plane crash. Hurley, being The Heart, realises this and builds a makeshift golf course to allow people to blow the steam off. Jack is initially skeptical, but eventually admits he was wrong.Jack: We're surviving here Hurley, and that's what my main concern is, keeping us alive.
Hurley: Look, all I'm saying is, if we're stuck here, then just surviving's not going to cut it. We need some kind of relief, you know. We need some way that we can, you know, have fun. That's right, fun. Or else we're just going to go crazy waiting for the next bad thing to happen. - Monty Python's Lion Tamer sketch features a 45-year old chartered accountant who wants to do "something exciting, something that will let me live!". However, he appears to have confused lions and anteaters, and so backs down when he learns exactly what lion taming entails.
- In The Odd Couple (1970) episode "Security Arms", Felix moves into a different apartment after his and Oscar's place is robbed. The apartment complex has been designed for extreme safety, including things like inside locks, two-way mirrors and tons of rules. Eventually even Felix decides the problems with the new apartment outweigh any safety benefits. Oscar sums it up with an epic rejoinder when Mr. Duke tries to reassure him that all the creepy and inconvenient security measures are for their own good:Oscar: When I look back on the best times of my life, none of it was for my own good!
- Sense8: In season two Riley Blue makes a Sensate connection with a man known only as "The Old Man Of Hoy". Mr. Hoy has been on the run from BPO for 30 years, always staying on drugs to block his Sensate abilities and only coming off them when inside a soundproof box that masks his location from others. He admits to Riley that he let the two of them connect because after 30 years of surviving he wanted to live a little.Hoy: Maybe I realised, I'm slowly dying of survival.
- The importance of purpose is a common theme in Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Original Series: There's a civilization-wide example of this in the episode "A Taste of Armageddon". Kirk destroys a computer that was keeping a planet's people in a stagnant, mollycoddled existence, and argues that this isn't a Prime Directive violation because the people didn't really have their own culture at all, after having become indifferent to their "war".
- Star Trek: The Next Generation:
- In "The Hunted", the Enterprise travels to the planet Angosia, which is applying to join the Federation, but discovers that Angosia has an army of Super Soldiers. Due to the soldiers' inability to turn off their military conditioning to react violently to any perceived threat, their government sent them away to live on a penal asteroid. While the Angosian Prime Minister, Nayrock, tries to point out that the soldiers are not mistreated there, Picard and the lead soldier, Danar, both point out that "Even the most comfortable prison is still a prison." and Danar leads an uprising of the soldiers, telling their leaders that "Survival is not enough.". Picard, disgusted by the Angosian government's indifference, respects the soldiers' demands for a better life and leaves the Angosian government having to deal with their mistreated veterans.
- In "Birthright: Part II", Worf has discovered a Romulan prison camp where Klingons and Romulans live together peacefully, but the Klingons' children are not aware about their heritage. Worf starts educating them, making the Romulan leader, Tokath, thinking Worf is threatening their peace.Worf: I saw what happened to him when he caught the scent of his prey on the wind. For the first time in his life, he felt powerful, and that is what he has been denied living here. And that is what you have tried to take away from him. Now you may be content to sit here in the jungle and wither to old age, but Toq and the others have tasted what it is to feel truly alive, and they will not give that up now.
- Star Trek: Voyager: The trope is named almost verbatim in the episode "Survival Instinct":Seven: Survival is insufficient.
- Star Trek: Picard:
- Jean-Luc Picard invokes this in "Remembrance" when he realizes that his retirement has been a meaningless existence.Picard: I haven't been living. I've been waiting to die.
- Zani and Picard discuss Elnor's future (or more precisely, his lack of one) in "Absolute Candor". Living among the Qowat Milat nuns has isolated him from mainstream Romulan society, and although he did receive the full training of their order, men are forbidden from joining. The sisterhood is already stretched thin trying to keep the peace on Vashti, so Zani encourages Picard to ask Elnor to be his qalankhkai.Picard: And you would send [Elnor] away? He might find himself in serious danger. He might die.
Zani: He will. Before that comes to pass, it would gladden my heart to see him live. - The galaxy-wide Fantastic Racism against the xBs is so harsh that Elnor wonders aloud to Seven of Nine
in "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2" if their bleak existence is worth living.Elnor: Would the xBs be better off dead? Everyone hates them, they have no home. They don't belong anywhere.
Seven: Am I better off dead? I'm an xB, I have no home, I don't belong anywhere. Why don't I just put a phaser to my head and get it over with?
Elnor: Because... I'd miss you.
- Jean-Luc Picard invokes this in "Remembrance" when he realizes that his retirement has been a meaningless existence.
- Station Eleven: The Traveling Symphony's motto is "Survival is Insufficient". They travel around Lake Michigan performing Shakespeare for post-apocalyptic towns because they believe in the transformative power of art following disaster.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): Deconstructed in the episode "The Old Man in the Cave". Once a group of survivors who had made it pretty far After the End because of the titular old man's help in obtaining supplies free of radiation discover that the "old man" is a computer that their leader has been using to do radiation tests on the stuff they scavenge, they uprise and destroy the computer even as their leader begs them not to, saying that they are acting out on this trope. And then they decide to gorge on all of the food they can for the sake of celebrating life... and fatally irradiate themselves because they have no idea of what's safe and what's not, leaving the leader as the sole survivor.
- In season five of The Walking Dead (2010), Abraham Ford is in a discussion with the core Atlanta group, and offers a toast to survivors, but then challenges the group to do more than survive, and join Ford's group on their way to Washington, DC with Eugene, a person who says he can help end the Zombie Apocalypse. Eugene lied.
