"I'm fine, really—Ow, my back!"
Bob is injured, or perhaps infected with The Plague. He and his companions are far from civilization. What are they to do? Simple, cold pragmatism dictates that there is no hope for Bob, and that his companions ought to go on without him. He may even insist they go on without him. But no! They must do the decent thing, the humane thing, and take Bob with them in the hope that they can get medical treatment for him.
But alas, Bob's days are numbered, and after all that effort, he winds up coming to a horrible end anyway. Because he's the Doomed Hurt Guy.
The Doomed Hurt Guy is a trope that mainly shows up in war, horror and adventure fiction. It more or less stipulates that a character (usually a minor one) is injured badly and the heroes can't do much for him. This presents them with a Sadistic Choice, wherein they must either choose to abandon him or bring him with them. Despite them trying to save the guy, the poor bastard eventually dies anyway. The reasons for this vary from example to example. Sometimes it's just for pure Anyone Can Die shock value—the audience may not be willing to believe that injured Bob (or whoever) will bite it. Other times, it's to elicit a strong emotional reaction—the death of an injured or sick character who the story has invested a lot of time in can really pull at those heart strings. Also, it can be used to show the futility of the characters' situation, the hopelessness they face, that after all that, the person they've tried so desperately to save ends up perishing anyway, proving that fate is entirely out of their hands.
If the Doomed Hurt Guy is only there to spout exposition before immediately perishing afterwards, you have an Almost Dead Guy on your hands.
To qualify for this trope, the character should be someone the heroes make some actual effort to save beforehand. Aversions are welcome.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- In Psyren, during the first trip in the titular world, one of the group is shot by the Tavoo Alfred with his crossbow and later found by Ageha, who tries to take him back and promise to give the Psyren Card to his mother so that she can make money by selling it... but unfortunately doesn't survive the trial and succumb to his wound, underlining the hopelessness of the situation and how dangerous Psyren is. Subverted later by Oboro after he's attacked, wounded and left for dead by Shiner: wounded and alone, he manages to use his Healing Factor to survive and pretty much become a Humanoid Abomination.
Film — Live-Action
- Purvis in Alien: Resurrection although he at least gets a really badass (if somewhat out of left field) Heroic Sacrifice to kill the main human villain, Dr. Wren.
- One of the explorers in Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid gets bitten and paralyzed by a poisonous spider, thrown onto him by his business partner to keep him from calling off the expedition, and is later Eaten Alive by one of the titular snakes while in this state as their colleagues are confronting said partner over what happened to him.
- George Ritchie in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Upon encountering the titular dinosaur, he falls into a crevice and severely injures himself. His colleague Tom Nesbitt eats up quite a bit of screentime in an heroic attempt to rescue him. But, alas, the Beast returns, and as soon as Tom lays eyes on it, it causes an avalanche that critically wounds him and also kills George. As in The Blob, this is an instance of the trope being required to further the plot: George had to die so that Tom would be the only person aware of the dinosaur.
- The poor elderly hermit in The Blob, although he's an example where, debatably, it's needed for the plot to progress (although subsequent Blob Monster stories and films managed to do without it).
- The Colony (2021): Blake's companion Tucker is injured when their ship crash lands and doesn't make it to the halfway point.
- Another notable aversion is in Creature from the Black Lagoon with Dr. Thompson.
- Cyclone (1978): In the aftermath of the disaster, there are four wounded people (out of twenty-seven survivors) whom a doctor tries to help care for; three from the plane and one from the fishing boat. None of them live. The plane's co-pilot's wounds attract a shark while the plane survivors are adrift and the other three all die of their injuries over the next couple of weeks.
- George the cop in the movie Daylight. A sinkhole opens beneath his feet and a truck falls on him, paralyzing him. Despite a big setpiece wherein everyone joins together to rescue him, it turns out they must leave him behind. The last we see him, he's lying on a stretcher on the roof of a car as the tunnel fills with water.
- Captain Atherton in Deep Rising is among the survivors after the Argonautica gets invaded by a bunch of bloodsucking tentacles (which all belong to one single monster). Like Acres, Atherton is wounded but manages to limp along with everyone else without too much effort, but his injury is plot-speak for "dead man walking" (well, limping) and he's eventually killed by a tentacle all the same.
- Bob's assistant Stephen in The Edge. Severely cutting his leg when they're lost in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness already cuts his survival chances in half at best. Naturally, this makes him the the first, or rather the only, of the three plane crash survivors to fall prey to the film's man-killing Kodiak bear despite the other men's attempts to drive it off and save him.
- German officer "Heine" Schwaffer in The Enemy Below. Badly wounded when the American destroyer collides with the German submarine, Captain von Stolberg manages to get him safely to the top deck. Murrell assists him in rigging a rope to pull Heine over to the American ship so they can be rescued, but poor Heine ends up dying from his injuries later anyway. Notably, Murrell tells von Stolberg that Heine is probably fatally wounded, but the German sub captain refuses to abandon his subordinate (and lifelong friend).
- Jake in Evil Dead 2. All that effort to (very painfully) drag him through the house after accidentally stabbing him, and he winds up being lain down right next to the trapdoor leading into the basement. Henrietta then gets 'im.
- The pilot in The Giant Claw who bashes his head against the control panel. Mitch drags him from the wreckage after making an emergency crash-landing, but the poor guy dies anyway.
- As noted below, this is averted in The Guns of Navarone wherein The Load Major Roy Franklin survives. This is partially because the heroes deliberately leave him behind so he'll be interrogated under drugs and cause the German's to send off their forces on a wild goose chase.
- Jurassic City: Possibly, Stephanie is unable to go with the others after a raptor slashes her shoulder and the tourniquet they make for her isn't too stable (causing her to stay behind with Manny), and CO Armstrong is left badly injured and abandoned by Doyle. Both of them are probably killed when the doors unlock and raptors come charging into the wing before the camera cuts away.
- Speaking of short time-from-injury-to-death ratios, there's Udesky in Jurassic Park III. Injured by raptors and left out as bait for the other characters in a tree, when they realize it's a trap (mostly due to the raptors jumping the gun and attacking before anyone is even completely down) and don't come down, the raptors finish Udesky off via Neck Snap and depart.
- Lifeboat: Gus has an injured leg which becomes infected. They have to amputate it to save his life (which pains Gus, due to his love for dancing) only for Willi to murder Gus because He Knows Too Much.
- The Lost Battalion: The opening scene shows a blinded soldier trying to make it through No Man's Land while being fired on by the Germans as two comrades try to help him. The blind soldier's companions make it, but he's gunned down just a few feet from safety.
- In the movie The Lost Continent, the ship's cook is injured by mutineers, receiving a nasty head wound. He's tended to by his shipmates and a shelter is built for him in the lifeboat after the passengers and crew are forced to abandon the ship in a violent storm. When they become briefly trapped in a vast expanse of flesh-eating seaweed, the cook suffers some kind of fever-induced freakout, stands up in the boat, and promptly falls overboard and is dragged down and devoured.
- Karen in Night of the Living Dead is possibly the world's first Zombie Infectee version of this trope.
- In The Poseidon Adventure, Acres the steward is badly injured when the Poseidon overturns, but manages to limp along with the other survivors with minimal assistance until they have to climb up a ladder. An explosion causes him to lose his grip and he falls into the water at the bottom of the shaft far below. His injury pretty much ensured he was a goner from the get-go.
- Pancho in Predator, although the time from his injury to his death is unusually short for this trope.
- The helicopter pilot (named Huntoon in the Novelization) in the mutant bear movie Prophecy. He gets injured during said bear's attack on the Indian village, and so the good guys have to carry him through the forest, eventually strapping him to the top of a truck they find. When the bear attacks again and overturns the truck, John Hawks makes a rather halfhearted effort to free him from the stretcher, then runs as the bear comes along and gobbles up the poor pilot's head.
- Linda in Proteus. Injured by Charlie's claws, she's put in the rig's infirmary where she gets taken over (a la The Thing) by a tendril that oozes down from a vent above her head. Similar to Matthias in The Ruins, the other characters are busy talking about something unrelated to Linda, and by the time they notice the frantically beeping heart rate monitor signalling her demise, she's already been completely taken over.
- In Rovdyr, Roger, Camilla and Jorgen find an Almost Dead Guy tied to a tree when they wake up in the forest. However, his ability to give them any kind of message about what is coming on is severely hampered because his tongue has been cut out. To their credit, Camilla and Jorgen attempt to take him with them when they run, but he is soon caught and killed by one of the hunters.
- German tourist Matthias in The Ruins. Possibly one of the nastiest and cruelest examples. There's an extended sequence of his friends crudely amputating his legs and burning the stumps to cauterize them, but a few scenes later, he gets strangled by the killer vines while the other campers are arguing and not paying attention to him.
- Fred Clarkson in both 1943 and 1995 versions of Sahara. Injured in von Schletow's attempt to strafe the tank, he lasts long enough to get to Bir-Acroma and then bites it.
Literature
- The Adversary Cycle: A rare example of a non-physical sort of injury, there's Otto Grunstadt in The Keep. He survives the Germans' initial encounter with Rasolam, but is left insane. Captain Woermann makes plans to send him away from the keep for mental treatment, but Rasolam comes for him the next night.
- Andy Stevens in The Guns of Navarone is hurt during the climb up the cliff. He later sacrifices himself to hold off the pursuing German soldiers so his comrades can get away. This is averted in the film, wherein Roy Franklin (as Stevens is christened) manages to actually get medical treatment—from the Germans!—and survives.
- Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park. Although The Lost World (1995) reveals he survived and all that talk about a burial in the first book was premature.
- State Trooper Carl Martinelli to some extent in Return of the Living Dead. He is shot by arch-criminal John Carter, hoping he'll die and turn into a zombie so he'll eat his tied up partner, Dave Benton. Racing against time, Dave manages to get himself untied and tend to Carl's wound, but he begins slowly dying from it anyway. Poor Carl survives long enough to get blown away by Henry Dorsey's triggerhappy son the following morning after mistaking him for a zombie, pretty much making all of Dave's effort to save him meaningless.
- This also happens to someone in The Stand who develops appendicitis. The main characters drag him with them screaming in agony before finally attempting to (clumsily) operate on him, whereupon he dies during their sad joke of a surgery. Stephen King uses this trope to great effect, to show how helpless the survivors of The Plague are without modern medicine, doctors and knowledgeable in medical procedures.
- Thomas Blanky, the ice master, is a rare survivor of an encounter with the tuunbaq in Dan Simmons' The Terror, but throughout the rest of the journey believes he's destined to be killed by it, eventually just sitting down and waiting for the creature to take him after his wounds from his previous encounters become infected.
Live-Action TV
- Combat! (1962) does this a few times, with both Allied and enemy personnel on the receiving end:
- In "I Swear by Apollo", two people are badly injured by a German grenade. One of them is a member of La Résistance with important intel, and the other is American G.I. Wayne Temple (who'd previously appeared in "Rear Echelon Commandos"). To save them, the squad goes and captures German medical officer Captain Belzer. But Belzer is only able to save the Frenchman, as poor doomed Temple dies from his injuries.
- In "Masquerade", German infiltrators posing as "Corporal Kanger" and "Lieutenant Comstock" get behind enemy lines disguised as American G.I.s with a "captured" German colonel. However, they overturn their Jeep. They're fine, but the colonel is badly hurt. The Americans, being good guys, try and help him, and he makes it to almost the end of the episode, but dies shortly after it's revealed the guys who "captured" him are Nazi spies. The poor guy goes through so much throughout the episode that when he finally bites it from his injuries, even Saunders feels bad for the guy despite the fact he's a Nazi.
- Intelligence officer Captain Thorpe in "The Mockingbird". German infiltrator Asher shoots him in the back during a firefight, but he survives, long enough for the squad to get him to an abbey for medical treatment, but despite the best efforts of Doc and the monks, Thorpe lapses into complete delirium. At one point Asher tries to smother him with a pillow, but is stopped by Caje. Despite this last-second reprieve, Thorpe ends up dying anyway.
- In "Retribution", badly wounded French civilian Andre is the only witness to SS officer Colonel Bruener's torture and murder of Kirby's friend Eddie Kopicek. Doc treats him as best as he can, before they bring him to his house so his wife Micheline can get the local doctor. Alas, when they return later with the captured Bruener, Andre has shuffled off his mortal coil in their absence.
- In "More Than a Soldier", Saunders, New Meat Carey and a nameless German sergeant become trapped in a collapsed mine. The German ends up buried under some rubble and badly hurt. Carey wants to abandon him, but Saunders insists it would be tantamount to murder, so the two risk their lives by digging him free. He ends up dying from his injuries anyway.
- In "Headcount", the squad ends up with a buttload of German prisoners, among them the Schiller Brothers, Karl and Kurt. Kurt is injured, suffering from some kind of unspecified injury. However, there's nothing Doc can do for him in the field, so all they can do is try to make it back to their lines. But Kurt dies on the way, much to his brother's anger.
- In the Game of Thrones episode "Beyond the Wall", Thoros of Myr becomes the Doomed Hurt Guy after getting attacked by an undead bear north of the wall. While the party is initially able to tend to his wounds and get him up and moving, he ultimately freezes to death in his weakened state later that evening, after the party gets trapped and is forced to spend a night out in the frigid elements.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In the episode "The Ship", one of Sisko's men, Muñiz, is shot during an engagement with the Jem'Hadar. Unfortunately, Jem'Hadar disruptors leave anticoagulants in their victims' bloodstream, inflicting a Wound That Will Not Heal. Without access to proper medical treatment, O'Brien is forced to use parts of his uniform as bandages in an effort to slow the bleeding, while Worf believes Muñiz will not survive and that he should be ready to face the end, to O'Brien's chagrin. Ultimately, Muñiz bleeds out from his wound.
- Stranger Things: Agent Harmon gets shot in one episode, then dies in the next while the others try to save him and come up with a way to get him proper treatment without attracting the attention of those hunting them.
- The X-Files:
Video Games
- Tom in Dino Crisis. The player can avert this with Gail after he's seriously injured by a falling computer tower by knocking him out and dragging him to safety before he can continue on the mission and get himself killed.
- The Resident Evil series:
- Richard Aiken in the first game. When he's found dying from the venomous Yawn's bite, the player is sent to get anti-venom for him, but he ends up croaking anyway. Making it so that the player can do nothing but fail underlies the futility of S.T.A.R.S.' situation. In the remake, Richard is cured with the medicine, but still winds up perishing in an apparent subversion of the trope, the idea apparently being that even though you can save someone from one thing, they can still perish from another.
- Marvin Branagh in Resident Evil 2. He was bitten by a zombie and he knows he will soon turn, so he urges Leon and Claire to save themselves and to go on without him. When the protagonists run into him again, he becomes a zombie and has to be put down.
- Mikhail Victor in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, although he gets up and fights before finally biting it.
- Bob in Resident Evil: Outbreak. Assuming the player bothers with helping him along, he dies anyway, either by committing suicide or turning into a zombie and being killed by his friends.
- In Resident Evil 6, you have Helena's sister Deborah. She and Leon rescue her from the catacombs underneath the cathedral, and Helena carries her on her back. Great effort is taken to rescue her, but, alas, she succumbs to the C-Virus and turns into a monster.
- In Resident Evil Containment: (a fan game), Ghost encounters a wounded scientist in the mansion who specifically asks him for a medical kit to heal himself. Giving it to him nets Ghost a map that lets him cross a booby-trapped floor to acquire a MacGuffin necessary to leave the mansion, after which the scientist is shot to death offscreen.
- Luke from Season 2 of The Walking Dead. Survives a stray bullet to the leg in a shootout with some bandits, but the injury dramatically reduces his strength and mobility, and he consequently drowns after falling through A Crack in the Ice.
