"Your fleet is lost, and your friends on the Endor moon will not survive. There is no escape, my young apprentice. The alliance will die... as will your friends."
The villain, who never had any intention of letting the hero (or heroes) live, has finally instituted the perfect plan that will ensure their demise (or at least, that's what the villain thinks). Of course, for some people it's not enough to simply kill the heroes. They have to crush their hopes utterly, ensuring maximum despair and humiliation. In short, they have to tell them death is inevitable. This is never wise.
A form of Evil Gloating; this tends to be standard for a Smug Snake. Expect this to almost always be invoked when there's a Death Trap. The villain can and will combine this with "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
This would be a Stock Phrase... although very few villains end up saying this the same way twice. The classic villain threat has several variations, some of which are:
"Your Days Are Numbered!" (when used as an expression)
"I'm afraid we won't meet again."
"This is now the ultimate power in the (x). We will crush you under our feet like insects!"
"Soon you will all be dead, and I will be (lounging on a beach / on my throne / etc.)!"
"Take time to collect your thoughts, for soon you will be dead!"
"Treasure what little time remains of your lives!" note
"Say your last goodbyes!"
"Make peace with your gods, for you will soon meet them!"
"I'm afraid we won't meet again."
"This is now the ultimate power in the (x). We will crush you under our feet like insects!"
"Soon you will all be dead, and I will be (lounging on a beach / on my throne / etc.)!"
"Take time to collect your thoughts, for soon you will be dead!"
"Treasure what little time remains of your lives!" note
"Say your last goodbyes!"
"Make peace with your gods, for you will soon meet them!"
Note that this sort of threat is always telegraphed in advance. The hero may or may not be at the villain's mercy — for reasons related to Bond Villain Stupidity. When the villain finally utters a Pre-Mortem One-Liner prior to delivering a beat-down of some sort, that's Prepare to Die.
If the hero is in a position to retort, expect a Badass Boast. There are also occasional heroic and sympathetic versions; the former may be part of a Shut Up, Hannibal! speech or other put-down of an overly cocky villain, while the latter might come from a dispassionate observer who is defining the extent of the challenge facing the hero.
Compare If My Calculations Are Correct and No One Could Survive That!. Contrast I Need You Stronger, You Will Be Spared, and No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine.
Not to be confused with the trope Your Days Are Numbered, which is not a threat, but a fact (despite the fact that some villains may very well use that exact phrase to mean this; if the hero's death is a foregone conclusion to them, it counts as a threat). Inverse of We Will Meet Again.
See also Thanatos Gambit. Not to be confused with Take Your Time.
Examples:
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Films — Animated
- In The Animatrix, once the machine intelligences have defeated all of man's armies, and man's leaders sign an unconditional surrender, the machine delegate says this followed by a huge nuclear explosion:
"Your flesh is a relic, a mere vessel. Hand over your flesh, and a new world awaits you — we demand it."
- In The Pebble and the Penguin, before throwing a boulder attempting to crush Hubie, Drake shouts "SAY YOUR PRAYERS!" Hubie and company live, but Drake is Hoist by His Own Petard when the crash brings the cave down around him.
Films — Live-Action
- 300: Straight from Herodotus:
Herald: By noon this day, you will be dead men. The thousand nations of the Persian Empire descend upon you! Our arrows... will blot out the sun!
Stelios: Then we will fight in the shade. - In Alien, Ash's last words before being incinerated are "I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies." At this point, he's shifted from villainous to almost coldly sympathetic.
- Blade Runner: Tyrell's immortal "revel in your time" line may be this trope.
- Goldfinger provides a famous example:
James Bond: Do you expect me to talk?
Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die! - Greyhound: The U-boat called Grey Wolf keeps radioing Greyhound and the other ships to gloat about how he and the Wolfpack are going to sink them all, even making wolf howls. Captain Krause orders a frequency change each time to get him off the air.
- Marvel Cinematic Universe:
- A heroic version appears in The Avengers (2012):
Tony Stark: You're missing the point, there's no throne. There is no version of this where you come out on top. Look, maybe you open the portal, and maybe your army is too much for us, but it doesn't matter, because it's all on you. Because if we can't save the Earth, you can be damn sure we'll avenge it.
- Then it becomes the standard villainous take with the Black Order of Avengers: Infinity War, who enjoy likening the Avengers' attempts to fight back to parlor tricks and that all is lost for the glory of Thanos.
- A heroic version appears in The Avengers (2012):
- The Matrix:
- Agent Smith does this repeatedly, sometimes as a form of Trash Talk.
Smith: Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.
Smith: Evolution, Morpheus. Like the dinosaur.
Smith: You can't win, it's pointless to keep fighting! Why, Mr. Anderson, why, why do you persist?! - In The Matrix Reloaded, the Architect pulls the "We won't" (meet again) line on Neo after he chooses Door #2 (the door that "leads inexorably to the extinction of every last human being on the planet").
- Agent Smith does this repeatedly, sometimes as a form of Trash Talk.
- In Midnight Run, Jimmy Serrano to the Duke, before slapping him across the face:
"Did you actually think you could steal my money and get away with it? I stopped by here to tell you two things. Number one is that you're gonna die tonight. Number two: I'm gonna go home, have a nice hot meal, I'm gonna find your wife, and I'm gonna kill her too."
- Return of the Jedi:
- The Emperor tells Luke that the Rebel army will succumb in their attempt to destroy the Death Star.
Luke: You're wrong. Soon I'll be dead... and you with me.
- After Luke refuses to join the Dark Side, Palpatine repeats the trope on Luke specifically. And he would have been right if it hadn't been for Vader's Heel–Face Turn.
Emperor Palpatine: So be it, Jedi. If you will not be turned, you will be ... destroyed!
- The Emperor tells Luke that the Rebel army will succumb in their attempt to destroy the Death Star.
- Resident Evil (2002): Just before the protagonists shut down the Red Queen (which disables the Hive's lockdown and lets the zombified staff loose), the A.I. bluntly tells them this:
Red Queen: You're all going to die down here.
- The Running Man:
Ben Richards: I'll be back, Killian.
Damon Killian: Only in a rerun. - The Wizard of Oz: Justified. The Wicked Witch hands Dorothy a large hourglass and tells her this is how much time she has left to live. Exactly what it will do is unclear, but apparently simply killing Dorothy will hurt the power of the ruby slippers and the hourglass will do it more delicately.
Literature
- In the seventh Alex Rider book, Snakehead, when Alex arrives at the Snakehead's center for organ harvesting, Dr. Tanner gives a lengthy speech in this vein: they have enough defenses in place to prevent escape, and even if he got out, the jungle is a death trap, and they have no boats for the river. It gives Alex all the information he needs to break out two days later.
- Artemis Fowl has this when Opal captures Holly and Root, then ties an explosive to Root, giving him at most a minute to live. This time, the evil plan actually works — Root blows up.
- Darkness Visible has an unusual example because, rather than the hero being at the villain's mercy, the villain is actually chained to a prison wall. However, his Evil Plan is still in motion, leading to this variant on the threat:
'I have taken away your need to fear growing old. You will not be thirty for very long!'...'You cannot stop it, Henry! You can only fail and die, and I hope you die with the knowledge that you lost at the forefront of your mind!'
- In the Left Behind book Desecration, when Buck Williams and Chaim Rosenzweig (as Chaim the prophet) are about to leave the Knesset after Nicolae Carpathia negotiates with them for a lifting of the plague of sores from the First Bowl Judgment, Carpathia threatens them with "Your days are numbered". In the Dramatic Audio version, Buck's retort to Nicolae, "As are yours, 'my friend'," is a warning that what God's Word says about him will come to pass.
- Night Shift: In "Children of the Corn," a red-haired Child holding a knife on Burt says, "Remand your soul to God, for you will stand before His throne momentarily."
Live-Action TV
- The Gunslinger from the Doctor Who episode "A Town Called Mercy" gives his waiting victims time to "Make peace with [their] gods".
- Stargate SG-1:
- In one episode, O'Neill is told that one of the Goa'uld system lords has declared that SG-1's days are numbered. O'Neill responds that's perfectly fine. So long as it's a large number.
- Anubis also invokes this in a speech when he uses a weapon to try to destroy the Earth's Stargate.
- The standard greeting of the Borg in Star Trek serves as one of these, except from the perspective of the Borg, it's not so much a taunt as a statement of fact.
"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."
Music
- Mother Maiden of Within Temptation delivers an awesome one of these during the song "Iron" from The Unforgiving.
You need not fear us, unless you are a Darkheart, a vile one who preys on the innocent. I promise: you can't hide forever from the empty darkness, for we will hunt you down like the animals you are, and pull you into the very bowels of Hell!
Theatre
- Les Misérables: During the climatic number, a solider tries to talk the rebels out of trying to fight. It doesn't work, and the rebels are massacred by the militia. Given the context, the delivery and direction can change the implications of this speech — in the 2012 movie adaptation of the musical, in which the speaker appears on-camera, he seems to genuinely be pleading with them and wishing to let them live.
"You at the barricade listen to this! No one is coming to help you fight, you're on your own, you have no friends, Give up your guns OR DIE! You at the barricade listen to this! The people of Paris sleep in their beds! You have NO CHANCE, NO CHANCE AT ALL! Why throw your lives away?"
Theme Parks
- In Universal's Halloween Horror Nights, "Chance" has this as her Catchphrase, always stating, "You won't stand a chance!" to her inevitable victims.
Video Games
- The plot of Batman: Arkham Knight is kicked off by Scarecrow hijacking Gotham's PA system and threatening to release his newest fear toxin, causing nearly the entire city to evacuate. Scarecrow then spends the entire game regularly announcing how horribly Batman and everyone he cares about is going to suffer.
- Alfred from Battle Clash does this in a pre-battle taunt:
"My calculations say the chances of you winning are... 0%."
- Oddly evoked by one of the good guys in Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django. It turns out he's actually right: the will of the galaxy itself has decided to wipe out humanity's very existence, and the most humanity can hope to do is fight off their inevitable (and soon to happen) fate for as long as possible. It still doesn't stop any of them from fighting back with everything they have.
Sabata: Our opponent is Dark, the Will of the Galaxy Universe, the origin of all life. Of course... Right from the start, I knew we didn't stand a chance. All the starts, all life... Everything is enveloped with eternal death. People die... But me... I don't care about all that. It's all about how I live. Resisting and fighting to the end. That's what it means to me... to live!
- The description for the Veteran difficulty setting in the Call of Duty games from 4: Modern Warfare and onward is "You will not survive."
- Kefka in Final Fantasy VI. "Such magnificent power! You are like insects to me!"
- When you confront Bruno Tattaglia in the basement of Tito Morelli's mortuary in The Godfather, he will boast, "You got no chance. You're a dead man, my friend." If the source material's anything to go by, you prove him wrong by throwing him into one of the two ovens in the basement.
- Marvel vs. Capcom 3
Wesker: You will not survive!
- Mass Effect:
- The Reapers love doing this:
Sovereign: We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it.
Harbinger: Human, you've changed nothing. Your species has attracted the attention of those infinitely your greater; that which you know as "Reapers" are your salvation through destruction.
Reaper: Every organic civilization must be harvested in order to bring order to the chaos. It is inevitable. - In Mass Effect 3, it turns out that the Catalyst who created the Reapers is fond of this. He claims that if Shepard chooses Destroy, which will wipe out all synthetic life in the Galaxy, because their body relies on cybernetic implants to survive, Shepard will die alongside the Reapers. Shepard can respond by blasting the crap out of the Power Conduit anyway, with a look on their face that clearly says they are intent on Taking You with Me. With a high enough EMS score, Shepard is seen taking a breath in the rubble, implying that they did manage to survive after all.
- The Reapers love doing this:
- One of voicesets for Neverwinter Nights can have the PC shout out, "You will not survive!"
- Sylvia in the first No More Heroes does this by phone (Wiimote speaker, it's awesome) before every boss battle. She's supposed to be your ally.
"Give it your best shot! I am 100% certain you're returning from this battle, Travis. ...In a body bag."
"I'm sorry to say this, but I'm 1800% positive that you will die here. But trust your Force... and head for the Garden of Madness."
"I am 3,602,600,218% certain you will die. But trust your Force... and head for the Garden of Madness." - Wheatley in Portal 2: "Take one last look at your precious human moon, 'cause it cannot help you now!"
- The Zero Wing line below is said word-for-word in Spider-Man 2 by Mysterio as a direct Shout-Out.
- In Transformers: War for Cybertron, Trypticon's last words to the Autobots are: "You haven't defeated me Autobots!" Optimus promptly uses his axe to knock him into a pool of energon. As the next game would show, Trypticon's body would not recover and would be permanently converted into the Nemesis.
- Many, many bosses in World of Warcraft. C'thun is most notable, as he spends the entire time you are inside his lair (Temple of Ahn'Qiraj) taunting you with this, before you even get to him.
C'thun: You Are Already Dead.
- Zero Wing is but one particularly well known example:
CATS: How are you gentlemen!!
CATS: All Your Base Are Belong to Us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say!!
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha....
Western Animation
- In the Batman: The Animated Series episode "The Clock King":
- The last part of Clock King's Just Between You and Me speech.
Fugate: ... Of course, if you want to get blown to bits, that's fine with me. Either way, it's time to say adieu, Batman.
- Fugate does this again when he has Hill at his Death Trap:
Fugate: Comfortable, Hill? Well, you won't be for long. At 3:15 on the dot, those hands will come together and you'll be crushed like an insect.
- The last part of Clock King's Just Between You and Me speech.
- In Jackie Chan Adventures, during the second part of "Demon World", the Demon Sorcerer, Shendu delivers one of these calm threats after Jackie Chan manages to escape him, despite having his memory altered after Shendu literally rewrote history in the Book of Ages.
Shendu: Centuries of history altered, your very memory erased, and still somehow you defy me! I shall find you, Chan. And I promise you, I shall erase more than your memory!
- Kim Possible: At least once, Dr. Drakken says "Farewell, Kim Possible! We won't meet again!" as he leaves her in a Death Trap.
- Superjail!: "Hey! Wait! You cannot escape! Never run away from the Time Police, you will not survive!"
- In Teen Titans (2003), Trigon tells Raven there's nothing she can do to stop him from killing everyone in the world. You Can't Fight Fate is kinda Trigon's schtick.
