Basic Trope: A coroner, mortician, autopsy technician, etc is portrayed as eccentric or weird.
- Straight: Dr. Death is a mortician, and has a tendency to be a rather weird guy, doing things like having lunch around the corpses.
- Exaggerated:
- Dr. Death is an outright villain who regularly engages in I Love the Dead.
- People in death-related jobs are always portrayed as weird.
- Downplayed: Dr. Death is a bit quirky, but in a Bunny-Ears Lawyer way and is ultimately very experienced at his job.
- Justified:
- Dr. Death has brain damage as a result of interacting with some of the preservative chemicals for extended periods of time.
- Dr. Death's eccentricities and propensity for bizarre behaviour are a way of coping with the stresses of his job.
- Inverted: Dr. Death is a mortician and the Only Sane Man in a cast full of Cloudcuckoolanders.
- Subverted: Dr. Death is actually perfectly normal, he just likes putting on a creepy act to troll people unfamiliar with him.
- Double Subverted: Dr. Death's claim that he's just putting on an act is false; he really is that eccentric, and proves himself as such when his mask of normality slips mid-autopsy.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig-Zagged: Dr. Death can act normal or strange depending on the particular episode.
- Averted:
- No morticians or anything of the like are ever seen.
- Dr. Death is a relatively normal mortician.
- Enforced: The writers made Dr. Death eccentric to provide some dark comic relief in an otherwise serious Police Procedural, as the show would be too dark otherwise.
- Lampshaded:
- "What is it with morticians and being creepy? You'd expect they'd be a bit more professional on the job..."
- Dr. Death is fully aware of his eccentricities and jokes about them with one of the other morgue staff.
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: A Corrupt Cop plants evidence implicating Dr. Death in falsifying records, expecting his reputation for odd behaviour to damage the doctor's chance of a fair investigation.
- Defied: Dr. Death is told that if he's going to be a mortician, he has to take his job seriously.
- Discussed: A newly-hired mortician comments that they expected Dr. Death to be much less serious than he is; Dr. Death replies by commenting that actual morticians don't behave like they do on TV dramas.
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Dr. Death's unprofessional behaviour on duty and overall weirdness gets him fired by his employers due to fears that they're compromising the accuracy of his autopsies. His efforts to find work elsewhere fail due to his eccentricities being known.
- Reconstructed: Dr. Death is ultimately rehired when his colleagues point out that his autopsies are indeed accurate, and his odd behaviours are common coping mechanisms for people in similar positions.
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