Web Video / Last Life SMP

By the nature of the series, all spoilers except those relating to the series' backstory in the "Eyes and Ears" continuity are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

Last Life was the 2nd season of the Life SMP. It is notable for the introduction of new cast members LDShadowLady, MumboJumbo, and PearlescentMoon, the latter of whom becomes a mainstay in the series, and the Boogeyman mechanism.

Unlike in Season 1, where everyone had 3 lives, each member of the server is randomly assigned between 2 and 6 lives, and the ability to transfer lives between players was introduced. In addition, each episode starts with the server randomly assigning a "Boogeyman", who needs to kill a player with more than one life left before the end of the day, or lose all but one of their lives. After Day 2, the Boogeyman has been given a protective buff after being cured so they would have an easier time escaping from their victim's teammates.

Last Life was first announced in Grian's final episode of Season 1, though with its title pending at the time. The season officially started on September 21st, 2021 and ended on November 16th.

Not to be confused with Last Life, a supernatural romance web-series which premiered in 2015.

Note: Unless otherwise specified, all tropes pertain to the characters, not the content creators that play them.

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The Last Life SMP provides examples of:

• After the End: Downplayed, but after Day 7, the world sure starts to feel this way. All major bases were destroyed or abandoned when their members either died, turned Red, or were forced to flee after repeated attacks from the Red Lives. Tentative alliances of Greens and Yellows resorted to roaming the server, looting anything valuable that was left in the ruins of bases, while the Reds got a lot more outwardly hostile, attacking anyone they saw roaming the server instead of relying on traps. The few bases left standing (the Shadow Fort and Magical Mountain) were clumsily patched up and reinforced, serving as strongholds for the survivors, though the Reds managed to sweep through them multiple times, and Martyn's attempt to hide out at Magical Mountain ended in his death as it was overrun.
• Alone with the Psycho: During Day 3, Grian is snooping through Scott and Pearl's house while they're away, when suddenly Joel reveals his presence as he sets up a trap. Grian's scream of pure unadulterated terror is truly something to behold.
• Anti-Climax: During Day 7, all but one of Grian's wolves is killed during the chaotic warfare. The Sole Survivor proceeds to walk into a cactus and die instantly, with the Red Names watching in complete disbelief.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Joel and Lizzie, being a married couple both in- and out-of-universe. In spite of their numerous attempts to off each other^*from Joel luring Lizzie into a trap as the Boogeyman of Day 2 to Lizzie plotting Joel's demise while both of them were Red Lives on Day 7, on Day 7 they share declarations of love in case either one of them died while preparing to lava-trap the Scottage from above.
• Cassandra Truth: While Mumbo and Grian are building the ghast farm platform together, Mumbo spots Joel, a Red Name, climbing the ladder up to them. Mumbo immediately alerts Grian to this fact, but Grian thinks he's just joking around and trying to scare him, until Joel shoots him off the platform to his death.
• Colour-Coded Timestop: The Watchers talking to Martyn is often shown this way, except for the chase at the beginning of Day 8.
• Cutting the Knot: On Day 6, Grian and Impulse resolve to gather the three Wither skeleton skulls scattered across the server. After two successful heists at the Shadow Fort and the Snow Fort, they are unable to find the one at the Scottage and eventually conclude that it's inside their Ender chest, meaning that they could never retrieve it. Rather than throw in the towel, Impulse heads to the Nether fortress and grinds Wither skeletons until he finally gets a new skull, which he presents to Grian at the end of the day.
• Darkest Hour: The end of Day 7. Six people had lost their last lives, and were out of the series permanently. Every major base on the server was destroyed or abandoned as their inhabitants either turned Red or were forced to flee. In the end, the Reds continue to roam the server while Scott, Cleo, Ren and Etho (the last non-Reds aside from Martyn, who had split off from them at some point and was still missing, and Pearl, who missed the end of the day due to a power outage) hunkered down in the lava-casted remains of the Scottage's underground base, struggling for food and other resources, desperately trying to figure out what to do next.
• Deceased Fall-Guy Gambit: On Day 7, Joel blows up the roof of Scar's wizard hut in an attempt to kill Scott and Cleo. On Day 8, he tells Scar that Bdubs vandalized the roof, who has conveniently been eliminated at that point and can't refute it. Scar learns the truth from Pearl, though.
• Difficulty Spike: In-Universe. On Day 8, Grian discovered that the server had been set to "Easy" rather than "Hard", as it was intended to be. He changed the difficulty and it had immediate effects, namely Etho's death to a creeper explosion which now caused more damage than he expected, as well as a huge uptick in armored mobs.
• Downer Ending: Once again, everybody dies. After Martyn's death, there are no more Green Lives remaining, meaning the Reds on the server have to duke it out between themselves. Scott, Cleo, Pearl and Ren form an alliance to go after Grian and Joel, and while they lose Cleo during the fight, in the end, Grian and Joel go down as well. Scott, Pearl and Ren decide that they don't want to betray one another, and each of the four remaining Reds picks a cardinal direction (Pearl picks north, Scott picks east, Martyn picks south and Ren picks west), they split off, count down, and each of them charges into the center of the map where they proceed to slaughter each other until only one remains. The winner of Last Life, Scott, only gets a brief moment to say goodbye to his axolotl Binkie before he too drops dead.
• Epic Fail:
  • On Day 2, Joel managed to go from four lives down to one. Motivated by his Boogeyman status, he tried killing other players to remove the affliction. He started with a pitfall trap. First, he lured Lizzie there to push her in, but ended up falling into it himself. Later, with a crowd lured in, Grian accidentally discovered the trap, exposing it to the others there. Joel panicked and tried to kill Martyn, which got him killed by Mumbo. As a last resort, he went after Scott and Pearl — successfully killing Scott but also getting himself revenge-killed by Pearl.
  • On Day 5, Scar tries to enter the Southlands' fort and triggers their TNT-lava-Pit Trap. The Southlanders are stunned when he survives, meaning they've lost their TNT for nothing as well as Mumbo's redstone door. This flips on Scar when they reset the trap and he triggers it again despite knowing it was there and having several people tell him to not trigger it. He doesn't survive a second time.
• Escort Distraction: On Day 3, Jimmy invites Scott and Pearl to tour the Southlands in order to get them away from their base so Impulse can steal their sugar cane.
• False Reassurance: Mumbo tries to convince Grian to walk into an obvious trap, but he doesn't do it well.
  Mumbo: If you walk through at the same time as me… then… then… then… good things'll happen I reckon.
• Fatal Fireworks:
  • On Day 7, Lizzie fills most of her hot-bar with firework-loaded crossbows and uses several to weaken Big B before killing him. Later that day, she unleashes a fair amount of them onto Bdubs when he betrays her. While Lizzie loses her final life, her firework rockets weaken Bdubs enough that he's killed by his fellow Red Names when he tries to run.
  • On Day 9, Grian and Joel arm themselves with firework rockets for their rampage and end up killing Pearl with them. Joel offhandedly mentions that the plan was made in honour of Lizzie.
• Food as Bribe: When Scar and Grian are trying to get Mumbo to join their respective alliances on Day 1, Grian keeps offering more and more salmon to tempt him.
• Foreshadowing: Cleo seems to have a knack for it this season.
  • When Cleo first comes to Lizzie's Fairy Forest on Day 1, she casually remarks on its flammability, as it's made entirely of trees. Come Day 5 and Cleo, now a Red Life, burns the Forest to the ground to dislodge and intimidate her old allies.
  • Later on, Pearl shows Cleo and Scott her booby-trapped dance room in the Green Lives club, and Cleo tells her she doesn't think it will kill Martyn or Etho but it would probably get Ren. Sure enough on Day 9, when Pearl lures the three of them into the room and activates the trap for her Boogeyman kill, Martyn and Etho survive it while Ren dies.
• Fun with Acronyms: Team B.E.S.T.'s name is an acronym made up of the first letters of its members' names (Bdubs, Etho, Skizz, Tango). Whenever one of their members turns Red, plenty of jokes are made about having to change the acronym.
• Geas: The Boogeyman curse functions along the lines of one: to kill another player by the end of the day, or be forcibly dropped to their final life.
• He Knows Too Much: On Day 7, Scott tries to kill Impulse for his Boogeyman kill when some of the Southlanders try to pull a heist on his base, however Impulse has an enchanted golden apple and an Ender pearl that allows him to escape. Scott knows that he'll have a much harder time getting a kill if Impulse tells anyone that he's the Boogeyman, so he hunts Impulse down again at the Southlands and successfully kills him there.
• History Repeats: Much like in the preceding 3rd Life…
  • Grian is responsible for the loss of Scar's first life, this time by scamming him into transferring it to him.
  • Jimmy is the first to be eliminated after losing his last life. It even happens on Day 7 again.
    Scott: Why is he always the first one out the series?
  • Day 7 marks the complete collapse of the server's fragile alliance system as several players die and many more drop to their Red lives.
• Ironic Echo: Early on, Grian tried to buy a life off Scar, instead being told he could pre-order one to buy later. Scar ended up walking back on that deal, pissing Grian off immensely. After Grian turned Red on Day 4, he went back to Scar to threaten him, while Scar desperately tried to make a new deal with him. Grian's response was that he could put that deal on pre-order.
• Irony: On Day 3, Joel sets the Southlands' outer wall on fire. Most of them fail to notice at first because they're too distracted by Mumbo's new redstone door, which he specifically built to help protect them from outside attacks.
• Jump Scare: It happens to Scar a lot. So far, Cleo has done it twice and Grian once.
  • On Day 7, Skizz did it to Jimmy, Lizzie did it to Mumbo, and Ren did it to Big B, who even put a Scare Chord over it.
• Kill Steal: On Day 7, Martyn becomes the Boogeyman after Pearl, the original Boogeyman, left the day early due to a power outage. Martyn attempts to kill his only ally Grian, but unbeknownst to either of them, Joel is watching from the shadows and is able to shoot Grian once before he kills himself with Ender pearl damage. This causes the game to credit Joel with the kill, leaving Martyn friendless and still needing to kill someone.
• Let's You and Him Fight: On Day 6, Grian attempts to spark infighting among the Red Names so that he doesn't have to deal with a unified Red Team.
• Losing Horns: Scott's Day 8 episode shows that should a player fail to Boogey-kill someone by the end of a session, one such sound effect plays when said player drops to their final, Red life.
• Monster of the Week: The Boogeyman, who is randomly selected out of the living non-Red players and must kill someone with two or more lives to cure themselves or be reduced to their last life the next day. In all, the Boogeymen were Bdubs (Day 1), Joel and Scar (Day 2), Lizzie (Day 3), Ren and Big B (Day 4), Etho (Day 5), Mumbo, Etho again, Bdubs again, Joel again, Scott, and Jimmy (Day 6), Pearl^*she ended up having a power outage, causing her to be exempt from it... but then got a kill from a trap anyway and Martyn^*chosen after Pearl's reshuffle (Day 7), Scott again (Day 8), and Pearl again (Day 9).
• Mythology Gag: A few to Hermitcraft:
  • Scar recycles a business scheme from Season 7 of Hermitcraft, which is to rename stained glass and sell them as magical crystals while dressed as a wizard.
  • On Day 4, Mumbo decides to build a ghast farm not only for gunpowder, but also for ghast tears so he can produce and weaponize End crystals, a gag from Hermitcraft Season 8.
  • In addition to events of the last season being mentioned, Scar also points out to a group of people that when Bdubs wears iron leggings and boots with his current skin, he looks like Oscar the Grouch.
  • During Day 5, Mumbo says that the way Impulse denied being the Boogeyman seemed sus, "and by 'sus', I don't mean sustainable".
  • After Tango loses his last life on Day 8, Grian makes a grave that says "rest in peace love and plants tango".
• No Blood for Phlebotinum: Given that the world is only 700 by 700 blocks big, there's bound to be conflicts over resources. In Last Life in particular, there's shortages of sugarcane (used in the server-specific TNT recipe) and villagers (as there was no village, making the only way to get them by curing zombie villagers).
• No Man Should Have This Power: Martyn steals the Scottage's Wither skeleton skull for this reason, but he gives it back after hearing that Grian also has one, and bringing the Scottage's skull to their base would make it easier for Grian to collect three and summon a Wither. The Scottage have also taken it upon themselves to ensure that no one faction will ever have more than one skull after Scott, Impulse and Mumbo successfully stole Grian's skull from the Team Red base on Day 5, with Scott delivering it to Lizzie after Grian turned back yellow and rejoined the Southlands.
  Scott: It's like the Infinity Stones; we just keep them as spread apart as we can.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Ever since Day 1, hearing the music disc "13", especially from an unknown or hidden source, is taken to mean that someone is about to attack; although the only time it actually happened was Bdubs' Boogeyman kill on Grian on Day 1. Etho exploits this on Day 3 to frighten several people.
• Overly Long Gag:
  • The Southlands unite when they all got spyglasses and pointed it at each other's faces while going "AHA!" They kept doing this until it comes time to build their base, and Martyn lets off a Hurricane of Puns around the "aha" sound, to the point where the others contemplate whether it was worth killing him to make it stop. They even make an "Aha Jahar" on Day 2.
    Martyn: I'm literally sweating from laughing, that doesn't happen very often. Like, I'm a mess.
    Mumbo: What–
    Martyn: I need a shower, or a ba-hath!
    Grian: STOP!
    Mumbo: MARTYN!
    Jimmy: Seriously, can we kill him?!
  • On Day 2, Mumbo and Grian spend a very long time digging for diamonds and try to one-up each other by pretending to have hidden diamonds nearby and saying, "My diamonds are right… HERE!"
• Pet the Dog: Since Scar is absent during Day 7 for health reasons, everyone else decides to not steal the Enchantment Table from Magical Mountain since it wouldn't be fair to him, although they do take the opportunity to get free enchants without his supervision.
• Plot Device: The Enchantment Table. Unlike the first season, the Table is set at spawn and the players are disallowed from crafting another one or any bookshelves. Although it was clearly intended to remain at spawn, there is evidently no actual rule stating such…
  • Day 1: Scar and Joel steal the Table and plan to charge others for its use.
  • Day 2: Scar and Joel are both assigned to be Boogeymen for that day. Joel tries to lure other players into a trap by saying the Table is in the back of his cave, when in reality the Table is carried in his inventory. His traps fail and he eventually loses the Table when he is killed by Pearl after killing Scott in their base. Scar tries to intimidate the duo into giving him the Table, but they manage to drive him away long enough to sell the Table to Lizzie in exchange for two lives. Scar arrives at Lizzie's Fairy Forest soon after, but he doesn't find where Lizzie hid the Table and ends up getting tricked into following Pearl and Scott again.
  • Day 3: Lizzie and the Castle Alliance set up the Table within the Fairy Forest and plan to charge for its use just like Scar wanted to do, but Lizzie agrees to trade the Table to B.E.S.T. in exchange for enchanted diamond pants and a chestplate. B.E.S.T. returns the Table to its original place at spawn attempting to facilitate free use to the whole server once again, but fail to provide sufficient security which enables Scar to steal the Table a second time. Although he allows the people of the Southlands to use it free of charge for a limited time, he's very careful to keep them from taking it. They are successful in stealing Scar's horse, however, and try to create a Hostage Situation in which they demand that Scar give them the Table for the horse's safety. Scar defies them, reminding them that it was actually Grian's horse which Scar first stole from him, and holds onto the Table while the horse is dropped into lava.
  • Day 4: Bdubs gives Scar a life in exchange for the Table. B.E.S.T. opts to keep the Table in a secret location in the fort, but allow everyone to use it free of charge.
  • Day 5: Bdubs and Etho offer the Table to Scar in exchange for giving Bdubs a life which he accepts, however it turns out to be a scam and Etho, that day's Boogeyman, kills Scar right after the transaction and steals back the Table for B.E.S.T. Scar belatedly realises this, and tries to call on his new contract with Bdubs and Etho to get the table back but they've given it to Skizzleman who hasn't signed Scar's contract. Scar then goes to call on his new allies to get the table back from him, only to die while recruiting Grian (to the same trap he'd miraculously survived earlier that day) and end up as a Red name.
  • Day 6: Scar attacks B.E.S.T. for the Table but they restore him to Yellow and trade it to him for diamonds, as well as the promise that he'll go after Bdubs when he becomes Red again, a request from Tango who had just been killed by Bdubs, one of that day's Boogeymen.
  • Day 7: The Table now has lost most of its driving force with the server shifting to much more open warfare, only used for occasional enchanting with not much fighting surrounding it. It completely falls Out of Focus for the rest of the season.
• Poor Communication Kills: Much of the intra-faction conflict on the server is caused by a player refusing to inform their allies of their Boogeyman status, and subsequently resorting to betray their own faction-mate to rid themself of the curse. On the other hand, in the instances where a set of allies are honest about their status and refuse to kill anyone from their faction, things tend to end in much more civil terms.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The survivors of Day 7. They all stem from completely different factions (Scott, Pearl and Cleo from the Scottage, Ren from the Shadow Alliance, Etho from Team B.E.S.T. and Martyn from the Southlands), with varying amounts of grief between them, forced to set it aside and work together to make a final stand.
• Red Herring: The Scottage (Scott, Pearl and later Cleo's house) was built as a decoy, and was never actually lived in. Their real base was buried under the ground, with the house serving as a distraction for anyone coming to steal from them or grief them.
• Running Gag:
  • Mumbo repeatedly loses/gives away the spyglasses that Jimmy makes for him, solely to annoy Jimmy.
  • There's an amusing trend of people building secret rooms underground and behind walls with a respawn bed and a chest of supplies in case they die, and when they die and respawn there, discovering that they forgot to leave themselves a pickaxe to get out of the room, so they must slowly break their way out by hand.
  • In most Last Life episodes, Martyn and the other Southlanders like to watch Mumbo doing his intro from a distance, often through spyglasses, while Martyn does an impression of Mumbo.
  • When Scar changes into his purple wizard robes, several people ask why he's dressed as a grape, much to his annoyance.
• Shout-Out:
  • On Day 6, Scott tells Pearl and Cleo that he intends to ambush Jimmy and Lizzie for his Boogeyman kill. Upon leaving, Cleo calls after him, "Have fun storming the castle!"
  • Also on Day 6, five people decide to play a game of Red Light, Green Light in the style of Squid Game, meaning anyone caught moving gets shot (although a single arrow isn't fatal). Martyn even creates his thumbnail to have himself, Etho, Bdubs and Impulse in green jumpsuits and Grian dressed as the giant doll, and names the episode "Red Light, Green Light".
• Spooky Séance: Parodied during Day 8, with Grian and Joel trying to contact Bdubs' "ghost" (Bdubs in spectator mode), in which they succeed when Bdubs responds to their questions in the chat.
• Stating the Simple Solution: After Grian and Joel use a TNT minecart cannon to damage the Scottage on Day 5, Scott tells them they could have done more damage by just putting the TNT directly on the house and blowing it up. Grian and Joel's argument is that they wanted to act with flair.
• Sword of Damocles: After the Southlands collected three Wither skeleton skulls, they planned to use the threat of unleashing a Wither on the server to strongarm others into doing their bidding.
• Tempting Fate:
  • On Day 3, Scar refused to make a deal when the Southlands held his horse Yellow Snow hostage. Out of earshot of the Southlands, Scar confidently told his viewers that there was no way they'd hurt Yellow Snow... at the exact moment that Grian was dropping the horse into lava.
  • On Day 4, Bdubs trades a life to Scar for the Enchantment Table, bringing himself down to his yellow life. He promises his teammates at B.E.S.T. that he won't be turning Red... only to fall to his death at the end of the day and do just that.
  • On Day 7, Grian's wolf army constantly drops like flies, except for one wolf, who kept teleporting back to Grian no matter what. Grian calls this out, saying that that wolf never seems to give up. Literal seconds later, the wolf runs straight into a cactus and dies instantly.
• This Is My Side: Etho divides their shared castle between himself and Bdubs after Bdubs turns Red, by drawing a line of cobblestone down the middle of it.
• Trouble Magnet Gambit: Discussed by the Scottage faction when Pearl is the last one with a Dark Green name, where they contemplate giving one of Pearl's lives to a random player to make them a better target for the Reds.
• Wham Episode: A four-parter in Days 4, 5, 6 and 7:
  • Day 4: Grian, Cleo, and Bdubs all reach their last life, which deals crippling blows to their respective former factions (although technically Cleo had already left the Castle Alliance shortly before turning Red).
  • Day 5: Although the Red Lives are restored to Yellow, the Fairy Fort is burned to the ground, the Scottage is blown up, and the Southlands are betrayed by Jimmy, dealing a massive blow to their alliance. Scar is threatened into giving up his remaining lives to the Reds, putting him on Yellow, shortly before falling into a trap and becoming Red himself.
  • Day 6: There are not one, not two but six Boogeymen, three of whom are Boogeymen for the second time. After numerous kills throughout the day, there are six Red Lives, including the entirety of the Magical Mountain faction, and the Scottage is the only faction to survive with all its members still on Green. The Southlands are officially disbanded, and as the three remaining members torch their base to put their old alliance to rest, they remain victorious in that they now have three Wither skeleton skulls (although Martyn doesn't know that).
  • Day 7: The Scottage is submerged in lava by Lizzie and Joel, B.E.S.T.'s snow fortress is destroyed by a Wither spawned by the now-Red Grian and Impulse, six players are Killed Off for Real and the six remaining non-Reds are forced to band together to survive. Furthermore, the entire dynamic of the server shifts noticeably, where before the Reds were more focused on trapping and harassing Yellow and Green Names, they now shift to actively hunting them down. Every faction save for the Scottage is destroyed or disbanded as their members have either died, turned Red, or were forced to flee their homes after repeated attacks from the Reds. In the end, Scott and Cleo resort to gathering the few remaining non-Reds together (save Martyn, whom they couldn't find, and Pearl, who missed the second half of the day due to a power outage) and hiding them away in the Scottage's now-destroyed underground base. From this point forth, the Survivors spend most of their time looting the remains of abandoned bases, trying to fortify the few structures still left standing to protect themselves, and hiding away from the Reds to avoid being hunted down and slaughtered.

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