The 10 Most Embarrassing Fictional Deaths of all Time

Most Klingons dream of dying gloriously in battle and I think we can mostly agree with the sentiment. If you have to take the eternal dirt nap it’d be nice to go with dignity and purpose, with your death somehow making a difference to the world. Well, here are ten fictional characters who totally didn’t die like that.

 

10. Boba Fett is Taken out by a Blind Han

Throughout Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Boba Fett is built up as the ultimate badass bounty hunter, and he looks so cool that we don’t even question the lack of evidence backing this up. But when Boba Fett finally takes part in the action all he does is fly with his awesome jet pack, get knocked around by Luke, then get accidentally pinged by a blind Han Solo and knocked into the sarlaac pit never to be seen (in film canon) again. Here’s the clip to refresh your memory in case your denial circuits have blocked it out.

 

 

It’s one of the poorest moments of badassery in film history, making Boba Fett look incompetent and making Han just look lucky. But hey, if this is the galaxy’s greatest bounty hunter I’m going to do just fine with my space crimes business.

 

9. Cyclops Whines and Dies Off-screen

If you didn’t see X-Men 3, I’m a little jealous but you also (kind of) missed seeing the disastrously embarrassing fate of Cyclops. Distraught over Jean’s death, Cyclops goes to Alkali Lake to have an angst scream and shoot his eye beams into the river because angst. Then Jean shows up, kisses him and then he maybe explodes? We’re never really sure as Cyclops dies off-screen and basically alone since the woman killing him clearly isn’t the Jean that he knows.

 

But at least he gets a really touching funeral … oh, his death is basically never mentioned or mourned throughout the entire film. Yet another excellent reason this movie got deleted from continuity.

 

8. Green Arrow Explodes Instead of Having his Arm Cut Off

 

During a complicated plot involving eco-terrorists, Oliver Queen found himself on a plane with his arm trapped in a bomb aimed for Metropolis that would detonate if he released his hand. Now this is the kind of death most heroes dream about, sacrificing yourself to save thousands of people, and dammit, Ollie was going to die that way whether it made sense or not. See this death isn’t so much a noble sacrifice as it is a pointless suicide since Superman was standing right next to Oliver at the time and offered to cut off his arm but Oliver refused to let Superman “cripple him” and decided he’d rather blow up, which he did.

 

But maybe Ollie made the right choice, after all, how could an archer ever go back to superheroing after losing an arm? That’s just ridiculous, right? You’d be totally crippled like he said. Hero career, over!

7. The Warg that ran off a cliff in Two Towers

 

So not every embarrassing death has to involve a superhero or a supposedly badass bounty hunter and I’m including this warg because he bothers the hell out of me.

 

Watch this scene (starting around 2 minutes) and try to figure out what the hell this warg was thinking.

 

 

Aragorn jumps on the thing’s back to kill an orc but gets his hand caught in the warg’s collar. Now with no rider and a ranger hanging off of him this warg proves he is the dumbest animal to ever live and keeps running at top speed directly off a cliff. And not even one of those cliffs that jumps out and surprises you, no, a really obvious cliff that he was looking right at. In fact, the warg falls off at the cliff’s farthest point. It gave itself as much space and time it possibly could to come to a stop and not die but instead it went right the hell off, taking them both over the edge.

 

 

Dumbass warg.

 

6. Captain Kirk has a Bridge Fall On Him

 

 

Captain Kirk fought Klingons, Romulans, Khan and every other “on” in the galaxy but he met his final end when the two greatest Starfleet captains in history teamed up to fight one guy with a phaser and Kirk ends up having a bridge dropped on him. Thank goodness the Andorian slave girls never saw that.

 

Even 18 years after the movie came out Malcolm McDowell still talks about how “They should have given [Kirk] a glorious death” and I can’t agree more.

 

5. A Green Lantern is killed by a Yellow Truck

The great thing about the Green Lantern Corp is that anyone can be a GL, no matter what race, species or size, like Ch’p here, a squirrel-like Lantern that was friends with John Stewart and went with him to investigate a city called Mosaic World. All was not well in Mosaic World though and Ch’p, a creature who has fought aliens and monsters and was currently wearing one of the most powerful weapons in the galaxy, was killed when he was run over by a truck.

“But the truck was yellow!” you are perhaps shouting at your screen, referring to the fact that Green Lantern rings can’t affect yellow objects. Well, you’re right, they can’t, and most of that truck is yellow, but the wheels that ran him over are clearly black so unless Ch’p suffered from a strange form of color blindness, he really should have seen this coming.

 

4. All the Aliens in Signs are Idiots

All right, I tried not to include too many bad guys on this list, but seriously, this is so much worse than the warg from Two Towers. At least wargs are dumb animals, the aliens in Signs were sophisticated beings capable of galactic space travel! They were smart and sentient and yet even though they must have known that water reacts to their skin like acid, this incredibly advanced alien species still invaded a planet that is 70% water WITHOUT wearing space suits, or even clothes! They were naked. Stepping on grass with dew on it would have seriously wounded them.

In the end their invasion was defeated because we had their greatest weakness just lying around everywhere and threw it at them. To put this into some perspective imagine if Superman flew all the way across the galaxy, found the planet with the absolute most Kryptonite on it as possible, and decided, this one, this is the one I shall rule and there’s no way the population could ever stop me.

 

And then was surprised when he got murdered with Kryptonite.

3. Padme Dies of Heartbreak

None of you need this recapped for you but here it is. Padme finds out that the man she loves and has literally zero chemistry with has gone to the dark side, gets force choked by him and is so injured in her soul that she dies.

 

Now here’s the exact quote from a medical droid explaining to Obi-Wan why Padme is dying:

 

“Medically she is completely healthy. For reasons we can’t explain we are losing her. We don’t know why, she has lost the will to live.”

 

I can’t stress enough that this is a medical droid talking. A robot doctor diagnosed his patient as having lost the will to live, like that was a real thing, and nobody questioned that? No one said “hey Robot Doctor, that’s not a diagnosis, that’s a feeling you’re having for some reason, maybe take another look, there’s probably a bleed you missed somewhere.”

You know what Obi-Wan, in a situation like this it’s all right to ask for a second opinion. If a robot ever diagnosed a friend of mine as dying because they lost the will to live, I’d tell that robot it was wrong because that’s not a thing and to get a real doctor down here to keep my friend from dying. But I’m no Jedi, what do I know?

 

I just hope no one tells her kids that her cause of death was literally losing the will to live as soon as they were born.

2. The 6th Doctor Bumps his Head on the TARDIS Console, Dies

When Colin Baker was fired from the role of the Doctor the BBC was so ready to get rid of him that they didn’t even write him a real death scene, instead they started the new season with the Doctor in mid-regeneration after dying from … something. Seriously, we never find out exactly what killed him, they just open up with him on the floor of the TARDIS regenerating.

 

 

Baker didn’t come back to film this flimsy excuse of a death so for the regeneration scene the BBC put a blond wig on new Doctor Sylvester McCoy and started off his run with the 6th Doctor dying from either falling off an exercise bicycle, or having banged his head on the TARDIS console or really any other number of things that might have happened as the death is entirely off screen. Hell, maybe he made a pass at his companion and she shanked him. We literally have no idea.

 

1. Iron Fist is Killed in His Sleep by a Child

 

So let me tell you about the time that Danny Rand, the Immortal Iron Fist, kung-fu master and living weapon, was accidentally murdered by a child.

 

The kid was named Bobby Wright and he was a Shazam-like superhero who transformed into an adult when he used his powers. But those same powers were also killing him so Iron Fist spent two days straight at the kid’s bedside using his chi energy to keep Bobby alive until Mr. Fantastic could find a cure, which he did. So, happy ending right? Let’s drink margaritas and have a party! Hahahaha, no.

Exhausted from using his life force to keep Bobby alive, Iron Fist takes what will become the longest nap of his life in the kid’s hospital room. When Bobby wakes up he’s alone and in pain from the treatment so transforms into Captain Hero and accidentally kills Iron Fist in his sleep.

 

Bobby then turns into energy and disappears, leaving Power Man to find the mangled dead body of his best friend and be accused of his murder. And yeah, that sucks for Power Man, but at least in terms of Iron Fist’s reputation it means no one knows that the Living Weapon was killed by a kid’s temper tantrum.

 

 

Did I miss any fictional deaths even more cringe-worthy than these ones? Tell me in the comments.