Deadly Distant Finale

This is a final chapter or episode of a work where the writer decides to explain how every single significant character in the series dies. Maybe death is a major theme of the work, or maybe it's just amusing. This only occurs well after the climax of the work and its major plotlines have been resolved. Oddly, this is almost never used as a Downer Ending and is more commonly used as way to demonstrate the beauty and preciousness of life.

A form of Distant Finale. Compare and contrast Kill'Em All in which most or all of the cast is killed at the climax of the work.

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

As an Ending Trope, Spoilers ahead may be unmarked. Beware.

Examples of Deadly Distant Finale include:

Anime

• In Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, we see the funeral of Leila, the mercenary working with D who feared that no one would mourn her death. She died as an old woman several decades after her adventures with D. She had many mourners (and at least one grandchild), much to the relief of D who promised her that he would place flowers on her grave and mourn her, if there were no one else around to do so.
• Le Chevalier d'Eon does this for the few main characters who survive.

Comics

• In the Marvel Universe, The End and Earth/Universe/Paradise X are all basically just comicbook/graphic novel embodiments of this for the whole Marvel universe.
• Frank Miller's Martha Washington Dies does this for the entire Martha Washington franchise, skipping ahead 77 years after the previous Martha Washington installment to show Martha dropping dead at 100 after giving an inspirational speech to a crowd while her granddaughter is present.
• Jonah Hex from The DCU was given a Deadly Distant Finale (set in the year 1904) in the Jonah Hex Spectacular one-shot. His death was based off of that of Wild Bill Hickok, but Hickok was never stuffed and mounted in a ridiculous Roy Rogers style costume afterward.
  • This is a bit of a strange case, in that the Jonah Hex Spectacular came out in 1978... And the regular Jonah Hex book lasted until 1985, running for about 75 more issues after the Spectacular.
• Y: The Last Man does this, covering five years in the first 59 issues and then jumping ahead sixty years for the final chapter, where a clone of Yorick Brown meets the titular hero, now a bitter old man who outlived every other major character in the series and is now committed following a suicide attempt on his 86th birthday. The meeting sparks several depressing flashbacks, crossing off Yorick's traveling companions one by one, as he shares some poignant wisdom with his carbon copy before unexpectedly departing (the room).

Literature

• In the book The True Meaning of Smekday (yes), the book ends with a newspaper clipping reporting the main character's death. It's actually a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, seeing as she was over a hundred and outlived by a massive clan of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and her alien companion.
• The final chapter of The World According To Garp by John Irving.
• Watership Down
• In The Accidental Time Machine, but with a twist that gives new meaning to the rest of the story.
• The Distant Finale to the Modesty Blaise novels in Cobra Trap.
• The Appendices to The Lord of the Rings tell you what happens to all of the main characters. They don't all die, though - several of them sail to Eldamar.
  • The mortal characters who sail west are still going to die. Being in the vicinity of the Undying Lands doesn't make one immortal. In fact the Silmarillion implies that it may actually make them age and die faster. Elves, of course, can be expected to live on until the end of the world, as can Gandalf, who is one of the Maiar.
  • True, but it is also implied that Bilbo, Frodo and Sam are granted a special pardon for having been Ringbearers, that Legolas and Galadriel petitioned for Gimli to live (and Shadowfax was Gandalf's horse), so they all had some powerful arguments going for them. Which is not to say that they became immortal, even if keeping mortals alive in Valinor could be done, apparently: Tuor (though he was allegedly counted among the Noldor upon arrival) is one case, Ar-Pharazôn and the Númenorean armada being imprisoned under fallen hills is another. On the other hand, that probably is a Fate Worse Than Death.
    • They were given permission to travel there. The Undying Lands were closed to mortals and were removed from the circles of the world when mortals tried to conquer death by conquering the Lands. The trauma of being a Ringbearer is such that the Valar grant them permission to land there as a recompense. Gimli is only allowed to go (and it's not entirely certain that he did; the Red Book admits it is only a rumor) because Galadriel herself acts as his sponsor. If he did go, he would be the one and only Dwarf to have set foot there. But Bilbo, Frodo, and Gimli would eventually die. Note that this is not necessarily a bad thing. In the Tolkien mythology, the Valar, Maiar, and the Elves will grow weary of this world long before they leave it. That's the true Distant Deadly Finale of the Lord of the Rings.
• The end of Stephen King's novella The Body has one where the narrator reveals the deaths of the other three main characters.
  • Stephen King also uses this in The Green Mile, where the sole survivor relates the deaths of every other character in the book as John Coffey is sent to the chair. Due to being Cursed with Awesome by Coffey, he ends up outliving all of his family and friends.
• Forsyth's The Dogs of War has an epilogue which shows how Kurt Semmler, Langarotti, and Cat Shannon all die.
• The last chapter of Tuck Everlasting takes place about 100 years after the previous one. The main character chose not to drink the water of immortality; the immortal Tucks discover this when they see her grave.
• Dumas' Vicomte Of Braggelone, probably better known to English-speakers as The Man in the Iron Mask, ends with a greatly aged D'Artagnan getting blown up by a cannonball.
• Jon Cleary used this in at least two novels, The Golden Sabre and High Road to China. The prologue to High Road already established this would happen, as the story is stated to be based on an unpublished memoir by the male lead, titled An Adventure. The epilogue's final sentence, after describing how he was found dead shortly after his wife's death, is, "The adventure was finally over."

Film

• The Bucket List ends with the ashes of Jack Nicholson's character Edward Cole, who beat cancer and lived another thirty years after that, being put on a mountaintop (illegally) next to those of his friend who failed to beat the cancer.
• Death Becomes Her ends with the funeral of Ernest Menville, who had refused to take the immortality potion and instead went on to lead a fulfilling life.
• The Godfather Part III ends 18 years after the movie's finale with Michael Corleone dying alone on an abandoned plantation, after losing his daughter and becoming estranged from his friends.
• Titanic
• Legends of the Fall: Tristan gets killed by a bear in 1963, after witnessing all of his remaining family members die of old age.

Live Action TV

• The last episode of Six Feet Under did this, in an montage set to Sia's "Breathe Me".
• Band of Brothers ends with Winters describing the lives of a few of the men after WWII. Since the series was made over fifty years after the war had ended, this meant explaining how a lot of them had died.
  • Some of the Easy Company veterans who were alive at the time of the series broadcast have since died, including Dick Winters and Carwood Lipton.
  • The book on which the series is based provided one of these for every member of Easy Company, including members who ended up being secondary characters in the adaptation. Most of them got as close to Happily Ever After as anyone does in Real Life, with the most prominent exception being Captain Sobel, who went through a decades-long Humiliation Conga that culminated in a Lonely Funeral.
• Babylon 5 has two. The fourth season finale extends out to about a million years after the series and everyone has presumably died a couple segments in (100 years later). The series finale goes about twenty years and deals with how Sheridan passes on.
  • His death is left ambiguous, though, as he sees Lorien once again before simply disappearing, implying he simply ascended and went beyond the rim.
• Power Rangers RPM does this for the Power Rangers series as a whole, taking place Twenty Minutes Into the Future, after 99% of humanity has been wiped out by killer robots. The species as a whole rebuilds by 3000 for Power Rangers Time Force, but that isn't very much consolation for those humans not lucky enough to have reached Boston Corinth.
  • Power Rangers Samurai reveals that RPM takes place in an alternate universe. When RPM Ranger Red visits the Samurai team through a wormhole, he doesn't demorph, for fear of being unable to breathe.
• Slightly varied in the finale of Lost: we don't see how everyone dies, but we see what happens to them after that.

Video Games

• The Distant Finale of BioShock (series) in the good ending shows the main character on his death bed, with the Little Sisters (who are now adult women) clasping their hands over his in a show of love for the man who saved them from a Fate Worse Than Death and gave them normal lives.
• The Playstation and DS ports of Chrono Trigger feature an anime cutscene showing the fall of the kingdom and corruption of the Masamune, leading up for Chrono Cross.
• The epilogue of Marathon Infinity is set at the last quantum moment before the heat death of the universe.
• The endings of each of the Black Isle/Obsidian Fallout games (Namely 1, 2, and New Vegas) is a slide show of this for the major factions and a few main characters. While not every major character is covered, endings like that of Broken Hills (in where even the good ending has the town's uranium mine running out, causing the town to be abandoned) fit this trope to a T. Oddly enough, the player character is excluded from the montage.

Web Original

• Teased repeatedly throughout the run of Bob and George, and finally shown in a somber death-by-death monologue that ends with the characters having faked all the previous events and retiring to Acapulco.

Western Animation

• The end of the Beavis and Butthead episode "Crying" shows the titular characters as old people living in a rest home, with Butt-Head still making fun of Beavis crying. Butt-Head dies, but Beavis was not upset about it.

Beavis: I'm serious. I was not crying, Butt-Head. I'm not crying now, either. (rams Butt-Head's dead body with his chair) Butthole.

• In the finale of The World of David the Gnome, the titular gnome and his wife die of old age.