One-Way Trip

A hero is in a tight spot and determined to go through with The Plan. Both the audience and other characters wonder how they plan to get out of it. That's when the hero drops The Reveal: they'd expected to have to make a Heroic Sacrifice all along, because Someone Has to Die, so escape wasn't necessarily part of the plan.

Often, this hero isn't alone either; they've taken others along with them who were assuming the hero had some plan up his sleeve to allow them to survive. In this case it's usually clear that the stakes are so high it's hardly a Moral Event Horizon for the hero to sacrifice his companions for the greater good. In fact, it's usually considered a small price to pay for saving thousands of other lives. When the others find out, they typically are shocked and horified, and quickly realize they've got three options:

1. Refuse to cooperate, in which case they will likely become the Doomed Contrarian.
2. Reply 'I'm (gulp) OK with that.'
3. Take a Third Option.

Can lead to a Justified Deus Ex Machina in which The Cavalry plucks the Badass in Distress out of danger at the last instant.

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

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

Examples of One-Way Trip include:

Anime and Manga

• Done subtly in Code Geass.
  • After being kicked out of The Federation, Lelouch takes over The Empire in order to set up a Self-Disposing Villain / My Death Is Just the Beginning scheme.
  • He also pulls a more traditional one when he enters the World of C with his father then blows up the only door, trapping themselves there.
• In Busou Renkin, Kazuki punts himself and Victor to the Moon, in the knowledge that there will be no rescue.

Film

• Deep Impact:

Mark: How do we set the nukes inside the comet and get out before they blow?
Orin Monash: We don't.

• Executive Decision:

Kurt Russel: 'We're not gonna make it!
Stephen Segal: 'You will' (pushes him to safety and falls)

• The Thing. An alien capable of duplicating and replacing people infests an Antarctic camp. If it makes it out into the world, humanity is doomed. After it's apparently destroyed, the two survivors (one of whom may be an alien replacement) talk it over.

Childs: The explosions set the temperatures up all over the camp. But it won't last long though.
MacReady: When these fires go out, neither will we.
Childs: How will we make it?
MacReady: Maybe we shouldn't.

• In The Abyss, Bud Brigman uses up too much of his oxygen getting to the nuke and disarming it to return to the undersea habitat. He even uses the phrase "I knew it was a one way trip".
  • In a subversion, he's saved by the aliens and makes it anyway.
• In Monsters vs. Aliens, there was only enough fuel in the jetpacks for the monsters to get to the Big Bad's UFO.
• From Midway: a Japanese sailor stops the pilot attempting to board the aircraft he's working on: 'Sir, there's a hole in the right fuel tank!' Pilot: 'Did you fill the left one?'
• From Star Wars: "Escape is not his plan. I must face him alone."

Literature

• In The Return of the King Frodo's only concern is that they have enough supplies to reach Mount Doom. Samwise mutters that they might be wanting to make it back as well.
• The book Emergence had a case of this where the heroine could go up to a satellite and save everyone, but had no way back. The third option is that some people came to stop her, and they had a spaceship which she could use to get back. I no longer remember enough details to describe this accurately....
  • More accurately, the only way to reach the planetkiller bomb in high orbit is use a Space Shuttle stripped of everything nonessential, including its wings and protective tiles. She gets out of it by disarming the bomb and piloting its reentry vehicle back to Earth.
• Played with in Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets. The titular Chamber is accessed via a sewage pipe, and the characters debate how to reverse the trip. Luckily for them, Dumbledore's Phoenix is strong enough to carry them all out. And when they revisit the place in Deathly Hallows, they just bring brooms. Similarly, in the first book, the end-of-book mission required the trio to drop down a hole with no idea whether there'd be a way back (there was).
• In the book Angels & Demons, when the camerlengo boards the helicopter with the antimatter bomb, Langdon follows him aboard, expecting him to drop the bomb where it can explode safely (such as in a quarry, or far out to sea). Unfortunately, it turns out that the camerlengo is going nowhere except straight up—and there's only one parachute...

Live Action TV

• On Stargate SG-1., our heroes have just tossed a grenade down to the engine core of a Goa'uld ship to destroy it. O'Neill asks what they do now. Bra'tac says "Now we die." O'Neill immediately counters with "Well, that's a bad plan!"
• This happens on Doctor Who all the time. An example from the new series would be: In The Doctor Dances, Jack leaves earth with the bomb expecting it to go off in his spaceship, he can't escape before it detonates. Then The Doctor and Rose rescue him with the TARDIS.
• The finale of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica had the titular ship going on a mission to rescue Hera from the Cylons. The area where the Cylons were was filled with dangerous obstacles and it was the Cylon homeworld, meaning they'd do everything they could to protect it. Adama even says in his Rousing Speech that it's likely to be a one-way-trip. Luckily, thanks to Starbuck, they find coordinates to get themselves out and even find Earth.

Video Games

• In Mass Effect 2, the central mission involves going through a mass relay that no one's ever gone through and come back from. Everyone on the team goes into it knowing there may be no coming back, although several of them believe you can pull off a miracle. After the jump, Anyone Can Die, and the One-Way Trip nature of the mission hits home when the Normandy is disabled in battle and crash lands on the Collector base.
  • If you make the right choices, they're right.
• About halfway through Final Fantasy X, Tidus finds out this is the case for every High Summoner and at least one Guardian for each of them.

Web Comics

• Order of the Stick:

O'Chul: Escape had not really crossed my mind. here (contains potential spoilers)

• Subverted in Homestuck. Rose's plan to defeat the now omnipotent Big Bad is to take a session-destroying bomb to the source of his power; she says to Dave that "she is not coming back"... and Hussie cuts off for the day. It turns out that Rose was referring to her dreamself.

Western Animation

• Batman does this in Justice League by crashing the Watchtower... manually but escapes.

Real Life

• Occasionally comes up as a strategy in warfare, either due to limited range of vehicles, or because the scale of destruction means that there won't be a safe haven for them to return to once they launch their attack:
  • The Doolittle Raid in World War II wasn't strictly supposed to be this, with the plan being for very stripped-down US Army B-25 Mitchell medium bombers carrying extra fuel to launch from Navy aircraft carriers, bomb targets in Japan, and then land at friendly airfields in China. The Navy task force was discovered a day before they planned to launch, forcing the Army bombers to launch several hundred miles farther away from Japan than they intended, and most of their intended airfields in China were captured by the Japanese. Several bombers ended up crash landing in the sea or in China, and one managed to make it to the neutral Soviet Union,^[1] where the crew was interred for some time. The motivation for this raid? The Americans badly needed a victory to rally morale, due to a string of losses in the first few months of the war. As a side benefit, the Japanese, thinking the Americans had a land base within range of the Home Islands, ended up diverting considerable resources to their defense, years before the Americans would be able to launch any real attacks.
  • Due to the likely results of a full-scale nuclear exchange, most nuclear strike-related missions, both by the bombers and their escorts and support aircraft, are predicted to likely be this, either because some earlier bombers wouldn't have the range to hit targets in Russia and make it safely to friendly territory, or simply because there would be few to no intact airfields they could land at after the nukes were launched by both sides. Nevermind if you got caught by the enemy's substantial defenses on the way.

1. ↑ Though the Russians were fighting the Germans alongside the Americans and British, they were neutral in the war with Japan.