One Last Smoke

The real reason smoking kills.

So you've got a character who's dying. He's had a good run, and now that he's being let go you want a way to give him that one, perfect send-off that will cement him in the viewers' minds for the rest of the series to come. Not just a few words will do, but something defining to his character that can only be done by his character.

What would be more fitting that to have him do the habit he's been doing all series long, but give this one the most flair? Usually the object in question will be just out of reach, leaving a nearby comrade to hand them the item of importance as a dramatic good bye. If no such comrade is nearby, it's Bittersweet Ending. If he's not mortally wounded and can still stand, there'll probably be a One Liner involved or even a smile.

The object itself can manifest as many things: a book he was always reading ("Hmm, last page..."), a picture of a loved one ("At least I got to see your face..."), or some kind of music player with a simple tune to encourage the mood of the scene ("I always hated this song...").

Most often though, it's a cigarette, because Smoking Is Cool. This comes with the bonus of being able to see the character's final breath, and the added symbolism of the cigarette dying out. A character who has previously quit smoking may take this opportunity to smoke his Last Unsmoked Cigarette.

Clever heroes will often use this as a diversion by taking advantage of the villain's vain pity to escape certain doom. Naturally, this is listed on item 14 of The Evil Overlord List.

Under most cases, the character must be Killed Off for Real for the trope to be played straight. Examples involving the character's survival are a subversion. Compare with the much more time-friendly The Last Dance. See also Last Request.

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

Examples of One Last Smoke include:

Anime and Manga

• Kato Yue does this in the Angel Sanctuary manga. He stands at heaven's gate to complete one of the many Heroic Sacrifices of the series, but not before he lights up one last time.
• In Ai no Kusabi Star-Crossed Lovers Iason Mink and Riki share a Last Kiss in the form of touching their cigarettes together before dying.
• In Mahou Sensei Negima, Takamichi's master Gat Å� asked his student for one last cigarette before he passed away from a still unexplained injury.
• Cowboy Bebop: In "Black Dog Serenade", Jet's former partner asks for a cigarette before his death. His last words are, "I couldn't quit smoking after all."
• Asuma in Naruto.
• Sanji of One Piece when he was defeated by Ghin. But it was actually a deliberate subversion, because he spat the glowing cigarette back into Ghin's face to distract him and evaded his final blow, continuing the fight.
  • He does this again before being hit by Eneru's Lightning.
• Occurs in the Trigun anime, Wolfwood prepares one last cigarette as he's dying, inhales once, and then drops it when he remembers Milly playfully scolding him for smoking.
• Subverted in Darker than Black as he's dying following a Heroic Sacrifice, November 11 lights up as per his usual Power At a Price. However, given that he hates smoking, he decides that he can forgo this just once and throws the cigarette away, and it is put out by his blood.
  • Also subverted with Huang who is convinced to stop smoking and take care of his health shortly before he dies. It's unclear whether or not Hei knew he was dying at the time he gave this advice.
• Arguement could be made that Saito from Rurouni Kenshin does this (or rather, subverts it by not dying) right before his apparent death. at the end of the Juppongatana Arc.
• Shogo Kawada asks Noriko to light him one last cigarette as he lies dying in Battle Royale
• In Death Note, Matt did this. It was exceedingly tragic.
  • This is still a subversion though: he had no idea he was going to die and just happened to have a cigarette in his mouth. Although it's a wonder he could keep a cigarette in his mouth while being gunned down.
• Lee Linho From R.O.D the TV, coupled with Redemption Equals Death.
• In The Animatrix segment "A Detective Story," the titular detective Ash does this when faced with the conclusion of "the case to end all cases."
• In the last episode of Ayashi no Ceres, Kagami stays behind on the ship while everyone else escapes. The last thing he does before the ship explodes and sinks is take out the pictures of Ceres that he always kept with him since childhood.
• In Wolf's Rain Hubb tries to smoke a cigar as he's dying. It's meaningful because his ex-wife Cher, who had just fallen in love with him again, had always wanted him to be "manlier".
• In Hellsing, Walter is already smoking while the room around him burns down. He knows he's failed to do the only thing he really wanted to do, he knows he's done for and he accepts it. Just before the flames engulf him, he smiles, says goodbye to Integra and flicks his last cigarette into the fire.

Comics

• In The Books of Magic, while visiting the future in which the boy lead has become the Antichrist, the characters encounter a dying John Constantine (the blond British guy the one mentioned below under movies was loosely based on) fallen in battle, and he gets the kid to light him a last cigarette. Does not turn a hair at the arch-enemy appearing as the kid he was back when they first met, just provides exposition, smokes, and has an Obi-Wan Moment.
• Parodied in one Sturmtruppen strip: cigarettes aren't avaible because the Colonnel is trying to stop smoking, so he has to chew bubblegum instead.
• After betraying the Evronian Empire,scientist Ghortan crashes on Earth and is found by Paperinik.However,he has lost his tank which contains the emotional energy his species use as nutrishment.Knowing he has little time left,he made a last request:

Do you have a good book?

Fairy Tales

• The Tinder Box by Hans Christian Andersen has the solder escape death by asking for One Last Smoke - the titular magic tinder box is able to make three dogs appear and save him.
• A similar ending happens in The Brothers Grimm tale The Blue Flame.
• One Jewish folktale involves a kabaalist who had captured Satan and had him in chains. The devil asked for some snuff, and the hero took pity on him and agreed. The devil proceded to light the snuff on fire and use it to break his chains. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.

Film

• In Fant ômas se déchaîne, commissioner Juve managed to kill three guards and escape by asking for one last cigar, and offering some to two of said guards: Those cigars hid single-shot guns...
• In Independence Day before Hiller (Will Smith) and Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) blow up the Alien mothership, they both smoke cigars because they think they're going to die anyways.
• Subverted at the end of Lethal Weapon 2: Riggs asks Murtaugh to get his cigarrettes out of his pocket then tells him to throw them away. Those things'll kill ya.
• Sophie, her brother, and their friend share a last smoke before they're all beheaded in Sophie Scholl – The Final Days.
• In Scary Movie, The Stoner Shorty gets shot in the lungs. Smoke comes out and he tries to breathe it in.

Shorty: Cindy... I think they got me in the lungs... you wanna hit this shit? (dies)

• The Good the Bad And The Ugly. Blondie a.k.a. the Good gives some dying young soldier a drag from his cigar. It is not some special request, though; merely something nice you can easily do for a dying person you do not know personally.
• This used in The Core, with the guy who'd been taping his observations the whole time. He started to smoke and use the recorder, then realized that nobody was ever going to get the recorder (duh), laughed and threw it away. He died cool.
• When Two-Face falls to his death in Batman Forever, he still holds out his hand for his silver dollar to fall into.
• In Heathers, JD lights up right before he goes boom.
• The Usual Suspects starts with a heavily wounded Dean Keaton approached by Keyser Soze, who, despite being a monster, patiently waits for Keaton to enjoy his last drags before shooting him dead.
• The recent^[when?] BBC remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps played with this: The hero looks like he's about to get shot, and asks if he can have a smoke. The German spies holding him captive say no. He then eyes up the cigarette smoking in the ashtray, looking like he's going to do something with it. He doesn't.
• In the James Bond film You Only Live Twice Bond requests a last cigarette:

Blofeld: The firing power inside my crater is enough to annihilate a small army. You can watch it all on TV. It's the last program you're likely to see.
Bond: Well, if I'm gonna be forced to watch television, may I smoke?
Blofeld: Yes. Give him his cigarettes. It won't be the nicotine that kills you, Mr. Bond.

• • Of course, the cigarettes are Tanaka gadgets containing a small rocket Bond uses to take out his guards and save the day.
  • In the comedy Casino Royale 1967 Woody Allen as Jimmy Bond has a last cigarette in front of a Latin American firing squad ("I'm gonna give it up any day now") - it's an impact bomb he throws at the squad. He climbs the wall laughing in triumph - and lands on the other side...in front of another firing squad.
  • In From Russia with Love Bond, at gunpoint and about to be shot by Red Grant, asks for a last cigarette, offering to pay for it - to get Grant to open up his booby-trapped attache case
• The Crow—Officer Albrecht is badly wounded, and Eric helps him light a cigarette, repeating the same line ("Those things'll kill you") he said when he first saw Albrecht smoke. Subverted—it's a near thing, but Albrecht survives.
• Played with, subverted, and double subverted in a complicated way in the 1998 film Fallen. The main character, played by Denzel Washington, is cornered in a remote cabin by the villain, a body-hopping demon possessing the body of his best friend. Denzel shoots him and in the process dooms himself, since as soon as the guy dies the demon will be free to possess the protagonist himself. Denzel takes a last smoke as the villain dies in front of him (first subversion)... only to reveal that he has poisoned the cigarettes, leaving the demon nowhere to run since there are no other humans close enough for him to possess. Death by One Last Smoke! (Second subversion.) Except the villain gets away and the hero doesn't. So it really was his last smoke. Third subversion?
• Constantine played with the trope by having John try for a smoke after his death, but being unable to light the cigarette because he'd hit the tendons while slitting his wrists.
• Played straight in a surprisingly touching moment at the end of Shaun of the Dead, when Shaun leaves Ed to be eaten by zombies, placing a cigarette in his mouth and lighting it for him. Played with a moment later with a fart joke.
• Appears in The Mask, of all movies. And it's done between the Big Bad and one of his henchmen.
• In the Resident Evil Live Action Movies, Carlos' Heroic Sacrifice finishes with him finding a cigarette and lighting up while the camera pans out, showing his vehicle surrounded by zombies.
  • You forgot to mention that the gigantic truck is also filled with a sack full of lit dynamite...
    • That might not have been a cigarette...it's a hand-roll that might be a rather fat joint, but Carlos was earlier bitching about the lack of cigarettes in the post-apocalyptic world. Your Mileage May Vary.
• Marcel lights up one last cigarette in Inglourious Basterds right before he uses it to light up the flammable film and burn the theater and everyone in it down, likely sacrificing himself in the process.
  • "There's a special rung in hell for those who waste good scotch."
• Used as a delaying tactic in a Three Stooges short. The boys are granted one last smoke, whereupon Curly pulls out a cigar the size of a horse's leg. (The firing squad falls asleep before the stogie can be finished.)
• Parodied in Ernest Goes to Jail. As he's about to be executed, Ernest is offered a blindfold or cigarette.

"No, I'm afraid of the dark, and cigarettes will kill 'ya."

• In The Naked Jungle, two workers are given cigars before their "hanging." After they receive a last-minute reprieve, they are seen happily puffing away.
• The (in)famous Sicilian Scene in True Romance; when Dennis Hopper's character realizes that the only way to avoid torture (followed by a possible disclosure of his son's location) was to provoke the consigkiere into killing him on the spot, he finally asks for a cigarette (even though initially he refused when he was offered one)

Literature

• In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Mitty is leaning against a wall smoking a cigarette, then enters a Dream Sequence where a firing squad is ready to execute him.
• At the end of Ai No Kusabi, Iason and Riki share a poisoned cigarette and a Last Kiss before everything explodes around them.
• In Discworld, executions have been referred to as something along the lines of "a short cigarette in the sunlight". They give you a nice white wall to stand up against, to.
• The scene in Matthew Reilly's Ice Station where the British soldiers are about to kill Schofield by lowering him headfirst into a pool of killer whales. The commander gives him a last request- "A blindfold? Cigarette? Shot of brandy?" and Schofield makes a last minute plan, opts for the cigarette, and uses it to set fire to the detonator cord entwined in his handcuffs, and then he escapes, kills them all and becomes a legend for killing all the bad guys and blowing everything up, classic Scarecrow style..
• Averted in a Ukrainian short story about a cossack being tried by the Poles. As he is facing the gallows, the judge offers him a last request. However, instead of a smoke, the man asks that he be allowed to dance a hopak (cossack dance). Everybody is confused and begs him to opt for a smoke instead. Turns out, it's a trick. As he is finishing his dance with a big jump, the boards that have been cut the night before give way, and he falls into a freshly-dug tunnel, his escape having been planned by the fellow cossacks.

Live Action TV

• In the second season of Life On Mars, Sam Tyler escapes death by asking for one last cigarette.
• On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, there are two examples in "Our Man Bashir", a James Bond spoof.
  • The villain Falcon (the image of Chief O'Brien) grants agent Komoninoff (Kira) and Bashir one last kiss before he shoots them. Bashir proceeds to remove her earring while they kiss and tosses it to the floor to make it explode, distracting Falcon and his minions long enough to knock them out and escape.
  • Bashir and Garak are strapped to a giant laser. Bashir's last request is for Dr. Honey Bare (Jadzia Dax's body) to let her hair down. The holodeck has turned her into a mousy scientist, so she's very shy, but she does it. This is enough seduction for her to slip him the key. Quoth Garak: "Kiss the girl; get the key. They never taught me that in the Obsidian Order."
• On Highlander the Series, when Hugh Fitzcairn is captured by The Hunters, he asks if he gets a last request prior to his beheading. When the lead Hunter gruffly demands to know what it is, Hugh asks for "a last smoke of my pipe." The Hunter considers it for a moment before denying him, though this buys Duncan the last few momemnts he needs to get to the scene and rescue his friend.
• Appears on Battlestar Galactica Reimagined at the end of the Mutiny arc. After the mutiny fails, Felix Gaeta is seen smoking a cigar and having a friendly conversation with Gaius Baltar, talking about the aspirations he had while growing up. In the next shot, he is facing a firing squad.
• Spoofed in an early episode of Friends, in which Joey is preparing for an audition in which the character practices this trope; he coughs after one smoke, and Chandler shows him the ropes, leading to a relapse in his addiction.
• Scrubs has the terminal patient of the week asking for one last beer.
  • He originally wanted a last smoke. He chuckled asking what the doctors thought would happen. JD commented that it could ignite the nearby oxygen tank, resulting in a huge explosion.
• Eliot and Hardison use this excuse during one episode of Leverage while held at gunpoint at an anti-IRS camp. It was later used as a fuse for a makeshift bomb.
• Beautifully and wordlessly evoked in the episode of Mad Men where Pete follows through on his threat to tell Bert Cooper what he knows about Don's past (that he deserted the army during the Korean War by switching dog tags with the real, dead Don Draper). As Cooper slowly gets up from his desk and walks around to where Pete and Don are standing, Don, expecting the worst at this point, faces straight ahead and lights a cigarette while waiting for the proverbial axe to fall. It falls on Pete.
  • Yes, it's true, that scene can be interpreted as a "one last smoke” moment, but its significance is somehow diluted due to the ubiquitousness of smoking in the “Mad Men” universe. I mean, come on! Everybody was smoking everywhere and anytime, so much so that lighting a cigarette became such a common, automatic, almost unconscious gesture, that abstaining from smoking would’ve been rather surprising.
• The script for the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer includes a (never filmed) scene in which Giles and Robin Wood share a "hand rolled cigarette" before the final battle.
• Get Smart. Max is about to be shot by a Banana Republic firing squad.

Max: May I have a last cigarette?
Dictator: Of course, it is the tradition.
Max: (takes out ridiculously-long cigarette) It might take a while.

• A different take on this trope occurs in the 1988 sci-fi mini-series Something Is Out There. Jack Breslin finds his police partner dying, but the partner wants Jack to light up instead, as Jack's girlfriend has been harping on about him quitting. Double subverted when the dying partner then says "Now throw those things away before they kill you."
• Inverted in Band of Brothers, Captain Speirs gives a bunch of German prisoners one last cigarette before he kills them all. Supposedly anyway him giving them cigarettes is shown, but he is not shown killing them. The other soldiers don't seem to care that killed prisoners, but are rattled that he gave them all cigarettes first.

Public Service Announcement

• Yleisradio, the Finnish public radio company, aired an anti-tobacco PSA where a man was about to be executed by a firing squad. The commander of the squad proceeds to offer a cigarette to the condemned, who turns it down, having quit smoking last week.

Video Games

• Both subverted, double subverted and played straight in Metal Gear Solid 4: Snake is about to kill himself, so he has a last smoke, however, it then turns out that he doesn't need to. However, he quits smoking afterwards, so it was technically still his last. Played straight with Big Boss during the ending, however.
  • "No, thanks. Those things'll kill ya." -Snake, after 3 games of dodging bullets, tanks, and super-villains.
  • Played completely straight in Metal Gear Solid, however: When Sniper Wolf lies dying in the snow after the second fight with her, she asks Otacon to hand her her sniper rifle, and she dies holding it against her chest.
• Variation with subversion: In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the apparently dying Bobbery wants one last sip of his prized Chuckola Cola vintage. (And yes, it really IS soda. In the Japanese version too.) You trek all over the island to fetch it for him. When you finally bring him the bottle, he takes one sip, and promptly... falls asleep. At which point, your partner gets annoyed that he put you through all that trouble, and orders you to conk him awake.
• Subverted in two ways in the flash game Armed With Wings 2. After his defeat, Smoking Martillo requests to finish his final cigarette, and is consequently executed by the main character. Probably a wise decision, considering he fights with smoke from his cigarettes. He is later resurrected, along with the other generals you killed.
• As seen in the page image, the Left 4 Dead comic "The Sacrifice" has Bill do this just as he's about to be attacked by three tanks.

Web Comics

• A recent^[when?] Cyanide & Happiness has a dying soldier ask a fellow soldier for a light for one last smoke. The response? "Why? You quitting? I'm so proud of you!"

Western Animation

• Patty & Selma, when Springfield was nearly hit by a comet. Subverted, seeing as they all survived.

"We did it. We beat cancer."

• This can be seen often in Looney Tunes for dramatic (and of course, funny) effect seeing as the characters could never conceivably die.
• Danger Mouse averts it, the titular perilous rodent turns down the offer of a final cigarette, calling it a filthy habit.
• In the Tom and Jerry cartoon "Texas Tom" at the ending thinking the bull will kill him Tom puts on a blindfold and smokes a cigarette.
  • In some of Tom's mouse trap cartoons he gives Jerry a cigarette to smoke thinking he killed him but tom is the one who gets hit.
• Shows up occasionally in Looney Tunes shorts when a character is about to be executed by firing squad.
• Near the end of the questionably canon American Dad episode "Raptures Delight, Stan, dying from a gunshot wound lights up one last cigar before the bomb he and Jesus set explodes.

Real Life

• Truth in Television: Men were usually given cigarettes before being executed by firing squad.
• In Incredible Victory, Walter Lord tells of some Japanese Officers who actually did this at the Battle of Midway. Some survived.
• During World War II, Kamikaze pilots drank sake before a mission.
  • They were not the only ones: Reds with Rockets had an official regulation to give each soldier a 100 ml glass of vodka before each attack. When you think back about the Soviet casualties during the Second World War...
    • More to the point, as Iron Man has put it: who in their right mind would climb into one of those things sober?