10 TV Characters Who Went Through Hell To Win (And Died Anyway)

Another entry and another appearance for the venerable institution of endless character suffering, the anthology series. There really is no end to the torture writers can put the one-off stars of anthology episodes through, as the audience know they won’t be appearing again and therefore can be offed as messily as the creators feel like without sacrificing narrative momentum.

To this end, this Beau-Bridges-starring instalment of the Crypt Keeper’s unending series of stories (seriously, how many of those comics did he write?) sees a pair of brothers, both surgeons, playing a long-running set of pranks on one another which… get more than a little out of hand, to say the least.

First off there’s the dumb med school prank which gives one brother, Carl, a heart attack—a reaction which you would think might discourage this family from further shenanigans. But alas shenanigans continue unabated, and Carl retaliates years later by drugging his brother, Marty, and pretending to perform an entire autopsy on him whilst he’s alive and awake, but paralyzed.

It’s a pretty savage prank by any metric, and no doubt Marty would have some years in therapy ahead of him to undo the Autopsy Room 4-style ordeal he’s been put through. Er, at least, he would have—if he didn’t promptly have a heart attack, leading his brother to declare him dead and go through with the real autopsy—while poor Carl is still conscious and unable to move.