12 Ridiculous Ways TV Characters Were Brought Back From The Dead

10. I Didn't Really Shot Myself In The Head! I've Gone Undercover €“ Fox Mulder (The X Files)

Season cliff-hangers are tricky things to resolve. They need to leave audiences stunned, desperate to find out what happens next. 'I am Locutus Of Borg' in Star Trek: The Next Generation season three. The aforementioned 'two years later' and 'My name isn't really Michael Vaughan' in Alias season's two and four. 'We have to go back to the island' in Lost season three. I could go on about big, bold cliff-hangers forever. The trouble is, following that up with something equally spectacular in the following season's opener often has the tendency to fall a little flat. As a season cliff hanger, the death of a main character creates a wonderful WTF moment in a show. But resolving it...well...that's a different matter. Take the season four cliff-hanger of The X-Files. Chris Carter had an ambitious plan €“ turn Mulder into the sceptic by making him belief aliens were just a conspiracy, conjured up by the Cigarette Smoking Man and his mysterious cohorts. It's a brilliant twist on the Mulder / Scully dynamic and helped keep the show going into season five. But to get there, Carter had to make us believe that Mulder's first reaction would be to give up on his quest totally. As season four drew to a close and Scully recounted Mulder dying that morning from a suicidal gunshot to the head, we didn't know where the show was going next. Except... ...Audiences knew Fox Mulder wasn't dead. It was still a WTF moment, but it didn't have quite the same impact that the show had intended. The X Files was still at the height of its popularity, with no sign of going anywhere and there was also a movie on the way too. All could be forgiven if Chris Carter had engineered an ingenious resurrection but instead we got something rather...mundane. Fox Mulder kills a mysterious government employee and makes it appear that it is his body in his apartment. Then Scully lies to protect him, so that Mulder can go undercover to discover the truth. (He doesn't). Which makes it a lot of sparkle and not much substance. Mulder doesn't really die. It's all a fake out and his 'death' felt plain hokey.