MovieChat Forums > Six Feet Under (2001) Discussion > Best/funniest opening death?

Best/funniest opening death?


So, obviously not all of them were funny/entertaining. But of those that were, what was your favorite?

Mine would be season 5: The old man eating the peaches he knew would kill him. The look on his face said, "yep, this will kill me, but it's worth every bite"

Loved it!

~I would agree with you, but then we'd both be wrong~

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•The overly zealous religious woman who was ready for the rapture and saw the helium filled sex dolls floating in the air imagining them to be angels. She ran out into the middle of street, hands in the air, waiting to rise with them only to out of nowhere get hit by a car. I laughed so damn hard 2:00 in the morning.

•The black man who drove himself to the funeral home then died.

•The fat man backing his SUV out the driveway, opens the door and still sitting in his driver's seat, tries to grab the newspaper, only to fall out of the car.....which is still in reverse....and the car backs up on his head.

There's more but those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head. 

I despise the pleasure of pleasing people that I despise. ~ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

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•The overly zealous religious woman who was ready for the rapture and saw the helium filled sex dolls floating in the air imagining them to be angels. She ran out into the middle of street, hands in the air, waiting to rise with them only to out of nowhere get hit by a car. I laughed so damn hard 2:00 in the morning.


Agreed. Religious nut chasing blowup dolls / the Rapture was my very favorite opening.

Second favorite is trail running guy who is unexpectedly mauled by mountain lion throwing a cross-body tackle.

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My all-time favorite will always be the opening to Season 5, the death of Andrea Kuhn in A Coat Of White Primer. That was the one where the woman gets instructed to stop being a pushover and start opening up to her loved ones, and end's up being accidentally murdered by her fiancé as a result of this.

For a what, five minute vignette at the most, I felt an extreme amount of sadness and sorrow for this woman, more so than any of the other opening death's that this show had ever given us.

There was just something so heartbreaking about watching this timid and scared woman start to come into her own and make strides with those around her. Obviously it was clear from the onset that something would go wrong for Andrea Kuhn, but just the idea of her finally finding some sort of happiness and making some peace with the world, and then being killed before said happiness could be completed was just extremely impactful for me.

I'm not really sure why this was the one death that stuck with me but i always go back to this vignette.

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That's one of my favorites too, and I love how it's almost like a little short film in itself. It introduces the episode and season briliantly, not only thematically but formally in how shadowy and dimly-lit the sequence is. It's just peerless filmmaking, really devastating.

One other that stands out is in S3E6: the woman who has a nosebleed while on line to enter some Dr. Phil-esque show and ends up just totally bleeding out due to a deviated septum. Very disturbing.

Also, one in S4 where the woman and her husband are at the doctor, and realize that she has cancerous tumors and it's too late to do anything about them because she put off going to the doctor for so long. Truly tragic, and as much as one might think "I'd never be so stupid!" there are a lot of times where otherwise smart people put off going to the doctor because they figure it can wait or is probably nothing, etc.

Another one of the saddest ones is Emily Previn, in S2E5, who was all alone in her apartment (and in life), and choked to death on a piece of food with nobody to help her.

I also like the weird ones, like the 1970s death of the guy on LSD who jumped off a building (that hoariest of anti-drug propaganda cliches, but it's shot beautifully); or the old guy who drives up to Fisher and Sons in his finest suit, ready to die.

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or the old guy who drives up to Fisher and Sons in his finest suit, ready to die.

That was my favorite. I'd like to think that I would plan my funeral in advance, to save my family the trouble. And this was definitely one of the more peaceful deaths on the show.

The worst one was Gabriel's little brother. I had to fast-forward though that one; now that I have a son, I can't even begin to imagine the effect of that poor little boy's death.

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I can't remember all of them, but the lady in the bubble bath, whose cat accidentally knocks her electric rollers into the tub. She's being electrocuted, thrashing around in the water & the cat is nonchalantly grooming himself.

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Yes, she was the porn star, uhh, ahem, "Adult Film Actress".

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"The black man who drove himself ..."

You wonder why she wrote "the black man". If he had been a white man would she have written "The white man ..."?

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Stop that nonsense. This is an order, not a request.

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Funniest is probably the woman thinking the dolls were angels. But there are a lot "memorable" deaths. The guy shooting his co-workers and killing himself was probably the most impactful/shocking death of the show.

But I love that they have funny ones, sad ones, crazy ones, tragic ones...

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But I love that they have funny ones, sad ones, crazy ones, tragic ones...


Yeah, good point, they covered a lot of different emotions and scenarios with those opens. I was also just thinking of that one where a little girl and her father let free a rehabilitated bird and it sets off a chain reaction of events from the bird crapping on an actor's ski cap to the actor using the restroom at a convenience store to the actor causing an overflow in the toilet to the convenience store guy having to mop up his bathroom to him calling his wife to complain about his overflowing toilet to the wife going outside of her kitchen so she can get better reception and finally to the wife being killed by one of the "Boeing Bombs" of frozen toilet ice falling from the sky and knocking her out.

I think I put that one in the "funny" category.

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I don't remember that death. Shame on me.

But yes, I like that they have crazy deaths, peaceful deaths, tragic deaths, natural deaths... All kinds. It gives you the feeling that anything could happen at any moment.

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One of my favorites was that lady who was making breakfast and her husband wouldn't shut up about his boring work story and she just whacks him over the head with the pan lmaoo

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One of my favorites was that lady who was making breakfast and her husband wouldn't shut up about his boring work story and she just whacks him over the head with the pan lmaoo


I wanted to write about this one too. 
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“Daydreaming subverts the world.” ~ Raoul Vaneigem

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Plus David and Nate were lamenting that she said he was "boring", both sadly realizing that they, too, may be boring.

Others were good as they lead you in a different direction. As the pudgy woman watching an overly fit guy drop dead of a heart attack. Or Mitzy appearing to choke while the girl's aunt gets killed by her golf ball only seconds later.

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Mine was the guy running in the mountains, stopped to check his pulse and bam, gets taken out by the mountain lion.

Side note, despite there being a death at the beginning of each episode, and the fact that I binge watched it after the series was done, I still quite often thought to myself, now who the hell are these people, at the start of the episode.

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I haven't watched this show since it aired,It's one of my all time favorites.
But I am sitting down to re-watch it now. I can vaguely remember laughing my ass off when Santa on the motorbike waving to some kids then getting hit by a truck or something!? Am I right? I will post when I finished watching it again if I have a new favorite.

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I like the ones where some unexpected rando dies instead of the person you're waiting for.

But I did love seeing that woman enjoy a peaceful breakfast after clocking her chatty husband with the frying pan.

I see now that the death-opener costs them the chance to do a "Previously, on SFU" clip to remind viewers about story points from long-ago episodes, but it's totally worth it. When the show started, in 2001, we'd rarely seen such an unorthodox approach and it put a lot of butts into seats, just to see who was going to bite it that week.

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That can't be right. The DVDs contain "Previously on" tracks.

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By far the least amusing of the deaths, but the most moving for me, was the baby dying of SIDS in the first season. I watched this only a few weeks after my baby son had come from hospital having been born premature, so naturally the SFU death played on my fears at the time. The way it was filmed was so just inevitable, so dreadfully hard to understand, so terribly sad and yet, strangely, almost beautifully peaceful in the way the baby's vision of its mother fades to the white light of death. I still get choked up just thinking of it.

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The guy in the stalled elevator, he decides to go for help, but the elevator drops, so he tries to grab the pregnant woman, the doors shut and the elevator collapses and he's cut in half.

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