TV Characters With The Most Plot Armor

In a good story, much is at stake, tensions are high, and the hero is vulnerable. If they screw up, they're toast — and so is everyone counting on them — so they have to be careful as well as brave.

But ugh, who has time for all that? Why take the time to write a surprising but reasonable way for the hero to apply all the hard lessons they've learned thus far to barely get past this group of goons or the next boss fight, when you can just, you know, have a piano fall on the bad guy's head instead? Or have the Big Bad inexplicably monologue long enough for the hero to find a gun with one bullet left in it? Or have the protagonist fall from the top of a skyscraper, only to reveal at the beginning of the next episode that they somehow limped away with minor scrapes and bruises? Doesn't make sense? Listen, they need the script for next week's episode by the end of the day, so get off our back, will ya?

Thing is, characters don't make it through all the plot developments they have to endure without a little help from the screenwriters. But some instances of improbable luck, death fake-outs, impossible physical endurance, and deus ex machinas can be more absurd than others. From Columbo to Jon Snow, these are the TV characters with the thickest plot armor.

"Hannibal," which follows cannibalistic criminal mastermind Hannibal Lecter of "Silence of the Lambs" infamy (though played here by Mads Mikkelsen rather than Anthony Hopkins), features in its 39 episodes more instances of plot armor and other ludicrously improbable conveniences for the main character than many shows that lasted far longer.

Cleverly, not all of this plot armor actually seems like plot armor, at least at first glance. But you don't necessarily have to survive a 50-foot drop or repeatedly come back from the dead with no good explanation to qualify for this list. Many storylines break Hannibal's way supposedly because of his peerless intellect, not to mention his skills as a martial arts master, a world-class chef, musician, and artist (as well as a razor-sharp dresser with infinite charm). So you could explain much of Hannibal's incredible luck by pointing to his advantageous character traits. But when a character is this unrealistically smart, to the point that they're capable of predicting how almost everyone else thinks despite having no information to base those intuitions on and still never being wrong about it, that counts as plot armor. In many circumstances, the obliviousness of his foes contributes to his evading detection in increasingly silly ways too. That can also be plot armor when it happens all the time, and a reasonable person in their position would've realized something was wrong.

Other than Batman, this version of Hannibal might be the most overpowered non-superpowered fictional character of all time.

Based on Margaret Atwood's novel of the same name, "The Handmaid's Tale" takes place in Gilead, a totalitarian theocracy that brutally oppresses women and relegates them to second class citizens by freezing their bank accounts, seizing their property, and forbidding them from having jobs. In this world, any perceived defiance by women is met with terrifying consequences including but not limited to mutilation, hanging, beating, solitary confinement, or worse. And by any perceived defiance, we really mean any perceived defiance. You don't have to try to assassinate political leaders, lead insurgencies, or rob banks to be sentenced to some form of horrific punishment. In one episode, for example, Janine has an eye gouged out for speaking back to an authority figure. In another, Emily is forced to endure genital mutilation for having a homosexual affair. Still other characters throughout the series have fingers chopped off and tongues cut out for "offenses" like speaking out against a stoning and reading books.

And yet although she's one of the most defiant Handmaids, protagonist June Osborne, known formerly as Offred #2, always manages to evade such punishment. That's not to say she's not "dealt with," so to speak. She's forced to endure all sorts of harrowing trials and tribulations courtesy of her patriarchal overlords, but most of these are psychological in nature. At no point does she have body parts hacked off despite doing everything in her power to "deserve" it, at least by Gilead's brutal, backwards standards.

This might be cheating, but "Supernatural's" ludicrous plot armor is enjoyed by multiple protagonists and is fairly evenly spread out. Bobby and Castiel, for example, die in Season 7. Conveniently, viewers might pick up on the fact that Castiel's dead body is never seen; despite the fact that an entire episode was dedicated to his demise, he returns in good health before too long. Bobby is only "dead" in a physical sense, but returns as a ghost. But we suppose we won't count that as traditional plot armor.

As for protagonist brothers Dean and Sam Winchester, their, well, supernatural good luck becomes so outrageous in later seasons that even a show this famously, delightfully over the top eventually felt compelled to address it directly. In Season 15, God himself reveals, right before Sam is about to trap him with magic, that he was the one dishing out heaping helpings of plot armor on the Winchesters. If he's out of the picture, they can't count on their famous immunities and good luck. Sure enough, the second they deal with him, the two start getting sick while their trusty appliances suffer routine breakdowns and malfunctions. Still, they're not getting strangled by demons, so we're not sure a common cold or a short circuiting microwave counts as a chink in their plot armor. Besides, it's all temporary: Sam and Dean eventually challenge a goddess to a game of chance and win back their good fortune.

In a good episode of "Doctor Who," the Doctor employs quick thinking to escape run-ins with deadly aliens, killer cyborgs, and all other manner of inter-dimensional or extraterrestrial baddies. But there have been more than a few instances where improbable luck saved the day instead — the villain inexplicably captures but doesn't kill our hero, for example, or his weird alien biology kicks in when a regular person would've been toast. His regenerative abilities have come in handy more than once after he's sustained what should have been fatal wounds.

Sometimes it's just good ol' fashioned plot armor without even a lazy explanation from the lore. For example, in the episode "The End of Time," the Doctor leaps from a crashing spaceship, reaches terminal velocity on a massive fall, then smashes through a skylight and slams into a marble floor. Even an Olympian would be a soup of blood and innards after an accident like that, but the Doctor is able to limp away with scrapes and bruises. Huh?

But at the show's most ludicrous, it seems as if the Doctor is able to twist the laws of physics themselves to eke out improbable 11th-hour wins when all looks lost. Just ask the Master, who earned his victory in "The Last of the Time Lords" only to be beaten when the defeated Doctor was resurrected. How? Because everyone on Earth merely thought the word "Doctor" and somehow channeled enough psychic power into his corpse to bring him back.

No genre uses and abuses plot armor more than anime, and no anime gorges on it quite like "Bleach." Based on the manga of the same name, the story of the show follows Ichigo Kurosaki, who uses his Soul Reaper powers to defend humans from demonic beings and escort dead souls safely to the afterlife. Naturally, he finds himself in all sorts of dangerous circumstances throughout the series' 366 episodes, and the show shamelessly uses every conceivable manifestation of this trope to get him across the finish line: deus ex machina, resurrections, death fake-outs, last-minute developments that turn the tide at the last second, inconsistently deadly weapons and enemies who can't help but monologue just long enough for the hero to throw together some kind of insane Hail Mary. You name it.

In one episode, for example, Ichigo just so happens to receive a special arrowhead that nullifies the otherwise invincible King Yhwach's Almighty power, just long enough to land a killing stroke. In another, he receives a bankai (the second, powerful release from his magical katana) in three days, simply because the plot doesn't want to spend time showing him training for decades to achieve this like the lore clearly insists is necessary. In yet another story, Ichigo loses a battle against Tesla Lindocruz fair and square, but Tesla inexplicably takes his time beating up Ichigo rather than killing him quickly, giving another character a chance to show up and save the hero.