So there’s always some unfortunate tropes about which characters die in a movie. Usually rooted in some sort of prejudice.

There’s “bury your gays,” of course. And the movies where the Black characters die first. Or the wife who exists only in happy memories of laughing together under a blanket or something. Or the guy who’s planning to retire to the countryside right after this and buy a farm. Or the sweet naive young newbie who shouldn’t be in a war in the first place. Or, in pretty much any Disney movie, your mom.

The TRON franchise is… hit-and-miss on this.

Legacy and 2.0 both jumped right onto that dead-mom thing. And Legacy didn’t surprise me even once in terms of which characters were clearly destined to buy the farm. The original 1982 movie did an impressive job at avoiding cliched plot elements on many fronts… but as far as “who dies,” it’s a mixed bag.

It avoids killing any Black characters by pretty much not having any. Same with moms. Same with openly gay characters– although Flynn himself comes awful close to fitting that description, giving his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend what’s basically a striptease and some extreme bedroom eyes (in his actual bedroom, which also just happens to be chock full of rainbow decorations). He’s not exclusively gay, but he’s got pansexual polyamory written all over him as clear as a 1982 Disney movie could get away with. And not only does he survive, he’s the actual main character!

On the other hand, poor Ram does double duty as both “sweet young newbie who shouldn’t be in the war,” and a seductive little twink who reads as very queer-coded to me. You win some, you lose some.

But one win especially stands out to me.

And that’s Dumont.

Of all the character archetypes that are likely to end up as Movie Deaths, one of the really common ones is the Old Person. Older characters, often, are basically just there to teach the young characters stuff, inspire and encourage them, and then die.

Which I guess I can sorta see the reasoning for. After all, none of us in the real world live all that long past the threshold we call Old Age. If a child of Disney-movie-age has already experienced someone in their life dying, it was likely an older relative. So, for characters beyond that threshold to be the ones sacrificed to the Narrative? It probably just feels… natural.

But it does get sadly predictable after a while.

Which is why Dumont’s storyline was such a breath of fresh air.

His role in the plot is being a helper and perhaps a mentor to Yori and Tron. By profession he’s a sort of temple priest, already very in tune with spirituality and the mysterious World Beyond. In short… he’s exactly the sort of old guy who would be killed off.

And the narrative even seems to be going that way, for a while! Yori and Tron know they’re putting Dumont in danger by asking him to let them into the Tower. They seem to think it’s worth the possible sacrifice, and once the situation becomes clear to him, Dumont also seems to resign himself to that risk.

And he does get caught. And taken prisoner by the secondary villain (Sark). And tied up, and tortured, and mocked, and handed over to the main villain (MCP). And put inside a big spinny death-machine with a bunch of other elderly temple priests, and tortured some more. And threatened with getting Absorbed into the MCP to make it even bigger and eviler and more powerful.

But it doesn’t happen. He gets rescued.

They ALL get rescued.

The only old (or old-ish) characters that die are the two villains. Dumont lives. Dumont is there in the very last scene inside the Computer World, standing beside Tron and Yori, happily pointing out all the Towers lighting up again.

I say it all the time, but I love that movie largely because it’s weird. Because it does unexpected things. Because the people are as chaotic and unpredictable and sometimes downright stupid as real people, and the plot is as messy and weird-paced and all-over-the-place as events in the real world.

Forget foreshadowing. In the Computer World people don’t have shadows.

And that’s beautiful.