Warning: This story contains light spoilers about His & Hers. About 15 years ago, it seemed that all you needed to do to give a male character purpose was to kill the woman he loves. While this wasn’t a new storytelling phenomenon exclusive to the ‘00s and ‘10s, it happened with such frequency that a trope was born: the "dead wife." In countless movies and TV shows, repeated gauzy flashbacks of a beautiful woman lying in bed, bathed in sunshine (Memento) indicate happier times before the Grim Reaper came calling. She might also appear as a ghostly hallucination (hello, Grace in Peaky Blinders) to needle his guilt, act as a moral compass, or offer a surface-level reminder of an aching loss. She will rarely get to be anything more than a pretty symbol of masculine failings and feelings.
In the years since Gone Girl took this missing-or-murdered cliché and spun it on its head, filmmakers like Christopher Nolan have since cooled on this kind of plotting (to a degree). But move over, dead wives, there is another deceased relative serving motivation, suspense, and conflict in an array of TV thrillers that are starting to resemble a mystery turducken.
