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I just watched Iron Man 3 and something confused me about the demise of the bad guy, Killian.
Towards the end of the movie Tony Stark pinned Killian to the wall with his Iron Man suit and it self destructs. But that doesn't kill him and he comes back, at which point Pepper Potts fights him and basically pushes him into a fire.
So why/how does he get killed the second time but not the first?
Actually, the second time Pepper kicks a missile, possibly the "ex-wife", to Killians face. Adding that to the damage he took when the armor self-destructed, suposedly overloads his healing factor.
We were previously shown that those altered by Extremis aren't immortal. Tony killed one on the airplane by blasting out his heart. I think the assumption in that situation is that without a heart to feed blood to the rest of your body you'll die.
When Killian was blown up the first time, he took a lot of damage, but it seems that his body mostly stayed in tact.
The second explosion by Pepper, as Elfangor states, was probably too much for Killian's body to handle, and he died.
Extremis is a super-soldier solution. It's a bio-electronics package, fitted into a few billion graphite nanotubes and suspended in a carrier fluid. A magic bullet, like the original super-soldier serum—all fitted into a single injection. It hacks the body's repair center—the part of the brain that keeps a complete blue print of the human body. When we're injured, we refer to that area of the brain to heal properly. Extremis rewrites the repair center. In the first stage, the body essentially becomes an open wound. The normal human blueprint is being replaced with the Extremis blueprint, you see? The brain is being told the body is wrong. Extremis protocol dictates that the subject be placed on life support and intravenously fed nutrients at this point. For the next two or three days, the patient remains unconscious within a cocoon of scabs. (...) Extremis uses the nutrients and body mass to grow new organs. Better ones..(source:Wikipedia)
So it may be the case that during armor self destruction Killian 's brain doesn't got damaged and made him able to heal and regenrate his damaged organs. But second time his whole body got destroyed even brain (head) too. Without brain extremis virus is of no use.
