For more than a decade, it has been apparent that apoptosis and other forms of cell death are often controlled at one or more crucial steps involving the mitochondria. Recent findings, including an elegant investigation in a recent issue of Cell (Hao et al., 2005), have helped to elucidate fundamental aspects of this involvement while raising puzzling new questions about mitochondrial routes to cellular demise. The emerging, if preliminary, perspective these new studies provide may represent either a refinement of our views of how cells die or, perhaps, the beginnings of what amounts to a reformulation of our ideas.