The Walking Dead: It’s not who dies, it’s who we lose
By Susie Graham
On The Walking Dead there will always be death. It seems like who will die next is always the question on people’s minds. But the real worry for fans is who will they lose next?
Yesterday I wrote about the catch 22 of death on The Walking Dead. How it must be difficult for the writers to decide which characters should die when during the season.
We have to have some death because of the nature of the show. It’s the apocalypse; people are going to die. Plus as a show, it keeps us in suspense and keeps things fresh. We never know who may go at any time.
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The deaths of major characters keeps things realistic and yet heartbreaking. We know the show is fearless and we don’t watch knowing that our heroes will always narrowly escape death just because they are main characters.
Some Tweet comments came in in response to my article that were very enlightening.
Tweeter Anna Dodson said, “An epic death scene is the ultimate sign of respect and appreciation on The Walking Dead.”
One of our regular Tweeters, Brian Scott Krause aka Big Ole Goofy, said something in response to the article that gave me hope and shift in perspective, and even a better tolerance for the word filler that people use.
"“The show is not about who’s going to die. However, with Negan being so hyped up, and the show growing in intensity with each episode, the worry is that we will all lose a character that we love in a truly horrible, terrible way. Then we will all feel as helpless as Rick and company as we watch.”"
So it’s not about who’s going to die. It’s about who we’re going to lose. And even after that, how our on-screen family will handle that loss. Filler episodes are not episodes where nothing important is happening in the episodes. A better description, as one commenter, Hershel’s Walker Head, called them, would be builder episodes.
They build the characters. Build the emotion. Build everything that happens brick by brick into creating the events and characters we love. We just know that those builder episodes will have big breaks where we have to stop building because a brick falls or we are too weak from grief to keep building.
If we want to call them filler, we can think of them as filling our hearts with the richness and depth of our characters so we get to know them fully. Filling the episodes with events that make the characters matter to us. Making our The Walking Dead life full.
With The Walking Dead we know that those losses and empty days are coming sometimes so while we’re building and filling we anticipate them. I suppose that’s only natural.