The Worst Deaths In The Walking Dead
By Liam O'Leary
Siddiq’s death in season 10 of The Walking Dead was one of the best. But that has me thinking: What are THE WORST deaths in The Walking Dead?
A couple of weeks ago, we watched Siddiq die at the hands of Whisperer spy Dante in, what I think, was one of the best executed deaths in The Walking Dead’s history. It was unexpected, it made sense, and, it left me sad and angry that Siddiq was gone. I feel like it was what a good character’s death in a TV show should be.
Of course, there’s been a lot of deaths in The Walking Dead, and, if we’re all being honest with ourselves, not all of them were as good as Siddiq’s. In fact, a few of them have been downright awful. This week, I intend to identify what I think are the five worst.
What makes a death in The Walking Dead bad? Well, any number of things, really, but, I’ll try to narrow it down to the most egregious.
1) Poor timing.
Even if a death makes sense in context, and is thoroughly dramatic, if the timing is bad, the rest doesn’t matter, because, either the character got killed off way too early, leaving the fans the bad kind of angry, or to late, i.e. long after the character had and true relevance to the show…usually, it’s the former.
2) Too abrupt.
This is like the previous problem, but, on steroids. In this case, not only is the character killed off too early, maybe even so early as to happen before the character can even really gain traction with the audience, but also, too suddenly, as in “A scene occurs, they just die, and onto to the next scene”. This makes you feel like the writers were just trying to get the character out of the way as soon as possible and just move on. While that might be realistic in a zombie apocalypse, for the sake of a TV show…that’s just bad.
3) Too controversial.
In cases like this, the death might be properly dramatic, the timing might even be right, but, the manner in which the character died might have been either too gruesome or maybe even too stupid, and the backlash from the fans ends up overshadowing the emotions they’re supposed to be having when a popular character dies. When the controversy is talked about more than the fans missing the character, you’ve messed up.
There are others factors, but, these are, in my opinion, the worst offenders. Hopefully, this will ensure there’s no confusion as to why I picked the deaths I did. Even if I liked some of these deaths for one reason or another, for me, the fact remains that I believe these deaths are, in one way or another, bad, so bad, in fact, that I have to believe them the worst deaths in The Walking Dead.