The top 5 Walking Dead deaths of 2020

1) Janis

The first half of season six of Fear The Walking Dead saw a lot of changes for the members of Morgan’s convoy, including its first (And, thus far, only) death since the penultimate episode of season five. I speak, of course, about the death of Janis, which is a strange coincidence, since the aforementioned death last season was of her brother, Tom.

Janis had changed, too, since the last time we saw her. She’d been a little bit hardened since her brother’s death, being forced back into the clutches of the very woman she and her brother were trying to escape when they met Morgan’s group, and relegated to trying to clear walkers out of a molasses warehouse in what amounted to little more than a prison camp.

However, in spite of this, she also managed to find a bright spot: Cameron. After presumably meeting him upon her promotion to laundry duty at Virginia’s headquarters in Lawton, Oklahoma, Janis developed a relationship with one of the Pioneers’ rangers. This relationship had gotten good enough that the pair considered running away together…that was until Cameron had been found dead, tangled in the community’s barbed wire perimeter.

In spite of no solid evidence proving her guilt, Janis soon found her accused of the murder. Faced with being railroaded by a person who’d, apparently, never given up her grudge from earlier, Janis accepted her fate, and confessed to the murder. This gave Virginia the excuse she needed to order Janis’s execution…by walker.

John Dorie, who’d been desperately trying, first to prove Janis’s innocence, and then, when that seemed impossible, to help Janis escape, learned only too late that Janis’s execution had already been ordered, and found his friend strapped to a tree, torn apart by a small gang of walkers, and a stereo blasting pleasant music to draw them. It was grim, it was grisly, it was tragic. It was exactly how a character’s death should be.

What made this death so great was that, for a character that we only barely got to know in Janis, the show was able to squeeze a surprising amount of emotion from it. By the time the episode ended, you cared whether or not John got to her in time, and were saddened that he hadn’t.

If we’re being honest, Fear The Walking Dead probably wasn’t going to use Janis much more than what we saw of her over these last two seasons, so, this was a great way to get the most potential out of her character. Could you honestly picture her becoming a more prominent character in Morgan’s group? Even if I believed it possible, I don’t think the writers would have done it, so, rather than let her become someone in the background who would just wind up forgotten, they chose to kill her off, and have her death serve as a moral crisis for John, and push him into a whole new direction.

Janis’s death is a textbook example of how to properly handle a relatively minor protagonist in a TV show: Keep their time brief, try to get the audience a little bit invested in them, and then, get rid of them before they get forgotten or wear out their welcome.