The top 5 Walking Dead deaths of 2020

2) Gary Plaskett

If there’s one thing that The Walking Dead World Beyond did very well in its first season, it was building the backstories of its main characters: Iris, Hope, Elton, Felix, and Huck all got really great backstories that served as wonderful windows into how they saw the outbreak unfold, in fact, the only one whose backstory didn’t revolve around the zombie outbreak, was Silas.

This, automatically, made his unique. Rather than focus on how Silas saw the outbreak, his backstory, instead, focused on why he was at Campus Colony, and the incident which forced him out of his home In Omaha.

As we would learn throughout the season, Silas was transferred to Campus Colony after the death of his father, Gary, which, rumors persisted, was at Silas’s own hands. Silas’s flashback would reveal these rumors to be true, but also, that his father’s death did not play out the way the rumor mill at Campus Colony might have thought it did.

We learned that Gary had violent tendencies, and often abused both Silas’s mother and Silas himself, and, that it was during such an incident that Gary’s death had occurred, as his violent behavior caused Silas to snap and fly into a rage, resulting in Gary being beaten to a bloody pulp, and stabbed in the stomach.

Part of what made Gary’s death work so well is the fact that, because he was already dead by the time World Beyond started, a lot of the timing issues that have happened so often with deaths in Walking Dead shows before were pretty much circumvented. There’s no issues of the death happening too suddenly or too late because, by the time we’re introduced to him…we already know that he’s dead!

Aside from that, it was just a very raw, very visceral death. By seeing the fight between him and Silas, seeing how Gary gets fatally wounded, and seeing how severely Silas beats him, it helps it feel more real. This, combined with Silas remembering how his dad was when he was a kid, and Silas being forced to confront his dad as an empty made you feel Gary’s death; It put you in Silas’s shoes, feeling his maelstrom of emotions, between his rage at his father’s abuse, his sadness at remembering the good dad that Gary had been, and then his horror at seeing that man now as an empty, and threatening his mother. All of that emotion surrounding one man’s death was captured through a series of flashbacks all of which (Including all appearances of the dying man in question) in one episode.

Let it never be said that you can’t, essentially, introduce and kill off a character in the same episode of a TV series, and do it well, because World Beyond knocked that idea out of the water.