The Walking Dead: Deaths that SHOULDN’T have happened

3) Carl

This irritates me.

I don’t know the behind-the-scenes circumstances behind the decision to kill Carl off, but from the perspective of The Walking Dead as a show, this is bad guys.

I know that there was a set of fans who didn’t like Carl as a character. That’s fine, but whether you liked him as a character or not, he was, in-universe, the future of the story. Everything Rick had been doing up to that point was to build something for Carl, and once Carl was gone, it seemed like things started to fall off the cliff.

Carl was the first of what would become a series of major departures for the show, with Rick, Maggie, and Jesus all leaving one season later, and then Michonne and Siddiq departing in the next season. That’s six in, what, a little over two seasons? This wouldn’t be quite so bad if two of them weren’t the main characters of the damned show, but, with that being the case, it seemed to seriously throw things out of whack.

Though I know people might have gotten angry, I think, in theory, the show could have kept going with Rick departing. (Whether actually dying or being thought dead, as is the case now, is up to you. Carl staying, as it could be, about Carl now trying to pick up the mantle for Rick and guide his siblings as he believed their dad would while trying to juggle learning blacksmithing from Earl and building a relationship with Enid. I think it would have been interesting to watch.

But, his death in the season eight midseason put paid to any of that, and I can only scratch my head and ask: What was the point?

I can think of all the cliche reasons: To shock the audience, to keep fans on their toes, etc. They utterly fail to satisfy me. Firstly, at this point in the series, we were sort of getting into a period where it seemed like deaths were happening at every premiere or finale, be they midseason or bookends. To do this just because they were a premiere or a finale, at which point, a death at such a time was the opposite of shocking. Secondly, if you were going to do it to keep the fans sharp, you could have easily done it with someone else; In fact, if they’d had Morales have a face turn and rejoin Rick, you could have had him die instead, having Rick finally get an old friend back, just to have Negan take him away like he did Glenn.

To me, killing Carl just looked like death for the sake of shock value, which is fine when timed right, but when it feels a little predictable, its potency diminishes. On top of that, when it’s someone who, one would think, the future of the show is built around, it just becomes baffling.

I honestly think that if Carl were still alive, we wouldn’t be looking at the next season of The Walking Dead being the last one.