WALKING DEAD fans: if you’re among the folks who think so-and-so’s survival is “a total cheat,” grow up.
Listen: characters in action-oriented fiction, which this particular show is, survive building collapses, ground-zero explosions, falls from great heights into water, and rollover car crashes, all the time; they do so because part of the power of such fiction is the hair’s-breadth escape from certain doom. It happens all the time. It is much of what powers WALKING DEAD, even if you have also been acculturated with that show arranging for major characters, sometimes even leading characters, to die tragically at any moment.
The fact that the show regularly horrifies you with the latter does not mean it cannot occasionally give you an upper with the former.
In the case of this particular sub-plot, the show played SO fair that many many viewers figured out one possible way for the character to have survived his seeming inevitable doom within hours of the scene where he seemed to perish. They gave you the visual clues. They offered you hope. They refused to pay off that hope by either fulfilling it or dashing it. And then they let you stew for weeks.
If your response is that they let you worry about poor so-and-so for weeks on end and that it all turned out to have been for nothing, then congratulations: you’ve just experienced one of the effects of being hooked on a story.
Whether you think the show is a piece of crap or a total masterpiece, getting you to worry, sometimes pointlessly, is within its job description. Getting you to mourn a character prematurely is within its job description. Lying to you, and getting you to like it, is within its job description.
You’ve been played like a violin.
Congratulations.
That’s the desired result.
Comment By: Janeen O'Kerry
November 25th, 2015 at 10:17 am
Adam-Troy, the message I got from other fans of The Walking Dead was not that we fans got played, but that we didn’t get played nearly well enough.
Comment By: Janeen O'Kerry
November 25th, 2015 at 10:17 am
Dragging out the “suspense” for three weeks, taking the actor’s name out of the credits (never done for anyone before), and even leaving the character out of the In Memorium on Talking Dead all made it painfully obvious that we WERE being played.
Comment By: Janeen O'Kerry
November 25th, 2015 at 10:17 am
There were also very strong objections that boiled down to, “If you’re going to kill off a major and much-loved character, then don’t F around with it. Do it and do it right – do it as epically as possible.” As a writer myself, I take the lesson to heart. The showrunners didn’t fool anyone with their little game and THAT is why the fans are angry.
Comment By: Adam-Troy Castro
November 25th, 2015 at 10:18 am
“If you’re going to kill off a major and much-loved character, then don’t F around ”
There are no rules.
Beloved characters can be killed off off-stage, their deaths reported second-hand. I have seen that done brilliantly.