Spoiler alert: This blog is published after The Walking Dead airs on AMC in the US on Sundays. Do not read on unless you have watched season six, episode 16 (which airs in the UK on Fox on Monday)

It may be the biggest show on television, but its fans deserve better than the cheap and easy cliffhangers that its producers keep teasing them with

The final moments of the sixth season finale of The Walking Dead were laughable for a number of reasons.

After we finally meet Negan, the despicable leader of the Saviors whose arrival had been touted in the show and in the media for weeks, he says that he’s going to kill one member of Rick’s merry band of survivors. (Actually, he says: “I’m going to beat the holy hell out of one of you,” so maybe death isn’t assured.) Negan plays a sadistic game of Eenie Meenie Miney Mo and chooses one of our favorite characters to obliterate. We don’t know who it is because the final shot is of that character watching Negan as he takes a bat to the head. We see a trail of blood trickle over the camera lens and the episode ends without revealing the identity of the victim.

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The trickle of blood made me laugh, because it seemed so lo-fi for a show with such amazing production values that it can light a giant log jam on fire on an abandoned highway in Georgia. But the big laugh is that we now have to wait six months to find out who got hit in the head.

The Walking Dead is starting to have a problem with cliffhangers and it has to do with its unique position regarding the deaths of its regular characters. Along with Game of Thrones, which debuted six months later, The Walking Dead revolutionized how we see beloved characters dying on TV. Both are based on source material that doesn’t give a hoot about actors’ contracts, fans’ feelings, or any of the usual narrative tactics that allowed TV regulars to survive even the stickiest of situations. Just as Game of Thrones killed off seemingly essential characters before the end of its first season, no one on The Walking Dead was safe either, including Rick’s wife Lori and his best friend Shane, neither of whom made it past season three.

The Walking Dead revolutionized how we see beloved characters dying on TV

The Walking Dead was truly a place where, as in the real zombie apocalypse, anyone could die at any moment (RIP Andrea). But the show is starting to use that power for evil instead of good. Witness earlier this season when Glenn seemingly fell into a herd of zombies to his death. Fans had to wait almost a month to find out if he made it out alive. Actor Steven Yeun’s name was even removed from the credits so eagle-eyed fans would be thrown off the trail. Ultimately, he survived a seemingly impossible situation.

Something similar happened at the end of the penultimate episode, in which fan favorite Daryl was shown getting shot and the camera was smothered with his blood. When the finale started, all fans wanted to know was whether Daryl was dead or alive. We had to wait until the final act to find out, and Daryl was bloodied but alive. After using him as the cliffhanger, the show made us wait to find out that nothing of consequence had really happened.

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It seems as though The Walking Dead is misreading its fans. It’s not the uncertainty of death that makes the show powerful; it’s the finality of it. Now, The Walking Dead might not be taking death out of the equation, but it is using it to toy with our emotions, dangling it over characters and then snatching it away at the last moment. It’s like a cruel trick a dog trainer plays when he pretends to throw a ball, sending the dog running after nothing.

The irony of The Walking Dead is that anyone who can use Google knows that Glenn is most likely the person at the business end of Negan’s bat, considering he is the character Negan offed in the comic book when he was first introduced. That would have been a much a better finale: knowing that he’s dead and leaving fans grappling with the emotion of how life will go on – not just for the survivors and Maggie, but also for the viewers themselves – after Glenn is gone. Instead, we are being told to wait and to consider what might happen.



But how many times is this trick going to work? How often will we chase after this ball if we know that it hasn’t really been thrown? Not much longer, I think, before we tire of this trick and know that there’s no real payoff. What is so engaging about The Walking Dead and what makes its cold-hearted approach to the characters’ mortality so effective is that we really care about these people. Toying with viewers’ emotions and not treating those emotions with respect will turn the fans off, and they will in turn turn off their TV sets. Rather than anxiously awaiting the show’s return, they’re going to start dreading what the final reveal will be.

