The Walking Dead’s Latest Death Will Shock You To Your Very Core

It is with a heavy heart that I report this tragic news.

AMC’s The Walking Dead, now two-thirds of the waythrough its 11th and final season, has done the unspeakable.

The hoary old zombie drama has killed off perhaps the best character ever in this show’s entire eleven-year run. And to what end?

Sure, we’ve had some crushing deaths before.

Glenn, brutally murdered by Negan, his eyeball popping out of his skull like some grotesque cartoon death. That was pretty messed up, especially after that dumpster fake-out.

Hershel’s head lopped off by the Governor, rolling across the pavement. Who would give Rick sage advice now? And he’d already lost a limb, the poor old codger.

Noah’s flesh peeled from his skin as he tried to drag himself out of the revolving door. I mean, we didn’t know Noah well, but we knew him enough to wince. And what a way to go, dear lord.

Many gruesome deaths, many terrible losses. Carl, Lori, Andrea, Shane. The list goes on and on. Back in the day, AMC even let these deaths occur without announcing it on The Talking Dead and social media months in advance—almost like surprise and shock value were crucial elements to a good zombie TV show or something. Wild!

But this latest death was a shock. And it’s not the first of Season 11, either.

Don’t even get me started on the tragic deaths of some of our most beloved characters, like Duncan and Agatha and Tony. All Season 11 losses. All . . . too much to bear.

But now The Walking Dead has crossed a line, killing off the one character I know all of us die-hard fans were really rooting for; the one character we all thought would make it to the end—last-man standing atop a heap of rotting walkers.

The one character who kept us tuning in week after week.

You all know who I’m talking about, but I’ll say it anyways. Marco.

They killed Marco, those bastards.

I, for one, am devastated by this loss. I’m not sure if the final eight episodes of the show will be the same with Marco around to drive the story forward. Marco has been the glue that kept this show together for the past . . . well, for the past little bit anyways.

I mean, he showed up in Season 11, Episode 16 and he definitely had a couple of lines. The show’s writers did a really good job establishing him as an important character that we all cared about deeply before icing him.

I mean, okay, we knew the moment he got a single line and then stood up that he was going to die right away, but at least the showrunner, writers and producers of The Walking Dead took a couple episodes to get us to relate to him before he was killed.

Or, um, nope scratch that. They didn’t do that, either. Marco showed up, out of the blue, said his piece and was killed off just like that. Literally everyone saw it coming except the other characters who, unlike the audience, were Very Very Upset about this.

We don’t talk about Marco, no no. We don’t talk about Marco!

I’m sorry, this is a lot of snark, but come on AMC! This is all so basic. You want to make a good zombie show you need to have some stakes. You’ve already spoiled the fact that basically none of the core characters are going to die, so you need to set up some other deaths that have meaning. Do that by killing off other main-ish characters (Eugene, Gabriel, Princess, Aaron, Ezekiel, Rosita etc.) or by creating new characters that we form some kind of bond with before they get shot or bitten or whatever.

Marco should have been introduced at the beginning of the season (or of this block) and given a personality and stuff to do and so forth before being killed off. Either that, or he should have just been killed with no fanfare. Pick one. You can’t have it both ways.

It’s amateur hour over at The Walking Dead these days, folks, and frankly there are no excuses left. By now, the people making this dreadful zombie show should know exactly how to make it click with viewers. It takes a certain degree of denial and arrogance to make a season as bad as Season 11 has been. I’m afraid that whatever Kool-Aid they’re drinking over on the set of Fear The Walking Dead has made its way to the mothership.

What a disaster.

P.S. This episode also featured the death of Leah, a character that the show tried—and failed—to setup as some big, terrifying threat. This was handled in the clumsiest, most lackluster way imaginable and I think we can all agree that The Walking Dead without Leah is . . . just perfectly fine.

This insistence on setting up new bad guys all the time really shows just how unimaginative the show’s creators are, wed to just one type of conflict over and over and over again as though no other literary conflicts exist. Le sigh.

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