This Character Death Caused Fans to Give Up on The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead, like most long-running, famous shows with an active fandom, has had many of its storylines and creative decisions heavily criticized on the web.
The fact is, however, that after Season 7, the show experienced a gradual but inexorable decline in viewership to much less than half of what it had in its heyday, so it is difficult to argue that some bad plots and unfortunate decisions actually occurred.
What exactly they were is debatable in some cases. But there is at least one plot twist that almost everyone agrees was bad, and perhaps the worst, dumbest one in the entire series – the killing of Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs).
To begin with, it was a huge departure from the source material. In the Walking Dead comics, Carl Grimes survived to the end, married Sophia, had a child and lived out the rest of his days.
More importantly, he effectively became the second protagonist of the story, with a number of major arcs revolving around him.
This alone meant that his death threw the story off balance. Sure, the show had made major departures from the comics before, but none were this big or important.
Then there is the fact that Carl was one of the most beloved characters on the show, and Chandler Riggs, despite his young age, was considered one of the best and most dedicated actors on the show – he even bought a house near the set. Many fans complained that after the death of Carl Grimes, there were simply no characters left to watch, or at least too few of them.
Finally, there are reasonable arguments that killing Carl was just a piece of all-around bad writing, whether motivated by a desire to surprise and shock the audience, or by motives that had nothing to do with telling a good story (the fact that it happened just as Chandler Riggs was about to turn 18, when he would have gotten a bigger paycheck, raised some suspicions among fans).
When you have a mentor/student pair at the forefront of your cast, you don't get rid of the student, because then what do you do with the mentor? Never mind that the whole mentoring storyline is ultimately pointless.
And most importantly, you don't kill him off in such a dumb way – Carl Grimes has survived much worse situations than the one that proved fatal for him on the show.
In short, the fate of The Walking Dead shows that sometimes killing one character can ultimately cost you countless viewers.