Spoiler alert!
No one is safe.
When your favorite TV show wants to make an impact, it's pretty much guaranteed that your
favorite character is going to die.
Everyone is expendable when it comes to generating buzz, and 2016 was an especially rough year
for TV deaths.
After you're done watching our first video about TV's most recent dearly deceased, prepare
yourself for some more spoilers with some of the most upsetting TV deaths of 2016.
Barb
In spite of being a collection of warm '80s nostalgia, the award-winning Stranger Things
is decidedly at home in today's TV landscape.
It's not afraid to kill off its characters, and that includes innocent, nerdy children.
The Netflix hit raised the stakes pretty high when the show's resident Milhouse, lonely,
geeky Barb was suddenly taken by the flower-faced beast from the Upside-Down.
Sure, her death gave her best friend Nancy and Will's brother Jonathan a reason to team
up and go monster hunting, but not soon enough to save poor Barb… who was pretty much forgotten
for the rest of the season.
Season Two promises to get justice for Barb, however, according to the Duffer Brothers,
the show's creators.
Poussey
An inmate at Litchfield since the start of the Netflix dramedy, Poussey was a fan-favorite
with a particularly heartbreaking backstory.
In season 4, Poussey started a relationship with fellow inmate Soso, as well as a friendship
with jailed TV chef Judy King, who promised her a job upon release.
Things were looking up, but tragedy struck from out of the blue.
During a peaceful protest in the cafeteria, a scuffle breaks out and Poussey is killed
when a guard restrains her, accidentally crushing her windpipe with his knee and killing her.
Abe and Glenn
Millions tuned in to the season 6 finale of The Walking Dead for the moment in which the
gang met up with the comic book's most notorious villain, Negan.
It was pretty much guaranteed that at the end of the episode, Negan would beat someone
to death with his bat, Lucille… and he did, we just didn't get to see it.
"You can breathe.
You can blink.
You can cry.
Hell, you're all gonna be doing that."
It wasn't until halfway through the Season 7 premiere that we found out Negan killed
two fan-favorites — Abe and Glenn.
Of course, it wasn't that simple.
Abe was murdered first, and just when viewers thought they could breathe a sigh of relief
for Glenn, who was Negan's victim in the comics, Daryl responded to Abraham's death by punching
Negan in the face.
The bad guy unleashed another dose of murderous violence — not against Daryl, but Glenn.
The brutality, and the teasing way in which the episode doled it out, were perfectly in
keeping with The Walking Dead's overall arc… but it was all still too much for more than
a few viewers to handle.
Robert Ford
HBO's Westworld revolves around several main characters who pretty much constantly die
and come back to life, mostly because almost everybody is a hyper-realistic humanoid robot,
controlled by the the mysterious and calculating chief robot god, Robert Ford.
At the end of Westworld's complicated and engrossing first season, he programmed series
star Dolores to shoot him in the head.
Why?
In order to demonstrate that he was finally liberating his robots, and giving them control
of Westworld.
While it's always possible that it was just a robot version of Ford that died, it isn't
likely that an actor with the stature of Sir Anthony Hopkins would be sticking around series
television for long, so we're going to call him dead … for now.
Jodi Hubbard
CBS's sitcom Mom is a show about people struggling with substance abuse and recovery, so it makes
sense that a relapse-related death would be part of the story — even if the show is
still a laugh-track driven comedy.
Jodi was a teenage addict in recovery, for whom Christy served as an Alcoholics Anonymous
sponsor.
In February 2016, Mom aired a fairly standard wedding episode, but at the end, Christy gets
a phone call from police telling her that Jodi had died from a drug overdose.
According to co-creator Chuck Lorre, killing off Jodi had been the plan for the character
since the beginning, to show that not all recovery stories have a happy ending.
Edward Meechum
At first just a temporary bodyguard for Frank Underwood, Edward Meechum was a loyal, stoic,
and reliable presence.
He was even officially promoted to the Secret Service when Frank Underwood became vice president,
and then President.
Sadly, Edward died in the line of duty, protecting the president when reporter-turned-cyberterrorist
Lucas Goodwin opened fire at a speaking engagement.
The president took two bullets, but it was Meechum who suffered fatal gunshot wounds.
He died right then and there, but not before taking out Goodwin.
Rhonda Lyon
Killing off a main character in a season premiere?
Who do you think you are, Empire?
The Walking Dead?
In the Season 2 finale that aired in May 2016, audiences were left wondering about the outcome
of a fight between Anika and Rhonda when somebody falls off a balcony.
Five months later, audiences saw Rhonda's body embedded in a car.
However, while Rhonda is definitely dead, the character may not be.
Showrunners have said that Andre will have an "unusual relationship" with his dead wife,
so there's a good chance we'll get dream sequences, hallucinations, and ghostly apparitions.
Empire is, after all, a soap opera.
Jack Pearson
As one of the biggest hits of the fall 2016 TV season, millions tuned in to This is Us,
if only to figure out what the cryptic promotional campaign was getting at.
What was the connection between a couple having a baby in a hospital, another couple slowly
falling in love, a sitcom actor, and an adult man confronting someone who appeared to be
his father?
Because the show unfolds over the course of three decades, character deaths are a given,
but one of them is pretty startling: it's revealed that Milo Ventimiglia's Jack isn't
part of any modern storylines, because he died and was cremated at some point in the
past.
Because of the way the show is presented, we'll still see plenty of Jack.
Still, it's pretty sad for audiences knowing what he doesn't know — that he won't live
to see his kids grow up.
Margaery and Tommen
After falling under the control of the High Sparrow, everything went up in green flames
for Margaery, her life becoming collateral damage at the hands of her vengeful mother-in-law.
Cersei Lannister blew up the whole of King's Landing with some heretofore undiscovered
Wildfire.
And Cersei's son, King Tommen, was pretty upset after the death of his bride, so he
went for a walk.
Out a window.
Ah, well.
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