12 Main Character Deaths That Killed Great TV Shows
4. The Kwons (Lost)
Episode Of Death: S06E14 - "The Candidate"
For a show that was never afraid to kill off its regulars, it was, perhaps, amazing that its longest-lasting couple made it to the end of Season 6; given which, however, their eventual fate seemed all the more brutal.
Having been kept apart for near enough two seasons - with Sun back in the real world and Jin apparently lost at sea - their reunion was always going to make for tearful viewing. Sun left their baby with her mother and traveled halfway around the world, back to The Island from which she'd spent so long trying to escape, on the possibility that Jin was alive, an event made all the more tragic by his desperate attempts to keep her away, to give her and their child a chance at a normal life: "This place is death!"
Jin's reasoning was proven true when the two of them lost their lives when the Dharma submarine flooded, Jin remaining behind to stay with his trapped wife, so shortly after they had been reunited. Though their death provided a sufficiently tragic way into the series finale, as well as fueling Jack with the grief and rage he needed to take on the Man in Black, the sense of tragedy within the show was mingled with the audience's anger that two such pivotal characters had been thrown away, "Charlie"'d (to coin a term). With Sayid having been killed in the very explosion that sunk the submarine, LOST had, in one fell swoop, killed off the few minority members of the cast that still remained.
Admittedly, it wasn't like our separation from them was permanent: Sun and Jin were still alive and well in the sideways timeline, albeit in the same emotional state in which we'd found them, with Jin as an emotionally withholding traditionalist and Sun seeking a way out. Their recovery of their memories from The Island was a resurrection of sorts, but it sort of got lost in the flood of people undergoing similar experiences, such as Sawyer's reunion with Juliet.
Say what you want about Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse's "forget about the mysterious, love conquers all" approach, but it's hard not to feel that certain characters came out the worse for it, not least Sun and Jin.