8 Cheapest Season Finale Cliffhangers In TV History
8. The Walking Dead - Who Did Negan Kill?
... A cheap trick designed to make sure you tune back in a few months later.
Last Day on Earth should have been The Walking Dead's The Rains of Castamere. The stage had been set: an entire half season established the threat of Negan's arrival and foreshadowed the destructive power of Lucille. The final episode set this dread in even further; the walls were closing in on Rick and his family, with a trap sprung that they simply couldn't escape.
Lined up and introduced to Negan proper, the tension was palpable. Somebody was going to die, and there was nothing you nor the characters could do about it. The end was coming for at least one fan-favourite, and it wasn't going to be pretty.
But Negan can't choose, and so begins a devilish game of eenie meenie, as he moves from one survivor to the next. Then the camera gets a little weird. The people he's moving to are out of order. All spacial awareness is eliminated, replaced with close-ups of the bat. Then he picks his victim off-screen, the camera cuts to their point-of-view, Negan swings...
... and then it cuts to black.
Robbing the moment of all its impact, instead of seeing who the villain killed, the writers turned it into a guessing game to get viewers back for Season 7. The fallout of this death should have been one of the defining moments of the show - potentially in all of television - but it was snatched away in favour of a cheap "who dies?" ratings gimmick.
[Josh Brown]