The Walking Dead Season 4 Finale: 8 Ways It Can Avoid Sucking

2. Kill Off The Right Characters

A show like the Walking Dead achieves greatness not by killing off characters at random, but by making the audience care about them first. This is a tricky one to include, as much of the show's fan base preoccupies themselves with merely speculating who will die. In theory, anyone could be killed in the next episode. But shock value only goes so far in a show like this. It is one of the great tricks of writing to make a character's death sudden and unpredictable, while letting it also have closure - what made Hershel's death so heart-wrenching is that his character arc had come to an end subtly in the episodes preceding it. Arbitrarily killing characters off simply for the sake of killing off characters harms the show's narrative more than anything else. That said, we all know that someone must die. Everyone who watches the show knows that not killing off a single character in the season finale in a show like The Walking Dead ends up trivializing the whole affair €“ remember the season 3 finale? Didn't think so.