The Walking Dead Deaths That Should've Happened Sooner
With a show based around surviving a zombie apocalypse, you can't really be mad at the producers for killing people off. It's kind of inevitable. But what you can do is grumble about the character who die when other characters clearly need to die sooner. And with that in mind, here's a handful of Walking Dead deaths that most of us can agree are not only necessary, but were a long time coming.
Andrea
When Andrea starts out on the show, she seems like a perfectly reasonable character. We sympathize with her when her sister dies, we cheer as she learns how to shoot and kick ass and we root for her to take on as many of those dirty walkers as she can. And then she meets the Governor and apparently loses her mind.
A crazy man with a bunch of aquariums full of zombie heads, an undead daughter chained in the back room, and a penchant for orchestrating zombie arena fights somehow convinces her to turn her back on her friends and close her eyes to every atrocity he decides to commit. What's she get out of it? A cushy bed and someone to sleep with. It's Shane and Lori all over again, two awful people for whom a sexual relationship justifies being blind to the chaos around them. The final straw comes when Andrea turns her back on Michonne in favor of the Governor. It's at that point Andrea should be offed. After that, she just sticks around to make the audience mad with every subsequent stupid decision she makes at that point.
Lori
Lori should have been a likeable character, but man, was she never written that way. Instead of a good mother, a wife, a survivor, and a source of strength and inspiration in the land of the dead, she's a woman who cheats on her husband after, what, three weeks of him being in a coma and the world ending?
The show tries to make some justification for her behavior, but the world had literally ended and she has a son to try to protect. Maybe hooking up with her husband's best buddy could have been back burnered? Not to mention once Rick returns she's just kind of overbearing and awful to both him and their son. Remember, there are zombies everywhere. This kind of high school-level petty squabbling and cheating really has no place. Keeping her around only serves to stress out the main characters and make Rick seem like a sucker for being so hung up on a woman who really doesn't seem to give a damn about him.
The Governor
Credit where credit is due, the Governor is a hell of a villain. The problem is he just wouldn't go away. He becomes a parody of a good villain, a bad penny with a zombie daughter named Penny that just refuses to die, like a zombie apocalypse cockroach. If he'd just served his purpose in season three, he'd have been fine, but then for some reason he lasts halfway through season four. By the time the man finally dies, fans were practically volunteering to move to Georgia and kill him themselves.
It's not that the Governor isn't worthy of a long storyline. The character's unnerving mix of charming but ruggedly heroic town leader protecting his citizens and completely unhinged psychopath is a great addition to the show. It's just that he proves himself to be really crazy really often, and no one does anything about it. And then season three ends and he's still alive. He has the nerve to show up again in season four, doing the exact same crazy, murder stuff he does throughout the second half of season three. It's all just too much.
Shane
Shane starts out as a good guy, it seems. Why the writers decided to go so dark with the character and take him from what appeared to be Rick's good friend and partner who was heartbroken to leave his friend in a coma at a hospital to an underhanded power-mad jerk sleeping with his friend's wife is anyone's guess.
Once Rick returns, every subsequent episode that keeps Shane alive just seems to be a knife in our hero's back as Shane grows more and more insidious. Sure, Rick finally has to take care of the man, but it should have happened much sooner and much more cleanly. Hell, Shane should have had the tact to take himself out and try to gain a little bit of redemption.
Nicholas
Nicholas doesn't appear in a lot of episodes and, all things being equal, doesn't deserve to be in half the ones he survives through. The man just can't stop trying to kill Glenn, and Glenn just can't stop letting him. Three times, if you're counting, until it finally seems to work. First, Nicholas runs like a chump and abandons Glenn and Noah, resulting in Noah's tragic and brutal death right before Glenn's eyes.
As if getting Noah killed isn't bad enough, Nicholas goes out of his way to try to murder Glenn to cover his own butt. And for whatever reason, Glenn lets him get away with it, maybe hoping there'd be some kind of redemption for the man. Well, good call, Glenn. Because Nicholas ends up blowing his own brains out and flopping on Glenn, causing both of them to fall into a zombie pit. Had Glenn gotten rid of the guy when he had the chance, when it was practical—since second chances are way too risky in a zombie apocalypse—none of that would have happened.
Abraham Ford
As much as fans might've dug Abraham's handlebar mustache and grunty tough guy routine, he should've been on the chopping block long before Negan took his fateful swings in that Season 7 premiere fiasco. In the comics, he actually died with an arrow shot through the eye, delivered by the Savior Dwight, and before he died from his injury, he managed to finish a few words of his sentence, not realizing what had happened to him until he succumbed to the wound.
That scene still played out in the show, but instead of Abraham's eye being impaled, it was Dr. Denise Cloyd who took the crazy shot from Dwight and kept delivering her inspirational speech to Daryl and Rosita until she fell out. This incensed many a Walking Dead fan, not just because that was supposed to Abraham's big exit maneuver, but because Denise's name added to a troubling trend of lesbian characters who'd been killed off on television series around the same time. Sure, Abraham's survival bought a few more gooey scenes with Sasha and all, but for some, they'd rather have seen more of Denise and Tara's budding romance than his.
Glenn Rhee
Glenn Rhee wasn't the first or last character to miraculously survive the unsurvivable–Jon Snow was magicked back to life on Game of Thrones, while Brian benefited from some of Stewie's time travel hijinks on Family Guy. But Glenn's unrealistic escape from the swarm of walkers that seemed, from the close-up camera angles, to be consuming his insides right before our eyes, was perhaps the most infuriating.
As much hubbub as Glenn's first "death" caused, it seemed like an obvious ratings ploy to play with people's emotions so thoroughly, only to bring him back and then kill him off a few episodes later anyway. For those loyal to Robert Kirkman's comics, those oh-so-familiar shots of Lucille's devastation to Glenn's face might've been payoff enough for all the trouble caused by the first fake-out death, but they still should've committed to just killing him the first time to save us all from a serious case of whiplash. Yeesh.
Hershel Greene
Hershel's death scene hurt. As in, the Governor did such a crap job trying to kill off everyone's adoptive grandpa that he had to do it twice because his first swing left the poor guy's head half hanging off in his sloppy decapitation sword-swing. Poor Hershel tried to crawl away as he bled out before he had to endure yet another stroke of the Governor's blade to meet his maker.
If that wasn't terrible enough, Hershel had already endured a field amputation of his leg, which successfully stopped the spread of the biter venom that would've made him a walker, just in time for him to sub in as the group's moral leader while Rick lost his mind and played phone tag with a ghost after Lori's death. So, for the sake of mercy–especially for his daughters, who had to watch helplessly as their father was killed purely for the sake of vengeance–he should've at least died on the first swing, if not sooner.
Owen
Morgan Jones' backstory and personal development scenes have been among the show's strongest since the very beginning–c'mon, who doesn't love the "Clear" episode and that random one-off of him with his lamb-loving peace pal? But whatever was happening with him trying to instill some humanity in Owen the Wolf was a gigantic waste of time.
Sure, he ended up being right, and Owen ultimately proved Morgan's point by sacrificing himself for Dr. Denise. But he was still a terrible weirdo who should've died like the dog he always claimed he was a long time before he actually did bite it. Kudos to Carol for doing the dirty deed, per usual.
Lizzie Samuels
The point of Lizzie was to show that children who are brought up in this kind of hellscape are going to either sink into mental oblivion or swim into gunslinging cowboy-ness like Carl. In Lizzie's case, she could never quite intuit the reality of this new life, and her rat-wielding quirks were all well and cute and gave Carol lots of fun teaching/mom moments until things took a terrible turn in Season 4.
Just for the heck of it, Lizzie murdered her baby sister Mika after becoming convinced that zombies were just like people and deciding she wanted her sister's reanimated corpse to prove it to everyone. The signs that this child was capable of such a thing were absolutely everywhere, from her naming all the corpses at the prison fence to yelling at the survivors for executing the undead. As much as Carol might have wanted to believe Lizzie could be talked out of her crazy ways, that faith cost poor Mika's life in the process, which was unnecessary and incredibly irksome. It made for horrifically good TV, but maybe Lizzie should've just fulfilled her wish of reanimating way back when she had the flu so little Mika could help keep Judith company.