TV Deaths We Never Saw Coming In 2018

Gone are the days when your favorite TV show could be counted on to bring you familiar adventures about familiar characters week after week, year after year. We're now in the era of Peak TV — a time in which the hundreds upon hundreds of shows available across broadcast networks, cable channels, and streaming services have to compete for attention by stepping up the drama. 

As a result, showrunners have free rein to be about as shocking as they want to be, and that means killing off major and long-term characters — often when fans don't even suspect it. In recent years, we've lost beloved characters on everything from Game of Thrones to Stranger Things to even Will and Grace. And 2018 shaped up to be another bloodbath in TV land. Here's a rundown of the characters who unexpectedly left us.

Carl Grimes (and actor Chandler Riggs, for that matter) grew up on TV. The son of Walking Dead protagonist Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), he'd been with the series since it started in 2010. Along the way, he endured tragedies and setbacks, including the death of his mother during childbirth, the loss of an eye, and various acts of evil by villains like the Governor and Negan. Keeping Carl alive and safe was the reason Rick never completely crumbled, and Carl kept human decency alive to the end — which is what ultimately killed him. 

Carl left Alexandria to help the mysterious Siddiq (Avi Nash) mercy-kill zombies because Siddiq believed it freed their souls. Alas, one of those zombies took a bite out of Carl. It's a death sentence, but not an immediate one, giving Carl time to say goodbye. He hangs out with his little sister Judith, writes devastating farewell letters, and then — so his death can be on his own terms — he shoots himself (offscreen) before he can go full walker.

NCIS wound down its 15th season with a heavily promoted plot: The departure of original character Abby Scuito, whose longtime portrayer, actress Pauley Perrette, was ready to move on. NCIS fans assumed or suspected that Abby might be written off the show in the manner by which characters are most commonly and effectively removed from a series: death.

It certainly appeared that this fate had befallen lab tech Abby, especially since in what was Perrette's second-to-last episode, airing on May 2, 2018, she and co-worker Clayton Reeves, an MI-6 operative and NCIS Liaison Officer, struggled over a gun with a yet-to-be-identified assailant, and a gunshot rang out as the screen cut to black. Resolving that cliffhanger ending, the May 9 episode depicted Ducky (David McCallum) sympathizing with another coroner about the agony of performing an autopsy on a former colleague. Had Abby died from a gunshot? Surprise! She hadn't. When the body bag was unzipped, inside was Reeves, portrayed by Duane Henry on more than 30 episodes of NCIS from 2016 to 2018. Evidently, he'd bravely and selflessly stepped in front of Abby to take the bullet. As for Abby, she was in the hospital, but she pulled through, and played an integral role in one last high-stakes NCIS adventure.

Deaths on Gotham are frequent, but they're usually just underlings, stooges, or random victims of the future Rogue's Gallery. Since it's a Batman prequel series, Gotham can't mess with the subject matter's mythology too much, or it won't "set up" what needs to happen next. Or maybe not, because many familiar Gotham characters met their end in the show's fourth season finale.

Butch Gilzean (Drew Powell), who somehow once survived an attempted murder by Barbara (Erin Richards), was brought back to life by a dip in a toxic swamp... although he came back not quite right, as the monstrous Solomon Grundy. The Penguin (Robin Taylor), however, seeking revenge for the murder of his mother, killed Butch/Solomon — and in front of his dear Tabitha (Jessica Lucas) to boot. The Penguin shot her in the leg, too, for good measure.

Also among the dead: classic Batman character Ra's al Ghul (Alexander Siddig). After Barbara turned down the baddie's offer to leave Gotham—after he destroyed it, of course—she dispatched him, stabbing-wise, with the assistance of Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz).

Will Simpson (Will Travel) was a vital character in the first season of Jessica Jones — at first he was one of the many unwittingly mind-controlled subjects of Kilgrave (David Tennant), a cop forced to kill Jessica's associate Trish Walker. She saved Trish, convincing Will that Trish was already dead...and then she saved Will, preventing his death at the hands of Kilgrave when he outlived his usefulness to the supervillain. 

The spell broken, Simpson was in control of his own life again, and entered into a relationship with Trish and hatched a plan to exact revenge on Kilgrave that involved taking combat assistance kills which made him so manic he killed three people — and almost killed Jessica before he was kidnapped by the enigmatic IGH, who just so happened to be his pill supplier. 

When season 2 started up, Simpson was stalking Trish. He cornered her and she shot him in the leg —at which point he warned Trish she was in danger. Sure enough, they were attacked by a person who turned out to be Alisa, Jessica's mother, who snapped Will's neck.

Riverdale is not your grandfather's Archie. Based on the squeaky-clean comic book adventures, the show is a dark and wild reimagining, switching out low-stakes teen life for murder, sex, and mystery. Take Midge, for example. A minor character in the comics — she was known for having short hair and dating the jock/sometimes bully Moose — Midge was brutally murdered in public on Riverdale. 

After surviving an attack by the show's second season big bad, a mysterious assailant known as the Black Hood, Midge (Emilija Baranac) was cast in Riverdale High's production of the musical version of Stephen King's Carrie. But when the curtain on the show rose, audiences — and half the town of Riverdale — learned that the Black Hood came back to finish what he/she started. There was Midge, brutally stabbed, with the knives and scissors still in her body and creepy messages written in blood on the wall around her.

The season finale of the second round of the rebooted X-Files sure felt like a series finale — mostly because so many longtime characters died. One of the season's main arcs concerned Cigarette Smoking Man's plans to unleash a deadly virus, and to pull it off, he'd manipulated Scully's shape-shifting son William, along with FBI Assistant Director Walter Skinner and Agent Monica Reyes, into helping him execute it. CSM (William B. Davis) also happened to be William's biological father — he was the one who'd drugged and medically impregnated Scully (Gillian Anderson) nearly two decades ago. 

William, wishing to be free of all this evil awfulness, finally confronted CSM on a dock while using his powers to disguise himself as Mulder. CSM then shot William-as-Mulder in the head. Then the real Mulder, distraught and devastated (in part because he was led to believe he was William's father), shot CSM and kicked him into the water. This means that one of series' biggest and most memorable big bads is finally dead. However, on the way to his own death, he caused some collateral damage: After Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) shot onetime Scully replacement Agent Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish), he got run over with a car. But is anybody ever really dead on The X-Files? Even William burst up out of the water at the end of this death-laden episode.

Kimmy and Titus's widowed, me-against-the-world landlord Lillian Kaushtupper, an old school tough New Yorker, former criminal, and anarchist, found love again in the third season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt with a most unlikely candidate: Artie Goodman (Peter Riegert), owner and operator of a Whole Foods-like grocery chain called Big Naturals that wanted to open a store in Lillian's neighborhood, which would bring about unwanted gentrification. They finally got together and Lillian reluctantly agreed to go on vacation with Artie. At the outset of Season 4, however, viewers learned that Artie died on their trip, and Lillian was entrusted to spread his ashes at the site of his summer camp in Manhattan, now an exclusive club called Snoke House. Barred from entering the exclusive club, Lillian was able to give Artie the final resting place he asked for—sort of—along with some closure for herself: She sold two plastic baggies full of Artie's cremains for $1,200 to a bunch of Snoke House finance-bros who clearly thought those ashes were something a little more party-friendly.

In May 2018, Clayne Crawford was shockingly fired from Fox's TV version of Lethal Weapon. Apparently, over his two seasons of work on the show as loose cannon cop Martin Riggs, Crawford made life difficult on the set for many people, notably co-star Damon Wayans. The two often clashed behind the scenes, and Wayans says he was struck in the head by debris from an explosion in an episode directed by Crawford.

Lethal Weapon still earned a third-season renewal, and news came down that Crawford would be replaced by Seann William Scott, who'd portray Wesley Cole, new partner to Wayans' Roger Murtaugh. That ramped up speculation as to how Lethal Weapon would explain Crawford's sudden absence. The show addressed the issue with its third-season premiere, and it was pretty easy for the show's writers. The second season ended on a cliffhanger, with Riggs shot by his half-brother, Garrett (Peter Coventry Smith). Riggs didn't survive the shooting — and Garrett, distraught over killing Riggs, took his own life.

When the Tim Allen sitcom Last Man Standing returned to Fox more than a year after ABC canceled it, producers made a few changes. For example, actress Molly Ephraim was unable to reprise her role as middle Baxter sibling Mandy, and was replaced by Molly McCook. Another big change: Bud Baxter, father of Allen's grumpy sporting goods store owner Mike Baxter, portrayed by veteran character actor and Oscar nominee Robert Forster, wouldn't be back at all... because Bud is dead. Forster showed up here and there on the ABC version of the show, but producers used the network switch to send his character into oblivion, which set up a new plot arc ripe with comedy: Mike Baxter's son-in-law takes over Bud's marijuana dispensary, much to Mike's chagrin. The death also led to an episode where Mike sees his dad one last time, in the form of a ghostly vision (because this is TV), for closure on some unresolved issues and to say goodbye.

After some extremely troubling and terrible allegations involving Kevin Spacey broke in late 2017, Netflix swiftly announced that the actor wouldn't appear on House of Cards again. When viewers last saw Spacey as the sociopathic political climber Frank Underwood, he'd cheated, connived, and killed his way to the White House, only to resign the position but still wishing to secretly control the new president — his wife Claire (Robin Wright). Early in the first episode of the sixth season, released in November 2018, viewers learned that Frank Underwood had died from taking too much of his prescription liver medicine. 

But nothing on House of Cards was ever simple or accidental. In the final moment of the season — and series finale — it's revealed that his longtime, blindly loyal lieutenant Doug Stamper, who'd variously served as Underwood's chief of staff and director of strategy, was to blame. Doug stopped an enraged Frank from killing Claire by stuffing a fatal dose of liver pills down the former president's throat. "I had to protect the legacy from the man," he tearfully confessed to Claire Underwood. Then Doug tried to finish the job Frank started, and threatened Claire with a letter opener, only to back off... at which point she grabbed the letter opener, stabbed Doug in the stomach, and suffocated him until he was just as dead as Frank.