TV Shows That Killed Off The Wrong Character

From the beginning, Netflix's Orange is the New Black has had a highly-developed sense of social justice and an accompanying interest in representation. With this comedy/drama set in a women's prison, creator Jenji Kohan and the writers attempt to balance a stark look at how criminal justice works (or, often, doesn't work) in America with a sense of comedy and a cast of likable characters, many of whom are LGBTQ women and women of color. 

One of the most likable characters from day one was Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley), a smart and funny gay black woman who was in prison for minor drug charges. Of all the women on the show, she was perhaps the kindest and the most helpful to her fellow inmates. She also had moving relationship storylines, from her unrequited feelings for her best friend Tastee to her eventual relationship with another inmate, Brooke.

As the show was running, the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining steam in the real world, reacting against the unjust deaths of black Americans at the hands of law enforcement. Naturally, a show as interested in social justice as Orange is the New Black wanted to reflect that reality in a story. A major character death serves as a natural way to drive such an issue home, so in the fourth season, Poussey was strangled to death by a guard when she attempted to diffuse an escalating situation. Then the show went on to attempt to make the guard who killed her a sympathetic character. Fans were angry, and the show became that much grimmer for the loss of its most likable character.

Fifteen years ago, queer relationships were much less common on television than they are today, but Buffy the Vampire Slayer offered one shining example in the romance between Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) and Tara Maclay (Amber Benson), two heroic witches whose powerful magic united them and blossomed into love. For a couple of years after they met in Season 4, nothing could keep them apart. Then, their relationship got rocky in Season 6, which wasn't too surprising on a show that always had a bit of soap opera in it.

What was surprising was the moment late in the season when, just as Willow and Tara had overcome their problems and were recommitting to their relationship, Tara was hit by a stray bullet fired by a villain who had come looking for Buffy. Tara died in Willow's arms, and the rest of the season became the story of Willow's unhinged quest for revenge against not just the villain in question, but the entire world. The loss of Tara was a blow to the show and its audience, and certainly an ignominious ending to one of television's first great lesbian relationships.

Torchwood, an edgier spin-off of Doctor Who about an extra-governmental agency that investigates the supernatural, just seemed addicted to killing its characters. More realistically, its actors became less interested in sticking around as the show struggled to find a stable position on British television. Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori) and Owen Harper (Burn Gorman) both died at the end of Season 2. Well, technically Harper died well before that, but he remained on the show as a mystically-animated walking corpse. It was that sort of show.

As of Season 3, which was presented as a five-part miniseries called Torchwood: Children of Earth, only three actual members of Torchwood remained: Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), and Ianto Jones (Gareth David-Lloyd). However, Children of Earth had an even darker tone that made further death practically inevitable. Ultimately, it was Ianto Jones who payed the price.

This upset many viewers, particularly because Ianto was in a gay relationship with Torchwood leader Jack Harkness. Fans accused the series and its creators of homophobia, despite the fact that showrunner Russell T. Davies was himself a gay man, as was John Barrowman. Nevertheless, Davies had unintentionally stumbled into the "kill your gays" trope, a longstanding and unfortunate cultural habit of killing LGBTQ characters in fiction. You may have already noticed that problem coming up on this list, and it will come up again.

Lexa was the character whose death brought criticism of the "bury your gays" trope into mainstream discourse. Played by Alycia Debnam-Carey on the CW sci-fi series The 100, Lexa was the leader of a warrior tribe on a post-apocalyptic Earth, and drama ensued when she fell in love with Clarke (Eliza Taylor), leader of a group of delinquent teenagers who'd been sent back to the planet by human refugees in space. Their political responsibilities complicated their feelings and led to betrayal along the way, but eventually they found each other and began a romantic and sexual relationship.

Unfortunately, Debnam-Carey was also one of the stars of Fear the Walking Dead, and its Season 2 shooting schedule was going to interfere with The 100. So just as she had found a moment's happiness with Clarke, Lexa was killed. Not only that, she was shot by someone who wasn't even aiming at her, exactly like Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show's fan base, which included many LGBTQ viewers, was understandably outraged by this turn of events, with many vowing never to watch the show again. In fact, it became impossible to discuss The 100 without talking about the Lexa problem, which cast a shadow over all discourse about the series until its end.

The BBC costume drama Downton Abbey, which found a surprising fandom in the U.S. when it aired on PBS, was very much an ensemble show. However, Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) was a prime protagonist from the beginning. He's introduced as a distant cousin of patriarch Lord Grantham, and he becomes the heir to Downton Abbey when Grantham's previous heirs die on the Titanic. He serves as an important audience identification character, adjusting to life on the lavish estate. He also has a doomed romance with Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery), Grantham's daughter. He goes to war and is badly injured, but then has a miraculous recovery, renewing his relationship with Mary. The two wed and have a son, but then one day Matthew randomly dies in an automobile accident.

There was no way Matthew could remain on the show, because Dan Stevens wanted to pursue a movie career and was free to leave after Season 3's Christmas special. However, the romance between Matthew and Mary had been a fan-favorite aspect on the show, and his rise to become Lord of Downton Abbey was a central element of the series from the beginning. Matthew's sudden death so totally derailed the show's storyline that it might have been preferable to end it when Stevens left.

Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) was the glue that held three seasons of Fear the Walking Dead together. The show began by focusing on her family, as the high school guidance councilor protected her son, daughter, husband, and stepson from an escalating zombie apocalypse. It was a great role for Dickens, a talented actress who rarely had a better chance to shine, and putting a capable middle-aged woman in the lead made Fear stand out from most of the rugged-man-dominated zombie genre, including the show it spun off from, The Walking Dead. Nevertheless, after teasing her absence for the first few episodes of season 4, the show revealed in a flashback that Madison had sacrificed her life by leading a horde of zombies to their doom (and hers) while the other humans escaped.

When something like that happens to a lead character, you might assume it's because the actor wanted out. This time, however, Kim Dickens was surprised to find out her character was dying, and described herself as "heartbroken" at the news. New showrunners Ian Goldberg and Andrew Chambliss made the decision to kill Madison as part of their vision for the show, which continues to seem like a questionable choice. Dickens as Madison is what made this show different from all the other zombie stories, so why would they want to get rid of her and be more the same?

Every once in a while, it feels like a show is backing away from a death even as it happens, which raises the question of why they're doing it in the first place. As we've previously established, killing off gay characters has a long and ignominious history, and these days it's almost guaranteed to get a negative reaction. Nevertheless, on the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, when Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif) was struggling against the Klingon identity that was sharing his body, it was Doctor Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) that he murdered in a Klingon rage. Culber and his husband Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) were the first canonically LGBTQ characters in Star Trek history, a fact that had initially been sold as a big reason to watch the show, so it's hard to imagine how they thought this would go well.

Before the second season even began, Wilson Cruz was out there letting fans know that Culber would be back. Ultimately, he returned in a new body thanks to the vagaries of the interdimensional mycelial network that enables the USS Discovery to jump through hyperspace. After that, much of season 2 was spent in suspense over whether this new Hugh still wanted to be with Paul. As of the season finale, they're finally back together. So again, why kill Culber in the first place? It was a bad look, and they didn't even stick with it. There were a lot of other people Tyler could have killed to show how dangerous he was, especially if that person was going to be resurrected anyway. Still, at least Culber's back for future seasons, no matter how rocky his road has been.

Game of Thrones has killed so many characters over the years that it almost feels wrong to put the show on this list at all. Game of Thrones, it seems, can get away with killing anybody. The more heroic the character, the more it seems retrospectively inevitable when they die (remember Ned Stark? And Robb? And Catelyn?). On the other hand, Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer) was no hero. She wasn't particularly a villain either, but she was one of the cleverest schemers on the show, a trait she inherited from her grandmother Olenna (Diana Rigg). Margaery died alongside her brother Loras (Finn Jones), father Mace (Roger Ashton-Griffiths), and a whole crowd of other characters when Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) blew up the crowded Sept of Baelor.

Out of everyone who was trapped in that church as it exploded in green fire, Margaery was really the only one who deserved better. Even in that moment, only she was smart enough to realize what it meant that Cersei had failed to show up herself. She knew they needed to get out of there, and said so, but was stopped by the doomed nay-saying bureaucracy of the religious leaders in charge. Who knows where Margaery would have ended up if she'd remained part of the series? She was simply too exciting and dynamic a character to be murdered from afar as just one body in a crowd.