Sunday night’s episode of The Walking Dead was brutal, sad and hard to watch. It was one of the most painful, disgusting, and tragic episodes in the show’s seven season run.
It was also humbling. While I was right that the showrunners decided to kill off Abraham, I didn’t see Glenn’s death coming. I didn’t think they’d go that far after toying with our emotions in the Glenn fake-out death last season.
I still think killing Daryl would have been the better move, but there’s no doubt that killing off Glenn was bloody, bold and resolute. On the other hand, killing Glenn just pours salt on the wound AMC left us with in Season 6.
The Walking Dead badly mishandled Glenn’s fake-out death last season—something I go into great detail about in this post—and I was sure they wouldn’t follow that up with killing him for real. While it’s pretty crazy that they did, and while it’s really great drama, it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. They just killed Glenn. Then they brought him back. Now they’ve killed him off again. Once again, it feels like a dirty trick.
To make matters worse, they killed him with the least dignity you could imagine. When Glenn “died” last season it was a scene of horror and tragedy, but it didn’t involve his eye bulging out from his head. It was a terrible moment, with the zombies apparently ripping into him, but it wasn’t tasteless. There was some dark beauty to his death; something poetic about the loss.