Entertainment: Warning if you have not seen The Walking Dead Season 6 season finale there are spoilers ahead.
Cliffhangers are fine. About every The Walking Dead comic book ends with a cliffhanger. Television is no different. America went crazy in 1980 when nasty oilman J.R. Ewing was shot on the hit show Dallas. Gary Burbank had a #1 hit on the radio that summer “Who Shot J.R.?” So cliffhangers are nothing new, and can be very successful in getting the reader, or viewer, back at a later time.
But you can take the cliffhanger too far. And if you do, your fans will never forgive you. Many, in fact, will begin to walk away.
Take Dynasty, for instance. The most popular show in America, and around the world, in 1985. This big budget nighttime soap featured a big cast of Trump-like families battling each other over money, lust and more money.
At the end of the fifth season viewers were beginning to wonder if that had seen it all. When the writers came up with a brilliant plan.
Throw a big royal wedding with the entire cast on hand, then have terrorists burst through the windows and start shooting everybody with their automatic weapons.
It was quite a scene.
Everyone tuned in to watch it. My college friends and I, many who were not Dynasty fans, loved it. All of the stars of the show lying motionless with blood all over the place. It had everyone talking all summer.
But there’s a risk when you play with fans emotions like that. A show had better be prepared when the next season begins to bring satisfaction and resolution.
The route Dynasty took was cheap. When Season 6 started only Steven Carrington’s gay lover and over-priced semi-regular Ali MacGraw were dead. Everyone else got up and walked away. Except for Joan Collins, the main star, who had been in a contract dispute so she was just missing for several episodes all together.
Fans hated it. The show lasted several more seasons but it never recovered. It dripped, dripped, dripped viewers to the bitter end.
Which brings us back to The Walking Dead.
For the life of me I can’t figure out why we didn’t see Glenn in a bloody heap for five seconds at the end of the season finale. That would have been brilliant. Any fan of the comic books knows that Negan pounds Glenn into a bloody pulp with Lucille (the barbed wire bat).
The writers had already toyed with our emotions about Glenn earlier in the season when we thought he might be dead. We had already experienced some grief.
So why not give us that shocking reality to discuss all summer?
Sorry, writers, but if we come back to season seven and it’s just a dead Glenn? You will have another Dynasty Moldavia Wedding problem on your hands!
So this MUST happen:
The show begins and Glenn is dead. No surprise. It’s devastating for many of us, he’s been by far my favorite character, the last link back to a kinder and gentler humanity. He will be missed.
But then Negan, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan (who I thought was fantastic) needs to raise Lucille and pound yet another cast member into oblivion.
Just for good measure.
Negan is the new charismatic and evil Supreme Ruler. And he needs to prove it.
And that cast member, like Glenn, must be big. Not a minor character who recently came onto the show.
No, for this episode to save the cliffhanger, Daryl must die too.
Daryl has been a popular character from the beginning no doubt. But what is his purpose moving forward? Daryl is not in the comics so he’s expendable at any point.
And we have reached that point.
To live up to the over-the-top soap opera like season finale we must start a new season so shocking there is a collective gasp.
Yes, sadly, the writers of TWD have gotten us into this mess. And the only way out – THE ONLY WAY – is to go SUPER BIG in episode one of the seventh season.
If the writers fail to do so, we will sadly have another Moldavian Wedding Massacre on our hands.