Right when Beth was starting to get interesting too.
Beth getting killed off after she finally had a story arc with dialogue and people wanting her to be Daryls girlfriend pissed people off.
They should have kept her on, the writing has gotten confusing and the only thing people are suggesting is Gimple doing this for financial gain, kill Beth off to avoid having to pay another salary
I just read that The Walking Dead franchise makes billions.
Walking Dead character death has fans out for Scott M. Gimple’s blood
It's hard to see how this plot twist makes any sense or will help the show's already sliding ratings, writes Debra Yeo.
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for Season 8 of The Walking Dead.
The major plot twist that ended Sunday’s
midseason finale of
The Walking Dead has some fans declaring all-out war — the theme of this season — on showrunner Scott M. Gimple.
If you haven’t seen the episode stop reading right here.
Carl, the son of main character Rick Grimes, has been bitten by a zombie and is dying.
Predictably, the twist drew anger and dismay on Twitter. User after user posted their disgust using the hashtag #FireGimple.
“I’m not normally a vindictive person, but I want there to be consequences for this,” tweeted viewer @DrLawyerPI. “Carl was the future of the walking dead.”
In fact, Carl’s character is very much alive in the comic books that inspired the show and a key part of the new world the survivors of the zombie apocalypse are building.
At first I thought this was a case of an actor wanting out. Chandler Riggs, who has played Carl since 2010 and grown up on the series, was about to start college. But Riggs told the Hollywood Reporter he planned to delay college to focus on acting and had just bought a house near the show’s set in Georgia.
Riggs told
Entertainment Weekly that learning of Carl’s death was “devastating because the show has been such a big part of my life. I had . . . dedicated so much time and effort into the show that it was crazy that that was going to be the decision.”
His father, William Riggs, went further, saying in a now deleted Facebook comment, “Watching Gimple fire my son 2 weeks before his 18th birthday after telling him they wanted him for the next 3 years was disappointing. I never trusted Gimple or AMC but Chandler did. I know how much it hurt him.”
Why did Gimple kill off Carl?
He told the
Hollywood Reporter that he and the writers made the decision to serve “the greater story of the season. It will be very apparent, the relationship of this awful incident — this very intense story turn — to the greater story. . . . I know as you’re watching it into the next half of the season that you’ll get it.”
According to Riggs, “(Gimple’s) reasoning . . . was that in the comics after All-Out War (between the main characters and the Saviors), Negan gets taken prisoner, so to figure out a way to make Rick not want to kill Negan would be to have Carl see things from a different perspective and try to push those ideals onto Rick . . . about how they can’t kill every one of the Saviors and not everyone is a bad person.”
Whether this was just Gimple making something up to appease Riggs or his actual thought process, it makes zero sense to me.
I can’t imagine Rick (played by Andrew Lincoln) being motivated to carry on with Carl gone, let alone deciding to go easy on Negan.
Lincoln himself hinted at this in an interview with
Vanity Fair. “You can’t write a character like Rick Grimes — whose engines are his wife and his son — and you take away the wife and you’re left with the son. And . . . then you take away the other engine that fuels him, that got him off his deathbed in the first-ever episode.”
In his Hollywood Reporter interview, Gimple said he believes
The Walking Dead can last into ninth and 10th seasons and beyond.
Forgive me if I don’t share his optimism, either about the series lasting or making sense of Carl’s looming death.
(The character will still be alive in the midseason premiere on Feb. 25, but there won’t be any miracle reprieve à la Glenn crawling out from under a dumpster, nor should there be. As much as I hate the decision to kill him off, it would be beyond ridiculous to let him survive a bite to the torso.)
The show has been playing fast and loose with viewers’ loyalties for a long time, particularly the last two seasons when we’ve been subjected to plot holes big enough to drive trucks through and the worst villain in series history in the two-dimensional Negan.
The ratings have reflected this reality and will likely continue to drop with this latest misguided decision.
If Gimple was hoping to goose viewership with this twist — which had been promoted the week before minus the specifics — he failed. With an average 7.9 million viewers, Sunday’s midseason finale was the lowest rated since Season 2, Variety says.
https://www.thestar.com/entertainme...h-has-fans-out-for-scott-m-gimples-blood.html
