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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5827662" data-attributes="member: 22424">Well, TV is all about escapism, and life in the UK is hellish, so... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Honestly, though, I dispute that it's specifically a UK thing. Ever since "Babylon 5", US TV hasn't been shy about killing off named characters. Other than Jack and Kim, did any other characters from the first series of "24" make it to the end? And that was a good part of the appeal of that show - the knowledge that any character (except maybe Jack) was expendable.Likewise, "Lost" killed more than a few characters, "Battlestar Galactica" wasn't shy about death, and "Game of Thrones" has had some shocking deaths.Conversely, "Red Dwarf" has retained the same core cast since the start (with one addition and one replacement actor in the same role), while "Doctor Who" has actually been fairly shy about killing off 'named' characters.Which is a good thing. If the writers are doing their jobs, you're supposed to be invested in the characters. And then, the death of those characters should be shocking and upsetting.But that doesn't mean they shouldn't do it. The single best moment in the whole of Star Trek is the death of Spock.That's fair enough. Certainly, there should be different shows for different tastes - there's room for both "The A-Team" and "The Unit" on TV, or at least there should be.On the other hand, Joyce Summers' death on "Buffy" was equally moving, but wasn't due to the actress wanting to leave AFAIK.And, indeed, the deaths of Tasha Yar on "ST:TNG" and Jenny Callendar on "Buffy" made for really good drama, largely because they came out of nowhere. Suddenly, the gloves were off, and the tone for the rest of the series was set. Those were perhaps the single best moves those shows made.(And that's not to mention the end of "Blackadder Goes Forth".)That was a particularly poorly-handled death, but bringing the character back was monumentally stupid and lame, IMO. Should have just apologised and moved on.Basically, what I'm saying is that character death is just another tool in the writer's kit. Like all such tools, it can be handled poorly or well, and that will determine how the death is received. It's just that character death is a particularly powerful tool - it must be handled with care.</blockquote>

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