Acing the finals: 10 on-screen deaths that hit us hard

Viewers know from the very beginning of this weepy family drama that Jack (Milo Ventimiglia), the good dad, is missing, likely dead. It’s what makes his absence and its effect on the surviving wife and three children all the more painful to watch. It was a cardiac arrest from smoke inhalation off a burning Crockpot that did Jack in. Frankly, every episode of this show hurts (helped by the background score). But Jack flashbacks hurt the most.

Love Quinn was not a good person. She was a manipulative murderer with a huge ego and a short temper. Her death is shocking only because no one saw it coming. After poisoning her husband Joe Goldberg, she advances towards him with a knife, but he injects her with his own lethal dose of aconite first. Joe who had the antidote ready for himself, survives yet again. RiP, Love.

Unexpected deaths hit bad when it’s a character everyone loves. They hit worse when they happen quickly in a show that is already fast paced. Ashtray, a drug dealer and the youngest character, dies protecting his brother Fezco from a SWAT team. For someone who’d only known violence and trauma, this death of a key character was a powerful way to re-arrange the stakes.

Jane had planned her wedding night with much anticipation and excitement. Nothing prepared her for her husband being shot. Like any good telenovela, this one had drama. But Jane’s screams, as she hears of the collapse of her husband of a few hours from a fatal blow, is the twist viewers feel in their guts. He is, after all, the man who rendered the show’s title obsolete.

He almost died in the opening episode. But he roared, thundered and held on to his billion-dollar empire for four seasons. Viewers knew he had to give up the throne (the title of the show is Succession, after all). But the heart-attack, sudden, off-camera, was devastating. As his not-serious kids take over, his legacy crumbles, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

Fans of the show that walks the line between tragedy and comedy know that living can often be worse than death. Sarah Lynn, self-destructive, with help from Bojack over the years, dies unsurprisingly of a drug overdose. Her last words are “I wanna be an architect”, a nod to her unfulfilled dreams and stolen promises. Impactful, isn’t it?

Ned Stark isn’t on this list. Nor are the key characters that dropped like flies over eight seasons. The death that hurts is Hodor, the gentle, slow, bear of a protector, who’s capable only of saying Hodor. They’re his last words too. He mutters Hodor over and over, when he means “Hold the door” against the enemies, giving up his life in a self-fulfilling prophecy, so someone else can rise to power.

When death accompanies good tidings, it leaves the viewers shocked. In Downton Abbey, when the sweet, rebellious youngest daughter dies in childbirth, as so many women did in the 1920s, it’s devastating. She was the fun one, bored by wealth, who wore harem pants, fell in love with the chauffeur and represented a brighter future. What a loss!

Bad things do happen to good people. And the death of the benevolent inmate at the hands of a brutal prison guard arrangement hurts more because it’s dismissed as an accidental. Her body is literally left on the cafeteria floor for a day until the coroner arrives. Does anyone deserve this pointless, ruthless death? It is even more agonising when we find out that she was in prison only for a non-violent crime.

How could we not include him? Poor Kenny died 97 times over 26 seasons, turning death itself into a complete joke. He was struck by lightning, gets destroyed by a snow speeder and even gets drowned and mauled by an evil goldfish. When the creators finally killed off Kenny for good, viewers hardly noticed.