Want to know how to disappoint and enrage your audience? The Walking Dead just gave a master class in just how to accomplish this.
I’ll be talking about the latest season finale of show. Technically, this calls for spoiler alerts. But it also doesn’t. The reason for this is that the makers of the show have been flat out lying to the audience all season.
Here’s the thing. We were told that a new villain would be introduced. Negan (played by the always cool Jeffrey Dean Morgan).
To fans of just the show, this wasn’t much in the way of news. To fans of the comics, this was huge.
Negan’s introduction in the comics was brutal. He had the protagonists captured, and the very first thing he does is savagely beat Glenn to death with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. It’s sudden. It’s horrifying. And it solidifies Negan as a force to be reckoned with.
We were teased all season long that this is exactly the introduction Negan will get in the show. We were told that his arrival will result in the immediate death of a major character. Glenn? Not necessarily. The writers said they were taking a “hard turn” from the comics, heavily implying that ANY character was up for grabs on the chopping block.
As the season chugged along, it was apparent that they were planning to hold back this potentially iconic moment for the show until the very end. Hit the audience with a gut punch and then make them wait for season 7.
So the day finally arrives. The Last Day On Earth is the season finale, and the main characters are put through the ringer (in which each series of setbacks seems more implausible than the last the more you think on it, but that’s beside the point).
The moment comes when the characters are captures and lined up. Negan walks out. We see the baseball bat.
And then the show pulls a reverse “Who Shot J.R.?” by switching to first person of the character Negan kills.
And then the end.
Now, it’s not unusual for a show to end a season on a big event. Sometimes this is the resolution of a season-long plot (think: Buffy defeating the Big Bad). Maybe it’s some incredibly shocking cliffhanger (think: the “death” of Jon Snow). Or maybe it’s the death of a major character.
The Walking Dead was trying to combine those last two for a double whammy. And this in itself wouldn’t be so bad.
Cliffhangers, especially those involving a character death, can be a huge hook to sustain an audience over the season break. Above, I mentioned the infamous cliffhanger in the show Dallas. The show ends with the first person view of someone shooting the main character, J. R. Ewing.
Fans went nuts. But in a good way. The entire summer was filled with speculation about the shooter. Contests were made to guess the identity.
And the show earned that cliffhanger honestly. The audience knew that everyone hated J.R. Ewing. Hell, the audience hated him. So everyone was legitimately a suspect. The audience wasn’t teased with the identity of the shooter all season long, and then left hanging. It just happened, and it was shocking.
Never mind that the show routinely went off the rails in so many ways. This one event was the perfect handling a cliffhanger like this. The reaction of the fans was visceral, but in a positive way.
Conversely, The Walking Dead did things like went out of its way to give us cast interviews MONTHS in advance of the finale. In these interviews, the cast discusses how the season ends and how sickened they all were by the outcome. The writers spoke out about knowing what the comic fans expect from Negan, but also asserting they plan to shake things up. Just because we know from the comic who dies, doesn’t mean we know who dies in the series.
All of this is a promise that these teases will be answered this season. Not turned into some attempt at a shocking cliffhanger.
See, the thing is, the audience was already promised to be shocked by who dies. And the writers failed to deliver on the promise. (And now some fans are even speculating that it really will be Glenn who was killed, further creating a rift between writers and fans after the writers announced they were going in a different direction from the comics.)
One of the biggest mistakes a writer can make is to be dishonest, not within a story, but directly to the audience.
You can have characters lie and cheat. You can have events be misleading. But you, as the writer, must maintain 100% honesty with your audience.
Sometimes this can be frustrating, especially if the audience figures out your plans before you want them to. But you have to resist the urge to lie, because their resentment toward your lies will outweigh their loss of surprise at having figured out your story.
J.J. Abrams learned this lesson the hard way when fans deduced that his villain for Star Trek Into Darkness was none other than Khan. He had intended this to be a shocking twist, but the cat was out of the bag. Rather than roll with it, he flat out lied. Leading up to the film he insisted that the villain absolutely was NOT Khan, that it was a totally new character.
And so when the Khan reveal occurred in the film, the backlash against Abrams was strong.
I fear that the people behind the Game of Thrones series are setting themselves up for similar backlash.
Last season they had a brilliantly brutal season finale with the death of Jon Snow. Game of Thrones is fearless when it comes to killing off main characters, so no matter how shocking it always is, it’s never completely unexpected. It had also set the rules leading up to Snow’s death early on. We knew he broke the rules of the Night’s Watch, so not only was his death unexpected in that moment, but it also completely fit the context of the overall story.
But ever since that ending of his body lying on the ground, people have speculated whether or not he is really dead. The writers and actors have insisted that he is.
And yet… fans have uncovered evidence of Kit Harrington (the actor playing Jon Snow) filming for the new season.
One thing that’s clear is that the actor is still involved in the show in some form or another. And sure, it’s unfortunate that in this day of information saturation that this fact escaped into the wild before the producers of the show wanted.
At this point, there are really only two options.
- The character really is dead, and the actor’s involvement is in support of that plot (either by filming scenes as his character’s corpse, or flashback / dream scenes).
- The character is not dead.
The first option is really the only way, at this point, the show can avoid a JJ Abrams / The Walking Dead level of fan disillusionment.
Don’t lie to your audience. If you want to take them on fantastic, incredible, or horrible journeys, they must implicitly trust YOU, the author, to be honest and fair. If you do something shocking in your writing, you want the audience to have a reaction to the story, not you.
Maintain trust and you can get away with a lot.
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