Killing off main or semi-regular characters has become so common, that it’s hard to imagine a time when it wasn’t a seasonal event.
We’re not even halfway through the current TV season and already some characters we loved (well, mostly those we loved to hate) have gone to the big tube in the sky.
Perhaps the most shocking was the death of Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan) on “Alias.� The prime love interest for Jennifer Garner’s Sydney Bristow throughout the series’ run, Vaughn was blown away in the season premiere – not long after discovering that he and Syd had conceived a child together.
Yes, that’s very sad, and the loss of Vaughn may have signaled the coming demise of the series, which, it was recently announced, will end this season.
But I wasn’t really torn up about Vaughn’s death, although most fans are outraged. In truth, I never felt that the character recovered from his ill-fated marriage to another woman (a double agent he eventually killed) while Syd was presumed dead.
Ever since, he’s stuck me as kind of a weak character, and I don’t understand what Syd saw in him.
Also not greasing my tear ducts was the loss of Shannon (Maggie Grace) on “Lost.� Perhaps the show’s most grating character and a mistake from day one, she’s that rare TV character that you’re actually glad to see go.
Granted, it’s sad whenever a fictional character’s time is up, but killing Shannon off was the only interesting thing the show’s writers ever did with the character. Her death set up tension between the main group of survivors and the so-called “Tailies,� whose leader, Ana-Lucia (Michelle Rodriguez) accidentally shot Shannon.
However, there has been at least one characters whose death I mourned this season: George (Roger Bart), the smarmy pharmacist who inexplicably charmed Marcia Cross’s Bree on “Desperate Housewives.�
Yes, he was oily, creepy and a psycho, but face it – George had panache. Every time he was on screen, the show had a tension and sense of danger that it lacked when he was gone. He also was one of the few “DH� characters who did truly shocking things, like slowly killing Bree’s husband, Rex, with a tainted prescription.
He definitely deserved a better death than the overdose of pills that led to his demise in this week’s episode.
I was hoping that, once Bree discovered George was the one who killed Rex, George would try to implicate her in the crime. That would lead to a knockdown, drag out battle between Bree, arguably the show’s strongest character, and George, its strongest villain.
I pictured a grand bloody showdown, in which Bree, a card-carrying NRA member, would blow George away, then collapse into tears, as only Bree can. Alas, that wasn’t the case, and “DH� fans now must mourn the loss of George, and what could have been.