For a long time, every piece of fiction I wrote ended in catastrophe. Suicide, usually, because that was just about all I could think of, as an ending to a story. Sometimes noble self-sacrifice, or murder. Death, generally.
I understand now that I did this because I didn’t know how to allow characters to live with the consequences of the story. I didn’t know what it looked like to do the work of living. That was beyond me, and so it was beyond all of my characters—a pretty serious personal failing. But I know this, now: Life is a choice, one you continue to make, day after day.
From here on out, there are spoilers for all of Veronica Mars Season 4, The Good Wife, Game of Thrones, and, weirdly, Justified and The Americans.
I guess maybe that’s not compelling enough for certain TV series. Twice in the span of a couple months, now, we’ve seen a male character on a series complete an arc of self-actualization and get killed for that: Jaime on Game of Thrones (which undid all that personal growth while killing him, how fun) and Logan on Veronica Mars.
Yeah. They killed Logan. I saw it coming—you learn to sense these kinds of things, after watching as much TV as I have over the last 20 years. As soon as I saw him go out to move the car for street cleaning, I stopped the episode and decided that was it for me, with this show. I had dishes to wash, anyway.
As I did my dishes, I wondered why this felt like such a betrayal. And the more I thought about it, the more it felt like a betrayal of Logan himself.
(That sounds a little weird because it’s a fictional character, but the point of TV is to develop relationships with the characters, so grant me this connection, even if it’s one I hadn’t thought about in a decade. Also, I did watch the final 10 minutes of the episode a few days later.)
Logan had put in the work. Even in the face of Veronica’s constant dismissal of therapy as an effective process and her honestly horrifying attempts to provoke his anger issues, Logan Echolls had persevered. He was continuing to put in the work, and trying to get his partner to do so as well. To blow him up with a car bomb that remained in Veronica’s car because of her own carelessness is to say—what, exactly? That Veronica’s job is dangerous? We knew that. That the people who love her will always suffer because of her? We knew that as well. Why does Veronica need her worldview—that a better life isn’t possible, that only bad things will ever happen to her—validated by an event like this?
Most importantly: Just because Veronica is our protagonist doesn’t mean everyone around her exists only in service of her character, even if Veronica herself operates from that mindset. Veronica Mars had in the past been pretty good at calling out that mindset, actually. But here, the show gave in: Veronica isn’t allowed to be happy and fulfilled yet, so her brand-new husband had to die.
On a purely personal level, though, I don’t want to see more of the Veronica we saw in this season. Libby Hill over at IndieWire had some good thoughts on how much of a piece of fucking garbage Veronica Mars (the character) is in the new season of Veronica Mars. Media studies professor Kristen Warner had similarly excellent thoughts on how these kinds of deaths, meant to isolate our Strong Female Lead and highlight her Resilience at the cost of every other trait we associate with women, illustrate exactly how plastic these stories are, how much they are still coming from a male perspective.
(If you’re unfamiliar with this use of “plastic,” I encourage you to read more of KW’s work on plastic representation, it’s truly great and I think about it all the time now.)
KW brought up an example in the slightly more distant past that was nevertheless seared into my memory: Will Gardner’s death in The Good Wife. Will died in a courtroom shooting because, I suppose, Julianna Margulies plays the hell out of grief, and her character needed some more trauma heaped on her. Well, and also because Josh Charles wanted to leave the show, but it’s fairly easy to just send him packing to New York or London, no? No. They had him killed in a violent way to maximize the devastation it would wreak not just on Margulies’ Alicia Florrick, but the other female characters in his orbit. Fine.
It doesn’t escape my notice that these shows have male showrunners (The Good Wife was showrun by a husband-wife duo). Even in shows about Strong Female Leads, it becomes, with each passing year, easier for me to see the vantage point of these shows, the essential male-ness of so many stories despite—or perhaps because of—their Strong Female Leads.
That includes the insistence on killing off characters instead of finding some other way to close an arc and send them out. Killing characters off is not an inherently bad thing. In a show like Game of Thrones, the literal axing of Ned Stark was vital not just from a story perspective, but to put the lie to any perception that this was a show where mercy and justice won out. I actually think Jaime did need to die in Game of Thrones, just in a way that didn’t tell us the journey he’d been on was utterly without purpose, in the end. A death blow in and of itself is not an invalid choice to make.
The manner of execution—the context—is what can make the choice to kill a character feel like emotional manipulation, rather than simply the logical end to a particular character’s story. Is there a point to the death other than inflicting trauma on a protagonist and, by extension, the audience?
Jaime is killed after being shitty to Brienne and running back into a toxic, if not outright abusive, relationship with his twin sister, a message from David Benioff and D.B. Weiss that trying to break free of that kind of relationship is pointless. Will is killed as he’s finally, truly coming to terms with his relationship with Alicia being over, with her being an independent, successful attorney on her own. Logan is killed after marrying the woman he’s loved for nearly 20 years, showing us that none of this matters because Veronica is poison.
There is an inherent sadism, if not nihilism, at play in each of these deaths. These are deaths that the writers know will cut marrow-deep, not least because there is a romantic relationship (or possibility of such) at stake as well—one of the core relationships in each of the series, in fact. (I think it was a mistake to bring Jaime and Brienne together romantically, but… Fine. It’s fine. Even if they hadn’t been romantically involved, Jaime’s end as written still wouldn’t have worked.)
The deaths also feel like a cheat code: “We’ve created a character so strong that she’s practically ossified! What’s a good catalyst for a big life change?” “Kill someone she loves?” “Sure.”
Grief, though, is an easy story to tell. Harder to tell is the story of relationships that disintegrate because they’re not tended. Or relationships that are held together with spit and packing tape, between two people who are doing the best they can. Relationships that inspire you to be a better person. To do the work not because some force like death compels you, but because you yourself want to live.
Jaime, Logan, Will: They did the work. And they all died horribly, to make a Strong Female Character sad.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Justified, a show dripping with violence, ended with its three main characters all still alive. In the run-up to the Justified series finale, I remember editors trying to get me to push some kind of “Who will survive?!” angle in stories about it, and complying while grinding my molars into powder, because the point was not who would survive but who would live. The show loved to use the many beautiful versions of the song “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” but in the end, it showed that it is possible to leave Harlan alive: Yes, Boyd’s in prison, Ava’s living under an assumed name, and Raylan’s doing what he does in Miami again—but they are not just alive—they’re living lives shaped by the consequences of all we’d seen them do. It was beautiful.
Ditto The Americans, which had me convinced everyone was going to end up a tangle limbs in a suitcase. But all of our mains lived: Philip and Elizabeth Jennings got about as happy an ending as they could have possibly hoped for, returning to their homeland, the one for which they’d sacrificed so much—and yet they’ll still have to deal for the rest of their lives with the tragedy of a son and daughter left behind, a daughter who made a choice to stay. It took me a little bit to understand how radical that was, to allow these characters to continue on, to live.
To allow them to make that choice. Day after day.