The Character Exit That Hurt The Walking Dead The Most

The Season 8 mid-season finale of "The Walking Dead" stunned fans, and not in a good way. Its closing moments revealed that Carl (Chandler Riggs), who viewers watched grow up for nearly a decade, had been bitten by a walker.

Some fans hoped the show might find a way out of Carl's death, but, sure enough, the bite proved just as lethal for Carl as it did for everyone before him: He died in the very next episode, "Honor," leaving his father, Rick (Andrew Lincoln), and unofficial stepmom, Michonne (Danai Gurira), devastated in his wake.

Carl's death was particularly jarring for fans of "The Walking Dead" comics because, unlike the death of Glenn (Steven Yeun), Carl's death was not in the source material. In the comics, Carl survived the entire series and lived to see the apocalypse settle down into a stable, safer world. As dark as the comics got, Carl offered readers some much-needed hope that brighter days were ahead — something the TV show robbed itself of.

Showrunner Scott Gimple explained his reasoning behind killing off Carl in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. "It's all having to do with the greater story of the season," he said, later adding, "It has nothing to do with real life in any way ... If people watch the whole season, they will see how incredibly critical it is to the telling of the story."

While Carl's death does admittedly spark a major change of outlook in Rick for the rest of his war with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a lot of fans were skeptical that the death was purely story-related. A common, unsubstantiated fan theory was that the network did not want to pay Grimes a larger salary after he turned 18, while another rumor alleged that Riggs' father, William Riggs, behaved in ways that caused friction between him and the show's production team. 

Those rumors were swelled when William Riggs ripped into the showrunner immediately after Carl's fate was revealed on the show. "Watching Gimple fire my son 2 weeks before his 18th birthday after telling him they wanted him for the next 3 years was disappointing," he wrote in a now-deleted Facebook post. "I never trusted Gimple or AMC, but Chandler did. I know how much it hurt him."

Although the ratings for "The Walking Dead" never recovered from their drop immediately after Glenn's gnarly death in the Season 7 premiere, the episodes following Carl's demise saw viewership fall even further, taking the ratings back down to the show's Season 1 norm. The ratings would only continue to drop from there. 

In forum threads asking fans when they gave up on the show, Carl's death is a popular answer. "I thought the writers were making a huge mistake," wrote one fan on Reddit. Another fan argued, "Without Carl, Rick's existence feels pointless," and noted that previous fan complaints about Carl being annoying largely stopped once his walker bite was revealed. "Carl's death is the perfect example of 'you don't know what you've got till' it's gone.'"

One of the biggest recurring issues among fans is that, after Carl's death, barely anyone from the original Season 1 cast was still around. So many of the characters that made "The Walking Dead" a hit in the first place had been killed off. While fans may have originally appreciated the writers' willingness to shock and devastate its audience, by the time Carl died, they were sick of all the doom and gloom.