The Walking Dead: Who Dies?

Tonight on Talking Dead, we'll get to see the midseason finale's director Greg Nicotero sitting down to talk with host Chris Hardwick, Sons of Anarchy's Ron Perlman and an as-yet-unidentified cast member.

The episode, which has been described as "brutal" and will supposedly be divisive among the show's fans, will almost certainly kill somebody. But...who?

Well, we like to speculate about this stuff, so let's have at it!

Carol Peletier

The thing about Carol is that she has a sizable, vocal fan base, in no small part because of the shippers who want her to end up with Daryl. Following on the heels of Beth's death, losing Carol would shake up the audience in a big way without dramatically altering the creative direction of the show, so that's appealing from a practical point of view.

Losing Carol would also be a major blow to the group in terms of their badassery. Yeah, there's Rick and Abraham, but Tyreese isn't nearly as intimidating in the show as he was in the comics, and a loss like Carol could make Daryl retreat back into himself a bit, making him somewhat less effective. That's all an argument in favor of the thing screenwriters always say about deaths: the drama you can get out of it is what justifies losing the character.

Daryl Dixon

This one is basically not going to happen, but you always have to look at the possibility. After all, Robert Kirkman has repeatedly said that the "If Daryl dies, we riot" fans will get him killed.

Like Sasha and Noah, he didn't exist in the comics, and so his loss wouldn't do much to inhibit them following the books closely. Unlike most of the recent fatalities, though, he's been a crucial part of the team all along and hasn't vanished for more than an episode or three since the start of the series.

Noah

We know so little about Noah at this point that there wouldn't be a huge dramatic impact to his death -- but then again, it could give him kind of an arc that he started out so aggressive toward Daryl and Carol and ended up saving the group if that were to happen.

There's also a long history on the show of people joining the group, getting a little development and ending up dead fairly quickly (see also: Axel, the Woodbury survivors, etc.). And of course, he's joined a new Criminal Minds spinoff, suggesting to some that he isn't long for the world of The Walking Dead.

That said, there's something about Noah that feels like he'll last. The culture shock he'd get out of no longer existing in the clean, dictatorial world of the hospital and instead ending up on the road with a more chaotic, democratic group of survivors like Rick's. Again, it feels like there's a lot of story to be had in going one particular direction.

Tyreese

Well, here's where we start to get to the meat of things. As we've suggested above, producers have said that Season Five will be hewing closer to the comics than the show has done in the past, and it's difficult to do that if you kill off characters who are important to other stories down the line.

Tyreese, meanwhile, has alredy died by this point in the comics (they gave his death to Hershel in the show), and so his impact on the plot by now is...minimal.

Especially since Sasha is a character created for the show, so even his death wasn't being mourned in a big way, as he didn't have any family traveling with the group and Rick and Carl were more preoccupied with the recent (in the comics) death of Lori and Judith.

There are a lot of fan theories on why Tyreese is gone, many of which revolve around, basically, tracking actor Chad Coleman's social media activity and the like. That's a rabbit hole we won't go down, except to say that those same fans accurately predicted Beth's sendoff in the midseason finale, so...it's worth at least considering what they think they know.

Sasha

This one is pretty much the same as Tyreese; her loss would be felt by the group in a big way, since she's well-loved, but it wouldn't change the trajectory of the story at all since she doesn't exist in the comics.

The death of one of the two siblings is basically guaranteed to play a big role in the other's development as a character, making them arguably perfect candidates for one or the other to go.

So...why Sasha and not Tyreese? For starters, Tyreese has more fans. As a wildly popular character from the comics, it's hard to imagine that he'll die without ever having lived up to that persona. Will he ever kick ass? Well, losing his baby sister seems like the only thing that could push him over the edge and make him the Tyreese comic fans love at this point.

Would that essentially be "fridging" Sasha to give Tyreese character development? Well, yes. But it's a show built on shock deaths, and the odds are equally good that it could happen to either character, so it's unlikely anyone much would take issue with the decision to make it Sasha.