Some thoughts on recent fictional deaths

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(contains spoilers for Call the Midwife and also a few of spoilers for slightly older stuff which I’m pretty sure everyone has already seen or heard about)

Ultimately I feel like Barbara’s death last CTM episode was a mistake, not a show-killing one but a mistake nonetheless. Partly because it was depressing, but mostly because it was pointless: she returns to the show all happy with her whole life ahead of her, immediately gets struck down by an illness and dies. And I know, I knowwwwwww, that when that happens in fiction the sheer pointlessness of it is the point, that hey! sometimes life is cruel and people die for no reason.

But… that’s not why I watch TV. Because that’s not a lesson that needs to be taught, y’know? Obviously sometimes life is cruel and people die for no reason. And it’s just basically a storytelling trope I’m really sick of and it’s everywhere. I was so close to finally sitting down and bingewatching The Walking Dead, because my husband loves it, but as soon as it became clear that the selling point for last week’s episode was “Watch A Teenage Boy, Whom We Built Up As Kinda The Personification Of Hope In This Show, Suffer And Die Over The Course Of An Hour” I noped out of there so fast. And I’m still kinda annoyed/depressed because I was finally gonna watch it, dammit, and then you go and do that. I do watch Game of Thrones, but it suffers from the same problem – pointless death after pointless death after pointless, sadistic death – and I only really care about a small handful of the characters now, because why should I bother liking anyone if they’re gonna be snatched away for the sake of a “gotcha”?

This isn’t to say that Barbara’s death is a “gotcha”, especially not knowing that Heidi Thomas herself suffered from the same disease that Barbara died of on-screen. I can see why she’d want to write about it. And I know that Charlotte Ritchie wanted off the show as well. So yeah, I totally get why they killed her from a meta standpoint. I definitely don’t resent them for that, honestly. It’s just…

When I read the original memoirs that Call the Midwife was based on, they were really, truly, thoroughly depressing and most terrible of all they were true. The stuff written in that book is mind-boggingly awful, but… when it made it on to TV, suddenly it wasn’t so awful? Lots of the real-life people who died in the memoir were given happy endings in the show. The women (and there were lots of them) who had terrible things happen to them, they didn’t suffer through those things when their stories made it to the screen. I know that to some people that sounds like lying, or trying to rewrite history or whatnot, but it always struck me as being primarily a hopeful thing, giving people the happiness in fiction that they were denied in real life. Maybe it’s just me?

But I guess I just really want to see more of that, and less “hey! Death is cruel and random!” on the TV. At least right now. I guess what it really comes down to is, we have so many reminders in reality about how hopeless stuff can get, so it’d be… reassuring?… to not have them in fiction as well.