Talk:Samantha J./@comment-104.230.51.44-20200927223710/@comment-72.134.79.182-20201004032614

It's not about expectations, the execution was just absolutely horrible. I actually went in totally expecting Samantha to die, given that her character was billed from the start as a "recurring character" rather than a "main character" and she's the only member of the group that wasn't in the original UK version. So I had strong suspicions from the start that she was created to be killed off to give the show a sense of danger. I expected that, but what I didn't expect, was that it would be done in a cheap and lazy manner.

She was killed off so early that her character wasn't given room to fully develop and her death had no consequences because her own friends seemed to just forget about it 2 episodes later and even going as far as to forgive Jessica Hyde by the end despite murdering their friend in cold blood for the dumbest reason. It compromises all of the main leads because her friends don't react to her death in realistic ways and it makes Jessica Hyde impossible to like. There are ways to write protagonists who are basically violent sociopaths while keeping them interesting to follow, Dexter Morgan and Billy Butcher are good examples of that. In fact, this would be like if at the end of episode 2 of The Boys, Butcher decided all of a sudden to shoot Hughie in the face just for questioning his decisions. Imagine what a travesty of a show that would have been. It also doesn't help that Sam was played by the only actor in the group with actual charisma, so it felt like a complete waste.

If they wanted Sam to be the "Ned Stark" of this show, then they needed to give her room to blossom before killing her off and give her death realistic consequences. You'd think that living in a post-Game of Thrones world with all of the successes and failures that show had with killing off its characters, that Hollywood writers(especially veteran writer Gillian Flynn) would have learned a thing or two about how to properly kill off characters. But nope, instead, they went with the cheapest possible way to add shock value. This was so incompetently written that it has made me severely distrust Gillian Flynn as a writer from now on.