Aw shiiiieet said non-readers, that’s why they call it the Red Wedding.
Anyone who saw last week’s (this week’s?) spectacularly grim Game of Thrones bloodbath “The Rains of Castamere” witnessed one brutal/bold/beautiful Scorsese-style revenge massacre shot with the pace, rhythm and precision of a gangland-style execution hit rather than a fantasy fiction political assassination. It’s amazing how modern it felt. Murder ballet, basically. And for that reason, the Red Wedding, the exact inverse of four weddings and a funeral, will rank among the most shocking, brutal and effective TV death sequences of all time. And should have really seen it coming.
Which is just another way of saying that the most important vestige of The Sopranos besides convincing us to empathise with flawed and brooding anti-heroes, is the use of a shockingly violent penultimate episode which flips the power, establishes allegiances and pushes down the reset button. In that series, as in this one, the bulk of the more memorable action sequences and character moments occur in the second to last episode, with long-game table setting and individual narrative threads spun out anew while giving the major remaining characters time to breathe, process the landscape (usually a room full of dead bodies) and relaunch again in the season finale.
We first witnessed this in GOT’s season one penultimate episode, “Baelor”, which, you’ll remember, featured the gut-wrenching beheading of Eddard Stark, the first real sign to A Song Of Ice and Fire non-readers that our attachment to these characters was subjugated wholesale by the brutality of George R. R. Martin’s universe. We saw that universe implode again last night and it’s pretty cool how those two episodes mirrored each other. And not just for the resonant thud of fresh cut Stark bodies hitting the floor. “Baelor” also contained a peripheral subplot involving Catelyn Stark promising marriage between a Walder Frey daughter and Robb in exchange for safe passage through The Twin. Two seasons later and we all know how that turned out.
Season two’s penultimate shit storm was the panoramic set piece “Blackwater” in which the Lannister army defends King’s Landing against Stannis Baratheon’s fleet, Cersei almost eats the suicide pill and Tyrion proves that his tactical nous is almost on par with his nose for wine and hookers. But for all the pageantry of that particular power scrimmage, it is our attachment to the Starks as the POV moral centre or the story and the respect that their sense of honour commands (promises of marriage notwithstanding), which makes last night’s betrayal so excruciating. They’re dead. Every single one of them present. Cat. Dead. Robb. Dead. Talisa. Dead. All dead. Even Ned Stark II who wasn’t even alive yet but managed still to replicate his namesake in at least one regard. What a tragedy. Even worse? Arya was present once again to witness the destruction of her family.
What a bummer. To alleviate that great grief gut punch here are some of the most brutal deaths in TV history because hair of the dog and all that. Warning: major spoilers ahead.
SOPHIA PELETIER IN THE WALKING DEAD
The closest equivalent from The Walking Dead to the hot mess that was The Red Wedding, would probably be The Barn Scene from season two; a relatively ‘key’ character was lost and there was mass assault with deadly weapons. It provided the jaw to the floor moment that – no, actually, no. Never has The Walking Dead reached the same level of heartbreak Game of Thrones did. And since it was quite different from the source material, people who had read the comic couldn’t sit smugly by and watch everyone else’s minds explode.
OMAR LITTLE IN THE WIRE
Omar Little, seemingly indestructible dead-eye dick stickup homosexual with a strict code of conduct and some of the most badass lines in the series, met his death in one of the most anti-climactic ways possible. Not in a video game gun battle. Not besieged on all sides in a safe house somewhere. Not in a stickup. Not anything, really. In a shitty little Korean grocery store, blindsided by a boy with a gun while buying cigarettes. That the audience was as unsuspecting of his death as Omar, who was basically invincible throughout five full seasons of robbing drug dealers in Baltimore, made his death all the more unnerving.
JIMMY DARMODY IN BOARDWALK EMPIRE
There’s always some measure of risk involved in killing off a popular major character. Sure, The Sopranos knocked off people all the time (see below) but never has that particular show eliminated a character so significant or so important to the audience as Boardwalk Empire’s Jimmy Darmody. In that respect, and in that respect alone, showrunner Terrence Winter surpassed the show on which he served his prestige drama apprenticeship (alongside Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner) but did so in a way that felt completely true to the logic of the universe. It was either Jimmy or Nucky. One of them had to go and it was the younger, more bullish and more naive of the criminal mentor-protege dynamic who caught the lead in the face. We’re not sure if the show ever quite recovered from his absence but we at least respect it for trying. 
RITA MORGAN IN DEXTER
Dexter’s wife Rita turning up dead in the bathtub at the Season 4 finale is arguably THE aw shit moment of the entire series. The birth of Dexter’s biological son in the beginning of Season 4 led to a significant change in Dexter’s personality: for the time he questioned the need to satisfy his ‘Dark Passenger’ because his feelings for Rita, his baby son and the whole family interrupted his blood thirsty priorities, finally revealing the hint of a murky conscience underneath all that rampant serial murdering. Of course, regardless of how much viewers desperately wanted Dexter to evolve, the show’s writers realised that his personal development wouldn’t leave much fodder for future seasons so, in the season finale, Dexter finds the murdered body of his wife and baby Harrison sitting in a pool of her blood – a very unsettling callback to the fucked up circumstances under which Dexter lost his own mother. Uncontrollably crying, emotional eating and hurling abuse/household items at the television screen were all acceptable ways to deal with this most shocking death from a show where deaths are omnipresent.
EVERYONE AT THE END OF SIX FEET UNDER
Not that surprising for a show so intrinsically concerned with death, dying and the way we process grief. But heartbreaking nonetheless. Completely transformed Sia’s “Breathe Me” into a universal, emotion-unleashing life anthem. Makes us cry just thinking about it.
ADRIANA LA CERVA IN THE SOPRANOS
The hit that confirmed to America that no one was safe from The Family if you crossed them. Adriana, longtime squeeze of Tony Soprano’s protege Christopher Moltisanti, had turned informant and earned a short trip to the woods for her betrayal. So deeply entrenched in popular culture was the murder that it would be later referenced in actress Drea de Matteo’s next gig on Sons of Anarchy: “What, you think I brought you here to Adriana you?”
