Jon, Glenn and Kevin

In drama, death is good.  It gives a sense of finality, and means the stakes are high.  But in TV (and movies), threatening popular characters but keeping them alive is good business.  Thus we have several cases of seeming death in TV drama these days where fans wonder if it's final.

I think it goes without saying there'll be spoilers ahead, but if you watch these shows you know already, and if you don't watch them, it shouldn't matter.

The biggest name is probably Jon Snow in Game Of Thrones, who when last seen at the end of Season 5 was bleeding out after being turned on by his Brothers.  But is this the end?  Aparently the books don't offer an answer, but the show often doesn't follow the books so they wouldn't help anyway.

It would seem impossible--if the show has a linchpin, it's Snow, and for five years they've been teasing about his illustrious birth. If he dies, all that mystery and future die with him. What good is a song of Ice and Fire without the Ice?  But, as has been noted, there's magic on this show, and people have been known to come back to life--in fact, those who die up North come back in unpleasant ways--so few people think we've seen the last of Snow.

The Walking Dead is also magical, in a way, with zombies walking the Earth, but the rules are consistent (if ridiculous).  Glenn, a regular since the first season, was last seen several episodes ago in a dead end surrounded by hundreds of zombies.  It seems unlikely he has survived.  It would be fine with me if he died, since I'm not heavily invested in the show, and think he's one of the weaker characters as it is, but he has lots of fans who want him alive (though I hear he's died in the comic books).

But the real problem with the show is why anyone dies?  How did these zombies kill anyone after the surprise factor wore off?  They're slow and stupid, yet practically every episode some zombie--who are usually loud and obnoxious--comes out of nowhere to chomp down on someone's arm.  A properly organized force could march through any area and leave behind thousands and thousands of lifeless zombies without a single casualty.  Instead, Walking Dead characters keep ending up surrounded by zombies with no way out.

Finally, you've got a far less popular drama, The Leftovers, but a more "real" one--I use quotation marks because it's a show about the aftermath when 140 million people vanish from the planet.  So magical things can happen, but the characters are otherwise grounded in fairly honest psychology.

The central character, if there is one, would be Kevin Garvey, former cop who has moved with his new family to a new city this season.  This being The Leftovers, nothing ever goes well. In the first season, we see the Garveys were pretty miserable even before the vanishing.  This year, things seem to be even worse, and Kevin is haunted by a women he saw die.  The rational explanation (and the one I buy) is he's having a psychotic break, not unlike what his father suffered.  But Kevin wants to get rid of this vision so much that he drinks poison which will allegedly lead to a cure.

So he seems to die at the end of the episode, and the man who promised to revive Kevin shoots himself. But then Kevin is led away, so perhaps he'll survive--we were never clear on how deadly that drink was, after all. (And the posters show him swimming to the surface of some water, a scene they haven't had yet.)

The show without Kevin would be very different, and I hope he survives.  Still, everyone is so miserable on it, he'd probably be better off if he didn't come back.