Like every year, 2024 was full of highs and lows. Some of the worst (well, nerdiest) lows came from the fictional losses we endured: a TV show coming to an end, or a dead character or three. Join us in looking back on those who won’t be joining us in 2025 and beyond—and prepare for some spoilers ahead, but you already knew that.
Scavengers Reign
Scavengers Reign is a show that I’ll forever be mad about not getting another season. Not only is it one of the most refreshing animated stories I’ve experienced this year, it’s also one that truly lived up to its alien premise. There was a lot of copium on my and many fans’ behalf assuming the show would receive a second chance at life on Netflix. But I think we all forgot that streamer has a knack for being the place where season two hopes go to die. *Shakes fist in the sky at David Zaslav* – Isaiah Colbert
Outer Range
Prime Video’s sci-fi Western about a rancher (Josh Brolin) hiding a time-travel portal in one of his pastures was almost too weird when it premiered in 2022—but its mish-mash of genres still managed to fascinate, using a cosmic mystery to examine rival families sharing an intertwined crisis. That Outer Range got a second season at all was a TV miracle, and we’re grateful we got to spend a little more time exploring its oddities. – Cheryl Eddy
Star Trek: Lower Decks
Sony’s Spider-Man Universe
On one hand, Sony’s very weird approach to its Spider-Man-free Marvel movies led to some charmingly weird work like Venom and Madame Web (debatable). On the other hand, it was really clear Sony didn’t know what it was doing other than filling release slots. After watching Venom 3 or Kraven, it won’t be any mystery as to why audiences got sick of that runaround. Ah well, at least there’s Spider-Verse 3, eventually. – Justin Carter
The Acolyte
Say what you want about The Acolyte, and many, many Star Wars fans have. But we thought it was a dynamite show that both acted as a great entry point to Star Wars, while also enriching the lore for longtime fans. So to see the show get canceled after its first season, with so many fascinating stories left untold, was one of the biggest bummers of the year. – Germain Lussier
Evil
Evil premiered in 2019 on CBS, then after one season shifted to Paramount+. Streaming made more sense for the series’ adventurous tone—it could be terrifying and funny all in one scene, let alone one episode, not to mention provocative, heartfelt, timely, and deeply insightful. Not bad for a show about a team of investigators hired by the Catholic Church to look into possessions and other weird phenomena, while also uncovering corruption and giving us characters we genuinely loved (or loved to hate) along the way. We wish it had gotten 666 more seasons. – Cheryl Eddy
Attack on Titan
Whether or not you watched Attack on Titan, you probably knew it lasted for quite a while, particularly toward the end. Its final season famously concluded in four parts, and then concluded again with a film version of the second half. With luck, that was the series’ true end, and Mappa isn’t cooking up some remake or enhanced edition to put out in a few years. – Justin Carter
The Umbrella Academy
Umbrella Academy’s shortened fourth season wasn’t the most triumphant way to end the Netflix show based (very loosely) on the Dark Horse Comics series, but we’ll always have the first three seasons—packed with all the apocalyptic drama its pack of misfit superhero siblings could bring to the table, not to mention quirky comedy, clever plot twists, killer fight scenes, and even a few dance numbers. – Cheryl Eddy
Chucky
DC/CW Universe
Part of why superheroes have been so popular on screen in the past 20 years has to be owed to the CW. From Smallville all the way back in the day to Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow, and the recently ended Superman & Lois, the network kept DC’s heroes around in the public eye through show after show of fluctuating quality. They weren’t all perfect, and some of them ran a bit too long, but they made many strides and kept the genre alive, and that ain’t nothing. – Justin Carter
What We Do in the Shadows
Aerith Gainsborough (Final Fantasy VII Rebirth)
The death of Aerith is one of the most famous of all in video games, and Rebirth, the middle-chapter of Square Enix’s ambitious re-imagining of Final Fantasy VII‘s legendary legacy, is very keenly aware of the expectation players have around that moment for all of its vast runtime. Not content with simply recreating that fateful climax, Rebirth carries on in Remake‘s footsteps of being a story about what it means to remake Final Fantasy VII by constantly playing with this meta-awareness around Aerith, as it centers her more and more in the game’s twinned stories of echoing the original game while also preparing to subvert it. So when existence splits on the steps of the City of the Ancients in Rebirth‘s final hours—one timeline where Aerith dies at Sephiroth’s hands, another where she lives on and helps push him back, simultaneously co-existing in the mind of Cloud—Rebirth has its cake and eats it too, giving us the hope of a rebirth that players have longed for for almost 30 years while also still getting to sit in the tragedy of her passing all over again. We’ll be waiting a few more years just to see what really happens, but there’s still a sense of loss in this limbo Rebirth leaves us and Aerith alike in. – James Whitbrook
Victor Aguilar (The Penguin)
Vic was Oswald’s last redeeming tether before the future crime lord sold his soul so nothing could stand in his way. A part of me hopes Vic isn’t dead, just left very near-death for Batman to find and take under his (night) wing. He was the heart of the marginalized people of Gotham—squashed before our eyes, hoping he’ll be the hope for their revenge too. – Sabina Graves
Claudia de Lioncourt (Interview With the Vampire)
Delainey Hayles should be nominated for awards for her tour-de-force performance as Claudia de Lioncourt. The agency and tenacity with which she was written in Interview with the Vampire’s TV adaptation should be studied, because it gave the book’s doll-like child characters multitudes. Aging her up a bit gave us a girl trapped forever on the verge of womanhood. As a fan, I knew she was destined to die, but Hayles’ performance made me wish that if creative liberty was allowed, then maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t burn. My heart broke in the scene where Armand sold her out completely. She was the best of Louis and the worse of Lestat all rolled into one, but that combination gave her a power that that shone right until her very last moment. I want her to have haunted every face in that theater that let her die. – Sabina Graves
Varric Tethras (Dragon Age: The Veilguard)
The Veilguard takes Varric out of the action pretty early, but you’re set up to spend most of the game with him recuperating in your home base as a trusted advisor for Rook to turn to whenever they falter in their belief they’re worthy of saving the world. That would be sad enough, that one of the franchise’s best characters is left to sit on the sidelines, but Veilguard‘s final act twist—that Varric was actually dead, and what Rook was seeing for much of the game was a magical, manipulative deception by Solas—hits you like a ton of bricks, even if you started getting the feeling something was off earlier than that moment of revelation. RIP to Thedas’ finest storyteller-slash-crossbow-
Gambit (X-Men ’97)
Arthur Fleck (Joker: Folie à Deux)
Like most of us, I didn’t love Joker 2. I didn’t really even love Joker. But I did love the huge swing for the fences Joaquin Phoenix took with the DC character, earning him an Oscar the first time around. So to see the character kind of give up on his struggle, and then be killed, was really disappointing. You wanted more for this character. You wanted to see him really impact some change. Heck, maybe you even wanted to see him on screen with Batman. Alas, now none of that will happen. – Germain Lussier
Delia Deetz (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice)
One of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s biggest strengths was the Deetz women being centered in the film. Catherine O’Hara, the woman she is, slipped so comfortably back into her eccentric vain kooky stepmother character without missing a beat. Barbara may have been more of a mother in the first film, but Delia became the best friend Lydia needed when Astrid became a rebellious teen. Delia and Astrid’s team up to call out the men in Lydia’s life and even sync up for a new poltergeist party song moment made me want more of them in future movies. Alas, dear Delia got got by some asps. In the Netherworld, she rejoins with her headless husband, but they don’t board the soul train, so here’s hoping if a Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice gets greenlit, we’ll see her running the place. – Sabina Graves
Kwon (Cobra Kai)
One of the issues with recent seasons of Cobra Kai is there hasn’t been a good young villain. That changed recently with Kwon, played by Brandon H. Lee. The evil Cobra Kai captain was not just incredibly intimidating, he looked incredibly cool doing it. The kind of bad guy you love to hate. You probably would’ve watched a whole “Kwon” show—but alas, because he was so beloved, the character had to die at the end of the second series of episodes. His death, while brutal and sad, really raised the stakes going into the final episodes. – Germain Lussier
Agatha’s Coven (Agatha All Along)
We kind of knew coming into Marvel’s witchy seasons that not all of Agatha’s ragtag new coven would make it down, down the Witches’ Road alive, but the show did such a good job of connecting us to these characters it still stung to lose them (yes, even Sharon Davis, dragged along for the ride). Both Alice and Lilia’s deaths were bittersweet for different reasons—Alice’s coming from an act of kindness and so soon after the emotional catharsis of her own standout episode of the season, and Lilia’s at the climax of what remains one of the best episodes of TV Marvel’s ever made. But all that goodness just made the knife twist a little deeper in our hearts. – James Whitbrook
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