It’ll move the story along, the producers said.

It’ll hype up ratings because it’s so controversial, they said.

It’ll potentially wreck the emotional sanity of our fans, but that’s okay, they said.

So goes the thought process that I’d imagine for many showrunners who choose to let or force their characters to die.

Hopefully that wasn’t the process for a certain show I watched this week, that I happen to love almost unhealthily, and whose name I won’t mention lest slow viewers get angry.

I knew it was a novel adaptation. And I did stumble upon the British equivalent of said show a while ago, when I was still relatively emotionally detached from the American show. Back then, I accidentally watched a YouTube clip of their version of the iconic death.

So I probably should have known it was going to happen.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t gape with a wide open mouth, fistful of popcorn in hand, when I was hit (haha) by the realization that the secondary female protagonist was now gone.

I realized I should immediately come out of denial and acknowledge that, right now, I’m still too invested to speak of the show objectively.

So to put those thoughts aside, let me detail the week-long moments of silence I had for other favored deceased show protagonists:

(I’m going to assume it’s been long enough that I can talk about these without being stoned to death for spoilers.)

1. **Lexie Grey**: After Lexie exited “Grey’s Anatomy” via an overdramatized plane crash, I basically gave up on seasons nine and ten.

2. **Mark Sloan**: False: I actually watched enough of season nine to watch her true love, Mark, kick the bucket in the premiere. After that I never went back to Seattle Grace Hospital again.

3. **Sherlock Holmes**: When I saw the end of the second season of “Sherlock” — never mind that I knew he’d most likely survive because the third season had already been announced — I nonetheless rage-screamed my feelings. You could say my fangirl frenzying over Benedict Cumberbatch was pretty extreme. And you could also say it got more extreme when the beginning of season three revealed that he was alive.

4. **Finn Hudson**: Okay, actor Cory Monteith’s real-life death was legitimately sad (I still have a screenshot of his unupdated Wikipedia profile on my phone), but Lea Michele’s rendition of “Make You Feel My Love,” from her character Rachel on “Glee,” just made me straight up bawl.

5. **The cast of “Lost”; Walter White**: “Lost” was the “Breaking Bad” of 2004-2010, and both shows, each addictive and depressing or even addictively depressing, did a good job with having death make sense in the context of the stories. (Thematically, with “Lost.” Not so much with logic. Also, that ending…) Doesn’t mean they didn’t still hurt, though.

6. **Tommy Merlyn**: Tommy wasn’t my favorite character, as I found him sleazy and an unnecessary obstacle for the Laurel-Oliver relationship, but his death seemed to come a little too early. It did a good job moving the plot along, however.

7. **Jenna Sommers, Alaric Saltzman, Carol Lockwood**:
“The Vampire Diaries” really likes to kill off its main cast’s parental figures, and most of the time it just winds up seeming like collateral damage. Add that to the fact that the vampires/hybrids/whatnot of that show (which is now 3/4 of the characters) are technically dead, and you have to scratch your head slightly at how well the show suspends reality for all its avid fans (no shame here).

Like I did with all these shows, I started them with optimism, not knowing that I would get overly attached and sad.

In the aforementioned case from earlier, the first episode of the second season alone delivered a punch to the gut only hours in.

But I will stay strong, and power through the rest of this season. Although a strong female character has left now, if I’m correct by the gut feeling I have beneath the sorrow, the show’s only going to get better from here.

And that’s what all character deaths should be about, right?