Walking Dead cliffhanger... Boooo!

Spoilers ahead. I will try not to be specific, but don't read on if you haven't seen the sixth season of The Walking Dead or read the graphic novel.

I recently named The Walking Dead one of the 20 greatest television shows ever, and I am a big fan of both the graphic novel and the television show. I can say, for the first time, I was truly disappointed in the tv show after the sixth season finale, which aired a week ago.

If you ask anyone who read the books what scene they remembered the most, they would say the end of issue 100, where villain Negan shows up with "Lucille," his baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. Negan uses Lucille to horrifically bash the life out of a major character who has been around since the beginning of both the graphic novels and television show.

The finale of the show's sixth season marked the first appearance of the iconic Negan. He shows up, makes a grand entrance, monologues for 10 minutes or so, and proceeds to unleash Lucille on... The cameraman! We get a first-person perspective of Lucille's fatal blows, and won't know who the victim is until the start of the next season in October or so.

I thought Negan's introduction was done well, and, from what I have seen, Jeffrey Dean Morgan was a good casting choice for this character. I don't like the choice to make this a cliffhanger, and I am not just saying this because I have to wait several months for a resolution. On that note, they better settle this in the beginning of the first episode of next season, instead of giving us two episodes of background on the Saviors and how they set these roadblocks for Rick and the gang.

First of all, I have a very good feeling that the victim is a major character. I am fairly sure it is the same person who died in the graphic novel. Ending the season with a major death would have been just as shocking, if not more so, than a cliffhanger. Furthermore, this cliffhanger cheapens what is the end of a major character and, if it is who I think it is, a fan favorite.

Secondly, this season has spent too much time playing "gotcha" with the audience. The show faked us into thinking Glenn was killed when zombies appeared to rip his guts out, when, actually, it was  actually the corpse of Nicholas, who had just shot himself. As we found out a few weeks later, Glenn was underneath Nicholas, and then scurried under a Dumpster. They even went so far as to take Steven Yeun's name out of the credits.

Then, in the season's penultimate episode, the very last shot was Dwight shooting Daryl and blood splattering on the screen. We do find out in the next episode that the wound was non-fatal.

I understand that sometimes it can be an effective plot device to toy with the audience or leave them hanging, such as the unbelievable Borg cliffhanger on "Star Trek: TNG," or for our older readers, the "Who Shot J.R." mystery on "Dallas."

However, I think "The Walking Dead" has been doing too muc audience manipulation this season, to the point of annoying even the show's most loyal viewers. This last cliffhanger only annoyed people even more.

"The Walking Dead" is usually a great show with good writing and compelling characters, and these kind of gimmicks are frankly beneath a show of this caliber.