Is Tom Payne leaving The Walking Dead, Jesus character for good?

Tonight, The Walking Dead aired its midseason finale and with that in mind, it was time for something big to go down. It certainly seemed as though we got that in the form of Tom Payne and his character of Jesus.

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In true The Walking Dead fashion, we had a character in Jesus who decided that he could carry the weight of a community on his shoulders. Whenever that happens, it’s a pretty good indication that someone is going to either die or get in mortal danger … and that is precisely what happened to this character tonight, who was stabbed in a pretty brutal fashion.

At first, we’ll admit that we actually thought that Jesus was going to make it through this alive, largely because we have seen characters survive so much worse on this show before. Also, it didn’t seem at first that he was stabbed in a way that was lethal. Yet, this is a show that probably does need a number of different ways to kill off characters and this was it in this particular case.

We would say that the death of Jesus was necessary for this one reason: The Negan effect. When we first saw Jeffrey Dean Morgan on the series as the character, he eliminated Glenn and Abraham not too long after it (at least via the show’s timeline). Given that tonight introduced the Whisperers as villains, there was probably a good bit of pressure behind the scenes in order to ensure that there was some exciting stuff coming up featuring some of these characters. That, of course, included proving that they meant business from the moment they turned up. Having the characters not realizing that they weren’t walkers at first was effective; meanwhile, the same goes for killing this character off.

We will miss Tom Payne on the show, who brought a lot to the role even if he didn’t always receive a significant amount of screen time.

Where does The Walking Dead go from here?

The series will return to AMC in February with new episodes and with that, we certainly expect the saga of the Whisperers to take center stage. We will learn presumably so much more about Alpha and some other characters under her command, including why they do some of what they do. These are clearly not the same sort of people that we’ve seen on the series before and that’s probably something that the writers wanted. At this point in the show’s run, they cannot just regurgitate the same exact plot twists again and again.

Related – Preview what’s coming up on the next new Walking Dead episode!

What do you think about The Walking Dead and their midseason finale overall? Be sure to share right now in the comments! (Photo: AMC.)