Dramatic events are nothing new for “The Walking Dead”, and the show’s fans have learned to not get too attached to all characters throughout the first four seasons. And yet, the loss of Beth was met with a surprising uproar, much stronger than the producers were apparently anticipating – it appears that an unexpectedly large number of fans were attached to the character, and her death was taken quite negatively by most of them.
It’s so bad, that fans have launched a petition called “Bring Beth Back!”, running on Change.org – and it’s gathering more and more signatures by the day. So far, more than 40,000 people want to see Beth revived, according to the public signature count – and that’s not a small number for fans of the show who have an online presence and are active around various social sites.
Still, it might not be too realistic to expect the producers to backtrack on their decision at this point. Even in the world of “The Walking Dead”, killing a character should logically be a permanent decision, unless fans want to see Beth coming back as a zombie – and it’s clear that nobody wants that.
The petition has exceeded its required signatures by a long shot – it was originally aiming for 10,000 signatures by Friday, but on Monday it already had over 30,000, with more coming in at a rapid pace as fans were spreading the news around messaging boards.
The production of the show isn’t a small-scaled one, though, and it’s important to remember that – it’s not unlikely that the producers not only realized that killing off Beth would be a dramatic decision, but they may have also prepared a contingency plan in case the response from fans is too bad (as it was). If this is true, then they could have prepared two separate lines of scripts for the events following Beth’s death – although it still leaves open the question of how exactly the producers could ever bring the character back to life in a non-cheesy way.
In any case, even if something like this does happen, it won’t be in season 5 – filming of the new episodes already finished this summer, and the season will air throughout the next year, leading up to November. It would be unrealistic to expect the production of those specific episodes to change at this point, but there’s still hope for the future – and given the show’s popularity, its producers would make a pretty bad mistake if they decide to ignore fan requests for too long. So far, there hasn’t been any communication from the studio regarding Beth’s death.