I’m currently immersed in Apple TV’s Masters of the Air. I've been looking forward to Fridays for the next episode, and with only two to go, I’ve been mentally living on an US AirForce base, waiting for the red mission light to blink on for a while now. The show isn’t without its flaws- it could be accused of being a little cliché, its two main protagonists Buck and Bucky both too cool and cocksure to be believable, but when the pilots get off the ground and the camera takes us onboard a fort flying a bombing run over Nazi Germany, there’s no trace of Top-Gun that follows us. Up there, the fighting is brutal, indiscriminate, and survival is based on chance alone. Masters of the Air has got me thinking about death in a way that few other stories have before.
Killing off a character is an artform within writing. Knowing when to metaphorically (or not) pull the trigger is complicated. It depends on a lot of variables: pacing, other characters, the general narrative context. It can even be a little emotional for the writer if it’s a character who they have spent a lot of time bringing to life. But mostly, killing off a character is a question of timing, and this is what Masters of the Air has got so right. Screenwriters John Orloff and John Shiban, adapting the novel by Donald L. Miller, employ the technique of killing off a character early by offing Barry Keoghan in the third episode. “Oh God,” Keoghan’s character Biddick says a second before his plane is obliterated against a grass bank, and never has a two-word line cut me so deeply. The moment is an utter shock, and it perfectly encapsulates the waste and devastation of war.
When it comes to killing characters, a writer really has three options. Firstly, there are the redshirts. These are the disposables, the nameless allies falling on the field of battle around the protagonist. The term ‘redshirts’ was coined by Star Trek, as red was the colour worn by the lower rank of space explorer (?), usually already dead when Captain Kirk arrived on the scene, the red-clad body signifying the danger to the hero.
Secondly, and probably most commonly, there are core characters. Think Ron and Hermoine, (or Sirius and Dumbledore more accurately.) A core character is named, fully fleshed out and integral to the story, and their death marks a pivotal moment. Maybe the death of a character is the inciting incident, spurring the protagonist into action. Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben. Or in an Agatha Christie style whodunnit, where the murder takes place prior to the beginning of the story and the arrival of the detective. In these cases, the dead character exists in the mind of the reader as past tense, someone they never knew. Any characterisation of the victim is done retrospectively, through flashbacks to before the inciting incident. It’s a common practice to kill a core character somewhere between the end of act two and the middle of act three, representing either the climax of the drama and/or a pivotal moment in the plot. Piggy’s death in Lord of The Flies, representing a spiritual change in the boys, for example.
In his blog Story to Script, a workshop for story development and writing, Nic Marcari criticises the decision to kill core characters:
Core cast characters are the ones bad fiction falls upon to kill as a means to jolt the reader. The shock value of their death is used as a gimmick to establish narrative tension; to scare the reader into thinking, “well, if they just killed that dude, who are they going to kill next?”
There’s truth in what Marcari is saying, killing a core character solely for the shock value is cheap, but what else can a writer do? When a writer kills a character, it is always to make the audience feel something, whether it be pathos, satisfaction, catharsis or horror. This is much easier to do with an established character who the audience has a connection with than it is with a redshirt, obviously. If you think about it, isn’t every character who dies a ‘core character’? I can’t think of many character deaths in fiction who I wouldn’t describe as core characters. What other options does a writer have?
Well, finally, a writer could kill their protagonist. The end is really the only time this can be done, and it’s usually in a noble or tragic sacrifice- the Hero’s death. Jack sinking at the end of the Titanic, or inversely, MacBeth and Walter White. But you can’t do this in the middle. Guys like John Wick or Jack Reacher can’t catch a stray, it would be against the rules of the story space: they are supposed to be invincible heroes. To kill them in the middle would be the cheapest shock factor move and would probably have to involve bringing them back from the dead somehow for another sequel.
Only by cutting the character’s journey short, does a character’s death really come across, at the deepest level, as shocking.
-The Art and Science of Killing Characters, Nic Macari on his blog story to script, workshop for story development and writing.
Omar from The Wire is perhaps one of the best examples of this, killed out of the blue before he has the chance to get his revenge, or complete a redemptive arc. I recently finished reading Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which was beautiful and harrowing in equal parts. Jude, who is gradually revealed to be the main protagonist dies the hero’s death, succumbing to his inevitable tragic end, but it is the deaths of Willem and Malcolm that are the most horrific because of the random tragedy- they are cut off suddenly in a violent accident way before the natural end of their story. This is exactly what Orloff and Shiban capitalise on too with Biddick in Masters of the Air.
Biddick’s death is a waste, his youthful exuberance and energy towards the adventure of it all is snuffed out. He didn’t need to die, he had the opportunity to get out. He stayed for his friend, already severely wounded and probably unsavable, to land the plane against all odds in an open grass space on the horizon. It’s an impossible task, but one that Biddick’s boyish enthusiasm wont shy away from. He surely won’t die, he can’t die, because he’s not a redshirt, he’s the hero of his own story ready to save the day against all odds. But in his last moment, the adventure and romance is ripped away, and the hopeless, fatal reality of Biddick’s situation is clear to him and the audience alike: “Oh God.” You see on Biddick’s face, you hear in his voice, he’s not the infallible hero of this story, he’s a kid. A young man with a romanticised view of the world, and of war, not yet old enough to truly appreciate his mortality.
It’s not just Barry Keoghan’s acting that makes this moment so visceral, it’s also the fact that it is Barry Keoghan. He’s still on the way up in his acting career and his name is ringing bells. As an audience, we expect to see quite a lot of him on screen, especially after he's introduced as this loveable New York rogue, and unless you've read the novel or are familiar with the story of the real Curtis Biddick, you were probably pretty surprised to see him die in only the third episode. You would be forgiven for expecting that the beloved star of Saltburn and Banshees of Inisherin would have a touch of plot armour. It just adds to the shock.
Masters of the Air is based on the true story of the 'Bloody Hundredth' bomb group, and, as comes naturally when dealing with subject matter like battles in the Second World War, involves a lot of death. It's a fine line for a writer to walk, to portray real world events that involve so much loss of life without trivialising their sacrifice, or glorifying the waste. Orloff and Shiban handle it perfectly, using Biddick as the character sacrifice. Ultimately, they've done exactly what Nic Macari would expect: killing off a core character to stun the audience and create narrative tension. But they've done it so well. Biddick's death is heroic, but pointless, and in this he represents every other character in the story- his death as a core character blurs the line between the redshirt and the hero. Biddick proves that in these airborne battles survival is random. Nobody is safe, everyone's a redshirt, and everyone's a hero.
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