The Big Picture

• Noah's unexpected, brutal death in The Walking Dead had a huge emotional impact.
• Noah's death was a spectacle, as he was ripped apart while pressed up against glass.
• Tyler James Williams, the actor who played Noah, was deeply affected by the emotional scene.

Introduced and killed off all within one season, Tyler James Williams' Noah was a minor The Walking Dead character whose death had a huge emotional impact on the show that we were not prepared for. While his death was inevitable (it is The Walking Dead after all), we couldn’t anticipate the abruptness and the harshness of it. The show gripped us by making Noah's death a spectacle, from the gory voyeuristic aspect of it to the more narrative-driven character revelations that caused a waste of life. Even Williams was vastly affected by the confronting death on set, which speaks to how haunting the scene truly was.

Noah entered The Walking Dead universe in Season 5 as a prisoner at the Grady Memorial Hospital with Beth (Emily Kinney). After Beth helps him escape, he teams up with the main group to rescue Beth, which unfortunately fails, leading to Beth's untimely demise. Permanently joining the group, Noah takes a bit of a backseat in the show, becoming a supportive friend and a supply runner during his short stay with them. As they settle in Alexandria, it is on a fateful supply run with two Alexandrian novices, errand veteran Glenn (Steven Yeun), and "still earning their stripes" Tara (Alanna Masterson) and Eugene (Josh McDermitt), that Noah is failed.

How Does Noah Die in 'The Walking Dead?'

During the supply run to grab technology that will reconfigure Alexandria's power grid, the main group is forced to work with two cowardly Alexandrian errand boys who had abandoned their comrades before, Nicholas (Michael Traynor) and Aiden (Daniel Bonjour), the son of the Alexandrian leader. In the dark musty warehouse, everything goes downhill as Aiden stubbornly shoots down a walker who is strapped in army gear that includes a grenade, leading to the collapse of the shelves and the flimsy wire fence that was keeping walkers at bay. With Eugene desperately taking an unconscious Tara to the van, and Aiden eventually dying after being impaled, Noah, Glenn, and Nicholas try to escape, only to be trapped in a rotating glass door with walkers on either side.

Finally making it to the van, Eugene lures the outside walkers away, giving the trio hope of escape. With Nicholas on one side and Glenn and Noah on the other, they brace against the rotation to allow Glenn to break the glass. However, as Nicholas foils the plan by preemptively escaping, Noah is doomed. Each beat of Noah's death is deliberately paced, letting the horror creep into every crevice of it and forcing us to soak in each gory moment. From furiously bracing against the glass door, to desperately saying “don’t let go” to Glenn as he’s being dragged into the building, to the gruesome details of the walkers ravaging him apart while he is pressed up against the glass, we are dragged along for each excruciating moment.

Noah's 'Walking Dead' Death Is a Spectacle

There is something far more explicitly voyeuristic about Noah’s death than most other characters' in The Walking Dead. Pressed up right against the glass, there is a split second hesitation in the action before the walkers begin gnawing at his neck and clawing at his face, demanding our full attention. With every painful bite on display, it is almost as if Glenn is stepping into our shoes and watching with a thin screen dividing them. The graphic exhibition is absolutely up there with The Walking Dead's most brutal kills, and forces us to watch while grimacing alongside Glenn (don't worry buddy, yours still wins).

But it is not only the gruesome deconstruction of his body that makes Noah's death quite insane. Just moments before he is terrifyingly dragged into the tangle of rotting limbs, Noah clutches Glenn's collar, looks him dead in the eyes and orders through gritted teeth: "don't let go." This ominous, damning and ironic line slices into us like an ice pick. Typically, in these kinds of situations in film, characters tend to spurn out heroic adages proclaiming sacrifice to ensure the other person survives, or their final wishes like sending goodbyes to their loved ones. As such, this plaintive plea is not only jarringly realistic, but also reminds us how young Noah is, making his death far more haunting and grisly.

The entire scene makes for a twisted spectacle of survival and torture. From the simple demand to the grimy hands ripping open Noah's face behind a glass door, it is impossible to tear our eyes away from the unfolding events. Making both us and Glenn a voyeur in Noah's death, The Walking Dead makes an eerily meta-comment on its own indulgent use of brutality. This fits uniquely into Season 5's overall theme of doing what it takes to survive, especially as we consider how Noah's death came to be.

Nicholas' Cowardice Kills Noah in 'The Walking Dead'

Like many The Walking Dead deaths, Noah's is explicitly avoidable if everyone had stuck to the plan. But, as the old adage goes, "if something can go wrong, it will," and in this case, bringing along two Alexandrian amateurs was probably the first mistake. Staying true to his cowardly nature, Nicholas panics and squeezes through the glass doors, allowing a gap big enough on Noah's side for walkers to infiltrate their space. Through Grady Memorial Hospital, Alexandria, and Terminus, Season 5 explores the balance between humanity and brutality in survival, and Nicholas' cowardice fits deftly into the middle of that scale as he leaves both Aiden and Noah to die.

While self-preservation is his primary goal, his lack of agency and willingness to ride on the coattails of other characters' achievements gear him towards the middle rather than the brutal side of the thematic scale. As such, this also foreshadows his later suicide instead of attempting to escape, which leads to Glenn's fake-out death. While his actions are deplorable, they are also reminiscent of Noah's own words to a completely emotionally-shattered Glenn. Both showcasing survival at another's expense, The Walking Dead deftly complicates its investigation into selfishness.

Yet, from a narrative standpoint, Nicholas' actions brilliantly emphasizes the emotional impact of Noah's death, especially as he had just begun settling into the main group and had finally found a function in Alexandria. In the previous episode, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Glenn had initiated Noah into the tight-knit family circle of the main group by engaging him at the welcome party. Earlier in Episode 14, Noah had also met with Reg Monroe (Peter Coulter) who had designed the walls of Alexandria. After a brief conversation, he expressed his desire to learn Reg's craft to ensure the architectural future and expansion of Alexandria. With all the strange normalcy the group experiences in the community, a young adult discussing his future plans is one of the most heartfelt, making his apocalyptic death all the more melancholy and wasteful.

Tyler James Williams Was Emotional About His 'Walking Dead' Death

Noah's death not only emotionally impacted us, but Williams himself. During an interview with Collider, he was asked a very simple question: "what's it like to be eaten by zombies?" His "otherworldly" response highlighted how much of a mental and emotional load the scene required. The technical aspect of it being difficult was a given, but he did not expect how deeply it would affect him. "I've never been able to kill a character and let them die and experience that with them in a very traumatic way..." he says. "This is somebody's last guttural death. We have to play this whole beat out." With such an emotionally-charged scene, it is understandable why he was left sobbing as the director said "cut."

Though Noah was fairly forgettable throughout his run, his last episode brought out a likable innocence in him, alongside a gritty reliability. True to The Walking Dead tradition, Noah was given more screen-time in his death episode, but interestingly, there was never really an attachment until his death scene truly began. While only being in one mere season, the savagely poetic curation of his death managed to create such a memorable scene. If anything, it is another testament to The Walking Dead's ability to create dynamic characters that we can easily get attached to at the very last moment.

The Walking Dead is available to watch on Netflix in the U.S.

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