Every Major Character Death In Wednesday Season 2 (So Far), Explained

This article contains spoilers for “Wednesday” season 2.

To the kooky, ooky, and spooky Addams family, a grisly demise sounds like their idea of a good time. Perhaps that’s why “Wednesday,” the Netflix series which is this era’s preeminent “Addams Family” show, isn’t stingy with bumping its characters off. In the same way that anyone in the show can be a suspect, given all the horror creature abilities and bad blood between Outcasts and Normies, anyone could become a victim, too. The first season saw a number of people killed at the hands of the monstrous Hyde lurking within Tyler Galpin (Hunter Doohan). Although Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) eventually dropped her crush on the boy and put a stop to his rampage, Tyler is still lurking in the bowels of Willow Hill sanitarium in Jericho, Vermont during the show’s second season.

Tyler does indeed get up to his old murderous tricks by the end of this first batch of four episodes, yet he’s far from the only killer lurking in and around Nevermore Academy. During this second year at Nevermore, Wednesday finds herself contending with an Avian, someone who has the ability to control birds: Judi (Heather Matarazzo). Surprisingly, Judi is not an Outcast, but a Normie who’s been given Outcast-type powers thanks to the clandestine experiments on Outcasts that her father, Augustus Stonehurst, has carried out at Willow Hill. Judi uses her feathered friends to commit some grisly murders during the second season, but there’s another deadly creature lurking about, too: the ravenous zombie that Pugsley (Isaac Ordonez) inadvertently resurrects, which he names Slurp (Owen Painter). Between these three unleashed monsters and some shenanigans, “Wednesday” season 2 features a handful of major character deaths, and the season’s only half over! Here they all are, in chronological order, for your wicked amusement.

The big reveal in the first half of the second season concerns the mystery at the heart of Willow Hill, which is ex-Nevermore professor Stonehurst’s project known as LOIS (Longterm Outcast Integration Study). After Stonehurst lost his mind attempting to turn himself into a “Da Vinci” Outcast, his daughter Judi not only took over the project, but decided to use her newfound Avian abilities to prevent others from stumbling onto the truth. One of the unfortunate souls to cross Judi’s path is a private investigator named Carl Bradbury. He happens to be on assignment snapping pics of a local Jericho couple having an affair when Judi unleashes her murder of crows on him, trapping him in his van and pecking him to bits. Carl used to be a cop, and worked closely with the ex-Sheriff, Donovan Galpin (Jamie McShane).

It turns out that Carl and Galpin have been personally continuing their investigation into LOIS, a subject that Carl got wind of and told his old boss Galpin about given Galpin’s newfound interest in the welfare of Outcasts, thanks to his son, Tyler, being one. Galpin tries to enlist Wednesday’s assistance in the investigation, but before she can make much headway, he too is brutally killed by Judi’s crows. In fact, Galpin suffers a particularly grisly fate, as he appears to have been eaten away from the inside by the killer birds. A death that even the likes of Alfred Hitchcock would be disturbed by!

Separate from Wednesday’s investigation into the Avian, her brother Pugsley gets up to his own shenanigans, as he accidentally brings an ex-Nevermore student who’d been buried under the Skull Tree back to life as a zombie. Naming his new mute (and hungry) pet Slurp, Pugsley makes his roommate Eugene (Moosa Mostafa) his confidant in feeding Slurp while keeping him a secret. However, a ravenous zombie cannot remain a secret for very long. Wrenching himself loose of his chains, Slurp escapes onto the Nevermore grounds one rainy night, and the first snack he finds comes in the form of student driving instructor Gabe Packard, who had earlier been disgruntled after literally being taken for a drive by Wednesday. After meeting Slurp, Gabe no longer has any worries on his mind, because he no longer has a mind at all.

The same ends up being true of another hapless Normie, the Phoenix Cadet master Ron Krueger (Anthony Michael Hall). After accidentally being double booked at Camp Jericho with the Nevermore students and losing a game of “Color War” to the school, Krueger attempts to save face with his troops by making plans to invade their campgrounds at night and roust them. Unfortunately, Pugsley and Eugene brought Slurp with them on their camping trip, and instead of helpless students, Krueger comes face to face with a hungry zombie instead. As such, he is suddenly and definitively no longer the brains of his operation.

One of the most pleasant surprises in the first half of “Wednesday” season 2 is the return of Marilyn Thornhill (Christina Ricci), who is also known as Laurel Gates. The ancestor of Jericho’s founding Pilgrim father, Thornhill unlocked the Hyde within Tyler in order to continue her family’s legacy of killing all Outcasts. She also sought revenge on Wednesday and the Addams clan for their part in the death of her brother, Garrett (Lewis Hayes). At the end of the first season, it appeared that Marilyn may have perished, but season 2 reveals that she’d survived and had been incarcerated in a separate facility from Willow Hill in order to keep her and Tyler apart. When Dr. Rachel Fairburn (Thandiwe Newton) finds herself unable to reach Tyler for treatment, she reluctantly has Thornhill transferred to Willow HIll, something which the woman is all too eager about, believing that it will allow her to regain control over Tyler and continue her dastardly deeds.

Tyler, however, has other plans, and they do not seem to include Marilyn in them. While Tyler is certainly out for revenge against Wednesday, her fellow Outcasts, and just about the entirety of the population of Jericho, he’s not interested in falling under Thornhill’s control again. When Wednesday and Uncle Fester (Fred Armisen) liberate the LOIS patients and cause all hell to break loose in Willow Hill, Thornhill gets loose and frees Tyler during the chaos, only to discover that there’s no love lost between her and Tyler. With the Hyde’s claws puncturing her body, it seems highly unlikely that Marilyn will be an ongoing thorn in Wednesday’s side, nor anyone else’s.

In addition to Thornhill and Tyler getting loose, Slurp — who had been briefly brought to Willow Hill after the Camp Jericho incident — finds himself liberated, too, and the zombie takes the opportunity to immediately begin munching on as many people as he can get his hands on. However, he appears to no longer be mindlessly rampaging, as each successive brain he consumes seems to be growing his own brain back. That can be seen when he encounters Dr. Fairburn and the mute paraplegic Stonehurst, who are attempting to escape as the facility devolves into bedlam. Initially, Slurp goes after Fairburn, chomping into the poor woman’s brains in the middle of her darkened office.

Perhaps Fairburn’s learned, academic brain gives Slurp the extra juice to finally get the power of speech back, because as the zombie turns his hungry gaze on Stonehurst, he speaks. “Hello, old friend,” he says, just before taking a healthy chomp of cranium. Clearly, while we’ve more than likely seen the end of Fairburn and Stonehurst, we have much more to learn about our new pal Slurp (including what his actual name might be). Given his comment, it seems possible that Slurp might be meeting up with Judi, who nearly gets torn to pieces by the escaping LOIS victims and other patients of Willow Hill, but appears to get away to menace Wednesday another day.

After Thornhill’s demise, the next most shocking death at the conclusion of the first half of “Wednesday” season two is Wednesday herself. After helping the LOIS patients escape, Wednesday hangs back to have a face to face confrontation with Tyler. As usual, Addams shows no fear, but perhaps she should’ve shown a little bit, as mere moments after the Hyde and the girl meet each other, Wednesday’s body is hurled out of a top-floor window of Willow Hill, meeting the ground with a hard thud. Wednesday’s voice over narration only further confirms her mortal status, explaining how she keeps hearing the words of her mother Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) warning her about how she’s made things much worse.

Of course, it’s 99.9% likely that Wednesday will be saved from this fate early in the back half of season 2, when that final batch of four episodes premieres on September 3. For now, however, it appears that the ultimate death in “Wednesday” season two so far is the title character herself. If there’s a deeper irony to that, it’s probably that Wednesday, lover of all things depressing and macabre, wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Wednesday” season two part one is streaming on Netflix.