Dallas Killed Off Way Too Many Good Characters.

[Scorp Noire]

In order for the audience to care about the death toll over Jock's will, they had to kill characters we actually liked.

I mean, what's the point of killing Mitch when he's only going to complain about the mahogany and satin lining and polished brass handles on his coffin as he's being lowered into the ground??

I can actually picture him doing that

 

[Crimson]

Killing a major-ish character can be dramatically impactful and trigger some storylines, but the tradeoff of course is losing any future potential that character had. Digger and Kristen were spent characters. Digger was a broken down old drunk and Kristen was an exposed schemer with no power; I don't think there was that much more the writers could have done with them.

Rebecca and Katherine, though, had so much potential for future storylines. I think having Rebecca in a near fatal accident and lingering at death's door for a few weeks could have served the same function, while saving her for future plots. Her threat to break the Ewings and her attempts at rallying the Cartel could have been an entire season.

 

[Spooky Owl!]

Jessica's redux murder spree in Season 13 (per DVD count) should have been played absolutely straight, like a horror movie, and (as others have suggested) should have been directed at the Dallas cartel we knew but were not really appearing much anymore (instead of Clayton's business associates with whom we were unfamiliar). It would turn out that Jessica had been blackmailing most of the cartel over Dusty's parentage, her scamming them all for 40 years that they were all his biological daddies (like Kristen did with Jordan Lee), and Jessica turned vengeful once they all ceased payment upon her entry into the asylum following her kidnapping of Miss Ellie and driving her to Loredo in the trunk of that town car.

Now, that's a constructive use of killing characters, even if we didn't know the cartel all that well. Only Marilee Stone (injured and now vengeful towards the Ewings, though attention from an unmarried Bobby might help) and Jordan Lee (who lives to die another day in Paris) survives.

Method of murder? I say: go for the axe... No absurd fish-tank dunkings.