always found it interesting that waterloo road's arguably most impactful three deaths (max, sam and hope) are actually portrayed so differently, despite being so similar on the surface (an episode based on the death of a teenage girl).
Starting with max, i'm pretty sure she was the first child death on the show. obviously adam died in episode 1, but he was a plot device for donte and chlo's relationship and the main throughline of the season, not a character we knew anything about. in contrast, we had known max for 3 seasons when she died. we'd seen her and steph become family, seen her work so hard to gain her life back, seen her as a chaotic, messy, happy teenage girl. we knew max and we loved max and then she was gone. and we didn't expect it. the show had built up earl as dangerous, we knew he was trouble, but i don't think anyone ever expected for him to shoot max. max's death hit hard not just because this character that we loved so deeply was gone when she had finally gotten her life back, but because until then we had always assumed that the child characters would be safe.
then you get sam's death, which is so similar to max's in so many ways. a character that the audience adored, that we had known for so long, that we had seen grow and learn and come through so many challenges until she finally had the happiness that she deserved. unlike max, whose impact was partly the shock of it, i think what made sam's death so hard-hitting was that we knew it was coming. the timeline is we know something's wrong episode 1, learn it's a brain tumour episode 2, find out it's terminal episode 3 and she dies in episode 6. because it's so drawn out, we end up with the same hope as the characters - maybe we'll get one more episode with her, one more chance to see her again. when she finally goes it's a relief that the waiting is finally over, but it still hurts to see her go.
and then, 9 seasons later (holy shit i've just realised what a massive jump that was, it was like 12 years), we all got bowled over by hope's death. we didn't really know hope - she got introduced at the start of the season and was mostly just kind of annoying. we knew a few basic facts - stella's granddaughter, mum was ill, loved performing and dreamed of doing it for the rest of her life - but that was it. she didn't even have any relationships outside of stella and ben, no friendships with other students or bonds with teachers. and then, 3 and a half episodes since we first met her, she was gone, sending the whole season off in a new direction. like max, part of the impact of hope's death was just how unexpected it was - she'd briefly referenced having "loads of allergies" the episode before, but that was it. mostly though, i've always found that hope's death hit hard because of the lost potential. to the audience, hope was a fairly annoying kid who enjoyed performing arts, and that surface-level character description was all she was ever going to be. unlike max and sam, who we mourned because we got the chance to know them so deeply, hope never got the chance - she will always be stuck at the start of her character development, with no way of knowing how she would have changed and what the audience reaction to her would have ended up being.
