The Most Awesome Thing We Saw Last Week: Farewell, Kuttner

So imagine the shock when, in an episode promoted only for a guest appearance by Meat Loaf, Kuttner committed suicide. This was not a climax of a long-running storyline, either. In the opening minutes, his co-workers found him dead in his home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. We never even got to say goodbye. His final scene in the previous episode offered no indication of his fate. It was senseless and surprising and depressingly realistic. Not every suicide is a desperate cry for help. Not everybody who’s suffering telegraphs it, and it doesn’t always make sense in retrospect. Sometimes there isn’t anybody left who knows what it was that tortured somebody.