Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-37824939-20181221232809/@comment-26397825-20181222103941

They killed him off becasue they enjoyed writing him too much.

Basically, he was only supposed to be in ep1 and then never seen again. They enjoyed writing him so much, he eventually got worked into stuff later. If they hadn't killed him, they wouldn't have been able to restrain themselves and would have written him into even more stuff down the line which would haveplayed havoc with the planned story. So they killed him off to remove that temptation.

Examples of Roman and Neo changing stuff include the installation of the Black Queen Virus on the Atlas Warship. If Roman hadn't been there, they would have had to use a different character. The prime character to use in that moment would be Watts, since he is a (disgraced) Atlesian scientist and created the virus in the first place, which would have introduced us to the idea that Cinder was one of multiple minions for a bigger bad before the Salem reveal at the very end of the season.

Instead Roman took the job, and we were kept completely in the dark about Cinder not being the extreme big bad and in fact having others who were her equals in terms of Bad Guy Hierarchy. This meant that a lot of viewers got very salty about Salem's reveal, feeling it came out of nowhere.

Now I'm not saying Roman didn't do great in that scene. He was fun, he was great to watch, and the scene played out well. I'm saying him being involved pushed some reveals back instead of happening at a more natural part of the story, such as Watts being revealed as working alongside Cinder and hailing from Atlas. It would also have given us part of the reason Watts was disgraced from Atlas, instead of his background being a super large Question Mark and having no idea what he did.