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Season 2 of "Fear the Walking Dead" opens Sunday (10 p.m., AMC) with considerable promise. As opposed to "The Walking Dead," which is more dead than walking.

I've pretty much had it with "TWD." The writers' cheap tricks, from the fake-out fake death of Glenn (Stephen Yeun) to a cliffhanger Sunday that was not just frustrating but downright arrogant, have made it all but unwatchable.

(Spoiler alert! Details of that cliffhanger ahead!)

Let's put all the other Season 6 flaws aside. The fake death. The extra-long season finale that spent an hour driving around in an RV, accomplishing nothing. The uninteresting and nearly incomprehensible Carol (Melissa McBride) and Morgan (Lennie James) storyline. The fact that Daryl (Norman Reedus) was all but written out of the show this season.

Let's look just at the cliffhanger, when Our Heroes were captured by Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and his minions. They're kneeling before Negan as he lectures and threatens them. Then he takes his barbed-wire-wrapped bat and begins beating one of them — to death, it would seem.

It's shot from the point of view of whoever has just been bashed on the head, and it ends with blood obscuring the camera lens as if it were the victim's eyes.

Which leaves fans wondering who was killed. Was it Glenn, who was the victim in the comic book? (Although producers have been quick to point out they don't always follow the comic books.)

Was it Daryl? Rick (Andrew Lincoln)? Carl (Chandler Riggs)? Maggie (Lauren Cohan)? Michonne (Danai Gurira)? Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green)? Rosita (Christian Serratos)? Aaron (Ross Marquand)? Abraham (Michael Cudlitz)?

It's another lame writing trick. A cliché that has been done better umpteen times before. An insult to viewers' intelligence … although maybe we're not that smart for sticking with the show, particularly after the fake-out fake death.

And the arrogance of it is staggering. This is 2016, not 1980 — when the producers of "Dallas" managed to keep the identity of the person who shot J.R. Ewing a secret for eight months.

The world has changed a lot. The Internet was invented. Spoilers have become a way of life.

Do the producers really think they can keep this secret? Have they been living in a cave, unaware of "Game of Thrones"?

It's not a spoiler that Jon Snow (Kit Harington) doesn't stay dead on "Thrones." That cat was let out of the bag months ago, when Harington was seen back on the set.

It will be a miracle if the same thing doesn't happen with "The Walking Dead."

Had the producers shown us which character died, it still would have been a cliffhanger. We would have been left to contemplate how that death would affect the show. It wouldn't have been another cheap trick.

Cheap tricks seem to be all "The Walking Dead" has left.

Scott D. Pierce covers TV for The Salt Lake Tribune. Email him at spierce@sltrib.com; follow him on Twitter @ScottDPierce.