Should they have killed off Lee Carter in Eastenders?

The Carter family got ever smaller recently when Danny-Boy Hatchard’s troubled character finally bowed out of Eastenders after months of dealing with crippling depression and getting himself into more and more trouble with his tolerant wife Whitney and his dad Mick Carter.

It was announced a few months ago now that Danny-Boy would be leaving the soap and since them we’ve seen him spiral downwards with his depression, with one episode quite literally pushing the character to the edge of a car-park roof, only to be survived by a good samaritan parking attendant.

Many speculated that Lee Carter was going to commit suicide as the culmination of his harrowing storyline that saw him bullied at work, unable to live up to his own unrealistic expectations of the husband he should be, and dealing with the guilt of his many ill-advised decisions. However the soap bosses had a slightly more positive exit in mind for Lee.

In recent episodes Lee left Whitney leaving a note saying that he didn’t love her anymore. A furious Mick, played by Danny Dyer, then tracked him down and encouraged him to return, only to have Lee heart-breakingly reveal that he feels the only way he can recover and be happy is to leave everyone behind and start again.

We were then treated to gut-wrenching scenes of Lee saying goodbye to Whitney and revealing to her that he is going to leave the square, and her, behind and one final goodbye between father and son outside the iconic Queen Vic.

This leaves the door open for Lee Carter to return at some point down the line, but is this the best decision going forward? Personally I beleive it is, Lee Carter as a character is one of the unluckiest and tragic that soap-dom have come up with for quite some time, and whilst it would have sent a powerful message to kill him off as a conclusion to his mental illness storyline, I believe the clean-break message of hope, and a slightly happy, yet bitter-sweet ending is something Eastenders needed.

Especially given that the Mitchell sisters were killed off not so long ago, and then the bus crash happened, the residents of Walford could do with a break, and to be honest so could the viewers. What do you guys think? Is it a good thing that Lee Carter is still alive? Will you miss his character in the programme?