Twitter and Facebook was alight with flurries of gossip and chatter as rumors surfaced that a major character on the hit CBS TV series, The Good Wife, was killed off. So the question begs itself: which character was killed off, and why did it happen?

(WARNING: The following post contains spoilers)

The beloved character of Will Gardner -- played by actor Josh Charles -- went out with a bang, according to The New York Daily News -- and literally. He was defending a man who was on trial for murder. The man had been abused in jail, and was afraid to spend the rest of his life in there. So, rather than see the trial through to the end, the defendant grabbed a security guard's gun and began firing randomly into the courtroom. When he went to turn the gun on himself, in an attempt to commit suicide, the gun was empty.

And in the aftermath, according to The Los Angeles Times, Gardner was found dead on the floor by his assistant, Kalinda (played by Archie Punjabi). There was no foreshadowing of Will's death in any of the previews, although there had been some hints on the Internet that "a major Good Wife character" would be killed off (though it was never clear which character would get the boot, or how s/he would die).

Will's death makes way for the return of Michael J. Fox for a four-episode guest starring role. Fox's sitcom on NBC was recently canceled, which makes it easier for him to return to The Good Wife for a guest starring role.

In a statement to their fans, The Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King defended their decision to kill Will off the way they did. "We could 'send him off to Seattle,' he could be disbarred, or get married, or go off to Borneo to do good works," they said. "But there was something in the passion that Will and Alicia shared that made distance a meager hurdle. The brutal honesty and reality of death speaks to the truth and tragedy of bad timing for these two characters. Will's death propels Alicia into her newest incarnation."