Animal Kingdom: The 11 Most Shocking Deaths In The Series' History, Ranked

Warning: The following contains spoilers for Sunday's series finale of Animal Kingdom. If you've yet to watch, you may want to put off weighing in on this countdown until you have.

Over the course of its six blood-soaked seasons, Animal Kingdom bumped off and rubbed out so many characters that you could imagine sticking a shovel just about anywhere in the desert and accidentally hitting a body that the Codys had buried. But of course, not all of the TNT drama's deaths were truly, ahem, killer.

Now that the series has aired its finale — and added three more major casualties to the list — TVLine is counting down the 11 most shocking murders in the show's entire history. Keep in mind, though, as you scroll through the rankings below that these aren't necessarily the saddest deaths ever, just the most starting, whether because of their horrifying circumstances, their significance or, at least in one case, the perpetrator.

In other words, we're looking for jaws on the floor instead of tears in the eyes.

Ready to see which characters' demises made this, the unkindest of cuts? Keep scrolling, then hit the comments with the death that left you the widest-eyed.

Once Smurf had had the character at No. 2 on this list offed, it was a much smaller surprise when she hired the Trujillos to blow away his cunning lover in Season 3's finale.

Season 5, Episode 10, had us convinced that dirty cop Chadwick had actually turned on the Codys — until he arranged for them to meet with the DEA and plugged their worst nightmare in front of their eyes.

Threatening to put Adrian on Pope's hit list as a stool pigeon in Season 4, Episode 6, got the lowlife fatally shot by the surfer's boyfriend, Deran. Who knew he had it in him? Not us, not until then.

After learning in Season 4, Episode 8, how treacherous Baz's executioner really was, J was given the option of putting a bullet in his conniving f—ck buddy's head — and took it.

The legal secretary never saw it coming. But, after the incidents at No. 8 and No. 6, we knew all too well that J had it in him to poison his significant other in the series finale.

Arguably J's most brutal murder came in Season 3, Episode 12, when he slashed the leg of the attorney who knew too much and left her to the sharks.

If these deaths were ranked on the basis of how heartbreaking they were, Andrew's would be No. 1. But since we're evaluating their shock value, c'mon. We all knew he wouldn't survive the series finale, right?

That Smurf would order Baz's babymama killed was to be expected. That Pope would carry out the order — after having sex with the woman he'd loved for so long — altogether horrifying.

We'd imagined the middle Cody brother meeting his maker a zillion times. But not once did we see the introduction being made, as it was in the series' ender, by a pistol-packing kid during a minor-league holdup.

After a long, hot summer in suspense, we found out in Season 3's premiere that Smurf's surrogate son hadn't survived the hit that she'd taken out on him at the tail end of Season 2.

"They wouldn't," we thought. "They couldn't." And yet, they did. In Season 4's penultimate episode, the powers that be had J grant his cancer-stricken grandmother's death wish before she could shoot Pope.