The Walking Dead has never really had a truly great season but the back-half of Season 4 is probably the best stretch in the show’s history. As disparate pairings made their way closer and closer to Terminus, each episode acts as a contained story about 2-3 people and how they’re dealing with the aftermath of The Governor and an unknown future. Eventually they all found Terminus, or rather Terminus found them, and the season ended with a cliffhanger as our group was about to be descended upon by cannibals.
It’s been fairly downhill ever since. The plots slowed down. The characters stopped talking like human beings and started talking in plot points and ideas. Everything happens in deference to the needs of the plot, which never makes for good television even if we think it does. We care about real characters and TWD stopped caring about that a long time ago.
Instead, the writers seem to have started paying too much attention to social media reactions, post-episode breakdowns and Reddit theories. Rather than try to tell the best story possible, they’re trying to tell the best story while also undercutting whatever expectations fanboy and fangirl audience members might have. It’s as if they’ve accepted a challenge from their audience that was never extended.
That’s been Season Six in a nutshell. If the show had simply followed the exact same story beats as in the comic, it would have done just fine. Perhaps some would have found that predictable, but this stretch of the source material was strong, culminating with the big payoff that is Negan’s introduction. Point is, they had a solid framework to work from and rather than focusing on tricks and cliffhangers, they could have deepened character development and used that to earn your payoffs.
Instead, we’ve spent all season watching the show tie itself into knots. Audiences came to realize that only tertiary characters will die, undercutting the idea that anyone could be next. Instead of Abraham getting the arrow through the eye, which the story seemed to be leading us towards, it was Denise who took the shot, a death that felt much less relevant.
This was proven even more so when the whole fake Glenn death fiasco happened. In what could have been a truly shocking moment, the show pulled the rug out from under itself, showing Glenn’s “death” to be a trick. Intended to make the audience think twice about making assumptions, it actually made the audience lose faith in the show to put logic first. They doubled-down when Glenn almost died again during a zombie attack, as if they were shoving it in our faces.
All of which brings us to the season finale, where once again the writers decided that pulling the rug out from under the audience was more important than giving them something to bite into. I have to admit that before I watched the episode, I came to the conclusion that one of two things was going to happen:
1. The writers will chicken out and kill a lesser character instead of Glenn, who takes Lucille to the head in the comic book. That means a character other than Rick, Michonne, Glenn, Maggie, Carl, and Abraham. In doing so, they would completely ruin the moment.
2. The writers will leave the death as a cliffhanger until next season, destroying the emotional impact that audiences would have to deal with all summer long. In doing so, they would completely ruin the moment.
Now we know, they went with No. 2. And as far as we’re concerned, No. 1 isn’t off the table yet either.
Deep breath.
So now it’s abundantly clear. The people behind The Walking Dead hate their audience. They despise them, their theories and their expectations. They seem to take offense to the idea that fans might want to speculate. They hate the people who watch their own show so much that they’re willing to torpedo it, as if some kind of dare to see if the good ratings will continue in spite of it all.
The Walking Dead has become a series of cliffhangers without any kind of valuable payoff. Sure, we’ll find out who died in the first episode of Season Seven, but the emotional resonance will be long dead before that. They’re going to make us sit through a good chunk of that scene again, a scene we’ll already know all the beats of, destroying the impact. When it’s over, the show will begin another long slog towards Rick’s people overcoming the odds until we invariably reach another important plot point, at which time we’re sure to be left in the dark again by another blackout.
It would be one thing if the show were giving us something good in the interim, but Sunday night’s season finale was the same old, same old. Characters no longer speak to one another, they say things that act as plot signposts. It’s all a bunch of weird motivational speeches that double as big flashing lights of foreboding.
“Everything we’ve done, we’ve done together,” Rick tells Maggie early on. “Things have happened but it’s always worked out for us because it’s always been all of us. That’s how I know. Cause as long as it’s all of us, we can do anything.”
“Be nice to each other, like it’s your last day on Earth,” one of Negan’s henchmen tells Rick.
“You decide,” Carol tells her attacker. “The world doesn’t get to decide, you decide.”
It’s as if the writers wrote down the ideas they were trying to get across and then, before translating them into actual dialogue human beings would have, just said “fuck it” and decided to go with that.
The truth is, The Walking Dead could have knocked out everything that happened over the course of Season Six’s 16 episodes in about eight to 10 if they really wanted to. If they were interested in telling tight stories and developing good characters, that was pretty easy to do. Instead, the writers stretched everything out because they can, because ratings, and sacrificed good storytelling for a season based on perpetual teasing.
The ratings for the season finale will probably be good. Audiences had been promised a big spectacular finish to a season of half-starts and fake-outs. Of course, everyone wanted to watch to get some sense of closure on a season so lacking in anything resembling it. Well, audiences got their big spectacular finish. They just didn’t get to actually see it.
It’s a perfect ending, if you think about it. The people behind the show have treated the audience with disdain all season long and people keep watching. Why change what’s working?
