AMC's The Walking Dead

Darabont has been gone for a very long time. Maybe it would have been better. Maybe it would have run into the ground after five seasons. I think the former is more likely, but far from guaranteed.

Season climax was last week, but it's not as if nothing happened last night. They abandoned the Kingdom. There were some key shifts in relationships. The Negan stuff with the "love quadrangle" was amusing, not for the actual jokes he made, but for the reactions of the other characters. That they ended on a somewhat hopeful note was predictable, but it made sense after the heads on pikes.

Am I mostly watching due to momentum at this point? Yeah, probably, but the show still has some decent moments. I don't get the hate from people still watching. Just change the channel.

 

And we know this show has historically had almost as many slow episodes as exciting ones. Part of the package.
I am hopeful that the new show runner has made a difference.
The one theme that has always irritated me is people going off on their own or without "permission" for one reason or another and causing all kinds of problems by doing so. But that's how it is.

 

In this case, it seemed more fitting because it was two of the youngest characters doing the running off. Judith is a little kid who has perhaps been given too much freedom. Lydia is a traumatized teenager.

One thing I didn't realize until I watched Talking Dead was that the scene with Carol finding Lydia was a reference to Carol's fate in the comics. Her story was very different in the books and it ended a long time ago.

 

Finally caught up and that episode downright sucked, and I don't say that about many of them. They've been in the South or Midatlantic for seven seasons and never seen a winter. Now suddenly there's a winter storm that could last weeks? WTH?

Nothing happened in this episode that was worth the time spent on it. Last week would have been a better finale. It was weird to go from last week to suddenly the Kingdom has fallen, everybody is wandering in snow for the first time of the series and the Whisperers for some reason were in a humid climate looking like nothing had changed. It's like they wrote a story arc for the season and the realized they forgot an episode.

Are we going to get some big reveal next season of who the big Whisperer is? He never takes off the mask, so they seem to be hiding his identity for some reason.

What was said over the radio in the final scene? I couldn't understand it.

 

It was tough to understand, but it was apparently a general call hoping someone would answer.

They had set up the fall of the Kingdom during the season, so that part wasn't out of the blue, but it was rushed. So was much of the story in the final three or four episodes.

I agree regarding the end of the season. I would have rather the season ended on the discovery of the heads on pikes.

 

I wholly agree the episode sucked and the other episodes didn't keep my attention well enough to pick up details that the Kingdom was going to fall. Did it burn? Did it "rot?" I have no clue and I'm not going to re-watch because it sucked. The episode really should have been a teaser episode before the start of the next season. Show back up in August, time has passed for us and the show and the Kingdom had to beat feet. Stay tuned when we return in three weeks to find out how they are faring.

 

There is no doubt that the show is sometimes driven by what they think would be a cool visual. I think that was the case with the season finale. It felt like something out of the source material. Comic books often follow an issue with a traumatic event with one that is fluff and/or built on little character moments such as Carol leaving Ezekial and Michonne having a respectful discussion with Negan. I'm not saying it was good, but it kind of fits with the books.

They did explain during the season that there were structural issues with the main building in the Kingdom, especially the pipes.

 

The reason they showed Alpha and Co. in a warm place was to establish that they were nowhere near the storm. Being the "animals" they are, they don't have a home base and moved to a warmer climate.
The crew at The Kingdom didn't know this, so they crossed into the "Whisper's land" without knowing they weren't even there.

 

The Whisperers had to have traveled pretty far to avoid that storm. Will they come back? If so, why would they bother? Alpha seems to have moved on from Lydia, so what would be the point in them coming back?

The whole episode was a mess.

 

Yeah, they set up that the Kingdom was going to fall, but it feels like we wasted a lot of time with the buildup to the fair and the hope it brought only to cut to "the Kingdom has fallen" at the start of the next episode. How did it fall? Why did it fall? Opening up the trade routes didn't help rejuvenate the Kingdom? How come?

They built much of the season around the fair being a way to bring the four communities back together, to help them all survive as one, and as soon they accomplished that goal, they cut to the group leaving the Kingdom behind. If they were going to show us them accomplishing their goal, which presumably would have helped them survive, then they should have shown us why it didn't work.

 

They did, but it was so rushed that it was way too easy to miss. It was at the beginning of the episode when they showed pipes leaking. The pipes got to the point that they were beyond repair and that made it so the Kingdom was no longer a viable living space.

My issue is that they rushed that story. They dropped seeds of it earlier in the season, then show it falling apart in just a few moments of the finale. That just wasn't enough to make it clear.

 

Didn't King Zeke say there was a fire as well when he was talking to Judith on the radio?