The Walking Dead

[Ron]

Right, and the point of comics (and books, too) is to tell a story however you want to tell it.

 

Agreed, and I'm expressing my opinion that I don't like what they've done with the plot and I think they can do much better. 

[Old Man Jenkins]

So, The Walking Dead Season 6 and Fear The Walking Dead trailers just dropped, figured it'd be justifiable enough to bump this. Fear The Walking Dead looks to be promising while the first half of Season 6 is shaping up to be tense af what with the apparent Rick/Morgan power struggle alone, along with the threat of The Wolves still at large which will probs lead into a huge comic event hitting the TV screen. Hyped.

[Clappy]

Watched both of these earlier. I'm actually more excited for S6 than the spinoff, which is surprising because I thought for sure that I'd be more hyped for the latter. But that trailer did such a damn good job getting me hyped for what's to come and that Rick/Morgan power struggle is definitely going to be fun when they head down that road.

[Young Nug]

I really really thought Season 6 was geared up to become the Walking Dead's peak, and with those first two episodes, I thought I was right in my hopes. Then Thank You aired and I wavered, but the 90 minute Morgan episode restored my faith. These last two episodes though  at least last week gave us some insight into some characters that will be VERY important later on (if they are who I think they are), but the episode with Rick coming back to Alexandria was pretty damn boring. I think it's still a tie between Season 5 and 1 for best season so far.

It's not over yet, but maybe this meh first half will give way to a fire Season 6B, as was the course with 2 and 4. It'd be nice if this show could just have a consistent whole Season though :(

[Clappy]

I can't wait for Negan.  Jeffrey Dean Morgan is great casting and I can totally see it.

Otherwise 6A has been a vast improvement over 5B.  I feel like 5B dragged a lot and didn't capitalize from the far superior 5A.

[Old Man Jenkins]

Yeah, this season has been on point for me so far. The only real ehh episode being the ep with Rick coming back from two weeks ago, like Nugs mentioned. I just hope we get a nice payoff with this mid-season finale, which I think we'll get since the mid-season finales from the last two seasons tied things up pretty nicely together leading up to those. I'm expecting some juicy deaths since they've killed every other Tom, Dick and Harry in the first three episodes of this season.

[Old Man Jenkins]

Figured I may as well bump this since the season finale is coming up on Sunday and some serious fucking shit's about to go down.

 

 

Carol's off distressed and possibly injured, Morgan's off on his own to find her, Glenn is in the Savior's clutches, Daryl might still be alright after all dat blood, Alexandria and Judith is about to be left in Father Gabriel's hands, Judith #2 is giving Mags some probs, Trevor from GTA V is gonna play a fucking Savior and Negan's not far. Anything and anyone can go, hyped as fuck.

 

[Hayden]

I hear the finale ends on a cliffhanger......

It's about time my bet with Clappy came to an end though, regarding Daryl's death.

[Old Man Jenkins]

So the audio for Negan's big debut has been leaked and AMC has been cracking down on it. The snippet of it I'm about to post is only like 3 minutes long whereas the original leak was a good 10-11 minutes. Posting the 3 minute version because I can't find another full one for the life of me. This version covers the juicy stuff tho, the rest is Negan in all his glory minus the f-bombs. Don't pay much mind to the subtitles this person slapped on. Hope this one doesn't get taken down long enough for those of you that wanna hear it. If you would like to savor this moment and abstain, feel free to do so. Without further ado, I give you motherfucking Negan.

 

 

 

They really hit a homerun (pun intended) casting Papa Winchester as Negan. Just hearing him gives me chills, can't wait to see it in full. Find it interesting how it leads into the theme song. It could be just the end credits, or maybe they're ballsy enough to open the ep with this scene (from the rumored Lucille recipient's point of view) and have the episode back track from there and lead us back into the big moment with a full reveal of who gets to meet Lucille??? I can hope. All I know is that this is the fucking jolt this show needs right now. Rick and the gang have been having it too good and too easy ever since The Gov's demise and for them to be left this helpless after looking like a bunch of badasses curb stomping everyone and everything in their way for two and a half seasons is honestly a breath of fresh air for me.

 

[Clappy]

I'm more distressed that I'm missing the season finale of this over Wrestlemania.  Can't wait to see who gets to meet Lucille.

[Hayden]

You won't know until October

[Old Man Jenkins]

It was great to finally see and hear JDM as Negan in full (and Trevor from GTA V), definitely the highlights of it for me along with Rick and his group's resolve being systematically broken. Morgan actually killed again, should be interesting to see how he goes about handling that. Gonna guess that the horse guy is from The Kingdom. I'd be more bent out of shape with the cliffhanger ending, but I've been through enough of those with Supernatural that I feel I can handle anything no matter how long the wait.

[Young Nug]

nah man nah

profanity laden spoilers for the entire season are after this so if you even want to watch this season and haven't yet i suggest you don't read

I don't want to start this and say the cliffhanger didn't work, or that it didn't do it's job. Because it did. I'm going to be back for the premiere in October because this episode forces me to.

But it was shitty writing to the nth degree. And I'm not pleased with it in the slightest.

This whole season has been pretty damn stupid, from Rick's quarry plan blowing up in his face, to Daryl helping Dwight back in the first half. Things got even dumber once Rick decides, "hey, let's kill a group of strangers we know little to nothing about", and then everything goes to complete shit after that.

"Let's take the pregnant woman on an assassination run"
"Let's take the only doctor we have out on a supply run"
"yo let me just leave the home of the people I love, even though I know there's a group of killers out there"
"Let me get revenge on the dude who killed my friend even though they nearly killed me the first time"
"everyone let's leave our community unattended for who knows how long to get this medicine"

The few arcs we had going on all season were whatever. And the Glenn shit was not cool in the slightest.

This finale though. God.

This was 90 minutes of Scott Gimple and Matthew Negrete poking the audience with a stick saying "Hey. Hey. Check it out. Rick has no idea what he's doing. Isn't that crazy?" Which would mean something, if all the stupid actions I wrote about above weren't all eventual victories for Rick. The quarry thing blows up in his face, but after that, everything goes rather smoothly for him... Until things start going wrong again. It creates an inconsistent status quo for Rick, because it's not really shown that he's a winner or a loser this season. He's had his fair share of both, and while it is haunting to see him be completely and utterly fucked over by the end, it has no weight. There's no expectation to subvert. Rick has no real reason to be cocky, but whatever.

We didn't need 5 different scenes of Rick encountering roadblocks. That was repetitive and a waste of time. It ceased to be scary. 

Morgan and Carol's plot was fucking stupid. Morgan's been going on his "all life is precious" mantra all season, it makes sense. Carol's godawful transformation into a wishy-washy plot sack has been disgusting and disheartening to watch, because while the general idea makes a lot of sense, they execute it horribly. It comes out of nowhere. And it's not good. She's suicidal now? What the fuck? Then, when Morgan comes to save her from that dude and kills him, that could've been a cool plot - but no, we don't even get any time to think about that, here's some Season 7 setup! Ugh.

I'll be nice and say that Jeffery Dean Morgan knocked it out of the park as Negan. The whole scene when Rick gets ambushed - the whistling, Andrew Lincoln's freaked out face, the emotions running high, Negan's jokes as the tension became palpable - it took 80 minutes of shit to get to, but those last 10 minutes were really powerful storytelling.

And then they didn't even deliver thematically, because they decided to stop fucking telling the story for ratings. People have been waiting for this episode for years. The whole season has been setting this up, there have been hints about this man dating back three years. This was a slog of an episode, but as bad as this, Twice As Far, and East were, it could've all been redeemed, had they just stuck this landing, and showed us. That's all. And they didn't. "They'll be around next year to see who gets it! #WhoIsIt?" Because fuck the audience, right? Worst season finale, hell, maybe even worst season. Fuck.

Maybe it's because it just aired, but I've never been so angry about an episode of television before, man. It was just so bad. I love this show, but it let me down so hard. What a mess.

[Clappy]

I'm in between when it comes to the finale.  I absolutely understand why people are pissed off too.  It's the build to a moment its core fan base has been waiting for for years and Scott Gimple just gave a big FU to everyone by leaving the season finale on a cliffhanger...again...especially after how the rest of the finale went.  But everyone will definitely be tuning into the premiere to see who gets Lucilled, so it worked...I'm just not sure it's working to the extent that Gimple wanted because this is the kind of shit that pisses off a fan base as we've been seeing these past 24 hours.  I'm not sure how much more of this The Walking Dead can get away with though because this is the second hour and a half finale where virtually nothing significant happens for a good portion of the episode and ends on another cliffhanger that could easily be resolved in said episode.

[Old Man Jenkins]

Dat Shiva tho, damn. Rumor mills have been saying as of late that both Glenn and Abe got the bat axe. In other old news, they apparently filmed Lucille scenes for the entire character line-up that was captured in order to keep spoilers from getting out, sure hope those show up as special features for the blu ray release.

[Hayden]

Gray Rick. Shitting pants. Morgan saying "I don't die" means he dies. All Out War.

[Young Nug]

This show better get un-shitty really fast. I'd usually have a lot more to say, but at this point I just want consistency from Rick and co that isn't boring and depressing as fuck. That's all. 

[Old Man Jenkins]

Damn, they gonna pull a season 4 and wrap up the Negan conflict by the mid season finale? But more importantly

 

[Old Man Jenkins]

Don't know how many people here still care about the show, but I figured I'd bump this since there's been quite a few developments both on and off camera since the last time I posted here. Firstly, the character of Morgan is moving over to the spin-off series, Fear The Walking Dead, which is something I'd be more excited for if I actually kept up with that series after the pilot episode (but if the Fear The Whisperers theory actually somehow turns out to be true, that may change). And, of course, the inevitable killing-off of Carl's character.

Which is just, wow. I usually go to bat for this series, but as season 7 and especially this first half of season 8 went on, I began to gradually come around to most people's opinion on the show losing its luster under Gimple's supervision (like my god, this fucking Scavenger thing being one of the biggest pieces of shit on my list). And it's all come to a head with this last decision he made to kill off this very integral character to the whole story of TWD. I say "last decision" because Gimple's been booted off as show runner, apparently, being replaced by longtime show writer and producer, Angela Kang (who's got a few gems under her belt like "A", "Four Walls and a Roof", and "Coda"). But off the heels of that, he's apparently been "promoted" to supervising the entire tv franchise, The Walking Dead, Fear The Walking, any other future potential spinoffs, what have you. I'm just a bit skeptical about this "promotion" considering the circumstances. Gimple's removal has shades of previous showrunner before him, Glen Mazzara's departure, who I believed was removed from his post following the season 3 finale where Andrea, another huge name at the time, got killed off.

But on the subject of Andrea, they at least had some pretty well established characters on hand to help fill her void, a combination of Michonne's growing bond with the Grimes family and the absolutely badass development of Carol. It also helps lessen the blow of her death considering how ass she was being made out to be, whereas Carl had some great development when the spotlight was shone on him and he still has plenty of places to go character-wise. With Carl, it's just, who's there to fill his void? His character represented the goddamn future for crying out loud. Unless they somehow pull another Carol with Enid, I just don't see that happening because she's nowhere near Carl on the totem pole for me. Is Judith finally gonna step up and fill her brother's shoes during the time skip following the war? Is freakin Daryl gonna get Carl's future material now? Cuz that honestly would not surprise me. Killing Carl just feels like sacrilege, mang. I'm all for deviating from the comics whenever necessary, but that just felt like a character death for the sake of a cheap pop to the ratings, and that's coming from somebody who defended the whole season 6 finale cliffhanger debacle.

Hopefully now that they cut out a good chunk of fat behind the scenes, we can finally see some proper fat trimming on-screen (looking at you Daryl, Tara and somewhat Rosita). Goddamn, why didn't they just kill Daryl instead. His character would've had the same impact, but far less implications on future story arcs. Well, it's not like I'm just gonna stop watching. This is like one of two series (along with Supernatural, which should just fucking end already) that I've been (more or less) fully invested in and following non-stop for years now, might as well see it through to its end. Whenever that may be.

[Clappy]

I stopped live viewing the series after the shitshow that was Season 7A.  Been sporadically viewing afterwards and man, this series has been rundown into the ground.  I hate what it has become and the signs were pointing that this is what it was going to lead to about three or four years ago when Scott Gimple and company stopped giving a shit about good storytelling and focused on how to top itself in terms of viewership records.  And don't get me started on whatever the hell that midseason finale was for 8A because killing off Carl for shock value is the worst cliffhanger they could have done.  Yes even worse than the much ridiculed one for 6B that we talked about above.  You mortgaged potentially the future of this series for shock value and another shitty cliffhanger.  Even if it is a fake out, which wouldn't surprise me if they bullshit their way around resolving Carl's zombie bite to let him live, this was just a ratings ploy.

I don't know who to blame for The Walking Dead's decline amongst Gimple for his constant ratings traps to AMC for allowing this to happen just so they can consistently brag about how much viewership this show gets.  I agree with OMJ that for this series to get back into my good graces, it needs to trim a lot of the dead weight that is sitting around doing nothing from all these secondary characters that have been alive for four or five years, but have never made the opening credits sequence to killing off some of your main characters that you are keeping alive but doing absolutely nothing worth noting (sorry fangirls, Daryl Dixon should have died years ago).  But who cares about what I think, certainly not AMC.  AMC just wants to keep it's biggest cash cow going for as long as humanely possible.  I just hate how they are going about doing it.

Congratulations to Angela Kang for her new position as showrunner, but good luck trying to fix this mess.