The Walking Dead S6 (no comic spoilers)

[Myrddin]

Even though the A Team hits headshots most times, I can see them holding fire when a live person is in the way. It's one thing to pop a basketball sized target, and another to do it with no margin of error allowed.

Yes, they all laid down their guns too fast and then stood back in a ridiculous manner, but of all the things wrong about that scene, Tara's hesitancy to shoot isn't one of them.

As a normal episode, this was fine. But as a "mid-season finale" it was a bit wanting. The pacing was off and each group too separated from compartmentalized. 

And what happened to Aron?

[Dr. Pepper]

You're forgetting the fact that Mr W had a bad untreated wound and wouldn't have made it far. Carol only appears when whatsherface doctor is finishing up treating him.

Wut?  I may not have explicitly written that Denise had just finished treating his wound, but it's pretty well implied that I definitely remember there was doctoring going on.

The Wolf wasn't trying to talk her into treating him.  Instead, he was discussing what sounded very much like religious dogma that the wolves seem to abide by and stated that whether he lived or died due to the wound was the right thing.  He was basically telling her not to treat him and let nature take it's course.

He didn't do anything while she was treating him.  He then sat back with his legs crossed after she treated him and while she slowly reloaded her medical bag right next to him.  He had all the time in the world to overpower Denise and use the things she had in her bag to help him escape, and he didn't.  Denise is also a trained psychiatrist.  Her conversation with him is very pointed, especially the part where she challenges him on his system of beliefs.  It seemed clear by then that she knew he probably wasn't going to kill her and even clearer when he didn't kill her or any of the idiots who gave up their guns.

Carol definitely caused the Wolf to react in that moment.  

[Elder Sister]

If the Wolf guy at any point has some kind of empathy awakening, thereby justifying Morgan's fantasies, it will be weak writing.

But we just know it is coming, don't we...

As for the final scene. Don't you just love it how our hardened team of survivors see a bunch of evil looking armed bikers blocking the road in front of them, and then proceed to drive right up to these guys, get out of their truck, and walk unarmed right into the middle of the road, just so that the writers can dramatically namedrop Negan for us.

You'd think that after surviving in a hostile world for 2 years, our super soldier Abraham, our badass tracker Daryl, and the aggro psycho warrior woman Sasha, when confronted with an armed bunch of Hell's Angels, would back their truck up to a safe distance, and take cover behind it, armed with an assault rifle or two and maybe even Abe's convenient rocket launcher.

And THEN start chatting to them.

Instead, they walk up like lambs to the slaughter, for the bad boys to have their way with them - in all senses of the phrase.

I love this Show. The writers KNOW we are morons.

I know, right?  I was amazed at the stupidity of that scene.  And also, the whole "let's leave Denise and the young Dave Grohl look-alike wolfpack guy alone and see what happens.  (Chris Hardwick said that on Talking Dead and he's so right - just like a young Dave Grohl)"  That was the dumbest thing I've seen besides Carol deciding, mid-concussion, that she's going to fight Morgan, and kill the wolfpack member.  

And what about Deanna?  Isn't she now a zombie unless they ate her brain?  I also thought that was stupid.  

[briantw]

I think it actually might have been the best of the half season. Complaints about it's placement don't even really hold up anymore as the episode after would have killed the momentum anyway. 

I think complaints about the placement still hold up just fine.  The episode after being both bad and horribly placed doesn't excuse the placement of the Morgan episode.  It just means that the people running the show are idiots and assholes.

[Dr. Pepper]

I think most of the episodes this season were pretty good, just horribly misplaced and editing.  The show has long had a problem with not knowing how to have multiple viewpoints in each episode.  I think they think that it puts us more into the mindset of the characters when they don't know what's going on with the rest of the group because there aren't cell phones to keep in touch.  But in reality, it's just annoying.  I don't need for them to ignore Glenn under the dumpster for four weeks just to convey that Maggie is uncertain about his fate.  Having Maggie act as though she's uncertain is the way to convey that.  The tension was wracked up the moment the zombies surrounded Alexandria because we have a pregnant Maggie inside, Glenn outside and anything could happen.

I know they'll never do it because they have been ridiculously consistent with their model.  However, they could significantly improve the show with better editing.  Cheap cliffhangers are stupid, they need to integrate the arcs so that we are can see what's going on with everyone even when the group is separated.  And, as great as Morgan's episode was, that really could have and should have been condensed. The plot that dealt with Morgan's philosophy would have served the story better if it were actually discussed instead of Morgan just going around and saying "all life is precious".  

Of course, none of this justifies the stupid in the finale.  I still can't get over the fact that Tara and Rosita meekly handed over their guns, that Morgan and Carol went for a concussion stroll, that Carol was super worried about the Wolf while Alexandria was overcome by zombies, that Daryl and co drove right up to a bunch of bikers and will likely hand over everything they have to them and that the show conveniently pulled out the zombie gut ploy when it should have been used a thousand times already.

[briantw]

I actually don't mind cheap cliffhangers in a show like The Walking Dead because it's made for them.  What I do mind is when they have a cheap cliffhanger, then wait several episodes to address it.  

[Dr. Pepper]

I actually don't mind cheap cliffhangers in a show like The Walking Dead because it's made for them.  What I do mind is when they have a cheap cliffhanger, then wait several episodes to address it.  

Yeah, that's a better point.  And I guess I don't mind cliffhangers at all, but as you say, it's waiting through all the other episodes that made it not work.  It made it so that the audience naturally couldn't move forward or care about much else because we needed this other thing to be resolved.  It could have worked if it were a minor character, like if this happened to Nicholas.  He can survive or not survive and it won't really matter to the audience unless or until his survival proves to be beneficial to the plot.  With Glen, his death or survival matters to the audience.  Not only has he been there since the start, but he's also the moral center of the show.  Their attempts to continue the story without confirmation on what happened to Glenn was never going to work.  

[OnionAhaiReborn]

On the subject of cliffhangers, having the steeple knock down the wall would have been a good mid season cliffhanger. Having it happen in the penultimate episode, and following it with an episode where basically nothing happens except for the death of a tertiary character, is a shit way to leave the audience waiting for several weeks.

[The Anti-Targ]

If the Wolf guy at any point has some kind of empathy awakening, thereby justifying Morgan's fantasies, it will be weak writing.

But we just know it is coming, don't we...

 

Why, because people can't be influenced in a positive direction? There's a good way to show positive influence and there's a bad / cheesy way. But you can't automatically dismiss any sort of as yet unseen character development of the guy as weak writing.

I'm trying to understand the Wolves' philosophy as loosely explained by the captive Wolf. Are they actively seeing to end humanity, as in are they the post apocalyptic evolution of extreme environmentalists who think humanity is a cancer on the world and so it is desirable to end human civilisation completely, to finish what the zombie apocalypse has started? I would like it if there was method to their madness, as opposed to the Wolves just being another [crazy and very violent] tribe merely competing for survival and wanting to eliminate competition within their patch.

[RumHam]

I hope they actually develop Spencer's character and have him stick around now that his whole family has died. (Arguably all due to the actions of Rick's group.)

[princess_snow]

what happened to Heath ? He didnt appear in the finale ..... I like Heath. I really really find Sam a pain in the ass, and Ron is creepy and dangerous. 

[BrettG]

It being Sunday made me think briefly about Walking Dead, and I realized that this is the first time that I'm actually not at all excited for the show to come back.  I think this has been the worst half-season in show history, and there are so many problems that I don't even see how the second half of the season can fix them. Broken down for easier reading/skipping:

-Writing:  The writing at this point has the subtlety of a crazy person cutting a woman in half with a machete in broad daylight.  Which actually happened this season.  Everything is so cliched and one-dimensional it's impossible to take anything seriously. Rick is clearly a crazy person right now that is ruining everything he touches, and yet he's being called the savior of Alexandria, despite the fact that he's going out of his way to be a dick to everyone there, as well as people in his own group, and has brought down a horde of zombies onto the community.  Morgan is a joke.  Carol is even more of a joke, in that at least the fan base recognizes how cartoonishly ridiculous Morgan is.  Carol, meanwhile, is the most dangerous, least trustworthy person in the entire cast, and the only person recognizing this is the aforementioned Morgan.  Whatever point they're trying to make with her and Morgan is not working at all, because of how cartoonish they made the Wolves.  Of course Morgan looks like an idiot when the person he's trying to save is a self-professed insane, murderous, psychopath. Therefore Carol's right by default, even though she's just as far off the reservation at this point as Morgan is. Same with the Rick/Alexandrians plotline.  The A's are so ludicrously incompetent that Rick can be wrong about almost everything and still come out on top. It's boring and ridiculous when the "conflict" in the show is so basic and engineered for a specific outcome.

-Directing: Holy shit has this fallen off.  The staging of scenes, the editing, it's all gone dramatically downhill.  The Glenn fiasco on the dumpster is the prime example.  Has there ever been a sloppier scene on a major TV show, especially in such a crucial situation? There's clearly a fire escape in the alley, barely obstructed, which both Glenn and Nicholas run past without mentioning it. The sound design puts in the click of Nicholas's unloaded gun, moments before he shoots himself with it. Once on the dumpster, the two fall off away from the dumpster -- Glenn's feet would be closest to it. On the ground, however, it's the opposite, and Glenn's head is closest. This is all obvious, first airing stuff, too, not stuff you'd have to be obsessively watching to catch. Or the scene with Daryl and the other survivors in episode 6. A truck pulls up to bring them back, they shout back and forth at each other, Daryl helps them hide basically where they're already standing...the staging makes no sense at all. If they're shouting at each other, can't Wade and his people hear where they are?  Shouldn't Daryl have made them run? Did they run and it just got cut out? And again, this was stuff I was utterly mystified with the first time it aired. Obvious, simple stuff that they aren't getting right anymore.

-Scott Gimple and structure: I liked this guy when he took over the show in Season 4, but he's turned out to be a one-trick pony. All he wants to do is tell stand-alone episodes that jump back and forth in time, and that simply doesn't work long-term in a serialized, weekly show with an ongoing story. It was fine in Season 4, when it was novel and the separation of the characters after the prison allowed it to make sense. It doesn't work when it's forced into the show when the story doesn't call for it. It's probably the biggest reason this season has been so bad so far, there has been absolutely no momentum whatsoever. The Glenn thing happened, and then we spent 90 minutes with Morgan, in an episode that was too long, horribly placed, and suffering from the same simplistic writing that's been in every other episode. We didn't get back to Glenn till episode 7, by which time the audience had all figured out Glenn was alive and didn't care anymore. Then Morgan didn't have a single line in the episode after his spotlight, undercutting the momentum built up there. No one cares what's going on with Sasha, Abraham, and Daryl, and it's only set-up for the back half of the season anyway, so the fact that they got an entire episode to themselves, rather than a subplot in an episode that also advanced the main story, was a stupid mistake. And the fall finale itself was just set up to next season. Half the threads in the last episode came out of nowhere (Sam's gone from understandably freaked out by the Wolf invasion to straight-up mentally disturbed and detaching from reality in literally one day of show time, I have no idea why Father Gabriel is there and what storyline he's supposed to be part of), and the others were so disjointed over the rest of the episodes that there was no momentum going into them (the Wolf himself hadn't been onscreen since episode 4, the Tara/Denise connection that was the crux of that last scene with him hadn't been seen since episode 5). And Deanna's the big death? Really?  You realize no one in the audience cares about her, right? And of course, just when momentum is finally being built, the episode ends. No one is going to have any emotional investment in that walk through the zombies two months later, so any tension or emotion you could have built is going to be absent from the resolution. Gimple is writing as if he's working on a Netflix series, that will all be watched in one day, and ignoring the fact that that approach is utterly disastrous if watched week-to-week. But the show still gets huge ratings, so he doesn't care, which leads to the biggest problem...

-Complacency: Everyone says working on The Walking Dead is a blast. Every actor, in every interview, goes out of their way to mention this. It happens so often that it has to be genuine. I truly believe it's a super fun set. And that, I think, is the problem.  They haven't hired a new writer in three years. The regular cast has remain virtually unchanged since mid-Season 4, when Scott Wilson and David Morrissey (who was barely in that season) left and Alanna Masterson came on. Since that time they've lost Emily Kinney, Chad Coleman, and Lawrence Gilliard, and added Seth Gilliam and a few Alexandrians. Barely any have left, and instead more have been brought in. And the directors are more and more just members of the crew -- not only Nicotero, but the DP, two editors, and the unit production manager. It's becoming an increasingly insular community with almost no outside voices. There's no one in the writers' room that's saying "Hey, this Netflix/stand-alone episode approach isn't working," not only because they've all been doing it since they started on the show, but also because, even if certain writers do have reservations about it, I feel like they don't have the heart to tell Scott Gimple, their awesome boss, that his ideas suck. So they just go with it, knowing it doesn't even really matter, the ratings are so high. Listen to Lennie James talk about the origin of that Morgan episode on Talking Dead to get an idea what I mean. Same goes on set. Everyone's having such a great time that no one notices that the dumpster scene, or the Daryl scene, makes no sense at all. And even if they do, no one wants to be "that guy" that's breaking up the party. Of course Glenn isn't going to die, they couldn't bear to let Steven Yeun go, regardless of how it cheapens the story. And with this logic, of course Deanna dying is a huge event, and worthy of a fall finale. That actress is a blast, we love her, it was so hard letting her go! What do you mean, she's a tertiary character that no one cares about? 

Bottom line, they need new blood on the show. New directors, new editors, and most importantly new writers. I won't call for a new show runner yet, Gimple has done some good stuff, but he needs people that don't think exactly like him and/or are wiling to speak out against him, and challenge him. Because the show's not only getting bad, it's getting stale. I realized in the process of writing this post that this half-season had the EXACT same structure as last half-season. Proof!

-Episode 1 -- Huge action extravaganza, probably cost most of their budget -- S5, the Terminus battle, S6, the mega-herd

-Episode 2 -- Fast pace continues, action keeps moving -- S5, meeting Gabriel and Bob being eaten, S6, the Wolf attack

-Episode 3 -- Action concludes -- S5, Termites are wiped out, S6, the escape from the herd concludes

-Episode 4 -- Stand-alone, completely separate from ongoing plot -- S5, Beth in the hospital, S6, Morgan's journey

-Episode 5 -- Stand-alone, resolves some plot arcs -- S5, Abraham's group, resolves Eugene, S6, Alexandria, resolves Rick, the herd, Maggie being pregnant

-Episode 6 -- Stand-alone, very few characters -- S5, Daryl and Carol in Atlanta, S6, Abraham, Sasha, and Daryl

-Episode 7 -- Multiple plot arcs, sets up fall finale -- S5, group goes to Atlanta, we see Beth, S6, Glenn's alive, Alexandria is in danger

-Episode 8 -- Ends original plot point -- S5, hospital comes to an end, S6, Alexandria is overrun by the herd

 

So yeah, I'd really like to not be able to predict the entire structure and plot development of the show on a week-to-week basis going forward. Hopefully next half-season is better. Can't really imagine it could be any worse.

[DireWolfSpirit]

So when exactly does the next season/episode start up again?

[Ferrum Aeternum]

So when exactly does the next season/episode start up again?

February 14th. 

[First of My Name]

Yep, Valentine's Day.

 

BrettG, I agree with pretty much all of what you such, but I try not to view the show in too critical a light because it'll ruin my enjoyment. Ignorance is bliss

[Dr. Pepper]

Rick is clearly a crazy person right now that is ruining everything he touches, and yet he's being called the savior of Alexandria, despite the fact that he's going out of his way to be a dick to everyone there, as well as people in his own group, and has brought down a horde of zombies onto the community. 

This has become the deal breaker for me.  Since Rick arrived, Deanna loses most of her family, a savage group attacks a vulnerable Alexandria compound because Rick has bullied everyone into dealing with sedate zombie horde right that very minute which eventually leads to a collapse in the wall resulting in Deanna ending up literally on her deathbed.  Yet for some unknown reason she's looking up at Rick as though he's a hero, a savior, the only person in the world who could lead Alexandria despite the fact that they were led pretty well for about two years.  Rick's a chaos leader.  He's a decent enough person to look to when on the run, but absolutely not when seeking stability.  Every time the group is stable and Rick takes charge, things turn to shit.  I thought it was just some sort of loyalty the others in the group were expressing towards him.  Then I thought maybe it was an inside joke with the writers.  But this season pretty well proved that the writers are completely unaware at how they've actually written Rick. They seem to be focused on the fact that he was originally presented as the hero and sort of forgot to actually write him that way.  

I can take the bad pacing, questionable direction, strange storytelling.  But I have to draw the line at the entire production team being completely oblivious to how they've actually written their character.  

[Myrddin]

This has become the deal breaker for me.  Since Rick arrived, Deanna loses most of her family, a savage group attacks a vulnerable Alexandria compound because Rick has bullied everyone into dealing with sedate zombie horde right that very minute which eventually leads to a collapse in the wall resulting in Deanna ending up literally on her deathbed.  Yet for some unknown reason she's looking up at Rick as though he's a hero, a savior, the only person in the world who could lead Alexandria despite the fact that they were led pretty well for about two years.  

While I agree Rick brings a certain level of chaos, you do realize he caused none of those things?

[MisterOJ]

I think a pretty strong argument could be made that Rick (and friends) saved Alexandria. Up until the point when Rick showed up, those folks had been extremely lucky. That luck wasn't going to hold out forever. If the Wolves had shown up without Rick and his crew there, they would have slaughtered everyone on the spot and none of them would have survived.

[Consigliere]

I think that the problem was that the writers made the Alexandrians far too incompetent, to the extent that their survival for this long was largely down to blind luck. As a result, Rick was always right even when he made poor decisions.

[Dr. Pepper]

While I agree Rick brings a certain level of chaos, you do realize he caused none of those things?

Lol, sure.  I suppose since favorable outcomes with the Alexandrians is written off as simple good luck then unfavorable outcomes with Rick is simple bad luck.  None of his decisions matter.  Which certainly doesn't make me want to put this show back in my line up.  

This reminds me of season 4 episode 1 where Hershel gets down on amputated knee and shows Rick all of the accomplishments they've made since Rick has been out of the leader position and then Hersh goes on to try to encourage Rick to become the leader again because they apparently need him.  I remember at the time thinking how stupid it was and that the writers probably just mistepped.  Now I think it's scenes like this one that primed the audience to think that if anything unfavorable happens as a result of Rick's decisions is just simple bad luck.  

I think that the problem was that the writers made the Alexandrians far too incompetent, to the extent that their survival for this long was largely down to blind luck. As a result, Rick was always right even when he made poor decisions.

Agreed, their extreme incompetence made no sense when they've survived very well for nearly two years in an area that was once highly populated.  They were competent enough to make the decisions that kept them isolated, safe and fed.  They should have been allowed to be competent enough to plant a garden or shoot a gun or any of the basic things that people in a post-apocalyptic world should have known to do.