Last night marked the return of AMC’s gargantuan series The Walking Dead, and if you haven’t seen the episode yet, don’t read further.
Last season finale “Last Day on Earth” concluded last April with something every single Walking Dead fan hated: a cliff hanger.
The group was trying to get Maggie to a doctor because she’s pregnant and they were cornered by Negan (played by Jeffery Dean Morgan) whom they believed they had previously killed. Surprise! He’s alive and he’s got his favorite “vampire bat,” Lucille, with him.
This episode “The Day Will Come When you Won’t Be” did one of two things for fans of the show. Either A: you were torn up inside watching Abraham and Glenn get their brain-matter smeared on the dirt, or B: you were pissed at the show for killing off Glenn, who had JUST come back from a season cliffhanger where we had believed he was dead.
That’s right folks!
If you don’t recall, Glenn recently returned from a season ending cliffhanger where he had fallen into a crowd of walkers. Apparently he survived for nothing.
This episode was hard to watch. If not because of the needless gore and sadism, then for the terrible direction that the season is off to.
Listen, I understand that the show had been on six seasons and it’s hard to get an emotional response out of an audience after that long, but smashing two characters’ skulls was just emotionally numbing.
The moment when Glenn’s skull had a dent in it and his eye was popping out and he was looking around was too much even for me, a fan who has read the, often considered more gory, comic. This, coming right after Abraham’s death, made our red-headed hero’s death seem absolutely pointless.
I can definitely say that this episode was handled in the worst way possible. The cliffhanger was bad – an ameteur move on this show’s part. The 15 minute delay in the reveal was stupid. We had to put up with Rick’s flashbacks for every character so that the show could say “look how much these characters mean to you,” just so that when they pulled the trigger, or in this case swung Lucille, we would feel something. I for one stopped caring after Glenn’s death.
The show tried to milk you even further and had Rick cut off Carl’s arm to prove some dumb point. You know what’s worse than a 14 year-old in the zombie apocalypse with one eye and one arm? This senseless, aimless and disappointing episode.
The only good thing to come out of this was Morgan’s portrayal of Neegan, a character that, though senselessly violent, was interesting in the delivery of his lines. His acting chops (bad pun I know) are on display and they make the episode palatable. As the leftovers of our gang pick themselves–– and the bodies of Abraham and Glenn –– up I’m not sure what they’re going to do. I’m going to watch this season simply because the trailer for the next episode with Ezekiel and Morgan looked promising.
I pray that the writers are happy with themselves, and that they never try and pull this shit with us again.
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