The Walking Dead had its second mid-season finale for its eleventh season on Sunday (the final year is broken up into three eight-episode sections), and it has become quite apparent that the show is running on fumes at this point (and the franchise with it). I have been watching TWD since it first debuted in 2010 (yeah, that long ago), and for a large part of its run this has been one of my favorite genre shows on television. I was still onboard with the show in its seventh season when viewers started to sour on it and the Walking Dexit began following the Negan bash. And I acknowledge that the eighth season had its low points, but I was still enjoying the series at that time. Then it managed to find some new life after the jump forward of several years in the ninth season, and the show continued pretty strong from that point. But then the eleventh season arrived and I have been struggling to make it through each episode since then.
It’s not necessarily that the show is bad, it is just wildly uneven with the moments of good writing often outweighed by sloppy story-telling or outright incoherence. Many have been claiming that TWD has been at that point for quite some time, but for me the good parts have balanced out the rest prior to the eleventh season. Maybe I am just growing franchise-weary and I am finally starting to see the warts that have been there all along, but I am definitely not looking forward to watching the show at this point (but there’s only eight more eps, so I’m going to stick it out).
Take the mid-season finale as an example. (Spoilers ahead and all that.) That whole thing with the locusts swarming about should have been really cool and brought some atmosphere to the episode, but it just seemed to fall flat. When we first heard them, I was like WTF? And by the end of the episode, it still seemed like they have not been very well incorporated into the story. Then take the confrontation between Maggie and Leah. It seemed like they were building up to something big (though you know Maggie won’t die because she has already been pegged for a sequel series), but then they just killed off Leah without much real resolution to her multi-season story arc.
The whole story with the Commonwealth is tired as well. It follows the same pattern of our heroes finding a new group who are not quite what they seem and then it’s just good guys vs. bad guys again. And they went out of their way to make the leadership of the Commonwealth into mostly cartoonish villains. It is interesting that this new society that has rebuilt much of the old world is not perfect, but they could have built in some better moral dilemmas than just having to deal with evil leaders.
And speaking of evil leaders, that whole storyline with Pope and his people that covered the first part of the season seemed to be there just to pad out the episode count. I really don’t see what that brought to the story as that group borrowed aspects of the Saviours and Woodbury, but nothing really new. I thought maybe that was building up something more with Leah, but as mentioned above they just killed her off.
And I am still having a hard time with Maggie’s acceptance of Negan. She watched him bash her husbands brains in right in front of her. That’s not something you get over very easily, even if the man has since shown some repentance for his actions. I understand the viewers like the character and they want to keep him around, but having him and Maggie make amends seems to be stretching suspension of disbelief.
But that’s generally what happens when a show goes this long. It is hard to keep up consistent quality no matter how good the creative team is, and The Walking Dead is certainly at the point that it is stretching things thin. It is definitely time for this one to wrap up, and it’s a shame that it appears it will stumble to the finish line. As for the other shows airing or having aired, the spin-off series The Walking Dead: World Beyond had about a movie’s worth of story stretched over twenty episodes, and I haven’t been engaged with Fear the Walking Dead for years.
And AMC will keep stringing this franchise along with one show hitting the schedule later this year and two more spin-offs in the works. The anthology series Tales of the Walking Dead at least looks promising, and that is probably the best way to keep things going. It will give us a chance to look at other parts of this zombie-pocalypse world and perhaps go back and revisit some of the TWD characters that were killed off previously or that have not had much screen time. And those Rick Grimes movies (if they ever arrive) might be a good way to cap off the original show.
But there is also a Daryl and Carol spin-off series announced and a Negan and Maggie mini-series in the works. It sure seems to me like those are going to tread over a lot of the same territory that TWD has already covered, and I’m not sure what they can bring to the franchise that is new. More than anything else, they look like attempts by AMC to keep the property on the air and to continue to milk advertising revenue from it. Tales of the Walking Dead is the best way to do that, and it would probably be a better idea to wrap those other spin-offs into that show for multi-episode arcs.
I still consider The Walking Dead (the main show) to be one of the genre greats based on its overall track record. But it has had its low points and looks like it will not redeem itself with its final season, so it would probably be best to give the franchise a rest of sorts at this point. The anthology series is an acceptable continuation for now, but the other shows really seem superfluous.
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