The Walking Dead: Season 6 Review

Here we go into the Walking Dead’s Sixth season but if you want to check out the reviews of previous seasons just follow the links below.

Season 1  Season 2  Season 3  Season 4  Season 5

I’ve held off doing this for a while now and really thought about just doing two reviews. Most seasons of the Walking Dead are really two. There’s the first half with a midseason finale and there’s the actual season finale. It makes sense in a way but I’d honestly be just as happy if they simply said they were separate seasons.

I think it goes without saying but just in case . . . SPOILERS BELOW!

I hope it also goes without saying that there are a MILLION things I could write about here and for all the amazing plot points and details I talked about here there are tons more I wanted to talk about. Everything from Jesus, to the Hilltop, to the hint of the Kingdom, it’s just impossible to put it all here.

My favorite?
“Warriors! Come out and plaaaayeyay!”
There’s no getting around the amazing nod to the Warriors we get in the person of the Saviors. And if you need that explained to you because you haven’t seen the Warriors, stop reading and go watch it.

The Good
This was one of my favorite seasons. I was constantly on edge and unsure about what was going on. No matter what I may say about all the cliffhangers and writing or timing, I still absolutely loved this season. So the one thing that jumps out at me that I loved right from the get go is that …

…we felt it.

Every season people complain about the show while simultaneously wetting their pants waiting for each episode to come out. This season one complaint I ran into a lot, (besides the lack of action and the finale, I’ll get to to those,) was that the show had basically descended into misery porn.

To some degree I feel the same.

It’s a tough show to love. The characters are great and many of the stories resonate with audiences but how do you recommend it to people? I always find myself saying something like;

“Oh, it’s a great show. Except that you die a little more every time you watch it and it leaves you feeling depressed. But yeah! You should totally check it out.”

Essentially, this show does one thing for me that most shows don’t, it makes me feel something.

I’ve seen so much television and so many of the same stories and episodes over and over again that the TWD feels best when I’m feeling my worst. Kudos to the high production value and incredible acting for still pulling my jaded self out and running it through the muck.

It’s time to nut up or shut up.
Time and again this season we saw characters face the choice to fight or not. Eugene maybe exemplifies this the best having been the most passive character for the longest period of time and eventually stepping up to the plate when the going got tough.

The season opens with a plan shot to shit and the sudden choice to fight. For the longterm survivors the choice was clear but for the people of Alexandria this was a major choice and not an easy one to make. We finish the first half of the season with Alexandria under siege and its people first stepping up to do something in a loose reactive way followed by the second half of the season which leads off with Alexandria under attack by a massive swarm of walkers roaming through the town. The Alexandrians take to the streets following Rick to take it back.

It’s the stand-up-and-be-counted moment that finally unites the groups for a single cause and convinces Rick of the future. He finally sees a future where working together means a successful life for everyone and where people can learn to work together. It’s a hint of a much larger world.

The Bad
Too many cliffhangers
This season has been compared in a lot of ways to season two where not a lot of action took place. I’ll just be blunt and say that criticism is misplaced and silly. The whole point of The Walking Dead is to see these characters develop over time and not to rush the story. Sure fans want to see Negan show up and all these crazy events happen but just because a baby wants a lolly doesn’t mean you give it to them.

No, the real “bad” of this season came in two very specific story points that fell flat due to timing and perhaps in a  reaction to the fans? The first was the midseason finale and the second was the season finale.

The Midseason Finale
To summarise, the season finale was shoehorned into a cliffhanger and lost a chance to focus on a huge moment in the story that deserved the focus and pause the midseason break would allow.

So the end of the mid-season sees Rick, Carl and a few others covered in Walker guts walking into a crowd of the undead. They are wading into uncertainty; Walkers have swarmed Alexandria, there’s no way to fight them all off and their only hope seems to be to sneak right through the heart of darkness with a cowardly boy in tow who endangers the whole group just by his presence.

It’s a tense moment to end on and not badly put together.

And the midseason reopens with this moment, this gut-wrenching moment of Carl, his head half gone, weakly calling for his dad . . . it just kills me every time. It’s hard for me to even look at. When I read the comics it was one of two walk-away moments where I just couldn’t take any more misery and had to put it down.

This is the moment of silence, the second before the fall, that chilling instance. It’s the perfect place to leave your season off, the shit just starting to hit the fan and uncertainty everywhere with this dead moment in the middle of it all.

And why? Because when the season comes back and Carl is shot in one episode and up running around adventuring the very next episode the time scale feels skewed. It seems like the miraculous TV healing we’d expect on LOST not the Walking Dead.

Take the same moment in time and place it before the midseason break and from the audience’s point of view it feels like a longer time ago than it actually is in the story. In the end what we got was Carl up and about like normal not long after having his head nearly taken off. Remember what a big deal it was in the comic? It’s just a costume change on the show.

The Season Finale
I wouldn’t think the midseason finale was so bad on its own if not for the season finale. This really cemented the feeling for me as a viewer that the writers were playing with the audience in an unsatisfying way.

In the season finale the show ended on what was clearly one of THE defining moments in the comics and had been leading up to that moment for a hell of a long time. So the faithful drawing on the comics material and it’s high-point endings seemed a little inconsistent in these two cases.

To be fair, I actually enjoyed the season finale and was genuinely scared the whole time. Again, having read the comics, and knowing how the show has teased the possibility of Glenn getting killed I was tense as hell trying to watch it. (Even though I had predicted it would be Maggie as far back as season four.)

Most people agreed though that the finale left us all unsatisfied. The camera suddenly changes to a first-person point of view and shows someone getting their head beat in by the villain we’d all been hearing about, Negan. Of course we won’t know for sure who that is until the start of season seven.

Glenn’s Dead?

Though it didn’t come at the end, the Glenn cliffhanger was perhaps the worst received of them all. At one point this season Glenn falls off a dumpster into a crowd of walkers when Nicholas, the idiot he’s with, blows his own head off. The way the music swells and the shots are set up we are sure that Glenn’s been eaten.

Or are we?

Right away people were coming up with explanations for why Glenn wasn’t really dead and how he could have escaped. Of course he survived and all the teasing and hints at his demise were just that. This one fake out, more than anything else, seemed to set off more negative reviews and bad press regarding how the writers basically trolled the audience.

Articles popped up in Forbes, Vanity Fair, and all over the place. Very few of them good. It was an instance of the writers trolling the audience perhaps with the best intentions but it backfiring on them.

The Ugly
The Sonogram
In the past I’ve compared TWD to LOST. It struck me this season that the pregnancy and sudden availability of a sonogram machine in an otherwise primitive environment seems extremely similar. I know it’s probably not that big a deal but there are enough little similarities that I hope one day someone out there puts together a comparison video of the similar scenes on the show.

All life is precious
Rick, Morgan, Carl, Carol, Daryl, and Glenn all struggle with holding back from killing people who tried to kill them. It’s a recurring theme throughout the season that sometimes seems baffling. As audience members we can see where a lot of the plot is going and think to ourselves “Come on! Just shoot that guy already.”

There is a struggle going on in each of our characters over when it’s right to kill and who. The levels of sustained violence, gore and horror they are exposed to is enough to destroy most people. So even being able to wrestle with those ideas is a sign of their humanity and that’s one of the deeper themes running throughout the show.

We can argue it’s a sign of weakness that the survivors don’t just blaze away and kill everyone they meet. But we can do that because it’s a TV show. Despite how bad the bad TWD can make you feel it’s NOTHING compared to real suffering in your life. Ultimately this show is a reminder that we are all still alive. Maybe on a TV show it sounds trite that people say all life is precious.

But it is.

Think about it. What if it’s the last day on Earth for you? For someone you love? What if that’s true? Maybe you should be extra nice to those people, ’cause you never know… just like that. [snap] Be kind to each other. Like it was your last day on Earth.

Back in the real world
Shortly after this season aired a rash of shootings started breaking out across the U.S. There were mass shootings of civilians, police shootings where innocent people were killed or injured, shootings against police officers. It goes on and on.

In most of these cases the difficulty of holding back and not just shooting first or shooting when you feel threatened is a key issue. This isn’t the best forum to state my opinions on any of those events. They deserve better than to be bundled into this review. I mention them now as an example of just how hard it is to know what’s right in the heat of the moment and the struggle we go through in trying to be more than just walking dead.

“Forgiveness takes more strength than anger.” – Maggie

The Walking Dead – Season 5

For my write ups on previous seasons check out:
Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
Season 4

Now here we go into the bowels of Terminus at the start of The Walking Dead: Season 5

The Good:
One of the general themes of season 5 is trust. 

The season opens with our characters in the worst possible situation: locked in a freight car totally dependent on someone outside to let them out, with little to no way to defend themselves they are at their most vulnerable. Yet they are confident and trust in each other like never before.

Contrast this with the second half of the season where they are in idilic surroundings, safe, behind walls, clean, with hot running water and electricity, cookies, even jobs. This is as close as they are ever going to come to going back to the world as it was. And that’s when they are most suspicious and on edge and where they really fall apart.

Along the way they continually run into questions of trust. After Terminus the first person they meet is Father Gabrielle whose stupid sense of humor makes all of us, survivors and viewers wonder if he can be trusted.

We find Beth questioning who she can and cannot trust in the hospital where she is taken hostage. During Rick’s rescue attempt and dealings with the cops we’re constantly wondering if we can believe anything they are saying.

The ultimate lie that Eugene had told his friends and later Rick’s group comes out and then it’s the trust of the people closest to you that is in question.

When our crew meets Aaron, the question of trust is right there. They’ve been hurt before and who is this guy promising good news with a big smile and a reasonable tone. We’re not falling for THAT! Of course he turns out to be alright. But when Rick’s group reaches Alexandria, we are all reminded of Woodbury and wonder if the people here can really be trusted. Can they ALL be trusted? Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? It takes time to understand people and build trust and along the way we get hurt. The people in Alexandria rightfully wonder if Rick’s group can be trusted. Look at these people and their seemingly rough almost feral way of living.

You get the point. Trust is the core of the interactions this season.

The Writing this season seemed very well done with a great deal of tension being created in the Walking Dead that’s similar to what we are seeing on Game of Thrones. Both series are based on written versions, comics in TWD’s case and the books in GOT’s case. Both have strong fan followings meaning viewers who are familiar with them already know what to expect next. Or do they?

The writers are being smart by playing on those expectations, events happen to different people, don’t happen, or don’t happen the way we expect them to. This means that the tension is kept high for people already familiar with the story and that fan favorites and main characters like Dale are in just as much danger of getting killed off as everyone else. On the show, Dale died on the farm in season two yet in the comics he survived MUCH longer and had his leg eaten by the hunters just like Bob in season five, (image of that below.) We see a lot of allusions to Glenn’s fate during the lead up to the end of season five that make it very clear the writers are toying with our emotions.

Being a fan of the comics I was terrified that certain things I was familiar with there were about to happen but if the rumors are to be believed I have a feeling they are on the way in season six.

The Bad:
Eugene: I’ve said it before but I just never really believed that Eugene was what he said he was. When it’s finally revealed that he’s a liar and a fake . . . yeah, no big surprise there. The question is where he goes from here. If he is anything like he is in the comic . . . good things lay ahead.

Father Gabrielle: In the comics I believe his character and really like his story and though I feel the same about him on the show something about the actor playing him didn’t work for me at first. His portrayal didn’t win me over though hat gets better over time and by the end of the season I’m sold. His character is definitely interesting, torn between what he did, what he believes he should do and what he actually is doing. If I had to group him in with the good guys or bad guys he definitely wouldn’t be someone I could trust.

The Hospital: What was this crap? I’ve gone back and forth about certain story elements on the show but this was the worst. The cops, in uniform, in a hospital in Atlanta? What? It just didn’t make any sense or fit with the feel of the show. It just seemed ridiculous. They drive around, run people over, hurting them, and then force them to work as indentured servants sewing buttons and mopping floors? Yeah, I don’t think so. Everything about how the hospital episodes worked seemed impossible for me to believe based on the context of the sow. The cops could come and go from the building seemingly at will but no one else could or would? I’m not buying it.

The Ugly:
(And the ones we lost)

The zombies are amazing.
The effects people really outdid themselves this season; from waterlogged things in the basement of a building near the church to melted victims on the streets of Atlanta. The Walkers this season are seriously amazing.

 

 

 

Bob: Look out Bob. You’re getting a lot of screen time. Your number might almost be up! Oops! You’re dead. Well Bob wasn’t  such a bad character but as a latecomer to the show I wasn’t particularly attached to him. What’s really interesting about him though is Dale. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. “Dale? He died seasons ago!” You would be right but you clearly haven’t read the comics.

In the comics Dale survives for quite a long time and it isn’t until he is bit, and wanders off to die that he’s grabbed by the hunters who cut off and eat his legs. That’s right, Bob filled the Dale role in this case. It all played out exactly the same. As a point of interest it helps reinforce that things we know about in the comics often appear in different way and events involve different people. This offers hope and fear for viewers who’ve read the comic, because, oh no! Is this it for this character? Or is it going to be different?

Beth: Beth’s death served a purpose in that it helped destabilize Maggie’s character. Maggie lost her entire family to the walkers after the rest of the world had already fallen apart. They were  relatively safe on their farm until a heard of walkers came through leaving only a handful with our group. Over time we, the viewers became more and more attached to those that were left and felt Maggie’s pain as they fell. Beth was a sweet character who had just come into her own. Though her death seemed basically pointless, it wasn’t entirely without reason.

Tyrese: No matter how you spin it, I’ll still say his death was pointless. It’s not unusual for characters in TWD to die pointless deaths. It happens a lot actually. But in storytelling terms we hope there is some greater point to the event. Tyrese was a giant with a big heart. He never really was able to deal with the world around him. In some ways he remained apart from it all, he maintained a sort of purity and innocence that others lacked and at times he was deeply hurt by the horrors he witnessed. We’ll miss him.

Tasha Yar: Seriously, I was surprised too. That’s right, Denise Crosby played Mary, Gareth’s mother and co-leader of the people at Terminus. I didn’t even realize this when I was watching it and I think that’s a good thing. I enjoyed the character and the portrayal as it was without the attachment of knowing the actress beneath the makeup. Denise is amazing and I’m so glad she was in this show.

Dawn Lerner: The whole story of the people at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta didn’t sell me for reasons I’ve already stated above. The characters were interesting and the idea wasn’t so awful but there seemed to be a lot of plot holes that didn’t make much sense. In the end we felt sympathetic towards Dawn Lerner. She was a complex character that we didn’t really get to know as well as we could have. The way her story played out though, most fans were probably glad to see the character go. 

Aiden Monroe: The self-proclaimed douchebag leader of scouting parties was a great example of someone with no experience getting other people killed or hurt. I want to say he got what he deserved for his stupidity but I sort of feel he deserved to learn from his actions not just get killed by them.

Aidan’s father is also killed in the final moments of the season and is possibly an even more important death as it relates to the other characters and their reactions to the act. Rick want’s to kill the abusive wife of the woman he has the hots for so when he shows up to a meeting drunk with Michonne’s sword in hand he accidentally kills the architect husband of the leader of Alexandria who immediately tells Rick to go ahead and kill him which of course is right as Morgan walks in and sees all this going on, closing the season and setting up the action for the start of season 6.

That’s a LOT for one scene.

Noah: Holy shit. Noah was just a sweet guy who died HORRIBLY. I’m still just . . . just wow! They pulled out all the stops on that one. It was an amazing reminder of how high the stakes are and that EVERY life even the new cast members or new friends we make have an impact on all of us.

All in all this was a great season. The show keeps getting better and better though I’m at the point where I can’t recommend it to anyone anymore because it’s SO depressing. There are times when I read the comics and I just couldn’t go on. I had to take a break. It’s the same with the show. It may be a little too good for its own good if that’s possible.

There’s a lot more coming and none of it is going to be easy. If you’ve read the comics you know it’s a big world and there’s lots that can happen. So here’s a look ahead at what’s coming in season six:

The Walking Dead: Season 3

I usually post write ups of sweet and often horrible zombie movies on Mondays. I’ve also taken a little time to go back over the Walking Dead. And although some episodes deserve their own review, I’m looking at the show season by season.

You can find my season one  and season two write ups by clicking the links to the left.

despite the awful photoshop prison in the background this is still a pretty bad ass shot of Rick.

There’s a lot going on in Season 3. Our survivors have made it to the prison so popular in the comics and we are introduced to some of the biggest conflicts we’ve seen to date. Every episode seems to drive the story further and further into dark territory. I’ve previously tried to stay away from making comparisons to the comics but there are times it seems to mean quite a lot in the writing process and the  development of the characters.

So let’s dive right in.

The Plot: 
This season opens with our survivors on the road, on the run from roaming herds, going hungry and getting more and more desperate. What they need is a place to settle in and it’s not long before they find it, the prison. (It’s actually about seven minutes in, so no big wait there.)

The prison is a major part of the storytelling in the comics. It’s where a LOT of the comics take place and where much of the early drama of the characters happens. It’s also exactly what the fans had been waiting for.  The prison doesn’t come cheap though. It takes a lot of work getting it up and running and then they face the problem of holding onto it.

Added to that is the developing threat posed by another group of survivors in the nearby town of Woodberry lead by the ruthless Governor.

The season goes back and forth between these two camps, as we see new characters’ reactions to the two groups, and series regulars attempt to struggle with the reality developing around them of growing threat from the thousands of walkers in the area as well as other survivors.

Upon first viewing I was a little frustrated by some wishy-washy back and forthiness in the season but from a writing standpoint it’s meant to give the audience a better perspective on the action that is engulfing our characters. It shows the struggle and the doubt about which camp or way of living is actually better. By all accounts Woodberry looks like the place you would want to stay, and the Prison looks like a hell hole run by a psycho. Yet appearances aren’t what they seem in either case.

The Good: 
Michonne – A fan favorite and one of the main characters from the book she is hands down one of the toughest most badass and beautiful female characters on Television. I just love everything about her. Despite how Kill Bill I find her samurai sword, I can’t help but love it.

Herschel – A horrible scare had him bit early in the season only to be saved by Rick cutting his leg off. In the comics this happened to Dale so for any of the hardcore comics fans seeing Herschel this way must have been a real surprise. It was a good indication to those fans that similar or familiar events could happen but to different characters, meaning anything could happen.

Tyrese – A classic character from the comics and one of Rick’s best friends. Tyrese showed up much earlier in those stories but he’s beautifully cast here and is going to develop quickly over the series run. He’s sort of a gentle giant in this incarnation and not the freaked-out father we meet in the comics.

Sasha – Another series regular joins the cast. I can’t say her character really compels me much but she’s a survivor nonetheless.

Judith – Rick and Lori’s little girl was killed in the comics shortly after being born but lives on, on the show in season 3. She terrifies me. Adding the pregnant lady story line is a sure way to create tension and fear among viewers. Adding a baby or a child just seems even scarier to me. Please! Let that baby make it.

Carl – This kid is fantastic. Not just the character. Chandler Riggs is phenomenal in this part. I totally believe him as he plays the character and there’s never a time when I don’t believe it’s not Carl. That’s tough for any actor, maybe more so for a child actor. He’s someone I really hope to see develop into a good actor as he grows up.

For his part, Carl, the character is also developing and in some pretty hard ways. He made a hard choice but did the right thing when he shot his mother after she died giving birth to Judith. But he also made the wrong choice when he decided to shoot a boy from Woodberry who was surrendering to him outside the prison. Growing up in the world he is, it’s hard to believe Carl wouldn’t make those kinds of choices, mistakes or otherwise. It raises questions about the right and wrong of our actions.

Imagine if Carl had done the same thing as a kid growing up in say, Baltimore or Atlanta or Tampa. He’d have been trucked off to jail in a heartbeat and would probably be lost for the rest of his life. In the world of the show we are divorced from those social consequences and left with purely moral ones.

The Bad:
LOST – This post is already so long that I’ll simply note that I’ve repeatedly pointed out writing similarities between LOST and The Walking Dead. For more on that check out my post on Rick from a  few weeks back. A quick example or two are in order though. Like Rick’s newfound fondness of seeing people who apparently aren’t really there. (On TV mental illness is a plot point, not a realistically portrayed phenomenon.) We also get the very “Others-like” Woodberry, a solitary town that seems peachy keen in the middle of a survivalist tale. As if to remind us of just how much we have . . . wait for it . . . lost. There’s also Claire’s baby. Sorry! Lori’s baby. Yeah, throwing a pregnant lady in the mix on a survival show is a sure ticket to freaking people out. More on that in my Rick post though. 

The Ugly:
The Governor – This character was fleshed out rather differently from the comics and in a more satisfying way I felt. As I mentioned above I had stayed away from comparing the comics and show for some time but as we get further into the series the differences start to matter a bit more.

The Governor in the comics was a monster who repeatedly abused and raped Michonne. This is deeply important to the way Danai Gurira portrays her character. She has said that the show is a reflection of what happens to women and women’s bodies when society breaks down. We only get a hint of what the Governor is really capable of along those lines on the show but it’s definitely there bubbling under the surface and hinted at.

On the show the Governor is a more sympathetic character. There are times you feel sorry for him, when we learn about his daughter in particular. In not sympathetic, at least you can see why he ended up where he did. We can never accept or forgive his actions but as his brutality is portrayed differently on the show, restricted to mostly martial violence and a greatly restrained sexual abuse scene, he is a very different animal here on television, more human, less of a straight monster.

Merle Dixon – Daryl’s racist brother is back and hard at work pissing everyone off. We finally get a deeper look at his character and again, a tribute to the good writing, despite being a person we hate, he is a character we are deeply interested in. He’s played superbly by Michael Rooker throughout the season and it was a real pleasure seeing him develop. Right up until the very end. Which brings me to . . .

UUUuuuuuurp!!

. . .the ones we lost this season.

Lori – died giving birth to Judith. And though she also dies in the prison in the comics it’s a bit different there. In fact she survives childbirth just fine in the comics. This was another break from that continuity as Lori and the Baby were both gunned down in that version. Here in the show we see something even more horrible. When Lori dies, it’s up to Carl to make sure she doesn’t come back. This changes Carl, deeply. For all the vitriol surrounding this character, when she finally goes, it’s hard. She loved her son deeply and despite being a flawed human being she was a compelling character.

She was also apparently COMPLETELY DEVOURED after being shot in the head and dyeing. Like seriously, where was her head? Where was her hipbone and the rest of her skeleton? We are sort of left thinking that the walkers just gulped her down whole.

T Dog – A series regular since the beginning it was tough seeing him go. Still, his character wasn’t being pushed that hard into new territory and it was a safe call on the writer’s part.

Andrea – This was a real shock for many people. Andrea has been at the heart of both the show and the comics. It was a major blow at the end of the season when she was bit by the zombified Milton. It made a lot of sense though as her character developed. Andrea was torn between the two groups, the prison and Woodbury and from her point of view she had been away from the group for about seven or eight months, longer than she had actually been with them it seems. She really couldn’t go back to either group and simply fit back in, nor was she able to just head out on her own. The very fact that she was even allowed to go back and forth between camps is sort of a testament to how torn most people felt. Seeing her fall has been described as the blood sacrifice that helped Rick open up and start letting people in again.

So what was your favorite part of season three? There was so much going on there’s no way I could write about all of it. Let us know in the comments! 

Gummers

When someone says zombies without teeth  one of the first things I think of is Michonne’s zombie slaves on The Walking Dead. I also think of a fairly goofy sight gag used in zombie comedies. It goes like this, a zombie pops up and bites one of the main characters. The main character grimaces in pain and the horror of being bit, but then shoves off the zombie. The big reveal! The zombie was a little old lady and her teeth were only dentures. Big laugh.

Although it’s a rare zombie type and mostly used in comedies (where the hell did I see that?! Somebody help me with this!) I decided I would still include these fun, but seemingly harmless zombies on the list of zombie types. These zombies are typically old people who have turned and have a full set of dentures. (Though I think it’s pretty rare for anyone in real life to have a FULL set of dentures.) So if you come up against a little-old-lady zombie, or any zombie for that mater, don’t make the assumption that she’ll be easy to take out. Treat every zombie as a threat. As soon as you let down your guard you’re dead.