The Walking Dead Season 7 Finale

If you don't watch The Walking Dead, or if you do watch The Walking Dead but haven't seen Season 7, and in particular the finale, it's best you get out of here. I'm going to be talking about it, and spoiling it merrily.

So we're all clear up front, I have not been happy with how Season 7 of the show has played out. I'm aware I'm not alone in this, although reading a few reviews here and there and speaking with some friends, people seem to look more favourably upon the Season 7 finale than I do.

I've been a fan of the show from the start. It's only this season that has even slightly tested my resolve in being able to defend it and stick with it. I didn't mind Season 2's slow-pace at Hershel's Farm, or the episodic nature of the journey to Terminus. And furthermore, the first episode of Season 7 - as in the above image - where Negan's punishment to Rick's group saw off Abraham and then, in a genuine jaw-dropper of a twist, also ended Glenn. . . Yeah. Take the glory, The Walking Dead, because you delivered a home run.

For that first episode alone they earned the grace of my patience, even when the very next episode forced me to swallow the ridiculous Ezekiel and his tiger.

I tried. I really tried. But right up to the very end, in the finale, when this self-confessed actor was still playing his part and spouting ludicrous vernacular during a gunfight, I could no longer sustain my patience. Let's have it right. He's fucking stupid. He makes the show laughable. All sense of grit and realism goes out of the window the moment he shows up.

And whilst I'm here, how the fuck did Shiva the Tiger know which were the Saviours to attack and which were the Alexadrians to not pounce upon and eat the face off of?

Anyway.

The Walking Dead also delivered unto us the utterly dumb as shit dump people, lead by this Jadis woman.

Now here was another character, and group, that strained credibility of the show beyond breaking point. That these people have formed an isolated group surviving in a giant dump is tricky enough to fathom. That they have, in the few years since the zombie apocalypse, become a weird Mad Max style cult that has generated their own insular way of speaking and ritual practices is absolutely not being sold to me.

No way. No fucking way.

These are people that are still able to retain memory of the internet. Of what Coke tastes like. These are people that were ordinary, regular folk that watched Friends. And you're telling me they've all swayed over into this weird bullshit in just a few years? Nope. No. Not having it.

On balance this group was responsible for the only element of surprise that garnered a reaction from me during the finale with their double-cross of Rick's group. It was the best moment of the episode. I liked that it had been hinted at, in the previous episode, where Negan mentioned that he knew Rick was up to something because a little bird had told him. Jadis being that little bird was a kick of a twist, mainly because everyone was so hurriedly trying to forget she existed in the show we completely overlooked her.

Still, stupid King Ezekiel and whackjob from another genre Jadis weren't the real problem I had with The Walking Dead finale. The real problem I had was that, after all this interminable waiting the entire season had made us viewers sit through, the show thought it was just fine to make us sit and wait and linger some more.

To be clear, from the moment Negan battered Abraham and Glenn and reduced Rick to a gibbering wreck, we've been waiting for him to get his balls back and deliver some payback. And The Walking Dead spent the entire first 8 episodes before the mid-season break getting Rick back to the point where he'd actually decided enough was enough and they were going to have to fight back.

Or, actually, 'rise up' as all the promotional materials were heralding the second half of the season.

Well we fucking waited and watched whilst Rick went off to various places to obtain guns to give away to form an army, and every now and then that revolutionary journey was abandoned to give us some stories about other characters. Some of the episodes were good. Some were a bit flat. But none of them gave us what we were most interested in.

I, as a fan, kept my patience. The show was going to get there. It was going to keep up the foreplay all the way to the last episode, but rest assured it was going to deliver the fucking goods.

And then it didn't.

What was most frustrating was that all the elements were in play. They just elected to fuck them all up. Let's take what happened with Sasha as a clear example. In the finale we were left initially confused as we saw her lying down, confined in darkness, listening to an iPod and not looking particularly 100% OK.

We would be treated to scenes of Sasha in this manner repeatedly during the episode, and these scenes would give way to various sequences - most notably Sasha and Abraham in a flashback memory on the fateful day Abraham was killed, and Sasha and Maggie talking. Whether you buy into Sasha and Abraham as a couple is almost irrelevant (for the record I bought into them getting together and finding a soul mate of sorts - but the grand romance The Walking Dead has tried to retrospectively paint it as just wasn't justified on the show).

We got these flashback scenes, and the headshot of Sasha in the confined space with the sound of a vehicle, so often that we could pretty much already piece together what had happened before they eventually showed her taking the poison that would kill her, courtesy of Eugene.

But these interminable interruptions to the action were just another way of the show dragging its heels and messing up the flow. Imagine it another way. Imagine they let the whole thing play out in order. So we see Rick and the gang getting ready at Alexandria. Then we cut to Sasha agreeing to Negan's plan. We watch her get in the coffin, and then we see her take the poison. Then we're with her as she drifts in an out of consciousness, seeing Abraham and Maggie in memory, before she closes her eyes and dies.

Now, when Negan gets to Alexandria and wheels out the coffin and is talking about Sasha suddenly we, as an audience, are in on something no one else knows. We know she's dead. We know all his talk about Sasha is about to get shot to shit. This is pure dramatic tension. This is the classic trick of showing an audience a loaded gun in Act I for it to be used in Act III.

With the Season 7 finale The Walking Dead just fucked all that old-school shit like drama and tension aside in favour of frustratingly lyrical dream sequence interruptions. By the time the action then did eventually start it was a confused mess of bullshit. All the Alexandrians that were fully-armed and set to go down fighting somehow got rounded up by Negan's people who were somehow all inside the town. And then there was that shitty fake out of Michonne screaming to her death even though we fucking knew she wasn't ever dead. (This show pulled that same shit when it tried to make us think Rick was dead instead of the worst CGI deer ever just a couple of episodes ago!)

No one notices a fucking great big tiger rocking up. Bullets are sprayed everywhere and no one of any consequence gets hit. Carol and Maggie and Morgan all show up but that raises more of a shrug than anything. The dump people run off via smoke grenade screen, hopefully to never be seen again. And by the end of the sorry spectacle Negan and his people are untouched and ready to wage war against Rick.

Oh. Right.

 

It's just I thought I spent the whole of fucking Season 7 building up to war? You know, "rise up" and all that shit? And basically the show stuck up a Negan-shaped middle finger in my direction and said I can fucking wait until next year.

Not only did this finale not have the goods, it didn't even have the decency to non-deliver it with any excitement or thrill.

I've read earlier that Greg Nicotero, one of the key showrunners, has stated that they will not change the manner in which they are making and presenting the story and the show just because of how people react. I suspect that's absolute bollocks. Falling ratings and vocal backlash do tend to generate reaction. I just hope, next season, we're looking back at Season 7 as a poor blip the show learned and recovered from.