The Walking Dead: 5 Points On How They Botched The Finale

It’s fairly rare that a television show will receive both high critical praise and be tremendously popular. Those two things typically don’t go hand-in-hand, but somehow, The Walking Dead managed to do both. It transcended a genre, and became more than just a zombie horror show, it's managed to make the people still living more interesting than the zombies that now inherited their world. 

They explored themes not typical with other shows: The struggle to keep one’s humanity in a world where everything tries to take it away, the moral choices of survival in an apocalypse, the will to fight against odds real and perceived, what killing does to people, and so on. The Walking Dead reached a tremendous height.

It is sad, now, to see the nadir so quickly approaching.

On Sunday night, The Walking Dead committed television-suicide right before our very eyes. To be fair, this has been coming for a long while. Most of Season 6 has been an abomination. Entire plot lines make no sense, deaths were crowd-sourced and needlessly teased (re: Glenn), and characters were either not developed at all, or behaved in such erratic ways, we wonder whether we missed several episodes in-between.

A certain suspension of belief is required for any show during an apocalyptic era, but the show has taken so many liberties with the plausible, we’re left to wonder if the writers view the audience as zombies themselves.

Yet Sunday, that should all have changed. This entire season has been one needlessly long lead-in to a moment of shocking brutality. All may not have been forgiven, but the show would have itself a legendary “where were you when” moment. It would have left viewers uneasy, sick, heartbroken, sad, angry. It would have made them feel something.

Good art makes you feel something.

But this? This wasn’t art. This was a cash-grab, and a blatant one at that. This was a 93-minute episode that good editing could have pared down to half that. This was promising the arrival of an iconic character who is known for a defining, seminal moment that changed the entire series—and then taking the moment away in favor of a six-month hiatus in order to drive ratings. Instead of sating the appetites of millions of fans, the creators and producers decided that your time simply doesn’t matter. They told everyone, “You’ll tune in six months from now, so what’s the difference?”

It's not so much that they got the episode wrong, it's that they knew it was filled with cheap gimmicks and unpalatable tricks that haven't worked in the past, and continued to use them anyway. Which leads us to just how they botched this finale so badly...

If one was to draw a line from event to event in the finale, it might look something like this: Roadblock---Roadblock---Trap---Roadblock---Trap---Cliffhanger. That was the gist of the finale, and it took them 93 minutes to tell it (64 if you subtract the time allotted to commercials, which tells you all you need to know about the real purpose of this episode being so needlessly long). 

Rick’s group ran into roadblock after roadblock, in an attempt to illustrate just how badly they underestimated the strength and breadth of the Saviors. But it didn't work, mainly because up until that point, the Saviors were portrayed as a hapless bunch who were cool with getting killed in their sleep, and couldn't tell that Carol was hiding a semi-automatic gun in her sleeve, and couldn't pull off a fairly simple prisoner exchange, and... you get the point. 

The Saviors weren't exactly the nasty villains the Wolves were depicted to be, and they were nowhere close to the cadre of militarized people working for the Governor. No, up until that series of roadblocks, viewers were left to believe the Saviors were fairly tame in comparison.

Now, the argument is that's what we're supposed to believe because that's what Rick and his group believed. Okay. That's fine. But it seems pretty implausible that a group would allow many multiples of their own to die—be it via rocket launcher or knives to the head while asleep—just so they can set up an absurdly elaborate trap for Rick's group. 

It seems unlikely that one of their own would behave so foolishly as to chase after Carol while bleeding to death instead of just taking the car left behind by Rick and Morgan. And it seems downright moronic to go through so much effort into setting chained-up-walker traps, a log trap, and a couple other roadblocks instead of just grabbing the group straight away. 

You have to suspend some belief—we get it—but you don't have to insult the audience's intelligence by doing so. This didn't work, and it felt like the roadblocks were there more for the commercials than for effect on the overall story.