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

What’s going on with Abraham and Rosita and Sasha? Why is Carol crying all the time? Why is she unexpectedly reticent to kill? Why did Morgan kill that guy? (Side note: On Talking Dead, Scott Gimple said Morgan “had no choice” but to kill the Savior who was about to off Carol. Yet all season, we’ve been convinced that Morgan no longer kills. So of course he had a choice. How Gimple doesn’t understand his own characters is remarkable.)

There were so many odd and abrupt character changes that the audience was left to wonder if we’d missed several episodes worth of content.

Only we hadn’t.

Characters like Carol made swift and unforeseen changes to their persona that made no sense given the context we were presented. All that led to the finale’s odd and drawn-out segment with Morgan tracking Carol, begging her to come back because even he couldn’t understand why she left in the first place.

At a base level, this was bad for the finale, but zoom out and it’s apparent this is bad for the series as a whole. When characters start to behave in ways that are either unexplainable, or just downright strange, we start to lose interest and instead focus on how these sudden changes took place. The characters themselves get lost in the absurdity of their actions, and as a result moments that were designed to be a culmination of sorts all fall very short. 

Abraham’s speech in the truck about what he would have to do in this new world felt odd and out of place. Carol crying on the ground after being shot was supposed to be far more emotional, but instead it was just confusing—we couldn’t get past what drove her to this. These failed motifs pervaded the finale, and only made the season as a whole much, much worse.