It’s a weird thing to talk about hope when you’re talking about a show centered around a zombie apocalypse. But after the terror of Negan swinging Lucille and the controversial cliffhanger of the Season 6 finale, The Walking Dead needed to give its loyal fans some reason to find hope.
[*** SPOILERS BELOW ***]
It has been a dark half-season for The Walking Dead, both for the plot of the show and for its ratings.
It started with the nightmare of seeing Negan swing for the fences and take out both Glenn and Abraham in a shocking and startling twist on the source material. While that scene may have delivered in the moment, it may have been too much violence for even fans of TWD to handle. Negan’s dominant personality taking Rick to his knees for a half-season is not what fans of the TV show are used to seeing, even if the portrayal by Jeffrey Dean Morgan brings everything about the colorful character from the comics to life in a powerful way.
Another factor in the dark clouds surrounding the show is that television viewers clearly weren’t impressed with the program’s storytelling devices this half-season. Instead of building on the intense drama of the season opener and how Negan’s actions had an effect on our merry band of zombie apocalypse favorites, the show diverged into a series of bottle episodes, each featuring their own location. The series has used the same device in earlier seasons to build characters. But this season, it fell completely out of balance as we went several episodes without seeing core cast members, while ancillary characters like Tara got entire episodes devoted to them. The mid-season finale was Carol and Morgan’s first appearance since all the way back in episode 2 this season and that was before Halloween.
The mid-season finale did what viewers had been asking for weeks and finally bring it all together. And in doing so, we at least saw why The Walking Dead did what it did in episodes 2-7 of Season 7. The storytelling device was put in place to build up the communities of Alexandria, the Hilltop, and the Kingdom to get to the point where we would be more encouraged for when they finally all came together to fight Negan and the Saviors. While the Oceanside group isn’t a part of the uprising and you might be wondering why that episode was necessary, perhaps it was done to show that there are groups outside our television universe and communicate the brutality of the Saviors as they killed all the men of that community. Although it’s hard to argue that brutality needed reinforcing after everything else we’ve seen over the last season.
And that’s why TWD ended where it did Sunday night. A brutal and sometimes plodding series of episodes desperately needed a pick-me-up. Again, even for a show about the zombie apocalypse, it’s ironic that we would need something in which to hope, even though the Walking Dead universe is a fairly hopeless place. Additionally, TWD couldn’t leave fans with another cliffhanger after the jaw-dropping conclusion to Season 6 and the months of endless speculation with waiting over the identity of Negan’s victim. (Or victims, as it turned out to be.)
Sure, Sunday night’s mid-season finale had its fair share of thrills and spills and, of course, horrible demises. While predictable, Negan finally putting an end to Spencer’s annoyance after a relaxing game of billiards was every bit as gruesome as the violence of the season opener. Rosita was never taking out Negan with Eugene’s single bullet, but the explosion of anger over harming Lucille was frightening. Finally, the capture of Eugene leaves us with at least one of the main characters in distress and provides an important distinction from the comics. There is also that entire matter of who the mystery person is keeping watch on the citizens of Alexandria. Someone from the show’s past or perhaps its future? Maybe someone entirely new? It’s apparent the producers couldn’t resist leaving at least one question hanging over the next two months.
However, take a step back from everything else in Season 7, and Episode 8 was a positive development for the main TWD cast. Rick does some soul-searching with Michonne and finds himself once again, Daryl escapes from the clutches of the Saviors, and we see multiple reunion scenes that really did mean something after a half-season apart: Rick and Daryl (with Rick getting his gun back), Sasha and Rosita, Rick and Maggie, Carl and Enid.
These meant something to viewers watching at home because they meant something to the characters themselves. If the TWD cast can find hope in reuniting the colonies under Negan’s oppressive fist, then viewers can as well. And after a fall campaign that saw ratings decrease and disappointment with the show increase, that’s what everyone desperately needed.
