"Wrath" wrapped up Season 8 in a style redolent with both Biblical (and Koran???) references and others smacking strongly (visually, but also in terms of content) of "The Lord of the Rings". A surprisingly large number of loose ends ended up being tied, suggesting a kind of clean slate for what lies ahead - of course to the extent that the series's comic-book forebear can be departed from (which Season 8 teaches it indeed can).
The Season kicked off looking self-indulgent in the extreme, given that we are presumably looking at a few days or at most weeks of warfare, albeit seen from a host (!!) of different angles. That was a questionable move, but also one that revealed how TWD basically had nothing to lose at that point. And indeed no other direction to take.
A more general, recurring, time-related question for TWD concerns the amount of time that has passed since the sickness in that world erupted ... but clearly our zombie "Walkers" are now very much the worse for wear.
Yet still perhaps not as much as they ought to be!! For we are to understand that the wolves and the crows keep biting, the hurricanes keep blowing, the frosts keep freezing, the rivers keep flowing and the tide keeps ebbing and flowing, so just how long is that endless supply of even vaguely-intact dead going to remain so?
Yet "herds" go on getting larger and larger, so are the living dead capable of learning new tricks????
(Admittedly we did see one new trick from the makers "chucked in" here - that suddenly blood and guts from the zombies can prove infective, even though for 7 seasons they could not, no matter how immersed in them our heroes became. The (flimsy) excuse here is presumably that the rot has now set in so far that things that were not possible before suddenly become so - hmmmm?)
Otherwise, the Walkers are largely background to this Season's events, rightly and inevitably so. And - after all we've seen - it is hard to imagine them ever taking centre-stage again. That left a Season in which the job was to put paid to Negan and the Saviours, and that is - more or less - what we get to see, in exhaustive detail. In some sense, it's not much more than marking time, but the warfare issues at times prove interesting.
To pad that out, it was necessary to bump off a couple of key characters - impactfully enough as it turned out - while others descend into merciless, pseudo-psychopathic madness, with the question writ large then being about the possibility of return to mercy and a semblance of the old normal life; and this is as much an issue for Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan (again the absolute star of this show in some amazing, and surprisingly nuanced, performances) as it is for Andrew Lincoln's Rick (who finally makes some progress in this season, having stagnated or gone backwards in 7).
A matured Chandler Riggs as Carl does well here (as he must in the circumstances), while there are also good, now-fully-fledged performances from Khary Payton (King Ezekiel), Seth Gilliam (Gabriel the Priest), Xander Berkeley (Gregory) and - of course(!) - Josh McDermitt as the unique Eugene, who just keeps getting better!
This all proves that actors acting their interesting characters can keep us watching TWD as much as can shock value, or even a dystopia at moments compelling enough for we armchair-bound folk who never actually have to face it to relish...
Other players don't seem to do much, however, and do seem stuck in a dull groove.
Hence the chance (but also the risk) to move on, which this epsisode embodies.
Were it to prove courageous enough, TWD always had the option of moving in the direction of a more character-based, less gory, less violent "rebuilding after the dystopia" storyline a la "Survivors" (BBC), "Day of the Triffids" and so on.
And, right now, that would seem to be about the only option it has left, and this final episode of Season 8 seems to be accepting that clear truth.
I am aware of course that Season 9 is already underway, but this is the situation as seen at the end of 8, so let's not complicate things...
The Season kicked off looking self-indulgent in the extreme, given that we are presumably looking at a few days or at most weeks of warfare, albeit seen from a host (!!) of different angles. That was a questionable move, but also one that revealed how TWD basically had nothing to lose at that point. And indeed no other direction to take.
A more general, recurring, time-related question for TWD concerns the amount of time that has passed since the sickness in that world erupted ... but clearly our zombie "Walkers" are now very much the worse for wear.
Yet still perhaps not as much as they ought to be!! For we are to understand that the wolves and the crows keep biting, the hurricanes keep blowing, the frosts keep freezing, the rivers keep flowing and the tide keeps ebbing and flowing, so just how long is that endless supply of even vaguely-intact dead going to remain so?
Yet "herds" go on getting larger and larger, so are the living dead capable of learning new tricks????
(Admittedly we did see one new trick from the makers "chucked in" here - that suddenly blood and guts from the zombies can prove infective, even though for 7 seasons they could not, no matter how immersed in them our heroes became. The (flimsy) excuse here is presumably that the rot has now set in so far that things that were not possible before suddenly become so - hmmmm?)
Otherwise, the Walkers are largely background to this Season's events, rightly and inevitably so. And - after all we've seen - it is hard to imagine them ever taking centre-stage again. That left a Season in which the job was to put paid to Negan and the Saviours, and that is - more or less - what we get to see, in exhaustive detail. In some sense, it's not much more than marking time, but the warfare issues at times prove interesting.
To pad that out, it was necessary to bump off a couple of key characters - impactfully enough as it turned out - while others descend into merciless, pseudo-psychopathic madness, with the question writ large then being about the possibility of return to mercy and a semblance of the old normal life; and this is as much an issue for Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan (again the absolute star of this show in some amazing, and surprisingly nuanced, performances) as it is for Andrew Lincoln's Rick (who finally makes some progress in this season, having stagnated or gone backwards in 7).
A matured Chandler Riggs as Carl does well here (as he must in the circumstances), while there are also good, now-fully-fledged performances from Khary Payton (King Ezekiel), Seth Gilliam (Gabriel the Priest), Xander Berkeley (Gregory) and - of course(!) - Josh McDermitt as the unique Eugene, who just keeps getting better!
This all proves that actors acting their interesting characters can keep us watching TWD as much as can shock value, or even a dystopia at moments compelling enough for we armchair-bound folk who never actually have to face it to relish...
Other players don't seem to do much, however, and do seem stuck in a dull groove.
Hence the chance (but also the risk) to move on, which this epsisode embodies.
Were it to prove courageous enough, TWD always had the option of moving in the direction of a more character-based, less gory, less violent "rebuilding after the dystopia" storyline a la "Survivors" (BBC), "Day of the Triffids" and so on.
And, right now, that would seem to be about the only option it has left, and this final episode of Season 8 seems to be accepting that clear truth.
I am aware of course that Season 9 is already underway, but this is the situation as seen at the end of 8, so let's not complicate things...