The Walking Dead, Season 6, Episode 16: Last Day on Earth
Ah, season finales. Season six has been one of the more polarizing seasons for me personally because of how... underwhelming it is, and it's not a feeling I've had since I finished the trudge that was the second season on the goddamned farm and caused me to swear off the show for more than a year. Even at its worst, seasons three through five have all had decent developments and episodes that, while far from being perfect, tends to have something that it's doing. There were some weaker strings of episodes here and there but it never quite felt as exhausting as season six.
Before we go into this episode, let's go through the season as a whole, shall we? We spent nine out of the season's fifteen episodes (yes, at least one was a flashback episode, but still) dealing with combined threats of both the quarry full of zombies and the Wolves' raid on Alexandria, with Morgan and Carol's moral problems being built up as the personal conflict that would drive the season. And that arc ended with a rather underwhelming 'bazooka all the shit' solution that while awesome for the five seconds that it lasted, was ultimately underwhelming. Add to the fact that we're nowhere closer to getting any answers about the cryptic Negan or his Saviours, only vague hints here and there, might be cool foreshadowing for the first two or three times it's done, but once it drags on across nine episodes it's just a drag.
The pace picks up in the final 7 episodes somewhat, but we've got a huge ton of information dump squeezed into two episodes (10-11), two episodes that's mainly the raid against the Saviours which I admittedly enjoyed (12-13), one episode (14) that's more focused on several minor characters, the inelegant setup for the finale (15) and now this episode, the finale itself. Again, though, despite destroying a Saviour base we don't really get much beyond a name and a glimpse at their method of operations, which isn't fine. It would be fine if Team Alexandria was doing something in-between foreshadowings, but when each episode is just a huge slog at hinting at oooh, Negan the boogeyman and the eventual grief that he's going to inevitably bring in the season finale without any other real substance is annoying. Especially when allying with Hilltop or any other communities ends up being a huge can of worms that no one ever mentions, or actually developing Carol and Morgan's characters because, shit, I really don't know what to make of how they have transformed pre- and post- the mid-season timeskip.
And this episode? God, this episode was bloated as all hell without having much in lieu of content. It's 90 freaking minutes long, and the extra length hurt the episode more than it helped to ramp up any sense of dread, because by the halfway mark I'm just so fucking bored, which is never something I felt watching any season finale. Even crappier season finales (hello, Gotham) tend to have a high-paced mass of plotlines and interlocking characters that would give us some sort of payoff and lots of action and dialogue that meant something.
Here? Nearly the entirety of the journey that followed Team Rick was just buying time until the end of the episode where Negan would make his big, epic debut. And it would've worked if I actually felt scared for these characters, but I'm not. The roadblocks look laughably silly, and so did the whistling, or the increasingly awkward ways characters try to work the episode title into dialogue, and the absurdity of Rick continuing to insist that they'll all be fine despite the fact that four of their strongest fighters are MIA (though granted Rick doesn't know that) is such an obvious buildup to deconstructing Rick's overconfidence. Really, absolutely nothing from the Rick group ends up holding any sort of interest beyond the odd weird wisecrack from Abraham's accent. "We are neck deep up shit creek with our mouths wide open." They're just repeating the same old tired dialogue that they've been saying all episode long as every single pathway to Hilltop is blockaded by increasing amounts of Saviours as they try to get Maggie to the obs-gyn doctor in Hilltop... which meant that Denise's death was in service of allowing this inane, forced conflict to happen.
We did briefly get the idea that something less moronic than 'drive around in circles' is going to happen when Eugene offers to be the distraction, complete with anguished farewell to Abraham who now respects him, and giving Rick the plans to the bullet factory. Except that Eugene gets caught off-screen. Of course.
And, yeah, the last ten minutes of the episode with Negan was decent, even great... if we actually get some payoff beyond seeing the dude do a monologue. Though, man, what a monologue. It's extra-amazing in the uncensored version where he drops the word 'fuck' every second line. Like, the actor was amazing, Negan feels like a huge threat, with him being completely in control and swinging around that huge-ass bat (Lucille?) and monologuing... about stuff we already know, i.e. how the Saviours operate. And that there's a fuck-ton of them, easily fifty men strong during the final scene alone. Negan himself is well done, with a combination of a more playful comedian (looking at Abraham's intense mustache and concluding that he needs to shave in the middle of his long rant) but at the same time his constant talk about punishment and control shows that he's a force to be reckoned with. He tries to immediately pick the most vulnerable people in the lineup of characters -- the sick girl, the young child -- and just ramp up the dread, which is honestly the only moments in the episode that I actually feel like the main characters are in real deep shit, but at the same time I just kind of want the show to get on with it. And Negan bashes some poor sod's head to a mush but the audience doesn't really get to see it because ooooooh suspense.
It's a moronic move that doesn't give us much of a conclusion, and the fact that it's going to be the next season (a six month gap, shit) until we know who got their head bashed in is absolutely irritating. Cliffhangers are fine! Some of the best season finales I know of are cliffhangers, but whatever it is, cliffhangers need to give at least some modicum of expectation for the audience. It's one thing to have the cliffhanger be "oh, did X character survive?" or "oh shit, a horrible thing happened, how will our heroes solve this?" It's like the cliffhanger at the end of seasons four or five. Season four ended with everyone we care about captured by the cannibals at Terminus, so the audience is excited to see how Team Rick breaks out, but the arc that's being told through season four itself is more or less wrapped up. Season five also wraps up with Rick's position in Alexandria being solidified, but at the same time leaves enough cliffhangers as to how Morgan will react to seeing Rick's brutality as well as the Wolves finding Aaron's bag.
Here? Here it's a cheap trick just to boost audience arrival come season seven's premiere, and while I can just boot it up and watch it right now, the way it's done in this particular finale is just moronic. It doesn't even have the shock value that Walking Dead loves so much, because the show has been hamfistedly insisting that someone's going to die. So yeah.
It would be something if Negan dismantling Rick's cocky attitude was satisfying to watch, but it would've been satisfying a season ago -- season five and six have been particularly bad at stroking Rick's ego and establishing that he is the best at what he does and all that jazz, and the string of successes have only served to bolster it that it's honestly a matter of time until it comes crashing down... which might work in a stronger cut of this storyline, but the fact that he spends the entire episode repeating various variations of "we will make it out of this if we work together" is hilariously moronic.
Meanwhile, the Morgan/Carol storyline could've given us something decent, something character driven to work with. Morgan and Carol are two of the most intriguing and least flat characters in Walking Dead's roster, but at the same time they've not really been given a great run in this season. I kind of bought Morgan eventually discarding his no-kill rule in order to save someone he cared about, shooting Douchebag Old Saviour to stop him from killing Carol. But Carol's freaking out and being a death-seeker really felt, again, inorganic. She just jumps too abruptly from the ultimate-pragmatic-badass that kills everything in her path pre-timeskip into this weird combination of guilt-ridden and death-seeking in the latter half. It would be fine if we actually get to see her get tortured by, say, flashbacks to Sam. Or if she had more conversations with Morgan. Or something. Here, as much as Carol and Morgan's actors are generally amazing, it's just so damn boring despite me wanting to like their scenes. They find dudes with huge hockey armour but disappear from the plot after that, because, well, tune in next season for the exciting conclusion to all these cliffhangers.
It's been a problem this season where the season's episode-to-episode quota hinges almost exclusively on cliffhangers. Carl gets shot in the eye! Is Glenn dead, and watch us tease episode by episode with no mention of him and oh he just hid under the dumpster! Sam says 'mom' during the end of the midseason finale only for it to not mean much and the actual death to happen because of a different freak-out! Again, if like previous seasons I get a sense of the story that the showmakers were trying to tell this season instead of 'draw things up until Negan at the end' (and honestly I'm not convinced that they couldn't have done the Negan episode in like episode 10 or some shit), it would've been much better. As it is, though, season six easily is the weakest season of the Walking Dead I've seen, and honestly I think I enjoyed season two a fair bit better -- at least even with the plodding pacing, the Rick/Hershel and Rick/Shane conflicts are organically built up across the season and makes me relatively invested per episode.
So yeah, easily one of the weakest and most boring episodes in the series. I might actually overlook the stupid cliffhanger and the absurdly stupid blood-splatter effect if the finale was actually a good episode -- but it isn't. It's boring, which is easily its biggest crime.
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