The Walking Dead, Season 8, Episode 8: How It's Gotta Be.
God, that's actually not much content over an hour's worth of television. And on paper this would really sound like a cool mid-season finale. Alexandria burns! The Kingdom is taken over by the Saviours, who are back in power! Everyone is forced to evacuate to the Sewers! Yet the entire eighth season was handled so piss-poorly that the much-lauded super-awesome Team Rick versus the Saviours war ended up easily being the weakest of all Walking Dead plotlines... and yes, I'm including season two's farm in this one.
The biggest problem is the pacing of the season, really. We have the huge eventful first episode where OH MY GOD WAR ALL OVER THE SANCTUARY IS BESIEGED BY ZOMBIES, but it was a muddled episode, and episodes 2 through 7 just a weird little jumping back and forth with strange pacing and things that... kinda sorta happen? Not to mention absolutely stupid decisions that our heroes did. What was the point of Rick wasting his time dicking with Jadis and the Scavengers throughout the last three episodes? Obviously they're going to turn tail the very first moment something doesn't go their way. And why is Rick charging into the Sanctuary accompanied only with the Scavengers? And Team Daryl... apparently didn't stick around to make sure their kamikaze truck plan worked and just... left? That seemed out of character, especially for the very vengeance-happy Daryl and Tara.
And the entire episode just jumps around from Alexandria to the Hilltop bunch to the Kingdom to Oceanside to the Sanctuary with so many moving parts, yet's it's really hard to follow the action and to actually see just which setting we're in at the moment. And add that to the unexplained off-screen teleportation of the entire Saviour army from being locked down in the Sanctuary to be able to set up their whistling sieges of roads and blockading everyone... it feels illogical, it felt shoehorned, and it doesn't feel earned. It's obvious that they're going for the classic storytelling structure of having our heroes win a little then lose a lot, but it's still very poorly done.
And the whole episode ends up as a huge, tepid mess that I just can't wait to end. And when it does, with the absolutely unnecessary montage of closeups of everyone, it's just... bland. Oh, and Carl's bitten by a zombie while saving Mr. Carlfriend, who is so irrelevant I don't even care to look it up, and... well, plot twist? It's the best the episode tries to get me to care about the characters this time around.
So let's go through everything that happens quickly. Aaron and Enid (remember them?) try to go to Oceanside to make nice with them, but shoots the grandma by mistake. Yyyyyeaaaaah. Then they disappear from the episode. This was so fucking necessary and you know what? Aaron and Enid haven't really done jack shit for the past three seasons, and I really don't care about them at all. Eugene, after helping the Saviours get out and attack all his buddies, decides to help Gabriel and Obs-Gyn doctor to head to the Hilltop, which is another subplot that I really didn't care that much about. Rick gets left behind, comes back too late, then gets into a fight with Negan that is interrupted with a convenient falling out of a window.
Maggie, Jesus and her people gets stopped on the road, Simon pulls off a Negan and threatens to kill Jerry (nooo), but settles for shooting Neil. "Who?" you ask? Hell if I knew, the show doesn't even give us a close-up of his face, and I certainly don't remember any Neils. Then Maggie is pissed off, goes back to the Hilltop, and then kills that one prisoner that tried to attack Jesus (and killed Morgan's apprentice) last season, and leaves his body out as a warning to the Saviours.
Ezekiel gets a heroic moment when he distracts Gavin (a.k.a. "come on, guys, I don't want this any more than you do, jeez" dude, and one of the legitimately entertaining Saviours alongside Simon) from killing his people, and gets the Kingdom people to escape (really? No one is guarding the gates?) but at the cost of giving the Saviours the Kingdom itself and himself. There's something about Daryl confronting Dwight but that went nowhere.
Oh, and Carl gets bitten by a zombie. And I guess he's one of the few characters who people theoretically would care about enough that his death would shock... and the cliffhanger makes it pretty certain that, well, Carl's a goner since the show has had a relatively consistent lore that, well, all the people who get bit will turn into zombies. If Carl survives, then, well, it's just a shitty cop-out.
Like, jeez, it's so convoluted and so generally bland that I don't really have much to feel about it. Like, the revelation that Carl was bitten had me go 'oh, so that's why he offered to die and atone in front of Negan' but not as much emotion of the 'holy shit' variant that this reaction should really have gotten from me. And honestly, for such a 'huge event' episode it's pretty bloodless. Like, other than Carl (who's going to take some time to die because rule of drama) like, only Dean the Saviour and Neil the Hilltop Man. There is such a lack of interest in anything that's going on that the only real entertainment value is to see what a trainwreck this show ended up being. Oh, and Negan and Eugene, both of which are so over-the-top and it's fun. So yeah. Pretty crappy all around. We'll see if I actually continue past this point, to be honest. Maybe I'll just combine the rest of season 8 into a single review and be done with it if I have nothing else to talk about.
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