Although I can’t promise that what words come from my fingers in ensuing paragraphs might not be blatant spoilers, don’t read too much into the quotation marks in the title. S11E24 of The Walking Dead was most definitely the finale to the series, but there’s a lot of nonsense in the final eight minutes of the runtime that very much implies otherwise, and that’s all I’ll say about that, at least not without a tastefully placed cut.
Honestly, leading up to the long-coming series finale, I actually did not have any high expectations that it was going to be any good. Frankly, I still maintain that the series still peaked with Negan and the Saviors, which I think was season 7 or 8, so that means the last 3-4 seasons have definitely been on a downhill trajectory.
However, all things considered, in spite of the low bar I had set, the final episode was actually better than I had anticipated. Without giving anything away, the episode resolves the supposed final conflict fairly early on, so the rest of the episode was actually allowed to breathe and methodically wind things down, instead of a mad dash of trying to tie up as many loose ends as possible in a sloppy manner /coughGameo Thrones.
I make the analogy a lot, but The Walking Dead also feels like the Rurouni Kenshin bell curve, where the television series peaked hard with Shishio and the Kyoto arc, but then went downhill until the series was mercifully ended. TWD’s surprisingly positive finale still doesn’t save it from a similar fate, and much like Breaking Bad ended with generic Jack the White Supremacist when Gus Fring was so good, Pamela Milton and the Commonwealth seems like such a weak antagonist to end with, especially after Negan.
Alright, enough with the eggshells.
Speaking of Negan, his redemption arc was really my favorite thing about the series as it began winding down. Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and by proxy Lauren Cohan as Maggie, had the most interesting dynamic, an intense on-screen chemistry, and the way the showrunners handled Negan, were my favorite parts of the show as it came to an end.
Be that as it may, it’s not enough to really motivate me to watch his spin-off series, TWD: Dead City, or any of the fucking numerous spin-offs that were revealed in the final minutes of the episode, unveiling an overarching fucking THE WALKING DEAD UNIVERSE, as if a franchise dedicated to zombies and the general shitty nature of people when left unchecked has enough gas in it to overcome the notion that people just might be tired of zombies and TWD.
I mean, I played Left 4 Dead nearly every single night for like three years. I loved all of the films George Romero produced, I loved Lucio Fulci’s Zombi. I played the fuck out of the Resident Evil and House of the Dead franchises. I ran in two different mud runs solely because they had a zombie survival theme.
I’m a fan of the zombie genre; but even I grew fucking exhausted with TWD. A part of my anticipation with the series finale was the fact that it was supposed to be the series fucking finale – an end to the series, full stop. I can officially take The Walking Dead off my list of shows needing catching up/keeping up with, and move onto a whole new series to dive into. Close the book, literally and metaphorically on The Walking Dead, and moving onto something else with a clean slate.
Sure, the series did end, in the sense that the format of ensemble cast and needing several concurrent storylines swirling around bigger ones, but it just set up a weeding out of the most compelling characters, and creating series beginnings for multiple individuals instead of a big ass Dom Toretto family.
I mean really, Negan gets a spin-off, Daryl gets a spin-off, and the reveal everyone knew was coming, Rick and Michonne were confirmed still alive and doing their own thing, and boom, they’re getting a spin-off as well. Fear the Walking Dead remains in production, and they’re basically like when Angel continued to air, after Buffy the Vampire Slayer had closed shop, and it’s a weird dynamic to know that the spin-off exceeded the origin.
I went through the final episode thinking how refreshingly novel they were allowing the series to close out, feeling very positive about everything. Actually getting emotional that the series that started while I was single and living in my old home 12 years ago, was finally coming to a close after I moved, got married and had two kids.
But then the final eight minutes of run time happens, and the show is all like fuck you, this isn’t the end, this is all just the beginning BOOM The Walking Dead UNIVERSE. And I’m just fucking groaning in disgust and exhaustion, because regardless of my initial disdain and disapproval of this swerve, I know that deep down, I’ll probably still at the very least, give each of these spin-offs a chance, because I’m a sucker for familiarity and I really do like these characters.
Even though all of them will undoubtedly continue the trend of zombies exist, but human beings are still worse, I’ll still think it’s nice that Rick and Michonne and Daryl and Negan are still out there doing shit. All I can hope for at this point is that there’s a nice long layover between now and when these shows start to come to existence, because as far as TWD goes, I think just about everyone needs a goddamn break.
