The Walking Dead

It was lousy...and I may not watch next Sunday either. The "I'm not in charge anymore" story line is so predictable - then again, I may just go bed by nine and see it On Demand when I get home from work Monday.
 
It was about Dwight's story made many bad decisions. He should had listened to Daryl Dixon.
 
I just hope I can get into the story again Sunday; I want to like the new season - just hope it lives up to the hype and doesn't drag on with previous themes like what we had at the prison and with the governor.
 
Yo yesterday this story was about whole group can't win without Daryl Dixon and Carol. I know the group need Carol help cuz she know how come up smart plan. She rescued group at Terminus last time.
 
I was surprised that Negan didn't kill Olivia! It will be interesting to see how they fight zombies without guns.
 
I think I'm only going to watch if Carole is on the show; I didn't even bother to sit through last week. This is another "Governor" story and it's been there, done that for me. Same characters, just different names....
 
I rarely skip the episode, beside boring white and black in one of last season or repeat of story.

I like TWD and FTWD.
 
I have to admit, last Sunday was awesome...nice to see the show finally getting back on track with the storyline....
 
Now we all know Rick is not really a southerner, but just a British actor pretending to be a southerner. A real southerner would have ND that Glock into Negan's eyeball when Rick handed it to him.
 
He'd also be able to pronounce his son's name instead of calling him "Coral." You think they'd give Lincoln a voice coach....BTW, I hear Chandler Riggs (Carl) is planning on going to college and his seven years are up with his contract. Wonder if Negan will give him a Lucille send off?
 
In the comics he went over to Negan's side as I understand it. But... who knows with the show... they've departed greatly from the comics in some spots. At the moment it looks like Daryl is staying put with Negan but who knows.
 
On the show, the sign about Morse code was clearly shown in Rick's home. I suspect Daryl communicated with Rick that way and a hostile take over may happen soon.
 
It should be two writers of the show given how bad this season has been....
 
Why continue to watch if you think it's so bad?

Am sure you're jumping for joy for the mid season finale and no episodes until February now.
 
DeafDucky said:
Why continue to watch if you think it's so bad?

Am sure you're jumping for joy for the mid season finale and no episodes until February now.
Click to expand...

I am actually because the writing has sucked that bad. This season I've watched only two episodes all the way through. I didn't watch the season opening for more than 20 minutes and I watched last night for the last half hour. Like a lot of fans who have been with the show from the first episode, we hang in there hoping the writing will improve. This season should have been called "The Governor, Part II." The only "story" has been showing how all the characters have been suffering. Where's the entertainment in that? Is it no wonder the ratings have dropped...and if the writers don't get a clue, they'll be responsible for why the show goes off the air the way it does.
 
Well not all fans will agree. I think it has been a good season. It takes time to build up a story... Too many people would rather a story be tied up neatly into an hour and end happily. At least that's my take on it and not directed at you. Would it be more exciting for them all to sit around living life mundanely (like me lol)? Rhetorical question.. and one I'd ask of any fan out of curiosity.
 
So the strength of the show — at least when it’s at its strongest — has always come from its examination of how the characters either strengthen or crumble in the face of this dark new world. It hasn’t always been terribly graceful at that, particularly when it comes to the endless wars about leadership the characters have, but when it works, that’s the space it lives in.

This made it slightly baffling to me to have Talking Dead — the post-episode talk show recap AMC airs every week — on while writing this and hear Robert Kirkman, an executive producer of the TV show and writer of the comic it’s based on, talk about how we’d been watching a full season of Rick realizing he needed to fight, or that we should be freaked out that Daryl no longer wants to make peace. Both of those things seemed so deeply buried that I’m surprised the show wanted us to be cognizant of them at all. The Walking Dead is many things, but it’s not particularly subtle.

Instead, season seven has been the Negan show. He struts and preens and tells awful jokes, and we wait for him to do something bad to make the plot lurch forward again.

Tonight, he kills Spencer by disemboweling him after Spencer tries to get Negan’s support in a coup against Rick. Then, after Rosita finally fires her single bullet and hits Lucille instead of Negan, the man has a follower shoot a random Alexandrian. (Said follower picks Olivia, which feels especially random, given how little time the show has devoted to her beyond “Negan made her cry.”)

“Hearts Still Beating” tried to make the argument that all of these events were enough to finally push Rick toward fighting back, toward drawing together with Hilltop in an alliance that will, presumably, eventually include the Kingdom and that community of Water Women with all the guns that Tara found a couple of weeks ago.

But is there anyone in the audience who didn’t get there ages ago? Is there anyone for whom this is a surprise? Rick’s alliance with Hilltop doesn’t carry the feeling of “Finally!” It carries the feeling of grudging acceptance of what’s about to come: more Negan.

Despite all that, there’s some pretty good stuff in this episode
twdeugene.jpg

Not Eugene! He knows how to make bullets!
AMC
And yet “Hearts Still Beating” had its moments. (I daresay that at a standard length, instead of an overstuffed 85 minutes, this episode might have been genuinely good.)

I loved Rick and Aaron’s adventure through the zombie-infested lake in a rapidly sinking boat, which felt like a challenge out of a brain teaser but made for one of the most purely entertaining action sequences the show has managed in a while. Michonne’s road trip with the abducted Savior wasn’t quite as compelling, but Danai Gurira sold the hell out of it.

It was nice to see Carol and Morgan again, and I’m glad Daryl is no longer a Savior captive, even if I have no idea what his story was supposed to be about. And there was some great cross-cutting between the Saviors beating the hell out of Aaron and Spencer trying to cut a deal with Negan.

If you’re going to do an episode whose entire point is, “Rick decides it’s time for the show to have a plot again,” there are probably worse versions than this. (There are also probably, as mentioned, better versions.) There were some genuinely pulse-pounding sequences, and everything with Negan gutting Spencer, Rosita shooting at him, and things just getting worse from there finally gave the show the queasy sense of very bad things going south in a hurry.

That’s good, because the show has struggled to truly convey any of the weight of what Negan does. Thanks to some combination of his jokey dialogue, Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance, and the other characters just watching him do his thing, he’s come to feel like an enemy in a video game cut scene — where you wait and wait for the screen to say “Press X to continue” so you can finally fight the dude.

My guess is that this is very much intentional. Showrunner Scott M. Gimple and his writers want us to feel like there’s no hope — Rick and company have even lost Eugene, their bullet maker! — before they offer the tiniest glint of a silver lining around that very dark cloud.

But it’s all miscalibrated and logy. Did we really need that lengthy, lengthy montage of the characters hugging at the end to know they were all glad to see each other? Nah. We probably could have figured that out on our own.

There’s been much written about how The Walking Dead’s ratings have sagged this season, blaming that on the grim hopelessness of the Negan storyline. I would quibble with this a bit. The show’s ratings were already down last season, by a bit, which those of us who follow TV ratings would tell you usually presages a steeper fall in future seasons. But even I’ll admit a show that was once kinda fun even when it was actively bad is now a slog.

We’re just wise to how this show works now. We know a battle with Negan is coming. We know Rick will win, and some of his friends will die. We know that good will triumph, until some new evil enters the story. We know, we know, we know. That’s usually an invitation for a TV show to push pedal to metal, but The Walking Dead shuffles more and more slowly with each passing year, just like one of the creatures in the title.
 
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