UUntitled Reaction to the Walking Dead Season 7 Premiere

This post contains spoilers for the Walking Dead's Season Seven Premiere.

This post is untitled because I don't want to spoil the Episode for People on the West Coast. It's title would be "When You Cheat Your Audience, You Declare a War You Cannot Win."

We all knew that season six was going to end with Negan braining someone with Lucille. The only reason to watch that episode was to find out who.  The producers decided to cheat the audience of that moment because they knew the "Who Shot J.R.?" factor would create a lot of buzz.  But it was a cheat of the fans that was destined to fail for two reasons. The first reason is that the deaths were inevitably going to leak in the age of social media and camera phones.  And leak they did. In fact, good portions of the script were out there for the past week.  Once that cat was out of the bag, the episode was doomed to failure because the melodramatic emotion of the cast members could never play straight without the suspense or shock factor of the deaths.

This cheat was especially bad because they had to know that lots of super devoted fans would obsess on figuring out who the kills were. The most convincing case based on the evidence was for Michonne.  The finale contained several POV shots.  The first few were all from Michonne's perspective.  The last one was from the victim's. If you respect the audience, you would keep that commitment.  And I will admit that even as the show started, I hoped it would be Michonne. Michonne is one of the best characters in the show but the integrity of the show required her death. I was really hoping to not be cheated. I hoped the leaks were disinformation. That would have really been something.

You put your audience into suspense, those who really care enough are going to find a way to end the suspense. So some of those devoted fans scoped out the shooting locations and figured out who was missing. Then someone put their mitts on a script and shared its contents online.  I normally avoid spoilers because I'd rather enjoy a show than play "I've got a secret" with its creators. But I had no hesitation in reading these spoilers and watching the associated YouTube videos.  If you don't respect me enough to present an honest work of art, I do not feel bound by the normal rules of fandom. And I'm obviously not along.

Execution.
To be fair, the episode could have been worse.  My initial expectation was that Lucille's victim would be Abraham.  He's important enough for the other characters to care about but not so important that his absence would undermine the show. Glenn is a great character, so his death upped the stakes considerably. But the moment was so anticlimactic that I actually chuckled at the detail, meant to be shocking. that his eye was hanging loose from the socket. I had a similar reaction to Carol shooting Lizzy in the back of the head while she looked at the flowers.  This show overestimates its emotional range.

The storyline of Negan feeling the need to break Rick made sense. And Jeffrey Dean Morgan seems capable of carrying the story forward as a villain with the right mix of pathos and mischief. That's very encouraging.

If I could give one note to the creators going forward, it would be to shift away from the relentlessly dark tone toward something more constructive and at least occasionally amusing. They went all in on making Negan's arrival frightening.  They need to step in the other direction for a bit.

AMC's lousy spin off, Fear The Walking Dead saw its ratings plummet this year and I think the cliffhanger was part of that. It was probably the first tangible fallout from mistreating the mother ship's audience so blatantly.  But none of this will immediately impact the show.  Tonight's ratings will be huge and people will stick with the show for the rest of this season.  If they follow the comic books, season eight should contain some great action that might give the show a revival.

AMC needs this show and the cash it generates. There are enough die hard fans that it will go for at least another four seasons. I"m not giving up on it, because the premise remains fascinating and there are still a handful of characters that I feel invested with. But the show's best moment probably passed, and there is now one fewer death that had the potential to be truly shocking.  Damn shame they ruined that moment by provoking their fans.

What Happens Next.

Keeping Darryl as a hostage was a good wrinkle and I am looking forward to what happens between him and Dwight.  The Kingdom shoul introduce a handful of new characters and at least the tiger will be cool. The coming arc is pretty obvious: Rick and his people will rebuild and reform. We've seen that before, but never from such a low starting point.

So yes, I'm still on board. I might even blog about the mid season finale or some other milestone. But if Rick and the gang looked down, they would probably see a dorsal fin sticking out of the water.

No, Really, what was conquered? (Immediate reaction to The Walking Dead Season 5 Finale)

I enjoyed the finale, very much. I thought Morgan's return was fantastic and his anti-climatic reunion with Rick was handled perfectly. Immediate impressions:

1. What was conquered?  Well, Glenn conquered some fear in letting Nicholas live.  That was actually pretty impressive and it's consistent with his character.  I guess Rick's way of doing business conquered the Alexandrian's denial.  And of course Morgan conquered two huge scum bags with W's carved into their foreheads.

2. What was gained and what was lost? They lost an architect and a doctor but they gained a Jedi in Morgan and a huge dose of reality in the Ricktatorship's way of doing business.  Perhaps most importantly Dianna lost a husband but gained a very competent general.  I love that she gave the order for Rick to kill Pete.

3. Carol is the Paulie Walnuts of this Zombie Apocalypse.  I keep thinking that she will die, but she hangs around. And she's also being asked to deliver some of the comedic relief, albeit a more ironic tone than Paulie's was on the Sopranos.

4. There probably will be a time skip but I don't think it will be as long as I had hoped.  The Wolves are 50 miles out from Alexandria and I don't think those photos will have any revealing signs because Aaron knew they could fall into the wrong hands.  The ones Rick saw had no such signs at least and the ones they added just showed people. (Probably in response to Rick and Michonne's freak out that there were no people in the pictures.)  So they can play with the timeline as much as they want. I expect it will be like the jump between season 2 and 3: a few months but not more than year. Probably the first way to tell will be when we see Judith for the first time.

5. Morgan and Rick are going to have some great conversations next year.  Lenny James has already revealed on The Talking Dead that Morgan had some kind of life-changing experience between when we saw him in Season 3 and his meeting up with Rick and gang in Alexandria.  Rick of course has descended nearly into the kind of madness that Morgan was grappling with back when he had a booby-trapped town to himself.

6. The Wolves have great potential.  I hope they don't screw up the casting.  When Michonne first appeared in the Season 2 finale, they never showed her face.  We did see a couple of the Wolves tonight but they don't have to be the, well Alpha males of the pack. So they will probably cast someone with at least a bit of name or face recognition for that part. The show has an uneven track record of casting.  Hopefully they will cast someone more like Andrew J. West (who played Gareth) than David Morrisey (the Governor).

One interesting thing is that they do not seem to be well supplied. After all those 2 dudes that confronted Morgan had to do so with an empty 9MM.  Makes you wonder how efficient that food trap is.

7. Negan is another year away.  I don't think we will see Negan in Season six but he's probably on track for a Season 7 story arc.  The Wolves should be able to up the cruelty ante and only Negan will be able to top that.

8. Lennie James is the best actor in this company and I love his British accent.

A Final Thought, Much Repeated.

Please for the love of God can this group think a little more Strategically next season?  Now that they have a congressman, a UNICEF veteran and a Jedi to go along with the sheriff, the archer, the samurai  and the soldier, there is no reason they can't start to think more than 2 moves in advance.  A few suggestions:

1. Dig Zombie Pits.  Why on Earth was the Governor the only person to figure out that gravity is our friend?
2. Send a search team to destroy that food truck trap.  It's obviously a tool of very bad people.  You don't want them to survive and you don't want them to kill any more good people, like poor Mr. Red Pancho.  Send a team back and bring enough explosives to destroy that whole yard.
3. Eugene needs to contribute more.  Maybe he can design the perfect way to destroy the Wolves food trap or figure out a way to make bullets. (Something he apparently does eventually in the comics.)

Law & Order was  really successful show that eventually launched two spin off.  Law & Order SUV was more salacious and less challenging than the original. Law & Order Criminal Intent was slightly brainier and attempted to be clever from time to time.  Of course of the 3, SUV became the most successful and is still on the air.  I'm sure Fear the Walking Dead will follow in that vein. But I'm a dreamer and I choose to hope that the smarter version of TWD will come along, eventually.