I second the FU to this show. To spend an entire season essentially building up to this moment, and then not see it all the way through…I know the show runners/writers believe that they just did something awesome that will have people talking about TWD all summer, but honestly the only thing they’ll be talking about is how lame the non-reveal was.
Oh, and also, Neagan apparently has what amounts to a small army at his disposal, and that’s AFTER Rick’s crew slaughtered like 25 of them. Why all the mind fuck games? They could simply take Alexandria by force at any time. Sure they’d lose a few more people, but it was really stretching the imagination to believe that not only did Negan and the Saviors somehow know Rick and his folks would try to get to Hilltop, but that they coordinated the massive effort to orchestrate this setup in what amounts to less than 24 hours.
On The Talking Dead:
Q: “So why did you decide to not show us who died?”
A: “… Because that’s the beginning of another story”
REAL ANSWER: “Because we’re freaking bastards who like to toy with our audience”
I thought this episode was really terrible. This is basically the “Red Wedding” moment in the Walking Dead - a story so jarring that it’s hard to screw up, but the showrunner did his very best to make it less effective, with all the really heavy-handed foreshadowing and goofy “we can do anything” hubris injected.
The whole chase was ridiculous and terrible - they made the Saviors almost supernatural and omnipotent. They chase some guy down, and then throw him on the road because they need to teach “other people” a lesson – but that was before anyone had left Alexandria. How did they even know anyone was leaving in the near future? Where they just going to stand out there for weeks, in case someone drove out of Alexandria to the hilltop, with the dude rolling on the street in front of them? And then what if it was just some stiffs on a foraging run instead of the leaders of the Alexandria group. And then how did they manage to get all the way ahead of Rick’s crew, with their hapless prisoner, just in time to hang him when they got to another road block? And setting up that elaborate log roadblock? finding them immediately when they diverted into the forest and being able to silently surround them coral them? That was some serious Freddy Krueger shit - those fuckers can do anything. And why did they completely empty out Alexandria of fighters when they knew an attack was likely, leaving only the priest who was an imbecile until 2 hours ago, and 6’5" Tobin who should have been the first person out searching for Carol and instead they probably have him bouncing Judith on his knees.
To give some perspective, in the comic there is no “chase”, or supernatural ability to be everywhere and see everything at all times. There is just a van of people, including Rick, driving to Hill Top, who stop to rest for the night and their guard - Rick - gets surprised from behind, so they are caught defenseless. The showrunner made a mockery of this story by overplaying his hand and making the Saviors into such supernatural bogey men. It’s supposed to instead just be a sudden, shocking, turn of events that isn’t foreshadowed at all. In fact, the comic cleverly instead suggests that an attack on Alexandria is pending.
And not revealing who was killed is just so lame, especially after the show has been so heavily criticized for jerking its audience around. There’s just no reason for that.
Yes, yes, let the hate flow through you and come to the dark side…where we don’t really watch this crap anymore. I did come back and watch the last part of this episode but it cut off right when he said ‘it’…
I really liked this season. But, fuck that cliffhanger ending and fuck this show. And fuck the writers with their “I’ve Got a Se-Cret” disdain for the audience.
The whole speech by Neegan seemed somewhat tedious and boring. At this point, how many wannabe despots have Rick and the gang had to listen to. And what they get is some overblown self-important speech by another blowhard who is going to make them jump through arbitrary hoops to do whatever the latest thing is. It all seemed a little bit grandious and silly on Neegan’s part.
How Neegan knew that they needed to head north, and to devote so much resources to blocking the roads, I can’t fathom. The whole reason they need to go in that direction is Maggy and that’s a random event. That’s the only real flaw I saw in the episode.
Other than that the finale seemed fine. I don’t agree with much of the outrage about it. Looking forward to Fear the walking dead next week.
A lot of this stuff in the episode does make sense, but I agree that we should have been shown who it was at the end.
Negan does not want to wipe them out. This is how he accumulated such a huge army, by not killing everyone. If anything, with all the losses he suffered, Negan needs to recruit Alexandria to build up his resources again. The big problem with ruling by force is you only stay in power as long as you have the ability to exert that force. They have radios, we saw it before. It’s not hard to imagine they have way to communicate so that when the RV rolls out they can put their plan in play. There are only so many ways to get from point A to point B in that RV. It’s obvious Negan’s group is a well oiled machine and have a time and combat tested method of operation.
It’s this stupid need for a cliffhanger that annoys me. Seeing them captured and watching one of their own killed, that’s plenty for the audience to chew on till next season. Not knowing who it is adds nothing to my enjoyment of the episode, and I’m not going to spend any time wondering about it since it makes no difference now. I would have thought about it a lot if I saw who it was tonight since it would have been the core of tonight’s episode.
Regarding knowing where they were, it was already established that The Saviors had walkie-talkies, and that they’d been spying on Alexandria. Spotting them heading out en masse and coordinating a trap isn’t nearly as outlandish as Glenn’s Magical Dumpster Dive. The logs, however, were over the top (among other issues).
What makes you guys think someone got killed? Jeffrey Dean Morgan – terrible casting, by the way – specifically says he’s just going to beat the hell out of someone. Are you just banking on the fact that getting clobbered in the head with a baseball bat would be fatal in real life? Because by the logic of this show, well…okay, there is no logic in this show. Just whatever suits any given episode. But I see no internal evidence that someone has been killed.
Walking Dead is still a better than average TV show, but my interest is really waning. The entire cat playing with the mouse scenario I thought was ridiculous.
Ok the Savior are bigger and better armed than we thought. But geez just kill Rick and the gang, why screw around with this dangerous group of people. Part of me thought and they should just kill them all and end the series that way.
The person being beaten will die. The show has gone out of it’s way to impress upon the viewers this season that Neagan ALWAYS kills a member of a group as an example to the others. Even his road gangs have the same standing order as we witnessed with the original Daryl/Sasha/Abraham run in with one. I’m pretty sure the pictures the group found on the wall of the Savior collection station (the ones of bodies with their heads smashed in) were of Neagan’s previous “examples”. Someone is most certainly going to die from the beating, the question is who.
My theory on why they chose to end in such an unexpected and frankly lame fashion is that all season long they’ve been telling viewers that “Neagan’s entrance on the show is going to be the same as in the comics!”, which has resulted in comic readers pretty much spoiling who was going to die in many threads and articles across the internet. By ending it this way, they can claim that Neagan’s “entrance” was exactly the same as the comics, but they can then switch his choice of victim because it won’t be revealed until S7E1. That is just the sort of stupid Magic Dumpster misdirection that TWD’s writers seem to get off on.
After thinking about it for awhile, it is plausible that Neagan’s crew had a spotter near Alexandria who radioed back that the RV was on the move. They also probably figured out by now that Hilltop and Alexandria had an alliance, or at least that Hilltop was supplying them with food. So they surmised that at some point Alexandrians would want to head to Hilltop, and setup the elaborate series of roadblocks and detours to force whomever attempted to make the trip into their trap. It’s a stretch, but given the sheer number of Saviors and the fact that they are well equipped and have radio communication, it’s not exactly as magical as it appeared in the episode.
That said, by the second roadblock it should have become VERY apparent to Rick and Co. that the Saviors were on to them. At that point it becomes obvious that the Saviors are trying to prevent Alexandrians from reaching Hilltop, and the next very simple logical conclusion is that the Saviors have also compromised Hilltop again. I mean seriously, Rick sees all this effort the Saviors have gone to, and he doesn’t once think that even if they reach Hilltop, Hilltop isn’t going to be there anymore, or is going to be overrun by the Saviors making the trip moot. At the second roadblock, and surely by the Red Rover one where it was obvious the Saviors were not trying to kill them (and thus were leading them into a trap), the decision should have been made to turn around and head back to Alexandria despite Maggie’s condition. Once again, TWD has smart survivors make stupid decisions because it’s convenient for the plot.
I read where someone (Kirkman, I think) made a comment on Talking Dead likening the end of the episode to the S2 ending discovery of the hatch on Lost.
I sure hope tptb aren’t planning on using Lost as a template for future episodes.
Oh, almost forgot, one bright point in the episode : What was up with the guys in full on lacrosse/football armor on horseback who look to be helping Morgan and Carol? They had a Hilltop pike, but none of the other Hilltop people dressed in that sort of stuff, so I’m thinking they must be from some as of yet undiscovered (by Rick’s group) settlement? A bunch of high school athletes who survived the initial apocalypse and can team up with Alexandria and Hilltop to rid the world of Negan forever? WOLVERINES!!! ;-)
