Tag Archives: Rick Grimes

The Walking Dead Rolls Rick

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I know what you’re thinking. Does this review of The Walking Dead S09 E05 contain one spoiler? Two spoilers? Three? Go on, punk. Click. Make my day.

Season 9 Episode 5 – “What Comes After.”

Word up, people. You’ve been Rick Rolled. Where did Rick Roll? Under a dumpster, motherfuckers. Only this one had wings.

I don’t know how I allowed The Walking Dead to pull this bait-and-switch trick on me again. In retrospect, dwindling audience figures notwithstanding, it seemed slightly desperate and insane to make a massive spoiler – ‘It’s Rick Grimes’ Final Episode’ – the focus of the show’s marketing campaign.

I guess it was technically Rick’s final episode. They never said ‘dead’. I assumed ‘dead’. But what else is there but ‘dead’ on The Walking Dead? In my defence: why else would a character leave? What other possible, plausible reason could they have for exiting the show? The chance of a modelling career in Paris, perhaps? A new job teaching community college in Mississippi? Mind you, Morgan left ‘The Walking Dead’ alive, but he immediately went on to join the spin-off show ‘Fear the Walking Dead’. So is that the future for Rick? Another spin-off show? ‘Fear We Go Again’?

Just after the bridge blew up I scribbled something down on my notepad and read it aloud to my partner: NO BODY – SEE YOU IN SEASON 13, RICK. We laughed and I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Watch this, he’ll turn up in a few seasons time and they’ll reveal that he was fished out of the river and whisked away in a helicopter.’ The idea amused me: Rick rocking up to the Hill Top disguised under a heavy cloak and clutching a walking stick, Willy Wonka style, and then casting off the cloak, chucking the stick away and doing a big comedy forward roll, before jumping to his feet and shouting, ‘Did somebody call 911?’

I quickly realised that I’d accidentally discovered the ending. Well, not the stuff with the forward rolls, of course, but the helicopter rescue. I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen – at least until Judith Grimes showed up. WHAT ARE YOU DOING, WALKING DEAD? YOU’VE ONLY JUST GIVEN US ETERNAL PEACE FROM ONE IRRITATING-AS-FUCK GRIMES KID – AND THE REPLACEMENT’S HERE ALREADY??

Negan goads Rick by taunting Karl’s eye again

Still, sad as Judith made me, I could never be sadder than old Saddam Hu-Negan, ripped from his cell by Maggie and ready to die cause he missed his baseball bat, or his dead wife or something. His whole reaction here is really in-keeping with the character, just as long as the character you’re talking about isn’t Negan. I always hoped they’d add a little colour and substance to Negan’s X-rated panto-villain schtick, but instead of nuance, we got no-ance.

On a side note, how strange that a show as nihilistic and violent as The Walking Dead would choose this time to take a stance against capital punishment, even if the show’s argument does appear to shy away from the moral and ethical considerations and lean heavily into the assertion that prison fucks people up more and for longer, so let’s do that!

So what did this episode teach us, apart from the two most obvious and painfully apparent lessons, namely: 1) that we should never, ever trust The Walking Dead, and 2) that we shouldn’t let four very good episodes fool us into thinking that the show is now fixed and back on track after two-and-a-half disappointing – and often downright duff and dull – seasons?

Nothing. It taught us nothing. Nothing that we didn’t already know, and in any case nothing of any real interest or consequence. We were reminded that Rick is a weird, kaleidoscopic chameleon of a character; a conveyor-belt of mixed bags and action archetypes spinning round and around on the carousel of plot; a man with no discernible qualities outwith his own exquisite ‘Rickness’.

“Why are we herding these thousands of zombies?”

“I AM RICK!”

“Why are we stabbing sleeping people through the head?”

“I AM RICK!”

“Why are you such a poorly defined character?”

“I AM RICK!”

It’s a shame, really, because there were elements of this episode that could’ve lent a poignant sheen to Rick’s death, had the show had the balls to actually bump him off. I wrote things in my note-pad like, ‘the herd represents the death that has stalked him from the pilot episode, that stalks us all, now catching up with him’ and ‘Rick is looking for his family – he will find them in death’. And what a nice touch it would’ve been for Rick to have died willfully destroying the literal and metaphorical bridge he’d spent the season wholeheartedly believing in and building. But in the end it was all a lot more wanky than that. (See also: ‘I GUESS YOU WERE MY FAMILY ALL ALONG, GUYS!’)

It was either this, or Shane, Hershel and Sasha appearing in the sky above Rick scored to a John WIlliams’ composition.

I went with the Rick Roll angle in naming this review, but the other title I was toying with was: ‘A Rickmas Carol’. After all, Rick was visited throughout the episode by three ghosts of Walking Dead past, each with some nugget of knowledge to impart to the man who had directly and indirectly caused all of their deaths. Shane said, ‘Hey, Rick, you’ve got to get angry and keep stabbing people, man,’; Hershel popped up to say, ‘Something something something big cuddle’; which left Sasha to cover the mystical angle: ‘Confucius say these aren’t dead people you’re standing on, Rick. This is a carpet of almost inscrutable super profundity, and we’re going to have a stilted, cod-philosophical conversation all about it, my friend.’ At one point in their dialogue, Sasha says something about going toward the good, toward the brave, and a teary-eyed Rick replies by splurting out ‘toward love’, which I felt was a rather an incongruous almost-coda for a man who’d spent so much of his time beating people to death with his bare hands and running them over with his car.

This was no ‘Rickmas Carol’ (or ‘Rickmas Corrrrrrrrrraallllll’, if you prefer), though. In ‘A Christmas Carol’ Scrooge emerges from his Xmas Eve hauntings a changed man; Rick emerges from his slo-mo horse-based chase… well, exactly the same, but exactly the same and flying through the air in a coma.

It was awesome to see Shane again, ditto Hershel, whose appearance was all the more poignant for being actor Scott Greene’s final time on screen. It was good to see Sasha, too, but ever-so-slightly mystifying, since I can’t remember Rick and Sasha ever even saying ‘hello’ to each other, much less having an actual conversation. I guess the production team’s rule was, ‘If they say yes to reprising their roles, then they’re in. Even if it’s the Bike Zombie from the pilot episode – we’ll find a way to make it work.’

In the final analysis, it didn’t work. Mainly because the analysis wasn’t final.

Rick may very well be alive.

But I’m not sure how much longer the show will be.

#10seasonsandthreemovies

Civil War on The Walking Dead: Crock or Cracker?

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The Walking Dead has been with us for so long that it’s hard to remember a time when zombies weren’t staggering, swiping and shambling their way through the TV schedules.

Robert Kirkman’s and AMC’s success allowed zombies to eat their way into the TV mainstream. The Walking Dead naturally spawned would-be rivals, masses of imitators and latterly a child of its own, while simultaneously emboldening producers and networks to green-light ever-quirkier spins on the undead phenomenon.

But – much like its titular ambulatory corpses – the longer The Walking Dead has remained in motion, the more thoroughly the rot has set in.

Over the years, as the characters in the show quickly became inured to, even bored of, the zombies, so too did the audience. When the show tried to counter this slackening of grip upon the audience’s attention by sidelining the zombies and positioning mankind itself as the series’ major threat and obstacle, people said they were bored, and demanded more zombies.

Let’s call that a Scratch-22.

Of course, the blame doesn’t rest solely with the poor, put-upon zombies or the audience’s fickle nature. The show undeniably suffered when it shifted focus away from its core unit of characters to service a multitude of old and new faces across multiple locations. It’s a narrative balancing act that Game of Thrones handles with aplomb, but which The Walking Dead has always struggled to pull off without dropping threads, circumventing reality or stalling momentum – sometimes all three at once.

Over the last handful of seasons The Walking Dead’s characters, even those like Carol whom the show has occasionally serviced very well, have started to feel less like actual people with their own drives, wants, needs, vulnerabilities, and complex motivations, and more like walking plot-putty, there to be moulded to fit whatever shape best suits the story.

So earlier this year, when the closing moments of The Walking Dead’s eighth season appeared to be setting up a civil war between Maggie and Daryl on the one side, and Rick and Michonne on the other, I baulked.

Maggie’s grief and Daryl’s pride may be incredibly powerful forces, but were they really strong enough to over-ride everything that the core group had suffered through together? Somehow, it didn’t ring true. I wrote it off as yet another narrative sleight-of-hand designed to magically generate conflict out of thin air, at the eleventh hour, again at the expense of character.

While season eight was a vast improvement upon the plodding, tepid and occasionally ridiculous season seven, for the first time ever I found that I wasn’t excited about – or even really that interested in – the prospect of The Walking Dead’s return.

But then I started thinking about it.

Really thinking about it: the season; where the show was heading; where it had come from. Everything. I felt I owed The Walking Dead a degree of analysis and introspection before I cast it aside. If only for old times’ sake.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that two things had happened/were happening inside my head:

One: I’d performed a nuance-ectomy upon the show, and reduced the two-seasons-long conflict to a classic ‘The forces of good triumph over the forces of evil’ narrative, a la Return of the Jedi, or a children’s fairy-tale (you might argue that the two aren’t mutually exclusive).

The baddies are vanquished, the goodies cheer, and everyone moves on to have a happy, hassle-free time. Cartoonish, yet undeniably cathartic. Obviously, framing the story in this way leaves no room for ambiguity or the possibility of future struggles along ideological fault-lines.

Two: while the show has certainly dipped in terms of quality and consistency over recent years, maybe over-exposure to the critical consensus was prejudicing my enjoyment; perhaps by expecting disappointment at every turn, I was actually inviting it. Was the bitter cocktail of cynicism and apathy that burbled in my gut as I watched latter-day seasons of The Walking Dead preventing me from giving the show-runners and the writers the benefit of the doubt?

While I stopped far short of venturing into ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ territory, I’d convinced myself that it was time to cut The Walking Dead a break. I let the ebbs, flows, highs and lows of season eight continue to tumble and percolate inside my brain; I held everything in there until the jumble made sense; or at least until it made more sense.

I still felt that the plot seeds leading up to the impending civil war had been peppered rather too clumsily throughout the eighth season, but I was beginning to see how (and why) betrayal, and its bedfellow war, might erupt around Negan’s prison-cell in the wake of the territory’s uncertain and unexpected freedom.

The process of interrogating history helped give an anchor to my thoughts; history helped not only to illuminate the fractured and ever-fracturing tribal loyalties of the post-Negan apocalypse, but also to give a rich and fruitful context to the show’s evolution from ‘Days Gone Bye’ to ‘Wrath’.

By drawing on some of the defining epochs of human civilisation I was able to re-frame and re-interpret the world of The Walking Dead, and in the process ignite some excitement for the ruckus (or should that be Rickus?) to come.

In the end, the beginning; in the beginning, the end

While it’s true that people in the West today are generally less inclined towards violent protest when times are tough or rulers are corrupt (except for the French, who would gladly burn the country to the ground rather than allow the passing of even one mildly disagreeable traffic bye-law) this shift can’t solely be attributed to our new-found civility.

There’s also the matter of our (comparative) richness, in both time and wealth, and access to a wider range of leisure pursuits and luxury goods than at any other point in our history. And, perhaps most crucially, the sheer might of the state which, thanks to the development of ever-more destructive and invasive technologies, has never had so much deadly power at its disposal.

If a group of angry artists and artisans tried to take a leaf out of Robespierre’s book and rush towards 10 Downing Street with rakes and rifles held aloft they’d be a puddle of blood on the street before the first of them managed to get within spitting distance of the rather bored-looking policeman guarding the front door.

If by some miracle they managed to break into the building unchallenged, it wouldn’t be long before tanks rolled down the street. Before they rolled down every street in the city.

This highlights one of the main reasons that The Walking Dead has always been so enduring and intriguing: it takes all of that away – states, nations, bureaus, satellites, nuclear weapons, stock-piled wealth, an inter-connected planet – and levels the playing field again.

The show allows us to travel back to a more violent and uncertain age, and show us what might have happened at various critical junctures of human development if we’d had access to modern weapons, vehicles and modes of thought.

The Walking Dead essentially forces a hard-reboot upon the human race, and then re-runs key events in the evolution of human society on a hyper-accelerated timescale.

When Rick wakes up in the hospital in ‘Days Gone Bye’ he’s a man taking his first steps upright in a new and terrible world, with only one rule: survive. Rick is early man, charting an alien environment with a million hungry mouths waiting round every corner.

In the early days of the show the members of Rick’s group huddle together in the darkness, terrified of the horror and death that surrounds them on the fringes.

Over time their suffering teaches them the tricks and tools they need to survive. They drift across the landscape as nomads, wanderers, hunter-gatherers, but as they become faster, braver and bolder they form tribes. They meet other tribes, but only in battle. They rise, they fall, they rise again, each time stronger than they were before.

As their dreams get bigger, so too does the world around them and their place within it. Before long, they’re sending emissaries and quasi-diplomats to other colonies and proto-nations to trade goods, ideas and arms; their ingenuity, adaptability and resolve bring them stability, which in turn allows them to talk about things like the future, families and farming; and debate concepts like freedom, justice and worth, instead of constantly fretting and obsessing about the mere fact of survival.

In the short space of (in-show) time between season one and season nine the new human race has crawled from the swamp, got to its feet and rushed headlong into its first ideological conflict: its first war. It’s raw progress, but it’s progress none-the-less.

It’s tempting to view the conflict that follows the arrival of the Saviours through the prism of the American Civil War: to imagine the Alexandrian north taking up arms against the Saviours in the south, to oppose and destroy the forces of slavery and corruption. To my mind, though, the French Revolution is a much better fit, because the battle between Rick and Negan is really, at its heart, a battle between democracy and dictatorship; a showdown between the downtrodden masses and their King.

Hail to the King, Baby

Supporters of the UK’s monarchy see in the Queen and her sprawling web of dependents a reflection of everything that is refined, restrained, civilised and genteel in the world (with the possible exception of Fergie), overlooking the fact that in a different time Queen Elizabeth would almost certainly have played football with the axed heads of her political enemies.

Status of this magnitude isn’t bestowed upon ordinary men and women as a reward for good manners or having impeccable taste in cardigans. Whatever may sustain or shape power once its attained, it’s nearly always taken. The truth is that all bloodlines must have begun with one male realising he had greater strength and better resources than all of the other males in his territory, and deciding to use that imbalance as a basis to establish dominance over everyone and everything else. There’s nothing noble or worthy about that. It’s disgusting, immoral, and sadly all-too-universal.

Negan, of course, is the show’s true King, in deed if not in name. While Ezekiel is a show-man and a politician, Negan is a tyrant who rules with a switching mixture of vanity, brutality and cruelty; a righteous cloak of benevolence billowing around his bloodied bat that’s invisible to all but him. Like other famous sociopaths – Manson, Hitler, Thanos – Negan is all the more chilling for believing himself the good guy.

If The Walking Dead has any enduring theme beyond ‘Ha ha! Life’s a bitch!’ it probably lies somewhere in the ethics and limits of killing and survival.

Most would-be revolutionaries in our world – save for the most impassioned and anarchic – try to respect the rule of law. They want change, but they won’t turn their backs on civilisation in order to get it. They’ll wave banners, sign petitions, sing songs, set up websites, organise media interviews and try to cause minimal disruption to traffic (think of them as Dale, Hershel or early season 4 Rick). What they probably won’t do is storm parliament and summarily execute the entire cabinet. I guess the reasoning goes that if you have to become a barbarian in order to effect positive change, then the change might not be worth it.

Except that France, and arguably most of Europe, might still be ruled by the unclenching fist of absolute monarchy if not for a bit of storming, burning, rioting, beheading and massacring back in the eighteenth century.

The Walking Dead makes the dichotomy between war and peace its stock-in-trade. OK, Rick, we get that Negan is a murderous oppressor, but does that really make it okay for you to run people over with your car in cold blood, or stab scores of people to death in their beds? OK, Morgan, killing people probably does lead to madness and disgrace, but is it a good idea to abstain from it when someone’s running towards your best pal with a steak knife? Same question to you, King Ezekiel. Should you appease a maniac when your own people might eventually starve?

In the end, Rick led and won his revolution against The Walking Dead’s ruling class, but in contrast to this revolution’s real-life ‘inspiration’, the King escaped with his head. The decision to let Negan live may well have put a target and a ticking clock above Rick’s head.

The architects of the French Revolution achieved a feat that no-one thought possible, the aftershocks of which are still felt today. Their revolution helped to spread democratic ideas around the globe, and provided direct inspiration for the American Revolution.

Did they revel in this spectacular, epoch-altering achievement? Did they all join hands and whoop and cheer like the crowds at the end of Return of the Jedi, their friendships and alliances stronger than ever, their fates and spirits bonded for eternity?

No. No they did not.

They’re human, after all.

They all died, pretty much to a man and a woman. And mostly at each other’s hands, through a combination of paranoia, mistrust, skullduggery and cruelty. They tore each other apart on points of principle, for things they did leading up to and during the revolution, and for the things they envisioned for the future. Ironically, some of them were put to death for being considered too blood-thirsty.

Liberty? Equality? Fraternity?

Betrayal. Murder. Death.

The Walking Dead has demonstrated that it’s ready to give us a war that will finally make us feel something. Not a war between goodies and baddies, but a war between friends and allies, sisters and brothers. Maggie’s and Daryl’s hateful sneers in the closing moments of season eight now seem all the more explicable, not to mention auspicious.

The end of season eight now feels like a new beginning, a chance for the show to evolve again and … possibly… hopefully… endure. Especially now that the show is beginning to detach itself from the canon of the comics.

So what happens next?

Will the post-Negan era usher in freedom or pave the way for wholesale destruction? How will the differences between and within the disparate groups be reconciled? Can humanity get it right this time, or will utopia always remain a pipe-dream? Will the cycle of death and revenge and greed and violence simply repeat itself, ad infinitum, until the end of time itself, in the manner posited by Battle Star Galactica? Will we forget all about the zombies? (Or will we meet something that isn’t quite zombie and isn’t quite human? Shhhh. Keep that to a whisper.)

But do you know what?

When I really start to think about it…

I’m looking forward to finding out.

The Walking Dead Season 7A: What happened, and what’s going on… and what went wrong?

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It’s fair to say that the front-half of The Walking Dead’s seventh season has attracted a lukewarm response from audiences and critics alike, despite the arrival of Negan, everyone’s favourite trash-talking, bat-wielding sociopath.

So what went wrong? I’d contend that The Walking Dead’s biggest enemy has been the audience’s expectations. Never before has a show or a movie taken such a continuous, long-form look at the nuts and bolts of a zombie apocalypse. A zombie movie has a definite arc: there’s an outbreak, society collapses, the survivors endure horror and heartache, a plan is hatched or a quest undertaken, and slowly and painfully the survivors learn to adapt. The movie then ends on a note either of hope or nihilism. The zombies never linger long enough to lose their terror, certainly never long enough to become a manageable nuisance.

The Walking Dead has entered its ‘manageable nuisance’ stage, and many viewers now find themselves struggling to reconcile the show’s new direction with their expectations of it being a man-against-monster zombie survivalist saga. Nobody can talk such viewers out of their apathy or active dislike; however, it’s worth pointing out that if the show had simply continued to place its zombies front-and-centre – if the story hadn’t expanded to incorporate new challenges, obstacles and threats – we would have become as desensitised to the undead as the show’s characters have by this point in the narrative. The Walking Dead had to end or evolve, and if you’re willing to accept its evolution, then you have to cut it a certain degree of slack during its transition.

I only started reading the Walking Dead comics after the show’s sixth season finale. I very quickly gorged myself on them, catching up and then overtaking the TV show. By the time Lucille had crashed down on the heads of her flesh-and-blood victims, I was already in a post-Negan, Whisperer-infested world. I’d also decided that the quintessential Negan could only be the brutish, black-and-white, fuck-fuckity-fuck-stick version from the comic books (you can read my article about that here). It’s fair to say that Jeffrey Dean Morgan had something of an uphill struggle against my expectations. As did the entirety of the seventh season itself.

While the show doesn’t follow an identical trajectory to its source material – and has different characters and different versions of existing characters to boot – I already knew the main thrust of the narrative, meaning that when certain scenarios began to unfold on screen, I had a fair idea of what would happen next, and in some cases who would die. I wonder if these two related things – how much I’d enjoyed comic book Negan, and my knowledge of the main story beats to come – robbed me of my objectivity and sense of surprise, which in turn left me pre-disposed to view the show comparatively and analytically, instead of through the gut and the adrenal gland (which of course is the manner in which The Walking Dead is best enjoyed).

That being said – and while it’s obviously impossible for me to un-read the comic books and watch those first eight episodes again through untainted eyes – I do believe something has been severely off-kilter with season seven so far; problems that run deeper than the show’s new direction, and my foreknowledge of the source material. I can’t remember ever enjoying a fresh batch of episodes less. Sure, The Walking Dead has always had slower episodes, and weaker episodes, and filler episodes, but these are usually buoyed by a mix of competent, good and occasionally great episodes either side. Not so this season. All of the episodes thus far have felt lukewarm and lacklustre, and somehow lacking thrust and cohesion. Many of the big dramatic beats, especially the deaths in the premiere and Rick and Negan’s jolly RV trip, were handled clumsily and gratuitously. The show has never felt so coldly nihilistic, and that’s saying something in a series threaded through with so much death, destruction and misery.

I understand that in order for the coming war to mean something, and for the inevitable victory to provide us with a visceral dose of catharsis, our heroes must first be trampled deeper into the dirt than they’ve ever been trampled before. We have to fear for them, we have to feel their sense of pain, impotence and outrage. We have to be introduced to and start to care about all of the potential allies that are going to be thrown together in the back half of the season, and have a fair idea of the mechanics of the enemy camp, and the tenuous fear-soaked peace that keeps the Saviours in power. I understand the chess pieces have to be moved into place, and the pace slackened to prepare for the fireworks. But still… meh. At first I thought the problem was Negan. But I’ve come to realise that the real problem is Rick.

Not Andrew Lincoln, you understand, who has always done terrific work as Rick Grimes. But Rick the character, who suffers in comparison to his more effective comic-book counterpart. While it’s true that Comic Rick has had his lapses of judgement, spells of foolhardiness, and suffered the odd psychotic break, he’s always felt like a leader in both name and deed, fully deserving of the title and capable of handling the weight of the crown that goes with it. His ruthlessness and occasional recklessness is tempered by a strong conscience and a pragmatic outlook. I can see why his people like him, trust him, respect him and follow him.

The only real evidence that TV Rick is a great leader is the amount of times the other characters repeatedly tell each other that Rick is a great leader. To my mind, he only has two stock responses to most managerial and logistical problems: cry face, or full psycho. Case in point, Comic Rick only swallows down Negan’s brutality in order to lull him into a false sense of security. Even as Lucille swings down atop Glen’s skull, Rick is formulating a plan to take that mad, cackling bastard down, despite the seemingly insurmountable odds against him, because that’s who Rick is, and that’s what he does. He’s strong and capable, even in his darkest and most testing moments.

Game of Thrones may be able to juggle the narrative demands of an entire world and its multifarious clans and characters, offering up a smorgasbord of delicious little interlocking short stories that served together are greater than the sum of their parts, but The Walking Dead – while definitely an ensemble show – really needs Rick as its focus, its point-of-view, its through-line. The lack of Rick – and especially the lack of a strong Rick more in-line with the comic book incarnation of the character – has been to the show’s detriment.

Unless of course this Ricklessness is part of a deliberate strategy. I’m thinking more and more that perhaps the ground is being prepared for a shocking shake-up that will serve as the biggest break from the source material imaginable: the death of Rick Grimes. One thing season seven has done particularly well is to promote the strength and resilience of the show’s female characters, especially Maggie, who is an obvious and believable contender for the top spot should Rick ever take a long, one-way walk into Walkersville. It’s worth steeling yourself for such an eventuality. For once in the show’s history, the possibility of Rixit doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

I sincerely hope that, whatever lies in Rick’s immediate future, the Walking Dead will return with a barnstorming, seat-of-the-pants, solid smattering of tense and exciting episodes, to exorcise the malaise of this season’s opening half, and perhaps even grant it a retrospective pardon. The first eight episodes may not have rocked my world or inspired much in the way of hope or enthusiasm, but there was still plenty to enjoy: Carol (she’s my ‘if x dies, we riot’ character); the introduction of King Ezekiel and his pet tiger; the effective and over-due fleshing out of peripheral characters like Rosita, Father Gabriel and Tara; Daryl’s stay at Dick Dastardly’s Dog-food Motel; and the mid-season finale, which was actually very good, and finally convinced me that Jeffrey Dean Morgan was the right man for the role of Negan; he really owned the character in ‘Hearts Still Beating’, seemed to swagger straight onto Alexandria’s twee suburban streets from the pages of the comic book. I’m sorry I doubted you, Jeffrey. Perhaps you just needed a shave.

One thing I didn’t enjoy – and which I gather had fans howling into their hankies – was the emotionally manipulative reunion of our band of heroes at the episode’s climax. Those few minutes of silent smiles, nods, tears, hugs and raised eyebrows, all set to uplifting music, felt a bit too on-the-nose, like a cross between a music video and an episode of a soap opera. I couldn’t help but remember a funny video I watched on YouTube a few years ago, where the musical score was removed from the scene at the end of Return of the Jedi, as the heroes are receiving their medals. It just looked ridiculous, and made me laugh like a loon.

I’m under no illusions about The Walking Dead. It’s a compulsive show, incredibly popular and lucrative, but it isn’t, and never will be in my opinion, a truly classic show; certainly not when stacked against worthy behemoths like The Wire, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. That’s not to say that it hasn’t produced thrilling narratives, or produced some truly great episodes: the pilot, 18 Miles Out, Better Angels, Seed, Clear, Internment, Too Far Gone, After, The Grove, No Sanctuary, Consumed, What’s Happened and What’s Going On, JSS and Here’s Not Here, to name the stand-outs.

Lest you imagine I’m launching an attack, it goes without saying that I’m very fond of The Walking Dead, else I wouldn’t expend so much time and energy thinking and writing about it. And while the show may never be uttered in the same breath as the true classics of TV’s first and second Golden Ages, it’s shown itself more than capable of greatness in seasons gone bye (sic). And I sincerely hope that it’s able to reclaim some of its past vigour.

So come on, showrunners, Let’s do it.

Let’s make The Walking Dead great again.

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MORE ZOMBIE ARTICLES I WROTE FOR ‘DEN OF GEEK’

Syfy’s Z Nation: fun, low budget and well worth your time

How will The Walking Dead end?

When zombies attacked … Neighbours (and other shows)

And another from this website, reviewing S05E09.