Some shows pull you through with a pregnancy or wedding planning or a presidential election.The Walking Deadused a Negan.
(Ill explain in the addendums.)
The show embraced the sensationalism but changed and missed the winky point.
Credit: Gene Page/AMC
Instead, the show drafted us to play the role.
Now you know what its like to killed offThe Walking Dead, dear viewer.Its Hardcore Henry, bro!
But the choice also denied us the reveal of the identity of the actual victim.
Tune in next season, folks.
I took it as a sick, twisted April Fools joke.
And with that POV shot, we paid for it with a blow to head with a rimshot.
Oh, you whackyWalking Dead!
How you slay us!
I liked the finale.
I hated the finale.
The advent of Negan was an epic negging a long, insulting seduction.
Am I supposed to feel judged, too?
The punishing POV shot sure felt like it.
For my love of zombie head-splatter?
For my relish of nihilism?
For my excited fanboy wonder about who was going to get negated when Negan showed up?
I dont mind provocation or a healthy degree of narrative game-playing.
Before I finish burying this season, lets give this bedeviled thing its due.
The scenes with Glenn (Steven Yuen) in particular were shattering.
Watching him stake these slumbering vamps was watching him flay his soul.
This idea transformed the conflict into quagmire where heroes and villains were relative if not irrelevant.
Rick presented as idealistic and paternalistic in the finale.
His high-risk Maggie mission aspired to selfless heroic sacrifice.
His we-can-do-anything-if-we-stick-together speechifying was all very All for one and one for all!
(Or Live together or die alone for those of us who seeLostwritten all overThe Walking Dead.)
But you know what?
Cult leaders talk like that, too.
I wanted this band of brothers to succeed in their mission in the finale.
So why I am not too broken up by their defeat?
He sees the citizens of Alexandria and the other Southern city states inWalking DeadU.S.A.
Is he cutthroat mob boss or cutthroat CEO president?
Federalist or totalitarian communist?
Negans climactic violence: jackboot oppression or justified self-defense and capital punishment?
The future ofThe Walking Deadseems to be less about killing zombies and more about … arguing about government?
Shading Alexandrias damnable, reap-the-whirlwind spiral: a strew of ironic Christian allusions.
Last Day On Earth had Christian maxims and parables written all over it.
Lucille and a hellish place far away from the Hilltop.
Jesus had a colorful phrase for those he considered hypocrites: whitewashed tombs.
Put another way: The Walking Dead.
He usually levied the charge against the high priests the teachers of the law.
Rick used the phrase as part of a threat, a bullying bluff.
Rick wrote him off.
The Saviors later hanged him.
In this religious war, both sides were enemies of grace which is to say, anti-Christ.
Gimple and his writers have great imagination for expanding the world.
The ideas they keep churning up keep drawing me back after so many times Ive vowed to quit.
deadpool game everyone else is playing.
My job requires me to give you a theory.
Its Abraham (Michael Cudlitz).
But I also just dont care.
I should be pissing my pants for these people, to borrow from Negan.
Instead, my eyes are as dry as that future serial killer Carl (Chandler Riggs).
I blame the mismanagement of characters and stakes in season 6.
AMC clearly wants us to keep shipping our heroes, no matter how anti-hero they become.
I liked the idea of someone rejecting Ricks course of action on moral, spiritual and personal grounds.
I even understand why youd choose Badass Carol to be the vessel for that turn.
I felt that way about almost all the characters this season.
Maybe the writers are tapped out.
Maybe these characters are burned out.
(Which is a shame: these actors work damn hard for this show.)
Was the joke not funny?
But we were asking for it, I guess.
Negan explained that he couldnt kill the mom.
He couldnt kill the people of color.
Ive been called a lot of things, but Id never want to be called a racist.
He couldnt kill Carl.
I cant kill you before your story ends.
No: hes the hero, and killing would have too many undesirable and potentially destabilizing consequences.
Still, someone had to die.
And so he played Eeny Meenie Miny Moe and chose his victim at random.
But theres nothing random about this at all: its all Kirkman.
Deleted graph/Micro-Essay:2016 is shaping up to be a banner year for the anti-hero takeover of comic-book pop.
They aim to murder him.
