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Walking Dead Season 8 (1 Viewer)

Adam Lenhardt

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I would be fine with the show continuing indefinitely if they played this situation out honestly, and the remaining seasons were more like The Postman, rebuilding civilization now that they've got a handle on dealing with the zombies.

But the last few seasons have reeked of wheel spinning. Our cast of characters finds some place safe to settle. They come into conflict with a sociopathic nearby strongman. There are a series of skirmishes but our protagonists ultimately prevail. A handful of the supporting protagonists are killed off; a handle of new protagonists are introduced or given greater prominence. Rinse and repeat.

If Negan had been knocked off a season ago, and this season had been about Alexandra, the Hilltop, the Kingdom and Oceanside strengthening their communities, deepening ties through trade, and working to establish more reliable communications with the wider world, that would have kept me a lot more interested.

But a show where the characters get picked off one by one and new characters roll off the assembly line, and little to no real forward progress is made feels increasingly stale to me.
 

TravisR

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I would be fine with the show continuing indefinitely if they played this situation out honestly, and the remaining seasons were more like The Postman, rebuilding civilization now that they've got a handle on dealing with the zombies.
That's one of the things that the comic book is currently doing and it's why the comic still continues to work after 15 years and more than 175 issues.
 

ScottH

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After this episode I REALLY don't understand the people that complain about Negan. His scenes were the only interesting thing in the episode and he continues to be the only compelling character on the show. Please don't kill him off.
 

TravisR

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After this episode I REALLY don't understand the people that complain about Negan. His scenes were the only interesting thing in the episode and he continues to be the only compelling character on the show. Please don't kill him off.
They even managed to humanize Negan to some degree by having legitimately him care about Carl's death and be concerned that it was the Survivors' fault.

I don't mind Jadis sticking around but I'm glad to see that the garbage people are gone and hopefully, Oceanside will be forgotten from here on out.
 

Patrick Sun

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I may just stick around for this season to finish up, but not sure I want to carry on with season 9.
 

Adam Lenhardt

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I liked last night's episode better than the premiere. At its most self-indulgent, the show would have stretched out these character-centric vignettes into six separate episodes so I suppose we should be happy they got through them in one.

For a subplot that has been a major drag on the show for two seasons now, the fate of the garbage people was a lot more satisfying than I anticipated. Once they betrayed Rick at Alexandria, they all had to die. When they then betrayed Negan to aid Rick, it was just another nail in the coffin. But it did a great job illustrating the limitations of Negan's strategy.

What Negan says goes worked great when one community after another fell in line and played by the rules and the few that didn't were easy to deal with. But the Saviors have been on top for quite a while now, and they don't handle being back in the shit very well. Simon is used to dropping the hammer, not having the hammer dropped on him. The refusal of Alexandria, the Hilltop, and the Kingdom to submit is a personal affront to him. The fact that his people, specifically, from the satellite are being kept in a pen at the Hilltop only stokes the fires. He has lost confidence in Negan's way, and that leads him to indulge his passions.

The biggest criticism leveled against the garbage people, other than them being duplicitous and manipulative no good shits, is that not enough time has transpired since the world ended for the cultural and linguistic shifts we've seen. So it makes sense that, once her community has been exterminated by Simon and his men, we learn that it felt artificial because it was artificial. What Ezekiel did on a personal level, Jadis did on a community level. The culture and language of the garbage people was a conscious, collaborative creation, like an artist colony for keeps. And now that the project has been destroyed, she reverts back to talking like she did before. It was the best performance we've gotten yet from Pollyanna McIntosh. While it didn't make her earlier choices any more palitable, she embodied Jadis with real humanity here, and you felt the impact of her loss.

After this episode I REALLY don't understand the people that complain about Negan. His scenes were the only interesting thing in the episode and he continues to be the only compelling character on the show. Please don't kill him off.
I continue to believe that Negan is the best villain the show has ever had, specifically because he is not just another sadistic sociopath. He is a narcissist who delights in inflicting pain, but he commits the bare minimum murder that he thinks is necessary to achieve his goals. He is evil, but there is a rationality to his evil. He hasn't slipped into insanity like Shane or the Governor. He has a plan to bring humanity out of the darkness, and the only problem is that that plan requires absolute submission from everybody who crosses his path.

They even managed to humanize Negan to some degree by having legitimately him care about Carl's death and be concerned that it was the Survivors' fault.
That entire walkie-talkie conversation was riveting. The first half, Negan is reacting as a human being to another human being he respects. Carl was important to him, not in the deep emotional way that he was important to Rick, but as a crucial piece in his grand plan. And then, once it becomes clear that Rick is not willing to submit, he starts performing again. But the performance when it's just mano a mano is very different than when he's performing for a group. Every word here was targeted to wound one very specific target.

Oceanside will be forgotten from here on out.
I think Oceanside is going to play a crucial role in the final act of this little war. The storytelling purpose of this little visit was two-fold:
  1. To establish Cyndie as Oceanside's leading voice. If her views had carried the day earlier, things would have turned out much better for Oceanside and for the communities under Rick's flag of rebellion. It's also an important generational shift that none of the other communities have made, to someone who has come of age in this world rather than the world before.

  2. To pop Enid's murder cherry so that we don't have to pause for hand-wringing when she's in the thick of it back at Hilltop. I thought her reaction was interesting. She felt awful about killing Natania, but she also recognized and accepted the necessity of it rather quickly. The moral landscape of her generation is very different than the moral landscape of Rick's generation, where the rules of civilization applied a lot longer.
 

TravisR

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I liked last night's episode better than the premiere. At its most self-indulgent, the show would have stretched out these character-centric vignettes into six separate episodes so I suppose we should be happy they got through them in one.
Yeah, I liked that they focused on one character per act too and I wish the show would do that more often. I think cutting between the Carl, Rick & Michonne story and the Morgan & Carol story really took away from Carl's demise in last week's episode.
 

Bryan^H

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Being a fan of horror shows, movies, comics one doesn't have to wonder why I watch this show. Even if the story was complete crap(it isn't) I'd still watch it for the horror elements. The zombies in tonight's episode were just gruesome, swamp zombies, chained zombies, asphyxiated head bagged zombies, bear trap gonna get you zombies....All great.

Loved the Gabriel Arc tonight, and Negan is in fine form.
 

Hollywoodaholic

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How are they possibly going to sell the idea after seven seasons that exposure to zombie blood alone can infect you? How is it possible in all the encounters with zombies until this time, including being splattered with their blood, in your mouth, in your eyes, in your cuts, covering yourself with their guts.... that NOW Negan comes up with the bright idea that he can turn people with zombie blood?

I thought Eugene's idea to catapult zombie parts into the hillside meant that they would launch zombie HEADS biting around into there. But this idea that you can suddenly infect people with zombie blood is an insult to any sense of consistency for rules within what is already a basically absurd premise. But at least they were somewhat consistent with the rules. Only bites can infect. You have to stab the brain, blah blah blah.

Otherwise, I did enjoy the Gabriel story in this episode. It was like a miniature Twilight Zone story within the episode. Following his faith, ultimately leading him to blindly sorting bullets.
 

TravisR

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How are they possibly going to sell the idea after seven seasons that exposure to zombie blood alone can infect you? How is it possible in all the encounters with zombies until this time, including being splattered with their blood, in your mouth, in your eyes, in your cuts, covering yourself with their guts.... that NOW Negan comes up with the bright idea that he can turn people with zombie blood?

I thought Eugene's idea to catapult zombie parts into the hillside meant that they would launch zombie HEADS biting around into there. But this idea that you can suddenly infect people with zombie blood is an insult to any sense of consistency for rules within what is already a basically absurd premise. But at least they were somewhat consistent with the rules. Only bites can infect. You have to stab the brain, blah blah blah.
I'm not sure this stands to science (neither does the whole premise of the dead coming back though) but I've always been under the assumption that the amount of exposure to the blood matters. If some of the zombie blood gets in a cut or in someone's mouth, etc., they probably would not get sick enough from that to die. However, if someone gets a deeper wound and enough of the blood gets in there, the wound will infect and they'll die. Based on the comic book, the Saviors plan will
involve infecting people with the blood by creating deeper wounds with arrows or knives that have been coated in zombie blood.
 

Hollywoodaholic

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Well, okay, that's certainly splitting hairs, but I'll go along with that premise in you spoiler as, at least, a variation.

Reminds me of the Paul Verhooven film Flesh and Blood, where a group trying to reclaim a castle they lost to raiders by launching body parts into the compound that were infected with plague, and one of the body parts landed in the well that was the drinking supply. Wonder if that film inspired this 'variation'.
 
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Stan

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I have no idea why I am still watching this show. Mainly for Steven Ogg I think

I actually hope he leaves soon. I have a feeling once Negan finds out what he did, he's history. Hopefully slowly and painfully as an example to others. Not some quick Lucille beating, make him suffer :D
 

Paul D G

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How are they possibly going to sell the idea after seven seasons that exposure to zombie blood alone can infect you? How is it possible in all the encounters with zombies until this time, including being splattered with their blood, in your mouth, in your eyes, in your cuts, covering yourself with their guts.... that NOW Negan comes up with the bright idea that he can turn people with zombie blood?

I was trying to figure that out as well. I was thinking Negan was out of the loop of the fact that everyone carries the virus but he must know that by now from experience.

[...] If some of the zombie blood gets in a cut or in someone's mouth, etc., they probably would not get sick enough from that to die. However, if someone gets a deeper wound and enough of the blood gets in there, the wound will infect and they'll die.

[note: I did not read Travis' spoiler] Right. So I'm thinking if he had a blood soaked Lucille, he would only need to poke at someone and cut them with the barbed wire and the zombie blood on the wire would infect that person and cause them to die slowly.

[edit] Oh! I just realized that ties in to the injured Rick imagery under the stained glass. omg...
 

Richard V

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I actually hope he leaves soon. I have a feeling once Negan finds out what he did, he's history. Hopefully slowly and painfully as an example to others. Not some quick Lucille beating, make him suffer :D
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that somehow, Rick, Simon, Negan, and Dwight face off in the end resulting in Simon and Dwight going down, and Rick and Negan forming some kind of weird alliance.
 

Hollywoodaholic

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I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that somehow, Rick, Simon, Negan, and Dwight face off in the end resulting in Simon and Dwight going down, and Rick and Negan forming some kind of weird alliance.

If the showrunners had left some shade of grey to Negan instead of painting him an irredeemable psycho, that would be a more original turn than we're probably going to get.
 

ScottH

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Yeah I will have a hard time getting past this whole zombie blood thing. Hard to imagine how they'll explain their way out of this one. Even if it was a valid attack, at that point aren't you close enough to just kill the enemy anyway? As great as Negan has been, that whole speech was really bad.

Doesn't Nick from 'Fear the Walking Dead' constantly cover himself in zombie guts and blood to camouflage himself from the zombies?
 

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