This post contains spoilers of Walking Dead Season 6.
For all of Season 6, I waited out 15 mostly tedious episodes with a promise of Negan. Negan came. Negan lifted up Lucille his pet deadly baseball bat and then.....fade to black.
More tease in a season full of tease. And the payoffs haven't been worth the tease. The Walking Dead is giving me blueballs.
For the past three seasons, I have spent around $50 per season to watch the Walking Dead on Apple TV since I don't have cable. That is one of the most expensive season passes. I used to not mind because there was a reason that Walking Dead was the number one show. Sure it had lots of cool ways to kill zombies or...,eh...walkers, but the main draw for me at least was the character interactions on the show and how they survive (or don't) in the extraordinary environment of the undead. One of the best things about the Walking Deaf was how unsentimental it was about killing off fan favorites since they are after all in a place for pending doom and a place where death is a reality.
That's not the case anymore. Something changed.
I've been far more critical than most about the show for the past few seasons. There has been a real pacing problem. Storylines full of action like Terminus were over pretty quickly while slower ones like Alexandria seemed to go on forever. This would've been fine if anyone had actually thought about building character development, but throughout the first half of season 6 in Alexandria Walking Dead swapped out interesting characters for more gory zombie kills.
Then there was the second half of season 6 which was spent trying to get excitement stirred up about Negan and his savior crew, but after the third repetitive episode which involved looking for supplies outside Alexandria and running into walkers, bad guys, or both. I had started to have enough. Bring Negan on already!!
Then there was the Glenn thing. This was the moment that the makers of the TV show may have really started to ruin the show. We see fan favorite (for whatever reason) Glenn in a zombie pileup that nobody could survive. NOBODY. The show runners copped out in killing a character that has been long dead in the books BECAUSE they were afraid of fan reaction. This is a show that decapitated it's wise gentle old sage and had a grieving mother shoot a child who had killed her little sister. Those moments were disturbing and unflinching. The Walking Dead is better when it doesn't flinch. With the Glenn debacle, the show flinched badly.
Then there it was last night. The moment that the season had trudged toward. Most of the cast was on its knees begging at the mercy of Negan. He decides he is going to kill one of them, he looks to have actually done it, and then it's over. We won't know for at least 5 months who it was (And it better be Glenn and NOT one of the more ancillary characters). A season of build up for this?!
The Walking Dead isn't a terrible show. Not even close. But I'll spend part of the cliffhanger months deciding if it's worth paying for a season pass. I may have to resort to being a more casual fans and waiting it out and watching it on Amazon Prime or Netflix about a year after it aired on TV.
You teased one too many times, Walking Dead.
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