I’m being nice with the title of this review.
Every single person, with the exception of Judith, deserves to die on The Walking Dead. Let them all become the first course of an all-you-can-eat walker buffet, and turn them into the undead.
At this point I’d rather start over with a new cast, or watch everyone shuffle around as a walker for 60-75 minutes every week. This show has become an absolute chore to watch, and they’ve literally made the majority of characters unlikable.
The third episode of the zombie series’ ninth season, ‘Warning Signs,’ taught us two things.
First, nearly every character on the series is a hypocrite, and this is provided by the actions of the people from Oceanside.
At the end of ‘Warning Signs’ we see the gang from Oceanside — the crew that’s barely memorable at this point — execute a Savior that we’ve barely seen. So from the jump the stakes are “super” high because nothing says high drama like periphery characters in a moral crisis over a periphery character.
In this scene it’s revealed that Team Oceanside has been killing off random Saviors in order to exact revenge over The Saviors killing their families back in the day. The motivation is understandable, but the Savior brought up a good point, ‘we’ve all done terrible things.’
And if there’s one thing this series has beaten into your head at an unmerciful rate is this — no one in the apocalypse is a good guy. Everyone has done terrible things, and most of them have taken pleasure in doing them. In short — everybody sucks.
Of course this is a huge problem with the series because if everyone sucks, who the hell do we invest in? Think about it — you’ve turned two of the show’s most adored characters (Daryl and Maggie) and turned them into whiny, blood-thirsty malcontents. How can you even watch them at this point?
So at the end of the day, Oceanside crew commits murder, and I guarantee one day vengeance will be sought upon them. The set-up is so boring and so contrived there’s honestly one simple solution — all of them should be eaten by walkers, and just eliminate them now.
The second thing we learned is this — nothing that happened in the last season really mattered at all. Seriously, the whole war was a complete waste of time. Jadis is still an untrustworthy character. The Saviors are still mostly blood thirty assholes. Maggie and Daryl still want to murder all the Saviors. Carol’s motives are as murky as ever. Most of the other good guys remain complete caricatures. Father Gabriel is still useless. And worst of all, there’s really no peace at all.
Who’s to blame?
Rick Grimes, of course.
The series has done a marvelous job of making Rick Grimes the catalyst for everything that goes wrong. He wants war when everyone wants peace. He wants peace when everyone wants war. He kills the wrong people at the wrong time. He spares the wrong people at the wrong time. Yes, he’s “human” but he also can’t be the most incompetent person on the face of the planet either. He literally makes all the wrong choices, and so many people die because of it.
So what do you do to solve that problem?
You kill him off obviously.
Sarcasm aside, AMC has said Rick Grimes will be around for two more episodes. And in typical Walking Dead fashion, they give us the sweetest, most tender montage between he, Michonne and Judith. This was only done in order to build to the fact…HE GONNA DIE.
The Walking Dead is turning out one of its worst seasons of all-time, and not even the stunt of killing off the lead character will change just how bad this show is…unless the writing team gets bold and changes the direction of the show entirely.
Rating: 2.5 out of 10
