***Contains spoilers.***
Never has a TV show made me feel like I'm abjectly wasting my life watching it quite as effectively as this year's Season of The Walking Dead.
When the show started years ago I rather enjoyed it's fresh approach to the zombie genre, the sympathetic Rick as the protagonist and his ragtag group generally seemed to be efficient at surviving even if they occasionally made dubious decisions.
Fast forward to now, however, and the series is really starting to grate on me. The writing seems lazy, lacklustre, predictable and above all just plain stupid in places.
Rick in particular has become a complete joke over the course of several seasons. He manages to completely mess up almost everything he does, usually getting large numbers of people killed in the process. And yet the group still venerate him as The Great Leader Who is Never Wrong despite these constant idiotic blunders.
I mean, just off the top of my head, Rick has:
1. Left the excellently defensible prison "overrun" instead of merely clearing the few zombies out and resettling there after defeating the Governor.
2. Lost cars, food, people and guns on multiple ill fated outings to get supplies (usually cars, food, people and guns). Extra props for reversing a truck full of food into a lake.
3. Found an entire quarry full of zombies and proceeded to unleash them on his own camp, nearly killing everyone.
4. Got ambushed and captured by about 6 different groups of bad guys. In fact he gets captured every time they meet hostile survivors.
5. Nearly gone completely mad in the wilderness.
6. Messed up every interaction with Negan he's ever had, despite moronically insisting over and over that he will "kill him".
7. Entrusted a huge cache of automatic weapons to some creepy cultists living in a junkyard even after they attempted to murder him and even told him that they take all their stuff off of other survivors by force. Group then of course betrays him at the critical moment (really Rick? You were that dumb? Really?)
Then we have stupid situations like Darryl and Maggie hiding from the Saviours in Hilltop (which is constantly visited by suspicious Saviours) rather than literally any one of the hundreds of anonymous abandoned buildings in the towns near camp.
This season has been even worse, though, not merely for Rick and the other characters consistently acting like brainless gibbering idiots, but also for the incessant padding of practically every scene.
When we're not treated to long, lingering shots of zombies walking about or long, lingering shots of people walking about we're plied with cheesy sentimental conversations.
Or flashbacks. The Season 7 finale features Sasha having about 10 flashbacks with Abraham, all of which were extremely long and barely made any sense.
Normally I'd place this on poor pacing (which The Walking Dead is awful for: remember the season with the cannibals featured them for literally 2 episodes after building up to it tediously for about 12) but this season and last season all this mind-numbing filler feels intentional. Call it cynical, but if I didn't know better I would say that pretty much the entirety of the last two seasons have existed only to set up Finale cliffhangers for the next season.
Think about this season: what's actually happened? We lost a couple of uninteresting characters no-one really cares about (Richard's death at the hands of Morgan was perhaps the only jarring thing that had any meaning, and even that felt silly and not particularly noteworthy) and that's it. We're in exactly the same place as we were almost SIXTEEN HOURS of television ago, with the exception that Rick et al. managed to botch shooting at Negan once in the last 5 minutes.
To me that's pretty inexcusable. Viewers should be rewarded and entertained for putting the time in, not just feel like they're clocking up the hours until the next series is commissioned and something vague happens.
I'm going to give the show one more season to buck up the bad writing, dumb characters and lack of any kind of actual real plot...and then that's it. Right now the only thing that's good is Negan: I actually like him more than Rick. He may be evil, but he's leagues more efficient and is actually pretty good at surviving as a form of society compared to our utterly dysfunctional heroes...
