_-_

So... I didn’t actually loathe this episode. Or–– let’s be fair. I didn’t loathe about the first 5/6ths of this episode. My bar’s low at this point, so “not loathing” is a pretty high praise for this season, and for a while there I was actually enjoying it. I was feeling a little bit invested in these characters. And I think the reason was that it actually felt like a break from the endless, relentless slog of pure misery that the show’s been plagued with for more than a season and a half now.

And then, of course, it wasn’t.

Now look, I’m not going to argue that the apocalypse should be a happy place. I’m not saying TWD shouldn’t be dark overall, shouldn’t be frightening and tug at your heartstrings and leave you in ruins. But it also shouldn’t be one endless stretch of depressing to the point where it just leaves you vaguely irritated, bored, and drained more than genuinely upset, and that’s what it becomes if we don’t see some sparks of hope littered through the misery. Shows need emotional contrast. There needs to be an occasional respite. Viewers need a reason to care.

And this felt like, finally, we might be getting that. That finally, through faith or luck or just pure probability at this point, something might actually go right. Not perfect –– the doc still got injured, and that makes sense. They had to fight their way there and Gabriel might still go blind. But at this point, after how long the characters and the viewers have been repeatedly beaten down, it would have been not only nice but better, story-wise, to have a moment where something good happens. Re-engage the viewers. Give them a reason to hope again. Give your story more depth by mixing up the emotional elements a little. Everyone knows that an action movie can’t be pure action or people’s eyes glaze over. We need to be invested in the characters. A drama needs a dash of humor here and there, and a tragedy... a tragedy needs hope.

The episode could have given us that. It could have been unique in the course of a dreary season. It could have offered a spark of brightness when we all needed it, when we’re all wounded from recent losses. Just give a couple of minor characters a bit of luck, and give the viewers a reason to hope again.

But no. The show did the depressing thing. The predictable thing. The boring thing. And you can argue that it’s more realistic, but I’d argue that even in dark circumstances, good things do happen occasionally, and the show’s less realistic for never giving us that. More than that, it’s less engaging. We all know things are going to suck, people are going to be sad, and if there are two doctors then one of them’s gonna die. We live with a show, now, where people live or die by plot armor, where attempts to be shocking are too expected to be more than frustrating.

I was enjoying the episode because I hoped it was going to be something different, for once. Something interesting. But they couldn’t resist the urge to try and pull heartstrings, and forgot that hearts need a chance to mend before pulling them again will pay off.

I used to love this show so much. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be feeling nearly this amount of sheer rage about the direction the show’s decided to go now. From the beyond stupid and illogical decisions to the sheer message it’s trying to deliver, nothing about this show is working anymore... to an extent that I can’t understand how these scripts even managed to make it out of the writers’ room, much less through filming, editing, and onto my screen.

Spoilers ahead.

The Garbage People

First off, the positive: thank whatever lingering revenants of Walking Dead gods exist that the Garbage People are finally dead. Well, most of them, anyway. In a seeming convenience of epic proportions, the Garbage Leader managed to survive the slaughter. (Are we supposed to believe Simon left her alive to seek revenge another day on purpose..? Are we supposed to believe that, even if he had decided to do that, Jadis had just stood by during the firefight doing nothing, not trying to save her people? ...Well, that one I can actually believe; her one proven characteristic beyond completely unwarranted self-confidence and an inability to form basic word groupings was her complete and utter selfishness. Why would she fight back during the slaughter, if a gun wasn’t aimed at her?)

So, plus side: the Garbage People are (mostly) gone, plus the shock of seeing them all die seemed to jolt the part of her brain that remembered how sentences work back into motion.

And I guess we were supposed to feel bad for her at the end there, when she finally showed some hint of human emotion, grinding up the Walker remnants of her people, but I was pretty unaffected. I’m not going to blame the actress for this one; she worked with what she was given, and did it well. In another situation, I would have been moved. These people have been absolute scum since they first appeared on the show, stealing everything they had, betraying anyone who came in contact with them. Repeatedly.

And yet Rick was obsessed with befriending them to the point of utter stupidity. Seriously, they’d proven untrustworthy so they were a high-level risk. They’d also shown absolutely no sign of strengths that would help Rick defeat Negan. Beyond, I guess, being extra bodies. Their entire motto was that they “take, don’t bother,” meaning that they scavenge when other people aren’t looking. If Rick had needed them for food runs, or to steal weapons from the Saviors maybe, then that would have at least made some sort of sense. But for some reason, Gimple & co introduced us to these scavenger characters with no apparent fighting experience and immediately made Rick obsessed with the idea of having them as fellow soldiers, no matter what. They demand guns –– when they, again, haven’t proven themselves and shouldn’t be in a position to demand anything. But ok, fine, Rick was desperate for extra bodies. But then they betrayed Alexandria in an absolutely devastating way. So does Rick write them off? Does he want revenge? Nope, he goes back to them with no plan beyond “pretty please lets be friends now,” gets himself locked up, and then abandoned and betrayed AGAIN.

After that, you’d think Rick would start to catch on. But nope, the start of this episode has Rick and Michonne heading back to beg these useless, treacherous people for help A THIRD TIME. What is Rick’s obsession with these people? What is he seeing in them that I’m not?

Of course, Rick’s not seeing anything beyond terrible writing pulling his strings, because while he was more than willing to let bygones be bygones when he headed back to the trash heap, when he saw Jadis and she actually did ask to be allies, he bitterly turned away and left her to die. He made the entire journey there in the hopes of finding an ally, found one, then scoffed and wasted a bullet trying to run her off. I guess you can argue that Rick’s only interest in the Garbage society had been their numbers, and now that those numbers were gone he’d finally recognized that siding with her wasn’t worth the risk, but it just ended up seeming like a waste of screen time, and doubled up on making Rick seem stupid and unlikable all at once.

Last Garbage thoughts:

The explanation for their absurd Kevin from the Office-style communication is really just that... she wanted to separate her group from the rest of society? I guess... where people know how to talk?

Why the hell was Jadis trapped in those garbage piles, with that door being the only way out? It was a garbage heap, couldn’t she just... climb to the top of the garbage and down the other side? Am I missing something there? ...Maybe there’s a wall taller than all the garbage that I just haven’t noticed? And am I supposed to believe that supposedly expert sneakers like the Garbage People wouldn’t have a ton of secret ways out of their compounding in any case?

I actually thought they were about to touch on something interesting for a second there, with the mention of a helipad. I guess something could still come of that in the future, since it does seem to tie in to that helicopter Rick saw at some point and never mentioned again, but just the image of any of the Garbage people flying helicopters is ridiculous enough that I’m not sure I wouldn’t just outright laugh at the payoff, if it comes.

Alright though, that’s enough on them. Moving on.

Michonne

I’m not going to rag too much on Michonne’s grief-stricken attempt to save the burning gazebo. She was grief-stricken, I get that. But I do think it was a pretty missed opportunity that they showed the handprints Carl had made with Judith –– one of the last things Carl had done in his life and that might actually have emotional significance to the family and Judith as she gets older –– and then have her express her grief by trying to save a random gazebo they’d never see again anyway. Trying to pull up a plank from the porch might have been a hopeless move, but seeing her try to pry that up while the Walkers swarmed closer… refusing to abandon this small piece of Carl until it was almost too late… that would have made a much bigger emotional impact to me and had just been set up at the scene’s start. It was a huge miss, in my opinion.

And now onto Negan.

Negan

If you subscribe to the Church of Negan you’re not going to agree with this part, but that entire final speech was... infuriating. One of the clumsiest rewrites of history and attempts to redeem an unredeemable character I’ve ever seen, and I hate that the show seems to be doing it so earnestly.

Here’s the thing. Negan might actually think he’s a good guy. He might think he’s on the right side of history here. That’s fine, that’s good. Villains are the heroes of their own story and all that, and that kind of conviction even in irredeemable people is what makes for interesting villains. But that’s not what’s happening here. The show’s framing, the fact that they have Rick stunned into silence by Negan’s off-base insights, the fact that he gets the last word in the episode, as though the writers are leaving us all to think “that’s a good point, just go think about that,” suggests to me that this isn’t a case of a villain seeing himself as a hero. This is the show trying to suggest to us that despite all Negan’s done, all we’ve seen him and his people do, he’s actually had the best interests of these communities at heart the whole time, and they could well have been irrational for choosing to fight back.

And that’s just not true.

Do we remember when the Saviors first visited Alexandria? The way they treated the community? The impossible demands they made? Beating the crap out of Aaron for absolutely no reason? The way they stole all their beds and burned them as a completely pointless fuck you to our protagonists? Negan’s goal was never to make the communities comfortable, happy, or feel safe. It’s never been peace. He was there to terrorize them into submission. He was there to make himself and a few trusted lieutenants rich off the backs of literally everyone else they encountered.

His has always been a reign of terror.

Have we forgotten his wives? The women who loathe and dream of killing him, who he coerced into marriage and rapes under threat of misery or death to themselves or their loved ones? But nah, he’s a swell guy actually. He’s a little tough, but he just wants the best for everyone.

I don’t understand this eleventh hour attempt to redeem Negan. I don’t read the comics... and I honestly don’t care. If he was redeemed there in an arc that makes sense, that’s great. Good job, comics. But that’s not happening here. I don’t buy it, and the show’s attempts toward it are clumsy and hugely transparent. And this idea that Negan “might have had a point” that the show’s trying to feed us with that ending...... no.

You know what, maybe he’d have had an argument if Carl had died in a fight with the Saviors. “Well Rick -- you had to try and fight back and now you’ve lost your son. He might’ve still been alive if you’d just listened, but you taught him to rebel and he paid the price.” That would’ve been a twisted argument, but it would have been an argument, at least. But the idea that Carl’s death by Walkers –– his totally unrelated death by Walkers because he decided to go out on his own time and act careless –– is in any way on Rick is beyond absurd. Carl wasn’t on a leash, he would have gone out either way. It’s got nothing to do with the war and Negan –– and the show –– should not try to argue that it does.

Alright, I was going to end my rant there, but I still need to jump over to the absolute stupidity of that Oceanside arc for a second.

Because.

What the hell.

Oceanside

Ok, Oceanside has never been a successful story device in my opinion. They’ve always brought out the sociopathic side of our heroes and continue to do so here: Enid taking no responsibility for taking a kill shot when she absolutely didn’t need to, and going on to tell the girl whose grandmother she’d just murdered that they should basically be grateful for everything Rick’s group has done for them. Which is… nothing. Absolutely nothing. They terrorized them, stole their guns (leaving them defenseless against Walkers and future attacks) and then killed their former leader. That’s all the Alexandrians are to these people, but for reasons beyond my understanding Oceanside continues to treat them the way Rick treats the Garbage People, and us viewers are somehow supposed to think that’s a good thing. Just imagine the Alexandrians from their perspective. They’re basically the Saviors. And if that’s the point the show is trying to make they’re utterly failing at expressing it, because Cyndie continually treats them as though her own group is in the wrong for just… wanting to stay safe and survive. “Stop attacking outsiders,” really? That’s the message they’re supposed to be getting from this? They left Tara alive and she betrayed them, the Alexandrians stole their weapons without a care for their safety, and then the third time they show up out of thin air, it’s to kill someone’s grandma.

...And that breaks my heart because I loved this show so deeply for so long. But I feel like if you don’t worship Negan and think he’s the highlight of the universe, there’s just no point to continuing.