The Walking Dead Season Six Finale

Spoilers. Duh. (If you call the fact that there are no spoilers, spoilers.)

 This week’s Lesson on Narrative Construction comes to you courtesy of The Walking Dead: Creating 92 minutes of well-crafted tension and suspense is only effective if it closes with one minute of resolution. See, if you put the viewer on the hook for an hour and a half and then give them absolutely no ending, you have just hit the “implode” button on your story. It doesn’t have to be the ending the viewer wants. It can be gruesome, or weak-willed. But it should be SOMETHING. Say the camera had panned back to reveal Darryl, Glenn, Maggie, Rosita, or Eugene; the result would have been somewhere between electrifying, expected, horrifying, or par for the course. But the worst you can do is leave everyone with a hearty “MEH.” Kill Darryl: outrage. Kill Glenn: predictable (but also, awwww…) Kill Rosita: safe. Kill Eugene: FINALLY. Kill Maggie: holy shit, they went there. But kill…….um, someone?: okay, who chickened out?

 My suspicion is that the showrunners and writers are now crippled by what has become the main goal of this show: to not piss anyone off too much. AMC lives and dies by The Walking Dead now, and the fear of alienating the fans is what keeps them up at night. My guess is that rather than take any sort of risk, the writers decided to phone it in, not show who died, watch social media carefully, and unveil their decision after the summer. They didn’t tell us who’s dead because they need us to tell them. Do we want to finally see a beloved character kick it, to shake things up a bit? Can we bear to lose Darryl, were we hoping for something less predictable than Glenn’s presupposed demise, were we crossing our fingers for the end of one of our less-beloved newcomers or background players, like Rosita or Aaron? (Oh, Aaron, whose character, for me, bears the Arrested-Development-trademarked Curse of Ann – “…who?” Unlike characters I love to hate, this show is peppered with characters I hate to hate – there’s not a bad actor in this bunch, but some of them are so unevenly or just poorly written that I end up disliking them in spite of what the show’s intentions may be.)

 Yes, this season was flawed. As with many of the seasons, it was uneven, at times ambling and wandering and boring in turn. The sheer phobia of killing off anyone we care about has made for a predictable narrative: characters are introduced in order to die, even if they deserved a longer arc (RIP, Emmy-winning Merritt Wever) because we can’t risk our core bunch now. Everyone has been getting comfortable nights’ sleep and a hot shower for months and it seems like food is on endless supply. Sure we're told they're running low and need to go on supply runs, but mainly because they're out of toothpaste and whatsherface wants a soda. That crisis level is only slightly higher than my recent frantic plea to my husband to pick up tacos on the way home from work. No one is scared or scary anymore. We may get a little tense watching, but that’s it. Somehow a world full of zombies and marauding survivors has transitioned into little more than an annoyance, and there’s still enough food for Eugene to continue appearing incapable of a brisk jog to the mailbox. (Seriously, in the zombie apocalypse, I’m pretty sure everyone would be racking up extra belt notches after a couple of years.)

 It’s been implied that the show gave “hints” to who died. I doubt this, since I maintain that they didn’t actually decide yet, but I could buy that they gave us a few suggestions to run with. Negan - who, by the way, was played to the barbed-wire hilt by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, in a unfortunately poorly-written and rambling monologue that belabored its three talking points for entirely too long and started to smack of those heavy-handed “WE’RE CREATING TENSION HERE” scenes with the Governor that had me skip half a season out of sheer annoyance… that tangent went on so long that I’ll just start over. Negan didn’t deign to speak to a few members of the group; Rosita and Aaron, for example, were completely overlooked. And with the benefit of being less divisive on the death front, safe money is on one of them going to bat (HA! HA HA!!) for the gang. However, both Abraham and Euseless – sorry, Eugene – had nice tidy potential wrap-ups to their storylines buried into the season finale. Either one could die feeling pretty good about his role in the group and this new world.

Which gives rise to another failing of the show: it is absolutely enamored of a nice neat narrative. Everyone gets an introduction, an arc, and a resolution. Finally found people who make you feel safe? Peace out. Finally discovered who you really are in this world? Glad you nailed that down, bye. Making it work with a special someone? Good, you’re going out feeling loved. Had a hero moment? Tick tock! You know Morgan and Carol will be around for a while because everything they know about themselves has been screwed with bigtime in the past couple of episodes. (Carol tangent: I love the crisis of conscience and I feel like it’s authentic in theory, but it’s like some writer woke up at 3 a.m. and went “WE NEED SOMEONE TO HIT WIT’S END” and just shoved it into the middle of an already-written episode. Where was the development? Carol just, like, made beet cookies and realized her life was meaningless. Which, now that I talk it out, makes perfect sense. That’d about do it for me, too. And look, I know I JUST finished complaining about too many nice neat narratives, but Carol’s jump from bang-bang to boo-hoo doesn’t ring true without SOME development.)

 Despite its inanity in the end, and what one could argue was a pretty implausible set of circumstances, the tension-building in the episode was applause-worthy if only because it created real stress for the first time in recent memory. We lost all fear with this show ages ago, but it was also dangerously close to losing any tension too. We never really feel like our characters are in any real danger anymore. Even with the quarry-zombies or the Wolves’ invasion of Alexandria, certain peril always seems miles away. Even cliffhangers, which could be rewarding in their tension, have come to be so expected on this show that they’re not effective devices anymore. And now, with this impotent season finale, we’re left again with little fear or tension, just frustration and resignation to what we KNOW is coming next: a time jump. Which brings me to my next point:

 Stop being so predictable in your dicking around. Open Season seven with a pan of the scene you just closed on, and reveal what happened. I suspect that’s not going to happen; we’re going to open on a damn supply run a few months down the road and bounce around on a bunch of morose characters going about their daily scrappy-menial-existence, collecting stuff to share with Negan. If we’re lucky they’ll give us the low-down in the first episode on who ate it; more likely we’ll visit several groups over a few episodes before we nail it down, so that by the time we figure out for sure who’s missing, we’ll have started to make our peace with it. Unless of course you do what could be the best thing for this show at this stage and cut the head off:

 Ditch Robert Kirkman; keep him on as consultant. The whole writing and showrunning staff could probably use a bit of tidying up. Kirkman is a brilliant mind who wrote a brilliant comic. And when you take someone who created a work of brilliance and ask him to adapt it to another platform, you’re probably not going to get much that’s unexpected. He is likely pretty proud of his original story and, with the exception of maybe adding a fucking CGI Jabba the Hut, he may not want to mess around with it too much. We can add (hi Darryl) but we don’t subtract. So yeah, it’s probably gonna be Glenn in the end. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing narratively – it’ll spur Maggie on to…..well, do exactly what she does in the comic. See the problem here? Let’s take a few risks. Hell, Lucille our “hero” Rick - whatever, like you’d care, you all want Darryl in charge anyway - and send the gang off to farther reaches. (Because come on, we live here: if zombies start popping up the FIRST thing I’m going to do is get the hell out of the deep South. This is not the place to be when vigilante justice becomes the law of the land.) It’s okay to change it up and stop regurgitating stuff folks already read in the comics, or heard from people who read the comics. We don’t have to be eternally faithful to the source material for this to be a great show. I might even argue that we CAN’T be eternally faithful to the source material for this to be a great show. A single film would have plenty of storyline to choose from and could stay faithful yet still be unpredictable; a serial that follows the original storyline suffers from a feeling of stale recitation. And if nothing else, one big huge deviation from the comics might be enough to shut up all of us who incessantly snivel about what must be coming because of what happened in the comics.

 Oh, and bring in some fresh stunt people. I recognize some of these zombies almost as easily as I do Carl and Michonne.

 (A note on the ninety minutes of meandering: I suspect that extra half hour comes down to censorship and, if true, was actually a good choice. Negan is VILE in the comics. To give up his ability to pepper his speech with profanity would water Negan down in a big bad way – and the show didn’t even come CLOSE, but it did the best it could on a cable network. The rules change after 10 p.m. – so there’s your explanation for being dragged along for 80 minutes before he shows up, rather than 50. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to him in the standard 9 p.m. time slot.)