‘The Walking Dead’ – Season 8 - Sundays on AMC

Jerm411 said:

There was just no consequence to it...I mean he gets bit off camera to save someone that'll probably be cannon fodder within 5 episodes.

That's another huge problem I have with the show...their "big moments" almost always just fall flat.

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Not saying your point doesn't still stand, but, if they stay more or less faithful to the source material, Siddiq...

Latvian Hitman said:

Not saying your point doesn't still stand, but, if they stay more or less faithful to the source material, Siddiq...

Spoiler: Comic Spoiler

...will be on the show for a long time. He's still alive in the comic. Or, at least he was as of late last year. I'm a few issues behind, currently.

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ArkkAngel007 said:

• Rick, who already wasn't wanting to kill all the Saviors (and was causing that rift to blows between him and Darryl, Maggie, Tara, and Morgan, remember?), suddenly turns heel from that and breaks his promise to Carl in wanting to kill them all and let others die. Morgan is also a coin flip at best in direction.

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That's kinda everyone at this point innit? The show's kinda boiled the protagonists down to either peace love Woodstock flower power agents of love or the child of The Punisher and Lt Kilgore, switching between them when they get too boring. The Saviors are the only ones with any real amount of complexity to their morality/motivations, at least in terms of Dwight, Gavin, mostly Negan. Shit, even Eugene's got an interesting angle even if he's a little weasel.

Mr Spasiba said:

That's kinda everyone at this point innit? The show's kinda boiled the protagonists down to either peace love Woodstock flower power agents of love or the child of The Punisher and Lt Kilgore, switching between them when they get too boring. The Saviors are the only ones with any real amount of complexity to their morality/motivations, at least in terms of Dwight, Gavin, mostly Negan. Shit, even Eugene's got an interesting angle even if he's a little weasel.

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I wouldn't really classify the ridiculous flip-flopping as moral complexity

Like does it get any more ridiculous than Carl? Last season, he was on the warpath for Negan. The show specifically made a point of showing his angry glare during Glen's murder when everyone was crying. He was the one who kicked off the finale shootout. He broke into the Sanctuary to kill Negan before anyone else.

And then all of sudden, off screen, between seasons, he becomes all "we need to live with the Saviors, no more killing, hope for the future, we need to help people"?

Rick was just as bad. Going from uniting everyone in a war and fighting back to being all about second chances and how he gives people his word and wanting to make alliances with people who betrayed his group like three times.

Jerm411 said:

Spoiler

That would be cool...I think he's a actually a character with a lot of potential, I just know how this show is...

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With five episodes left there's probably room for a "get to know siddiq" episode.

Wonderment said:

With five episodes left there's probably room for a "get to know siddiq" episode.

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...and then bam dead lol....

Man, this show... this latest episode wasn't even bad, it was just so damn boring. I really, really don't think I can watch it past this season, unless they drastically change things up.

Biological warfare after eight seasons. Really?

Maybe I'm really done with this shit.

The biological warfare idea seems a little lame considering the countless times we've seen these characters get covered in walker guts while having open wounds and stuff on their body. The entire cast should've been dead a long time ago going by these newly introduced rules.

Also I feel like I have no damn clue about the timeline of this show anymore. Tara is pissed about Denise being killed and I had to remember who Denise even was. She got killed off like three seasons ago but apparently only a few days have passed since then in the shows timeline? Maggie has been pregnant for multiple seasons now too and has yet to show any sort of baby bump. It's really weird how all this shit is occurring in such a short period of time yet the show has made it seem boring and slow as hell.

Wasn't there a time when Rosita went ham on zombies, and then accidentally sliced open Abraham's arm with the same knife? He didn't even get a cold.

Covering yourself in walker stink has been a defense for years. Trying to sell it now as an offensive strategy is weak. It's not the bubonic plague so that catapult strategy is lame. Are they hoping to nail somebody in the face with zombie goop? Sure, I'd want to see it for the comedic effect, but I'm not going to suddenly believe it's going to be an effective war strategy. All it's going to do is piss off the clean up crews.

Maybe they can play "It's Raining Men" during the attack.

That episode felt like it lasted 3 hours.

In fact, every scene with Tara is far too long. Jesus Christ what an awful character.

The only thing that could redeem this illogical biological warfare is if it completely fails and the other team just completely mows down Negans men.

SABO. said:

The only thing that could redeem this illogical biological warfare is if it completely fails and the other team just completely mows down Negans men.

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Would be easy either way considering the Saviors' are infecting their melee weapons like they're going to be conducting a medieval siege

SeanM said:

The biological warfare idea seems a little lame considering the countless times we've seen these characters get covered in walker guts while having open wounds and stuff on their body. The entire cast should've been dead a long time ago going by these newly introduced rules.

Also I feel like I have no damn clue about the timeline of this show anymore. Tara is pissed about Denise being killed and I had to remember who Denise even was. She got killed off like three seasons ago but apparently only a few days have passed since then in the shows timeline? Maggie has been pregnant for multiple seasons now too and has yet to show any sort of baby bump. It's really weird how all this shit is occurring in such a short period of time yet the show has made it seem boring and slow as hell.

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Its definitely been more than a few days, but Tara isn't going to get over her GF being murdered in a few days, months, or even years (although she kinda forgot the last girl pretty quickly didn't she). The problem is the writers aren't good at writing for multiple character and concurrent events. They succeed far better when all the characters are together. Some of the best moments have been when large ensembles of the cast are together or working at least in the same environment (ex. Carol saving the rest of the gang from the termites). The writers also don't do so bad when the characters are apart but are going through self-contained independent plots (Rick, Michone, and Carl dealing with the Scavengers or Carol and Tyrese with the children at the grove). Honestly, the stage is too big for the writers' own good. They wanted to show this large scale operation unfold on-screen but they can't coherently write what every character is doing to set the end stage without making a mess out of it. The focus on so many communities, including the Saviors fucked the writers even more. They don't have the skill to make it work. All the cuts become so jumbled and hard to follow and the constant cutting makes it feels like nothing much ever happens. It's taken seasons to set this war up but not much time has really passed.

If someone needs to die, it's Tara. What an awful, awful character.

Sure, get the one guy who has info on the Saviors off the group so you can kill him for your own revenge. And then fuck up so badly that he ends that he has to save your ass by going back into the enemy team. Daryl had every right to be pissed, and you only defended Dwight because it was your fault he left back.

So fucking dumb.

Lol what an episode this week, Gabe parts were part endearing and part comedy.
I dont get the point of his character.

Also I kinda feel Dwight slipped back into the Saviors waaaay to easily

How on EARTH does the actress who plays Maggie still struggle so hard with her accent.

Rehynn said:

How on EARTH does the actress who plays Maggie still struggle so hard with her accent.

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haha, I was thinking the same.

Dreams-Visions said:

That episode felt like it lasted 3 hours.

In fact, every scene with Tara is far too long. Jesus Christ what an awful character.

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tell me about it

please just die already

Pankratous said:

tell me about it

please just die already

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Seriously. I wanted Dwight to kill her so bad when she was chasing him. He should have just ratted her to those Saviors and saved us all from her inevitable stupidity in future episodes.

Rehynn said:

How on EARTH does the actress who plays Maggie still struggle so hard with her accent.

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I didn't even realize she was trying to do the accent.

Alligatorjandro said:

Please kill Eugene

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Please kill everyone except Rick, Negan, Maggie, Michonne, Daryl, Ezekiel , Siddiq and Dwight.

It's become such a shit show. "The lord will show us the patch". Jesus, what a worthless character and arc.
Nothing in this last episode was of any value. Well almost nothing of this season was of any value.
The story is crap, the characters all are becoming complete assholes for the most part. Daryl is the prime example of wasted potential.
Nothing that happens even matters and at this point I don't even care anymore what happens to any of them.
And this was one of my favourite series of the last couple of years till a season or 2 ago. Fuck. :-/

Eh.. back to the usual stuff. Recycled themes we've seen a billion times (faith to carry on, we're here for a reason, only to have it all shattered), side characters we don't care about, force drama (the Tara stuff was laughable), general spinning wheels. Negan is tired, just kill him off. I have no confidence they can do what was done in the comic in any meaningful way.

They've shown there is no interest at all in fixing the major problems with the show and are just trying to sail the ship along as far as it can go. As long as it's got millions of viewers (headed into it's freakin' 9th season), they're just gunna ride the wave. It's frustrating to watch them make the same mistakes for years in a row.

bye said:

Ratsky will defend the show until his last dying breath.

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Lol it's truly remarkable.

Rehynn said:

How on EARTH does the actress who plays Maggie still struggle so hard with her accent.

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Well, she is British...

Also, was that Maggie's baby? I must have completely forgot that she had a baby. I thought she was just pregnant.

Klean said:

Well, she is British...

Also, was that Maggie's baby? I must have completely forgot that she had a baby. I thought she was just pregnant.

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I think that's the baby rick found after killing everyone in a building recently. (When he and Daryl were looking for guns)

Maggie is supposed to be many months pregnant but his somehow rail thin.

This season is the first time since the show started that I record the shows and don't feel any sense of urgency to watch them. I just caught up with the last 3 episodes, and man has this cast/crew and setting run its course for me. Wrap it up at the end of the season and move on. While I like the narrative and cast of FTWD better at this point, I think the zombie apocalypse setting has worn out its welcome across all mediums.

Negan's revelation about using zombie guts on weapons just made me roll my eyes and wonder if the current writers don't even bother with their own rule continuity anymore.

Super Amikami said:

Its definitely been more than a few days, but Tara isn't going to get over her GF being murdered in a few days, months, or even years (although she kinda forgot the last girl pretty quickly didn't she). The problem is the writers aren't good at writing for multiple character and concurrent events. They succeed far better when all the characters are together. Some of the best moments have been when large ensembles of the cast are together or working at least in the same environment (ex. Carol saving the rest of the gang from the termites). The writers also don't do so bad when the characters are apart but are going through self-contained independent plots (Rick, Michone, and Carl dealing with the Scavengers or Carol and Tyrese with the children at the grove). Honestly, the stage is too big for the writers' own good. They wanted to show this large scale operation unfold on-screen but they can't coherently write what every character is doing to set the end stage without making a mess out of it. The focus on so many communities, including the Saviors fucked the writers even more. They don't have the skill to make it work. All the cuts become so jumbled and hard to follow and the constant cutting makes it feels like nothing much ever happens. It's taken seasons to set this war up but not much time has really passed.

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The storytelling structure is absolutely destroying the show imo. There's such a huge disconnect between the shows short timeline and how the episodes are actually being delivered to the audience.

Tara's girlfriend Denise got killed in Season 6, Tara didn't even learn about it until like a year later in Season 7, and now we're in the final episodes of Season 8 and the writers are still trying to mine drama from the death of a very minor character that occured three seasons ago. Fucking ridiculous. Under no circumstances should such a simple storyline for a superfluous D-list character take this long to play out. The audience simply doesn't give a shit at this point and Tara just comes across as an unlikable and annoying character. Terrible actress and storyline.

And that feels like the norm for this show. Characters sometimes disappear for episodes at a time and when they pick those storylines back up nobody remembers or cares anymore.

I feel like the only people who enjoy this show anymore are the comic readers. They'd understand the show better, have an understanding of the passage of time, scenes to look forward to, etc. As a non comic-reader though it's been extremely boring and frustrating to follow. I'm hoping the new showrunner will get things back on track, but I highly doubt it. And if this lame Negan storyline somehow continues into S9 then I'll probably drop the show for good.

I'm right in the middle of the third WD comic omnibus (coincidentally the war with the Saviors) and what's readily apparent is that this show takes the source material and really drags it out and because of that these last two seasons contain a ridiculous amount of filler, which is why I think people are losing their patience.

I still enjoy the show regardless and Dean's Negan is fuckity-fuck-fantastic but yeah, there's so much nothing in some of these episodes.

And Tara is beyond annoying at this point.

bye said:

Ratsky will defend the show until his last dying breath. It's slightly endearing.

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Surfinn said:

Lol it's truly remarkable.

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To be fair, there are definitely some rose-tinted glasses going on. I'll take seasons 2-5 of this show, hospital arc aside, over season 1. Every single time.

Tetra-Grammaton-Cleric said:

I'm right in the middle of the third WD comic omnibus (coincidentally the war with the Saviors) and what's readily apparent is that this show takes the source material and really drags it out and because of that these last two seasons contain a ridiculous amount of filler, which is why I think people are losing their patience.

I still enjoy the show regardless and Dean's Negan is fuckity-fuck-fantastic but yeah, there's so much nothing in some of these episodes.

And Tara is beyond annoying at this point.

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I know some hate filler regardless (always need the plot moving forward, action, revelations), but with The Walking Dead it's just bad filler. Contradictive and pointless character writing, very little real interaction and relations despite the cast size, and just a general lack of depth. Occasionally they hit the mark like with Clear and allow it to influence characters down the line, but these past couple of seasons have been a whole lot of nothing.

As for Tara, I'm cooling a bit in my annoyance. Far less stupid things have been done and it was expected. Getting sick of the swinging pedulum that is Darryl though. Dwight leading Savior's away after Tara tried to murder him (after Darryl defended him most of the episode)= Must Kill Dwight ARGHHH!

Edit: Hopefully they stop drawing out the Sherri mystery and just reveal she's alive. Wouldn't be surprising if she ran into the one who escaped Dwight and killed her.

Pillville said:

I think that's the baby rick found after killing everyone in a building recently. (When he and Daryl were looking for guns)

Maggie is supposed to be many months pregnant but his somehow rail thin.

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She on that "survival diet." I dunno- it's not too far fetched. Had a vegan friend who went through a pregnancy and only gained 20 lbs. Literally nothing about her appearance changed at all except for her belly, and even that only became noticeable to outsiders over the last few months.

ArkkAngel007 said:

I know some hate filler regardless (always need the plot moving forward, action, revelations), but with The Walking Dead it's just bad filler. Contradictive and pointless character writing, very little real interaction and relations despite the cast size, and just a general lack of depth. Occasionally they hit the mark like with Clear and allow it to influence characters down the line, but these past couple of seasons have been a whole lot of nothing.

As for Tara, I'm cooling a bit in my annoyance. Far less stupid things have been done and it was expected. Getting sick of the swinging pedulum that is Darryl though. Dwight leading Savior's away after Tara tried to murder him (after Darryl defended him most of the episode)= Must Kill Dwight ARGHHH!

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Having finally gotten around to reading the comic, I'm sometimes taken aback by how quickly some of these larger story arcs are resolved when compared to the TV show. As you mentioned, such filler isn't always a bad thing given the transition from one medium to another but there really is an abundance of episodes that are just so much air in the potato chip bag.

jelly said:

One of the worst things about this season is the editing and how it constantly jumps around in time and place. It's almost incomprehensible at times, I've thought on more than one occasion that I missed something, wait what's going, when is this, before that or after that, how did they get there.

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Yep. And they only have 8 eps per half season, but they'll spend one ep per character or couple characters, so by the end almost nothing has happened, and then you wait 4-6 months.

jelly said:

One of the worst things about this season is the editing and how it constantly jumps around in time and place. It's almost incomprehensible at times, I've thought on more than one occasion that I missed something, wait what's going, when is this, before that or after that, how did they get there.

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This was especially bad the first half of the season when the "war" first broke out. Putting aside the confusingly poor staging, shooting and editing of the gun battles themselves, it was all just a narrative mess to begin with. The "who, what, where and why" was just completely lost on me at points.

This show is one of my favorite comedies.

Latvian Hitman said:

This was especially bad the first half of the season when the "war" first broke out. Putting aside the confusingly poor staging, shooting and editing of the gun battles themselves, it was all just a narrative mess to begin with. The "who, what, where and why" was just completely lost on me at points.

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I don't know what happened. The season six super horde arc worked pretty well IMO, with the first three-four episodes happening around the same time, but the episodes synced together up well and didn't come across as disjointed

Gimple has single handedly managed to fuck up this entire show. I wish we still had Darabont.

Still haven't watched the episode. I can assume that I didn't miss much?

ZeoVGM said:

To be fair, there are definitely some rose-tinted glasses going on. I'll take seasons 2-5 of this show, hospital arc aside, over season 1. Every single time.

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There are issues with every season. But to not recognize the obvious nosedive in quality, especially in the last two or three seasons, feels disingenuous.

RatskyWatsky said:

I'm actually pretty critical of the show, but this thread is overflowing with (mostly poorly thought out) criticisms to the point where it's looking like a YouTube comment section. Rather than just piling on, I prefer to do something else.



It's also entered into a "look at this bitch eating crackers" phase, where literally nothing it does will ever please anyone. If it follows the comics then fuck the writers, if it does something new then fuck the writers - I mean, not that the execution has always or ever been very good, but a lot of these complaints have been with the show since season one and you'd think people would have learned to accept them ages ago.

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I get what you're saying. I do. I used to defend the show a lot.

But I find it really hard the past two seasons.

Klean said:

Well, she is British...

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As are the actors who play Rick, Jesus, Jadis, and Morgan, yet they can actually do a decent American accent.

ZeoVGM said:

I get what you're saying. I do. I used to defend the show a lot.

But I find it really hard the past two seasons.

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I loved Season 1. Season 2 had some really trying times (The farm), but was still good. Everything since then has been up and down (Most of that season three Lori stuff, Killer Carol -> I don't like killing Carol -> Killer Carol), but it is largely an enjoyable show. These last two seasons have lower highs and lower lows. I like some stuff like Negan and Eugene, or that scene from last episode with Jadis and the crusher (it was nice to have a moment that was emotional for a character and not something the audience was supposed to feel). The biggest problem it has is pacing. The show likes to drag on, as if spending more time on something = audience investment. The last two seasons are especially guilty of this (Though the Andrea and the Governor stuff dragged a bit too earlier on), and the slow pace is exacerbated by the multiple story-lines.

Said story-lines:
A) Involve characters that suddenly get a lot of focus and aren't interesting (Tara) and/or
B) Act as filler material to give characterisation to the main cast without doing anything (I'm thinking of that Rick and Michonne episode from last season with the deer) and/or
C) Are completely new material, that gets bad audience reception and gets nipped in the bud (Trash people, those "Wolves"/ "W" guys from several seasons back, I'm sure there are more). I guess this is a debatable point - whether ending these threads early is a good or a bad thing.

You could probably cut the last few seasons down by several hours into only the important scenes, and it would be better. Take out every scene where X shoots at Y and nothing important happens except a few no-name extras die and you could bring back the tension in gunfights again. Or hell, make it so that Walkers are actually threatening even to smart people that are paying attention.

I swear, for a zombie show it really goes out of its way to make the zombies an inconvenience rather than a main threat.

More_Badass said:

I don't know what happened. The season six super horse arc worked pretty well IMO, with the first three-four episodes happening around the same time, but the episodes synced together up well and didn't come across as disjointed

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The first few episodes of season 6 when it covered the same few hours from about four perspectives? That was genuinely one of the most dragged out and dull pieces of television I've ever seen. After that I pretty much have up on the show.

http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/daily-ratings/sunday-cable-ratings-march-11-2018/

The show is plumetting. And it can only keep dropping for so long before "It's still one of the highest rated shows on television" will no longer matter to AMC.

Sunday cable ratings: 'The Walking Dead' goes even lower

It turns out "The Walking Dead's" lows last week weren't just a result of the show airing opposite the Oscars.

The AMC series still led Sunday's cable ratings by wide margins, but it did so with even smaller numbers than the previous week — which were below anything "The Walking Dead" had drawn in at least six years. Sunday's 2.8 rating in adults 18-49 and 6.6 million viewers were down from 2.9 and 6.82 million a week earlier.

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Good to see people are responding to the poor quality. Maybe it will light a fire to make real, long lasting changes that will get things back on track.

Nemo said:

Gimple has single handedly managed to fuck up this entire show. I wish we still had Darabont.

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I don't know how you manage to drive away that kind of proven talent.

Look at that man's record; it's fucking gold.