I found the overall finale to be quite not the best. I had expected a bit more of a brutal final battle similar to that of that mob battle in The Dark Knight Rises. I felt the show was kind of hinting at it given there was all of that talk of being low on ammunition. It would have been neat seeing two groups of humans being so desperate to destroy each other that they have been devolved to such a sorry state that they literally had grab at each others' throats with their bare hands. Instead, it was one sided and we got the typical off-screen shooty shooty bang bang.
I feel after the whole conflicted was over, things started feeling rushed. As if the show was trying to acknowledge as many arcs as possible and close them all up to call it a day. I felt it was rushing itself to cut from one scene of characters to the next to do it all. Here is Maggie talking to dude who wants to totally bone her NEXT here is Rosita and Tera visiting Sanctuary, oh look how quickly they've all become frie- NEXT here is Daryl and Dwight, oh they don't like each other still, get out of here you ugly burnt face man- NEXT uh oh, Maggie and Daryl don't like Negan being alive NEXT alright finally here is Rick and Michonne talking to Negan about his fate NEXT here is Morgan talking about being alone because HE KNOWS WHAT IT IS.
They really could have left a lot of this stuff out and kept the essentials. Negan's fate and Dwight's fate. The two main antagonists and what happens to them. Seeing Sanctuary all pretty and friendly that quickly didn't make sense to me and would have been better to have seen that in the next season, rather than just shoving it in right then and there. We didn't need that Godfather-esque Maggie seen to imply something completely out of character with these characters. I felt it was implied enough that keeping Negan alive leaves Maggie with some bad blood. Leave that tension to start building up next season, not explicitly shove in this moustache-twirling scene with Maggie and Daryl plotting and scheming. And all of the Morgan stuff could have just moved over to Fear.
Overall, I don't think it was very fulfilling. After almost three seasons of this Saviors nonsense, it just didn't pan out well at all.
For the amount of build up they spent on Oceanside, the payoff was very little.
Indeed. They showed up for like one little scene to throw some molotovs and that was it. At only a small group of Saviors at that. Enough Saviors that it didn't even seem necessary to evacuate all of Hilltop. It's another aspect of this finale that really leads me to believe this was rather rushed. I wouldn't be surprised if we never saw Oceanside again, and I would be okay with that because I don't care about them.