“Love doesn’t die. LOVE… DOESN’T… DIE!”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
Well, that’s over. A plotline that’s been six years in the making, stretching across no fewer than four TV series, with details eked out crumb by crumb, has finally come to an end. Was it a satisfying one?
It was always going to be a tall order to tie up all the threads regarding the Civic Republic established throughout the original Walking Dead, Fear, World Beyond, and even Daryl Dixon. It was an even taller order to do it in the one episode The Ones Who Live allowed itself for this conclusion. What we got was… ok. But hardly the denouement that fit with all that buildup.
Along with that, this show didn’t exactly help itself by also having to provide an emotional reunion for two of the franchise’s best-loved characters after six years apart. Hands up who seriously expected Rick and Michonne not to survive this? No? Thought not. Scott Gimple might have been brave/audacious/mad enough to kill off the beloved Carl Grimes, but Rick and Michonne are probably the safest characters in the franchise who aren’t Daryl and Carol.
But with this having been touted as the actors’ final appearances in the parts, does this mean we’ve seen the last of them? Their somewhat underwhelming happy ending, reunited with Judith and RJ (Cailey Fleming and Antony Azor have certainly grown) in an otherwise empty field leaves the possibility of their return open, should Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira fancy it.
The path that took them there was, though, somewhat predictable; indeed I’ve been predicting it for several weeks now, ever since we heard mention of the big ‘summit’ at the CRM’s Cascadia Base. It seemed so obvious that even last week I was wondering if it was a red herring, and the Civic Republic Military would survive to tyrannise another few spinoffs.
But no, the Operation Valkyrie approach it was to be. And this was where its plausibility began to come apart rather. The 20 July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler by his own officers relied on having hundreds of people in key strategic positions to safely transfer power from the Fuhrer’s surviving loyalists. And it still didn’t work. Rick and Michonne’s plan had… Rick and Michonne.
To be fair, franchise honcho Scott Gimple, on scripting duty again this week, managed to put the characters into positions that the beginning of this, at least, was plausible. Rick had no problem walking right back into Cascadia Base with only a few cuts to indicate he’d fallen out of a crashing helicopter; well, it’s no more ridiculous than what the CRM has already seen him do, and did give him the opportunity to growl, “I’m Sergeant Major Rick Grimes. You probably thought I was dead”, which is a pretty cool line.
Michonne, as a less-trusted newcomer, would have had a harder time if not for the CRM’s handy propensity to wear face-obscuring mesh masks at all times. Ok, it is a sensible precaution against being bitten by Walkers, but why wear them when behind the lines? It also made it more difficult for the viewer to tell who was who, which was occasionally good for a surprise but mostly made it difficult to follow who was doing what.
Having breezed back in with no hassle, Rick was subjected to the “Echelon Briefing” by Maj-Gen Beale. At this point the story ground to a halt for a considerable chunk of the ep as Beale filled Rick (and the show’s more casual viewers) in on the multifarious double dealings of the CRM across all those different shows that only fanatics like me had watched all of. There was no new information here if you had watched them, and even if you hadn’t, it was a pretty brain-numbing infodump.
Terry O’Quinn, playing Beale, is an old hand at this kind of mountain of exposition, as you’ll remember if you ever watched him explaining things in Lost and Millennium. He managed to bring a pretty good performance to his final (living) scene even amidst all the exposition, revealing Beale to be, while a pragmatist, nothing more than Negan writ large. All he wants to do is to protect his group, and he’ll take anything he needs from anyone else to do it.
And of course his next plan, the Big Operation the CRM was there in force for, was to wipe out Portland, the remaining partner of his three city alliance. Which would come as no surprise to anyone who slogged through Walking Dead: World Beyond, at whose conclusion the teenage heroes were en route to warn the unwitting Portlanders. Let’s hope somebody tells them they don’t need to bother now – certainly they were among a myriad of plot threads from other shows left unaddressed here.
The script nicely intercut between Rick’s briefing and one for the rest of the troops, who’d presumably been told the Big Secret already. So no wonder that when Michonne found out about it too, she and Rick joined forces to Bring It All Down. “What kind of a world are we leaving them if we let this happen?” Rick averred, like the Big Damn Hero he is.
Of course the two of them were going to save the world. But with barely twenty minutes to do it in, I still say it was too damned easy. There was a nice poetic justice in using the zombified Beale to set off the chlorine explosives that would hoist the CRM on its own petard; but with hundreds, perhaps thousands of troops onsite, the only obstacle faced by our heroes was Thorne.
The plot to kill Hitler was foiled, in large part, by the Reich still being full of true believers in his cause. You’d expect a demagogue like Beale to have a similar mass of loyal henchmen; but no, after some initial prevarication, Thorne was the only Josef Goebbels to be had. Lesley-Ann Brandt was as excellent as ever in the part, written to mirror what Rick could have been if he truly had given up, and I almost found myself hoping she would recant. But no, she got a suitably dramatic exit at the hands of Michonne while Rick yet again managed to survive ridiculous odds as he used a zombie soldier’s grenade to wipe out the mini-horde piling on top of him, emerging totally unscathed. “Ooh, you lucky bastard,” I found myself muttering.
You get the point. For an enemy that had been built up as such a formidable opponent for such a long time to be wiped out by two people in less than twenty minutes was… well, more than a little ridiculous. Ok, I didn’t want another two and a half seasons of interminable ‘All Out War’, but a little more time and fleshing out of the CRM’s overthrow was merited by the sheer amount of narrative time that’s been spent on it so far. After all, Beale said it had spies in communities all over the country and all over the globe, along with arrangements to supply test subjects to nutters like the ones Daryl’s been dealing with in France. Are we really expected to believe that all the CRM soldiers remaining in Philadelphia and Portland were utterly ignorant of what was going on? That they’d just roll over for a new democratic civilian government? That all those agents all over the place will be happy to switch their murderous ideology to a new Kum-Ba-Ya attitude just like that?
Sigh. Oh well, it was an enjoyable show in some regards, not least for the reunion of its beloved protagonists. And while I thought that the overthrow of the CRM was ridiculously easy compared to the style of previous shows in the franchise, I am glad that Scott Gimple hasn’t decided to keep them around forever, as he seemed to be doing with the Saviors at one point. I can understand the hanging plot threads regarding the CRM left unaddressed from previous shows (no point alienating the casual viewer unnecessarily), but if this was always the masterplan, why leave those threads hanging in the first place?
As finales go, this was… meh. Much of it consisted of people sitting around talking, the ending was rushed, and the Big Reunion of Rick and Michonne with their community could only muster two returning characters to greet them. It’s been carried well by Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira, who’ve been as good as ever, but unusually for me, I think the story needed longer to actually be believable.
Rick and Michonne might not be coming back, but with second seasons of Dead City, Daryl Dixon, and Tales of the Walking Dead all on the way, the franchise is far from dead. No, it’s actually more undead, shambling aimlessly along like its own zombies with all life, and ideas, thoroughly wrung out of it. This was… ok; and yes, like an idiot, I expect I’ll watch all the others too. But for heaven’s sake AMC, try and think of something else to make.
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