The Walking Dead S6 E16: Last Day on Earth

Was it Glenn? Was it Abraham? Was it Darryl? Was it Patrice/Ruth/Siobhan? Was it Maggie? Was it Carl? Was it Eugene? Was it Sasha? Was it Michonne? Was it Rick?

Was it an hour and 20 minutes of bullshit followed by 10 minutes of tension ending in inconclusive action?

Cutting to black just as Negan brought down Lucille on somebody’s head was amateur hour. I assume the creators of The Walking Dead wanted the ending to have a cliffhanger effect and have us all guessing who was dead all spring and summer but personally, I don’t really care. They’ll reveal it and it will be sad but I probably won’t even think about it much until season seven starts. I can’t believe I stayed up for that on a school night. I was looking at the clock and saw it was 10:29 and thought “wrap it up, guys.”

I did like the actual confrontation in the woods once they got to it, with the creepy Mockingjay whistle. Rick’s slow-motion breakdown was unsettling with a great Andrew Lincoln performance. It started subtly once they found Michonne’s hair pinned to that zombie and by the time they were all kneeling in a circle, it was distressing to watch him out of control with no ideas for escape. Negan certainly was a dick, making Maggie kneel when she was already laid out on a stretcher having a miscarriage/major health problem.

To play devil’s advocate, do you think most of the people in that circle would kind of deserve being hit with a barbed wire bat? Rick and his people did kill a bunch of them unprovoked and getting hit with Lucille isn’t too much more brutal then getting stabbed in the face in your sleep. Also, how much of this predicament is due to the group making really terrible decisions? If they’d just stayed in Alexandria, they might have been alright and if the Saviors came for them, they would have been in a more defensible position at home. I know there was the issue of needing to be less isolationist due to the food supply and all that. I’m not saying I’m right about any of this but it would be good to have a debate, either in the fandom or on the show itself.

Gathering most of the cast like that for a last stand was so primal that it felt like Carol should have been there, rather than sidelined and saved by a knight in a shining bulletproof vest on a white horse. However, I did appreciate the introduction of another group of people who do want to help. It can’t be just a bunch of Negans out there.

But that first hour or so was such an aggravating slog and it was amusing how the cast was literally going nowhere in that RV. There really was a way to expedite that and drive home the point that they had no way out without turning it into an extended tapdance interspersed with commercials. It’s easy for shows to have an extended running time and screw it up by adding a bunch of padding. If I read any interview today with the writers saying anything like, “We realized we had a story that was too big for an hour-long episode,” I’m going to buy some tomatoes on my lunch break and throw them at my monitor because it’s unadulterated horseshit.

The Walking Dead is not some avant garde play that runs as long as it needs to tell its story; it’s commercial TV. I assume television works like magazine publishing in which the number of ads we can sell determines the amount of space for content, not the other way around. AMC knew it could sell a bunch of extra commercials for the season finale so they had the writers come up with a longer episode. So because Disney ponied up some money to run a trailer for Captain America: Civil War, we had to watch that RV hitting roadblocks.

Despite my negative tone, I did enjoy season six overall but it was frustratingly uneven. They run a fantastic episode like “JSS” (probably my favorite of the series) with the breathtaking sequence of Carol putting on a mask and shooting the Wolves but then follow it up with Morgan’s origin story with embarrassing dialogue (“the door was always open”) then follow that up with the meaty, nightmarish raid on the prison and mind games of Carol and Maggie held captive and then we literally drive around in circles in the woods. I’ll spend my off season not worrying too much about who Negan killed and staying as far away as possible from Fear the Walking Dead.