The Walking Dead’s Mid-Season Finale, Or: “Robert Kirkman Survives My Wrath For Another Day”
There have been some pretty glorious (gorey-ous?) episodes of The Walking Dead, but I wasn’t particularly bowled over by Season 5’s mid-season finale. [Obviously, spoilers ahead].
So far this season, it seems our characters have been separated for some pretty stupid reasons. Am I the only one who thought Eugene (a.k.a. Mullet Head) wasn’t a DNA sequencing genius? I get that everyone needs something to believe in, especially when it’s the apocalypse. I could totally believe Rosita (a.k.a. GI Jane) and Abraham would fall for that crap because until hastily written character development in a recent episode Rosita’s dialogue was mostly nonexistent, so who knew where her head was at. And Abraham was just plain star struck.
But Rick’s crew? People have tried to hop on the tails of comets and imbibed in fatal Kool-Aid for less, so maybe I should be able to suspend my disbelief long enough to buy that Rick’s crew could believe in the Almighty Power of Eugene. In ye olden times, Rick would have gone to war with Abraham over his insistence to break up the group. But now everyone’s all, “K, that guy who says he’s a genius has a pretty solid mullet so I’m going to roll the dice on this one.” Right.
The other reason our group was split up again was, of course, Beth, who they ultimately risked their lives for but to no avail.
(image source: http://bit.ly/1tGQfCn)
Sweet Beth being the emotional little caged songbird she was had to express her rage against The Man and make a hasty move on an already proven homicidal cop. Said cop shot Beth without any hesitation, killing her sharply and thus anticlimactically. Other than serving to harden Maggie’s (and probably Daryl’s) already broken hearts, I’m not sure where this little foray into an Atlanta hospital got us. But maybe it’s all in the writers’ master plan.
Yet again, we all breathed a sigh of relief that the death we’d been hearing rumors about was not Daryl, because if you kill our shining feminist knight of the apocalypse (more on why I think Daryl is one of the best male feminist characters on TV at a later date) we will REVOLT. Same goes for Carol.
So, Robert Kirkman, while I am somewhat peeved that Rick’s crew was broken up for a pretty dumb reason, and while I was not really on board with this season’s focus on Beth whose best qualities are that she is great with babies and calls people out on their shit, but she mostly just whines and sings, you survive my wrath for another day.
AMC and its The Walking Dead fanpage do NOT escape my wrath however, for posting this spoiler hours ahead of the episode’s west coast premiere:
(image source: https://www.facebook.com/TheWalkingDeadAMC/photos/)
Rude.
Some good things did come out of this episode, though. We get to see Rick shoot a guy and tell him to shut up afterwards, solidifying his acceptance of his new, 100 percent jaded attitude about killing.
And while I find the priest mostly irritating because he is another whiner who mostly just puts my favorite people in danger, his pilgrimage to view Bob’s half eaten leg was an interesting turning point for the guy, as was his willingness to die for Michonne and Carl because it was his fault they were in danger in the first place.
And then, of course, there was the post-credits clip of our dear friend Morgan. If you haven’t seen it, head on over to www.amc.com and watch it. In case you forgot, Morgan was the first man to take Rick in after he escaped the hospital in Season One. We’ve gotten hints that he’s been on the trail of Rick and his crew throughout this season, and now it seems pretty obvious a reunion is approaching. After his meltdown in Season 3, I’m very curious to see how that turns out.