Walking Dead Series Finale Recap: Rest in Peace

Friends, zombies, countrymen, lend me your ears! I’ve come to bury The Walking Dead, to not reward it. I haven’t come to trash-talk it both, really. But it feels vital to notice that the zombified model of TWD that has been shambling round our TV screens for years has had its cranium crushed and its brains pulverized. You know, metaphorically talking.

I’ve frighteningly little to say about “Rest in Peace,” on condition that it was a super-sized episode meant to shut an 11-season run of what was once the preferred present on TV. Everything the season has been supposedly main as much as, i.e., the warfare with the Commonwealth, is so perfunctorily achieved away with; it’s just like the present was embarrassed with the storyline. Although shot, Judith is okay. Mercer was arrested however he’s instantly rescued and is okay. Although everybody was trapped in the course of a Commonwealth avenue with a horde of zombies, they’re tremendous. Rosita finds her child, who is okay, however Rosita will get bitten on the way in which after which refuses to let anybody know to reduce the drama.

Overthrowing Governor Pam Milton is a good simpler affair. She’s holed up in her gated neighborhood along with her semi-loyal faction of troopers, all of them staring on the big gate the place her lower-income constituents are begging to be let in lest they be eaten by the zombies which have flowed into the city. There’s loads of area inside and loads of time to let everybody in safely, however Pam has turn out to be so one-dimensionally evil she simply stares at them as an alternative. That is, till the entire protagonists arrive, Daryl provides an emotionally stirring speech (“They deserve better than this. We ain’t the walking dead.”) that seems to be precisely what the Commontroopers wanted to listen to to disobey Pam and never watch dozens upon dozens of their pals and neighbors needlessly eaten alive. The persons are let in, Pam is arrested, and Pam thinks actual onerous about letting herself be eaten by Hornsby’s zombie, who pops by, however Maggie saves her so she will be able to rot in jail.

So in the long run, all that the Commonwealth wanted was for a imply previous girl to get arrested, and she or he did. As for as action-packed collection finales go, that ain’t a lot, so The Walking Dead gussies up a really foolish sequence the place they draw all of the zombies into the gated neighborhood, fill it with fuel tanks, and organize a Wile E. Coyote-esque document participant to ignite the place when it finishes enjoying Living Colour’s “Cult of Personality.” The ensuing explosion seems like a cutscene from a PlayStation 2 recreation.

If I used to be in any respect invested in The Walking Dead, I think about would have been upset with how the Commonwealth storyline ended up, particularly because the solely primary character who purchased it was Rosita (no, Luke doesn’t rely, and disgrace on TWD for pretending he does). The finale felt cold, which is a bizarre factor to say a couple of present that used to thrill within the miseries it may heap upon its characters. Maybe it’s significant for the present to finish with Our Heroes defeating a villain in a method apart from utilizing unbelievable violence, but it surely doesn’t really feel significant—it simply felt too straightforward.

The second half of “Rest in Peace” is a prolonged epilogue which I can greatest sum up as “The Walking Dead were the friends we made along the way.” It works a lot better, primarily as a result of now we have spent greater than a decade watching these characters. When The Walking Dead started, what set it aside from different zombie-tainment is that its story stored going when a zombie film would have ended. Getting to see these characters lastly attain that ending—or see them survive to the ending—is significant unto itself, even when the endings are a little bit dippy. But how good was it to listen to Negan inform Maggie he actually is aware of what he took from her, and offers her an precise apology? Or for Carol and Daryl to platonically inform one another they love one another? Or to verify in on Rick and Michonne one final time, as a result of that’s all that anybody nonetheless watching the present needed to see, anyway?

Yes, Rick and Michonne made it again to The Walking Dead for a post-credits scene so giant it needed to be caught earlier than the credit. They seem individually and Rick deposits the journal, boots, and iPhone Michonne later finds in “What We Become,” whereas Michonne is proven studying it within the current/future/some level later. Rick is inexplicably barefoot, carrying a CRM jacket (they’re unhealthy guys from The World Beyond spin-off, apparently), and wielding a really unusual zombie-trepanning trident. He was apparently on the run, as a helicopter tracks him down, somebody in it yelling “you’ve been located and are instructed to surrender. Remain in place with your hands up.”

Although I’ve spent sufficient of my life watching The Walking Dead that I might want to watch the Rick and Michonne miniseries to really feel at peace, I weirdly don’t have any questions on or curiosity in speculating what the hell is occurring with Rick. I’m, nevertheless, intensely interested by studying the place Michonne obtained some kind of samurai armor for each her and a horse, and why she determined it was a good suggestion to gallop right into a horde of hundreds of zombies along with her sword drawn. It’s pure Walking Dead nonsense, in its method, and I appreciated the hell out of it—but it surely additionally made me unhappy to appreciate the perfect, most entertaining second in your complete finale was principally a trailer for a unique present.

And that’s that, I assume. I’ll have some extra ideas later about spending a full decade of my life recapping The Walking Dead for io9, however when it comes to the collection finale—the final episode of a present that ran for 11 seasons, 177 episodes, 12 years, and was at one level the preferred TV collection on the air—I don’t have any extra musings, assorted or in any other case.

The Walking Dead is useless. Somehow, that looks like all that must be mentioned.

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