Overall, the show’s big bet on Negan has been a bit of a misfire, with ratings hitting staggering lows last year, and Negan himself largely absent from the first half of the show’s eighth season.īut a season-ending climax is an opportunity to bring all the threads together. That means the end of the feud between Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and his archnemesis Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) - and perhaps that’s a good thing. Want up-to-the-minute entertainment news and features? Just hit 'Like' on our Digital Spy Facebook page and 'Follow' on our Twitter account and you're all set.The Walking Dead is back and careening toward the conclusion of the “All Out War” saga. Let's just hope the show doesn't die before it's had a chance to be resurrected.
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Stop with the fancy directorial flourishes, cut out all the self-indulgent stuff, and there's plenty to work with. The episode's mixture of a structure that'll only make sense at the end of the season, with some pretty severe logic goofs, all feels a bit first draft to us. We get that you want to keep Negan on the show, but surely there are better ways to do it than this? Why didn't Rick just shoot him on sight? Why did Negan and the Saviours come out to face Rick's army when presumably the logical thing for our heroes to do would be to shoot the bad man? We'll probably find out that Rick is keeping Negan alive on purpose (that Polaroid he took will presumably be used to show the other communities Negan's weak, to inspire them to rise up against him) but it feels too much like bad scriptwriting. Yes, we heard bullets in the air, but if cowardly Gregory was brave enough to go for it, why not Gabriel (whose actual arc involves him getting more bold, not less)?Īlso, and this is a big one, when Gabriel found himself him an enclosed space with Negan, why did he ask for clarification on what "shitting pants" are (seems like the term is pretty descriptive) as opposed to, we don't know, shooting Negan with the gun he was holding? Why didn't Gabriel go after Gregory when he made a move for the car? He saw it happen, he was right there – he could have easily followed. So much in this episode doesn't make sense. Hopefully things will improve soon, but when Carl (sorry, Chandler Riggs) is operating at the same performance level as the rest of the cast, you know something's gone very majorly wrong. It's almost as if McBride and James are being asked to do stuff that doesn't make sense for their characters, and they're struggling to make it work. Lennie James was wasted, Norman Reedus looked like no-one was telling him what to do (that scene where he asked Rick if he was okay was weird – as was the moment directly after it, where Daryl signalled to everyone to leave using his hand, before remembering he was supposed to do it with a scarf, and doing that as well).Īs for Melissa McBride, what the hell is going on with Carol at the moment? The character's present, but we're not entirely sure the actor is. Even the normally fantastic Andrew Lincoln seemed lost, veering from relatively naturalistic one moment to impossibly hammy in the next.
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This could be tied to the direction, but whoa boy, this was bad.
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But, you know, maybe there's some grand plan going on here that we don't know about, and it's not just lazy fan service. It certainly doesn't make much narrative sense to bring back the same actress to play a grown-up version of episode one's zombie girl (complete with the exact same wounds!), as a) Rick shot her in the head, and b) zombies don't age.
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Is this evidence that they're going back to their roots to rediscover what made the show such an instant hit? Or that they're running out of ideas? Whether it was Rick waking up in bed with some flowers next to him, Carl going on a gas run, looking at a rotting zombie and crouching under a car (all framed in exactly the same way as when Rick did the same in the pilot), or the return of the little zombie girl ( played by the same actress, with updated make-up), there were so many direct references to the pilot fun for die-hard fans. We're not sure if it was the producers retreating to a comfort zone, a 100th-episode thing, or if it's part of some overall plan that's going to pay off, but there were a lot of season one meta-references in 'Mercy'.