The Walking Dead.

[Casey]

If they killed anyone else but who we suspect they did, it wouldn't have the same emotional impact that the introduction of Negan's character is supposed to have. Short of killing Rick or Carl, anyway.

 

I don't know why that's so hard to believe. Scenario A has what happened in reality, and fans are pissed they didn't get to see who Negan killed. Scenario B has Negan killing a fan favorite (Glenn, Daryl, Pregnant Maggie) and fans are pissed because their favorite just got their wig split. In both scenarios, fans are pissed. The latter option has the potential for fans to be so pissed off that they don't come back for the next season - but so does the former, apparently (don't understand that one myself, even though I hated the cliffhanger. It's a staple of TV dramas and we shouldn't be surprised).

[evilwaldo]

It is because fans can get so emotionally attached to a character that when he is killed off people get so angry that they leave their emotional investment at the door.

The key to that is not doing stupid stuff like bringing him back from the dead by hiding under a dumpster or showering with his wife or knocking her up.  

They are trying too much to expand the audience by Hollywood tropes like making Darryl gay and inserting religion into the stories because it is a hot button issue at the time.  

That is another thing that bugged me.  They teased Darryl being gay while the LGBT rights movement was rising and when the mood switched to pro-God they pivoted to inserting Christian themes.  I don't mean Father Gabriel but the insertion of rosaries and crosses this season which were not common shots the first five seasons.  

It is almost like they are reading the tea leaves of the news and social media analytics and deciding to write certain themes into the stories.

[Casey]

I legitimately don't remember the period in which you speak where Daryl was teased as maybe being a homosexual. But, a lot of these episodes kind of just blend together once they're over with, so there's that.

[evilwaldo]

Last season they teased Daryl being gay in leaks and interviews.  Check interviews from December 2014 through March 2015.

Aaron is openly gay on the show (relationship with Eric) but this season that storyline has been dropped for rosaries and crosses.  

It bothers me that they start a storyline and then completely pivot away in a direction opposite the old storyline.  When they pivot you realize both storylines are more current event related and the reason for the pivot is more a reflection of current events.

It is not like the Wolves and the tractor trailers full of walkers with disco lights and music.  We still don't know if the food plant is Savior or Wolves but you can come back to the Wolves because the Saviors are now a larger threat.  That pivot makes sense.  The Wolves could be an arm of the Saviors or a group of still undetermined origin.

[Technico Support]

I always assumed Darryl to be a "sexual anorexic" (tm Ray Donovan) due to some past abuse. 

[AxB]

16 hours ago, Technico Support said:

Oh and I really enjoyed Steven Ogg's (Trevor from GTA 5) character and hope he stays around a bit.

They should cameo him in Fear the Walking Dead, have him be driving a roofless red Jeep around with a random Juggalo in the back, and say he's heading East because Los Santos is too dangerous.

Doing a cliffhanger ending, rather than letting people know that they've killed a fan favourite, it's a cop out. Because it screams "We couldn't decide whether to change it or not, so we've bought ourselves a few more months to make our minds up". It does just solidify TWD as belonging on the "This show used to be considered part of the Golden Age of TV, but now everyone thinks it sucks" list. Y'know, with Dexter and True Blood.

[NikoBaltimore]

My friend shared this and looking at the video it appears they indicate who it was that got it.  So to me it's not necessarily who got killed, but more of a "maybe this death would have been too gruesome/we'll show it next season" type of thing.  And they even said on Talking Dead that it's pretty much there if you search for it, which this did.  Worth checking out, even if I feel this has made the rounds already.  http://comicbook.com/2016/04/04/the-walking-dead-finale-audio-may-offer-clues-to-who-died/

 

Spoiler

According to the video it is indeed Glenn.  On a couple re-watches the audio definitely sounds like they're saying his name.  I can't see it being Maggie because Glenn would have done the yelling instead.

 

[AxB]

It actually pissed me off that they didn't do what they did in the comic, where Neegan shows his working and explains the logic of how he decides who to kill, saying the reasons why he can't pick each character... they should have done that in the show too, to build to the "Fuck it, you'll do" ThwACK! Instead, he's kind of rambly and directionless.

[Technico Support]

True.  I kept waiting for the "I can't pick you, they'd think I'm a racist" line.

[Lawful Metal]

Fuck it, I'm done. I don't care. This show has people constantly make bad decisions that don't make sense, manipulates the audience shamelessly, and never makes sense to its internal logic. Negan is as annoying as advertised, and I'm not terribly interested in his redneck asshole army. 

I really don't care who they kill at this point. If it's Glen or Daryl, they'd be getting rid of a good character people actually like. But it'll probably be Eugene or Rosita or someone else lame, and then what's the point? They've backed themselves into a lose-lose situation.

I've always been of the thought that the show should back away a bit from the constant catastrophe. Show that Alexandria can rebuild a society. Get trade going with Hilltop. Start making bullets. Get a farm going. Let Father Gabriel get a church going. Have Maggie and Glen successfully have a baby. Build that hope up, then you can tear it down with a near omnipotent Negan. Don't tease us with nincampoop Dwight and picking off side characters or deus ex machina bazookas and the like. 

So done with the show. Done with FTWD too. Who trusts these show runners anymore?

BTW, I called it.

[The Z]

45 minutes ago, Lawful Metal said:

Fuck it, I'm done. I don't care. This show has people constantly make bad decisions that don't make sense, manipulates the audience shamelessly, and never makes sense to its internal logic.

Damn right! More people should follow your example and just finally stop watching Monday Night Raw.

 

Wait, what thread is this?

[Omega]

[Technico Support]

Daaaamn

[Jingus]

Finally catching up: the only thing that genuinely pissed me off about this season was that bullshit copout.  Fuck a buncha that.  Have the goddamn balls to just end on the death of a first-tier main character and not artificially delay the payoff until next year.  And there's plenty of people who besides Glen who could've worked in that spot: Abraham because he's already dead before this point in the comics, Eugene because he gave Rick the instructions on how to make bullets, Michonne because she suddenly started a not-in-the-comics boink session with Rick and is thus that more emotionally important, or even Maggie just to totally rip everyone's hearts out with some "goddamn, Negan's last name must be fuckin' Lannister" level of coldest-shit-we've-ever-seen-in-our-life.  

But ending in a Who Shot Mr. Burns? cliffhanger was really insulting, it felt like the most cynically manipulative thing they could've possibly done.  That's not the type of cliffhanger this show usually uses as a season finale, which tends to be a What Happens Next? sort of teaser for the next season.  I mean, even season 4 at least showed them ARRIVING at Terminus and what happened there, rather than fading to black as they walk through the front door.  

 

Other than that, I didn't really have any problems with this season.  Well, I thought they could've gotten a lot more mileage out of poor Rookie Doctor Lady than they did, she seemed like way too interesting a character to cut down that quickly.  But aside from THAT and the usual "we didn't see the body" fake-kills they do every single season, everything was pretty solid here.  I liked them having to deal with another mega-swarm, and deciding to do things differently than they had in the past when they pretty much just ran away.  I actually enjoyed the subplot with the Wolves, it was a nice inclusion of something new which wasn't in the comics; and the whole "everything goes to hell in the time it took Carol's cookies to bake" sequence was excellently handled in its outta-fuckin-nowhere brutality.  The finale's buildup to Negan's appearance was downright brilliantly done, with every new roadblock just driving a stake deeper and deeper into the heart of Rick's confidence, until at the end he's literally shivering in fear.  And although I must mourn the fact that the radiant and amazing Alicia Witt didn't last beyond a single episode, she fucking killed it in said episode, a really awesome demo reel of that sadly underutilized actress's formidable talents.  So I do think the overall positives far outweigh the negatives, and don't see at all the same level of sucking which is having other people making these grand "I'm done with this show" proclamations.  If THAT'S what it takes you to be done with a show, y'all never would've lasted past the first season of Lost or True Blood or various other shows which constantly did cliffhangers just like this one.  

[HumanChessgame]

Anyone know what their shooting schedule is like?  Part of me is wondering if they pulled the copout ending they did to gauge fan reactions and get a feel on just who to decide to kill off and have a couple different plot directions they could go with accordingly.

[Jingus]

I think they're like most shows, they tend to shoot a surprisingly short period of time before they air.  The beginning of the current season (or half-season) often airs while they're still shooting the later episodes.  

[Jingus]

Because I've got nothing better to do with my life at the moment, I decided to tackle Fear the Walking Dead.  Three episodes in: holy shit, this is just the dullest nothing-happening garbage.  It's like someone said "hey, let's take the first 30 minutes of Every Zombie Outbreak Movie EVER, and then stretch that out to four fucking hours!  (Also, make sure the main characters are a bunch of entitled jackasses who all hate each other and conveniently refuse to discuss important plot points.)"  I can appreciate the back-to-basics idea of looking at how a zombie apocalypse first starts to break down society, if that hadn't been done SO many times in so many zombie movies from the original Dawn of the Dead onward.  And FtWD adds absolutely nothing new to the formula, presenting the exact kind of cliches which Shaun of the Dead was gleefully mocking, except doing so with the straightest of faces.  In a post-Max Brooks world, this tired old shit feels downright remedial.  We've seen it all before, and seen it too many times, and seen it executed much much better than this.  

[Jingus]

I finished Fear the Walking Dead.  I immediately regret that decision.  It finally goes to a situation which is legitimately fresh and interesting: the day-to-day life in a relatively safe neighborhood, when the military is keeping things more or less under control in this safe zone.  That could be fascinating; I don't think I've ever seen a zombie show which took place in that setting.  So of course the goddamned morons in charge of this asshattery decide to speed through that scenario in the space of a single episode, and immediately zoom into the inevitable "military dictatorship turns abusive" and "then the zombies just burst in and fucking kill everyone anyway".  

This fucking show is like the world's shittiest remake of Planet Terror.  I refuse to believe that Kirkman had anything but the most token involvement in writing this glum glacially-paced garbage, it doesn't have an ounce of the personality and spark which infuse the main show or even the comics.  The characters are uniformly hateful, all a bunch of shallow selfish dipshits whose only notes of individuality is whether their psychosis takes the form of being a naive manchild or a sociopathic killer.  Over and over again, they break the needle on the "Don't Go In There" Meter, with characters constantly wandering off alone and unarmed to go poke around in dark scary buildings as if they were TRYING to get eaten by zombies.  Sadly, such eating never seems to fuckin' happen; this has got to be the lowest body count of main characters of any show which is nominally about dead things that walk.  Even when the show finally gives us some action scenes in the finale, they're very poorly done, amateurish and clumsily staged and badly paced.  

Worst of all is how the show's moral messages are genuinely offensive: it starts off with a bet of "all soldiers are bloodthirsty fascists", then raises with "all immigrants are war criminals who cannot leave behind the barbaric ways of their third-world homelands", then finally calls with "even the BEST human beings are perfectly willing to commit deliberate mass murder of every man, woman, and child within their line of sight if it means having even a slight chance of keeping their own family safe".  Fuck you, show.  Fuck you so very much.  In the hopefully-unlikely event that this damn thing gets renewed, I won't be there to watch the next season.  

[Casey]

You know the first episode of S2 was last night, right? I hear it's more of the same.... but on a boat!

[Jingus]

1 minute ago, Casey said:

You know the first episode of S2 was last night, right?

goddammit

[Casey]

Spoiler: They don't know how HAM radios work. And the editing is horrible.

[Jingus]

(reading IMDB)  Jesus FUCKING Christ, they seriously gave this piece of shit fifteen episodes for its second season?!  I can't believe the ratings for this awful, hacky, third-rate bullshit were THAT good.  

[Casey]

That's for the first season. Obviously shows people got tired of it real fast. I suspect if it continues into this season, with more episodes, we won't be seeing a S3.

[elizium]

Just watched the premiere. I love how no one on the boat seemed to notice that the girl was talking on the radio to some rando for seemingly hours and days on end and was apparently just carting it around with her. Like, wouldn't they want that in the captain's room (that's what it's called right? I know nothing about boats). So "Jack" is spending his zombie apocalypse catfishing would-be pirating victims, assuming that's what was going on?

I think the show would have been better served being an anthology of some sort, where you follow a small band of survivors for a couple episodes at a time. For a show about the fall of society, we actually don't get to see too much of it, since the focus is so myopic. Like, spending an episode or two showing what happened at the apothecary they found in this season's Walking Dead would have been more interesting then 7+ episodes now of this crew.

[Technico Support]

On 4/11/2016 at 2:56 PM, Jingus said:

 It's like someone said "hey, let's take the first 30 minutes of Every Zombie Outbreak Movie EVER, and then stretch that out to four fucking hours!

Exactly.  One of the big ideas behind this show is, "let's show how the zombie apocalypse starts and how society breaks down."  Thing is, nobody ever asked for that and we don't need that.  There's a reason zombie movies (and even the original Waling Dead) skip past that or pay quick lip service to it and move on.  As an audience, we're already educated to what zombies are and what they do.  Showing us a world where they've never heard of zombies and have to figure this shit out, S-L-O-W-L-Y, is just frustrating to watch.

23 hours ago, elizium said:

I think the show would have been better served being an anthology of some sort, where you follow a small band of survivors for a couple episodes at a time.

"Tales from The Walking Dead" would have been amazing.  That's  a great idea.

Cliff Curtis is the most amusing part of this show for me.  I'm looking at him saying, "is he supposed to be Latino?  Because he looks Indian."  The I look him up on IMDB and he's actually Maori.  Hollywood: yeah, just call all the brown people we can find and we'll figure it out.