nodorothyparker

That was I think an even longer tease with such a rushed payoff than Winter is coming, winter is coming, winter is coming, oops there it went. Eleven seasons of random black helicopter sightings on the mother show, multiple sightings on multiple spinoffs over multiple seasons, and it took them all of about 20 minutes to take the whole operation down once they made up their minds to do it.

I assumed they were around Yellowstone between the Wyoming signs and the talk about geysers. We know they jumped from the doomed helicopter coming back from a mission somewhere in the Cascades and there aren't any geysers in the eastern half of the U.S. I liked this mostly for seeing the Rick that we knew for so many years re-emerging, even if at times he seemed a little over compensating. If we're really going to watch them do a 180 now on returning to the CRM in what feels increasingly like a setup for a still unannounced second season, I guess it's better that it's almost entirely on Michonne's say-so instead of any more of Rick waffling about it even if the dossier as a motivator feels increasingly contrived. As far as anybody at the CRM supposedly knows, Rick and "Dana" died in that helicopter crash. If Jadis is also presumed dead when she doesn't come back, is anybody really going to care all that much about some file in among her things about some podunk place another dead officer came from? I could sort of see it if they were escapees known to be on the run, but now it just feels like a plot device to get them to reverse course after an entire episode of fighting and handwringing about not going back. So ramen, booze, and a deserted cabin to have sex in. As my husband snarked, Michonne and Rick just got everybody's favorite weekend college road trip. The calcified walkers were at least an interesting take. But guys, it's been something like 12 years showtime. Stop showing us hapless survivors who just can't fight or have any survival skills at all beyond halfassed robbery this far out. See also three hardened survivors apparently forgetting that the hapless survivors they just got killed would eventually turn and come back on them at just the right moment to set off the longest deathbed soliloquy we've been subjected to in awhile. About the only interesting revelation there is that Gabriel was apparently sneaking off from Rosita's harem and diaper duty from Father Not the Father's (thanks, Negan) kid every year to play confessor to a woman who pulled a gun on him repeatedly except for the five minutes she was trying to act normal.

She wouldn't know that though. More than one article I've read places the time of this episode probably around the same time as the mothershow finale before Daryl left or Carol would have eventually followed. Michonne wandered off in the middle of the Whisperer war. So she has no idea how that turned out. She has no idea about Daryl's sometime girlfriend's reaper group or the Commonwealth. For all she knows, happy fun time Uncle Negan is now raising Rick's kids. You notice she didn't mention that possibility to him.

While I generally liked this episode and thought it was a conversation that needed to happen instead of the endless tropes of not talking to each other and pushing the one you love away to "save" them, at times it also felt overlong and self-indulgent for such a short season. It also made me think that while Danai Gurira is obviously a talented thoughtful writer, this a great example of how giving one person this much control over the words literally coming out of these characters' mouths can lead to a point of fluffing her character as the ultimate savior of this piece while Rick Grimes, one of the greatest if sometimes wildly uneven protagonists on TV for a good decade, weeps about how he's nothing without her. I did like it. But I was also struck by how the building was dangerously on the verge of collapse except when they paused to rehash the same argument over and over or needed a well appointed place for a sex scene and then conveniently waited for them to be done before starting to collapse again. And how nice it was of the doomed off the gridders to leave the yellow hybrid of contrivance with enough fuel to get home! (From where? The Cascades? That's more than a bit of a drive back to Alexandria or even the Commonwealth they don't know about where their kids probably are in the current timeline.) parked right out front ready to go where they couldn't miss it. Michonne mentioning that RJ is almost 8 puts this roughly 9ish years after the bridge and the big time jump. So probably not an exact matchup but in the same general ballpark timeline as the other current spinoffs or Morgan from the FTWD timeline in what was obviously a setup for a possible crossover from his exit of that show. Both actors deserve full marks for going beyond selling this. I've always though the actors and performances in this franchise as a whole were a lot stronger than they were ever given credit for even as I get that they generally don't hand out acting awards for zombie genre shows. I do buy that Rick, who has always derived so much of his strength from being a protector and bearing the responsibility for the people he loved, could be broken and worn down by years of isolation away from that and repeated failures to escape his own personal Groundhog's Day as just another cog with walkers. Given where we first met him, you have to think waking up in another hospital where everything he knew excepting Jadis of all people was again gone had to have done a terrible number on his head. Which almost certainly didn't help. That doesn't make his dogged insistence on the same silly argument any less tedious though.

I'm enjoying this a lot but yeah, this is a bit of a sticking point. She keeps saying Judith is good and I realize what else can she say at this point, but it's been a year? two years? maybe longer since she left. And she wandered off in the middle of the Whisperer war when they'd already beheaded a bunch of other people's kids and didn't seem any closer to a resolution. That's an awful lot of faith to be putting in the rest of the cast who already haven't had the greatest track record at keeping kids not named Judith alive. I know, I know. True love and all that. We're apparently not supposed to think about it beyond that. I guess it really must be the real deal for Michonne to have not clocked Rick in the head with another rock yet after having gone through everything she went through to get there and let herself be dragged against her better judgment into this unending Hotel California with walkers and snazzy uniforms only for him to act out the least convincing breakup scene ever. Add me to the chorus of people who can't make out half of what Thorne says without turning the closed captioning on. All I can tell is that she's really damn impressed with herself for being let in on the Big Secret of the CRM and she's more than a little pissed off that nobody's taking the bait and asking her about it no matter how many times she brings it up. The more they add to Jadis's story, the less sense she makes.

This is proving to be a much much better series than I was frankly expecting as I'm rarely all that invested in big romantic pairings. But I admit that Andy Lincoln and Danai Gurira do have some pretty terrific chemistry and play well off each other. And we finally get some concrete answers to one of the longest teases in TV history in answer to what about the black helicopters. So I'm all in. I'm sorry to see Nat come and go so quickly as he was one of the better new characters we've seen across the franchise in some time. The actor was solid and the character felt pretty well developed for someone we just met. But because it's this franchise, we can't ever have nice things. The reunion was lovely and because it's been almost as long real time as it has show time since they saw each other, it mostly felt earned. But you could already see that Michonne was mostly powering through her happiness at finding him to the point that she was blowing past every red flag Rick was waving. Rick has clearly been cowed and beaten down by his time with the CRM and hasn't been able to successfully escape in how many years, but you're going to just smile and nod and go along with allowing yourself to be captured by people who tell you point blank you're never allowed to leave because oh, he'll figure something out? When she rightly clocks his mention of "one of my last times I tried" to get out, he's shifty and evasive in waving it away as oh they had him trapped but they don't have him now. Say what? Then why are we here? Mostly, I'm now just curious about what existing "deal" Rick has had with Jadis of the bad bowl cut. That can't end well.

He put his gun to his head in the very first episode of the mother show and probably would have blown his head off and ended all of this there had he not found the conveniently located hatch up inside the tank in Atlanta. I just rewatched the pilot episode with my teenager who was a baby when this franchise started and is now old enough to be getting into ZA lore herself. The parallels and callbacks to that episode are really strong. I liked this a lot more than I was expecting to because Rick was feeling really played out by the time he went trip trip tripping off that bridge and into the black helicopter in the sky. But while the franchise made some er, interesting attempts at world building, it never really recovered from the Rick-shaped hole that he left. So to see him step back into those boots as a Rick we recognize but don't quite anymore was lovely and a nice reminder that Andy Lincoln was sometimes a much better actor than he was given credit for. The show did a nice job of integrating the bits of story about government response and what little we knew about the CRM from the mother show and each of the spinoffs in a way that felt organically cohesive, and like the Daryl spinoff pulled off some really nice bits of cinematography as a reminder that this series started out as what was supposed be a couple of films. I of course have questions. All of the talk about secrets and saving the world was unsurprisingly vague, but this was a good enough start I'm willing to give it a bit to see how it plays out.

New trailer for May 12th. And Lestat's in this one.

I stumbled upon this last night. It felt ambitious in that it clearly wanted to tell a larger story about Western evangelicalism and colonialism and the place it occupies in the public imagination but stumbled over itself in trying to be overly sensitive and fair-handed with the religious nutters who either egged this kid on or at minimum did nothing to make sure he was at least somewhat realistic about what it was he was proposing to do. I think we were supposed to draw parallels with the older failed missionary who wasted years with the tribe in the Amazon thinking that if he just lived among them long enough and studiously worked on learning the language, they'd eventually embrace him and his message but if that's what they were going for, it was pretty muddled. We didn't get much more than our good missionary thought if he just rowed up to them with presents of fish they'd "accept" him and go from there as explanation for how he saw that playing out. Part of me suspects the kid didn't know either though, so there's that.

We've got a premier date of Feb. 25. It's not the originally promised three movies, but it is happening. And bonus that the Dumpster Diva will reportedly be there too.

And Forbes does not disappoint: ‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Two-Part Series Finale Review: A DreadFul End To A Terrible TV Show

It's ... an ending, I guess. There were about 5 seconds in there that I thought (or maybe just hoped) maybe the show was going to go full grimdark and let everybody get eaten so close to the finish line as a result of Madison's unrelenting stupidity and awfulness. It's an ending that the original recipe mother show would have loved had it not gotten itself so publicly locked into multiple spinoffs before the final season even rolled. But then as it always has, it whiffed on doing anything other than retreading on some generic hopefulness and "something to believe in" in sending everybody inexplicably off to the four winds so they're conveniently positioned if the franchise ever decides to drag them into yet another spinoff on the apparently misguided notion that we might ever want to see any of these people ever again. But hey, they let Morgan exit stage left early so he'd be positioned for exactly that even though it's hard to imagine anyone's really clamoring to see more of the dithering bag of crazy Morgan became, so never say never I guess. Beyond that, the only amusing thing was how quickly the same people who'd been so happy to see Madison not dead became just over her endless me me me my kids selfishness and refusal to listen to anybody or stick to any kind of plan. But oh, she sacrificed herself again in some kind of nonsensical nonsacrifice, so oh well. Everything else was a lot of the usual blah blah blah second chances, have to kill XXX, have to save XXX, believe believe believe, Alicia's the mother, Alicia's not the mother, demon spawn waving a gun around, hey Alicia didn't you have just the one hand last we saw you, random kitty sighting, sure let's head off into what's surely a bombed out urban wasteland a dozen years into the ZA because it's what the ashes of Junkie Nick rattling around on the dashboard would have wanted. End scene. But then I actually stayed awake to see it through to the end, so what does that say about me?

A reasonable person might have thought the whole hammer to the head and being left for dead in an exploding dam would be reason enough for most people. I mean, Daniel managed to be rather pissy with Strand for shooting him in the face and leaving him for dead for quite some time. But for this crew, apparently not.

The Forbes reviews have been about the only entertaining thing about this final half season. Beyond that, who the hell knows? Geography still doesn't matter, we're obviously going to drag the mystery of what happened to Christ-lite Alicia now with her own cult following after the rafts drifted away until the bitter end, the acting is high school theater production terrible for even the most basic line readings, and we've dropped any pretense that any of these characters' motivations are at all consistent or make any sense. We have to kill the kid. We have to save the kid. We have to give her back. We have to keep her forever. Meanwhile I can only assume that whoever is writing this child's lines has never actually spoken to a child in real life or even heard how one sounds because it sounds like they're writing for a 40-year-old woman. All of the strum und drang (see Strand, I know a little German too) over the NotAlicia! walker still doesn't explain why Crazy Eye Troy is honked off at Madison over supposedly getting the demon spawn's mother killed. Something something no one's gone until they're gone, I guess in a callback to when they they thought they could save the world painting cryptic messages on trees or whatever. But really, show, arguing over who did what to who first a full five seasons and a reboot full of a whole other cast of terribles ago doesn't really land much as no one can possibly be expected to remember any of that. Never thought I'd be to a point of missing Strand doing his Idi Amin cosplay in his little great dictator hat, but they've almost got me there.

It's hilarious though that when she mentioned that her real name was Odessa, Dwight had no idea what she was talking about. The show devoted an entire episode in the first half of the season to the character and her backstory called, curiously enough, Odessa.