BasilSeal

I'm late to the party here and most of the relevant points have already been made by others. Though the fact that i watched this over a week ago and i'm only just bothering to comment says as much as anything about how underwhelming this much vaunted big finish actually was. We've been told for years that this story would be a trilogy of epic big budget movies and it finally sees the light of day as a modestly budgeted 6 part TV mini series. For dis hard fans of Rick and Michonne it gives some resolution to their stories, but ultimately it adds little to the overall TWD cannon. at the end of the show we still don't know much more about the CRM, or how it works this pretty much sums it up for me, we were teased some incredibly complex and multi layered new world order type society, and what we get is just another poorly thought out two dimensional villain. Presumably the moral message of all this is that isolationism is bad, that thinking you can simply shut yourself off from the rest of the world and refuse to assist or cooperate with outside groups / countries is unrealistic and morally wrong. The problem is that the CRM's isolationist plan isn't just morally reprehensible, it's batshit crazy and makes no logical sense. how can they possibly think they're going to run out of food? they live on a continental landmass that previously supported330 million people and they now have a population in the hundreds of thousands at most, and they have maintained a pre-Fall level of technology and the logistical and manufacturing capacities to run a mechanised military force. Then there's the unique structure of the CR / CRM that allows rick and Michonne to turn it from a fascist, totalitarian, genocidal police state to a benign force for good in one fell swoop. Apparently there is a civilian administration just kicking its heals for the last ten years waiting to take over and run everything in a liberal, progressive and entirely non killy manner, also, it's only a tiny minority of the military CRM force that are part of team genocide, and they've all put themselves in one location right next to a convenient means of killing all of them. How lucky is that? The denouement is somewhat contrived and rushed, culminating in a half baked reunion scene where no one from Alexandria bothered to turn up and welcome back the guy who saved them in the bridge explosion, yeah, i know, there's a huge cost to getting actors back just for a few seconds of air time but at least think of a decent reason why they aren't there, particularly when the actors from TWD original you have got back to appear in this are the two least popular characters from the entire show's history. I could go on, but i think essentially the problem is this has been billed as something epic but it was in actuality rather mundane and run of the mill TWD fare. when Michonne first found the not Station eleven people back in the original series, we catch a glimpse of a much bigger picture, a trick that TWD often does, to imply a greater story going on off screen. We are introduced to these characters from an whole new group of survivors but because of the pace the story needs to move at, these charcters are wasted, personally, i was more interested in Nate and his friends that the CRM, i'd have much rather Michonne had stayed and had some adventures with them and forgotten about Rick tl.dr: Watchable and gives closure to Richonne fans but ultimately falls down on the world building and details.

i thought on a discourse level the writing was very good and i agree that it was good to see the specific issues of Michonne leaving her kids behind being addressed. i assume Danai is writing the dialogue but working to the show runners' designated plot points, so maybe i'll let her off some of the plot holes and overly convenient happenstance that mar this episode. Other's have mentioned the collapsing building that conveniently stops collapsing so sexy times can take place. then there's the conveniently placed car fueled up, just ready to go. how long ago did this high tech community collapse? because if it was more than six months ago, how come the car's battery still has charge to fire it straight up? the high tech enclave itself is an example of an oft used TWD trope, the untold story. we see evidence of events that have happened off screen, other lives, other stories that are only shown in the periphery, (for example the painted mural Daryl finds in the subway in the last season of TWD original). Now i guess the purpose of these details are to imply there is a wider world beyond what we see, but i wonder what we're supposed to infer from the high tech enclave shown here? what's the message? it's no good having a robot vacuum cleaner and then forgetting to grow food? Are we supposed to think that technology is bad and not the answer? or does it mean nothing beyond the show runners thinking it was some cool but ultimately throw away idea for background to facilitate the action? there is supposedly only two more episodes of this and still we know nothing of how the CRM works, how it came into being, or why we should care if it all goes to shit. I'm assuming that this will be the end of the story one way or another for rick and Michonne mainly because Andrew Lincoln probably has better things to do, and Danai certainly does, and this is about giving closure to the characters, (though not so much closure for Judith and RJ if their parents both disappear and they never find out what happened to them) Never mind only two weeks at most until we find out what the CRM's big secret is, the one that will make you get onboard with the whole genocidal fascist thing once you know what it is. I'm sure it won't be a big let down that doesn't make sense and hasn't been properly thought through, i mean, they wouldn't do that to us? right?

Oh, good call on Station Eleven, that's exactly what the caravan did remind me of now they mention it. Things didn't work out quite so well for them though, but that's TWD for you. Am i correct in thinking that this is a limited series with only the 6 episodes? So effectively each planned film from the trilogy they originally intended to make has become two episodes of the season. so the first two episodes where we find out what rick is doing in the CRM and how Michonne finds him there are essentially what the first film was going to be about. So when we get to episode 6, that will be the final conclusion of Rick and Michonne's story. Rick losing his hand is obviously echoing events in the comic. This is going to end like the comic for rick, isn't it? only with the CRM standing in for The Commonwealth. My Guess:

yeah, the only thing worse that world beyond was the last season of fear, now that really did suck, but i digress. I think the show runners have made a mistake by tying this show to the lame duck that was TWB. the premise of that show was very poorly thought out, as above, Jadis is one of the most annoying characters in the whole franchise, (and boy, that's a high bar when your show has SHUTUPCARL in it) and yet they've managed to devise the new flagship star vehicle with her in a pivotal role while linking it to some ill thought out YA drivel that in an ideal world we'd all just agree to never mention again and pretend never happened. In fairness, so far it's not too bad, the standalone writing is quite well done by TWD standards and there's some subtle stuff in there. all that tine to find each other and they are lying to each other, rick hasn't told her they can't escape, and Michonne hasn't told rick he has a son. One more detail i've recalled from TWB, IIRC there was a civilian govt to the Civic Republic but the military had seized control and had the colony under martial law, but this was supposed to last for only 10 years, which has now passed, so there's the potential for a power struggle with the civilian leaders and the military, i'm wondering iof this is where the plot will go.

this was one of many major plot faults in World Beyond. The theory was that the CRM had done some computer modelling and found out that the settlements at Omaha and the campus colony were likely to collapse for, er, some reason. Jadis gave this reason during an episode of World Beyond, and i've looked back at my old posts and found that i wrote this about her reasoning at the time. It was kindness to commit genocide because we did some modelling and it turns out in a couple of years time we might be a bit short of food because although we have the resources to run fleets of helicopters and hummers and the logistical capabilities to supply an entire army, we couldn't grow enough food to feed 100K people with the landmass of the entire continental united states to go at. yes, that sounds plausible. Essentially the CRM kill 100k people because they are worried that a possible shortage of food 10 or 15 years in the fuute might cause unrest in a community of people who have no idea where the CRM's settlement actually is, so if this did indeed happen, how would it be the CRM's problem? This is the page with the main discussion of this issue on you may as well read it there rather than repeat it all her but basically this particular plot point, and it's a really important one for that show and likely this one as well, makes absolutely no sense. Yes there are obvious problems in feeding a population of 100k holed up in a closed city, but if you have the resources to run a mechanised army, with the manufacturing capacity and logistics needed to just keep the CRM working, are we seriously saying that this problem couldn't be overcome? One interesting point in this episode is the details about the bombing of the cities at the start of the outbreak, in a futile attempt to control the spread. One thing touched on in the first season of Fear was that the army were killing some people in order to concentrate on saving others. (an concept dealt with in more detail in The Last of Us) What is implied with rick's conversation with General Beal, who is mentioned but never seen in TWB, is that the CRM has been formed from a rouge element of the military who refused to go along with the federal plan of euthanising population centers, and somehow coordinate with the guy tasked with bombing the city they are protecting and get him to bomb the marine base tasked with wiping out the survivors of the planned bombing of their city instead. So we have this irony where the CRM is born from a military force disobeying orders to save a population who were supposed to be wiped out because their survival was deemed hopeless, and now they are wiping out settlements themselves because their survival has been deemed hopeless by a computer model.

this is a guy who's prepared to cut off his own hand with an axe in order to escape and get back to his family, when even this doesn't work, contemplating suicide is a reflection of the despair he feels at accepting that escape is impossible. In TWD, there are a lot of times when characters behave in ways that are psychologically unrealistic, or inconsistent with how they have been previously portrayed, in all fairness to them though, this isn't one of them.

Yeah, there's also the bit where the plumber guy he's known since getting to the CRM says 'hey, why not just play along with the whole being a soldier thing and then take the chance to run off when you're out on a mission or something' and you can literally see the cogs in ricks mind working like this is some sort of great revelation.

It could go either way couldn't it? They've show what they're capable of with the Daryl spin off, dead city was also watchable and well made although the logic underpinning the narrative was a bit shaky and didn't stand up to close scrutiny. This will have a decent budget and they'll have drafted in some decent writers, the trailers certainly look slick and visually impressive but that won't be enough. The world building of the 'wider TWD universe' aspect of this will need to work otherwise it will just be world beyond with a bigger budget. In the past they've proved themselves to be not so good at the world building stuff, in WB the CRM are just pantomime villains who commit genocide for reasons that make no logical sense, whenever the CRM has cropped up in the other shows it's always seemed to me that they were just throwing in random details to confuse us, like they hadn't actually thought of any overarching plan that put all these details together into something that makes up a bigger coherent picture. Even when the CRM appears as a major plot point of WB, we're still no wiser. apparently they're some sort of residual US govt that incorporates aspect of the former US military, but even that is a guess. The CRM has to have a believable backstory and logical motivations. They can do this, but more often than not they don't manage to. they'll pull out all the stops for this as the main star vehicle, I'm going to watch it and hope for the best, but i wouldn't want to bet real money on the outcome.

Congrats to you and Mr Nashville on your anniversary, and a merry Christmas to all the rest of the primetimer apocalypse enjoyers out there.

Yep, that sums it up succinctly. this bit struck a particular cord with me It ended up unrecognisable from the show it started out as. I thought the early seasons benefited from a greater degree of realism than the original show, it ends up far more cartoonish and nonsensical. such a waste of a good premise.

Oh Come on, who amongst us hasn't been impaled on a branch, had it yanked out by a mad woman with a variable lung condition and then dug a grave? It's absurd that an injury this severe wouldn't cause troy to pass out from loss of blood and / or go into shock but but here he just walks it off. It's the epitome of the 'will this do' writing that's plagued this show for the last three seasons Well indeed, they supposedly have access to PADRE's extensive inventory of post apocalyptic survival gear, it there really no construction equipment or materials? Then again non of this makes any sense, this is just one aspect of the many things that cause one to say 'but why don't they...?'. there's so much wrong with this show it's pointless trying to list it all so i'll just go for a few of the highlights that stood out. there's a basic lack of narrative progression, we move from one scene to another and stuff has just happened for some reason and we're expected to just suck it up. How did this character find the other character? how did they get from here to there? what reason do they have for doing / saying this when last week they said the exact opposite? and so on. How does Madison get from the garage to the island in time to draw off the walkers? How is it that half a dozen people inside the garage take down 40 or 50 walkers no problem but the entire population of PADRE, who were trained for years to fight walkers, couldn't manage the 300 or so that were on the boat? Everyone on the island is dead, oh no, they're all alive and Madison saved them and they're all so grateful they will dedicate the rest of their lives to helping people because that was what Madison believed today although she'd probably have changed her mind by tomorrow again and hang on wasn't this all Madison's fault anyway for killing Troy because if he was alive he could have simply told his guys to stand down? and despite the fact that everyone's so grateful and all they're not going to bother digging her out of the rubble, yes, best leave that job to an eight year old, hang on how did Tracy get to the island? oh never mind more to the point how does she manage to dig Madison out from under the rubble from an explosion big enough destroy the entire PARDE complex and kill 300 walkers? but never mind about that now because Alicia has turned up because she heard a legend about a woman called Madison who saved everybody because word has spread far and wide about this miraculous event that happened <checks notes> yesterday. And that's just a five minute segment of the show, you could pretty much do the same for the entire hour and a half. That sums up the narrative style pretty well. it's such a sad and unsatisfactory end to a series that started out with so much more potential than this, and IMO in it's earlier seasons actually did rather better than the original at expressing it's themes and ideas. I always though that much of the problems with TWD stems from the source material being a comic, the nature of the comic book means that many of the original characters were stylised and cartoonish which works well in the visual medium of the graphic novel but doesn't always transfer to the screen as live action as well. the advantage Fear had was starting from scratch with no baggage. I remember someone on youtube making the observation that TWD was about superheroes, but Fear was about ordinary human beings. i think this was correct and the show was all the better for it. I'm repeating myself but the main theme of fear was always the morality of survival, IIRC the original tag line was 'you can't save everyone' and much of the early show is about how the characters come to terms with the stuff they have to do in order to survive. You can't save everyone turns out to be what the soldiers protecting the Clarkes' neighbourhood have decided, they have created a safe zone in the local area, but outside to cordon sanitaire they kill everyone, living and dead. it's a cynical realisation that the govt can only save a few and anyone else is just a potential vector for spreading the 'infection' and needs to be killed, (an idea covered in more detail in The Last of Us). This idea isn't just limited to the military though, when they discover that the soldiers don't intend to try and hold their position but will withdraw and 'euthanise ' the civilians, they escape but drop everyone else in the shit in the process. Strand takes them along with him on his escape plan, not because he's a good person but because he's calculated correctly he needs other people to help him execute his plan. Once they're on the Abigale and in a strong position, there are lots of desperate people who need their help but if they help them they weaken their own position, and there's always the chance that if you did help others they'd be desperate enough to kill you and take what you have because it's the only way they can survive. Ultimately, everyone who survives does so at the expense of others, much of the ensuing story is about how they try to come to terms with the guilt inherent in this realisation by helping others, with varying degrees of success, and the conflict this brings with people who think people shouldn't be helped, for, er, some reason Strand and Daniel are such important characters is because they had already compromised their morality by doing bad things in order to survive in the old world Their final conversation is pivotal because when Daniel speaks to Victor in German he is addressing Strand's new persona, Anton, he's acknowledging that Strand has changed and become someone better. the big theme at the end is can people change, can good come from bad and the answer seems to be: up to a point. People do change, murderers can repent and spend the rest of their lives doing good works but more often than not they don't. It's hard to see how someone like Troy could change. though one should be wary about diagnosing mental conditions over the telly, if troy isn't a sociopath he sure did a convincing impression of one. After all when we first meet him he's a neo Nazi, killing people for shits and giggles to see how long it takes for them to turn so he can write it down in his biog book of nature along with all the stuff about torturing squirrels as a kid. Daniel and Victor aren't sociopaths, they are people who were capable of doing bad things when the need arose, but they can also do good. Everyone in the story is compromised morally in some way and the end is about all of them finding peace with this. this might have worked but is ultimately unsatisfactory because the characters have been so badly served by the writing of late so it's hard to care or take seriously their current state of mind as no one has gone thorough a convincing mental journey to reach this point, they've just arbitrarily flip flopped between opposing ideas for no good reason. "We must trust everyone" "No one can be trusted we must kill everyone" "helping people gives life meaning" "no it gets everyone killed" "We must risk everyone's safety to save this awful person who did terrible things" "It's vitally important that we murder this child" No one cares if they've found inner peace because they'll all have changed their minds tomorrow and anyway if there's one thing we've learned from this show its that driving round the apocalypse in a big truck full of stuff helping people turns to shit real quickly.

If you remember, and let's face it, why would you? Troy killed everyone at the prepper scout camp back in the day by leading a herd to the Ranch. I assume he is using the walkers as a weapon, he's led them to place where, apparently there's an entirely different climate so they'll get caught up in the frozen ground and stay there until he needs them. (presumably to attack PADRE in the near future.) OK, my bad there. looks like my powers of prediction didn't work this time which is embarrassing because this show is nothing if not predictable. In my defence it's clear that the theme here is building a better future for one's children, and there needs to be some sort of continuation for Maddison, which is kind of difficult when both her kids are dead so a lost grandchild seemed like the obvious get out clause. looks like they're going with the Bootleg Alicias tribute band instead though. I think the time jump was as much to bring this show's timeline in parity with the main show's so that they can use any characters they need for the spin offs, though i suspect everyone with the possible exception of morgan will be seeking new employment after the season finale, i can't think that the show runners of any of the spin offs will want to call back to this shit show. Well i should have been unreasonable, but by the standards of this show...... Mo was 8 going on 15, but this is the apocalypse, so maybe she just had a really hard paper round you know. you're not expecting continuity are you? we've managed ok with just hand waiving this stuff up till now. If you start demanding to know how they got the MRAP back, next thing you know they'l be having to explain where they get the ammo for it or how they've still got functioning car batteries to start it with after 10 years or where they get spare parts and filters to keep it running or what they do if they get a puncture. Or come to think of it, just how the fuck did they manage not to shoot Troy at the gas station? I mean there were at least 50 armed guys with guns trained on him, many of them in cover with all his guys out in the open, and if the shooting started, you'd make sure you shot him first wouldn't you? You see, it's much better not to ask these things, the writers obviously don't, and they're clearly much happier for it

Nah, watching the actual show is masochistic enough for me.

Yeah, i know what you mean. i tend to tune out for that bit, it has all the charm of a toddler proudly displaying the contents of its potty to their parents' dinner party guests.

I terms of being a stand alone episode it was one of the better ones of this series, (low bar, but, you know...) decent production values, a bit of action, some of the more able actors leading, but as you say what is it actually for at this point in the story? I think it boils down to the somewhat leaden theme of something good coming from something bad, the morality of survival has always been one of the key themes for FTWD, how this world forces people to do terrible things and make impossible choices, and how this in turn causes some to embrace to bad stuff and either go mad, become evil, or to seek redemption as a coping strategy. Quite a lot of this show has been about the characters' abortive attempts to help people in order to atone for what they've been forced to do in the past. this is partly why we have characters like Daniel and Strand who had already made the choice to do bad things in our world before the apocalypse, the writers present us with these flawed characters and make them the 'good guys', or at least the people we're rooting for. which is actually quite a clever and nuanced way to explore this idea. I thought in the early seasons this made for an interesting show, but when it didn't generate the kind of viewing figures they thought it should they started to mess with it in a a sort of 'throw as much shit at the wall as you can in the hope some will stick' manner and we've ended up with the mess the show currently is. Daniel appears to have recovered spontaneously from dementia, Strand spent a year cosplaying as Idi Amin and murdering people by throwing them from the top of a tall building but now it appears that someone has pushed his factory reset button and he's back to being normal Victor again. This is just indicative of the poor writing which just flails about; trying different ideas and not paying too much heed to continuity or previous story lines. Here many of the supporting characters have been hand waived away, even ones who were previously quite important like Sarah and Wendel, (or skidmark). The purpose of this episode is to illustrate this theme of coming to terms with what one has done to survive. Dwight and Sherry defy geography to go back to where they made difficult choices in the past, confront those choices, and conclude that their lives do mean something and they can go forward and try to build a better future. This superficially makes sense but it's all rather contrived, June can't perform surgery, for some reason, Dwight spent years looking for Sherry but just walks away from her for. er. reasons, and look here's a guy who's an insulin dependent diabetic 12 years into the apocalypse because, erm because....., I know! there was a magic guy who made insulin, that's it. no you can't meet him, he went to a different school. and he's dead. All of those things are possible but it's the writers' job to make them believable and they fail, instead we get inconsistent characterisation, contrived plotting and flexible geography. The showrunners and writers have destroyed what started as a very promising show, the whole thing is just a mess, so many poorly realised, inconsistent characters, dead end story lines, unresolved plot points and disappearing characters. Even PADRE is simply a massive Deus ex machina, a post apocalyptic survival community that's set up by the govt for them to find when the series grinds to a halt. I'm going to watch to the finish because i'm, a completist and it's likely there'll be some stuff relevant to the other on going shows in there at the end, but this show has turned, it turned about three seasons ago and it's been chained up in the barn ever since being fed the occasional live chicken to keep it going while the writing team ring their hands over what to do about it. There is no cure, just shoot it already.