11x24 Rest in Peace

[4.8/10] Well, that was dumb. I don’t want to pretend The Walking Dead was in anything but an impossible position at this point. The final eight episodes of the Commonwealth arc have been a dud, and there was almost certainly no saving it at the eleventh hour. Many of the important people from the show’s inception are gone, but not dead, and even more are committed to other projects, so it’s hard to put a period at the end of the series. This would be an uphill climb under the best of circumstances.

But it was also a bad finale. Oh my god, the preponderance of on-the-nose speeches at all too convenient times was just too much. The show’s themes haven't exactly been subtle to this point, but this takes the cake. We absolutely do not need Judith yelling “It’s never too late!” at Pamela in a scene that was pretty bizarre and underbaked to start.

For this part, Daryl’s never been big on speeches. He does better with quiet, intimate scenes as a man of few words. Having him shout out, “Your problem is that you tried to make this like the old world!” feels awkward coming from him and lays everything on much too thick. Pretty much everything does.

I said it last week. It’s just so hard to care about this anymore. There’s a raft of storylines and few of them have satisfying endings. THe Commonwealth is supposed to be a war zone, with a confluence of shock troopers and walkers running around like mad. But nobody seems terribly bothered. THere’s plenty of downtime and our heroes are able to hole up, rest, and recharge without even the minor threat of zombies or foes messing up their spot.

The conflict with Pamela is solved...with a couple of speeches, which are somehow enough to persuade everybody who matters that this was wrong and arrest Pamela. Oh yeah, and the walker infestation? It’s not even a thing. We’re just going to play “Cult of Personality” and blow them all up via some of the least convincing CGI you’ve seen from a major television show.

Everything is too simple, too easy, too weightless. The conflict has been dumbed down for a while now, so I wasn’t expecting anything particularly different. But our heroes don’t do anything particularly brave or clever. They just sneak in by magic, give a few faux-inspiring bits of oratory, and then the problems basically solve themselves.

God help me, I cannot be bothered to care about Negan and Maggie. (And good lord, I cannot imagine watching a show centered on the two of them.) It’s smart to try. Their conflict is a big deal. It should be taken seriously. The show has put in the work. But the characters have gone so far afield from when Glenn’s death happened, with the show itself drifting so far away, that I am just not all invested in whether Negan is redeemed, or whether Maggie will forgive him, or any of it.

I don’t fault TWD for trying. Negan trying to be the one to assassinate Pamela so that Maggie won’t have to deal with the fallout of doing so is a strong choice and gesture. Him asserting that the Commonwealth threatening his wife and child made him understand what Maggie went through and regret it all the more. God help them, they're trying. But both characters have just been exhausted to this point that none of it has any impact.

I’ll admit, during Maggie’s big speech, I started zoning out. I was thinking to myself, “When was the last time I cared about something Rosita did? Was it when she and Sasha teamed up to infiltrate the Saviors? Is it when she shot Negan’s bat? Gosh that was a long time ago.”

And it was, so I don’t even care about Rosita’s death, the biggest one in the episode. SHe’s been such a big nothing for a while now. It’s good, at least, that she doesn’t just fall into a pile of zombies and come out unscathed like the rest of our plot-armored lead characters. But I still just don’t give a damn because they haven't known what to do with the character for a long time, and it’s left her bland and empty. So while I can, in theory, comprehend Eugene and Gabriel being sad to lose her, or a mother being sad to miss her daughter’s life but gratified to be able to save her, there’s just no juice left in Rosita as a character for it to matter.

That goes double for Luke and Jules, one of whom is barely a character, the other who is comparatively new, and both of whom have been gone for what seems like forever until very recently. The actors sell the hell out of Luke’s death scene, but considering how little shading there’s been for them, it plays like a token loss amid the supposedly major threats floating around right now.

And what is any of this saying? The closest we get to a point comes from the conversation between Lydia and Aaron, where Lydia is convinced that this is all going to pot and she’ll never see her new boyfriend again, and Aaron reassures her that good things can still happen in a rough time. Sure enough, his optimism is rewarded, as both Elijah and Jerry make it back fine, and yay, we're all together again.

That’s kind of it. I don’t envy the writers of “Rest in Peace”. How do you sum up twelve years of far-flung storylines with very different takes, tones, and messages into one complete package. You can’t. All we get is some vague cliches and purple prose about communal strength and the power of goodness in dark times. As you’ll know if you’ve read my reviews, I’m not one to judge on that front. But it still ends up deeply unsatisfying, with no apparent message or final statement from the show beyond the broadest, blandest feelgoodery with hardly a whiff of real insight or eloquence.

So from there, everything is hunky dory. In a weird, cheesy line, Carol retorts to Pamela that they won’t have to worry about her place when deciding who gets to live in the nicer houses, but they do, apparently, decide that they and all their friends get to since they have a big feast in some fancy digs. Ezekiel is Governor. Mercer is Lt. Governor. Eugene and Max have a daughter named after Rosita. Alexandria is back to its full glory. Everybody’s happy and healthy. Everybody’s hugging. Big hip hip hooray for everything, I guess. I don’t fault TWD for wanting to go out on a warm note, but it comes off so arbitrary and unearned. It does next to nothing for me, even for the characters I care about.

(As an aside, the closing moments made me remember what a good dynamic Daryl and Connie have. There’s a ton of missed opportunities in these final seasons, but one the big ones is the show not leaning more into that for some reason.)

The whole thing is hollow. Sure, there’s some synergy to closing things out with Judith waking up in a locked off hospital much as Rick did in the series’s debut. But that’s a cute bookend, not a valid shortcut to make meaning out of all of this. The Walking Dead creative team hopes that if they can just pile on enough sap in the finish, that will suffice and we’ll stop pestering them over trifles like satisfying character development, or a world that makes a modicum of sense, or plots that feel worth it.

Plus god help me, almost everyone of note has a spinoff in the offing, so there’s no sense of finality to all of this. Just more teases of Daryl’s next adventure. (Do you know how crappy a job you must have done for me to barely feel a thing at Daryl and Carol saying goodbye?) A bro nod offered to Negan before he heads off to the next thing. And of course, what better way to close us out than by subjecting us to one more godforsaken Rick monologue. (Okay, I’ll admit, Michonne as a horseback samurai is pretty cool, if empty.) Just throwing a rush of familiar images and catchphrases at the audience amid your mini-trailers for future shows does not count as an ending, and certainly doesn’t count as profound or moving.

What a mess. Why in god’s name did I spend twelve years of my life watching this show, constantly waiting for it to reach its potential? Why did I stick out this last couple of seasons, figuring that even if it wasn’t great, I’d at least want to see how it ended? The Walking Dead has had its high points, both in terms of stories and performances, and I wouldn’t begin to deny that. But by god, the quality to crud ratio was almost never on the right side of things, and this pale, lumbering rotter of a finale does nothing to reanimate my onetime affections for this series.

I cannot imagine you’re reading this if you haven't likewise made it through far too much crap to reach this finish line. But all I can tell you is, don’t do what I did. Don’t waste your time on this series that will never justify your patience with it. Go consume some of the buckets of other zombie-focused media that will fly higher than this ever did.

If you can’t tell, I have no plans to watch the spinoffs, even to get to the end of these stories. I’m done expecting a good or satisfying ending to every come. I’m done thinking that the potential of “prestige zombie show” is enough to sustain a series in and of itself. I’m done expecting that “The Walking Dead Universe” has any more tricks left up its sleeve. Not me. Not anymore. “We are the ones who live.” Sure. Fine. This franchise will keep on living in some sort of malformed existence forever, much like the undead that give it its name. But it can do it without me.