The Walking Dead: Mid-Season Report Card
This article is more than 2 years old
The Walking Dead is now on its annual hiatus until February, but the mid-season finale, “Too Far Gone,” gave us a lot to chew on for the next few months. Carol has been banished; Hershel (Scott Wilson) has his head lopped off with a sword; and though the Governor is now deceased, Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and the gang are homeless, the group is in scattered shards, and they’re once again on the road, in search of a place to call home.
“Too Far Gone” was a strong way to go into a break. Not only did it leave fans with a solid cliffhanger, the episode created a nice balance between character, emotion, and action, something The Walking Dead has never been particularly adept at. So they’ve placed themselves in a good position, what do they need to do moving forward so as not to squander what they’ve achieved?
The biggest thing The Walking Dead needs do to is to maintain the momentum they built up going into the time off. Despite the misstep of “Dead Weight,” the show has as much going for it right now as it ever has in its four year run. As troublesome as this feat has proven to be in the past, if ever there was a time the show was going to jump on it, it is now.
With the core group broken up and wandering around the wilderness, this is a perfect time to get to know them in a different way. They’re lost, they’ve experienced a huge trauma—in Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Beth’s (Emily Kinney) case, they’ve just witnessed a lunatic hack off their father’s head—and how they react to these hardships tells you a great deal about a person, and it could be a fantastic opportunity to finally, after multiple years, actually find out who these people are.
The road is a hard place to live. Having been ousted from their home—the Governor definitely took the if-we-can’t-have-it-no-one-can approach—we’ll get to see the various factions attempting to survive on their own. They don’t have anywhere to hang their proverbial hats, there is nowhere they feel comfortable, and life moving from place to place will only weight on their souls and humanity. I’d like to see the show push them, give them a legitimate shove, towards their respective breaking points.
We know there are going to be new additions to the group in the coming episodes, and ideally these new faces won’t be wasted like the last big addition. At the end of season three, the group at the prison had an influx of new citizens left over from Woodbury. In the intervening months between the two seasons, they added even more. Here’s the thing, almost none of those people did anything but die. Few, if any of the newcomers even had names, let alone hung around for more than an episode. They existed solely as zombie fodder, nothing else, and it was yet another missed opportunity.
Coming up we’re going to meet Abraham (Michael Cudlitz), Rosita (Christian Serratos), and Eugene (Josh McDermitt), who fans of the comics will recognize. These three characters figure prominently into the upcoming storylines, at least as they play out in the comics, and add a new dynamic to the group of survivors. The group will also see another newcomer in the form of Gareth (Andrew J. West), a character described as a remix of existing people from Kirkman’s narrative. What that means remains to be seen, but he could add an interesting new wrinkle. Lets hope that The Walking Dead doesn’t shortchange them in the same way it has other new additions.
Above everything else, however, The Walking Dead needs to keep it more about the people than the zombies. The drama works best when the undead exist on the periphery, as a looming threat, and the characters are at the heart. The primary concern should be how the events on the screen impact the survivors. When the narrative sticks to that, the show has success; when it strays, it fails, often in spectacular fashion.
What do you think? What would you like to see The Walking Dead accomplish moving into the second half of season four?
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