The Walking Dead; 6.16 "Last Day on Earth" (open spoilers)

Cafe Society
261

Fucking lame. Our Gang makes a laundry list of newbie bad decisions (“let’s ALL take Maggie to Hilltop!”), drives around for forty minutes, with some parallel story about Carol’s breakdown, Morgan, a horse, and two dudes in paintball-Jedi-esque outfits (I know what they refer to in the comix, but man they look silly).

The best part of this episode was the zombie chain gang.

Also psychic. “We know you’re going to go thru the woods and have someone drive around as a decoy!”

#2 bothered the hell out of me. Also the overlong finale, as you mention. Forty-five minutes of driving around like a bunch of noobs to the ZA, then five minutes of actual action that drives the story forward.

Oh, and the Carol/Morgan thing. So, we know they aren’t going to die via Lucille; anyone want to bet they try a deus ex Carol a la Terminus?

Yes, this. Or run them over, or something.

Which brings up the question, where the fuck were the zombie hordes during all of this? They’re attracted to light, but not to Negan’s little light-filled torture-fest. Also no response to all the noise and people running around through the woods.

It’s too bad they couldn’t get Henry Rollins, who was the comics’ inspiration for Negan.

You know, FTWD annoys me, for many reasons, but Nick the Junkie intrigues me. I think he’s going to have some really good development.

Also, I like Daniel Salazar and that obviously slightly sociopathic guy, Strand.

262

That’s it. doorhinge wins the thread. :smiley:

263

Putting Negan aside for the moment, another reason this back half of the season in general and the finale in particular sucked is they spent oodles of time dropping tantalizing clues about the Wolves for it all to mean jack shit. Who were they? What was the deal with the W’s on the foreheads? I wanted to know more but it’s like that didn’t happen.

264

“W” stands for “Wolf”. I don’t think there is anything more to it, other than a grizzly parallel to the “A” that the late Sam went around stamping on the Alexandrians.

265

Obviously it stood for Wolf…my point is we never saw any more of them after many episodes of build up.

266

I agree about the Wolves. Didn’t they have some zombie slicing ritual? How did they come to be? Who was their leader and how was their particular zombie-apocalypse philosophy formed? Where did they go?

267

This is false. Negan’s group encountered Daryl, Abraham, and Rosita whereupon the former explained to their latter that their modus operandi when encountering new people was to shoot one of them “to set the tone” and force the others to lead them to their settlement. That encounter combined with what they learned from Hilltop gave ample evidence as to what Negan’s group was all about even Rick & Co. failed to appreciate the scope of their power. Rick was right, eventually Negan was going to come after Alexandria because that’s simply what they do.

268

Given how many people thought Shane was right to murder Otis and The Governor was right to kill those National Guardsman, yeah, Kirkman has a point.

269

I was hoping FTWD would do that too. Alas, they didn’t during the 1st season and the start of the 2nd season is about where TWD began.

270

In the episode where Red Leader is killed we see Negan’s group display some sophisticated radio protocols that included instructions for when they’ve been compromised. I don’t doubt that they kept track of the RV via scouts with radios.

271

OK, re-watched it.

POV. Definitely not a thing. We had several “POV” moments of Daryl et al being held in the box. But when Negan was beating his pick, the “POV” was different-- complete darkness. Not the same at all as the “POV” from inside the box.

Keegan says multiple times that he’s going to beat the shit out of someone. He doesn’t actually say he’s going to kill one of them, except once, and it’s unclear what he really meant.

The chair against he door thing doesn’t work. Chairs can slide across a floor easily enough.

Keegan said he wouldn’t tolerate one more outburst after Glenn’s, but he tolerated one from Rick.

I think if you just made a note of who was positioned where, and then followed along with the eeny-meeny-miny-moe, you should be able to figure out who got chosen. He was going in order.

272

What the heck is that supposed to mean? There was a different light level in the shot therefore it wasn’t meant to be the same person’s POV? Of course it was the same. And it was Glenn.

Assuming you mean Negan, it’s already well-established that he always kills someone. It was established through dialogue in earlier episodes, it was established through the wall of photos (which again, Glenn found), and we know from the producers of the show that a “major character” was going to be killed off this season (it’s Glenn, by the way).

I don’t think that really means anything. But it’s Glenn, in any case.

273

I’m under the impression that the Wolves were a small group and Rick’s group exterminated them. They seemed to be a bigger group than the Claimers. Maybe the size of the Termites? Several Wolves were killed during their assault on Alexandria. Rick killed the five or six who had escaped and were trying to take the motorhome. Carol killed the last Wolf because he was trying to kidnap Doc Denise.

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Good point. The times they are a-changin’. :frowning:

275

You’re right, it would have been a bit more satisfying to know more of the backstory of this group.

276

Did you miss Breaking Bad, where people thought Skyler is a bitch because she wanted to leave her drug-dealing murdering husband?

This is how How I Met Your Negan would unfurl.
Season One: the fall of society, and Negan goes from car salesman to someone struggling to survive.
Season Two: Like the Termites, Negan realizes that it is kill or be killed. Reads The Prince. Season ends with Negan killing off leader of the group he belongs to and taking his place.
Season 3: Negan’s group fights another group and captures many prisoners. Negan realizes that he cannot stomach killing all of them, so takes a page from history and decimates them, saying that after he kills one, the rest are welcome to join his group.
Season 4: Negan’s group takes over other small ‘farmsteads’, and makes a plan to take over Hilltop after the Hilltop loses many people to the dead. Negan rolls into Hilltop, chooses his victim based on his scout’s reports that the kid had been trying to steal/kill his soldiers. Emphasizes security patrols to keep number of walking dead down.
Season 5: Negan takes over another town, and begins to stitch together brutal society with his warriors being cream of crop. Scouts find other towns, and Negan rushes to grow big enough not to get swallowed.
Season 6: Negan’s world begins to lose people en masse. Thinking rebellion Negan tries to seek out source. Discovers it’s actually Rick et co. killing his wandering warriors. Searches out Alexandria and makes plan to fight. Ends up capturing Rick and Co.

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(post shortened)

Yes I did skip Breaking Bad. Terminally ill teacher begins selling methamphetamine to kids. Resorts to lying, theft, and murder to keep making money while ruining the lives of who knows how many users and those close to him. Also affecting the lives of the victims of the users who need to steal or rob more money to buy more drugs. Not my cup of tea.

According to Wiki -

Breaking Bad is widely regarded as one of the greatest television series of all time. By the time the series finale aired, the series was among the most-watched cable shows on American television. The show received numerous awards, including sixteen Primetime Emmy Awards, eight Satellite Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, two Peabody Awards, two Critics’ Choice Awards, and four Television Critics Association Awards. For his leading performance, Cranston won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series four times, while Aaron Paul won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series three times. In 2013, Breaking Bad entered the Guinness World Records as the most critically acclaimed show of all time.

I sit corrected. Kirkman does know his audience better than I do.

Your layout of the first six seasons of How I Met Your Negan is very plausible. Have you thought of sending your resume to team Kirkman?

278

Um, not to “kids”. Although he’s involved in wholesale, not street dealing, so you don’t really know who most of the customers are.

More to protect himself and his family than anything.

That’s silly conjecture that has nothing to do with anything shown in the show. It sounds like you just really hate drugs in general and have a lot of preconceptions about the drug business. In any case the show is not an endorsement of meth in any way. If anything, it’s the opposite. It’s just a really, really good drama.

279

Sure. OK. The drug dealer is Robin Hood and even though he doesn’t care who the end users are, they can’t be children. :smack:

Selling methamphetamine is really no different than selling ice cream. :smack:

Illegal drug use is good for TV viewers. :cool:

I think I’m beginning to understand the type of audience that Kirkman would be expecting to market “How I Met Your Negan” to. Thanks for your helpful insight.

280

Look, you’re not going to watch it anyway, but BB is quite a bit more complex than indicated by your flippant dismissals of the premise.

At first, he’s not a “drug dealer” per se, just the manufacturer. And rationalizes that by reasoning that people are buying it anyway, but they’re buying crappy, adulterated, tainted, awfully-made stuff that is even more dangerous than it needs to be. By being a great chemist and making a “great” product, he tells himself that though the users have made bad choices and are hooked on these drugs, at least now they’re not shooting up random contaminants and rat poison and whatever else. And he does have all kinds of ethical stipulations about who he’ll allow his associates to deal with, deal to, etc. And then as the seasons go on, we start to see his standards slip as things get harder to control and the protagonist shifts even more clearly to the villain. All while continuing to rationalize and justify every step of the way. At the beginning, you kind of wanted to root for him because it really seemed like he was trying to do something to provide for his family before he died while making a good effort to not hurt anybody (more than they already were, anyway). At points, we see connections and consequences to his actions that he’s not able to see from his perspective; so he’s fucking things up even though he might still think he’s able to minimize the damage. But his success leads to hubris, followed by everything spiraling out of control.

It’s a very similar story we have here of the complications of morality, the danger of thinking that you’re the good guy and have moral high ground to do whatever you want to do. Or maybe to what degree? Getting in over your head. And so on.

So yeah, he understands the audience, which is this audience, because the themes are much the same. Your points about selling meth and drug use on TV don’t really work for me: BB certainly never glamorized any of it, if anything it drove the point pretty clearly that getting involved in that in any way dooms one to a horrible life, a horrible death, or both.

Anyway, other than “selling meth to kids” you did pretty much have the gist of what he became. The thing is, though he’s the protagonist of the story, you don’t have to empathize with him. I would certainly argue you’re not expected to. You find yourself surprised who you end up empathizing with here and there, which I thought was incredibly interesting. People who also made bad choices, but still may not have really deserved what they got.