The Walking Dead; 8.16 "Wrath" (open spoilers)

Andrew Lincoln, Lennie James, Garret Dillahunt, Danay Garcia, Robert Kirkman and Scott M. Gimple are on Talking Dead, which will cover both the season finale of TWD and the season premiere of Fear.

Garret Dillahunt? isn’t he in the other show?

Eugene! My man!

Holy crap!

There is a Fear The Walking Dead on directly after TWD (well, it’s on right now) and there will be a crossover. Morgan (Lennie James) is joining Fear. So tonight’s Talking Dead (on after this episode of Fear) will have guests from both shows. I don’t know the timeline for Morgan’s joining the other group in California.

Guess I was wrong Eugene, his face turn makes about as much sense as Maggies heel turn though.

I think I agree with Maggie.

I am surprised Jesus is in on it. Daryl I can understand, though.

That is a turnaround for Jesus.

This episode was anticlimactic. It was full of stupidity and inconsistent character behavior.

This show absolutely must get someone to help with the structure of action sequences. Rick’s attack on the decoy Saviors looked ridiculous. You can imagine the director on set saying “Okay, when I yell “bang”, all the Saviors fall immediately to the ground, and all the zombies just stand there.” What it looked like on screen is that Rick’s group instantaneously made perfect head shots on all but one of the Saviors interspersed amongst zombies.

Also, Rick’s group (again moving in a giant clump), gets “surrounded” in a giant field even though they cannot see anything. So, while Neegan monolgues, they just all stand there, dumbfounded, listening and waiting. No attempt to just go back the way they came, no taking defensive positions, no moving out of a giant clump.

None of this felt remotely coherent with the depths of pain and torture the show went to with Glenn’s and Abraham’s deaths. It seems like good writers would chart a more satisfying arc with a conclusion that matched the path toward it. This felt like going through the motions.

Eugene’s deception was interesting, but it only occurred to him after Gabriel tried it? You mean that until that moment, he was down with actually making rounds that worked?

The whole Carl/Neegan thing hasn’t made much sense, so the idea that Neegan would be swayed for a moment did not ring true for me.

I liked how Morgan makes a huge speech about the importance of being with people and then immediately follows up with “I need to be alone.”

I thought surely they would at least back up into cover.

Sabotaging the cartridges would be an easy way to get caught, even when a lot were needed for the upcoming fight. It just needed one of them to fire one round.

Luckily, none of the saviors had any rounds that were made BEFORE Eugene sabotaged them. And they all had one of the sabotaged rounds loaded for the first shot.

Thanks.

They’re in Texas now.

We don’t know when it occurred to Eugene, although I predicted this would happen.

From a story-telling perspective, it would need to be ambiguous. But retroactively, it actually explains why Eugene was so angry with Gabriel. Gabriel’s clumsy attempt at sabotage or his escape attempt could have revealed Eugene’s more sophisticated sabotage.

That actually made more sense to me than most of the other moralizing bullshit throughout the season.

Yeah…there’s a lot of that going around.

Jesus is preaching sparing Saviors, but he’s on board whatever Maggie’s plan is?

Daryl all fired up to kill Saviors and Negan, but after all his big talk, he lets Dwight go (or I kill you!).
Do we really need Maggie, Jesus and Daryl fomenting civil war with Rick and Michione next season? I feel like they are going to have a hard enough time integrating with the Saviors in whatever new society they try and create. I mean, I’m sure that of the hundreds of people killed on both sides, Abraham and Glenn weren’t the only ones who had people who cared about them. When push comes to shove, is anyone willing to trade any of the main character’s lives for Negan’s?

I’m assuming “May” in the poll was supposed to be “Hated It.” Good lord that was horrible!

Nothing anybody did was remotely in line with the characters or how they arrived at this point. On top of that, it wasn’t even entertaining to watch. +1 to everything Hentor said above.

Hadn’t we seen that ridiculous tree with the stained glass windows hanging in it before? Did Rick have a vision of it earlier or something?

And one more thing, I don’t know where the set dressers are from, but they have no understanding of how shit works. Here on the east coast it rains. In fact it rains a lot, and plants grow. Unless there are Walkers driving tractors around periodically mowing these big ass pastures the characters are always walking through, the grass weeds and pine trees would be as tall as a man by now at least. Fields do not look like that when left unattended. Those stupid windows that were apparently there just to provide rick a shard of glass to cut Negan’s throat with would have rotted away.

Horrible, just horrible. They may be more thoroughly ruining this show than they did “Lost.”

At the end Negan had maybe 40 guys total and his plan involved sacrificing a quarter of them and sending another quarter to hilltop. His grand master stroke was an about even fight against Rick’s forces with both sides standing in the open like it was the 1700s. At least they had the high ground. The more this show tries to be an action show the worse it gets, we had better fire fights on the A-Team in the 80s.

They had a boat to get there. What will Morgan do it, hitch hike?

Maybe I misunderstood Eugene’s Eugene-Speak but I thought he said that Gabriel’s clumsy attempt was what inspired him.

I liked this episode. Rick’s turn around form wild eyed crazy to moral center was way too sudden but I am glad it happened.

The set up for next season seems interesting.

What did Eugene use for primers, did they find reloader supplies?