Rick and Maggie prepare for all out war in 'The Walking Dead' season 8 premiere.
The members of Hilltop, Alexandria and the Kingdom, have all come together to bring the war to Negan's doorstep. That's not figurative, either. They quite literally drive up to his doorstep, cars rigged with big sides of sheet metal for protection, armed to the teeth. Click here to donate for free tuition University Education for the poor and you will richly be blessed by God
Earlier, in Rick's speech, he made clear that only one Savior had to die: Negan. (They go and kill several lookouts right after that speech, so it's more like "only five people have to die" but who's counting?) And who should walk out onto his doorstep in plain view of all these heavily armed rebels? Who gives them all the perfect chance to take him out then and there? Who swaggers like he's the king of all he sees, never once worried that maybe Rick had given orders to shoot him on sight?
If you guessed Negan, you win. The Big Bad walks right out there like he hasn't got a care in the world. He's soon followed by his lieutenants, including the coward, Eugene, and the traitor, Dwight. It turns out, he had nothing to be afraid of. Despite being heavily armed, despite having multiple weapons with scopes and a clear shot, despite coming to do this very thing, nobody opens fire on Negan. Why?
This is one of those incredibly frustrating moments that have come more and more to define The Walking Dead. Because there's really no good explanation as to why nobody shoots Negan the moment he showed his smug face. There's no reason one of the dozens of rebels couldn't have popped him at such close range.
In the end, Rick "tricks" Negan and his men. He gives them one last chance to forsake Negan and switch over to Team Rick and starts counting down from 10. But, like that fake old black white movie in Home Alone, he starts shooting before the count is up. And you know something else? Rick shoots with the accuracy of a Storm Trooper from Star Wars.
See, Rick spent all his time making speeches and none of his time devising a plan that actually made any sense. By now, Rick would have known that Negan would come out with his little hip-swoop move and start talking crap in the most annoying way possible. He knew that this would afford them the perfect shot. And since he only wanted to kill one guy, having sharp-shooters take Negan out the moment he walked outside would have made perfect sense.
But that would have been too easy. The show could have avoided the painfully bad shootout that followed by just not having Negan come out to begin with. He could have holed up inside and sent a proxy (Eugene, perhaps.) I guess his plan was to use Gregory to "order" Hilltop's members to stand down, though why he thought that would work is beyond me.
Credit: AMC
Daryl at least looks cool riding his bike.
The rest of Rick and company's plan involves simultaneously taking down Savior satellite outposts as well as drawing a huge herd to the Saviors' fortress and blowing open the gates with explosives. I guess the whole "only one person needs to die" thing was never actually part of the plan. Rick was just doing his best to sound noble while not actually meaning any of it. Which is fine---all's fair in love and war---but still a little odd. Click here to donate for free tuition University Education for the poor and you will richly be blessed by God
Oh, and Dwight is in on the plan, of course. He sends out some of the guards right before the good guys arrive on a false-flag mission. They drive right into our heroes' explosive trap.
The gunfights that ensue after Rick opens fire on Negan are as silly as they are inexplicable. The good guys (for lack of a better shorthand) fire hundreds upon hundreds of rounds into the side of the building, shattering glass but not really aiming at any discernible targets once Negan and his goons have leaped out of the way. Negan isn't killed, of course, though it appears he was at least grazed. Somehow he makes it to a trailer outside the main building.
That's where Father Gabriel finds him after he stupidly tries to help the sniveling Gregory. In one of the weirdest scenes I think I've ever watched in this show, Gabriel gets out of his car, runs over to help Gregory, then watches helplessly as Gregory runs back to the same car and drives off. It's a characteristically awful thing to do, but I'm not sure why Gabriel got out of the car to begin with or just watched as Gregory ran over and stole it. (Why didn't he at least take the keys?)
Swarmed by zombies, Gabriel ducks into the trailer and, lo and behold, there's Negan. He proceeds to say quite possibly the dumbest line of dialogue ever written for a serious TV show. I won't even repeat it.
Credit: AMC
Tom Payne as Paul
'Jesus' Rovia, Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes, Khary Payton as Ezekiel,
Ross Marquand as Aaron, Lauren Cohan as Maggie Greene - The Walking Dead
_ Season 8, Episode 1 - Photo Credit: Gene Page/AMC
In any case, it's the gunfight that bothers me more. The sheer waste of once-precious, once-scarce ammunition is galling to say the least. The fact that the good guys are just firing indiscriminately at a building is absurd, both because it's wasteful, probably won't achieve any meaningful goals, and could endanger innocent people within (like children.) In another similar scene, when some good guys go to take down an outpost, a Savior runs and hides behind a car. The good guys fire at the car, pumping dozens, if not hundreds, of rounds into it rather than just flanking the guy and shooting him. I don't get it. Are bullets really this common in zombie-land now?
The rest of the episode was confusing, though I didn't hate it until this atrocious gunfight. It's one of those non-linear episodes we sometimes get, with lots of different flash-forwards. So we go from a flash-forward of Rick looking like he's not doing so hot, pale and breathing heavily, to a flash-forward (vision? dream?) of Grandpa Rick, all silvery-haired, walking with a cane, to a much shorter flash-forward of the good guys preparing their plan for all out war, to the sort-of-present where Rick is giving his speech, then to the sort-of-maybe-present of the actual assault, then back to the speechifying again, plus a couple more flash-forwards to pale Rick breathing heavily and Grandpa Rick.
Episode 1
Credit: AMC
Remember this zombie?
There's other references to the original episode as well. When Carl looks beneath the car and sets his hat down, it's almost the same exact shot as the opening scene of the pilot, when Rick looks beneath the car and sees the slippered zombie girl. It's just also not as interesting as a zombie child wearing slippers picking up a stuffed animal.
Indeed, I'm not sure drawing parallels to the pilot is at all flattering. The opening scene of the pilot was frightening. So was Rick waking, delirious, to an abandoned hospital. And while the pilot uses a flash-forward for its pre-credits scene, it tells much of the rest of the story in a more straightforward manner.
Also, unlike episode 100, episode 1 has a small cast of core characters. Rick and Shane talk about the difference between men and women before Rick is shot in a brief gunfight that's filled with far more tension than anything in tonight's bullet-fest. How can there be tension when nobody that matters ever gets shot? Rick and Morgan have their first, excellent scenes. And in the end Rick is trapped in Atlanta, surrounded by zombies as the camera pans up into the sky to show us just how dire his straits truly are.
So it's not a flattering comparison, however cool it is to nod at that long-ago episode. It makes me miss the show that The Walking Dead used to be, back when there weren't so many main characters, so many communities and Cartoon Villains.
Credit: AMC
Morgan and his spikey stick.
- The plan to bring the herd went surprisingly well given how badly this group has manipulated herds before.
- That being said, Daryl is driving pretty fast as he goes around blowing stuff up, yet somehow the herd seems to keep up...?
- Judith keeps getting older, but Maggie doesn't get any more pregnant. Seriously, I wonder if she's even showing in the Grandpa Rick flash-forwards.
- I feel so happy that there were no Garbage Pail Kids in this season premiere. I want AMC to just quietly write them out of the show.
- I wonder who the dude Carl ends up giving food to is. I feel like he's probably a bad guy, but maybe I'm just as cynical as Rick.
- I liked the parts where they took out the lookouts. I was less fond of the scene where the various communities are mingling and chatting. Felt forced.
Maybe it's all a sign of fatigue. It's tough to keep going and keep things interesting for eight seasons. What we loved about the earlier seasons---a smaller group on the move, scavenging and surviving---has simply changed into something else. It's like an entirely different show now, and for some that may be just what they want. For me, I keep pining for what's been lost, and tonight's nods to the pilot only made that worse.
What did you think? Am I being too harsh? Do you think Grandpa Rick is a dream or a flash-forward? It has that fuzzy dream feeling to it, but I'm not really sure.
Fans of ‘The Walking Dead’ react to shock twist in the first episode of season 8
WARNING: SPOILER ALERT.
Fans of ‘The Walking Dead’ have reacted to a twist in
last night’s opening episode of Season Eight, which left the fate of a
key character hanging in the balance.
As the episode drew to a close, nefarious villain Negan was seen cowering in a caravan after facing a rebellion from Rick Grimes and the Hilltop, which he had unsuccessfully attempted to quash.
But while it doesn’t necessarily mean that he is a guaranteed goner, fans began bemoaning the fact that he hadn’t already died after facing some seriously hairy moments during the episode.
“Feel like Negan could have gotten killed 100 times in the episode”, one fan wrote.
As the episode drew to a close, nefarious villain Negan was seen cowering in a caravan after facing a rebellion from Rick Grimes and the Hilltop, which he had unsuccessfully attempted to quash.
But while it doesn’t necessarily mean that he is a guaranteed goner, fans began bemoaning the fact that he hadn’t already died after facing some seriously hairy moments during the episode.
“Feel like Negan could have gotten killed 100 times in the episode”, one fan wrote.
“They could have killed negan 10x over, but chose to talk instead..lame”, another said.
No comments :
Post a Comment