Did you know Negan is coming? Oh man, just you wait until Negan shows up. Hoo boy, that Negan, I tell ya – as soon as he gets here, shit is going down. You know he’s got a bat that he kills people with? Well, he does, Negan has a bat named Lucille. I’m so excited for Negan to show up!
There. I just summed up the last eight goddamn episodes of The Walking Dead for you. I can’t remember the last time a season of anything limped across the finish line like this, especially after getting off to such a strong start. But after Glenn’s fake-out death, TWD has been content to sabotage its best character (Carol) and endlessly tease the arrival of Negan and his bat Lucille. Andrew Lincoln even went on record saying that Negan’s entrance was “the greatest entrance ever written.” Is that too much hype? Yeah, probably, but at this point there’s no way Negan could arrive and live up to expectations. (The same thing happened last season on Game of Thrones – remember the Sand Snakes?)
So even with the introduction of a character like Negan, how, then, was “Last Day on Earth” so goddamn uneventful? This is what it looks like when a team of writers is actively contemptuous of the fans. “Fuck it,” The Walking Dead seems to say, “we’re going to get ten million viewers every episode anyway, so here’s another episode where people just walk around and accomplish nothing.” All snark aside, that’s a pretty accurate summation of this episode, which was representative of the wheel-spinning nature of this season as a whole. Travelogues are rarely interesting, and “Last Day on Earth” is no different. Rick and his group are trying to get Maggie to Hilltop so she can get looked at by their doctor, but find themselves cut off by Saviors at every drivable road.
(It speaks volumes how little Rick’s group, or the show in general, cares about Alexandria, because Rick, Aaron, Eugene, Abe, Sasha, and Carl go to take Maggie to Hilltop, while leaving Father Gabriel in charge of Alexandria. Not to mention it’s a laughably obvious bit of narrative contrivance.)
And you know what? Some of this is genuinely effective visual storytelling. The show comes this close to achieving the stomach-sinking sensation it’s going for, as the Saviors seem to operate almost with a hive mind. At times they’re even reasonable, which just makes them that much more frightening (shades of Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil”). Of course, this is all undone once you realize that The Walking Dead has, several times by now, shown the Saviors’ ruthlessness and efficiency, so the whole thing amounts to a big show put on for the enjoyment of the players themselves. Not to mention that going to five separate roadblocks just shows how goddamn stupid Rick’s group has become. Oh well, at least we got a nice cameo from Steven Ogg, better known as Trevor in GTA V, and who got one of the best lines in the episode: “Welcome to where you’re going.”
So let’s switch gears a bit, because before we get to Negan, we have to talk about Morgan and Carol. Like most of “Last Day on Earth,” this plot could have survived with half the runtime, but nothing says portentous like a 90-minute finale, right? I’ve made no secret of my disdain for Morgan, and of how his mindset has infected Carol. But what’s worse than that is that Morgan is so goddamn dogmatic that he approaches pacifism like fascism, and his “all life is precious” credo means he thinks he can choose when people die.
Does that sound like an exaggeration? Maybe it is. But it’s a bad look to track down Carol (against her wishes, mind you) and ignore her insistence that she wants, and is ready, to die. “Last Day on Earth” had a weird undercurrent of men making decisions for women (see also: Carl locking Enid in a closet to stop her from going on the Maggie mission).
But more than that, the Morgan/Carol plot only existed so they could meet members of the Kingdom, a band of survivors who wear armor, ride horses, and are led by someone called Ezekiel. (Here’s their Wiki page, if you’re interested. I didn’t read too much out of fear of spoilers, so potential spoiler alert.) That introduction could have been over and done with in way less time than it was given. But The Walking Dead wasn’t interested in storytelling last night – it was interested in spending 90 minutes to introduce a single character.
So, does Negan deliver? Was he worth the wait? You know what, he kinda was. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is pitch-perfect casting: funny, smart, scary, and above all charming (notwithstanding the fact that Negan is an adult who promises the group will be in “pee-pee pants city” soon). It’s easy to see how Negan could be at the center of this cult of personality, and Morgan is so quick with a smile and a threat that he’s never less than enthralling. Like Melissa McBride as Carol, Morgan is better than the material he’s been given.
At the 4-minute mark of “Last Day on Earth,” I made my Negan kill prediction: Abe. At the 6-minute mark, I got the sinking feeling that it would be a cliffhanger. At the 90-minute mark, I realized that sometimes it’s not fun to be right. TWD had the chance to end a lackluster episode on a strong note, and it came so close to doing so. But we should know better by now. After playing the world’s longest game of eeny-meeny-miny-moe (a cheap way to build tension), Negan decides on a victim; the camera switches to their POV, and Negan lets fly with Lucille. And…cut to black.
Fuck you, Walking Dead.
Icky sound effects are not an effective substitute for visuals. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t tease your audience with rumors of seemingly every character dying and then not have the balls to show it. For a show about zombies, The Walking Dead is remarkably toothless. Not showing Negan’s victim shows how little respect the show has for its fans at this point, knowing that they’d have to actively try to get people to tune out (which would explain Morgan’s increased role). The word I keep coming back to is cheap. It’s cheap that the show would build up to this huge moment only to yank the rug out from under us. It’s cheap that the show waited until the end to trot out Daryl, Glenn, Michonne, and Rosita, after not checking in on them for the entirety of the episode (also, as a side note, Dwight not killing Daryl on their third run-in shows that Dwight is dumb, is not a real threat, and The Walking Dead will jump through every hoop imaginable to keep Daryl alive, which, again, is cheap). It’s cheap that it’s a blatant, cynical way to keep fans talking about the show until its return in the fall. (Vox.com’s Todd VanDerWerff summed it up nicely on his Twitter: “Scott M. Gimple has the face of a man who’s just realized that will be in every ‘worst cliffhanger ever’ listicle for the rest of time.”)
The worst part is that it’s so hard to make a clean break from this show. Once in a while the show can pull out all the stops and deliver riveting television (see the late-season episode “Not Tomorrow Yet”). Some of the performances are genuinely great, and it’s amazing from a technical standpoint (Bear McCreary’s music was excellent in this episode). But “Last Day on Earth” was such a cynical, insulting way to end the season that it’s just become depressingly obvious how little this show cares about its fans, or even itself.
“Last Day on Earth” score: 1.5/5
The Walking Dead season 6B score: 2/5
The Walking Dead season 6 score: 3/5
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