Broken Pawn: TV Review - The Walking Dead Season 8 Episodes 1-8

WARNING : THE WALKING DEAD SEASON #8 EPISODES 1-8 SPOILERS BELOW!!!

Season 8 of The Walking Dead featured the 'All Out War'

  AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ just completed the first half of its season 8 ‘All Out War’ story arc in which our intrepid zombie apocalypse survivors of Alexandria, the Hilltop, and the Kingdom seek to fight off the oppressive regime of the band of Saviors and their leader Negan who receive ‘tribute’ from all the nearby communities in return for not killing them.

  This show is still the top rated cable show but its viewership has plummeted to six year lows and barely half of the season 5 average of 14 million viewers a week. I think the reason for the drop is that instead of following our cast of a dozen or so apocalypse survivors for the first five and a half seasons there are at least 3 dozen characters to follow. We still have our core group but now there are four to six people each at the Kingdom, the Hilltop, the Saviors compound, as well as the newly discovered communities by the ocean side and the trash heap. So many groups to keep track of and visit leaves less time for the viewers to stay connected to the main characters. Season 7 focused on a character or two in each episode but left the main characters unseen for weeks at a time. Season 8 has tried to patch in snippets of each group of each episode. It is great to see stalwarts like Rick, Carol, and Maggie in each episode but in most episodes it seemed they were guest stars giving cameos instead of the main characters we should be following all the time.

  The season started with a great premise as Rick Grimes and company use information given to them by Dwight the Savior traitor to lead thousands of zombies to the Saviors ‘Sanctuary’ compound during a meeting between Negan and his lieutenants in an attempt to starve out Negan and the Saviors. Escape seems impossible with a well-positioned group of snipers ready to foil any attempt to leave the compound. Meanwhile Rick has sent teams to destroy Negan’s satellite operations while all the leaders are trapped at the Sanctuary.

RIP Shiva the CGI tiger..

The raids work although there is a heavy toll of redshirts from the Kingdom along with the death of minor character Aaron’s husband Eric who is left by a tree to bleed out and seemingly reanimated as a zombie. The main objective of not allowing reinforcements to free the Sanctuary from the zombie horde has been met. This storyline took the first five episodes of the season and contained intense side plots. One outpost has seen two dozen Saviors surrender, leaving Hilltop leader Maggie to decide whether to execute them or imprison them which requires using resources to feed and guard them as well as the knowledge that an escape attempt or riot could erupt at any time. At the Sanctuary, Father Gabriel and Negan are trapped in a trailer in the compound and must work together to fight their way through the surrounding zombies while inside the Sanctuary his lieutenants have to deal with a worker uprising without their leader. I found Episode 3 especially intense as King Ezekiel deals with the killing of his entire army by the saviors, having to escape from his now zombified-army, and if that wasn’t bad enough the king loses his beloved CGI tiger Shiva who manages to be devoured by a half dozen slow moving zombies while protecting her master.

If James Tiberius Kirk was in the zombie apocalypse this is what he would be like.

  The first five episodes had a lot of what I like about this show - zombies and more zombies.After a great first five episodes of the season the show seemed to go off the rails with many of the main characters leaving their lane in a rush to the ‘grand’ season finale. In episode six, Rick Grimes heads to the dump to once again enlist the help of Jadis and the monosyllabic trash people. These are the same trash people that sold out our group of survivors to Negan just last season which in show time was a few weeks ago. Naturally the trash people take Rick prisoner which did have a redeeming quality in giving us another Star Trek like fight between Rick and a helmeted zombie> Rick’s Captain Kirk like victory convinces the trash people to join his side at least temporarily. Meanwhile the plan to starve out the Saviors is working too well for Darryl who decides to ram a truck through the Sanctuary walls to let the zombies eat their way to victory. This idea meets with the approval of the snipers surrounding the Sanctuary.

  Daryl’s truck breaches the Sanctuary walls and the zombies flood in but when Rick arrives at the end of the seventh episode the zombies, Negan, and the Saviors are gone. What happened? How did the Saviors escape? We never find out but we do see despite having their vehicles blown up and there outposts destroyed there are enough Saviors to outnumber the communities of the Hilltop, the Kingdom, and Alexandria. The confrontation between Simon’s group of saviors and the Hilltop on a barricaded road is especially odd. After hearing for at least two episodes how Negan wants Hilltop leader Maggie must be captured along with Rick and King Ezekiel so they can be killed and have their zombie selves posted on spikes at the Sanctuary, Simon allows Maggie to take her crew back to the Hilltop after killing the obligatory redshirt. It was the equal of the many times one of our crew of survivors or snipers had the drop on Negan but failed to pull the trigger. Naturally Maggie heads back to the Hilltop after promising to be the Saviors minions but immediately kills one of the Savior prisoners and prepares for a last stand.

  There are some vague references by the Saviors how Eugene came up with the plan to drive the zombie hoard away from the Sanctuary but that doesn’t explain what happened to the snipers. It also doesn’t explain how Eugene has morphed from a fairly useless science teacher who can barely fix a radio into MacGyver. Another unexplainable occurrence happened in the season finale. Rick, Carol, and Jerry are driving when their car is rammed violently and we cut to commercial. Jerry ends up captured by Simon and shows up at the confrontation with the Hilltop people, Carol ends up at the Kingdom, and Rick at Alexandra for a showdown with Negan. How did they survive the car crash and end up in such disparate locations? The only explanation is that it was required to advance the plot. The confrontation between Rick and Negan featured both men taking turns hitting each other with Lucille the barbed-wire baseball bat and again in the name of plot advancement both men were able to walk away from the fight.

In a massive break from the comics, Carl has seemingly met his end...

I don’t mind all the silliness of the plot consistencies or lack thereof - after all this is a zombie apocalypse show. What I want is to see the small band of apocalypse survivors fighting zombies and other groups to survive. There were plenty of zombies this season but there is no longer a small band of survivors – there are so many characters the show keeps track of that only one or two get any meaningful screen time in any given episode. That is my biggest problem with the show at present – the show needs a purge and get the group on the road instead of the current civilization building arc. There will be one less character after the mid season finale revelation that original cast member Carl (Rick Grimes’ son) has been bitten by a zombie and presumably will pass away in the second half premiere. While I hate to see Carl go the development gives me hope for the future of the show as it is a major break from the comics (where Carl is still around years after the ‘All-Out War’). Other characters have met an early end but other characters can have their roles replaces – not the main protagonist’s son. I suspect the falling ratings may prod the showrunners to ditch the comic arc and get our zombie survivors back to what made the show so attractive which is the constant quest to new locations and survive zombie attacks.