Spoilers for the Season 6 Finale of The Walking Dead!
Tonight marked the finale of The Walking Dead, AMC’s hit zombie killing series based on the comic of the same name. While I haven’t watched the show in about two and a half years, I’ve largely still been unable to avoid the show because of the people I follow on Twitter. However, the promise of this season’s finale was enough to make me tune in. I dig Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Comedian for the win), and if anyone could play that psychotic dude Negan and get me to tune in, it’d certainly be him. Seriously, have you seen Watchmen lately? He’s awesome.
What certainly also helped is that the show was building up his hype pretty damn well. The cast and crew promised that Negan was “the most evil person we’ve seen so far,” and his reputation with his baseball bat, Lucille, was enough to draw me in. The whole week leading up to the finale, I was debating with friends who’d be on the unfortunate receiving end. Would it be Glenn, like in the comics? Deviate to kill off Rick or Abraham? Or would they be incredibly ballsy and axe off the fan favorite Darryl Dixon?
Then, as the minutes wore on and the commercial breaks kept coming, my anticipation slowly devolved into irritation, followed by eventually exasperation. Myself and plenty of other people on Twitter were just demanding that the show get to the point, hoping that the folks at AMC wouldn’t seriously drag out a 90-minute finale and that they’d just have him do what he was literally made to do.
Yeah, so that’s totally what they did. Because of course. The Walking Dead loves to drag things out pointlessly like a teenager loves to say they’ll clean their room, but doesn’t follow up on it for another couple of hours. Once Negan walked out of the RV and started talking, it was cool and legitimately terrifying. But then, he just. Kept. On. Talking. To the point where I was seriously considering changing the channel. Finally, he swings his bat towards an unlucky recipient, and… it’s shown in first person. We won’t know who it is for the next six and a half months, something that isn’t an exciting prospect at all.
When your entire finale is building up to an iconic character and near everyone watching it is just waiting for the point to come, you know you’ve done something horribly wrong. Not that there’s anything wrong with building suspense, but there’s a fine line between keeping viewers on the edge of their seats and stalling for time. This one was the latter, which wouldn’t have been an issue in and of itself if it hadn’t been so blatantly obvious. Negan basically repeats himself about two or three times about Rick and crew being pieces of shit, then he plays a stupidly long game of “eeny meeny miney mo” to figure out who he should make his victim. What was the point of all of that if it was just going to be a six month long tease?
Sorry, The Walking Dead, you don’t get to do that. You can’t just build all that up for months and then just barely live up to the expectations that you set for yourself. Morgan’s perfect in the role, but for all of that to lead up to a big fart just reminds me why I stopped watching this show in the first place. And no, using teaser image after teaser image is not going to get me to tune in when the show starts back up again in October.
Check out our episode recap over here!
