By Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
Dec. 10, 2020 — Oh, Walking Dead, wherefore dost thou vex me so?
I really want to like TWD and, by extension, its spinoffs. I loved the first few seasons of the original, and still remember the thrills I once experienced. Also, it’s a genre show, which I feel honor-bound to watch. Further, it’s based on a comic book. So yeah, a guy like me, writing a column like this — it’s a gimmie.
So please be better, Walking Dead. Please.
Two Walking Dead spinoffs came to a temporary halt in November. Both left me with mixed feelings.
Morgan Jones (Lennie James, left) and Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey) are two of the most popular characters on Fear the Walking Dead. (Ryan Green/AMC)
Fear the Walking Dead came to the end of the first part of season 6 on Nov. 22. The second part, consisting of nine episodes, will air sometime in 2021. And it’s already been approved for a season 7.
I’m not sure how I feel about that.
Fear the Walking Dead began as a study of an already blended family that was forced to make common cause with yet another family, refugees from El Salvador, as the zombie apocalypse began. The show also added annoying con man Victor Strand (Colman Domingo), for no reason I’ve ever figured out.
It would have been interesting to see more of the collapse of civilization — The Walking Dead didn't, as it began six months into it, when Rick Grimes famously awoke from his coma. So Fear could have showed us what that show didn’t. But nope, Fear jumped years ahead and we missed the technical beginning of both shows a second time.
And it would have been interesting to see how these blended families coped. But nope; instead everybody died. Well, mostly. Of the original first-season cast, we only have high school student Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey), Strand and the patriarch of the Salvadoran family, current barber and former torturer Daniel Salazar (Ruben Blades). An entirely new cast has coalesced around this trio, including two transplants from TWD. And, while the show began in L.A., and took a swing through Mexico, it seems to have settled in Texas.
And mostly, I like the new group. (Even though I still hate Strand.) But one wonders what the point of the show is now. It doesn’t vary all that much from the middle seasons of the original, except that this group tends to surrender at the drop of a hat — even when they have the advantage. (Had Rick Grimes been on this show, our survivors would be running Texas, and probably most of Oklahoma as well.) Currently, the group has surrendered to a woman named Virginia (Colby Minifie of The Boys), who has separated them and put them to work all over Texas.
When Season 6 began, each episode focused on a different character, or pair of characters. This was pretty interesting, as these episodes served as deep character dives, as well as moving the overarching narrative forward.
But while the character work has been excellent, the writing still suffers from its usual flaws: 1) characters acting stupidly to advance the plot (“Hey, I have an idea! Let’s surrender!”); 2) set-piece zombie fights the audience can see coming (“Why does nobody notice that fence is about to give way?”); 3) plot armor for major characters; and consequently 4) no sense of real danger.
Yes, I’ll still watch. But if Morgan (Lennie James) or John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt) get killed, we riot.
Huck (Annet Mahendru, facing) and Hope Bennett (Alexa Mansour) are the two most important characters on The Walking Dead: World Beyond. At least so far. (Macall Polay/AMC)
Meanwhile, the two-season The Walking Dead: World Beyond has finished its first season with a resounding, “Eh.”
If you haven’t heard, the idea is that four teens from the tenth year of the apocalypse — the conceit being that zombieland is all they’ve ever known — try to walk from “the Colony” at the University of Omaha in Nebraska to the state of New York, to rescue the father of two of them. Two adults accompany the four, but let’s face it: YA angst is the focus of the show.
Which is irritating. Yes, I know teen-oriented shows are popular. Yes, it’s an angle we haven’t seen on a Walking Dead show. But shouldn’t any Dawson’s Creek issues take a back seat to simple survival in the apocalypse? Every time a teen tears up on this show I want to slap them.
However, World has two things going for it I really applaud.
First up is that one of the group’s chaperones has turned out to be a villain — and the best kind of villain, the kind that thinks she’s a good guy doing the right thing. Huck (Annet Mahendru) wants to separate Hope (Alexa Mansour) from the others and take her to the Civic Republic Military in New York, because the CRM thinks Hope is a genius, and these Civic Republic dudes are trying to save all the geniuses they can find in order to save civilization. (Huck, real name Jennifer, is the daughter of a CRM colonel.) The Civic Republic’s goal sounds righteous, but they’re ends-justify-the-means types who have (for example) already wiped out the Omaha Colony for reasons unknown.
They are also, it appears, the group that kidnapped Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) in The Walking Dead. Which is reason No. 2 that World is important beyond its young and mostly predictable cast. Grimes is supposed to eventually star in three Walking Dead movies, presumably focusing on wherever he is, which is increasingly looking like the CRM in New York that the World cast is seeking.
"We're the lead-up to the movies, so we're going there," Mahendru told comicbook.com. "All the questions fans have had for, I don't know, inherently a decade, right? Our show is the answers to that.”
Bad subject/verb agreement aside, don’t hold your breath that we will actually see Grimes in World Beyond. Scott M. Gimple, chief content officer, has been quoted in numerous interviews that while AMC is “cranking away” on the first movie, Grimes will not appear in World Beyond.
Which is good to know. I was keeping expectations pretty low for season 2 to avoid disappointment, and this announcement keeps me there.
Like Fear, World Beyond will return at an undisclosed time in 2021. But before that, The Walking Dead itself returns. The Walking Dead Holiday Special — obviously, there’s nothing more festive than zombies — arrives on Dec. 13, and then a bonus six episodes of season 10 of The Walking Dead begin on Feb. 28.
The Holiday Special seems to be little more than an extra episode of Talking Dead. It’s hosted by Chris Hardwicke, and features interviews with cast members, behind-the-scenes bits and sneak previews of coming events. That elicits another “eh” from me, but if you’re a true fan, it should hit you between the eyes like a red-handled machete.
I find the six new episodes far more intriguing. Like the recent run of episodes on Fear, the episodes tend toward character studies. They include:
- "Home Sweet Home" (Feb. 28): Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan), returns to the show from her failed network drama, Whiskey Cavalier. Oops, that’s the real-world reason. In-story, her departure is still unexplained.
- "Find Me" (March 7): Another Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride) adventure! Both have plot armor, since a spinoff starring the two has been announced.
- "One More" (March 14): Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) and Aaron (Ross Marquand) go on a supply run. Neither has plot armor. Doesn’t help that Gabriel has only one eye, and Aaron has only one hand.
- "Splinter" (March 21): In the last episode of Walking Dead that aired, Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura) and Princess (Paola Lázaro) were captured by dudes in white armor, who looked an awful lot like the CRM on World Beyond. This episode promises to fill in some Princess back story.
- "Diverged" (March 28): Daryl & Carol return for another adventure.
- "Here's Negan" (April 4): Title kinda gives it away, doesn’t it?
The main show is still the best of the bunch, and I like character studies, so these episodes should buck me up after nothing but Fear and World for so long. Maybe so much that I’ll look forward to the latter two shows returning.
But only if you write them better, AMC. Pretty please?
Find Captain Comics by email (capncomics@aol.com), on his website (captaincomics.ning.com), on Facebook (Andrew Alan Smith) or on Twitter (@CaptainComics).
Replies
Princess is in the latest season of TWD? That is welcome news to me. She appeared in the comics, but not nearly long enough.
White armor was also featured quite visibly in the comics around the same time when she debuted. Of course, that does not necessarily mean much.
IMO TWD suffers from its need not to stray too much from the comics, although that no longer much of a concern. It has also become a bit too militaristic at times, as had Fear the Walking Dead back in the second and particularly the third seasons, In any media, Walking Dead is at its best when it engages in character development with character not named Negan.