We Need To Talk

Why The Walking Dead is Beyond Resurrection

If you're anything like me, you were one of millions of people to fall down the Walking Dead fandom rabbit hole over the last several years. I for one fell in love with the show when I was twelve, two years after the show's premiere in 2010. I mean, what's not to love? It takes the zombie genre and completely twists it by giving the audience such a human story, with raw emotion and the acting and writing, for the most part, has been absolutely phenomenal. It has skyrocketed, been the cause and inspiration for many other projects, including inspiring me to create my own zombie series, and took out the age of vampires with a fucking rocket launcher.

But in recent years, things have changed. Our beloved show has taken a nose dive and it ain't pretty. What was once television's top rated show, aside from Game of Thrones, is now being made a mockery of. Why has this occurred, you may be asking. Well, that's what I'm here to discuss. I want to break down with you all that went wrong with our perfect show and why the writers set off to destroy it.

The Walking Dead is based off of a comic book series of the same name, written by Robert Kirkman. When the project came along to turn this comic book into a TV series, director Frank Darabont took to role of being the show runner. The show premiered on Halloween of 2010, with six episodes in the first season. The second season was given 12 episodes, and was also show creator, Darabont's last season on the show. After that, the show went through a trial run with another show runner until Scott Gimple took on the role for the show's fourth season in 2013, until the torch was handed over to Angela Kang for season nine in 2018.

The show has had a kind of cult following for roughly a decade and their fandom doesn't really seem to be faltering any. Still, the audience is less than thrilled with many changes that have occurred throughout the series' last three seasons, me included. You see, a show that was once dubbed as unique , exciting, and flawless is now being compared to a soap opera. It's got to the point where fans are actually enjoying the video game series adapted from the comics by Telltale Games (RIP) more than the show itself - not that I blame them, that game is a masterpiece.

So, how did we get here? How did the best show on television get this bad? How could we let this happen?

Let's start with where people's issues with the show began. No, I'm not talking about season 2, that season was great I don't care what y'all think. I mean where the viewers' issues really began, which was in 2016 after the season six finale. During the second half of the show's sixth season, the show hinted at the introduction of a beloved villain from the comics, Negan. Then in the finale, we finally got to see him as he warned that he was going to kill one of our favorite characters. This left everyone one on the edge of their seats for the entire episode... and then ten months after that because we didn't get to find out who was up to bat (get it) until the season 7 premiere. Huge mistake.

The writers tried to justify this by stating that the ending of six was a different story than the beginning of seven, which makes no sense at all. How could the introduction of Negan and his murdering a character be part of two separate stories? The answer is, they're not. Want to know the real reason they left the cliffhanger. Shock value. Or they weren't sure who they wanted to kill. This decision left fans months to think about who got the bat, the obvious candidates being Abraham, since his comic book death was given to someone else, and Glenn because he was the one who got Lucilled in the comic. Then people began to predict that it would be both of them.

So, what happened? Well, since fans had a whole ten months to guess what happened, they turned out to be right. The effect it had on people, sadly, wasn't as strong because it was predictable (oof), and therefore anticlimactic. What did this result in? A bad choice on the writers part that they never learned from, but we'll talk about that later.