The Walking Dead is close to calling it a career, when the final eight episodes air beginning October 2 on AMC, but plenty of stories remain to be told in TWD universe.
Eleven seasons and 177 episodes of The Walking Dead will be the important totals when the series reaches the finish line late in autumn of 2022. Heroes and villains have graced our screens, even as audiences left in a mass exodus once Negan finally arrived. (While that's due to the violent nature of those episodes, or the characters who met their demise, well, that's up to you to decide.)
The series did have a renaissance in recent years, thanks to harkening back to stories and character development that made many fans fall in love with the show in the first place.
Well, that and creative zombie kills galore.
Popularity soared with the arrival of The Walking Dead television show, helping to spawn a universe of zombie-related shows. Fear the Walking Dead is somewhat limping along after seven seasons, especially with the exit of original cast member Alycia Debnam-Carey (Alicia Clark). However, Kim Dickens (Madison Clark) made a return.
Spin-offs from the original series, and standalone shows set in the same universe, are beginning to pile up. We already had The World Beyond and are getting Tales of the Walking Dead, a show focused on Daryl (Norman Reedus), plus spin-offs involving Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) and Isle of the Dead with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan).
The trouble with the announcement of these spin-offs is that we lose some of the drama that should be associated with the show's final season.
Who lives, who dies, that's not the story
This is not to say the final season of The Walking Dead has been lacking in suspense. One of the main storylines, however, is what exactly would happen between Maggie and Negan as they learn to work together.
Tension has been high between the two as they learn to navigate the sins of the past while working toward a better, safer future for those around them. Heading into the final episodes, I was looking forward to how their dynamic played out.
Suffice to say, after the announcement at San Diego Comic Con last weekend, there is little of that intrigue left.
To be fair, I thought neither character was going to meet a bloody fate by time the show faded to black. It might have been nice, however, to see the final episodes play out with the potential for death hanging over those character's heads.
Now, interesting angles could play out in order to get them to a place that correlates to their upcoming series. And I get that SDCC is the exact place to hype up and announce future projects, like Isle of the Dead, but there is also something to be said about waiting until a current series is finished with its run.
The same can be said for what once was the Daryl/Carol (Melissa McBride) spin-off. That one had been in the works for some time, though eventually it turned into a Daryl standalone as McBride exited the project.
The same idea held here, too, where I believed both characters to be safe from death, as they are two original characters that have powered through since the beginning. But, even keeping that possibility in play helped the tension and the story arcs moving forward.
Creators of The Walking Dead, and its subsidiaries, have taken careful care to balance the world building. And the last couple of seasons of the flagship show in this universe have returned to a recipe that worked so well in the early going. While there are definitely storylines and character arcs to keep the story moving forward these final eight episodes, I wish AMC might have held off on making these announcements.
Tease out the tension of these characters as you build towards finality. In knowing that certain characters will hop about in this now expanding universe, these episodes will now be viewed with a different lens. Not necessarily a bad lens but one that holds a little less anticipation and expectation.
This is also not to say that universe building is necessarily bad. In this instance, better ways could have been done to go about announcing these shows with some of our favorite TWD characters.
In many ways, part of the fun of The Walking Dead is guessing and predicting which characters will meet their demise. Many of those options have now been taken off the table, leaving fans will an assortment who have already been on the chopping block for multiple seasons. Suppose now, as the end path winds near, the surprises will not be who will die but how. And while still fun, not as supersized and unpredictable as they could have been.
photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
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