Through two-thirds of its elongated final season, The Walking Dead hasn’t really felt like it’s coming to a close. Sure, the surviving heroes have once again been facing down extinction at the hands of a seemingly insurmountable threat, but the feud between them and the Commonwealth hasn’t felt any more dramatic than past conflicts with the Saviors, the Whisperers, the Governor, and so on. Now with just eight episodes to go, I’ve been eager to get to the part of the season that illustrates this drama as the true last act of the show. After watching the first two episodes of season 11C, I’m still left waiting for the train to feel like it’s pulling into the station.
I think the issue stems from AMC’s plans for a much grander Walking Dead universe–it’s even marketed as the Marvel-like “TWDU.” There are no less than four spinoffs either already airing or that have been announced–on top of the two that we’ve seen in years past, leaving the should-be questionable fates of major characters set safely aside even as their lives are supposedly threatened in these final episodes. I wrote before about how the spinoffs have deflated some of the tension in this final, important season, and though I’m enjoying the episodes in spite of that, I think the series’ biggest issue goes beyond those self-inflicted spoiler wounds.
The problem with these first two episodes of Season 11C are that they don’t seem to get the show any closer to saying something about its world. The show has always roped me in with its tenured characters, and I’m invested enough to never miss an episode because I want to see what becomes of them. I really do care for Daryl, Rosita, Maggie, and the rest. But character closure is, in large part, coming in the spinoffs for the series’ biggest characters, so what needs to happen in these final two months of episodes–and sadly what’s missing so far–is a final thesis for the series. What has living in an undead world taught these heroes and anti-heroes? After every loss, every burned-down community, every beheading of a leader, what has it all led to?