'The Walking Dead' Season 7 Midseason Finale Review

Image from The Independent

By Darian Scalamoni

            This season of The Walking Dead has been very up and down. With a premiere that brought the vulgar, destructive villain from the comics, Negan to life, it seemed to decline in quality from there. Sure, there were cool moments like seeing Ezekial for the first time and Carl coming out of nowhere to gun down some of Negan’s men, but for the most part, the show is lacking. With the midseason finale there were for sure some moments that made me excited for the second half of season 7 but with the ratings going down and the show trending downward from a fantastic season 6, it begins to anger the audience.

            The show has this ability to bring viewers in with these tremendous episodes to lead off and end seasons but the quality throughout the longevity is clearly something the writers are struggling with thus far this year. The midseason finale provided the audience with an above average episode to try and make them forget the last three episodes or so. In the eighth episode of the season titled ‘Hearts Still Beating’, we saw plenty of things to get us excited for the future but the episode was for the most part a long, slugging pace that didn’t have as much merit as past seasons. There have been episodes this season that I’ve absolutely hated (so much so that I didn’t have the energy to write a review for how bad I thought it was), but that’s still no excuse so I’m going to be honest: so far this season has sucked, plain and simple. All of these drawn out episodes that ultimately don’t mean anything has come to bit this show in the behind with the constant loss of viewership season by season.

            Having said all of that, I believe that this all could be over because Rick is motivated to finally take down Negan with help from the Hilltop and eventually, The Kingdom. The bigger message at the end of the episode (in a fantastic scene between Rick and Michonne) brings a realization that winning by keeping everyone alive is ultimately not winning at all. The communities are putting their fate in the hands of a tyrannous leader who kills anyway for fun. All in all, it really only cost us the fate of two characters that weren’t central characters at all but I guess you had to figure that considering we lost two fan favorites in the premiere.

            I really appreciate that our crew is finally all together again, for the most part. Yes, Morgan and Carol are in The Kingdom but that moment when Daryl sees Rick again for the first time since being captured and then embracing each other actually did pull at my heart strings. Speaking of Carol though, she’s become very much a recluse since entering her new area of living. Morgan is just trying to be a good guy, come on. But they do agree to reject the invasion plans presented to them by Richard, something tells me they’ll have a change of pace when reuniting with Rick, Jesus and everyone else.

            Plenty of other worthy occurrences also happen in this installment including Daryl actually busting out of The Saviors’ sanctuary, Michonne aborting her plan to kill Negan and some bonding between Rick and Aaron, who is quickly become one of my favorite characters because he’s become incredibly authentic and human in a world surrounded by the dead. Then there was the death of Spencer who tried to talk Negan into making him the leader instead of Rick, which was one of the dumbest attempts at a power move ever. The audience has observed all season that Negan has a genuine respect for people that have integrity and some toughness to them so not soon after, Spencer’s guts were splattered all over the street.

            In one of the dumbest moments I’ve ever seen in television, Rosita shooting at Negan and the bullet hitting Lucille is such a cop out its insane. Look at the size of a person like Negan compared to that of a bat wrapper in barbed wire. Just a really dumb moment that got Olivia killed and left Rosita with a scar on her face.

            The midseason finale ended on a great note reuniting all our fan favorites and I am truly excited for the second half of the season but the writing must get better. No more of these long, drawn out “filler” episodes that don’t add anything else to the substance of the show as a whole. We unfortunately won’t be able to see how they approach it again until 2017, so until then…

8/10