The Walking Dead “Welcome to the Tombs” Review

 Carl looks at the badge in The Walking Dead

Some thoughts on the finale of The Walking Dead and the season as a whole coming right up right after another showrunner change…

“In this life now, you kill or you die. Or you die and you kill.”

-The Governor

Wow what a mess! The Walking Dead’s fall run was easily its best as producer Glen Mazzara seemed to balance the ship and deliver consistently good episodes that didn’t frustrate me to death week in and week out. Then the spring season came and returned the show into the uneven mess it has always been. Sure we got some very good episodes including the best of the whole series “Clear” and last week’s very solid “The Sorrowful Life” (both written by new showrunner Scott Gimple) but for every step forward the Walking Dead took two backwards. The season finale “Welcome to the Tombs” is a great representation of how the show has been as a whole throughout the spring half of the season, a series of good moments marred by some strange decisions and bad characterization that ultimately comes out as an utter mess.

Let’s start with Andrea, poor sweet Andrea who gets the big dramatic moment of the episode by, you guessed it, dying! The way the writers have treated Andrea as a character this season has been a big problem. The dumbness in which Andrea operated with this season was quite startling and her ultimate reasoning of “I wanted no one to die” was forced and really emphasized all the poor decisions the writers made with Andrea this year.  That being said the scene that she shared with Milton after the Governor stabbed him a million times so he would die and turned was fairly fantastic and was a great payoff to Milton’s fairly interesting character.

Andrea’s death itself was fairly well done. While her reasoning for being dumb throughout the season still felt forced, the scene that she shared with Michonne before offing herself was ultimately well done and worked on enough levels to be satisfying. While I didn’t like where the character went this season at least she got a decent, slightly redeeming death, in the vein of Laurie’s death in the first half of the season.

Then there was the Governor’s anticlimactic attack on the prison. The scene in the prison, while decent throughout seemed to drag for the ultimate payoff it gave. The Governor ended up retreating and alive without much harm. Then the scene that followed again seemed to take him away from reality as he went all boogieman and shot up the people he took with him before taking off with his henchmen. The writers don’t seem to know what the Governor character is and ultimately throughout the season he’s gone from kind of grounded to completely over the top. It’s a strange move and it will be interesting to see how the character comes into play come next season.

The other interesting character beat to mention was Carl’s sudden transformation into hardened, Governor like killer whose opinion seems to contradict Rick’s at every turn. I liked the turn and the potential tension it can bring but there didn’t seem to be a character arc to get us from the Carl presented as recently as “Clear” to the Carl presented here. There didn’t seem to be any strong evidence to back up the seemingly sudden turn and while it worked it seemed a little odd.

Ultimately the Walking Dead ends on a strange note. The idea of the Woodburry elderly coming to the prison seems odd even with the Governor’s wrath, as Woodburry seems to have resources and electricity and the prison is well a prison. Either way it’s going to be interesting to see how the next, showrunner/victim Scott Gimple will handle the show going into season 4. He did write the two best episodes of the season after all…

Some other Musings:

• I’m happy that Michonne has become a much better character throughout the last few episodes and her scene with Rick was one of her better efforts to become more sympathetic.

• R.I.P. Glen Mazzara as showrunner of The Walking Dead. Who knows what argument he got into with Kirkman that forced him to part ways with the show but for all intensive purposes he did well enough in his brief time as showrunner.

• Let’s hope Carol doesn’t re-become our super annoying female character that the writers have no idea how to write for. I actually liked her this season

That’s just me though. What did everyone else think?