Following up on the article making it known that The Walking Dead mid-season 8 premiere suffered the lowest ratings for any of the show’s mid-season premieres, I ventured to Reddit to see if there were any like-minded opinions and thoughts similar to my own.
Boy, what I found!
Redditors gave Variety’s report on the low ratings an up-vote count of a whopping 16.6K with over 4,300 comments!
Before getting into their opinions, which rips The Walking Dead a new one (and rightfully so), the top up-voted comment is pretty hilarious (noodle_salad):
The actors are great, don’t get me wrong, but the Emmy should go to Chris Hardwick for all the work he does pretending that this show is still good.
Another Redditor argues that The Walking Dead should be actually leading to a conclusion (kuslap):
They need to set an end-date and build to it. It is a miscalculation on AMC’s part to run this thing into the ground.
HeterosexualMail responded to that as follows:
AMC has done the exact opposite and come out and said it could run for decades.
The next response then hits the nail on the head (versusgorilla):
And it could if they weren’t so terrified of changing things up. The ONLY time they change things up is when they kill off characters. This “All Out War” plot has gone on for wayyyyy too long, I can’t even count how many times Alexandria has burnt to the ground and had its walls smashed down. I can’t count how many times Negan has had Rick and Co on their knees JUST ABOUT to smash their heads only to waste time giving a long monologue and get interrupted.
It’s boring and never ending. Even Carl’s death took a hour and a half of him laying around whispering his character motivation to Rick. Everything since the “Is Glenn alive?” arc has taken for-f–king-ever to culminate into anything. They jam unrelated episodes in so one week will end with a good cliffhanger and then the next week will be a Tara standalone episode, followed by a Carol standalone episode, so by the time they get back to that cliffhanger, no one f–king cares and everyone is mad and likely, the plot leaked online anyway.
This show deserves to waste away and die. I think the only thing that would interest me again would be something drastic and insane happening, like 95% of the current cast dying and Rick (or someone else) being forced to go alone to a totally new location. Really just throw away the comics completely at this point and make a new show.
Regarding the death of Carl, Ridicatlthrowaway and MaximumCameage chime in that it should have been Rick that got killed off:
Ridicatlthrowaway:
I quit after 3 episodes this season after the 10th fake shootout. Only thing i ever miss now are Neganisms, but I would rather keep the good Neganisms in my head. When i heard Carl died from all the spoilers I knew that was it for the show. He was the only character that wasn’t supposed to die as it makes no sense to the ending of the story. Just like Ned Stark wasnt the main character of GoT, neither is Rick, it is clearly Carl in the comics.
If anyone ever watched Reboot TV show as a kid, Carl was supposed to grow up to be Enzo’s character taking over for the show when Rick is gone. Now the show has no continuity. Glad I bailed.
MaximumCameage:
Yes! Thank you! You hit the nail on the f–king head for me! I couldn’t figure it out before. I always felt that they should kill Rick and really thought they were going to when he was trapped in the RV and again when Negan killed Glenn and Abraham. It would completely change the status quo just like Ned Stark’s death, which was the turning point that got me into Game of Thrones in the first place.
The problem is Carl’s been awful until this past season when he finally started stepping up to the plate. And the episode where his plan saves everyone in Alexandria, that’s the Carl I always wanted and he finally grew into it. Perfect time to kill Rick… Carl’s bit. WTF?!
Rick even said he kept going to make a better world for Carl. His whole motivation was Carl. Now that’s gone. You know who’s boring as hell? Judith. Because she’s a f–king baby and literally can do nothing. And I wish she was eaten at the prison.
Carl should’ve become the main character.
MaximumCameage continues blasting the series thinking that The Walking Dead is going to do a time jump with Judith (MaxC may have a point as Sunday’s episode saw Carl pass the torch by giving Judith his hat):
I’m dead serious. I was disappointed when they revealed she was still alive. I thought, “Great. Now they gotta carry this f–king baby around everywhere.” And I was right.
And they’re probably gonna do a f–king time jump with her instead of Carl. But I don’t care about her because she’s literally been worse than Carl.
But at least I got to know Carl for 8 years. Judith would literally go from a prop for 5 years to a central character out of nowhere. That’d be like making a fire hydrant a major character halfway through Battlestar Galactica. Why should I care? I know they’re gonna f–king do it, too.
Another funny comment comes from Bikermousefrommacon:
They are doing it like DBZ, where Gohan was suppose to take over. They just said f–k it and kept running with Goku
User johnpaulatley‘s comment has also been up-voted over 5300 times:
Scott Gimple needs to be fired rather than rewarded for overseeing the slow decline of the show.
I’m sick of this show’s bullsh-t frankly, and watching it now feels like a chore.
Here’s hoping the new show runner can turn it around, but I don’t really care that much anymore.
Some other comments:
(TheCodeJanitor) Yeah, Seasons 4/5 when the group was split up and on the move was really refreshing. There’s a big open world, with lots of potential for storytelling. Having the characters settle down and get involved in yet another turf war is just boring
(Grimstar-) The Glenn dumpster thing was exactly where the show jumped shark. I got so frustrated with that season and the finale cliff hanger and negan’s botched introduction due to it, that I completely stopped watching after just googling who he murdered the season opening afterwards. Glad I stopped when I did.
(hydruxo) This. The biggest reason I stopped watching is because there’s no endgame in sight. It’s a revolving door of boring subplots and characters who get killed off and replaced the next season with less interesting ones.
(LittleRudiger) At this point the show is just like .. bad-bad, as in boring-bad. I genuinely think there were some gems throughout the entire run, and I think Season 4/5/6 were as strong as Season 1 at points (mainly brought down by whoever the worst or least interesting character is at the time). But, 7 and 8 have just been plain terrible. Before, the Walking Dead would at least get funny-bad, now it’s just a chore to sit through. This episode was straight up the last I’ll ever watch. Sick of endless pontificating, episodes that are stretched out longer than they need to be, baffling non-linear story structure that fundamentally serves no purpose other than to give the impression of a narrative more complicated than it is (i.e., jumping back to why Morgan abandoned his post in this episode as opposed to just getting it out of the way in the mid-season finale) and most importantly; frustratingly arbitrary character turns (“Morgan is a psycho killer, now he’s painfully pacifist which upsets Carol, and now he’s a psycho killer which upsets Carol”, “Carol is a pacifist, now a psycho killer, now upset at Morgan for not executing Saviours, now upset at Morgan for executing saviours”).
(vex91) I miss the times in the show when the zombies were actually a threat… now they’re treated more like an inconvenience. It went from “holy f–king sh-t its a zombie, run!” to “let me just singlehandedly kill these 12 zombies real quick with this stick, so I can continue to bitch about how we are being mistreated by this other group of people”. The show was dead as soon as the focus moved away from the zombies imo.
(romafa) I wish I lived in an alternate universe where the show changed direction after the group got to Alexandria. In my opinion, the show was at it’s absolute best when this bedraggled, road-weary group arrives at Alexandria and they just couldn’t cope with finding a community of people who were relatively untouched by everything. I loved the idea of Rick becoming the “bad guy” of the show when he fought Pete and was waving a gun around, scaring even his own family. That’s the direction they should have gone in.
(Choco_Churro_Charlie) It would be great for Maggie to wake up and find Glenn alive and well in the shower.
