This Just Keep Getting Worse

The Walking Dead is dead. It died in Season 6, showed some signs of renewed life when Angela Kang took over as showrunner in Season 9, and then—after a hit-or-miss conflict with the Whisperers—jumped the shark, fell off a cliff and died in a fire. Again.

The Commonwealth storyline is, simply put, awful. It’s preposterous, boring, convoluted and cringey. We got to see Eugene kiss Not-Stephanie #2 in Sunday night’s episode. We can’t unsee that.

Here’s my biggest problem with this storyline: I am sick to death of every single one of our ‘heroes’ and how they’re all being set up as these grand saviors of all that is good and holy, while the Commonwealth is being presented as derelict and corrupt. Pretty much everyone of the ‘good guys’ is doing something to make the world a better place, while the leaders of this (thriving, safe, relatively wealthy) community they’ve been welcomed into are all presented as cowards and crooks and ne’erdowells.

Remember when the gang showed up in Alexandria and Rick basically lost his damn mind and killed the town doctor? That was frustrating but at least it was interesting. The Alexandrians had their problems, but our group was hardly a band of saints. But now? Well, let’s see . . . .

After Daryl and Rosita were sent to retrieve all that cash, they began investigating all these mysterious disappearances. Daryl and Rosita are given special treatment by the Commonwealth and are allowed to only wear their armor when it suits them, unlike all the other Commonwealth stormtroopers. They also have spare time and resources to dig into this conspiracy.

They bring it to Eugene and newly-minted Commonwealth investigate reporter, Connie (if I could roll my eyes any harder I would, but it makes it hard to type). Yes, the authoritarian Commonwealth would totally give Connie a job as a reporter and then sit back while she dug up all their dirty laundry. That makes total sense.

So here we have this little clique of detectives trying to figure out just how dirty Pamela Milton and her son are. Eugene is so suave and charming, he’s managed to get Max, Pamela’s assistant, on board. And since her brother, Mercer, the Commonwealth general is not only sleeping with Princess, but also like best buddies with Carol the Magician, he’s reluctantly on their side, too. How convenient! Also how convenient that our heroes showed up and finally started exposing all these problems that nobody worried about before!

As a side-note: It’s really frustrating just how many new characters have been introduced in the final stretch. Mercer, Max, Pamela, Sebastian, Hornsby, Leah. Leah is especially irksome to me, as she’s being presented as this hardcore badass but in the silliest way possible. Recall, she lost. She got her people killed. She was the loser, but of course we must present her as this super deadly assassin ninja. When Hornsby finds her in the final scene of the episode and hires her (to kill Maggie, I believe, though we know that won’t happen because AMC spoils their own show constantly) she comes out with her gun looking all tough, but they have her outnumbered and in any realistic scenario she’d be done for.

Also, why throw people off the roof to find out who stole your guns and then, when you find the actual culprit, give her a job? Oh right, because she’s so tough.

I won’t even get into how silly it is that Hornsby was able to track her down in the first place, apparently on his way back from Hilltop.

Anyways, speaking of Hilltop, here we have our other survivors. Hornsby makes Gabriel and Aaron (who he clearly thinks are full of crap, and rightfully so) accompany him to Hilltop to question Maggie about the fiasco at the Riverbend community (just around the riverbend!). Daryl also comes along for the ride.

This whole bit was weird. Why does Hornsby think Hilltop helped anyone to begin with? Hilltop and this community have never had any contact before. Hell, until last week, despite being just a few miles away, nobody even knew this community existed. But Hornsby has such good instincts, he just knows. He’s right, of course, but still. It’s such a stretch.

He goes up there and things get tense as he investigates, boiling over when he gives Hershel his baseball cap back (again, rightly deducing who it belonged to somehow). Guns are drawn, including Daryl’s, and Hornsby takes his leave.

Now, clearly Maggie’s instinct to not trust Hornsby or the Commonwealth is the correct one, but I can’t help feeling like this show would have been better if they’d had the stones to kill Maggie off instead of letting Lauren Cohen take a break and come back. Her character is just so one-note and grating at this point.

Now that Aaron and Gabriel—the hapless leaders of Alexandria—have come to the light and realized that the Commonwealth is evil, Maggie’s original decision to not join up seems more sensible. The problem, of course, is that Hornsby went from ace recruiter, doing everything in his power to bring these new people to the Commonwealth, to unhinged villain in the space of three episodes. So the guy who brought food and supplies to help out has just been replaced, in a flash, by the guy who sends Aaron and Gabriel on a death squad mission, just because, and who now apparently could care less about any of that stuff.

The problem is, even if he is this scheming Littlefinger type character, why has he chosen to show his hand to perfect strangers? To all these newcomers? Wouldn’t the expert schemer be more judicious?

Finally, we come to Ezekiel and the doctor, Yumiko’s brother (who now has more screen time than Yumiko and Magna combined, because hey fun new characters we don’t care about!) Ezekiel has basically started or gotten heavily involved with a free health clinic and enlists the doctors help to steal supplies from the hospital for a surgery.

See, Ezekiel is one of the Heroes of the story, so of course he’s already doing awesome stuff that nobody in the Commonwealth ever thought to do! He’s giving back to the community!

Eugene, Connie, et alia are doing their investigative work; Ezekiel is saving lives; Carol is puppet-mastering all the powerful men in the Commonwealth; Maggie and her crew are fighting back, refusing to join up with this diabolical regime. What a bunch of boring, tepid do-gooder jerks. I’m so bored to tears with every single one of them. I want Hornsby to win, but they’ll do him like Littlefinger in Game of Thrones no doubt, when we all know Baelish should have sat the Iron Throne in the end.

What trite, tedious claptrap. I’m bored to tears. Half the current cast is so new I don’t care about them. The other half are so old and boring I don’t care about them. The only good ones—Negan, miraculously—have been hobbled by poor writing choices (he got married offscreen and his gonna be a dad—gag me with a spoon) and the only good new characters, like Hornsby, are either all over the place or dead (RIP Carlson, you should have had that drink when you had the chance).

This is an awful show. The Walking Dead is dead. The final season is embarrassing, though perhaps less disappointing than the final season of Game Of Thrones, if only because our expectations are so much lower.

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Read my other Season 11, Part 2 reviews here:

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