‘The Walking Dead’ Series Finale Almost Gave Us The Perfect Ending

The Walking Dead ended Sunday night with a finale that was about as good as we could have hoped for following a very, very lackluster eleventh season. The show has shuffled and stumbled its way to the finish line. The Commonwealth plot has been far less exciting and tense than the Whisperer War that preceded it, and with 24 episodes to get through, it’s been something of a slog.

Spoilers follow.

I thought the series finale was decent in a lot of ways, and in some ways it really knocked it out of the park. Rosita and Eugene were, surprisingly, the stars of the show. I go on about that at length in my review of the finale.

One bit that the episode almost got very, very right has me a bit bummed out, simply because almost doesn’t count. The ending was nearly perfect, until a pair of cameos screwed the whole thing up.

In the final moments of the episode, Daryl and Carol say their farewells. She is staying behind. He is heading out on an adventure. Originally, the two were meant to ride out together and be in their own spinoff show together, but Melissa McBride decided against it and so Norman Reedus is going it alone.

As he drives off on his bike, some really gorgeous music is playing. He heads out down the dusty road, past the occasional zombie, out into the wild world and we cut to black. It’s poetic, haunting and beautiful, and in many ways the best ending I can imagine for this show. The only problem?

It’s not the ending.

MORE FROM FORBES‘The Walking Dead’ Series Finale Review: Rest In PeaceBy Erik Kain

Instead, we get a jumbled, frankly somewhat bizarre, pair of cameos. We see two of the show’s main stars who have been missing for a very long time. Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) though the two of them are not together. What follows is some hokey narration and a chant—we’re the ones who live!—from a bunch of other characters that’s extremely cringey. Instead of ending on Daryl riding off into the sunset, the series ends with Judith and R.J. staring off over the fields and Judith says: “We get to start over. We’re the ones who live.”

In an interview with Variety, it turns out that Lincoln only agreed to be in the cameo if he wasn’t in the final shot:

“For Andy and Danai it was important to them what this appearance was going to be and that it wouldn’t overshadow anything that was happening in the main story,” Kang says. “Andy was really clear, he did not want to be the last thing that the show ended on. He felt like that was not correct, because he had left. There were a lot of people working on it for a long time with different angles with good intentions and good faith.”

It seems to me that AMC fudged this request by including the brief scene with Judith and R.J. Instead of ending with Daryl, who stuck around from Season 1 until the bitter end, we still end primarily with Rick and Michonne in scenes totally detached narratively and emotionally from the rest of the episode and story up to this point. The brief return to Judith and R.J. really doesn’t count. These cameos still upstage Daryl’s poetic exit, which could have been the perfect ending to the show.

According to that same interview, Scott Gimple wrote this final scene, which explains why it’s so tonally off-kilter and doesn’t seem like the same show at all. We’re all reminded of other Gimple gems like “You know what it is!” (No, sorry, we don’t. Please write characters who talk like real people, Scott).

According to Insider’s Kirsten Acuna, neither of these scenes were the original ending they had planned. According to anonymous sources close to the project:

After Daryl rode off, we cut forward to the Freedom Parkway, outside Atlanta — where the iconic shot of Rick rode down from the pilot. See an ethanol-modified van, with a young woman and man in the front seats (in their twenties). And through the scene, we come to realize it’s adult RJ and Judith. Other adult versions of the kids are in the back — Coco, Gracie, etc. They’re out there, looking to escort any survivors back to their communities. Continuing the legacy of their parents. As RJ speaks over the radio, he finishes with: “If you can hear me, answer back. This is Rick Grimes.” (Which, of course, is his name — and the line Rick said in the pilot.) Then we end with the voice of a survivor answering back: “…Hello?”

I still prefer Daryl’s ending to this one, though I can see and appreciate what they were going for here. Either is preferable to the Rick/Michonne cameo which just felt completely out of place, and mostly like one great big ad for the coming spinoffs.

What do you think? Am I being too harsh? Too kind? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.

Check out my video review below:

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