‘The Walking Dead’ Season 11, Episode 23 Review: Shuffling Toward A Finale

As I watch these final episodes of The Walking Dead, I find myself thinking a lot about missed opportunities. I shouldn’t be thinking about this. I should be deeply invested in these characters and the conclusion to their stories. There are a number of reasons why I’m not, of course:

• The show has gone on far too long at this point. I’m hardly alone in feeling burnt out on what feels very much like a story that passed its expiration date a few years ago.
• The cast is far too big still. Somehow, in nearly 24 episodes, they have barely killed off any of our heroes. Some villains are dead, naturally, but our heroes remain intact (more on this in a minute). It makes the show feel toothless; and a toothless zombie drama is about as effective as a toothless zombie.
• Several main characters’ fates have already been spoiled thanks to AMC’s insistence on making early announcements about spinoffs (which is on brand given how frequently the show either straight-up announced or telegraphed a character’s departure).

These factors, combined with my antipathy toward the Commonwealth and its boring leader, Pamela Milton, makes it hard to become emotionally invested in the final season. It’s hard to care about characters dying when they never seem to and I’ve lost my feelings for almost all of them—and those who I still care about, like Negan and Daryl, have spinoff shows announced. Sure, I’m worried about some characters like Rosita and Princess, and I’ve started liking Gabriel and Aaron more, but overall . . . I just don’t care that much.

So I think about missed opportunities instead. For one, this entire season could have been spent killing off more of the cast. Some much-needed sense of impending doom and rising tension could have been put in place long ago (or even just at the end of the second block of eight episodes) that would have upped the emotional ante at this point. If Pamela had killed off some of our heroes six or seven episodes ago, that drive for revenge would be fresh and raw.

Instead, everything feels rushed and messy as we near the end of the line. The good guys have overcome their captors and return to the Commonwealth on the train they commandeered to take down Pamela once and for all. With Eugene escaped, Pamela’s faith in Mercer has crumbled, and she puts a plan into motion to take him down and quell the rising anger among the populace over Eugene’s sentencing. She has troops steering a herd of walkers toward the walls, which she uses both to send Mercer away and to order the streets cleared. Aaron, Jerry, Lydia and that group is walking amongst the herd in their half-assed zombie gut disguises.

I actually really enjoyed Aaron and Jerry playing Whisperer during this scene. It made me think of missed opportunities. Like, what if instead of the show fighting the Whisperers, they’d taken it in a radically different direction and had the heroes become the Whisperers instead? Their motivation would have been rebellion against the Commonwealth. They would have devised this whole method of hiding among the walkers wearing zombie masks and whispering to each other in order to avoid detection from the Commonwealth’s superior military might and waged a series of guerilla warfare battles and terrorist attacks on their enemy.

That’s not the story we got, however. Instead, as the group tries to get inside an RV and Luke and Elijah are pushed away from the others by the herd, Lydia reaches out to save her new boyfriend and a zombie bites her. Inside the RV, they tie a tourniquet on her arm and Jerry hacks it off with his sword. It’s a gruesome scene and you feel bad for Lydia—and then for Jerry who agrees to go looking for the others—but it feels like too little, too late. Lydia’s arm is one of just two casualties in the penultimate episode of The Walking Dead.

The other is Judith, who may or may not be dead, though I’m guessing she survives. She’s shot when Pamela springs an ambush on Daryl and the others as they try to enter the city. Mercer was supposed to meet them, but he’s been arrested along with his loyal troops. Pamela’s men show up and start firing immediately and a big gunfight ensues. For whatever reason, Pamela joins the fight, grabbing a gun and shooting at Daryl. Judith leaps forward to save him and takes the bullet instead. Pamela is shocked, clearly not wanting the blood of a child on her hands. “You did this!” she shouts at them as she retreats. “You did this!”

Pamela’s plans go awry in more ways than one. The zombies have evolved and the walls no longer hold them back with the few troops she has to spare now that Mercer and his men are in custody. The undead climb the walls, quickly overwhelming the Stormtroopers and opening the gates to the city. The entire horde makes its way toward the Commonwealth and Pamela orders her troops to seal off the “Estates” where she and the other rich and powerful live. When the woman she has running the army now protests—thousands could die if left to fend for themselves—Pamela tells her that their job is to protect the Estates.

Our heroes make it into the city but the dead are there as well, and barricades have already been set up to funnel the dead away from the Estates and into the rest of the city (though these evolved zombies should be able to make their way past the barricades easily enough).

The goal now is survival more than rebellion. The survivors fight through the zombies, clearing an opening for Daryl, now carrying Judith’s near-lifeless form, so that he can break through and find medical help. “Daddy?” she says at one point, looking up at him through blurry eyes. This is probably the best moment of the episode, packing an actual emotional punch for once. Earlier in the episode, Daryl promised that when all this was over, he’d tell her all the stories he could remember about all the people who ever loved her—Carl, Michonne, her birth-mother Laurie and her long-disappeared father, Rick. Judith had talked about having two mothers, but in reality she’s had two fathers as well. Daryl has stepped in as her adoptive father now that everyone else is gone. It’s a sweet, sad moment when she calls him that for the first time, and probably by mistake.

I’m not sure if this show will kill off its final Grimes family member or not. I guess we’ll find out in the finale.

The problem right now, however, is that they haven’t killed off anyone yet. Eugene, once again finding that small pouch of courage he keeps buried deep within, overcomes the soldier searching for him and joins up with the other fighters. Everyone is still alive, even if things look bad for Judith and Lydia. Magna, Yumiko, Luke, Rosita, Princess, Negan, Annie—really, there are even more main characters alive in Season 11 than in Season 10 with the addition of Negan’s new wife and the return of Maggie and her son (and Elijah and all those other people from her community that this show had no problem killing off as fast as possible).

The plot armor is a problem. The fact that any meaningful deaths have to take place in just one episode is bizarre. Jerry is probably a goner, which sucks. I wouldn’t mind if Jerry, Aaron, Gabriel, Rosita, Princess, Negan, Daryl and the kids survived. Honestly, though, if this show had real steel—and AMC wasn’t so interested in spinoffs—it would end like The Mission, with just the children left to pick up the pieces of a broken, tragic world.

The series finale of The Walking Dead won’t come to AMC+ today, which is a good thing. Frankly, I wish AMC had never broken up the show’s audience this way. Far better to air the episodes at the same time for everyone. That’s what event TV is supposed to be and we’ll get it one last time next Sunday, November 20th, when the very last episode finally airs. What a long strange trip it’s been.