Caution: There Are Spoilers In The Walking Dead Hearts Still Beating Review
So the mid season final of The Walking Dead just aired for season 7. The episode is the last for the year, until the show returns in February 2017. Hearts Still Beating is an episode that somewhat represents a slight build up from a variety of plots we had seen occur throughout the season. As a result there are multiple characters from the cast thrown in to see and a lot of plots to either resolve or build even further.
This episode is quite Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) heavy. He spends most of his time in Rick’s (Andrew Lincoln) town with Carl (Chandler Riggs) waiting for Rick to get back from wherever he went earlier that day. As a viewer for the whole episode, I still feel some strange anxiety watching Negan scenes because I know that at any time he’s probably going to do something brutal. In this episode I was actually expecting someone to go, I mean it’s the mid season final, something big has to happen. This episode sees the end of Spencer Monroe (Austin Nichols), a character who I found to be pretty annoying since he appeared in the show. I guess Rick and his group were right, these guys just don’t really know how to survive.
It was great to see in this episode a lot from Rick. He’s been strangely absent for most of the season and I know that in the first episode he seemed broken, I never really truly believed it. This episode really proves it and by the end you can see that. The old group gets reunited and seems strong again and willing to fight. We see Daryl (Norman Reedus) escape Negan’s compound, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) looking a lot better and Rosita (Christian Serratos) and the rest looking motivated after what happened with Spencer. I guess they’re all sick of Negan by now and I can’t wait to see what they do about it.
This episode was great, there was a good mixture between action and drama and it had a lot of progression in there for a lot of the characters involved. It looks like the second part of season 7 will be an improvement on the first part, hopefully we see our hero characters doing something about Negan and his group. Not all is good though, there’s also the fate of Eugene and what will become of him at Negan’s place, will he actually start to make bullets over there?
