There Are Spoilers In Our The Walking Dead Wrath Review – Episode Discussion
So the final episode of the The Walking Dead season 8 just went to air and this one was particularly important as it marks the culmination of the Rick v Negan war which has been going on pretty much since the beginning of Season 7 when Glenn and some others got smacked by Lucille.
I was really excited for most of this week waiting to see what would happen between Rick and Negan this week. The war has been going on for some time and last week we saw Negan move away from his past ways of trying to save Rick and his people, to seemingly commiting, just as Simon did to wiping them all out.
The first half of this epiosde sees things move in Negan’s favour. We see Negan start to lay a trap for Rick and his people. Last week we saw that Negan had known about Dwight leaking the plans to Gregory just at the end. So this week sees the progression of that information, as Negan knows where Rick will be, so he lays a trap and that’s pretty much where the end of this war will go and what this episode focuses on entirely.
Rick comes accross a road block that Negan leaves and finds clues about where Negan will be. I suppose he suspects that it’s a trap, but he still goes there anyway. Negan enters with his famous whistle and it all looks to be over for Rick yet again, but then it isn’t.
Last week I mentioned that Eugene looked to be an important key to winning the war. Rosita and Daryl weren’t successful in stopping him from making the bullets, but I had actually thought that he seemed riled up against Rosita the rest of her group. It looked that way in this episode as well, Eugene was rough with Gabriel, Eugene looked committed. But then in the end he wasn’t, the bullets didn’t work and he explained to Rosita that he simply changed his mind.
The way Eugene’s sabotage happened on the battlefield, when Negan’s troops were about to fire was a little unbelievable. But under the circumstances, I think I can believe it. Negan had used all his resouces, he was out of ammunition. Simon mutinied, Dwight betrayed him and Eugune was the last resource that Negan had (remember people are resources) and Eugene sabotaged Negan. It’s a disaster for The Saviours, but a big win for Rick and his people.
It’s not long before most of The Saviours are rounded up and Negan and Rick end up with one final, one on one moment. Rick wins the fight and after a short conversation about Carl’s letter and his wishes, Rick looks to finish Negan off and he’s dead.
At first I immediately didn’t like this ending at all for Negan and I especially didn’t like it for Rick either. In my head I was thinking how can this be? The Savious guns just exploded and now Negan is dead! But then as Rick was walking away, he said to his people “save him” and Sadiq went over and saved Negan. I loved this ending, because it fit in well with what the show was looking to do this season. It was all about saving people.
We’d seen a few episodes ago, a vision of Rick in th future and it was Negan who was one of the people living in the community. This is something that the show has been moving towards slowly and Negan has been becoming an increasingly more interesting character and is actually I think my favourite character in the show. I always like the idea of the “saved villain” in stories, so I’m very keen to see what they will do with Negan next year in the show. There’s a lot for where the Negan character can go and the ending seems to hint that he’ll be around for some time to come. I’m looking forward to all this.
One of the characters that was not at all happy with what went down at the end of this episode was Maggie. She was screaming on the battlefield that she wanted Negan dead, but Rick says that it’s not the way. At the end of this episode, it looks like Maggie has launched some sort of plot with Daryl and also Jesus where she makes known her plans to build up The Hilltop and is still commited to taking out Negan, even though it’s against Rick’s wishes. I’m very interested to see where this plot might go next season and what tensions could come about between Maggie and Rick in the future. The two have always worked together really well in the past and I love both these characters, but where they are heading might be different and what will happen with Negan being in the middle of all that I wonder?
As this was the last episode of the show. I have to mention that looking back on the season that just went by, we had some fantastic performaces from the cast of the show. Everyone including Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus, Lauren Cohan, Josh McDermitt, Christian Serratos, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Austin Amelio and the rest all put in great work this season. Everyone has been a joy to watch and for the characters who didn’t die this season, I look forward to seeing them all back next year.
Overall this was an excellent finale for the show this season. Both Negan and Rick have been fighting for such a long time now, that it seems to be a little bit of a relief to see this arc finally come to an end. It was a great journey and we were introduced to so many great characters since The Saviours were introduced, which includes communities such as The Hilltop, The Kingdom and the people at the dump and they were all very interesting. The ending in this episode with Maggie looking to be up to something and the imposing threat of a possibe herd of walkers heading their way looks interesting. I’m curious to see what new challenges will emerge in season 9 of The Walking Dead, but overall season 8 turned out to be excellent and delivered both on action and intensity each week.
The Walking Dead airs express from the US on Mondays from at 1.30pm and 7:30pm on Showcase on Foxtel