This week might have been the season three premiere of Game of Thrones, but while most people have been counting down the days until Peter Dinklage once again graces our TV screens, I’ve been impatiently waiting for the season finale of The Walking Dead.
Expectations were high for this episode. Season three was a much more intense experience than anything the show had previously done, and although The Walking Dead has never been known for having a fast-paced plot (or a plot at all), certain events were sure to culminate in the finale. There were two clear rival forces – one led by protagonist Rick Grimes, the other by the psychopathic Governor – and they were both gearing up for war. For the past few months, both sides have slowly chipped away at each other, murdering important characters and raising the emotional stakes of their imminent confrontation. Surely the finale would be an epic battle between the forces of evil and the slightly less evil. Surely we would finally get some closure on the storyline that the series has been hinting at months.
And yet, none of that happened. The episode was so entirely underwhelming the only impression it left was a disappointing, “was that it?” When I say nothing happened, I mean it. On The Walking Dead, there are many episodes where “nothing happens”, where the characters are more or less in the same position at the end of the episode that they were in at the beginning, but most of these episodes at least develop their personalities, motivation, and so forth. They increase the viewers’ emotional investment in the story. The finale did not even do that.
The beginning was promising enough. Rick and the Governor were readying their respective armies, Andrea was shown locked up in a room with a dying man about to turn into a walker, and Carl was finally becoming overwhelmed with the death of his mother. But for whatever reason, the writers left it at that. After a full season of raising our expectations for a nerve-wracking conflict, we were given a three-minute battle that ends with The Governor’s group retreating and neither side making any gains. This is what the season was leading up to: a stalemate not unlike every other episode thus far?
Admittedly, The Governor did lose control in this episode, going on a rampage that wiped out most of his army. This was, however, a cop-out at best. We were not given a decisive battle between two strong groups. Instead, we witnessed a self-imposed defeat that lacked any suspense and that ultimately left one side impotent. So not only were we robbed of a possible epic conflict that could have changed everything, the main danger to the protagonists was scrapped in the most disappointing manner. This, of course, means there is no suspense to keep me waiting for the next season.
Not even Andrea’s imprisonment could save this farce. The Walking Dead has always had a knack for distracting us with the impending doom of any given character, and usually it creates enough drama to keep us interesting. But Andrea? They decided to appeal to our human side by threatening the life of the one character that has constantly been jeopardizing the group’s safety and livelihood? By this point, I couldn’t wait to have her out of the picture. Even Merle’s death in the previous episode was more traumatizing because it had a clear impact on fan-favourite Daryl. Andrea, on the other hand, had severed all ties to Rick’s group. Her death would mean very little to the viewer or the survivors. Indeed, the only character that would be affected by it is Michonne, but the series spent a total of about thirty minutes on their relationship, so I had very little reason to feel anything for either of them.
The episode did, nevertheless, make a few important developments. Rick finally got closure over his wife Lori’s death, and Carl’s increasing Lord of the Flies-like ruthlessness was an apparent foreshadow to his future inhumanity. But that’s not enough to make us forget that the balance of power has barely shifted, that The Governor is still at large, and that nothing has changed within the group’s dynamic. At the end of season two, we didn’t know who would survive, how they would survive, and where they would end up. At the end of season three, they’re alive, safe, and in the same exact place they’ve been for a year, with no indication of any of that changing.
Even if The Walking Dead can get away with doing very little plot-wise in a regular episode, there is a limit to how little it can do in a finale. Last night’s episode ignored that limit and left fans with an underwhelming, disappointing, and anti-climactic end to an otherwise great season.