Saw Walking Dead season 8 premiere. Ugh.
?
SPOILERS
?
I didn’t like it. The old feeling that they were just barely scraping by, and surviving by the skin of their teeth, has been long gone. Seems they just take actions in a vacuum now. It was damn easy to take out those watchmen. Why not do it earlier? It was damn easy to roll up to Negan’s gates with an army, and he didn’t even know what was happening? Why did he not have a garrison at each of those settlements, watching over them? He has dudes in the satellite station, to what end? That no one just sniped Negan while he was holding forth was very annoying. That they wasted hundreds of bullets basically shooting out windows in the building is plainly ludicrous. I didn’t get that at all. What kind of assault just shoots bullets at a building? That Rick counted down from 10, it just didn’t make any sense. Did he really think one of Negan’s lieutenants was going to turn on him, then and there, because a bunch of useless people with mudflaps turned up outside the gates, he was crazy. If any of them turned, Negan would just kill them. Now Rick has handed over about a dozen fully functional vehicles with batteries and gas. That is insane. Getting a vehicle to use-ready status cannot be time- or resource-cheap in the apocalypse. Massive win for Negan!
?
Their whole attack plan was really not an attack. It was just turn up outside and make some damn noise. Why? Negan just needs to close the inner doors, and Rick and co have killed no one, just given Negan a minor inconvenience of walkers outside the door.
?
So many bad points. Rick says “Only one person needs to die”, then goes along killing watchmen and shooting indiscriminately at a building full of non-combatants, and not even sniping the one guy who needs to die. In the middle of his zombie assault, Rick allows himself to be pulled away from directly trying to kill Negan, because why? ‘It’s not about Rick’, the priest says, but what does that even mean? It’s about NEGAN! Kill NEGAN and this whole thing will be over! That’s what Rick is doing, trying to KILL NEGAN!
?
But no, it has to wait until another day.
?
Then the priest’s actions with Gregory are inexplicable. Completely impossible to explain. The shoe-horning in of the zombie horde as an aggressive tactic is dumb. Rick has already showed how ineffective zombies are when he killed a horde of them single-handed a few seasons back. If they had all those explosives and weapons, the ability to sneak up on the base completely unseen with the sentries out, why didn’t he attack Negan’s base properly, storm in, and kill Negan!?
?
What strategy meeting was there when someone surely said – ‘Let’s sneak in at night, get inside, kill all the bad guys especially Negan before they even know what’s happening, then liberate the people?’ Then someone else said – ‘Yeah I take your point, but instead of winning like that, why don’t we do all the same steps required to get there unseen and silent, including a guy inside the walls, but once we arrive just stop at the gates and make a huge noise with wasting bullets, then talk to Negan, then let him get away, and run off ourselves?’. Everyone goes ‘Yeah, son!! Do it!’
?
It makes no sense. It’s like they’re not trying to win, they’re just trying to psyche themselves up for a bit more fighting. When they went to the satelite station and killed everyone at night while they slept, that was badass. Why are they not doing that? Plot armor for Negan, only? It’s not good enough. If Negan is truly unkillable by any conventional means, it has to be because he has prepped so damn well that they literally can’t lay a hand on him. Not because they’re too dumb to bust out a sniper rifle. I know they want this conflict to last al season, but you need to do that by escalating properly. If it’s genuinely hard to kill Negan and wipe outn the Saviors, make it GENUINELY HARD! As in, not easy to approach his fort unseen, not easy to lead zombies in, not easy to blow open his gates, not easy to take out sentries in one fell swoop. It’s just so lame on both sides. Negan is weak, Rick is weak, it’s like watching two wet strands of spaghetti trying to punch each other.
?
Ugh. Who is writing this show any more?