[spoiler spoilers fucking SPOILERS]
Internet comedy hero Seanbaby recently pointed out that Grand Theft Auto 5, whilst being a technical masterpiece, isn't actually much fun to play. It's just too involved and detailed to actually be enjoyable.
I'm having the opposite problem with The Walking Dead; I enjoy watching it, but Jesus, it's awful by any objective measure you care to use.
This was brought home to me after the mid-season finale (which I've seen through the medium of time travel and not internet piracy, honest) that airs tonight in the UK.
Spoilers ahead, obviously.
I'm saying it one more time: Spoilers for the mid-season 4 break in The Walking Dead.
(Hershel gets his head chopped off and Michonne kills the Governor, and the baby might be dead too. There. I fucking warned you, if you kept reading it's your own fault.)
I had to blow those spoilers early on because I'm acutely aware of being a Walking Dead fan bitching on the internet, and even a quick trip to the IMDb message boards for the show will make you realise that Walking Dead fans are some of the most bitchy, unpleasant TV viewers out there. Also, at least some of them are forehead slappingly stupid. I've seen two threads arguing that Hershel and the Governor will come back, respectively, despite Hershel having been graphically decapitated and the Governor being left with a fatal chest wound in the middle of a field full of zombies and then shot in the face for good measure.
So I'm trying not to be a whinging dick, but I still think this show is objectively crap, however much fun I'm having watching it. Why? I'm glad you asked!
The end of this half of the season sees the final, apocalyptic battle for the Woodbury Prison between our heroes on Team Rick and the psychotic, one-eyed Governor who wants to steal the prison out from under them.
Which is great, and all, except that this was supposed to be the end of Series 3.
The third series spent its entire run-time building up a massive confrontation between the two sides, established the Governor as a credible threat that needed to be eliminated, and then in the big finish the writers took an unusual approach by having the bad guy fuck off in a van for no reason.
It pissed me off at the time and it still pisses me off now. There was no payoff for series 3, no resolution, no catharsis. Just a damp fizzle because apparently the actor who plays the Governor wasn't busy and could do a few more weeks next year if they dragged out his arc.
This series, meanwhile, has been a total waste of time up to the midpoint. The first half of this half-series (I know, I know...) dealt with an outbreak of a killer disease at the prison. The outbreak of a deadly virus during a show set after the outbreak of an even more deadly virus seemed to be going over old ground, at best, but what it left viewers with was essentially a fly-on-the-wall look at what an old people's home must be like in winter as everyone sat around, hoping not to die of the flu.
Just when they couldn't flog a dead (or at least poorly) horse any more, the Governor was re-introduced and we then spent another two tedious episodes finding out what he'd been up to since we last saw him.
Kris Kristofferson tribute act, mostly.
Having introduced a new set of characters to be eaten and shot (because AMC pays good money for the actors you recognise, dammit, and therefore refuses to kill off any more than one per series), the Governor comes back to steal the prison, this time with a tank, and we finally get the resolution of a story arc that's been causing the whole show to spin its wheels for months. We, as viewers, gained nothing except what we were owed from the shitty climax of last year's story.
Even ignoring the fact that we've been conned into watching half a series of filler just to get a 12-month-old payoff, the writing for the Governor episodes was laughably shite. He murders one guy for asking him to help run things, then murders someone else a week later so that he can run things. At no point does anyone notice that there have been suspicious deaths ever since the new guy with the eye patch appeared, and by the end of the most recent episode he's somehow convinced everyone to form a militia. He then gets stabbed in the back in a moment of lazy deus ex machina during one of The Walking Dead's patented improbable fist fights.
Seriously, is anyone else bothered by the fights?! A few episodes back, skinny sheriff-turned-pig-farmer Rick beat the hell out of Tyrese, a man who outweighs him by a conservatively estimated four metric tonnes. This is the same Tyrese who goes on to take out twenty zombies with a hammer, but Rick batters him senseless without any effort.
Flash forward to tonight's episode and Rick launches a surprise attack on the Governor and knocks him down, and then, from this effectively winning position, proceeds to get his ass handed to him. Either the Governor is the one-eyed bastard spawn of Bruce Lee and Ivan Drago, or that was just fucking stupid. And seeing as the Governor lost his eye in a closely-fought battle with Michonne (a slim woman half his size) I'm going with "fucking stupid." Like everything in The Walking Dead, any character's ability in a fight is exactly what it needs to be to propel the script, coherence and logic be damned.
Michonne gets on my tits anyway. She just doesn't look comfortable with that sword. I get that the crossover area for trained black female ninja actors is probably pretty small, but she still looks like she's trying to remember which is the pointy end every time she draws it, and it shatters all realism for me.
Y'know, all realism in this show about a zombie apocalypse.
Fuck it, I'm going to bed.
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