A Bigger Disappointment than Game of Thrones - What Happened to The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live

if I had a nickel for every time a generation defining television show based on award-winning material spanning decades completely forgot the world that is set in made the main characters Invincible flat husks repeating the same thing over and over and running out of source material came up with a final season of six episodes to tackle the biggest threat in Universe only to do it in one Dreadful episode I'd have two nickels which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice best season ever having seen the catastrophe that was season eight of Thrones I never imagined that a beloved franchise could burn me that bad all over again I mean I stuck through tals World Beyond and all the other less than Stellar spin-offs how much worse could it get we saved you and the only people in danger of being killed well it isn't the helpers here yeah about that it did get pretty bad for Simplicity sake I'll break up this video in major chunks so that we can talk about all the specific issues in isolation and how they manifest in all the different shows and while the ones who live will be a major point of conversation I think it'd be silly not to talk about the wider state of the franchise and why most people probably didn't even make it to the ones who live but before we can dive into all of its failures I think it's important to return to the thing that made it successful in the first place I think the simplest way to summarize what I think Kirkman was going for with The Walking Dead is with three major points number one this is a cold unforgiving and brutal world where anyone can die at any moment but number two in spite of that this is a hopeful story about the future of humanity where number three the apocalypse is not something that has a solution or cure or anything like that it is a story about people set in a zombie apocalypse and how Society is rebuilt from the ground up as soon as Issue 6 or episode 2 in the show there is conflict within the group and all of that is just wrapped up in this layer of death creeping around every corner that just constantly keeps you engaged it was a balancing acts of people trying to fight back against this inhuman World while also trying to retain their own Humanity unlike a vast majority of other apocalyptic stories there were never any immune ones the idea of a cure is barely even a footnote the characters all have flaws all of them make sacrifices some of them weave awfully close to just being a straightup villain it was a world of Grace and while we followed generally good people they also did a whole lot of bad things and very importantly with a lot of those bad things it wasn't a case of oh I'm doing this because I need to save everyone else a lot of them were a whole lot more murky and sometimes unnecessary they were good people sure but sometimes they did bad things period not to protect someone not to save someone but just out of fear and out of survival and this leads me on to what in my mind is easily the most damaging thing to both The Walking Dead as well as Game of Thrones put very simply I think it's prioritizing spectacle over actual story story when it comes to written work action fights and all of those kinds of things are by default paced almost exactly the same as any normal scene since well it's just words on paper or in the case of The Walking Dead these singular moments captured in time but when it comes to adapting them you will Blitz through those scenes incredibly quickly because they are meant to be fast it's action right that's why Game of Thrones often added filler of just random dudes fighting and lingered more on the com before etc etc it was all just to establish stakes in this much more fluid medium every story needs some sort of climax right so it's crucial to make that rare climax actually carry weights the problem with The Walking Dead is that it's an apocalyptic story resources are scarce people are scarce and it is established itself as a very downto Earth setting so with that in mind 5minute fist fights are an absolute nogo this is not an action show random dudes shooting at each other also a nogo by design it is a lot more lowkey and so establishing that climax is already a lot more tricky and I think that's what the early seasons did incredibly well because they only ever added filler to elevates those scarce moments of shock take Rick's first journey into Atlanta in the comic he gets surrounded loses his horse barely gets out and just gets yed by Glenn that is it there is nothing more to the scene it's literally just Rick barely getting out the show on the other hand keeps the same exact DNA of Rick getting surrounded losing his horse having to fight through walkers but he then crawls into the tank where we get the now very famous yeah you in the tank Co in there it adapts and pads out that moment of action without adding meaningless spectacle this holds true for most of the early Seasons season 2 for example opens with a highway horde and Sophia getting lost that then leads into Carl getting shots the comic had a whole little Side Story of wheel chire where there was also a small horde but point is the show simply adds a bit more intensity to set up that big moment of Carl getting shots 10 out of 10 no complaints that's exactly how you should adapt stories replicate the feel and the themes but enrich it but the problem is spectacle and with The Walking Dead that escalation is extremely clear in case you've never read the comics before I want you to keep in mind that unless I mention it this probably does not happen in the comic I'll return to this point but season 2 ends not with the survivors just leaving the farm because the winter is setting in but rather because there is a huge hord a huge battle and the whole whole thing just burns down watching it for the first time yeah 10 out of 10 no complaints cool season finale it makes sense why not why shouldn't it burn down and it's really not that wild the season started with the horde so The Horde actually making their way over to the farm because of the helicopter and whatnot makes sense it is just spectacle but it is spectacle that does enrich the original Story season 3 we infiltrate Woodberry and conduct a whole raid on them okay our survivors are quite a bit bit more experience now and we also had Insider Intel sort of makes sense cut to the season finale the governor has a grenade launcher spicy but still makes sense they found the military guys right and this is still relatively early on in the apocalypse season 4 the governor has a tank the same exact thing as in the com oh wait it actually shoots that's cool but also very over the top especially Daryl just lobbing in a grenade but okay it's definitely a bit too action but Rick is still brutally beat up we lose the prison completely Hershel dies and it's real bad so yeah they've massively up the spectacle of this whole ordeal but it has value season 5 a totally new story of Carol soloing Terminus definitely more than a little goofy definitely leading a little too much into action and starting to lose a bit of its identity especially because none of this really amounts to anything they're captured they fight back and they escape with zero loss in a single episode oh hey would you look at that this is still the most viewed episode in the entire Walking Dead run what a fascinating coincidence I think you see what I'm getting at the show just keeps upping its action over and over even if it just straight up does not exist in the comic book but it gets like really really bad in seasons 6 to8 No Way Out happens both in the books as well as the TV show purely a question of survival it's also important to know that in the comic book we never had that big prison Alliance with like Woodberry and stuff so in the book this also tests Rick's leadership of this very very big Community but more generally speaking it tests Alexandria which Rick thought to be weak it tests the future of this new found Alliance and because this is still Kirkman we of course also lose a very major character with Morgan the show on the other hand has a whole side adventure with Daryl and his RPG yeah like we are definitely starting to go more than a little bit overboard then the show just completely skips an ire volume of Carl coming to terms with literally being shot in the face just to get to Negan faster like seriously he gets shot and the next episode opens with what actually yes Carl what and with Negan oh boy if you've watched my big retrospective series you'll be sick of hearing this but the show literally took the savior's numbers in the comic book and just like tenx them there is a fine line between increasing their numbers to make them feel even scarier and increasing their numbers to the point that there were so many of them that is just meaningless remember what I said about this being a story set in an apocalypse where resources are scarce these conflicts completely drain all of their defenses that is one of the things that the TV show massively improved over the comic book there is a whole cold war between the prison group and Woodberry the moment the saviors appear on screen that is completely forgotten just in season 6 darl RPGs all the dudes on the road we mow down the entire satellite group there's another small group with the whole Carol captured thing and speaking of Carol she too mows down a whole bunch of dudes you know what actually summarizes this very very well it's actually in the finale like that scene of us crossing a corner there's like 10 dudes we cross another corner it's like 100 dudes we cross another corner it's like a thousand dudes those are the saviors they just multiply and actually very funny little goofy fact there are so many of them that you can spot extras being reused as in they die in the episode but they eventually come back in the background season 7 and the con and meaningless bickering with jadus is a whole different kind of worms but when we get to the finale it's just I don't even know how to describe it it's like the most cringeworthy Avengers moment imaginable this is The Walking Dead the book's entire march to war story line is about Eugene making ammunition and their plan fails the show completely disregards that and we just have everyone running on an open Street shooting into nowhere even like music-wise this carries a completely different tone I tell it out of here they could regroup no we can't take the chance he's not going to stop all right and returning to that shooting Point don't get me wrong you could always nitpick their aim in the series whenever they're shooting Walkers they're like7 accuracy when it was shooting people suddenly everyone turn into Stormtroopers that's not a problem with just the walking dead it's really a problem with action in general but this in one fail swoop it completely removed any weight that this conflict could have had in my mind this makes about as much sense as John Beyond the Wall the goal of this whole thing is exactly the same as it was in the book we Ambush Negan but the themes and the grit is completely sacrificed for the sake of this meaningless spectacle of people just running down the streets genuinely the alliance just appearing feels like Avengers this is not the walking dead but season 8 said hold my beer because not only is it completely dumb meaningless action it is also mind-numbingly inconsistent the Ezekiel story is all about his entire Squad being wiped out by the big spooky 50 cal machine gun literally their entire Squad obliterated in a matter of seconds well time to deploy Rick and Daryl because they are also shot at by a 50 caliber machine gun on an open road for a good few minutes ignoring the fact that Rick's car would have been swiss cheese Daryl pulls up and one Taps the dude with a pistol and now you're going to tell me that this gun is super dangerous my suspension of disbelief doesn't quite go that far like at this point you're just telling me just just don't pay attention just don't look at the screen I don't know this is like if Danny's dragons suddenly went from indiscriminate nukes that literally melt buildings to highly precise targeted fires wait a minute season 8 also completely forgets that little fact that ammunition is a problem and we just shoot and shoot and shoot some more and then a little bit more and I feel like I need to stress this I'm not saying ammunition is a problem just because it was a problem in the comic book ammunition is a problem in the show we're going to jump over the rest of season 8 because it's just more of the same but the season finale just says you know what somehow they returned and after the war in which hundreds have already been killed this happens I don't even care about the fact that none of the guns were tested all of them actually blew up etc etc I don't even care about any of that anymore just the sheer number of people makes everything here completely and utterly meaningless we fought a war where do they keep spawning season 9 is actually a little bit better about this but Seasons 10 and 11 are once again just beyond dumb and the ones who live is oh boy we spent years and years even have an entire spin-off to convey the strength of the CRM the season opens by saying Rick has tried to escape like seven times or whatever and even cutting his own hand off failed oh and by the way I'm guessing a bunch of you might not have even seen the ones who live so the super tldr about the crra military is that they're this super militaristic unit who has a whole big plan of restarting civilization problem is they've run the numbers and realized we don't quite have enough resources for that so what we're going to do is kill a bunch of people and basically start from scratch in these highly secured safety zones and by highly sec C we're talking like missiles countless soldiers helicopters fuel out the Wazoo apparently and the list just goes on they have like literally everything you could ever want and a little bit more I'm simplifying here but after all of that after spending like 8 years with zero possibility of Escape everything just so happens to line up so that Rick and Michonne can just blow up all the soldiers in a single afternoon and Rick also face tanks a grenade remember how a grenade was our only way out of the CDC the whole bulletproof glasting and all that yeah actually Maybe I'm Wrong Rick had a couple of walkers in front of him I'm sure they'll absorb the grenade and again the worst part about everything in the CRM is that it means nothing it changes nothing very very simple question what is Rick's agency in the CRM how does his story actually change and develop he tried to escape a bunch of times and failed cool makes sense very brutal so what does he do does he make sacrifices is he forced to think selfishly to get back to his family what does he do well Michonne is now there so they just kill everyone and then try to escape and succeed spoilers for The Last of Us and the season one ending if you don't want to hear this skip to this time let's look at Joel and Ellie the ending of The Last of Us has Joel choose Ellie one person over the future of humanity over the potential of curing everyone of potentially putting an end to the apocalypse completely I know a bunch of people have created like entire scientific breakdowns of why Ellie couldn't have actually made a cure yadada yada but Joel has hasn't seen any of those YouTube essays so for him it is Ellie or the human race it doesn't matter what it is in reality it matters what's going on in his head and his agency in that moment but yes that is a very very heavy choice that people debat to this day rationally speaking obviously he should have chosen the human race emotionally speaking and most parents say this they would have chosen Ellie every single day of the week so with that in mind let's get back to Rick so the briefing is essentially we don't have enough lies for our whole big thought out timeline and we're going to kill people to make up the difference so it's a life or death question for a bunch of completely innocent people and this is a tyrannical military organization doing this just because it doesn't fit their timeline first of all if you want to create a trolley problem you need some sort of point of reference a lot of people means nothing in a person's mind but that's not even the worst part because the trolley problem we have here is a we're going to go out and kill people which by the way very morally complex I think we can sit here and debate whether or not this is a good thing for a very long time definitely or B we're going to let a whole bunch of people starve effectively they're still going to die oh and the cherry on top these people who are doing the very morally great thing of going out and literally hunting people down also enslave a bunch of people and there's also this whole thing where you can like literally never leave and if you had anyone you cared about on the outside they're literally going to die very very morally gray indeed and my favorite thing remember how with Negan we didn't go to war right away because Rick was just afraid of losing so many people like it's a war a lot of people are going to die right yeah well with the world's most powerful military all it takes is a single afternoon of Rick and Michonne's time okay I li My favorite part is what actually happens after a literal voiceover of what happened with the crm's front ler force and the CRM Force command including major remember what I said about the two nickels yeah this is literally the night King but with even less casualties and less cost what I think happened is they wrote themselves into a corner and had no clue how to wrap it up without having the most meaningless big explosion that just kills all baddies and saves us I genuinely think they had to write a story that was big in scope since it didn't allow Rick to escape but they simply Couldn't Write a proper solution that would actually make sense this is Rick Grimes right he's been in prison here for 8 years what kind of solution could you think of for him taking down the world's most powerful military oh and by the way like speaking of themes I also didn't mention the fact that Thunder Spears yeah those are now thing I also didn't mention the fact that Rick's helicopter literally blows up oh and by the way the explosion happens inches from Rick but he's unscathed remember the season 3 helicopter I also didn't mention the fact that they jump out of the helicopter but they were apparently flying super low and landed in water only the show doesn't actually show any of that because reasons but it looked cool so they had to jump out of the helicopter it absolutely should stay in when we're following the main characters in 99.9% of of shows of course we know they're going to win a good writer's job is to create a sense that maybe they won't the ones who lived didn't even attempt to construct that illusion Rick and Michonne fly over there and literally just blow it up but okay one last thing I want to mention is that it's not just the senseless escalation that's the problem because in the main show and we'll get to this in a second as well there are rare times where the episode is quite literally just the spectacle what I mean by that is like the episode's core appeal is just the something cool happens it doesn't really progress the story in any meaningful way or anything it's just something shiny let's look at season 11 an absolute mess of a season where the production didn't even know that that was actually the final season and they had to ride around that but you know whatever let's look at the Connie House of Horrors episode it's directed by the legend gregy guaro himself and Connie is easily one of the best additions to the cast post rck exit but the thing is while the episode doesn't have some infinite ammo 300 people nonsense it still lacks any substance as as it stands it genuinely feels like the writers were sitting around a table someone throughout the idea of these pharoh people living inside a horror Mansion everyone agreed that it sounds very cool and that's where the conversation ended the episode looks incredible and it's very scary because of course it is it's grego but that's it and don't get me wrong a completely disconnected side Adventure can be incredible it can enrich the world in like a dozen different ways I mean look at avatar the Last air bender so the question that arises is what sets apart avatar from The Walking Dead and the answer is surprisingly simple Avatar actually has a coherent story for Simplicity sake keep this in mind for now we'll return to this point but moving on and I've already blured the lines a little bit here because as much as I talk about this meaningless spectacle in terms of action it also inevitably translates into dumb over-the-top characters like for example if Rick is meant to single-handedly mow down 30 dudes just because this conflict is going to be very very big Rick also sort of becomes John Wick right promise this is going to be relevant for The Walking Dead But this is where I want to bring up Game of Thrones I think one of the biggest issues a show can ever have is breaking the illusion that this world of the story is painting truly exists and that we are merely looking in you know how people often say I could get lost in that book I could get lost in this world I could get lost in this game that's what I mean it's just very strong escapism which is very good because it's more than just like a raw thing that has been made it's an actual experience and what I mean by breaking that illusion is when Productions start to deliberately Pander to the audience even done poorly it immediately turns it from a world you could get lost in to a produced bit of content that you can almost interact with this is no longer a world where you're just peeking in and seeing what happens this is a world where if enough people like something it's probably not going to go away with Game of Thrones I think Braun is a very good example his Arc was basically complete but he keeps appearing just because the audience like the actor and the character and there's nothing wrong with that if you have substance for that character and they don't just be become this marketable action figure running around what's the problem fan service no not that kind of fan service settle down is not a bad thing you should service the fans but it has to go beyond just a token gesture in Walking Dead terms this is obviously Daryl like Daryl undermines every single right hand Rick was supposed to have from the comic books a slightly different but I think even more explicit example of this is Jon himself Martin has talked plenty about his love of tolken work and the profound impact that has had on A Song of Ice and Fire but one thing he has said that he really dislikes is how Gandalf dies only to return as an even more powerful wizard in the talking lore it of course makes perfect sense but I think you understand what he's getting at Martin always believed that if a dead character were to be brought back to life there should be some profound impact death is something so fundamental so Primal to life that it should change a person well fundamentally so in the TV series Jon Snow dies and comes back to life and nothing changes why well because he's a good guy doing good things and he can do all wrong because he's our protagonist pushing the story along he is stuck in a situation that absolutely means certain death nope he is saved by something someone but he lives you can call this plot armor but I think it's actually worse than that because it'd be bad if they just survived everything but the problem is that their mistakes are also not meaningfully punished and the same goes for so so many of the Walking Dead's characters I understand why after Andrew and den I left the show they were a little more hesitant on killing characters but season 10 there is a horde in a cave Carol is on a war path so sheep and the entire group that was sent searching for her fall into said cave the whole thing blows up collapses Walkers are everywhere and nothing happens all the fan favorites get out completely scratch free and the rest just get a good old fake out death and reappear some soon or others later this entire big Cave Story that obviously wasn't in the comic book because it literally contributes nothing to the story is there for the simple reason of seeming kind of cool and again this is not even about the spectacle this is about none of these characters ever facing any Fallout for any of this in the comic book one mistake meant someone dies simple as that this is a punishing world you cannot run into the literal enemy's base and nothing happens and with that in mind let us return to the ones who live because this is Crystal Clear in the short season there's the scene right here we are like 12ish years into the Apocalypse this group that we meet has presumably survived in the wild for 12 years and they come upon Rick and Michonne appreciate the help but we're going to need more hey why don't you just promise and we'll believe you why would you care about saving anybody's skin other than your own you look after you if I hadn't seen deny and Andrew act before I'd genuinely think this is an acting problem but no no matter how good the actors are this script is Dreadful season 4 began with a single woman leading Rick to her zombified husband and trying to feed him to him that was barely a year into the apocalypse this is 12 years they outnumber them and they also have weapons which doesn't really make sense but what I'm getting at is it's not just Rick and Michonne leveling up everyone else has also lived in the same apocalypse you know but what happens well they fall to the floor and basically say oh my God I never thought people like you existed you are so good please help me and speaking of this point of just not great dialogue trying to hammer you over the head that Rick and Michonne are good very good in a dead world love is dead is it going to be them or me me or them love doesn't die what the problem is not that this is a catchphrase like the whole We Are The Walking Dead is also a catchphrase the problem with this is that no human being would ever say this like you just killed a person you turn to them and say love doesn't die who does that a couple of months ago I would have been just plain confused but after reading that whole thing about HBO playing with the idea of filming Game of Thrones in vertical I'm almost led to believe that could this be like trying to make clippable moments like the line is so bad and so out of context that surely this isn't the same Walking Dead that had Rick and Hershel talking about the world and what remains of it right this show is like 10 times more comic Booky than the comic book and I do not understand it how is the comic book with Negan who swears every 2.3 words so much more realistic than the show but okay let's return to our group of low-level NPCs because they plus Jadis surround Rick and Michonne surprise Walker pops out of the blue everyone dies and we then press e to continue and Jadis delivers her dying monologue everything I've ever was tired my old one my new one if I didn't kill you all somehow some way you come I thought in my death it was worth it the CRM will bring the world back I wish I died an artist he found this he wanted to give it to you every single character in both this show as well as later seasons of the main show feel like NPCs designed to interact with the main character and then just cease to exist it doesn't even attempt to paint a and distant world for another slightly unrelated but also related example let's pop on over to New York there's the scene where our alliance is meaning the bad Alliance so Negan will be Unleashed to scare the bad Alliance thing is the bad Alliance knows that the good alliance is very weak so Negan is almost single-handedly trying to pull something here I can't show you the full scene because copyright but what they're trying to emulate here is obviously the Negan lineup from the main show Big Bad Negan scares everyone and everyone runs away but again this is a decade plus into the apocalypse Negan does not have hundreds of people surrounding them as he did with Rick's group he is a single dude spouting nonsense but he still just scares everyone off and that's not even mentioning the whole gimmicky nature of this entire setting with these weird grappling guns their entire group were also wearing masks It Feels So artificial and so out of place in a setting like The Walking Dead that to me it's impossible to take seriously but while I brought up darl a second ago I think Negan is kind of even more of a Braun in that compar comp Arison because why is he around his Arc ended years ago and then it ended again years ago and then it ended again years ago well honestly because everyone likes JDM he's a really really good actor so we're just going to repeat the same storyline with Maggie a dozen times as opposed to the comic where you know he's effectively left to rot completely alone because you know he's an evil man not only does it not really make any sense from a purely this is an apocalypse with hardened people perspective where Negan isn't some walking myth it also kind diminishes the entire Negan conflicts if you happen to be writing an essay about bringing back characters for no reason and you need more examples just watch Fear The Walking Dead the Final Season can be summarized with a sentence of somehow insert name returned and there I think the problems actually converge to create an even worse version of this because not only is everyone immune the show actively indulges in that immunity for the sake of spectacle what I mean by that is you see someone blow up like they literally die but don't worry they're going to be fine and is that over and over and over I think a simple way of getting my point across is that these characters literally have titles in Universe like I am sorry this is not Game of Thrones I don't think Maggie should be known as the Widow across the whole of the US it's just goofy imagine if every villain after Terminus called Rick the ring leader why I don't know why why not and also please when you are stabbed in the shoulder it should kind of leave a wound you know you shouldn't do hero Landings 15 seconds later but fine whatever I guess to try to summarize these two very very big points I truly don't know how this happened but by season 7 especially I think the show just completely lost its grit and its weight it was just spectacle with very little substance and the characters are either or can just do no wrong regardless of what happens and the best part if they do something Shady well an NPC will pop up to tell you that they are still good remember that random kid with 10 minutes of screen time who literally spawned in to tell the audience that nean is now good yeah me neither well actually I do remember him I remember him very well cuz it was very goofy but you shouldn't remember him cuz he was an NPC but the worst part about this whole spectacle thing that you're probably not going to see until it's already too late is that it's a death spiral if Rick has become a gigachad he can never not be a gigachad you can never pull back anymore so the action just has to get bigger and bigger and bigger to the point of being comedic but all right that's all super big picture stuff maybe I'm just being a boomer and don't realize is that quote unquote modern audiences want to see a ton of action 24/7 with little to no regard for the setting okay so let's zoom in and talk about another big problem The Walking Dead has its constant desperate attempts to set up some Grand mystery only for all of them to mean literally nothing The Walking Dead is not attack on Titan or Game of Thrones with its prophecies and whatnot the comic book does have quite a bit of foreshadowing but it never tries to fake this perception of there being some Grand Design behind it I think Martin himself describes this very well he's often talked about how there are two types of authors The Architects and the gardeners Architects are the type who plan out if not absolutely everything than most of the story before ever putting pen to paper probably the simplest examples are like crime SL mystery authors but tol and to fits the architect description I think you'll agree that coming up with an entire language like dozens of religions and wars and like a whole universe just to write a children's book is sufficient planning but then there's the gardener this type of author obviously still has some idea of where the story is going but they let it grow naturally Martin puts himself in this camp and I think Kirkman 2 is very much a gardener it just makes perfect sense for a story like The Walking Dead by design it was a realistic apocalypse that never ends so instead of coming up with some massive overarching plots Kirkman focused on themes characters and really allowed you to experience the world and that's where I think the show Once Again went directly against what it was meant to be I think around seasons four to fiveish and especially with the whole CRM stuff the writing really tried to lean into this whole super artsy everything is a sign type of writing let me make one thing clear I am very much a weird surreal dream sequence enjoyer Rick talking on the phone sign me up zombie Lori sign me up the entire traumatic Negan lineup sign me up Rick's entire death episode sign me up ditto for the lengthy flashbacks here's not here is easily one of my favorite episodes of season 6 so with everything I'm going to talk about in a second it's not about making things abstract but more so about planting these false promises easily the most notable ones are just all the A's in season 4 and five I think you can just interpret it as this overarching symbol of Rick being trapped it appears on the train carts then the hunter painted on the wall and later a for Alexandria is also this weird reminder of that entrapment as a small little call back it makes sense and it's a cool little detail for viewers wanting to overanalyze everything I am one of them but then they decided you know what a is everything A is for the Wolves A is for Daryl's shirt Jadis is a the CRM helicopter a oh and we planned it all along the a actually now has a meaning in the CRM if you really really wanted to make sense of course you can jump through hoops and just describe it as this recurring motif of danger throughout the series but to me it seems like this lazy cryptic thing that they just kept tossing in there to keep people asking questions that ultimately lead to something completely unrelated is it's just smoking mirrors it's just there to string you along with the promise of some grander mystery and don't get me wrong I understand that everything I'm saying right now is ridiculous I'm complaining about a random cryptic letter I get that it's ridiculous but the follow-up question is why is it there then this is there for people wanting to analyze the show but ultimately none of it is in any way related in a weird way this is like insulting the audience's intelligence because it's like oh you spent all this time wondering about what it could be well surprise it's a whole different Community all of it is connected you could never know that why are you presenting it as this Grand thing that doesn't have a solution it's just not fun and the best part this happened again because the same goes for Heath's disappearance and the highly spooky PPP card so let's break it down the real reason for Heath disappearing is because the actor wanted to leave the show that is it people speculated that the PPP card might be foreshadowing The Whisperers since PPP in music means very very quiet as in Whispering we've had very clear kn in foreshadowing before so it makes sense but no because apparently it's a CRM thing and you just have to trust it because it's the Sher saying it there's no indication of that ever happening but it's a thing and then that PPP thing is spliced in in tails of The Walking Dead as another blink and you'll miss moments and eventually it pops up on a whiteboard in the ones who live so the question that arises is clearly it's in some way connected with the CRM it says like some sort of weird PPP exception what does that mean what happened to Heath well I'll quote Scott gimple it's like with the CRM there's a huge mythology to it but the thing is and I don't want to tell it but if things change and you haven't released that much you can pivots but I will say we have is just sitting on a shelf right now and this really great mythology that might apply to something very very soon so basically it means absolutely nothing until they make stuff up so please keep watching please keep watching please there's something more it might apply to something very very soon please keep watching these are literally people on Twitter just posting like cryptic tweets of something is coming soon I do that myself sometimes cuz it's very funny but you that's not how you write a story and the thing is if it wasn't for the A's I'd be like okay maybe you've thought of something but the thing is after you make a whole overly dramatized thing about a literal community's fate being decided by a coin toss in the episode this is not like out of the show we actually see this only for the showrunner to reveal what happened after the show ends nothing happened by the way like I'm sorry I put more trust in my foreshadowing the weather than I do The Walking Dead at this point it's just red herrings gone Rogue a bunch of them are often just straight up inconsistent a whole bunch of them are complete afterthoughts redc conning half the show like smart Walkers by the way people were cooking up lore reasons since season 1 but there is no lore reason that was just a Frank darabond creative decision the walkers in the comic never had any sort of intelligence nor do they have any sort of intelligence after Darabont left the show it's not like their brains decaying or anything like that like we would have seen fresh people turning also exhibit intelligence but we never see that that was just a blatant redcon just because shunner changed that is until season 11 where once again false promise of Aaron suddenly saying I've actually heard stories of them now if someh have you made it this far into the video and haven't watched the show yourself buckle up because not only did they redcon smart Walkers out of existence they redcon them back in only for them to not even do anything meaningful why did they do that because please keep watching in The Wider lore there are special walk in Europe we promise keep watching please but wait I hear you say a lot of the stuff you keep talking about are entirely external events there was nothing they could do the reason why Oceanside didn't show up is because the show was cancelled and they had to work around it the PPP card was also the actor leaving the show yes you're absolutely right the same as Rick was airlifted out because Andrew Lincoln wanted to leave the show the same as Michonne disappearing because Deni got the bag from Marvel Big W by the way and the same as Maggie leaving because she also became a super comp another Big W so yes criticize ing external events is kind of goofy right but also kind of not because another problem the show has like after season 7 is that they never commit to anything an architect plans out everything a gardener develops the story based on current circumstances The Walking Dead does neither because it sets up this whole PPP card without ever knowing whether Heath will return remember season 5 and all those spontaneous deaths that just reminded us that this world is dangerous a bunch of those stories yes they were abruptly cut short but it makes sense in the world that is The Walking Dead that is what a gardener should do if an actor wants to leave kill them off with Andrew Deni and Lauren they got very lucky because all of them actually decided to return but what if whiskey Cavalier was never cancelled and Maggie never returned or better yes what if after the development hell that was the movie trilogy Rick and Michonne never got a proper conclusion Rick was airlifted out sure whatever but Michonne's story would have ended with her leaving her children behind to literally try to find a dude in the middle of a zombie apocalypse only to never return this is the same world where we lost Dale who too wanted to leave the show by the way on a regular evening stroll we lost Tyrese with the entire group still around the world where Noah was torn apart because of a single weak link but no we are a decade into the apocalypse and everyone goes off on their own Adventures because they can solo the world apparently they outscale the scaling okay why don't you go and find out your s send me a postcard honestly my theory is that they killed off Carl who was the obvious future of the show and by the way no Chandler didn't want to leave the show he didn't go to college or whatever else people have come up with he literally bought a house nearby to make filming more sustainable long term and his parents also roasted gimple for a few months which was very funny but no he was fired but that's beside the points I think they killed him off and sort of realized that hold up we don't really have anywhere to go like like Sophia is no longer in the show she's still in the comics Carl is no longer in the show he's still in the comics we sort of don't have anything that represents the Next Generation you know so when it comes to character deaths I think they never committed because what if someone else wants to leave and we don't have any more main characters like at least there was a chance of bringing someone back right and so yeah Rick blows up but his air lifted out people leave left right and center and then the show just gives up on show don't tell and just tells us that they were doing something somewhere and now they're back it's just so shallow you just can't tell a story like this without ever committing to anything well to be fair I guess they did commit to something and that was killing the entire future of the story by killing off Carl off screen for some reason yeah uh everyone else though they're vibing someone who isn't exactly vibing though are AMC themselves if you've been following the behind the-scenes stories for a while you'll know that Frank darabant the original Schauer sued AMC over profit sharing and more recently Robert Kirkman himself along with a number of producers also sued AMC from a purely viewer perspective a bunch of that is completely irrelevant to us it just deals with like residuals and payments but you know it's kind of boring stuff but the thing that is important is one AMC's relationship with Kirkman the literal creator of this franchise and two the effect it's already had on all the spin-offs starting with the latter correlation is of course not causation and also keep in mind that I am by no means a legal professional and my only consultant is Chad GPT but from what I gather AMC settled one of the lawsuits where one of the terms is that profits from both Fear The Walking Dead and The Walking Dead would have to be shared with the plaintiffs coincidentally both shows ended almost immediately and what followed are all the other spin-offs which are not covered in this legal documents keep in mind that legal proceedings are even slower than The Walking Dead Season 7 it's funny goofy get it's it's a Walking Dead reference but it takes a very long time you can see these things coming and you can pivot so people hoping for an official Walking Dead season 12 it's almost certainly not going to happen because they'd have to share profits instead if they make a spin-off called The Walking Dead Rick rymes searches for Daryl Dixon the book of Ricky do dog Rhymes the one who lives then it's all good the point I'm getting at is that by not having the main title of the Walking Dead you are splintering the audience big time and that is very bad for business but I do think it's important to note that I might be reading tea leaves here I mean the show of The Walking Dead did kind of sort of adapt all the comic book right I do think that if they could they'd probably just keep making the main show like it wouldn't be the first time they come up with completely new stories but maybe they really just ended it I don't think so because of the surprise cancellation but maybe but much much more importantly for me I want to talk about the first points even before The Walking Dead was turned into a live action show so this is like 2008 to 2010ish Kirkman said multiple times that he is interested in making a Walking Dead anime SL animation/ call whatever but even more importantly as recently as December and this April he is discussed AMC's interest in doing something like that and later stating that he'd want to do it but that he would have to get the rights back from AMC I've talked a bunch more about this on my second Channel but MoneyWise I think A Renewed collaboration between Kirkman and AMC for a 100% faithful comic adaptation does make sense looking at something like Google Trends none of the spin-offs have even remotely reignited interest in The Walking Dead as a whole even focus communities like reddits all of the top uploaded posts are all like 78 years ago none of those are really recent but then again would AMC even budge on like not including Daryl for example hard to say so I think the only way this would really work is if Kirkman really has a 100% creative control otherwise I mean we'd be doing the same thing the TV series was a comic book adaptation it just became very different especially with stuff like Daryl right so redoing it with these changes that were in the TV version is completely redundant with the colored version of the comic book still trucking along there definitely seems to be sustained interest in more comic material Invincible has been doing incredibly well on Amazon and just about every streaming platform is now fighting tooth and nail for exclusivity on anime properties so again purely MoneyWise I think this is something that could happen and to me that is the only bit of franchise that I think I'd actually be interested in now I think the unfortunate part around that is that a lot of people tend to throw out these reboots bad adaptations Bad Zombie genre fatigue or whatever else but every single metric dis proves that reboots and adaptations regardless of the finished product just juice up the original recent example avatar The Last Airbender source that big spike on Google Trends another example one piece big spike in Western markets once live action was released another recent example invincible so whether it was originally animated originally a manga and has an anime or it's just a comic it is still a net positive for the IP as a whole so again MoneyWise it makes perfect sense to me and with the zombie genre fatigue I don't think this is true either I think what people mean when they say they're sick of zombie material is just the same zombie material the number one complaint of The Last of Us was the lack of infected most of the infected were obviously in the gameplay sections and they sort of cut a lot of that so they were really really sparse thing is just like The Last of Us The Walking Dead is not a story about the zombies so as long as the primary plot is strong a good backdrop of the Apocalypse is just the cherry on top same thing goes for video games by the way I think when most people say genre fatigue it's just because the idea in that genre has gotten staled but that's beside the points what I'm getting at is that I think the TV universe is very much struggling from the numbers that are available it's still pulling okay figures but I mean compared to everything it did before and compared to most other big TV shows nowadays it's very very rough but the thing is there is this gold mine in the comic book just sitting there personally I don't see a future for this IP without like a big house of the Dragon moment where we actually return to the heart and soul of what made it what it was killing people and then telling them that love doesn't die that's like Far Cry levels of insanity it's not really the Walking Dead if I was prone to conspiracies I could almost believe that the title of the ones who live could even be a personal slight against Kirkman since it's kind of the complete inverse of what Kirkman did with that but yeah having slept on it having thought about it for a good few weeks now I do think The Walking Dead and especially the ones who live has actually beaten Game of Thrones for just how much it disrespects The Source material I think the reason people tend to really focus on Thrones More Than The Walking Dead is because Thrones imploded in spectacular fashion whereas the cracks in The Walking Dead had begun to form way way earlier and just compounded over time having spent a good 3 years now chronicling the entire story of both the show and the comic I've also seen a pretty funny emergence of survivorship bias back in the season 1 to 5 videos I was a crazy fan gushing about everything who needed to shut up but season 10 though I am either a the most jaded person on the internet just farming hate clicks because that is definitely what my channel is about and I don't have genius in every title of the video or B I am 100% based this show fell off and it's so bad but okay while I joke about it I think the worst part is the fact that most people nowadays are just completely indifferent people still talk about how much Game of Thrones fumble the back but The Walking Dead is already an IP that every Normie Reddit thread has almost forgotten it's that one show that everyone watched at some point then they kind of disliked it but eventually they just completely forgot about it and it's like oh it's still going loving it or pting it still means that people are invested in actually seeing it succeed indifference is the thing that actually kills an IP I've been very animated in this video and I might have misled you into thinking that I'm super mad about his failure and that I hate it and that it's super bad but after the ones who live I'm not really mad at all I'm not even disappointed to be honest with you I'm sort of just in michon and Rick were those two final remaining things that I was really looking forward to as classic The Walking Dead it started off relatively strong but very quickly the story saw exactly the same problems as the main show and because of that there's really not much else for me to look forward to and keep in mind like now there is actually no Source material for everything that we're seeing I should be excited but I'm just not the illusion of danger the illusion of this world it's been broken I followed the series for 14ish years now almost 2/3 of my life but in terms of new material this is where I think I drop off I don't want to make this overly dramatic or anything because regardless of what new nonsense they cook up the first seasons are still some of my favorite stories ever told and I still aim to finish the last bits of the retrospective for the comic sake but as of now and I'd be estatic if this age like milk I do not see a bright future for the TV Universe I made a similar video a few years ago going over the main drop off points of the original show but that was a very very different time and the show was still on ongoing so I guess I want to ask all the same questions again are you still watching is it just Sun cost fallacy like it was with me or maybe you're really enjoying the pseudo reboot era if you dropped off when and why if you say Glenn and Negan is it really Glenn or is it just because season 7 was a complete mess afterwards I'm really curious about this stuff because I still don't quite believe people when they say they actually dropped off just because of Glenn the reason why I think that is because like Game of Thrones also had really really big character deaths and people were very very mad about them but like no one actually dropped off you know because the show was good but whatever the case let me know where you stand and whether or not I'm completely off base oh and also if you don't even know what the Walking Dead is um I hope you had a very nice lunch I recommend reading the comic book it's very good and that's the video this one turned out to be much much longer but also much shorter than I expected I re-watched the whole show again while editing this so must have been like three four times now and yeah I think my thoughts won't really change much on it episode one was solid episode two was mostly solid but everything after that felt like a awkward stumble to the finish line but hey at least the final scene was very very cute I think episode 4's writing was also strong but the thing is the entire story is so telegraphed that none of it really meant anything to me at least I remember when I watched the first trailers I had a brief sense of them trying something like super spicy and like one of them would make it sort of like what we see in the bul but yeah no they just played it super super safe and yeah the whole thing is super telegraphed and also I can't believe I have to say this but people are once again roasting a kid like RJ's actor first of all it's the director's job to make them act properly Rick and Michonne's lines were equally bad and they are adults and they're very good actors clearly this is not an acting issue number two roasting a kid is Mega cringe stop being a Manchild grow up but anyway this is the outro and not 30 more minutes of my rambling so I want to say a massive thank you to our current patrons and YouTube members who allow me to produce even more of these for you all and let's also give a warm welcome to the newest members of the team Tom Murray and Franklin Stone without you there' be a whole lot less of my rambling so seriously thank you thank you my voice is really starting to go so I want to say thank you very much for watching I hope you have a great day and hopefully I'll see you in the next one bye-bye

Channel: Korotos Mystery Shack

Views: 130,357

Keywords: Koroto's, Mystery, Shack, Korotos, Koroto, The Walking Dead, TWD, The Ones Who Live, Review, A brief retrospective, what went wrong, TWD Downfall, TWD Retrospective, The Walking Dead Retrospective, Dead City, Rick & Michonne, Rick and Michonne, Why The Walking Dead Failed, Walking Dead in 2024, twd, retrospective, twd in 2024, twd rick spinoff, twd rick and michonne, rick grimes, michonnne grimes, twd ending, review, analysis, season 1, towl

Id: MZx_zIC9RSw

Length: 50min 23sec (3023 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024