Goodbye, Carl and Hello to the new Walking Dead

Carl, I'm shocked that you'll be gone, and it won't be the same without you.

[photo: from the Hollywoodreporter.com, at this link.]

Before and After The Walking Dead's Season 7 Premiere

Photo: from the Walking Dead Season 7's Wikipedia page

You can find more blog entries about Season 7 (and past seasons) of The Walking Dead by clicking on the tab for it at the top of this blog. I post this here just to introduce that separate blog. Thanks!

Just Before the Episode Airs

So, Season 7 is upon us, and I'm back for a blog of The Walking Dead since Season 5. Been busy!!!

Who will Negan be bashing with the baseball bat? Since the premiere starts in half an hour, there isn't a lot of time to get into it, so I'll present options and pick, and we'll see how right I was. (Or, wasn't.)

--Glenn

--Abraham

--Eugene

--Rosita

--Michonne

--Sasha

--Aaron

Okay, so my picks. Glenn gets it in the comics here, and in an interview, Lauren Cohen cried about this episode and said it was very depressing and difficult. In the comics, after he dies, she miscarries and then kills herself, but I'm guessing not all of that will happen.

But I think Glenn goes. The showmakers have veered from the comics quite a bit, but I don't think they will here. Plus, Glenn's arc has crested.

I also think Eugene and/or Abraham will go. I wouldn't be surprised if both do, but if I had to pick one, I'd go with...both. Eugene's character has definitely crested and there's not much more for him to do. Once he found his bravery, there wasn't anything else. And Abraham...well, he's basically been another Daryl lately, and that can't go on. His character has more to still do, but...I can't choose between them.

The same can be said for Michonne, and for Daryl, but I'm not ready to pick them yet. Frankly, the showmakers can't be that dumb to cast Daryl away, and Michonne has maybe crested, but has too much of a fan base, especially among women. I mean, she's basically a female Rick, and I mean that in the kindest of all possible ways. Seriously, that's a compliment. Either one would be a logical choice, but I'm not ready to go there.

I am ready to pick Rosita and / or Sasha, but I feel that there would be something interesting between them once Abraham goes. But I wouldn't be surprised if one of them gets hit.

And Aaron is just sort of there. Those guys don't last too long. He goes.

So now I've boiled it down to:

Aaron, Eugene, Abraham, Glenn, with a few maybes. I mean, if the showmakers really want to be mean, they can make it Maggie herself, but that would be...shocking, though not surprising, if you know what I mean. I've only recently been talked out of saying she was one of the ones tonight.

But I have my doubts. (Before the previews, I've even said that Carl could get it. But Rick would've been more insane in the previews had that been the case.)

But I'll say No for now. So four is too many. I'll pick two.

I'll say: Glenn and Eugene or Abraham. Maybe all three. Aaron gets away because he's so irrelevant.

And I don't expect Negan himself to last too long. Certainly not all season. Maybe a few episodes.

My guess is that they won't show who it is until almost an hour in. (The show is an hour and six minutes tonight.)

If you're reading this, what do you think? Make a guess in the comments if you'd like, and I'll be back to this blog with another entry to wrap it up and see how I did.

After the Episode

Well, I didn't want to be right, but so far I was: Abraham and Glenn.

Both deserved better. Glenn especially didn't deserve to go like that, with one eye bulging out. He got in a promise to Maggie, and showed he loved her, but...at least Abraham got a few choice words and attitude in there.

I was just asked why I felt Abraham would get it. One: as I mentioned before, he was essentially another Daryl, and that wouldn't last long. Second, he was listed as one of the stars at the Rhode Island Comic-Con, which is often an indicator that one's role has diminished--as Father Gabriel's last year--or that it has ended. His role wouldn't lessen, so it had to be that it was ending.

Now I'm watching The Talking Dead, so let's see how that goes...I'll watch that now...

Touching tributes to the departed. Hard to believe it's been six years for Glenn! And for all of us watching the show. Cool that Yeun said it was an honor for the end to come to him, as it's the catalyst for everything else that happens, and apparently there's quite a bit. Great attitude! I'm watching Michael Cudlitz and going to bed. Thanks for reading!

Before the Walking Dead Ends...and then After the Season Finale

Photo: Carol and Daryl, from this website, called Heavy.com


...a few comments about it, and about whatever else:

--Those who need to watch their step in tonight's Walking Dead season-ending episode:

* Glen: When a love song plays and you're making loving gestures with your pregnant wife while naked in a shower, you really need to be careful in the next episode. Plus, he almost died once, and the comics show Negan getting him early in Negan's tenure. And who do we see tonight? Negan. And I think Glen's had his character arc, which is always a problem. So, working against him are that, and the comics, and his almost-dying, and one other thing: I saw an interview, not during the Talking Dead, in which Lauren Cohan says this season ends very, very sadly. She said that over and over again. Her character in the comics kills herself after she loses her baby (which was maybe hinted at in the last episode) and after Glen dies. The show won't kill off Glen, Maggie and the baby all at once, but all that is against him, too.

* Maggie and/or her baby: But see above.

* Carol, who I think was badly stabbed at the end of the last episode. Rick and the Zen master (who my better half hopes gets his tonight) do follow a trail of blood, after all, and the producers did hire her stunt double to play a walker, to fool us for a moment, when we just saw the back of her, and she (of course) looks a lot like Melissa McBride. Plus, the whole fool-me-once dying thing. See: Glen.

* One of Abraham's GFs, and Abraham himself.

* Safe: Rick, Coral (I mean, Carl), Daryl (It's just a flesh wound), Father Gabriel (for now, and how has this guy survived for this long?), Enid, and, well, everyone else not mentioned above.

* My better half has heard ("...from a website I trust," she says, for whatever that's worth) that only one character gets it tonight, but she also said it was possible that one major and one minor character gets it. We shall see.

And, in other news:

* Mark my words: Trump doesn't want the Presidency, and he won't get the nod anyway. He's got to win the voters and the delegates over, and he hasn't done that. The delegates announce the party's choice, like the electoral college actually elects the Presidency. One often means the other, but not always, as Al Gore--and the rest of us--found out with Dubya.

* His campaign manager has been arrested. He's been banned from Great Britain. A mayor from West Hollywood has said he's "not welcome" in her city. And he should have every woman in the country pissed at him, plus most minorities, and certainly every Latino and Latina. So why are his numbers still so good? More than Trump himself, his numbers say a lot more about the mindset of a lot of Americans.

* Allen Craig ($9 million) is in Pawtucket right now, in the minors. Pablo Sandoval ($17.6 million) and Rusney Castillo ($11.2 million) are both on the bench and don't look to get much playing time this year. So the Red Sox are paying $37.8 million this year to three players to not play.  Why can't I get a contract like that?

* The snow's not accumulating, but it's really coming down in furious spurts, then drying up. All day today, and part of tomorrow. Power flickered on and off in the 50+ mph winds today. And, yeah, it's April 3rd.

* Game of Thrones cost about $1 million per episode when it first started. For this upcoming season, it's $10 million per episode. No wonder there's only 9 episodes a year.

* My guess is that the show's producers--who don't pay George R. R. Martin's book contract--have quietly asked him to let the series jump ahead of his books, so for the first time, many fans won't know what's coming.

***Just finished watching the season finale. All is as I suspected, except you don't see who gets it. My guess remains with Glen, but I have to say that the ending left me very frustrated, and not in a good way. A fan can't feel the outrage, or the loss, or the whatever, for a character until the fan knows which character gets it. And here, except for Carl and Rick (remember Negan's last comment before he swings), everyone else is at least a possibility. Because everyone on the Talking Dead says that the first episode of next season--when we know who got it--is a jumping board to everything that happens the whole season, and possibly for many seasons later, it has to be a very important character who gets it, possibly even Rick himself. I'm still going with Glen, but if they want to veer from the comics and really shock us, it could be Carl or Rick or Maggie. My second guess, if not Glen: Carl.

The Walking Dead

Photos: from The Walking Dead's website via AMC.

My blog for The Walking Dead, Season Five, is now up.  Below is an excerpt of the latest blog entry.  To read the whole thing, click here or click the Walking Dead tab above.

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The obliteration of peoples in the future might go something like this.

Actually, no.  Let me re-phrase.  This institutional evil has already happened in real history.

When Gareth strolls in with his clipboard and demands an account of bullets fired at Rick's group, he immediately stops the action--which, in this case, was some guy about to slaughter Glen with a hefty-looking aluminum bat, and then cut his throat over a trough.

He asks for the number of bullets fired at Rick's group.  He's got a clipboard and a checklist.  With more time and fewer commercial breaks, might he have asked about the weapons taken from them, or other valuable items?  I think so.  Three swords?  Check.  Six guns?  Check.  No where's that bag?

In World War II Germany, "valuable items" would've been defined as paintings, gold (including gold teeth, or haven't you seen the same documentaries I have?), silver, china, art.  Any metal to be melted down to use as bullets, tanks, etc. for the German war effort.  In a Zombie Apocalypse, "valuable items" would be defined as weapons and bullets.

Did a Jew at Auschwitz live a few seconds longer as a soldier answered a superior's similar question?  Did this soldier keep the gun pressed against a prisoner's head as he said, "Five gold teeth and two works of art taken from this prisoner, sir," in German, to his superior officer, who was standing over him at the time with clipboard and pencil in hand?

Yes.  Yes, I believe that could have happened.

But real life isn't TV.  So then the gun would've fired.

Systematically.  Impersonally.  Just taking inventory.

Institutional evil.  I wish I could take credit for that phrase, but I heard it on Talking Dead later.  Probably it's been a phrase widely used, at least since World War II.

I write this because some have already remarked that the people in Sanctuary got more than they deserved.  That Sanctuary Mary (Denise Crosby, from Pet Sematary and other 80s movies, if you're as old as I am) didn't deserve what she got.  This was, in fact, a poll question during Talking Dead.

So this blog entry is written to those 25% to 30% of the viewers who texted in with a "Yes, the Sanctuary People got more than they deserved.  After all, they were a group like Rick's, and they got raped and beaten and killed.  They were just trying to stay alive.  You're either the butcher or you're the cattle, right?"

Because this is exactly what the Germans thought at the end of World War I.  They'd been bombed and obliterated.  Berliners were starving.  Diseased.  Dying.  And a few of them were really pissed off.  They were just trying to stay alive.  They were tired of being the cattle.  Better to be butchers.

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To read the rest of this blog entry, or to read a few entries from The Walking Dead's previous season, please click here.  Or click on the Walking Dead Season 5 tab above.  Thanks.

As always, please feel free to comment.