The Walking Dead finale

[maystone]

Because you can't do spoiler cuts on freakin' FaceBook. I'm just going to paste something I wrote to my brother earlier. He thought the Rick/Joe ending was unrealistic. So my response follows. Feel free to jump in and comment. And I hope I do this right. It's been years since I've done a cut.

Comments

[budclare]

And Carol did the right thing. She was trying to stop a contagion that was turning people INSIDE THE PRISON into walkers.

Carol killed them after they were quarantined, after the damage had already been done. And even if you handwave that away, she still got the girl with the limp and the boy with the recently dislocated shoulder killed for no good reason. They did not need to "pull their own weight" right that minute or in that particular way. They have people more able-bodied than those two who pull their weight in ways other than making supply runs.

Carol panicked, period. She had the lives of two girls roughly Sophia's age dropped in her lap, and she panicked and overreacted at the first sign of trouble. Prior to inheriting the girls, she was making tough but sensible decisions. Her first few decisions afterward were tough but with only a veneer of logic...which is why that kind of panic is so hideously dangerous.

And Rick's banning her would have been unfair...had she cared in the slightest that she caused the deaths of two injured teenagers. I still don't entirely approve because everyone does stupid things when they're panicking; the ideal solution is to keep them out of trouble until you can talk them down. But Rick had no experience with that kind of panic, so he didn't understand what was happening. He could have handled it better, but his solution wasn't completely irrational (despite the fact that he was pissed at the time), unlike killing people in quarantine.

(As an aside, I love the subtlety of what they did with Carol's behavior...but that just throws into sharp relief how shitty the writers are most of the time. Crusading Survivalist Carol didn't bother patching up the holes in their evacuation plan, like establishing rendezvous points, or track down latex gloves, surgical masks, and hand sanitizer so they'd be ready for the inevitable epidemic? (The gloves and, I assume, the hand sanitizer would have expiration dates, but they shouldn't be that far out already.) I guess the writers think she's too badass to solve any problems that don't involve killing someone?)

As for Daryl, he had no way to know they were rapists beyond the ominous implications of "claiming", which I can mostly forgive him missing.

[travestine]

There was no way they were going to survive - they had no drugs that could respond to that kind of sickness, they were clearly getting sicker and they all knew that when people died, they turned. Did Carole act too quickly? Maybe. But Carole made a lot of tough calls that others wouldn't make - like teaching kids to survive instead of reading them happy puppy stories. She wasn't panicking - nothing indicated panic in her behavour. Clearly, whatever the contagion was - it was spreading. She was trying to contain it. What characters are you talking about that she 'got killed'?

Rick still didn't have the right to make that call - he was Farmer Rick at the time - he had no power in the prison. He wasn't on the council. He acted entirely arbitrarily. For all he knew, he was killing Carole just as he thought Carole had killed Karen and David - without consulting anyone. He was no different than she was.

How was Carole responsible for preparing for an entire epidemic on her own? There were still quite a few people (many already coughing and wheezing) in the prison at the time. As I recall, she had quite a bit on her hands, what with cooking for the prison, babysitting all the kids, preparing the 'hospital ward', etc.

Nice rape-apology. Daryl had a pretty good sense how bad they were. No, he didn't know at least one was a rapist, but once they spotted Rick, he knew what they were capable of. BTW, you're pretty quick to forgive the men on this program, but not the women? Just sayin' ...

If you think the writing is so shitty, why are you watching? A lot of us (12 million+ in the States watched the finale) happen to think the writing is mostly pretty spot on.