TWD 6x08 "Start to Finish" episode discussion... **SPOILERS WITHIN*

[Moon Knight]

As an episode in itself and if you don't go by the comics and judge it on its own, “Start to Finish” was pretty good. My biggest gripe is that they used the usually epic mid season finale for a much bigger payoff and explosion for the return in the back half; and if you are like me and constantly look at the time, then it was easy to tell that nothing was going to happen so in turn all the tension is gone. As Kidgloves pointed out earlier, and this is something I didn't even realized until I read his post, two people once again lost their legs and stumbled to the ground for false jeopardy. However, in Deanna’s case it really did prove fatal. See, I can understand her fumbling, she's older and inexperienced, but Carol? Nah, no way. They need to remove that trope from the show immediately. Also, with all the Walkers inside Alexandria, I would have liked to see what everyone else was up to. Aaron, Eric, Heath, Tobin, Bruce, Olivia, where were these people? Instead we had to spend time with Carl and Ron bickering and Carol and Morgan having a stand off; all while the giant herd is inside their community. Really, Carol, that couldn't wait? Again, all build up for a payoff next episode and I kind of have a feeling what the showrunner has planned. For me it's a double edged sword, I always said this story should have been drawn out over a few episodes and it now looks like we are getting exactly that. Having to wait until the second half isn't what I had in mind, however haha. I think the writers tried to be a little too fancy but instead everything just didn't play out right in the week to week story structure. I would have personally combined “Now” and “Always Accountable” for example. I did like Deanna’s performance in this one and her exit was handled well. Father Gabriel being featured in this one was also pleasant. One thing I noticed is how Eugene actually degressed back into bumbling Eugene after how he stepped up during “Spend”. A step backwards but perhaps they have something better in mind. “Shrugs” Overall, this first half started great but the structure hurt it a bit down the end. Too much time wasted and some of our favorites were pretty much an afterthought. I'm confident with what lies ahead. Negan is here and as long as they don't stray too much off from the source material, everything should be just fine. Just get rid of all that lazy writing and typical Hollywood tropes. Please.

[shootemindehead]

The way that episode should have ended was with everyone trapped in their respective positions with the dead outside clawing to get in and their immediate future looking very bleak indeed. Then in episode 7, have Negan and his goons show up, clear out the walkers and start demanding tributes from the Alexandrians, thus starting off that thread of the story. There's an incredible amount of ire in webland over that episode and I can understand why.

[Neil]

Not sure why they couldn't have literally killed the walkers at the bottom of the stairs... then when the next ones came forwards repeat... then again... and again... and again?

[Moon Knight]

Not sure why they couldn't have literally killed the walkers at the bottom of the stairs... then when the next ones came forwards repeat... then again... and again... and again? Eh, that wouldn't be as intriguing.

[zomtom]

To me it was an okay episode. I'm not jumping up and down over it, but in the same respect I'm not saying it was terrible. I keep reading too many comments from the actors who keep claiming these are phenomenal episodes full of blood and excitement only to get a meh episode. Maybe I allow my expectations to get raised too high only to be disappointed. Why couldn't this episode be 90 minutes? I would have much preferred it now as opposed to Morgan and his damned stick! And how the hell did the writers take a great character like Morgan and turn him into somebody who's death you're looking forward to? And don't get me going about Into the Badlands!! Talk about aggressive marketing!! I resent having that show shoved down my throat. I can't help but feel that type of marketing is going to bite AMC in the ass. I still love The Walking Dead to death, but I hope the writers and producers don't take the fans for granted. I can't help but feel we are being played with.

[MinionZombie]

As an episode in itself and if you don't go by the comics and judge it on its own, “Start to Finish” was pretty good. A calm and collected assessment (I just cut it down to this line so it wasn't a great big quote taking up a load of unnecessary space) - thank you. I don't necessarily agree on all points, but your considered response is a welcome one. On the week-to-week/binge watch issue - I think it's still a valid point, because in this day and age of binge watching we've all been spoiled rotten. We can charge through something at our own pace - but then we also lose all the time in-between to talk and discuss and anticipate - and it also means we're so eager for the next episode that when we have to wait an entirely reasonable and normal amount of time between episodes we get all revved up to an OTT degree. With some of the other cast members, yes, they do go missing a bit - but this is an inherent problem with having such a large cast - it's just going to happen, but on the up side it opens up numerous avenues for conflict and conspiracy, and it also helps keep the characters fresh (i.e. we don't get bored of seeing them every single episode over and over again). Sometimes it can just come down to script and production requirements - script requirements in that you need a certain amount of pages to focus on each of your stories you're telling in an episode, and the rule is to generally stick to about three plot - A, B, and C - any more than that and you run into problems with pacing, structure, focus, and so on. Particularly here in Season 6A we've got so much going on simultaneously, which is a different approach than we've seen in the past. Perhaps this has created some problems, but it's also had positive effects too - sometimes in life everything happens at once and you don't have enough time to get your ducks in a row and you're forced to improvise. It's quite something that Abraham/Sasha/Daryl didn't even figure into this episode at all - this is how large the cast has become. I can see what you're saying about combining a couple of episodes ... but I would warn that it's much easier said than done. Writing a show - particularly one this complex, with a cast this big - is a difficult task. Every choice you make on the page has positive and negative effects for the remainder of the script and the knock-on effects of what might initially seem to be a simple change can be massively complicated and troublesome. Neil - I agree - in a normal world you would try to just kill the walkers from behind that sofa. However, you wouldn't be able to get all of them - eventually you'd not be able to reach, and you might not have the supplies to create a 'pokey stick' from what you have upstairs (e.g. if there is Duct Tape in the house, it'll probably be in the garage of a downstairs storage space). So sooner or later you're going to have to make a move ... it'd also be boring as all hell to just watch people stabbing heads for hours from a sedentary position. Yawn-o-rama. Things need to happen, people need to move, danger needs to occur - chaos must bubble up and consume our protagonists. The real-world solution to a problem doesn't necessarily make for compelling TV. Agreed on Father Gabriel - good to see him getting stuck in, and vowing to do what Rick needs him to do. His arc is, in some ways, complete in that regard. He's come around to Rick's way of thinking ... ... sorta. He's got a lot to learn, but he's now taking on the reality of the situation and seeing what needs to be done. And aye, I'll say it again - Deanna flippin' rocked in this episode. With so many strong characters in this show you can easily overlook one of the newer characters - but boy, did Deanna go out strong. It was a hell of a moment that got my skin prickling. Another thing I've rather enjoyed this half season - the music - particularly in this episode towards the end (and as the tower collapsed at the end of 6x07). I've been digging the vibe. I felt that maybe the music had softened a bit (for sore lack of a better term) in the previous season (although I'll see if my assessment is maintained when I re-watch S5 pretty soon, having just snatched it up on Blu-Ray) ... but in these recent episodes the music has been great. ... On the entirely separate issue of Into The Badlands/AMC's scheduling - yeah - what a slap in the fan's faces. I see what they're trying to do - they want their new show to succeed - but getting in the way of your #1 show is a dumb idea. It'll be fascinating to see how the viewing figures change now that TWD is on a break and ITB has to stand on its own two feet (the third episode got over 5m viewers ... I wonder how many stopped watching after that A/S/D scene with the bikers). Fortunately it'll be business as usual come February 14th, but geez - talk about shooting yourself in the foot. They've stoked resentment against ITB, which is unfair to all the people who worked on the show itself - these sort of scheduling decisions will be way out of the hands of the people who actually create the shows - and forcing TWD fans to watch ITB just for a preview scene (that, quite frankly, should have been shown at the end of TWD's credits in the first place - just as they did here in the UK) or some other tidbit is damn cheeky. I hope that AMC recognise the backlash to that scheduling decision they've taken in the last three weeks and seek to never repeat it again. TWD has Talking Dead afterwards - it's a two-part package - and TD gets the prime slot after TWD's most prime of all slot (if that makes sense), whereas the slot after Talking Dead is getting a bit late on a Sunday night, so I understand that it's not an ideal place to start a new show, but wedging ITB between TWD and TD is not a good idea from an audience perspective.

[facestabber]

I liked Tovah's pitch about being immune to the bite. At some point I think that would be an interesting arc. I think that's what is done in Znation but at least TWD can breath life into it.

[Trin]

I'm one and a half feet in the hater camp on this and the last episode (which I'll address together). I enjoyed them for the most part but I'm not thrilled at the writing and plausability of several twists. Pros - - The zombie threat is real! Great twist having the tower fall and breach the wall. Totally digging the zombies swarming into Alexandria! This was probably the most Romero-esque feeling TWD has generated! - Morgan's talk with Carol and Rick about his stance on killing was very good. He defended his position well and made his actions seem plausible. - Carl has been refreshingly centered and shown an ability to man-up. Carl is a great example of Morgan's ideology done right. - Having Glenn back in action has been fun to watch. It feels like we have an ace up our sleeve with him out there. - A lot of the characters (not all, obviously) are acting sane and sensible. - The acting and character interactions have been very well executed. - The action scenes have also been very well executed. - I liked Eugene in these episodes for some reason I cannot quite pinpoint. - Tara giving Rick the finger was the feel-good moment of the season. Cons - The entire Ron plot is weak. They wasted screen time foreshadowing his dickishness and it's been tedious watching it unfold. Having the group put at risk over it is the last straw. Having the group repeatedly put at risk over Alexandrian's ineptness and pettiness is getting old. - Carol takes matters into her own hands....again... and divides and imperils the group. *sigh* - Rosita needed to shoot the Wolf guy, not give him guns. - Yes, the Glenn thing... I don't mind them saving him from insurmountable odds. But don't use tricky camera angles and misdirection in HOW it is filmed to mislead us. They could've shown Nicholas getting ripped to shreds on top of him surrounded by zombies and the same sense of peril would've been present without the casual jerking-around. - And, as a result of the Glenn thing... I thought Deanna was going to be okay. Why? Because the scene where she was injured never showed her getting bitten, but it DID show a zombie's hand near the wound site, and the wound looked like it COULD have been a rip from a hand with fingernail marks instead of teeth marks. Thank you TWD for making me hyper-questioning of everything I'm shown. - The zombie guts things. As shootmeinthehead commented, "It's simply dumb ... The logic fail with that nonsense is just immense." If it worked they'd use it regularly. And in this particular situation there's NO WAY those kids and baby are going to pull it off, and any idiot would know that. Plus, you really only needed one or two of them to do it. The rest could blockade the stairs and hide. So it doesn't even make sense to try it. - If you hide under a dumpster the zombies all wander off but if you hide in a bedroom they won't?? - Alexandria's preparation was crap. No guns distributed around? No secondary defenses/fortified buildings? No plan for who goes where in a breach? There was widespread concern for the walls failing yet NO ONE DID ANYTHING to prepare for it?? As a husband, parent and a regular guy I'm just imagining Jessie's reaction to Rick suggesting they cover themselves in zombie guts and go for a stroll. Jess - "You want us to what?" Rick - "Don't worry, I've done this before." Jess - "And that makes it better? Why am I just now hearing this?" Rick - "It's the only way. We're not safe here." Jess - "Yeah, I don't think so. If you like zombie guts so much why don't you get your sweaty ass out there and kill zombies until the stairway is blocked with zombie carcass. Or better yet, go wander out and get the CARS you said we COULDN'T get because we COULDN'T get past the zombies."

[DayoftheZ]

I have really enjoyed this season for the most part. I remain a little disappointed that Glenn didnt die when he "died" because I feel robbed of a cool and shocking death. We havent really had a bolt out of the blue death since Dale and Glenn going out that way would have matched any other TWD death. I have just finished a marathon of Seasons 1-5 and agree that TWD is best watched in bulk because it really is a "bigger picture" story. Waiting a week (or now two months) for a story to play out is a bit tedious but watching one after the other is very satisfying. The thing I dug about this episode was the ants crawling in at the same time as the walkers, it also answered the riddle as to why Sam loves cookies so much. Seeing Negans group was also great but like somebody said earlier up this is where I lost interest in the comics so I hope they stray as far away from the comics as possible. By the way Sam has chosen the wrong time to realise he needs the toilet.

[shootemindehead]

It wouldn't be all that easy to use the 'gut sheets' approach all the time. You'd have to constantly replenish the gore, and it's not safe in the long run - Kirkman mentioned the risk of falling ill by doing that - plus it's ridiculously disgusting, so I doubt you'd want to be roaming about covered in that gunk (in soaring temperatures to boot!) all the damn time. It's for extreme emergency situations only. It's been used, what, four times in six seasons? Three times intentionally. Of course it would. You could bring your clean poncho with you when out on a run and if things get hairy and the opportunity presents itself, go camo. It wouldn't be that hard. Also, by "all the time" I mean they would use it "all the time" when the need arises. In other words, they could have done it to get someone out of the siege they've just been through, after the botched cattle run, to get through the horde at the walls of Alexandria and then draw the wall zombies away, instead of just sitting around wondering what they were going to do. That's the problem with this deus ex approach to this smell nonsense. If you're going to go with it, then it needs to be a thing that you do on a consistent basis. Not just something that cheaply helps the writer out of situation they've penned themselves into. Besides, it isn't that hard to write around those situations. As for Kirkman mentioning illness, that's also bunkum, as clearly that's not an issue in the show either as, weekly, the characters hack and slash their way through zombies with gay abandon, regularly covering themselves in their blood and gore. The problem with that kind of writing is that it takes no care to consider future scenarios. If zombies can smell humans, they would have smelt Glenn under the bin. They would have smelt the characters hiding under the cars in series 2 and no doubt the the characters are going to be in situations down the line where they could be "smelled" too If they're sticking with this shitty idea, at least be consistent. I do agree that the 'science' reasoning behind it is a bit iffy - but the 'die from a bite' science is just as curious when everyone's infected already as it is ... but I don't let that spoil my good time either. There's no science behind it at all. It makes no sense whatsoever. Nobody, especially not a rotting corpse, would be able to "smell" a "clean" human amongst the powerful odors of putrid, rotting, flesh. Half of them don't even have noses? It's just mind numbing.

[MinionZombie]

Trin - Deanna's wound looked exactly like a bite should, from what I saw. That was an interesting bit. When Deanna escaped those walkers when Rick pulled her up - and I saw that one chomping away just near her back - I thought "boy, that was a mighty lucky escape!" ... so when it's revealed that she was bitten it was oddly satisfying, for lack of a better term. I didn't want Deanna to die - there are few characters I actively want dead (aside from villains, and then Ron and Sam of late ) - but everything about her final scenes/moments in the show was excellent. I do agree that there needs to be some tighter writing in terms of how Alexandria wasn't properly prepared. However, the trouble is that it's such a compressed time over which all these events have occurred in these eight episodes (like what, two days?!). They've not had a chance to train the Alexandrians in how to shoot - and you don't want some chump who doesn't know how to shoot a gun running around armed. They're just as likely to kill you (or themselves) as a walker. I think they could have clarified that lack of time in that regard ... but there were moments of downtime, albeit brief, in 6x07 ... so they could do with being a bit more consistent in mapping out some of these issues. Rick mentioned getting Alexandria sorted and stowed away, but the plan kind of got lost in other things (such as the silly and irksome overuse of 'big speeches' in that one particular episode ... 6x05 or 6x06, I forget which). It'd be nifty if they hired somebody in the writer's room specifically for the task of saying "But what about?" (e.g. "But what about Rick's plan to strengthen Alexandria?" or "But what about trying to thin out the herd with knives on sticks a la Season 4?") - to help smooth over some of these little inconsistencies in the storytelling. There's room for improvement on that front. This said though, the amount of stuff they get right far outweighs the slip ups (some of which are fleeting). However, as we've seen, they always seek to learn from their mistakes and aim to improve the show in areas where it needs improvement. They don't always address every issue (aye, if you're going to have someone fall over, it needs to be staged better and as an unavoidable encounter rather than a dumb accident - even if such things do happen in life, hell, I badly twisted my ankle walking slowly down a very gentle slope a few years ago!) ... but they do make changes and - what's even better - they look for ways to keep it fresh, to get the best material out of the comics and change things up along the way. Season 4 was a reaction to the mistakes of Season 3B. Season 2B paid off the padding of Season 2A. 4x08 gave us what we were bizarrely promised (but never received) in 3x16, and did so in extraordinary style (4x08 is one of the all-time great episodes IMHO). As zombie fans, with TWD, we're sitting pretty like Scrooge McDuck on his mountain of gold, luxuriously afforded the chance to nitpick over nickels and dimes. ... Ooh, here's some Behind The Scenes pictures from 6A. http://dailydead.com/behind-the-scen...6s-first-half/ e.g.

[Trin]

Trin - Deanna's wound looked exactly like a bite should, from what I saw. Yes... Yes it did. And Glenn *looked* like he got his guts ripped out. That's my point. My brain is now trained to second-guess what I'm seeing to figure out what trick they are trying to pull. My first instinct upon seeing the bite was, "Oh, dang, she got bit....crap." My second instinct was, "Heeeeey... I didn't actually SEE her get bit. Fool me once..." So I watched the opening again and still didn't see her get bit. I saw a zombie briefly clawing at her side. I looked at the wound again. Twisted my head around and squinted real hard. Yeah, it kinda looks like it *could* be a zombie chunk clawed out of her instead of bitten. "I wonder...." Yes, it's totally bonkers. But, again, that's my point. They have me second-guessing stuff based on their own duplicitous filming trickery. And regarding the zombie gut camo, I wholesale agree with shootmeinthehead ... it's not that the zombie guts thing is bad (okay, it's dumber than f*&k) but if it's gonna be a thing, use it. Make it part of your general problem solving arsenal. Or make up a better reason why you DON'T use it more. I agree that we're enjoying a zombie panacea compared to 10, 15, 20 years ago. But if you'd told me then that today we'd have a weekly zombie-based post-apocalypse TV show on ... I'd have expected to be WAY more into it than I am with TWD.

[Moon Knight]

I'm ok with the guts trick.

[JDP]

The camouflaging yourself with zombie guts idea, whether you think it is dumb or not, has been a feature of the series from very early on, so I have no problem with it, but as some have already pointed out, the problem comes from how inconsistently it is used by the human characters. If it is really so effective, we should expect it to be used more often. However, it is only used as a get-out-of-jail-free card when the characters are in very tight situations. By the way, way more difficult to accept than camouflaging yourself from the zombies by covering yourself with their guts is the also fairly early idea of camouflaging yourself by just keeping a couple of zombies around you without them attacking you and alerting the others of your presence, introduced with Michonne's character. If that works then all you had to do is capture a couple of zombies, knock their teeth out, cut their arms and keep the zombies close to you with ropes or chains, then you could have gone in and out of Alexandria despite the zombie blockade. No need at all to go through the disgusting process of smearing zombie guts all over yourself to cover your smell. I enjoy this show, I think it is one of the most entertaining things to happen to TV, but it is true that it has several plot holes and logical fallacies and contradictions. Sometimes it is necessary to overlook them to fully enjoy the show.

[Craig]

The camouflaging yourself with zombie guts idea, whether you think it is dumb or not, has been a feature of the series from very early on, so I have no problem with it, but as some have already pointed out, the problem comes from how inconsistently it is used by the human characters. If it is really so effective, we should expect it to be used more often. However, it is only used as a get-out-of-jail-free card when the characters are in very tight situations. The Monopoly analogy is exactly how I saw the 'masking' methods - you'd think at least the seasoned main characters would've adopted these camouflage tactics more regularly and in a variety of situations. The inconsistencies and stupid decisions/character behaviours are becoming particularly apparent this season in my opinion. 'Tiresome' is probably the best word to describe how, not all, but a lot of it seems. The bottom line is I really want to enjoy The Walking Dead - sometimes the show creators/writers make it easy and sometimes they make it bloody difficult. Safe to stay I'm gonna stick with it, but I needed to air these gripes in public.