Cras wrote:
The whole thing is a series of safe places that end up not being safe places that are pretty much interchangeable and just have different names?
Well yes there is that of course.
I'm trying to get my head around the fundamental issue with TWD as it grinds on, and I'm wondering if it is just that it's basically telling the same story every season, with slightly different characters.
Post-apocalyptic yarns are as old as the hills, but generally speaking they have a defined arc, a beginning, a middle, and an end.
So you have the disaster itself, you have the rebuilding phase, probably some sort of showdown between good and evil, and then some form of closure. I think Stephen King's 'The Stand' is a classic of the genre, and I think the rebuilding phase is the most interesting, but what do we have as our premise for S07 of TWD given how it's just started? Just more of a gratuitous mess of horrendous human-on-human violence and revenge, really.
Season One of TWD was driven forward by them trying to get to the government facility thingy, there was a purpose. Since then we've had the same thing how many times? The farm, the prison, that place where the governor was, heading for Terminus, Alexandria (have I missed any?).
The zombies are almost irrelevant at this point, they chuck a few of them in periodically but they don't pose much of a threat, so we're left with a decaying world where humans do increasingly horrible things to each other with scarcely a chink of light in the darkness, and no promise or realistic hope that things are ever really going to get better.
Maybe the basic premise of the post-apocalyptic tale is a bad fit for season after season of telly, and is instead a better fit for a film, or a book, or a story that gets wrapped up in a season or two, rather than ending season six on the cliffhanger of 'who got beaten to death with a baseball bat', so we know that going into season seven that's what we'll be presented with.
When was the last time anything really hopeful happened? Even when they found Alexandria Rick was basically plotting a hostile coup right from the off because they were too nice to each other and baked cakes, and then they infiltrated one of Negan's outposts and killed the occupants in cold blood.
Having said all that I will clearly watch S07, but most likely with my jauntiest 'I'M NOT REALLY ENJOYING THIS' hat on. It's no Bojack Horseman, that's for sure.