![]() In one sense, Carl was the easiest to eliminate. With Glenn gone, Dead was down to five remaining survivors from Season 1: Rick, Carl, Daryl, Carol, and Morgan (who, unlike the others, wasn’t a weekly series staple until Season 6). To make matters more predictable, Glenn had been killed in the comic books long before he left the show. Glenn’s murder was momentous, too - he was the first Season 1 regular who the show had dispatched since Season 3 - but in his case, the killing blow was preceded by a fan-infuriating fakeout and a months-long marketing campaign premised on the certainty that someone would die. All has been fairly quiet on the Walking Dead death front since Glenn and Abraham bought it in the Season 7 premiere. As it is, the combination of inconsistent, sporadically likable characters and implausibly close calls creates the sense among self-loathing hate-watchers that we’ve been robbed of blood that was rightfully ours - a hard-earned reward for suffering through seven seasons (and counting), long after learning to stop expecting something else.Ĭarl’s death is probably the boldest that the TV series has ever scripted, especially by the standards of its hyper-protective recent past. If the series’ characters were more deftly drawn, we wouldn’t want them to die if its events were more logically and painstakingly plotted, we wouldn’t be convinced that they deserve to. One of the complaints frequently levied against latter-day Dead is the plot armor that protects any person of importance. Rick’s son isn’t dead yet, but he is looking clammy, and - as actor Chandler Riggs confirmed in an interview posted after the episode aired - he’ll shuffle off this mortal Carl and exit the series after 100-plus episodes when The Walking Dead returns in late February. ![]() In The Walking Dead’s world, this kind of hickey can kill. Carl has a hickey that he secretly sustained two episodes ago, while helping a survivor named Siddiq fend off a few walkers’ unwelcome advances. Although the series mainstay - Carl to his friends, Coral to his family - stalled Negan long enough to save the residents of Alexandria, we learned in those last, silent moments that he can’t save himself. Then came the final frames of “How It’s Gotta Be,” in which The Walking Dead divulged a genuinely shocking discovery: Carl has been cupping. ![]() Season 8, which was hyped as an all-out war between Negan’s Saviors and Rick’s Alexandria-Hilltop-Kingdom alliance, was about to hit the halfway point - and an 11-week hiatus - with no notable casualties except a tiger, a coherent timeline, and that Season 1 guy we all Googled to remind ourselves of where we’d seen him before. Director Michael Satrazemis’s camera lingered on leads’ faces in uncomfortably long close-ups, artsily intended to signify … something. Series regulars escaped certain death at the hands of too-talkative villains, while glorified extras whose names we never knew (RIP, Neil) were added to AMC’s alumni list. Characters teleported around rural Virginia like ravens flying from north of the Wall. For roughly 87 minutes of Sunday’s 88-minute midseason finale - counting commercials, which are sometimes less skippable than the series itself - The Walking Dead was Walking Dead as usual.
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