Spoilers through the Season 8 finale of 'The Walking Dead' follow.
Credit: AMC
Sunday night's episode of The Walking Dead could have been a lot worse. As far as season finales go, it was far from the most exciting. On the other hand, it definitively wrapped up the 'all out war' plot and Negan, while still alive, is no longer a threat. Mission accomplished, one might say.
I was actually pretty close in my predictions from earlier this afternoon. No major characters died. Eugene sabotaged the bullets, leading to the Saviors' losing to Rick's group. Dwight escaped and, thankfully, Daryl didn't kill him. Mercy over wrath.
I was hoping that Rick actually killed Negan, but it was just a...weird (comic book inspired) feint. I'm not sure how you cut someone's throat like that and keep them from dying, especially without modern medical facilities, but oh well. I admit, every time I see a throat slit with a knife in a movie or TV show I think of this scene from Braveheart:
Of course, Braveheart is one of the finest pieces of cinema of all time and The Walking Dead is just...a mediocre TV show. And this season finale was, overall, much better than many other episodes in Season 8 (and Season 7, for that matter.)
Jerry was my favorite part. Shooting down Ezekiel's melodramatic nonsense over and over again. I liked that Eugene came through and had his redemptive moment. When Rosita was talking to him I said to my girlfriend, "I would still punch him in the throat for puking on me" and then she decked him in the cheek. Pretty perfect.
Credit: AMC
Probably the best thing about the episode was the setup for Season 9. Rick and Michonne have taken the path of mercy. And while Maggie agrees with that overall, she still wants justice/revenge for Glenn's murder. (We learn, also, that the eeny, meeny, miny, moe thing was just a facade and that Negan chose Abraham to spare Carl from watching his father get killed.)
In any case, Maggie/Jesus/Daryl disagree with Rick's decision and this could create exactly the kind of interesting character conflict and drama that I wrote about recently when I said The Walking Dead could learn from The 100.
As far as the rest, here are some scattered thoughts:
Oceanside was every bit as useless as I predicted. Aaron showing up with the Gorgeous Ladies of Oceanside (GLOO) just in the nick of time to almost burn down Hilltop with Molotov Cocktails was hilarious. And silly.
Gabriel showed some real guts tonight. I still wish his brains ended up on the end of Negan's bat. Do we really not get even one more bat murder out of Negan and Lucille? What a disappointment.
I hope Dwight finds his woman. He absolutely made up for his sins and thank god that Daryl let him live. And even said "go find her." That was nice.
The action scenes were okay, I guess. If I saw a bunch of Saviors crest the hill with guns drawn I wouldn't just stand there. I'd hit the ground and open fire. Don't just stand there, people!
Also, if I were Rick I wouldn't just run up to the tree like that. Flanking is a real thing you can do in a fight. You don't have to run headlong into danger without any precautions at all.
I liked Morgan's vision of Jared. That was really good and kind of funny and so, so much better than "YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS." Run to Fear Morgan. Run...
Gregory didn't die. That's too bad. Soon, hopefully.
Enid can't even carry a friggin' baby properly. That's how utterly useless she is. When you're running away from bad guys through the forest you don't hold a baby like you're cradling it. You put it over your shoulder and hold it tight. Or in some kind of wrap or carrier. SMH.
The Siddiq and Rick scene should haven happened two episodes ago. It was fine, I guess, but felt really out of place.
Maybe Alden will be the new Glenn. If Lauren Cohan sticks around and doesn't jump ship for a different show. Wow, what if both Cohan and Danai Gurira move on to greener pastures?
Either way, hopefully a time jump takes place and we get a more grown-up Judith, a new actor in Henry's role, etc. for Season 9.
Credit: AMC
Verdict
Overall, not a terrible season finale. Better than the season writ large. Just nothing that surprising or interesting, either. We had way too many battles leading up to this and each one took the air out of this one's sails. This is partly the problem with having 16 episodes in a season. It just drags out way too long and the writers and producers aren't skilled enough at their craft to make sure the plot stays interesting the whole time.
I'm a little torn on the question of Negan dying vs not dying. I thought it would have been really cool to have him killed off in a surprise twist, but on the other hand keeping him alive creates interesting character conflicts between our heroes. And that might be the better outcome.
But that's just setup. And that's fine, setting up next season is fine, but the season finale itself was pretty lackluster overall. No tension, no surprise, not much to really write home about. It wasn't terrible, it just wasn't much else either.
More than anything, I'm just glad this season is over (though I'll miss writing about it and hearing all of your thoughts.)
It was a mess. I'll have another post up talking about the season as a whole and what went wrong (and how they can avoid those problems in Season 9 by reading and taking my advice!) up tomorrow. In the meantime, let me know what you think. And be sure to watch Fear The Walking Dead. My review for that show's Season 4 premiere will go live soon as well.
Let me know what you thought of the Season 8 finale, and whether or not you're taking my advice and checking out Fear The Walking Dead on Twitter and Facebook.
Update: Here's my review of tonight's Fear premiere.
Credit: AMC
Other shows I'll be writing about soon:
Westworld Season 2
Legion Season 2
Netflix's Lost in Space
Let me know what other shows you'd be interested in, and thanks for reading!
Spoilers through Season 4 of 'Fear The Walking Dead' follow.
Credit: AMC
Sunday night's Season 4 premiere of Fear The Walking Dead brings Morgan (Lennie Jones) and a handful of new characters into AMC's Walking Dead spin-off. It also ends with a surprising twist and a cliff-hanger, leaving fans of the show more than a little bewildered.
There was only one section of this episode that I didn't like, and unsurprisingly it was the 'cross-over' section with other stars of The Walking Dead. This bit felt very much like that show, while everything else felt more like Fear.
In this segment we see Morgan, who has taken up residence in Jadis's old digs, doing his own thing and minding his own business. Then he's visited by three ghosts: The ghost of Christmas present, the ghost of Christmas past and the ghost of Christmas future. They help him see how his whole life has been cursed by his love of money.
Oh sorry, I'm getting my three-visitors stories all mixed up! Morgan is visited by three characters from The Walking Dead, all of whom come to give him a little speech and sit there with him in the same spot, awkwardly asking him to leave the dump and come back to live with them instead.
Credit: AMC
The first visitor is Jesus, I guess because he had a moment with Morgan in the season finale of The Walking Dead. I'm not aware of Jesus and Morgan having much of a relationship beyond that and the episode where they beat each other up, but I guess Jesus felt the need to come tell Morgan to come home. Carol is the second visitor, which makes more sense. In fact, if Carol had been the only visitor (or if she'd come with visitor #3) this whole segment would have been less painful.
The last visitor is Rick who, because this is The Walking Dead, tells Morgan that he can hide but he can't run. "You can hide but you can't run," Rick says, for some reason, even though that really doesn't make any sense. Why can't he run? Honestly, any one of them could have run at any point. Nobody needed to stick around for this whole war with Negan. In any case, Morgan seems to be thinking along the same lines. "Watch me run," he says with his eyes. "Far, far away from The Walking Dead and its crappy writing."
And so he does, and thank goodness. The rest of the episode is much, much better than this cross-over section. The dialogue is more natural. The cinematography and lighting are better. The character interactions feel more natural.
Credit: AMC
The episode opens to a man named John played by Garret Dillahunt. His full name is John Dorie (like the fish, he tells Morgan, but with an 'ie' insteady of a 'y.') John is by himself reading a book by his fire when he hears someone or something approaching from the woods. John looks like a gunslinger, dressed all in black with a six-shooter on his hip and a cowboy hat.
He stands up and speaks into the night, revealing little details about himself. First off, that he's really quirky and has an odd way of talking. It's not so different from some of the quirkier characters on The Walking Dead, but it's not so over the top and Dillahunt is brilliant in the role. I'm so used to seeing him as a bad guy in shows like Justified and Deadwood that it's really refreshing and great to see him play this sweet cowboy instead.
He's been on his own for a long time, he tells the darkness. At one point he was with a woman but somehow they split up and now he's looking for her. Laura is her name and she has a gun identical to his. We don't learn how they were separated.
So all the while John is talking it turns out it was just a walker approaching his campfire. He whips out his pistol and shoots it and we see Morgan had just run up behind the zombie to kill it with his stick. So John invites him over for some food, a warm fire, a place to sleep in the back of his truck. Morgan is suspicious, wary of John's generosity, but he eventually relents and tries to sleep in the back of the truck. When he can't, he leaves without a farewell, back on his own just the way he likes it.
Unfortunately he's ambushed by bandits not long after. They've set up a tent as a trap for wanderers and hold him at gunpoint. This is when John shows up, shooting the lead bandit's gun right out of his hand. This is the second example of what a good shot John is, which is a welcome change from The Walking Dead and that show's inability to make gunfights interesting.
Well these highwaymen aren't as stupid as they look, and no sooner does John show up to the rescue then several more armed men walk out from hiding spots nearby. Now both John and Morgan are disarmed and held at gunpoint and things aren't looking too bright.
Credit: AMC
That's when a second new character shows up. Althea arrives driving her massive SWAT truck, fully equipped with two machine guns that she can control with a lever above the driving wheel. She was nearby when she heard the gunshot and, since apparently she knows this crew and their thieving ways, decided to come check it out. They're afraid of her thanks to the truck, but she offers to trade them a case of noodle cups and a case of Pall Mall cigarettes for Morgan and John.
The bad guys oblige seeing as they have very little choice in the matter, and Althea rescues John and Morgan.
Now, I will admit that all of this is a bit of a stretch. Althea's truck is definitely over-powered, and I'm not sure that guns on one side of a truck would really scare a big group of bad guys when they could probably flank her pretty easily. It's also pretty convenient for Morgan and John to be rescued like this out of the blue, but none of that really bothers me. This kind of stretch is forgivable in a show that gets so much right. Besides, it's fun to have stuff like Althea's truck added to the mix. It's a bit over-the-top like some old zombie movies and I like that. I can suspend my disbelief.
Credit: AMC
I also really love the profession they gave Althea's character: She's a journalist out trying to document the apocalypse. This is why she saved Morgan and John. Not just to save them, but to get their stories. "You owe me," she tells them. "I didn't ask you to save me," Morgan fires back at one point. While John is more than happy to share his story, Morgan resists, offering up only vague tidbits when he finally agrees to let her film him.
Althea's questions unnerve Morgan, and he decides (for a second time) to leave his new companions. "Tell me one real thing," Althea demands as he stubbornly heads out on his own again. "I lose people," he says, "And then I lose myself."
It sure is nice to watch a show where the characters have actual dialogue and conversations that make sense.
But I'm skipping ahead. Before this second attempt to interview Morgan takes place, the companions are ambushed a second time. The bandits we met earlier have big egos and stung pride, so they follow Althea and lay a second trap. They want the truck.
The big fight that ensues is actually really great. John and Morgan, disarmed once again, quickly take out their captors. John gets his gun back and shoots the gunman on the roof. Morgan, meanwhile, takes off across the rooftops to take out another gunman, but he's shot in the leg on his way over. The two grapple as John runs to a building and opens the door, letting a whole mob of walkers out into the yard. Althea and the lead bandit are at the truck, and she tosses what he believes are the truck's keys off toward the zombies. When he goes for the keys he's bitten by a snake.
Credit: AMC
Morgan and the other robber fight it out on the roof. The bad guy grabs a flag from the roof to fight with---it's a strange flag, too. Just a large piece of canvas with the number 51 spray-painted in black on it. They fight and the robber falls, almost landing into the zombies' path below. He clutches on for dear life and Morgan, who has once again left the path of the killer, pulls him to safety.
Since no good deed goes unpunished, the man immediately starts attacking him again. They fall through the roof and land in the middle of another pack of walkers. The bandit is devoured but Morgan escapes, grabbing a grenade off the jacket of one of the walkers and tossing it into their midst before diving into a bathtub for protection.
Ultimately, the good guys when the day and head off on the road again. They take with them the mysterious banner with the number 51 on it. Althea says these banners have been popping up around the area recently but has no idea what they signify.
Morgan abandons his new companions not long after thanks to his stubbornness and unwillingness to talk about his past. He walks off despite his leg having just been shot. Later, he's almost killed by two walkers until John shows back up and saves him, insisting this time that they stick together. Morgan was investigating a walker who was a man he'd met earlier on the road. The man had been wounded at the time and for whatever reason, Morgan needed to know if he'd turned. Morgan's a little wrong in the head still, if you haven't noticed.
Credit: AMC
In any case, John takes Morgan back to the truck and they set off. Althea is taking John back to his own truck. Along the way they see someone on the road, crouched over, possibly wounded but almost certainly in distress. Althea tells Morgan to grab a gun but he says he can't do that. "I don't kill people," he says. "Neither do I," John pipes in. "Well I try not to."
Althea shakes her head in surprise but they all get out of the SWAT truck regardless. Althea approaches the crying woman with her rifle at the ready. She tells Morgan to go get the first aid kit. Whoever this is might be wounded.
Then we see who it is: Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey.)
She says something about bad people and, as Althea stoops down to her level, Alicia makes her move, grabbing at Althea's gun and sticking a blade up to her neck. From the side of the road we see Strand (Colman Domingo) and Luciana (Danay Garcia) approach, guns at the ready, telling John to lower his gun. When Morgan steps forward, Nick (Frank Dillane) appears, training his rifle on our Walking Dead hero.
They've been ambushed yet again, only this time it's not bandits or highwaymen, it's the lead characters of Fear The Walking Dead. I did not see that coming.
Verdict
By and large this is a really great Season 4 debut. Beautifully shot and acted, the premiere gives us new characters and puts them in interesting situations in a new part of the country for the Walking Dead universe. Morgan runs like hell to get away from The Walking Dead and lands nicely on the better of the two shows. I'm curious about what comes next and excited to write about the next episode (which I've also seen but can't review for another week!)
That final twist really makes the whole thing incredibly intriguing---have the Clarks and their companions broken bad or are they mistaking John, Althea and Morgan for someone else? What's up with that mysterious flag? Lots of mystery to keep us guessing going forward. Great new characters with compelling stories. All told, the best I could have hoped for in a somewhat rebooted Fear The Walking Dead season premiere.
What did you think of the episode? Let me know on Twitter and Facebook.
See my review of The Walking Dead season finale here.
I’ve got to confess: I teared up a little there. I’m not sure those tears were fairly won on Sunday’s season finale of “The Walking Dead,” an episode that gave us, at last, the end of the All-Out War.
I’m not sure I shouldn’t be approaching the end of the eighth season with the same skepticism that has carried me through seasons 7 and 8 of AMC’s zombie apocalypse series.
But eye moisture is eye moisture. No matter how many slightly exasperating moments may have led you to them, tears don’t lie. When push came to shove, and — spoiler alert — Rick’s two-TV-year-long battle with Negan was ending with Rick’s forces on the winning side, I got verklempt.
It happened abruptly, absolutely. After a storyline played out minute by minute, all of a sudden, Negan’s forces were facing Rick’s forces on a hillside and, all of a sudden, it was pretty much over.
But the good news is that this allows things to move forward, to show us what kind of society Rick and Maggie and Daryl and Jesus will build next year, to see what the people in the helicopters want, and to demonstrate what Georgie in her traveling caravan o’ the future has in mind.
Please let it be something about building a new society and curing this dread disease that has loosed a plague of zombies upon the land. Let it be more than the appearance of another tribal group to battle.
But first let’s look back on what happened Sunday. Here are five thoughts recapping Episode 16 of Season 8 of “The Walking Dead,” the season finale and the One in Which Eugene Showed His Stripes:
1. The battle was, to say the least, anticlimactic. Let’s go back in time and remember how we got here. Last season, Negan executed Glenn and Abraham, two of the stalwarts of Rick’s forces.
Since then, there’s been a kind of epic turf battle between the Alexandria/Hilltop/Kingdom forces aligned with Rick and the Savior forces aligned with Negan. Rick has vowed to kill Negan. Negan has wavered between murder and subjugation, but on balance has been leaning toward murder.
For all that posturing, Sunday’s final conflict was over in almost a heartbeat. Negan’s weaponry didn’t work as expected, and some unexpected people showed up to fight against his people, and, boom, there was an almost full surrender.
I can’t say it was disappointing because, as I mentioned, I found it all fairly emotional. But if I harden my gaze a bit, I think it could have been handled with a little more finesse.
We lived with this fight for 30-plus TV hours, and as much as I was ready to get to the next chapter, ending this one in the snap of a finger doesn’t sit entirely right.
2. Eugene is a good guy, after all. Sort of. The most decisive blow Sunday came when Negan’s forces reared up to fire on Rick’s, pulled the trigger and, blammo, their munitions exploded in their guns.
You immediately suspected this was the work of Eugene, the longtime ally of Rick and company who had switched sides to the Saviors but who kept showing signs of divided loyalty.
When Eugene was entrusted by Negan to resupply the Saviors’ ammunition, he apparently saw his chance, supervising an operation that produced round after round that would do its damage inside the gun rather than across a distance.
“I introduced a sabotaging aspect to the manufacturing process, unbeknownst to my colleagues,” Eugene later confesses, following his trademark pattern of talking as if paid by the syllable.
This decisive maneuver isn’t quite enough for Rosita who, even after hearing his confession, still gives him a hard sock to the jaw. Is she still mad at him for throwing up on her last week, or is it more about the damage he did during his period of defection? My money’s on the latter.
3. The Oceanside finally decided that Switzerland’s was not the policy to emulate. The series’ community of women living along the shore at last stepped up.
As the battle is happening and Negan’s people are hurting from their guns blowing up, here come the Oceansiders to deliver a crippling blow as other Saviors mount an attack on the Hilltop. Apparently, Aaron’s near-suicidal move to stay in their vicinity and sacrifice his health in order to bring them into the fold has paid off.
His pitch was that they needed to take action against the Saviors or they’d never have peace. Take action they did. Not long after the Oceanside dominated in its portion of the battle, the Negan folks surrendered.
“Don’t shoot, please,” said their de facto leader. “We’re done. It’s over.”
4. Rick and Negan still have to work out their grievance, however. Down a hill, under a tree, oblivious to what their troops might be doing in the background, the two alphas go at it. Each has vowed to kill the other. Each has received a letter from Rick’s dead son Carl urging them to bury the hatchet, and not in each other.
The fight is quick and brutal. Negan seemingly gets the upper hand. He tells Rick that way back at the beginning of the seventh season, he could have killed him, but chose Abraham instead because of Carl. “I didn’t want to kill a kid’s dad in front of him,” he says.
As Negan prepares to kill Rick with his barbed-wire-wrapped baseball bat, he does something that suggests he’s never seen any TV show or movie ever. He decides to give a speech instead of finishing the job.
And then he listens to Rick’s speech and Rick’s plea to listen to what Carl would have wanted. And as Rick says “it doesn’t have to be a fight anymore,” he pulls a shard of glass almost out of nowhere and slashes Negan across the throat.
It seems like a dirty trick by Rick, who we have seen is not above dirty tricks; remember his broken promises last week to Saviors who helped him escape. Then again, it achieved a result, survival, and a hope for the community’s future that he might not have won by talking.
And Negan, lo and behold, is alive and recuperating in the episode’s final minutes, with Rick and Michonne vowing to keep him around, but imprisoned, as a symbol of “how things have changed.”
“After all this,” Michonne says to the captive/living example, “you’re good for something.”
5. But will Maggie let Rick see the light? The last scene is a flashback to Rick and a much younger Carl, walking hand in hand on a country road. It was a moment of peace and safety Carl recalled in his deathbed letter to his father that we heard last week.
And it was a moment showing that Rick seemed to have finally embraced Carl’s message of peace and forgiveness. “I forgot who I was. You made me remember,” we hear him telling his son in voice-over, reading from yet another letter.
But that father-son flashback was also a predictable conclusion: “There’s your final scene,” I wrote in my notes last week, after we first heard Carl reminisce about the walk.
"We are worse than we were, me and you."
That's Morgan, talking to Rick at the start of The Walking Dead's season eight finale ("Wrath") and thinking back on how they both recently slaughtered their way out of the Saviors' grasp. In a meta sense, he's also be talking about what's happened to the two of them as TV characters. Television dramas generally favor redemption arcs, where seemingly irredeemable pieces of human garbage are inspired by circumstances to turn their lives around. Except this show has zagged where others zig. Over the past two years in particular, it has become an endless story about likable people turning lousy.
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For you optimists out there, the good news about this episode is that this duo may have pulled themselves out of their respective tailspins. By the end of the hpur, everyone's favorite stick-wielding ass-kicker begins to right his psychological ship, inspired in part by Jesus' suggestion that he go back to aiming the pointy end of his shaft only the dead. ("Things will get better," the bearded Hilltopper promises if Morgan only uses the blunt end on the living.) Our terminally tormented hero takes what he's recollected about how to be a proper human and promptly hits the road, following the path that will lead to his new gig on Fear the Walking Dead.
As for Rick, when he's finally given a clear shot at ending the critically wounded Negan, he instead heeds his late son's warning that "there's got to be something after" and lets his nemesis live. He then frees the rest of the Saviors, urging them to go home, tend to their own and try living in peace for a change. To paraphrase a character from an entirely different fantasy saga: Ended, this "All Out War" has.
Now here's something for the pessimists to cling to: "Wrath" isn't the end of The Walking Dead. Writer Robert Kirkman's original comic book series is still ongoing, and the show's producers have said they've already roughly mapped out their next four seasons. The cease-fire between the Virginia's various colonies is unlikely to last forever. In fact, before the credits have rolled, the seeds of a new conflict are already starting to sprout, in unlikely soil.
Compared to past Walking Dead finales, this year's season-ender was strangely under-stuffed. It only ran a little bit over AMC's usual one-hour time-slot, with most of the action packed into the first half. There's a lot of build-up early on, as Negan cackles to a seemingly simpatico Eugene and a mortified Father Gabriel about his plan to lead Rick into an ambush, courtesy of planted bad intel. But then the Saviors' big surprise literally blows up in their faces, courtesy of their malfunctioning new ammo supply.
Give Eugene credit for the sabotage, inspired by the priest's previous modest attempts to fill the enemy's arsenal with bad bullets. The mullet-sporting uber-geek pretends to be all in for his leader, applauding the plot to annihilate the Alexandrian alliance. (It will "alpha to omega this thing in less than 10," he insists.) But after the bad guys' guns explode, Eugene sheepishly admits to Rosita that the recent angry lecture she lobbed his way encouraged him to "create a modicum of fooey for the full kablooie."
Is this a plausible character turn? Not necessarily. It's more a matter of narrative convenience than a carefully set-up heel-turn (or rather heel-re-turn). But the twist gets the story where it needs to go, with the Saviors kneeling in surrender, while Rick and Negan end up by the stained-glass-adorned tree that's figured into multiple flash-forwards this season. There, Sheriff Grimes slashes the throat of the man he hates ... then calls for medical attention. He proceeds to give a speech to the vanquished about how now it's time for humanity to band together against the zombies.
One problem with this abrupt act of mercy: Maggie wasn't consulted. In the epilogue, she admits to Jesus and Daryl that she's entirely on-board with building a new society where killing's kept to a minimum. But she still wants Negan's head. And she now considers Rick and Michonne untrustworthy traitors for keeping him alive – even though their intention is to punish the deposed Savior boss by throwing him into a cell for the rest of his life. Thw world will thrive without him, and he'll be forced to bear witness.
So here's where we are as another Walking Dead season ends: The bonds between the Hilltoppers and the Alexandrians are frayed, yet both are now committed to helping the Saviors rebuild, while even letting some of their former opposition (like the hunky Alden) switch sides). And what of Carol? Or King Ezekiel? They're mostly relegated to the background, while the finale finds time for a scene with Jadiss, who asks Morgan to call her "Ann" and accepts his invitation to join one of the groups … but still doesn't explain those damn helicopters.
Related 'The Walking Dead' Season Premiere Recap: The Long Goodbye Midseason premiere says a lengthy farewell to a longtime favorite – and looks to the future
Overall, the emphasis here at the end of Season Eight is on closure, rather than on teasing what might be coming next. Perhaps that's because this episode marks the end of Scott Gimple's tenure as The Walking Dead's show-runner. He'll now reportedly oversee the franchise as a whole, while longtime TWD writer Angela Kang will handle the parent show's day-to-day operation.
As was common in the Gimple era, this finale presumes a lot of viewer investment in where the characters have been, moreso than where they're headed. There are callbacks aplenty, from a lyrical reflection on the meaning of Rick's relationship with his son to Dwight belatedly apologizing to Daryl for taking advantage of him when they first met way back in Season Six. Even Ezekiel gets his own reprise, revisiting his "if this day is to be our last" speech from last fall's premiere, but with more humility.
Whether all of this dotting of "i"s and crossing of "t"s is enough the pull The Walking Dead out of the rut it's been in for the past 16-plus episodes … well, that ought to be evident pretty early in Season Nine. If everyone jumps right back into being crummy to each other, then this show will clarify that it's going to keep on being what it's always been: a long look at how human beings rot.
Previously: Simon Says
