Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes and Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead.
Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes and Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead.
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The latest season of The Walking Dead shambled to an end this week. Robert Smith kicks at some zombie carcasses and asks, where to from here?
*Warning: The following contains spoilers for The Walking Dead. Do not read if you haven't seen the season five finale.
The latest season of The Walking Dead shambled to an end this week, with the final episode almost entirely devoted to making sure everybody knows Rick Grimes is bloody awesome.
It's been a big subtext of the entire season - Grimes is the guy who does what has gotta be done - but it came to the foreground in this last episode, which climaxed with a bunch of folk standing up around a campfire and declaring how he's is the most amazing man who ever lived.
Meanwhile, Rick was out back, saving their damn fool lives without them even knowing about it.
Anyone looking for any resolution in this episode will be out of luck. Rick's new role as the hardman enforcer of Alexandria was instantly upset by the last-minute appearance of a familiar face, and the big bad Wolves are still being set up as the central villains for next season, and maybe the next. With the slow pace of this series, it could take some time.
Rick and his crew of hardened zombie killers have stumbled across protected communities before, but this time, they're arguably the bad guys, tearing apart their new home with their trauma, even though they just think their new neighbours need to harden the hell up to survive this new world.
This means Carol's growth into the ultimate badass is almost complete, as she puts a knife to a much bigger man's throat and whispers threats.
Melissa McBride as Carol Peletier and Norman Reedus as Daryl Dixon in The Walking Dead.
It all gets a bit ideological, with no room for liberal niceties in this apocalypse, and while that might be an interesting way to take the show forward, it also means lots of scenes featuring people standing around frowning at each other.
Fortunately, the programme still has some of the most intense action scenes in modern television, and the multiple speeches in the last episode of the season is punctuated with the usual zombie carnage: a truck trap that escalates rapidly into almost certain death, Glen's awful afternoon in the woods, and the inventive use of a strong wooden staff as a zombie killer.
But five years into The Walking Dead, there's still a sense of weary familiarity, as one zombie attack bleeds into the next, just as all the frowns and serious scenes start to flow together.
As always, the promise of future action hangs over the story, but this climax is just a set-up for the next stage.
