The Walking Thread

[Content Note: Descriptions of violence; descriptions of an attempted sexual assault; child abuse; fat hatred. Spoilers are lurching around undeadly herein.]


Lord Richard Grimes of Traincar Abbey, looking markedly less sweaty than usual.
This fucking show. Just when I think there is no way it could gross me out even more (and I don't mean with zombies, but with its penchant for narrative fuckery), it hits a whole new low.

Right off the top, I want to address, with the seriousness it deserves, the scene in which the Dirtbags catch up to Grimes, Michonne, and Carl the Hat, and one of the Dirtbags (the fat one, obviously, because fat conveys extra immorality and weakness of character) tries to rape Carl, and Michonne is also threatened with rape. You see, it wasn't enough just for Fat Dirtbag to threaten to kill Carl and Michonne, because the entire episode is about how you can still be A Good Person (fixed identity!) if you've killed people in the zombiepocalypse. So, to show how extra super-duper evil these fuckos are, they have to threaten sexual violence: The fate even worse than death, as is constantly implied by pop culture.

It's completely reprehensible that a show which has never responsibly addressed how dangerous the threat of sexual violence would really be for women and children in the midst of such social chaos would suddenly introduce it as essentially a lazy piece of character development, for characters we already understand are terrible, amoral scum, in order to provoke Grimes into a brutally violent act of revenge, for a tired commentary on moral relativism that this show has already mined bare.

And it has not escaped my notice that the writers essentially decided to throw in a graphic threat of child rape to add a little extra shock value to the season finale.

Further, I was deeply distressed watching a 14-year-old boy be pretend-assaulted for a television show. Call me old-fashioned, but I just don't think that a child ever needs to be subjected to participating in a staged sexual assault for my entertainment.

Adult actors who have filmed rape and attempted rape scenes have spoken about how unexpectedly traumatic those sorts of scenes can be. This show has come nowhere close to the threshold for justifying putting a kid through shooting a potentially lingeringly distressing scene.

So, yeah. That scene was basically the centerpiece of the first half of the episode. Which opens on an image of Grimes, sitting on the ground with his face and hands covered in blood.

From there, we cut to a flashback of better days at Grimes Jail, and Hershel is being all Hershelly and lecturing Grimes on how he needs to make life at Grimes Jail as normal as possible and teach Carl the Hat how to garden and be a man. The episode is intercut throughout with flashbacks to this Golden Era of the Zombiepocalypse, before Captain Murder destroyed everything. They are typically saccharine and heavy-handed and introduce nary a single new idea about compromising one's principles in order to survive.

Then we go back to before Grimes was bathed in blood. Grimes, Michonne, and Carl the Hat are discovered on their journey to Terminus by Daryl and the Dirtbags, and Grody Joe holds a gun to Grimes' head and tells him, in retribution for Grimes having killed one of his men, he's going to make Grimes watch his son and his friend be raped before killing him.

Daryl steps in to stop Grody Joe, who orders the rest of the Dirtbags to beat Daryl to death. I mean, this fucking show.

While Daryl gets a beating, and Michonne is held with a gun to her head, and Carl the Hat is nearly raped, Grimes watches and slowly boils. When the Fat Dirtbag, who's got Carl pinned to the ground, reaches down to unbuckle his pants THIS FUCKING SHOW, Grimes loses it, and knocks Grody Joe's gun away from the side of his head, then lunges at Grody Joe and FOR THE LOVE OF MAUDE tears out his throat with his teeth, then turns on the Fat Dirtbag and stabs him A MILLION TIMES as Carl, clinging to Michonne, watches.

The next morning, Grimes, Michonne, Carl the Hat, and Daryl take off for Terminus, and Carl is scared of Grimes now, but Michonne tells him he doesn't have to be and makes her point (?) by telling him a terrific story about horrible things she did and how he and his dad and Andrea (!) brought her back.

Grimes buries their cache of weapons in the ground outside the perimeter of Terminus, and they each carry just one weapon as they climb the fence and head inside to investigate.

They meet a bunch of Terminus Heads, who seem hesitantly welcoming and super creepy. And then Grimes notices that one of them is carrying the stopwatch Hershel gave Glenn, and he grabs him by the neck and demands to know where "their people" are. Shit gets wild. They try to make a run for it, but a sniper shoots at their heels, directing them to a train car like a border collie corralling sheep.

Mary, meanwhile, is still cooking barbecue. And there is a big open pen (sure) past which Grimes et. al. run, filled with human bones. And the Terminus Heads say things about how the more people arrive, the better their odds of survival. So basically, it looks like we're dealing with a cannibal cult. Just what this show needed.

Grimes ("Ringleader"), Daryl ("Archer"), Michonne ("Samurai"), and Carl the Hat are ordered inside the train car, where SURPRISE! they are greeted by Glenn, Maggie, Sasha, Bob, Tara, Sgt. Red Bull, Doctor Mulletsworth, and Rosita Espinoza.

Immediately, Grimes assumes his Patriarch Posture, and says to everyone, inside their train car prison from which there appears to be no escape, "They're gonna feel pretty stupid when they find out."

"Find out what?" asks Sgt. Red Bull.

And Grimes replies: "They're screwing with the wrong people."

LOL OMG I AM NOT EVEN MAKING THAT UP. THAT IS REAL DIALOGUE. THAT PIECE-OF-SHIT CLINT EASTWOOD REJECT LINE ARE THE FINAL WORDS OF THE SEASON FINALE.

The writers of this show THIS FUCKING SHOW couldn't come up with anything better than "They're screwing with the wrong people." That's not even quippy and it's not even cool! It's terrible!

I mean, right off the top of my fucking head, something like "That we endure" would have been way more powerful (and quotable) and representative of what this season (and every season) has been about.

(Or, they could have gone the route of the EXTREMELY BRILLIANT, like: "That Grimes Gang always takes out the garbage." Which at least would have had the benefit of being deliberately funny.)

But instead they went with the wettest of all wet farts. "They're screwing with the wrong people." Okay, player. Enjoy your nap in the corner of the train car until Carol and Tyreese show up to rescue you, tough guy.

Next Season: More zombies!