Top 10 Reasons The Walking Dead is Going Downhill

Splitting up is never a good idea in any horror-themed show or movie, yet it happens all the time. In The Walking Dead’s case, you’d think our survivors would be a little smarter when it comes to this. They’ve been out there surviving for years, yet they still go off on their own little adventures, getting killed in forests and mucking up plans that were already set in motion. In most cases, the characters – good and bad – are intelligent and come up with great plans. Other times, they appear to have an IQ of 1.

Honestly, when every second person has turned into a madman, what’s the point of even living in this world? It’s been years of starvation, violence, horror, panic, and heartache for our heroes. Why keep fighting? What’s the point of living in the world where that is your life? If there were a goal other than fighting the big bad guy, maybe we’d feel more inclined to see how Rick and his group fare. How about infected animals? Zombies slowly turning back into humans? Aliens? Just give us something different, and a hunt for the explanation so there’s a mystery and new plot.

Arghh, we’ve seen Rick covered in walker blood before. It’s been in characters’ wounds, in eyes, in mouths, in places you don’t even want to know about. But now, a new rule has been established in the show that completely disregards that previously established aspect of world-building. Negan decides to coat his army’s weapons in walker guts, in the hopes that it will infect our heroes and kill them. If it works, then by that logic and what everyone’s already been through, everyone should be dead already.

We know the show is violent. It has to be. It’s a violent world. Gratuitous violence, on the other hand, is just there for the shock value, or even worse, to pad out the running time of a very thin episode. It doesn’t add anything besides showing off some admittedly impressive use of practical make-up, and after a while the audience just becomes numb to it. Sure, that takes viewers on the same journey as the characters, but that doesn’t make the constant violence any less tiresome.

Sometimes these can be effective. They get people talking and eager to find out what happens next. But The Walking Dead has been full of them lately, and their impact has been almost completely lost. The major one was not revealing Negan’s victim at the end of season 6. Aside from that, we got the infamous #Dumpstergate, a Glenn death-fakeout that cheapened his actual death later on. We also got Daryl being shot by Dwight, only to find out it’s just a small wound. Come on guys, give us real tension and stakes, not these copouts.

We cared about these characters in the beginning. Each member of the group was fully thought out and developed, and brought something to the table. These days, though, it feels like we get half a dozen new characters every episode who are set up to be an integral part of the team, yet they get around five minutes of screen time per couple of episodes. We can’t even remember their names half the time, or where they even came from, so why should we feel anything when they bite the dust, or in some cases, just disappear? (looking at you, Heath)

Remember when Season 2’s endless search for Sophia felt like a drag? Recent seasons make those episodes feel like action movies in comparison. Nobody wants to watch the group walking for ten minutes an episode. We want drama, action, and horror. A shorter season would tighten the pacing of the show and trim all the fat. We all know that when The Walking Dead is good, it's really good, and we’d like that more often. Unfortunately, given that the franchise is a huge cash-cow for AMC, we doubt they’ll be making shorter seasons any time soon.

Say what you will about the pacing, but the earlier seasons had some amazing character development and transformations. We really got to see how the harsh post-apocalyptic life affected our heroes. Unfortunately, that’s not really the case in more recent seasons. The writing is inconsistent, and no character is truly indistinguishable anymore. Their motives, characteristics and mental states constantly flip-flop, until we have no idea what they're thinking. We get Morgan turning crazy, finding himself, then turning crazy again. We get Rick turning into a dictator, deciding everything is a democracy, then turning into a dictator again. Characters should have an arc, not a circle.

How many times can we watch the group find a safe place, get it destroyed, kill the bad guy, find a safe place, get it destroyed, and so on and so on? It's riveting the first couple of times, but there aren't any surprises anymore. There's no reason to watch the show if we know how the season’s going to end. Having a different bad guy per season would speed up the pace a bit, but now we are getting three seasons per villain. Sure, Jeffery Dean Morgan’s performance as Negan is fun, but he can only lean back and swear so many times before the shtick starts to wear thin.

We can allow The Walking Dead to not have a clear objective in sight for the first couple of seasons, but after eight seasons we need some kind of goal or reason to keep watching. Just surviving isn't exactly an exciting plotline to watch, and apparently, neither are endless assassination attempts on Negan. With no major game changing plot device in sight, what we’re seeing in the show today is probably going to continue on into seasons 10, 12, 14, and onwards, until the series is but a shambling, empty husk of what it used to be.