Tag Archives: The Walking Dead S08E06

Episodes like these make me thank Heaven that The Walking Dead didn’t start airing on network television in the era of twenty-two episode seasons. With scores of characters, multiple locales, and plenty of plotlines, the show should be plenty capable of finding enough plot and incident to fill an eight-episode half season with minimal wheel-spinning. Sure, not every episode can advance a major season arc, but there’s still tons of space for character development, illuminating vignettes, or details that make it more meaningful when those major arcs do finally come to a head.

Instead, it feels like every half season has at least one episode like “The King, The Widow and Rick” which cannot, even charitably, be called a table-setting episode. At best, it’s an episode devoted to tying up loose ends. It throws out a few miscellaneous plots here and there, but those storylines don’t move the ball in terms of the overarching story of the series; they don’t really tell us anything new about the characters, and they don’t add much, if anything, to the show as a whole.

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