The Walking Dead season 7: news and episode reviews

The Walking Dead’s seventh season has often felt like an endless slog through a zombie-infested quagmire, where even the zombies are too stuck to do much more than moan.

If there’s been a theme for this season, it’s arguably been ambivalence and indecision. Yet a full season of characters being unsure what choices to make — and talking about their indecisiveness a lot — has resulted in a final burst of activity in the season finale, “The First Day of the Rest of Your Life.”

Instead of our usual recap this week, Walking Dead recapper and web culture reporter Aja Romano and critic at large Todd VanDerWerff got together to talk about “Something They Need,” season seven’s next-to-last episode, and why the season as a whole has struggled to take flight. Spoilers follow.

Todd VanDerWerff: I fell behind on The Walking Dead as you covered it, Aja, which meant I had to watch most of this season’s second half in one big, five-episode gulp one afternoon. And it was both better and worse than I expected.

So little happens in “The Other Side,” episode 14 of The Walking Dead’s seventh season, that it’s incredibly easy to summarize the “important” parts, which amount to fewer than five minutes of the running time.

Based on the episode teaser, you may have been expecting something big, like Sasha and Rosita fulfilling their suicide mission to take on Negan, and someone dying as a result. Instead:

In “Bury Me Here,” The Walking Dead did something it’s been threatening to do ever since its very first season: It destroyed the remaining pacifism of its sole hold-out conscientious objector, Morgan.

The show accomplished this through a series of plot twists that should have felt forced given how little time we’ve spent getting to know the members of Ezekiel’s Kingdom — where Morgan (Lennie James) ironically went to avoid violence.

In Sunday’s episode of The Walking Dead, not much happens, but what does happen is entertaining, generally fun TV. That is to say: “Say Yes” is mainly about Rick and Michonne fighting zombies together and being in love.

As season seven inches incrementally in the direction we’ve been heading all year — all-out war with Negan — “Say Yes” is a break from the incessant torture and nihilism of our heroes’ interactions with the Saviors.

It’s probably inevitable that a show so committed to indulging a single character’s nihilistic fantasies about his own self-importance would eventually start to get lost in its own hollowness.

That’s where “Hostiles and Calamities” — the 11th episode of The Walking Dead’s seventh season — leaves us: with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) once again strutting around threatening people at the Saviors’ compound, while both Dwight and Eugene arrive at simultaneous moral crossroads.

The Walking Dead is always at its best when it focuses on two things: its core relationships and cool zombie shit.

So even though very little happened in the most recent episode, “New Best Friends,” what did happen was satisfying in a way the show hasn’t been in a while.

This week’s episode of The Walking Dead is 62 minutes — 90 with commercials — of nonstop stuff you’ve seen before.

The Walking Dead season seven has often felt like a puzzle whose many pieces have been flung about seemingly at random. Every episode so far has focused almost exclusively on a single individual location: Alexandria, Ezekiel’s Kingdom, the Saviors’ Sanctuary, the Hilltop, and Oceanside (the secret village in the woods).

As The Walking Dead has staggered through its seventh season, it’s drawn frequent criticisms for what has seemed to be a total abandonment of the ethical questions it struggled with throughout the early years of its run.

That’s why the show’s choice to spend “Swear” weighing a militant all-female conclave’s decision not to kill an intruder is an honest surprise. After multiple encounters with bands of survivors prone to violence and mistrust, “Swear” is a reminder that somewhere beneath all its recent sadism, The Walking Dead still has a heart.

This article discusses the plot of this season’s The Walking Dead. There are spoilers here.

“The Cell,” the third episode of The Walking Dead’s seventh season, finally tells us what happened to Daryl (Norman Reedus) and the Savior known as Dwight (Austin Amelio) after Negan killed Abraham and Glenn in this season’s premiere.