DISCLAIMER:  If you did not see last night’s show there WILL BE SPOILERS.  DO NOT READ if you don’t want to be spoiled.   Also, the commentary here is more for those that have followed the comics and not for those that are invested in the show alone.

 

Ok, so the mid-season finale ended in a big bang.  There were a lot of big bangs with a few surprises and some not so surprising ends. But after some thought and actually reading one of my friends’ comments on his facebook wall,  for many of us that followed the comic book, last night’s ending pretty much put us right back on course with the book.

Now, there are many people who are against the idea of comparing a movie or a TV show against the written source material and are more content to tell those who do to enjoy it for what it is.  While I do tend to think sometimes that it should be the case, with last night’s finale, it made me wonder why go through this whole portion of season four only to end this way?   I and a few others are asking because with the way season 3 ended, we just knew Robert Kirkman was taking us into the unknown and was happy for it.

So what really happened?  This season, we have a faster paced plot line with a few new disposable characters introduced, a plague running rampant in the prison, Carol eventually gets kicked out, then we find out what the Governor has been up to and then he recruits some more people to throw away their lives needlessly, some of the main characters die and then he dies.  Oh sure, much differently than how he died in the comics and in a sense that was kind of botched (you stab him in the chest and let him live?  Really? )  Much of what happens in the finale was brought in from the comic with a few changes but one still has to ask, with the way last night’s show ended, why bother with this entire story line if only to come right back to the source? The only thing that was accomplished is telling a story that really wasn’t told in the comics and to be honest it didn’t add much to the overall arc, but that’s just my opinion.

By now I know some of you are asking, well what are you ranting about?  It’s pretty much this.  I really like the show. And I have read the comics. As much as I hate to be one of those that complain and compare the source material to the visual medium, I had it in my mind that with the different direction that Kirkman and Co. was taking with the show at the end of last season,  meant that any character’s lives were up for grabs and that the show’s story could go in so many different directions, but last night’s finale took a lot of the unknown out of the equation and will have some of us doing that stupid compare and contrast again.

Questions we can now ask again are:  Will Rick and Carl meet up with the Hunters (cannibal group)? Will AMC still follow thru and kill Judith? What about Abraham,  Father Gabriel Stokes, or Alexandria safe-zone, Hilltop, Jesus or Negan and his Saviors?

…will Rick still lose his hand and Carl his eye?

There is so much that Kirkman took off the table and put back on simultaneously by putting some of the predictability back into this show.  All I know is that once February 9^th 2014 rolls around we will get to see where it goes from there.