'The Walking Dead' Mid-Season Finale Review: Bored To Death?

image

Two conclusions to reach after watching the season-six mid-season finale of The Walking Dead: First, Glenn coming back from certain death turned out to be a good indication of how absurdly, arrogantly manipulative this show has become. Second, if covering yourself in zombie guts is so effective as walking-dead-repellent, why in the world doesn’t everyone walk around smeared with the stuff 24/7?

Note: Spoilers ahead for the mid-season finale.

The episode was a series of teases. In the early moments, we were meant to think, oh, maybe it’s Maggie who’s going to be the season’s Big Character Death, not Glenn… but then she made it to the top of that creaky platform, just out of reach of zombies. Later, we were supposed to get invested in whether Wolf Man would kill Denise, but — no offense to Merritt Wever, who deserves her Dead paycheck after all those terrific seasons on Nurse Jackie — now that character is caught in mid-season limbo, hostage to the Wolf.

So it went for most of the hour. Lots of the Alexandria characters talking to each other about how they’re afraid to die or willing to die or how they had to protect each other. Or, in the case of Denise held hostage by one of the Wolves, dumb folks handing over their weapons to save a character we don’t care much about.

RELATED: ‘The Walking Dead’ Recap: Tiptoe Through the Walkers

Rick has become a supporting player in the show. Ditto the now permanently solicitous Michonne. And that Tovah Feldshuh, she really knows how to play a near-death scene; her zombie-bitten Deanna went out strong. (It’s always interesting when really good actors pop up on The Walking Dead, seeing how they stand out from much of the rest of the show around them.) Or did she die, given we didn’t actually see her heart ripped out of her body? After all, under the latest, Post-Glenn Walking Dead Rules, I think the only way you can be sure someone is dead is if the show puts up a print-out of the person’s flat-lined vitals on the screen.

In a move to force people to watch the beginning of Into The Badlands, Dead fans got their teeny tiny morsel of information about Negan during a Badlands break. I wonder if the Dead audience is going to tire of being jerked around like this. There was a lot more suspense, over the same two hours of television, on Showtime’s Homeland and The Affair than there was in this Dead-Badlands duo.

The Walking Dead returns Feb. 14 on AMC.