Spoilers The Walking Dead - Season 9 discussion and spoilers

Fair enough. I kind of was annoyed with Carol for the same reason. Sometimes not. Guess it depended on how she was written in the episode.

 

A public hanging of your political rival, with benefit of a trial by jury, is a big mistake, and is a bad omen for Maggie's future as leader of the Hilltop.

 

Honestly, Gregory had it coming. He not only tried to kill Maggie, but ge also tried to get someone else to kill her, AND he was going behind the back of the alliance to deliver Negan information during the war.

He was opportunistic, power hungry, and a chickenshit. Maggie called him exactly that for exactly the right reasons.

He should have been killed during the war. He was given way too many chances.

I love the actor who played him... great in a lot of roles over the decades. But I hated the character... he had no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

 

Make Hilltop Great Again!

 

Totally. About the only downside to Gregory's death is it means the awesomeness that is Xander Berkeley is now gone from the show.

Which reminds me, I'm kind of glad the show skipped past the Hilltop Election Maggie was talking about early in the episode. Honestly, I just don't see how it could have been done without drawing some obvious real world parallels with Gregory filling You Know Who's role.

 

Despite positive buzz, ratings have dipped to season 1 levels.

https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/walking-dead-season-9-premiere-ratings-1202973672/

AMC - write an ending for this show, please! Don't let it slowly decay and then get canceled with no resolution!

 

I was reserving judgement on the season being as we're losing Rick, and that season 8 had a pretty good ending.

Having said that, this was a decent refresh the show has been needing for a while now.

I really liked Maggie's handling of Gregory. Bye then!

 

He absolutely deserved it, but it's certainly foreshadowing. Maggie is going to become a dictator soon, even though she is the only elected leader on the show.

 

I have felt for the last couple seasons that THE WALKING DEAD will finish after season 10. A nice, round number to end the series. Feels right for some reason. Plus, it can enter the double digit club of genre series.

STARGATE SG-1
SMALLVILLE
THE X-FILES (only due to the recent two seasons)
SUPERNATURAL
DOCTOR WHO (Classic and current hit double digits... but I doubt anyone can top 26 seasons that the classic series did.)

 

Let's be honest here. Technically she's already a dictator, election or no election. She is literally The Government of The Hilltop. There's no constitution or any form of written law, there's no legislative or formal advisory council, and the only person in Hilltop that didn't accept her word as law was Gregory. She's just as much an absolute monarch as Ezekiel was in the Kingdom. The election just means she's Empress instead of Queen.

Still, it's accurate to say that that kind of absolute power could either go to her head or bite her in the ass. We'll have to watch and see.

 

6.08 million viewers for Walking Dead, lowest since season 2. Doesn't look like the change in direction has resulted in an instant reversal of viewership trends.

 

Despite dismal ratings, AMC kept Halt and Catch Fire on for four seasons, and allowed it to have a proper finale. Peak viewership for that show was a fraction of what Dead pulls in on a bad night. I’m not worried.

 

Oh yeah, Dead is another 80% drop away from cancelation territory. It's just that for a show that was once as big as TWD, would feel nice to have the show go out on top, not with a whimper in 10 years when hardly anyone really cares...

 

I liked the season opener. It was lots of fun seeing them in the Museum and Capitial building. I of course liked the spider face zombie but I even liked the one in a suit and tie. I was talking not to long ago about seeing zombies in more exotic clothing then the stuff you you usually see where they all look the same. I do wonder why they did it and if they were trying to say something or the costume people just thought it would be neat to do.

Maggie got really interesting. She is to me turning into the villian I suspect of this first-half of the season. I liked seeing just how dark she got at the end and I can see her being a Dukat,Neegan type you sort of like, hating. Only different in that she didn't start off as a bad guy character giving her more depth. Even though Gregory had to go it was still hard not to feel bad for someone begging for their life with a noose around their neck. I wonder why murder instead of exile instead was chosen. I mean in this world that is almost certain death but he would still have more of fighting chance and it shows you have mercy and also you are not going to murder people which has to scare anyone at the Hilltop because if you can murder like that it means you might murder for any reason.

My prediction is Negan doesn't get out of jail until the mid-season break. He will be needed to help replace some of the presence that will be lost with Rick and Maggie gone. I think they are going to make him part of group though instead of having go back to being a pure villian because we have already seen that for a few years now with the character and they need to grow the character. I also predict one of these locations will be destroyed at some point. I could see it being the Hilltop because it's the one that is doing the best like mentioned thus it would fit into the shows history of watching our hero's homes be taken away from them only it would be exactly the same because you would still have Alexandria,Oceanside,The Kingdom and the Savior's factory still up and going. Plus we have all seen these places now and I think part of the fun of the show is seeing new locations so it makes since they would want to add another location just for the sake of doing something new.


Jason

 

What's going on with The Commonwealth?

 

After the complaints about the saviors and their factory trying to grow food, why not just give it up and absorb them into the other ones that are set up better? No reason to stay somewhere that isn’t working, plenty of land around.

Know there are hard feelings, but breaking up the Saviors into bite sized pieces also helps absorb them so less lingering crap...

 

Didn't they try to exile him before?

 

Exile is rarely a good idea for someone like that. They’ll hook on with someone and drive them towards where they got exiled from. It’s like bad guy 101. Like killing a whole family but letting the young son live; he’s definitely going to kill you some day

 

The show has been running for nearly a decade. Few series in TV history maintained their best ratings that long into their run, but it says much that its 6.08 million still makes so many fantasy series seem like wee-hour public access programming by comparison.

..and not to mention many network and cable series somehow stay in production with nowhere near TWD's ratings and popularity. Someone should explain that one.

 

But expectation is not normal human behavior to loss. That's conditioning, and for those holding on to their humanity, no amount of ZA environment seasoning will make the loss of a loved one any easier (see: Rick and Michonne about Carl, or Maggie and Beth about Hershel).

How so? There's no racial naming convention anyone needs to recognize, hence Glenn being Korean, yet having that name. Further, Hershel was her father, so naming the baby in honor of him is in step with one of the more natural ways people name their children.