The Walking Dead Still Don't Mean Nothin'

In a completely ridiculous episode of THE WALKING DEAD last week, our heroes destroyed what should have been most of the remaining Saviors, effectively ending the tyranny that has dominated their world for two seasons. There was no celebration. No one seemed particularly happy about it. In a show on which everyone talks, talks, talks all the time, no one even mentioned it. The tone of the show continued to be as downbeat, humorless and joyless as usual. Tonight's offering, "Still Gotta Mean Something," should have been a wrap-up ep in which our heroes mop up the last of the Saviors and begin to look to the future they're going to have to build but it seems the writers aren't quite willing to give up their played-out storyline just yet.

Just how many Saviors are there? It's a question of absolutely central importance to this season and to any plan to defeat them but though Savior turncoat Dwight would have provided this information to the rebel communities, it has never been shared with viewers. We've had, over time, some indications. A few seasons ago when Negan first appeared, his men staged some elaborate roadblocks and he confessed that doing so had seriously taxed his manpower; there were, at the time, maybe 30 or 40 Saviors on-hand. At the end of the previous season, Negan assembles his Saviors to declare war; he's shown addressing perhaps a hundred people, which felt like an escalation but go with it.

This season, Rick and co. engineered a zombie siege of the Sanctuary then proceeded to wipe out every other Savior outpost. The carnage was extraordinary and the kills and captures should have reduced the Saviors to a very manageable number. This impression was reinforced by all of the scenes set inside the Sanctuary during the siege, which made it clear the Saviors were dangerously short of manpower and increasingly desperate. At one point, there was a near-rebellion by the Saviors' slave labor force, one the Saviors certainly feared. It was stopped only by the timely reappearance of Negan--in a rather silly moment, the fear he instills in those lessers was enough to cow them into backing off. The Saviors even considered a plan to arm their laborers with melee weapons and send them out to fight the zombies. Whatever force was holed up at the Sanctuary, it shouldn't have been an enormous one, but viewers were denied even an estimate and had to depend on those past clues, so when the Saviors escaped the siege and suddenly had sufficient numbers to launch simultaneous punitive expeditions against all three rebel communities as if nothing at all had changed, viewers were left wondering if Eugene had invented a respawning device. Was he holed up in a hidden laboratory off-screen spontaneously generating new Saviors by the dozen? It felt like something that shouldn't have been remotely possible...

The full article is here:
http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2018/04/walking-dead-108.html