6 Things We Learned From ‘Walking Dead’ Season 6
Last night The Walking Dead ended its sixth season with a barbed-wire-covered baseball bat smashing into the head of … well, someone. We’ll have to wait until next October to know which beloved character just got bludgeoned by the series’ new supervillain: a grinning, whistling sociopath named Negan. In the meantime, we’re left to reflect on what’s happened over the past year, and to tally up what we now know about AMC’s smash hit zombie drama that we didn’t know 16 episodes ago.
1. The Deadverse is getting “larger”
For five seasons, the show stuck to a predictable modus operandi: Rick and his cohorts would migrate to a new semi-fortified location; they’d purge of zombies just in time to find out that their real enemy was some other group of humans who wanted to kill them. But now that our heroes have settled into the walled Virginia subdivision known as the Alexandria Safe Zone, the “walkers” are the least of their problems. The days are long gone when survivors of the apocalypse could expect to stumble across an abandoned grocery store or a house full of canned goods. Now that supplies are less plentiful, agriculture and trade are essential. This means the Alexandrians have to start thinking about negotiating with the remaining pockets of civilization, instead of fighting them.
AMC’s slogan for the most recent stretch of eight episodes has been “A Larger World” — which is increasingly looking like an understatement. Already, the ASZ has struck a deal with the agrarian community called the Hilltop. Can they make peace with Negan’s “Savior” army and/or the anarchic “Wolves?” Or with the as-yet-unnamed armor-clad horse-riders who whisked Carol and Morgan away during the finale? Readers of Robert Kirkman‘s original comic book series know that all of these factions — and more — are going to play a major role in a story that’s increasingly becoming more like Game of Thrones than Night of the Living Dead.
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