Today I will be doing a spoiler-free review of season 8 of The Walking Dead. I watched this season a while ago and I still don’t fully know what to think about it. It’s definitely better than season 7 for me, but it’s probably worse than all of the other seasons so far. It is a pretty good season, but there’s one major issue in it. It relies on action way too heavily. Leading up to this, all of the seasons were story-driven with a few episodes that were filled with action. This season it’s the exact opposite. One of the good things about this though is that there aren’t a lot of more boring episodes at all. The pacing issues that all of the other seasons had weren’t really there this season, since most of the episodes have a lot of action. For me, there’s only one standout episode as well in the season finale. Some other good ones are episodes 1, 6, 8, and 9. Episodes 8 and 9 are phenomenal but they’re centered around a character’s death that is just terrible they killed that person off. The main characters this season are still led by Rick with Daryl, Carol, Carl, Maggie, Ezekiel, and Michonne. All of these characters are fantastic again and display their own great acting performances throughout the season.
The villain of this season is Negan leading the Saviors group. Just like last season I absolutely loved Negan and I absolutely think he’s the best villain this show has ever seen by far. Jeffrey Dean Morgan was 100% the perfect choice for this character and he knocks it out of the park every time he’s on screen. The interactions with him and all of our leading protagonists were great. He and Carl have great chemistry together. Negan and Rick are the top-of-character interactions for me in this season and honestly might be my favorite in the entire series. The only two people I think might’ve had better chemistry are Rick and Shane from seasons 1 and 2. As I mentioned earlier, the pacing this season was a lot better but not perfect. There were like 2 filler episodes, but even one of those fillers I was a big fan of. The plot did take a big hit this season though. I always understood the overall goal of each side but almost 90% of the in-between just didn’t feel like there was a purpose behind it. The season finale is fantastic though and has one of my favorite lines in TV history. “My mercy prevails over my wrath” is just so fitting for everything that was happening and going on.
I always rate shows I watch and I rate them based on 10 things in the show. Those things are action, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, protagonist, and antagonist. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this season an 84/100, like I said the plot is just the biggest issue. Action, acting, score, and characters were all great but everything just felt a little down because of the plot issues. That is the most important part of a show and it felt like that was lost a little bit.
