What an exciting start we had for season 7!
Expecting only one character’s death at the hands of Negan, we actually had two! First Abraham dies brutally beaten by Lucille and then Glenn! It was in the interview after the season 7 premiere that it was Steven Yeun himself that had asked producers to stay true to the comic book’s continuity with Glenn dying with the introduction of Negan and his weapon Lucille (The Walking Dead #100).
However memorable that episode was, the rest of the season was not as exciting. Especially for fans of the Walking dead comics.
Why you might ask? That is because although Season 7 was filled with a lot of small snipets of rebellion, an introduction of three new communities (the Kingdom, Scavengers and Oceanside), and bunch of new characters (King Ezekiel, Jadis, Gary, etc); it fell short on originality.
Most, if not all of the plots used in the various episodes came out of the comics. As readers of the comic books noticed this season, a lot of the scenes were extracted from the “All out war” storyline. In fact, producers mimicked a lot of the storyline as they could. Examples such as the scene wherein Negan and Carl were together and Carl was singing.
Episode “Sing me a Song” was clearly a rendition of the comic.
Oh don’t get me wrong, the season finale wherein they had an all-out confrontation against the saviors thanks to the sacrifice of Sasha was quite thrilling.
But to be honest, every episode prior to that was slowly building toward that confrontation. And we also knew the Sasha character was going to be lost somehow since we knew Sonequa Martin-Green was moving over to Star Trek Discovery….
Was this an attempt by the writers to stay in line with the comic book continuity? Or was it simply poor writing that season. One cannot be sure. For this fan, there were not a lot of surprises for me this past season….here’s hoping for a better Season 8.