The internet broke a couple of months ago when AMC’s giant franchise The Walking Dead decided to leave us with the summer’s single biggest cliffhanger by far.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about a few brilliant yet hardly detectable storytelling techniques that are used in cinema, specifically I wrote about those used by David Lynch, Christopher Nolan and Robert Kirkman. The latter absolutely loves to play mind games with the audience, leaving breadcrumbs here and there, even encouraging the curious audience to look for the little clues he keeps throwing their way.
In that post, titled Cinema’s Best Kept Hidden Secrets I tried to resolve the latest mystery of The Walking Dead revealing who was most likely going to die in the show, taking as point of reference those ingenious little tricks that we’ve just mentioned. The small little clues that make any story more playful and intriguing, clues like: Foreshadowing, first person mode…etc.
After noticing the good reception that post had, I went on I shared it on Facebook (I do that from time to time in order to introduce my friends to steemit). But here’s the crazy part:
I received some inside information about the outcome of last season’s finale as well as some other stuff. First of all, I learned that my analysis although not precisely inaccurate, was substantially incomplete. The serie’s premiere is going to be far more explosive than I expected.
And more importantly, fellow steemians, I have some nice goodies that I want to share with you if you like.
So in case if you don’t want to wait until the summer to find out the answer to our favorite mystery, I think you will enjoy this:
Warning, major spoilers ahead.
The season 7 premiere starts with Rick Grimes totally losing it. From the first scene, he starts to lose his grip on reality. He’s still kneeling down on the floor as are the other ten protagonists while their Arch-enemy Negan is doing the typical eenie-meenie trying to decide which of one our beloved characters he would soon execute.
Rick starts to panic, and then all out of the sudden we see Rick in a total dream-like state, we see Maggie with the baby already born and in her arms, we see the whole group laughing, everyone is there, and then we see Maggie and Glenn happy and smiling and holding their baby… And then Boom!
The bat just landed on someone’s head, and repeated blows immediately follow as we hear the daunting screams of the rest of the survivors.
Reality is now catching up to Rick as Negan is bashing a fan favorite’s head with his barbed wire wrapped bat ‘Lucille’. The horrific beating starts replacing the magical scene, with Rick totally frozen in impotence, and then the silence drowns the screams.
The person who was killed is Abraham Ford.
It is probable that Negan killed Abraham because of his defying look and his big size, sort of to take out the biggest threat early so it doesn’t come back and bite him later. But there is nothing pointing to that at the time.
After that, Negan kills Glenn too, who was the main protagonist of the season finale Last Day on Earth, the whole episode was filmed on his point of view perspective as we previously discussed.
The story arc “Something to fear” that we’re about to see next fall, starts with Glenn’s frightful death and with that in mind, the producers reeled us into believing that Glenn was going to be killed in the season 6 finale Last Day on Earth filming the whole episode as Glenn’s last day on earth.
But then the producers went on and killed Abraham instead. Catharsis, is the term used in these cases, when the audience is relieved to see that the main protagonist has survived an imminent tragedy that was destined to him. But then when everyone drops their guard down, they’ll switched the bait again, killing Glenn too, leaving everyone in shock.
“We have to do an episode that justifies it to you, we have to do something so great and so intense, that you’re like: Ok, fair play! And the challenge that we have, what we're gonna do, we’re gonna deliver you something fantastic!” – Said executive producer Scott Gimple on the season 7 premiere.
It’s clearly no surprise that The Walking Dead is considered as one of the most dramatic television shows in history.
Something To Fear
To add more drama to an already explosive premiere, Daryl, fan favorite numero uno (played by Norman Reedus) is taken prisoner by Negan and his crew.
Even though he was badly injured with a bullet lodged in his shoulder, Daryl was the only one that tried to stop Negan from killing Glenn, he was caught by Dwight who almost shot him with his own Crossbow, but Negan decided that they’ve killed enough for one day and they took Daryl with them to their sanctuary as a hostage. They they treated his wounds, removed his clothes and replace them with a white inmate jumpsuit that has a big “A” spray painted on the back, and they fed him dog food. The "A" stands for asshole.
For those of you who didn’t want to wait until the end of the summer, I hope you enjoyed this, and unless I have been deceived (which is quite improbable) this is exactly what you will see on the small screen come October 23rd .
I hope you liked this small scoop and I wish a great weekend to everyone!