The Walking Dead S08E02 "The Damned" (My Review)
Okay now I really need to catch up on my reviews for The Walking Dead season 8. After writing this review I'm going to write another review on episode 3 so please bear with me.
This episode we have more people dying, guns blazing, bodies hit the floor(pun intended), and the ending that wants the audience to know what happens next.
The show did throw a few surprises in this show. One of them was in the battle scene where one team killed plenty on the other team owned by Negan. The ones killed then reanimated into walkers was definitely a great strategy and that (for me) was one of the highlight of the show. Another surprise was the ending where Rick comes face to face with a long forgotten character from season 1 of The Walking Dead who decided disbanded Rick's group at the time and somehow later teamed up with Negan.
So now their paths have crossed.
Is this ending really surprising? Shocking? Not really if that is what they really intended then that would be a bit disappointing because it was dragged on for too long especially with a character that was really minor way back in the beginning. Only the next episode will determine the replay value of this episode since the ending is also a buildup. I do believe and I would bet that the intention of the people making these episodes is to take a slower pace in the next episode where they explore more of his character, what happened to his family, and how he teamed up with Negan. That would make perfect sense since the creators of this show want to drag out as much as they can from the original comics. If you have watched season 7 you can already tell that they adapted it from issues or as I like to call them chapters from issues/chapters 100-114. There are now 173 issues/chapters in the comic. Who knows? Maybe season 8 of The Walking Dead will ENTIRELY be from the "All Out War" comic book from issues/chapters 115-126. Or....Maybe the 1st half or the 1st two-thirds of season 8 will be from the "All Out War." I will go in-depth with the pacing of the TV show in another blog post but it is clear that they don't want to catch up with the comics in the near future.
First off I don't think this episode is amazing but I'm not going to say that this episode was crap. I was on Wikipedia and I read that Eric Kain from Forbes gave this episode an "F." I was like whoa. An "F" is extremely harsh. Honestly I've seen plenty of Walking Dead episodes that are more boring than this one like the last half of season 4 where everybody is trying to get to Terminus. This episode may not be perfect but its got plenty of action and so far I like it better than season 7.
Here is my grade:
B-
If I had to give it a score this is what I would give. Maybe if I was a hardcore Walking Dead fan I would give it a C+. This episode is not crap since we are getting into the good parts which is the war. In all TV shows theres going to be slow parts and intense/suspenseful parts and thats just the way it is. If I had to compare this to the 1st episode I'd say the 1st is better but not by a lot. The surprises in this episode are weaker than the 1st episode. "The Damned" doesn't really show anything new in terms of action and/or tragedy but we do see guns blazing and more action than episode 1.