Since the kick-off of the second half of The Walking Dead’s sixth season, everyone involved with the show began teasing what was to come. We were promised the premiere of the villainous, diabolical Negan. We were told not everyone would make it out alive. We were promised a season of The Walking Dead unlike any other. And that’s what we got. But to be clear, what was got was NOT good.
The Walking Dead’s season finale, “Last Day on Earth,” was nothing more than the writers deciding to troll its viewers. We saw Negan for a total of ten minutes, and sure, they were evil minutes, but noticeably sparse compared to what we were promised. If you compare screen time and overall impact throughout the episode, this season might as well have been leading up to the big bad being Dwight, or the Grand Theft Auto Trevor actor. Negan seemed like he would breathe new life into the show (by delivering a whole mess of death, mind you) but instead, we only get him for a short amount of time, and our real Season 6 villain turns out to be a guy who looks like Cricket from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
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And then comes the season’s big “death” that we were promised. I wrote up an article detailing my Top 5 candidates for deaths, based off the lead-up to a big, meaningful death. And to be fair, someone did die – but we have no idea who it is. They lined up all the major characters, only to cut to a mystery POV at the last minute. There was no real combat at all in this episode – the gang fled from Saviors TWICE, watched a makeshift barricade burn down, and come up with a RV ruse that somehow fails – and again, we have no idea how or why it failed. It just did. Now it’s not like The Walking Dead is obligated to answer every mystery it presented in the finale, but it should’ve resolved something. That’s what finales are for! “Last Day on Earth” is garbage, for the same reasons the Season 3 finale was garbage – it doesn’t do anything to put a real endpoint to the action – rather, it was only in this episode that the real action came about. And at least in Season 3, we got to see The Governor throughout.
However, “Last Day on Earth” did do one thing effectively – it made me care about Carol again. For this second half of the season, the writers have been doing their hardest to strip everything good about Carol away, leaving the same scared housewife from Season 1. At least with her face-offs with Morgan (feel familiar?) and the remaining Savior, we got a Carol that could be hard and unflinching in her resolves. She isn’t just a scared woman, unwilling to kill – in this episode, she makes it clear just why she left. She knows that the loss of her killer instincts come with a death wish, and in the face of death, she laughs, knowing she doesn’t deserve this release, but that it’s found her at last.
And for anyone concerned about the fate of Daryl Dixon from last week’s episode, never fear – he’s alive. Of course, we don’t get any explanation as to how he’s totally fine. He’s a bit bloody, sure, but much like how the Great RV Ruse failed, it’s left up to the viewers to suspend disbelief and just assume the writers played with our emotions like that for a good, justified reason, despite the fact there appears to be no proof of this.
“Last Day on Earth” does nothing to satisfy the audience, nor does it tie up any plot points explored in the season. Rather, it feels like the mid-season finale for Season 7. This season should have ended on a powerful note, like “No Way Out” – big deaths, lots of zombie-fighting, and just enough uncertainty to whet the fans’ appetites, keeping them on the hook. Comparatively, “Last Day on Earth” just feels like a right hook to the face – purely offensive, not a shred of satisfaction, and making the fans wait several months just to know what the hell they had to sit through. The Walking Dead is as bad at ending its season as its characters are at avoiding roadblocks & toll booths. Essentially, every bit of hype building up this episode has been just that – hype. Nothing of real substance or importance justified this episode’s gravity, certainly not enough to justify the longer run time. If this world is just, AMC’s executives will give their PR personnel a pat on the back as they line up The Walking Dead’s showrunners for execution.
The series’ debut outing is a point for point remake of the first game’s tutorial case and sees Phoenix defend his best-friend; Larry Butz (get used to terrible puns) after he is framed by an unscrupulous newspaper salesmen. If you think I’ve spoiled anything, let me say that the stitch up, and the identity of the true culprit, is revealed in the opening 2 minutes of the episode and therein lies a problem that not only this episode has, but potentially the series as a whole. Being a murder-mystery show, part of the fun is trying to work out the identity and motives of the real killer before it’s revealed to you and that is taken away from the viewer in a lot of Phoenix’s cases. Later cases towards the end of the game tend not to reveal the who’s, how’s and why’s until the player figures it out, but until that point player’s were still in the driving seat and therefore, had control over whether their client was found guilty or not. Presenting the right evidence to contradict a piece of testimony and turn the case around was satisfying because you figure it out yourself, or potentially had turned to Gamefaqs. This is particularly important seeing as Phoenix isn’t a very good lawyer, but rather an every-man, often presented as a complete chancer who is way out of his depth. Much of the humour comes from Phoenix’s over-reactions to his own failings or his inability to remain calm when under pressure. Crime dramas that feature genius detectives like Sherlock Holmes can get away with walking you through the mystery because their leads are shown to think on a completely different level to us, but Phoenix lacks that edge. There is no satisfaction to seeing the case play out in court because we already know everything going in and because we are no longer in the driving seat as players, then we don’t even get the joy of catching the witness out on their lies either. This is always a problem that game adaptions face, but the nature of the Ace Attorney series makes this discordance between the game and anime much more apparent. Were the series to feature more original material than what this episode and the next episode preview seem to suggest then a lot of those problems could be resolved, but a straight adaptation is always going to struggle. The live-action movie was able to get around this by being more character focused and being a bit looser with how it adapted the cases. All that being said, however, the characters remain endearing and fun to learn about, with series’ stallworths Prosecutor Payne, and the Judge all retaining their eccentric personalities. Phoenix maintains his “so nervous it’s adorable” charm from the games and his inherent desire to help people makes him an incredibly likable lead.
The animation is satisfactory, accurately depicting the characters and there is nothing that would stand out as being particularly shoddy. It never delves into Dragon Ball Super levels of mediocrity, but neither does it shine like a Madhouse production. In the transition from sprite to screen, something was lost. The dynamism and eccentricity that made the characters pop in the game isn’t present. Seeing Phoenix panic or triumphantly shout “
