'The Walking Dead' series finale delivered more closure than expected, but failed to truly put the series to rest

It's hard to talk about "The Walking Dead" without talking about death. It built its reputation as a show where anyone could be killed, and indeed, it shot about a third of its cast each season during its early years. (To remember them, the series finale gives its final moments to a montage of those we've lost over the years.)

It's been a long time since death really moved the story forward. With multiple spinoffs on the horizon, the show struggled throughout its final season to maintain the suspense of the show's salad days, when seemingly anyone could die at any moment. While Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Daryl (Norman Reedus) are all set to star in a new series, each time their lives are allegedly in danger, the dramatic tension of whether they'll make it or not alive was cut at the knees.

But even with the show's three most visible characters off the table, a cast of dozens literals has made it through the past two seasons relatively unscathed. The show remained as violent as ever, but devoid of the real sacrifice and pathos that violence would naturally elicit. Throughout the final season of "The Walking Dead," new characters were introduced and expanded just enough to serve as sacrificial lambs with a frequency reminiscent of old red-shirted ensign jokes on "Star Trek," but the show didn't give its audience time to contemplate the mortality of these characters. They died in the service of the conspiracy, nothing more.

It was inevitable that the series finale would require an epic final battle against the titular zombie hordes . "The Walking Dead" was always at its best when it leaned into its comic book roots, after all, and to its credit, the episode offers plenty of lively, comic book-worthy action, including included several huge explosions and enough flesh-ripping and blood-squirting blows to temporarily make us all vegetarians.

For all the destruction, however, there were very few real consequences. Rather than providing anything resembling genuine devastation, the finale gave us exactly the death of a major character. Plus, they've delivered it via the tried-and-true "Walking Dead" trope of a character who seems to escape peril - only to dramatically lift his shirt to show the audience an errant zombie bite, then fake it for another half a minute. hour. While it's only natural to want to give Rosita (Christian Serratos) a final farewell worthy of her long tenure on the show, she frankly deserved a more spectacular outing. Her final moments were bittersweet, but not as bittersweet as they would have been had she died in the heat of the moment like the badass she has been for much of the series. p>

It's true, of course, that the plot wasn't driven by the deaths alone , and to its credit, the finale did a bit more justice to the surviving main cast. Several individual character moments, in fact, dug deep into the show's lore and rhymed beautifully with scenes from previous seasons. Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) began his run on the series as a cowardly priest who had excluded his followers from his church at the dawn of the zombie apocalypse; when he risks his life to open doors and offer refuge to Commonwealth residents fleeing the hordes, it's a perfect moment. Likewise, Negan went from being the show's most bloodthirsty villain to a man who's finally able to offer real remorse for his actions, and Maggie's heartfelt response to his apology was true to the two characters' journeys. It's almost enough to believe that they would be ready to embark on new adventures together. (And, of course, they're planned for next year.)

The denouement is followed by a 10-minute coda that fast-forwards a year and recalls the epilogue to Kevin Costner's 1998 vehicle "The Postman," of All Things, in which the new leader of the community dedicates a memorial to the dead and ushers in a new era of peace. (It can't be unintentional - a character is even shown delivering mail.) Eugene (Josh McDermitt) has started a family; Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Mercer (Michael James Shaw) and Carol (Melissa McBride) have taken on leadership roles; Daryl travels the frontier in search of adventure. If it's not the most original place to leave history, it is at least a happy and deserved place.