The Walking Dead:
Spoilers for The Walking Dead comic and video game
The engine which drives The Walking Dead video game series has always been the interaction between an adult and a child. Though the relationship between Lee and Clementine of Season One was rightly applauded at its debut for their powerful connection, the bond between Clementine and AJ in The Final Season outshines its predecessor. Yes, Lee's choices effected Clementine, but Alvin Jr. adjusts his beliefs and behavior around Clementine's actions. Unlike Clementine, who was a passive receptacle, absorbing Lee's beliefs, but not acting on them, AJ reacts instinctively, the embodiment of a strong-willed child. His ability to take in information, process it, and recreate it, forces the player to watch their behavior carefully.
Throughout the season I worried about
Alvin Jr's development. I worried from the beginning, that giving a
six year old a gun was trouble. Alvin had grown up only with
Clementine, and was unused to the peculiarities of a community.
Confrontation troubled him, causing him to act like an animal in a
cage. I tried to protect him against the horrors of the world, so I
encouraged him to be stoic, but I worried he had become cold. I
feared he, who had grown up in a world full of monsters, would love
them, revere them as gods, or see them as people in their own right.
When I told him they didn't hold the souls of their past owners, I
worried he would lose his hope and perish. So I told him to be
tough, and he killed without remorse. I had to teach him mercy and
patience. I had to explain that walkers were not evil or good, but
like a dangerous wild animal. I began to fear that when Clem died,
he would become a Whisperer and care for her like a pet.
Unlike the past Walking Dead games The
Final Season contains no cameos, but it does introduce the
Whisperers. These people, originally introduced in The Walking
Dead comics, live among the walkers, wearing faces made of human
skin. They learned to survive in the wild with little protection.
They learned how to gently manage the walkers. A lone Whisperer,
James, believes the walkers are still people, and tries to convince
Clem and AJ. After a tragedy, brought about AJ's lack of social
understandings, I teach him not to kill people, but to shoot walkers
if they threaten him. Later, I doubt his ability to distinguish
friend from foe. In a moment of panic, he fails Clem, leaving
friends in danger.
Clem often has AJ by her side, but
she's a teenage girl in dangerous circumstances. The two have
wandered alone for two years, and she's finally found young adults
her own age. The Final Season is the first, and last, season
where Clem can engage in a romantic relationship. The two characters
the game offers are kind, well developed teenagers, with their own
troubles certainly, but perfect for the situation. But it's tough
being a teenage mom in a zombie apocalypse searching for a date.
With all the death and suffering Clem witnessed in the first three
seasons, the player wonders: is happiness possible in The Walking
Dead, or is heartbreak inevitable? Loss is integral to the
story, but some hope remains.
Entering into The Final Season I
wondered about the ending from the opening scene. As I mentioned in
the previous article, I'd read all the comics, and I knew that the
writer,
Robert Kirkman, had said that he would never reveal the cause of the
zombie apocalypse. This statement implies that
the apocalypse will never be resolved either. If the character's
don't learn its cause, they can't solve it either. This means that
aside from the action of an outside force, zombies will exist
forever, and whenever a person dies they will become a zombie. So I
expected that The Final Season would end on a tragic note:
Clem's death, AJ's death, the death of everyone involved.
Considering the series, any of these would prove an unsatisfactory
ending. The video game finished in 2018, and the comic concluded in
2019, so the writers of the game, though overseen by Robert Kirkman's
company, didn't know how he would end his story.
In the first, second, and third episode
the character's proposed possible, hopeful outcomes. Maybe walkers
have souls like people. Maybe zombies retain a part of the humanity
of the original human. Or if they don't, maybe the plague which
unleashed the monsters (if it was a plague), would relent in the
future, allowing life to return to normal.
The first two ideas are thoroughly
discredited by Clementine, but the last is left as a possibility,
because it can't be proved or disproved. The writers seemed hopeful
Kirkman would end his comic series by killing off the zombies.
The final episodes includes three
ending elements worth consideration.
First, it tries to have its happy
ending, leaving a remnant of the school community intact, but the
society is too small to be sustainable. Eventually the community's
security will be threatened. The young adults will grow frustrated
with the half dozen people they see on a daily basis, and when they
grow into adulthood they won't be content with their minuscule tribe.
They'll fight over their resources and each other. Injury after
injury, illness after illness will drain their supplies until they
have no more, and someone dies. If they aren't careful a death will
create a zombie capable of killing even more.
Of course, the children are not alone
in the world, as demonstrated by the events of Season Four.
With a dwindling human population it is possible no one ever finds
them. But at least one or two outsiders know their location at the
end of the season. Eventually the kids will be forced to fight to
the death, or run into the woods, and that will mean their eventual
demise.
Clementine's fate at the
end breaks the rules as well. She lasted to long to be believable,
and AJ's solution is untenable because of the injuries inflicted.
The best the series can do to resolve
these problems is have the character's vehemently insist that someday
the walkers will disappear. And the final comic places this out of
reach. The Walking Dead comic ends in a future where humanity has
rebuilt society, but the zombie plague still exists. Kirkman
portrays it as a stable society, a rebuilt civilization, but that
they don't suffer from periodic zombie attacks seems unrealistic.
People die expectedly every day, and they die in public from
accidents, but they also die unexpectedly at night. Surprising
deaths would lead to spousal murders. But Kirkman's ending, though
not as hopeful as world without zombies, at least aids Clementine's
situation. It is possible the new society, The Commonwealth, in Ohio
could eventually spread its protections as far as Clem's new home.
Unfortunately, there is no evidence one way or the other whether AJ's
community is rescued.
In conclusion, the end of The
Walking Dead: The Final Season is preposterously contrived,
bending and breaking the rules of The Walking Dead universe at
multiple points, but it is the ending the series needed. In spite of
all the suffering, the developers offered Clementine the happiest
ending one could hope for is such dire circumstances. The rest of
the game is a fabulous resolution to a phenomenal series. It
includes the setting and supporting cast of the series, short of
Lee Everett, and the improvement on visual effects and game-play,
along with call backs with the music, makes it the best season of the
series. Of all the character's in video game history, Clementine deserves recognition as one of the best protagonists the genre has created.
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