Class warfare is The Walking Dead’s Big Bad in the new wave of season 11 episodes
The Walking Dead season 11B starts off with a literal bang when a group of survivors send fireworks into a hoard of oncoming walkers. The conflict between a hardened Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and the Reapers happening in the midst of the explosive blasts is bloody, grim, and advanced as far as hand-to-hand combat goes. After 11 seasons, the characters on The Walking Dead are seasoned fighters. But the challenge our weary survivors will face in the final season has revealed itself to be much more insidious: living in a society.
Fans of the series, and the graphic novels it’s based on, have known for a while that there will never be a “cure” for the zombie virus in the fictional world of The Walking Dead. But an apocalypse can end in other ways, and the way the final season is inching towards that conclusion is unexpectedly unsettling. History repeats itself, and anarchy gets replaced with dead-end jobs.
More and more of the long-running AMC series’ survivors have moved and gotten acclimated to The Commonwealth, and it becomes clear in the midpoint of the last season that the show’s Final Boss is a return to normalcy. This feels like a natural endgame for The Walking Deadto strive for as it winds down. Is the end of the end of the world not … the start of the world? And given everything they’ve been through, should it be?
After COVID-19 precautions left a handful of episodes in season 10 and the first chunk of season 11 stuck with intimate two-handers while shying away from big battles, the show is back to its full ensemble glory. Those episodes did not feel out of place or invaluable at all. Interpersonal relationships and quiet moments are what have kept The Walking Dead ticking after all these years. It’s always been
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