What’s Worth Watching: ‘The Walking Dead’ on AMC for Sunday, November 29

Don’t Be a Braindead Walker

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The Walking Dead, “Start to Finish” (Sunday, Nov. 29, 9/8c, AMC)

(SPOILER ALERT warning if you haven’t been keeping up with The Walking Dead this season—and what’s your excuse if you haven’t?)

So now we know that Glenn’s big death scene earlier this season on The Walking Dead was, as many suspected, a fake-out. Good for him, good for Maggie—if they both survive long enough for a reunion—but I’m not sure it’s so good for the show, which always seemed above such cheap fan-pandering tricks. (The first sign that most took as confirmation that Steven Yeun was coming back: his absence from the post-show Talking Dead that night, as well as no other sort of definitive online post-mortem interview. And what kind of way is that to experience anything, to temper one’s reaction by the way it’s being hyped or not?)

I argued a while back that I would feel cheated if this twist was just a tease, and that hasn’t changed. And yet as I watched a bloodied Glenn extricate himself from under Nicholas’s ravaged corpse to hide beneath the dumpster, I was compelled as ever by the survival drama that makes The Walking Dead so riveting, and make no mistake, this has been a very strong season. Now that the tower has fallen, causing a breach in the wall protecting Alexandria, thus opening the gates for the herd of walkers to invade the formerly safe haven, all bets are off as to who’ll survive this week’s Fall finale. Besides the obvious, of course. And even then, unless we actually see the light go out of their eyes as they become zombie chum, we’ve now been conditioned to not accept a character’s death at face value. Some trust has been squandered here, and for some of us in the audience, that’s a fate worse than death.