The Walking Dead: The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

I didn’t make many predictions prior to this episode, but within the first ten minutes of The First Day of the Rest of Your Life, I was able to figure out the three main things that happened in this episode: Sasha’s death – they spent far too much time focusing on her in a finale episode for it to result in anything other than her death; Jadis and her followers would turn on Alexandria – in retrospect this should have been obvious; the episode would end with Negan and the Saviors -they sure as hell weren’t going to end with a repeat of the previous season finale where Negan delivered his own version of justice on one of the Alexandrians via Lucile.

Sasha
As I mentioned above, there was no way Sasha was going to live through this episode. Besides just the amount of time they spent on her, it was also the strangeness of the scenes where she is in the dark listening to an iPod and her dream sequences with Abraham. What I didn’t see coming was that she was going to use Eugene’s suicide pill to turn herself into a zombie. In an episode where I was able to see most things coming, this was a genuine surprise and a good one at that. RIP Sasha.

Jadis
It really doesn’t make sense that Rick would enlist this group of automatons as their allies in the fight when they knew absolutely nothing about them. How could they possibly trust this group? The answer is they couldn’t, and it was dumb to try to do so when they had the Hilltoppers and the Kingdom on their side. Granted, they were reluctant to join the fight, but at least they knew that these were decent people and not a group of mindless robots. All I can say is, thank God Jadis and company aren’t fighting alongside the Alexandrians because there was no way in hell I could root for these people.

Ezekiel
The Kingdom came out with guns ablazing and saved the day along with the Hilltoppers. When things were at their bleakest for Rick and company, I figured that was exactly what was going to happen because Carl wasn’t going to get brained by a barbed wire baseball bat in this episode. On the one hand, it was a bit cheesy that both the Hilltoppers and the Kingdom coming at the exact moment that Carl was about to get killed. On the other hand, as an author, I’m guilty of doing this exact thing in some of my stories and novels, so who the hell am I to criticize?

Rick
This time Rick was able to stay strong in the face of adversity from Negan. Even with Carl’s impending execution, he stayed strong and told Negan this wasn’t going to change anything, that someday, somewhere he was going to kill him. Kudos for Rick. What I don’t get is why doesn’t Negan just kill Rick? That would make more sense. Michionne almost bites the dust here. That was an incredible makeup and effects job making her look convincingly as if she had been beaten to a bloody pulp.

All together, this was a strong finale, certainly better than last season’s awful finale. As Negan closed with, the next season will see war between these two sides.