I Give the Walking Dead Another %! Try

I am a weak, weak man. This has been well documented already, but let there stand as additional testimony my inability to put aside even a narrative I think is going hopelessly astray. It's the same with books. If I start one I physically cannot stop until I've finished it off. I've tried it, many times, and almost always failed. It nags at me, the lurking in the undusted corners of my brain, until I whimper and give in. A book has to truly, truly suck eggs for me to give up on it before the final page. It's a compulsion.

Just so with The Walking Dead, and how much harder that is when so much about the story is done very well. The characters - with a few exceptions - are compelling, and the moral quandaries, though necessarily everpresent here in the 'lifeboat' narrative sub-genre, are not handled too clumsily. The repercussions of the characters' actions do not usually manifest until much later in the story, episodes later, which is a pretty neat trick given the moving-target which the plot has necessitated.

But worse yet, I have good friends who have beaten me over the head with the series and demanded I go back and finish off the series. So I did. Yes, the last two episodes almost, almost, make up for the earlier abuses. Some balance is restored. But worse yet, the last scenes of the last episode are such heady cliffhangers that now I'm desperately waiting for season 3 to hit NetFlix. Curse you, friends with whom I share my interests. Your insight into my obsessions has doomed me to an agony of 3 to 6 months while I wait for the new season to move to my streaming service. Why couldn't you have been into knitting?