‘The Walking Dead’ season 7 midseason finale: Remembering Ann Mahoney’s Olivia

We had a feeling that death was going to be coming in some shape or form on “The Walking Dead” finale Sunday night, even if it took the writers / producers a heck of a long time to get to the meat of the story. After a lot of stalling (at least in our opinion, these episodes are far longer this season than they really need to be), we learned that the first person to leave the land of the living was Spencer … though we’re not sure just how much he’ll be missed, given that he was hardly the most-liked character in the world.

As for who was next up after him, that “honor” (should we really call it an honor?) goes to Olivia. This death to us was a little more sad, mostly because she was one of the better people within the zombie apocalypse, and someone who tried to look after Judith within the Alexandra Safe Zone while being loyal to Rick and his wishes — at least recently.

Yet, you can also argue that losing Ann Mahoney tonight was fairly predictable. This was a character who’d recently received a slight uptick of screen time, which easily was enough to make us think that something terrible was going to be coming her way sooner rather than later. While we didn’t think Negan himself would kill her, we figured one of his cronies would, and that also turned out to be the case.

In losing Olivia now, the world gets a little more brutal, as we don’t have yet another person who probably wasn’t meant for the post-apocalyptic life. Unfortunately, we also do think the town loses a lot of its soul, and Rick’s suddenly going to have to make some other plans for Judith while looking ahead to her future.

Of course, this also gives everyone a little bit more incentive to go after Negan, not that we think that anyone needed to have more fuel to do that given the course of the season so far.

We’ll be back a little bit later with a full review for tonight’s new episode of “The Walking Dead” over at the link here, and that’s where you can also check out a further preview for everything that lies ahead! (Photo: AMC.)