The Walking Dead season 8 trailer impressions: Enter old man Rick!
This piece is meant to be a companion to the video (which you can see here) — think of it as our impressions of what we see as opposed to just some elongated summary. You’re watching it! You don’t need it summarized for you.
Premiering this fall on AMC, the new season looks to be jam-packed with much of what you would expect from the show’s version of the All Out War storyline: Battles, bloodshed, walkers, worries, and inspirational Maggie speeches as she steps more and more into that role. It’s a pretty powerful and incredibly effective trailer, especially when it comes to delivering something that is rather expected: Lightness. Despite the fact that we’re watching people effectively try to murder each other, there is a surprising sense of fun that we get from it. Maybe it’s the music that makes this feel more like a rollicking good time and a little less like something that’s brooding and super-serious. Maybe this is Scott M. Gimple waking up and saying “you know what? Maybe there are enough miserable people in the world” and deciding up to the crazy factor. This is a show based on a comic book, and it’s escapism. We figure there are enough depressing shows elsewhere to last for a decade or so.
Content-wise, though, we’d say that very little in the trailer is a surprise — save for the last few seconds of it.
Is that Old Man Rick?
There could be a time jump coming on the show, which is something that does happen within the comics and could be reflected here. The part of the tease in the closing seconds that is more surprising than anything to us is the sighting of the flowers before the camera pans over to Rick. That obviously brings the aforementioned “look at the flowers” moment to mind, almost as though we’re waiting for Melissa McBride to turn up to put Rick out of his memory.
Is Rick waking up from another coma, did he break his leg (hence the cane), or is this all some sort of The Walking Dead – Sliding Doors situation where he wakes up in some alternate universe where Lori and Shane and so many other people are still around? We hope that the show isn’t going in that direction since throwing a mountain of false hope on people at this point just seems like a misguided move.
If you love The Walking Dead, odds are you’ll love the trailer and much of its inherent craziness. We do love the show, but we also do still wish that the show would get around to confirming an end date at one point or another. That’s one of the reasons why the Game of Thrones ratings are shooting into a different stratosphere — it’s kind of comforting to stick with something when you know that there is a light at the end of a long tunnel.
Obviously, we want to hear your thoughts and theories on the end of the trailer below!
You can also head over here to see when both The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead are returning to the air. (Photo: AMC.)