The Walking Dead: Was season seven premiere too violent?

The Walking Dead season finale cliffhanger angers fans

5 April

Spoiler warning: this article contains plot details for the season six finale of The Walking Dead

Critics were left frustrated and fans went into an online frenzy following the cliffhanger at the end of season six of the zombie-apocalypse drama The Walking Dead, which aired on Sunday night in the UK.

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The feature-length 75-minute episode, titled Last Day on Earth, came at the end of a season of plot teases and misdirections and culminated with the long-anticipated appearance of Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the sinister leader of the menacing gang The Saviours.

It also managed to drive viewers crazy by showing him beat someone to death with "Lucille" - his barbed-wire covered baseball bat - but not revealing which major character it was.

If you sensed some animosity toward The Walking Dead on Twitter, you were not imagining it, says Daniel Holloway in Variety. Social media analytics company Canvs found that the final scene drew "overwhelmingly negative reactions from viewers on Twitter".

The critic adds that Canvs discovered that more than 70 per cent of all Twitter reactions expressed feelings such as "crazy," "dislike," "hate" and "upset" during the show's closing moments.

However, many fans also saw the funny side of the teaser ending and a crop of comic memes have sprung up on Twitter, Reddit and Instagram.

"God help me!" wrote one fan on Twitter, alongside image of a calculator, a blackboard of equations and a scientist looking through a microscope to work out who the victim was.

Another fan on Instagram posted a picture of Negan with his baseball bat and the caption: "Walking Dead fans be like, time to study the position of the trees."

Meanwhile, a Reddit user uploaded an image from a steakhouse, with a plea – spelt out in meat - from fans not to kill off the character Daryl.

Many critics were also frustrated.

Ed Power in the Daily Telegraph says the episode was "a let down" at the end of "a deeply average season".

He adds that "Negan's entrance was preceded by 65 minutes of filler" and his appearance "had a tang of pantomime".

Power continues: "Even if we got past him calling his baseball bat Lucille, it was hard to buy into an arch-nemesis who spits out lines such as 'It's gonna be pee-pee pants city here real soon' with a straight face."

Yes, the "stay tuned" ending does seem a little cynical, says Morgan Jeffrey on Digital Spy, but taken on its own merits, Last Day on Earth is "pretty phenomenal".

That doesn't mean The Walking Dead can rest on its laurels, he adds. If they’re making fans wait seven months, "the bar is set damn high" for the series' return in October.

Walking Dead season six finale: Is it all over for Dixon?

31 March

Season six of zombie hit The Walking Dead comes to an end in the UK on Sunday and a tense trailer has left no doubt that a favourite character will die, perhaps even Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus).

In fact, not one, but two teasers have been released, says Movieweb. One shows Morgan (Lennie James) finding a stray horse while the other introduces the villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).

It has long been known that Rick and the other Alexandrians would come face to face with the evil leader of the group The Saviours in season six – and the new trailer makes it clear this happens on Sunday.

The clip shows Negan with his weapon of choice – a baseball bat wrapped with barbed wire. It even has a name: Lucille.

According to The Independent, fans are confident that a much-loved character will meet his or her end on the blunt end of Lucille.

Tipped by fans to get the push are Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun), Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride) and Dixon – all characters who have been with the show since it began.

Movieweb is intrigued that the show's title has been changed since Fox released a synopsis earlier this month. It's now called Last Day on Earth, while previously it was Something To Fear.

The original title "made sense", says the site, because it was taken directly from the graphic novel which inspired the hit show. So could the change indicate a shift away from the plot of the original?

All will be revealed on Sunday.

Walking Dead season six: fewer zombies, but still 'tense as hell'

1 March

Knots Untie, the latest episode of The Walking Dead, has been met with mixed reactions. Some critics complain that little happened while others suggest it is "pivotal" for season six.

The "average" episode was a little sparse, says Erik Kain at Forbes. It was "sort of an odd one - not a lot happens, really", it felt "uneven" and "sagged under the burden of too much filler and not enough momentum", he adds.

Variety describes it as "one of those necessary but tedious episodes where not much gets done but a lot gets talked about", while Bryan Bishop at The Verge says it felt "a little thin", adding: "You could probably have combined this and last week's episode into one much more robust hour of television."

However, he concedes that no show likes to "troll its audience" quite like The Walking Dead: "There's something unique about The Walking Dead's ability to get you invested, hold your hand through long stretches of dialogue-heavy character building, and then blow it all to hell."

Other critics also suggested the episode pointed to forthcoming developments. "The first hints are dropped that mankind is truly rebuilding society from the ashes of the zombie apocalypse" with the episode full of "foreshadowing", says the Wall Street Journal.

Brian Moylan at The Guardian describes it as an "excellent episode that packed a lot into an hour", including the discovery of the Hilltop, a community that raises livestock and crops, and more about the "diabolical" Negan, the head of a group called The Saviors.

Rob Bricken at Gizmodo thinks the episode was "pivotal", completely changing the game. "You don't need a thousand zombies to have a tense-as-hell episode of The Walking Dead," he says. "I'm hard-pressed to remember an ep where TWD gave us so much information, and almost all of it monumental in how it's going to affect the survivors in Alexandria."

Walking Dead: new season six episode leaves fans shocked

16 February

AMC's horror TV series The Walking Dead is back after its 11-week mid-season break - and the killer comeback episode has left fans reeling.

The action-packed episode, titled No Way Out, upped the level of mayhem and carnage while also managing to impress critics and overwhelm viewers, who took to Twitter to express their shock and delight on Twitter, with some calling it the best episode of the series so far.

The Walking Dead, based on a comic book by the same name, is set in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by zombies. Britain's Andrew Lincoln stars as former sheriff Rick Grimes, who leads a group of survivors struggling to adapt to this dangerous new world.

When the series took a break back in November, hordes of zombie walker were besieging the streets of Alexandria and viewers were left on the edge of their seats, with what Forbes writer Erik Kain described as "one of TV's more absurd cliff-hangers".

It ended "very much in the middle of a scene, in the middle of a shot, in the middle of some dialogue", he wrote.

Viewers were left wondering if Rick and the Alexandrians would make it out of the safe zone alive and what they would do about the menacing motorcycle gang, the Saviours, and their sinister leader Negan.

No Way Out "wasted no time in jumping right into the action" bringing with it new shocks and horrors, says Megan Davies on Digital Spy. Fans could barely control their reactions on Twitter, says Davies, but the general consensus was that "this was one of the best episodes of The Walking Dead we've ever seen".

One fan wrote: "What a first episode into the new season. This is wild!" Another posted an ECG image of a heart beating erratically and wrote: "Me right now." Others called it the "best episode ever", or commented that people were screaming in their living rooms.

The high death rate didn't go unnoticed either, as one viewer commented that the show was "killing off star cast members with ease".

In fact, nearly 120 named human characters have been killed so far, while more than 40 named zombies have come to a grisly end. MyVoucherCodes.co.uk has been keeping a close eye on the body count, as well as the deadliest characters – and it's Rick Grimes who has seen off the most named zombies, along with 14 humans.

"At a certain point the unrelenting glut of grief has a numbing effect on the audience," warns Joanna Robinson at Vanity Fair. "How many times can we watch a certain fan-favourite character nearly drown in a dog pile of zombies again before it starts to mean nothing?"

The "freshest angle the show can hope for in this repeating cycle of loss is a new audience proxy to capture our interest", she adds. The best candidate for season six is Dr Denise Cloyd, played by Nurse Jackie star Merritt Wever. She is "fantastic" here, says Robinson, veering from "paralyzing fear to jaw-clenching determination with little dialogue to help her get that point across".

Other critics were also impressed. Dominic Patten on Deadline Hollywood says The Walking Dead has "finally unleashed one of the most wrenching twists" of the series.

The show picks right up from where it left us at the end of the winter finale, he writes, "with explosive results and at great cost" as Negan's gang made their armed and threatening presence known, the core survivors remained scattered and a few of the residents of Alexandria unsuccessfully tried to slip past a group of walkers.

It might have been a little short on roses and chocolates, admits Alex Straker in The Independent, but the Valentine's Day show was "an adrenaline-fuelled hour that's bound to remind returning viewers why they fell in love with the series in the first place".

Whether the series will continue with this momentum for the next seven weeks remains to be seen, he adds. "But if things continue in this manner then The Walking Dead could well secure the mainstream recognition it deserves."