The Walking Dead Season 5 Episode 8: Mid Season Finale 'Coda'
November 30, 2014

So sorry all. There's been a cable issue on my block since last Wednesday and it's been messing my Internet up. A technician fixed it on Sunday and then it rained so I lost my connection after I had written about 750 words on this recap. Unfortunately, I closed the browser by accident and so I lost it entirely. While I have a few minutes before it dies again, here are a few thoughts on the mid-season finale.

I really liked this season, but I did not enjoy "Coda." Let me explain. I'm writing this without knowing anything about the comic books. First of all, it was leaked online that somebody was going to die before the episode started so throughout the weekend and the episode I was thinking who was going to die instead of letting the story unfold. It wasn't hard to figure out that Beth had been given her pink slip by the writers and that chapped me as well. They took pains to finally develop her character into an impressive young woman during her time with Daryl at the end of the fourth season (413) and then dropped her out of the picture until episode 504, Slabtown, where we find that she was kidnapped and taken to a hospital in Atlanta. Then they developed her a bit more as she struggled in forced servitude to survive in the confines of Officer Dawn's Grady Memorial Hospital and she did so admirably. But in the end, just as everything was going to be resolved with her and Carol getting out alive, she couldn't live with her hatred of Dawn, her involvement in the murder of Officer O'Donnell and the treatment of Noah so she chose to literally kill herself by trying to kill Dawn?

Sorry writers, I didn't buy it because you never really developed the hospital or it's society of survivors very much outside of a handful of people, Dawn's monotonous monologues aside. There had to be many others living within its walls for this constant power struggle between officer Dawn and the rest of the police staff to be so volatile. So it left me feeling that since the writers pretty much ignored Maggie, (who never mentioned her sister's name) they wanted to give her something to work with in February.

I'll add more later....

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