I'm not dropping the show because Nick died. I'm dropping the show because the character that died in 4x03 wasn't Nick.
Don't get me wrong, his name was Nick, and he certainly looked like the Nick I watched for 3 seasons, but it wasn't him. It was a completely different character.
Throughout seasons 1-3 Nick was characterised as being charismatic and (most importantly) fearless. He was the guy that would go outside into the "real world" just for fun, or even because he preferred it out there to in a camp. He was the guy that discovered the walker-blood trick to travel safely, and he can literally be quoted as saying the phrase "I didn't feel fear, I knew I wasn't going to die" (I'm paraphrasing lol)
Cut to season 4, and this guy "Nick" is a completely different character. He's gone from being fearless to being paralysed with fear, with literally no explanation in between. What's the point in even including the old Fear characters if they're literally unrecognisable as their old selves? It's not just this, Nick has lost all of his nuance. Remember he's supposed to be an addict? I think Gimple might have forgotten that (if he ever knew). Nick was also really good with kids (we see this in season 2) But in season 4 he feels incredibly awkward talking to that brat ass kid that eventually killed him.
Maybe we'll see this development in flashbacks, but for me that's not good enough. Because now we know it's all pointless, it's all building to an unsatisfying death that needed to invoke beautiful imagery (a field of flowers) in order to have any emotional punch. Remember the deaths of season 3? There was no pretty imagery there to tell us "you should be sad now", because the deaths had purpose, they felt earned. Again, maybe we'll get the build up in flashbacks (We all know how much Gimple loves his flashbacks, even if he has to ruin the structure and emotion of the show to do it), but that's the lazy, rushed way of doing it.
This is exactly what I was worried about when they announced the time-jump and the new writing team. That the characters would lose every bit of complexity that made them interesting for the first three seasons, because this new writing team has never written for these characters before. And don't get me wrong, there were ways to do Nicks death well - ways I would have congratulated them for. But this wasn't one of them, because he feels like a completely different character.
This feels like a completely different show, essentially. Which is exactly what I was worried about.
Submitted April 30, 2018 at 09:34AM by MircallaBlue https://ift.tt/2JHFj7s
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