The Walking Dead Season Finale Review: The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (Season 7 Episode 16)

For about 45 minutes (including commercials), The Walking Dead Season 7 Episode 16, “The First Day of the Rest of Your Life,” is a lot of talking, planning, and flashback-ing.

Then for about 10 minutes, there’s some negotiating and a brief skirmish.

And then a tiger mauls at least two people, the junkyard people disappear in puff clouds of smoke like supervillains, and Negan escapes while giving everyone the finger.

All of that, of course, takes place in a span of about 5 to 15 minutes, leaving just enough time to wrap things up with a few quick scenes and a monologue from Maggie that’s kind of nice, but maybe a little cheesy.

So The Walking Dead viewers endured episode after episode of tedious build-up during Season 7 and in the end, they got a few minutes of action and the promise of the start of a war. You’ll just have to wait until October for it to really start.

Even if you ignore the frustrating season that precedes it, “The First Day of the Rest of Your Life” is still a poorly paced, unnecessarily long episode.

Part of that is due to a number of Sasha flashbacks throughout the episode.

This is, as many people suspected, the last episode for Sasha, and the writers turn it into a grand send-off for her.

The problem is that Sasha spends most of the episode slowly dying in a coffin after poisoning herself with a pill from Eugene, which doesn’t exactly give her much to do.

So we watch Sasha, in her final living moments, relive her last day with Abraham. As nice as it is to see Abraham again, the memories sort of sully things in retrospect.

Sasha had a dream that Abraham died just hours before he actually died? Come on.

I guess it’s realistic that someone living in the zombie apocalypse might have a nightmare about their significant other dying, but adding those flashbacks when we know Abraham is about to head out on his final mission is so overly dramatic.

I kept hoping that something would happen during the flashbacks or that Abraham would say something to indicate that these weren’t Sasha’s actual memories, but a dream she was having in the present or some kind of daydream of a conversation she wished had happened before he died.

The scenes also drag the finale down. It’s understandable that they wanted to give Sasha more screentime on her final episode, but these flashbacks might have fit more nicely into “Something They Need,” when viewers were questioning whether she would join Negan or not.

Setting the flashbacks aside for a moment, Negan is right when he says no one wants to watch Sasha die, and thankfully, we don’t have to watch another series regular meet a grisly end.

Even though she doesn’t get to go out fighting, it’s still a satisfying ending for the character. She knows (or at least hopes) her death will help keep her friends safe, and she gets to go out on her own terms.

Two additional scenes contribute to the odd pacing of the episode — one showing Carol and the rest of the Kingdom on their way to Alexandria, and one showing Maggie, Jesus, and Enid discussing their plan at the Hilltop.

They’re thrown in because we need to know they’re coming so they don’t show up out of nowhere in the big action sequence, but like the Sasha flashback scenes, these scenes feel like they could have fit somewhere in a different episode.

It’s hard to judge finales as standalone episodes since they’re meant to reflect on and tie up the entire season, and the Season 7 finale in particular suffers partially because of the pacing of the past few episodes. It’s easy to imagine that if just those few things had been able to fit in earlier episodes, the finale could have been tighter and maybe a little more exciting.

It also falls short on the twists fans have come to expect from Walking Dead season finales. The junkyard people’s betrayal is a bit of a surprise, but it’s not that shocking, and neither is Sasha’s death, since many fans know Sonequa Martin-Green was cast in Star Trek: Discovery.

The short fire fight provides a little taste of the action that The Walking Dead has been lacking this year, but it is a short fight, and it brings things right back to the season premiere.

Negan threatens to kill Carl and bludgeon Rick’s hands, similar to the threats he made on “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be.”

On the season premiere, the scene was intense and stressful. Even if you didn’t believe they would actually kill off Rick or Carl, you still felt like something terrible could actually happen.

On the season finale, the threats don’t seem believable in the slightest. After this past season, we know our protagonists need to come out of the finale with a win, which means the stakes don’t seem that high. Instead of being on the edge of your seat when Negan makes his threats, you’re just waiting for the cavalry to arrive, because you know it will.

The writers may have wanted to avoid another cliffhanger after the angry response to the Season 6 finale, but instead they gave fans an underwhelming finale.

I’ve said this at the end of a few Season 7 episodes, and hopefully this will be the last time I say it: now that that’s out of the way, maybe things can finally get moving.

But we’ll just have to wait until The Walking Dead Season 8 to see if that’s true.

 

What did you think of the season finale? What did you think of Season 7 as a whole? Share with us in the comments below!

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The Walking Dead Season 8 will premiere in October on AMC.

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