Midway through the finale of The Walking Dead’s second season, the remaining survivors sit around a campfire and talk about the world they came from, and the one they all hope to be heading towards. It should be a nice moment for the characters to catch their breath and sum up the relationships that the season has built up…but it’s a little off. The conversations here serve to remind the player that these characters aren’t particularly well drawn, that their relationships to each other haven’t been developed with much nuance.

As I watched this play out, occasionally contributing dialog choices that added little to my understanding of Clementine’s journey throughout the series, I realised that I had no idea where this episode was going…not because it was unpredictable, but because I hadn’t cared enough to think about it, and because the season hadn’t really established a clear arc. The major themes felt played out, the character beats were overly obvious, and there was no sense that Clementine’s actions had led to this moment. I thought back on the decisions I had made in the prior four episodes, and realised I had forgotten most of them.



Perhaps the problem is that the season, at some point in the last episode or so, seems to have stopped caring so much about Clementine and decided that the white beardy anger-pit that is Kenny should be the finale’s focus. To some degree this makes sense – Kenny’s relationship with Clementine is the only remaining one that has spanned both seasons - but his character has turned into a rather one-note symbol for Jane’s insistence that you can’t trust anyone in this new world. By this point the series has killed so many characters that individual deaths have stopped having much meaning, and the series leans on this friendship because it doesn’t have much else left to lean on…but this comes at the expense of Clementine’s characterisation. Every second conversation in the episode is about how Kenny is broken, and Kenny can’t be trusted. For most of this episode I felt like I was sitting back and watching someone else’s story, waiting for the game to involve me or to get a sense of how my actions had shaped Clementine.

The writing is just a little dull in this finale. It’s repetitive for those who have been there from the beginning, the dilemmas and betrayals and character beats are no longer shocking or unexpected, and it’s increasingly weird how everyone demands Clementine act as arbiter and saviour at all times. The game tells you that her actions are important, but never really makes you feel it in this final chapter.

It leads to a good conclusion, at least. Without spoiling anything, the final moments throw up a single difficult (if somewhat rote, at this point) choice, and the final scene I got on my playthrough was lovely. Although season 3 has been announced, this feels like the closing of a chapter. It’s not necessarily an ending that reflects what I did throughout the season, but it did, at least, seem to hinge heavily on the last two big decisions I made. In the end though, I’m not sure that what I did had any impact on who Clementine was, or how things panned out. I ended the first season feeling as though I had made a series of gestures that said something about my faith in humanity. The end of this season made me feel like an observer rather than a participant.



The second season of The Walking Dead has had highpoints, but in the end it can’t match up against the first season. While individual episodes worked well, the series arrived at a conclusion that it hadn’t really bothered to build up to, and the last episode falls a bit flat as a result. It’s very well directed and staged, and manages to include a few tense moments and a lovely ending, but it’s not exciting or heartbreaking the way the first season was. There are enough plot points left dangling to indicate that the third season will follow up on the first two, but if the folks at Telltale are smart they’ll shift the focus to a new protagonist and really think about what made the first season work.

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James “Jickle” O’Connor is a freelance games critic, journalist and occasional editor, based in South Australia. His favourite game of all time is The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and he is absurdly, comically rubbish at most fighting games (except for Killer Instinct on the SNES, which was, incidentally, the first game he ever owned). He has huge soft spots for point and click adventure games, third-person shooters, and Deus Ex.

Recent articles by James:

• Valiant Hearts: The Great War Review
  
• The Wolf Among Us: Episode 5 - Cry Wolf Review
  
• The Walking Dead Season 2 Episode 4: Amid the Ruins Review

Find and follow him on Twitter - @jickle.