‘The Walking Dead: World Beyond’ Season 1 Finale Review: Finally It Gets Good

Well it took its sweet time getting here, but The Walking Dead: World Beyond is finally a show worth watching. In fact, the two-part season finale was so good it actually makes the rest of the season better in retrospect.

Much of this rests on the big twist—Huck, we discover in the penultimate episode (prior to the two-part finale) is a mole. She’s Kublek’s daughter and she’s been sent on a mission to bring the “asset” back to the CRM. The asset is Hope, a child prodigy who the CRM wants to use to help bring back civilization and end the zombie plague.

I admit, while I thought the season finale was mostly very good (and the past few episodes quite a lot better than the first half of the season) I do have a bit of a problem with the premise.

Huck (whose real name is Jennifer) is sent to the Campus Colony as a mole by her mother, the commander of the Civic Republic’s military. She has a cover story. She joins the security team. Her job is to convince Hope to come back with her to the CRM headquarters to join her father. Things don’t go as planned—she was hoping that Iris would try to talk Hope out of going, and just she and Huck would make the arduous journey across country together without other companions—and ultimately Huck has to separate Hope from the rest of the group through various and increasingly horrible means.

But why couldn’t they just invite Hope to join them? Give her a chance to see her father without all the trickery and subterfuge? Both girls wanted to be reunited with their dad. It turns out the messages he was sending them were completely benign, no warnings or fears that his life was in danger. Why change these to cast suspicion on the CRM when they could have simply come over and said “Hope, we’d like you to come work with your dad.” They created enemies and adversaries instead of just . . . recruits.

Then there’s the destruction of the Campus Colony and the wiping out of all those bright minds. If Kublek and the CRM really only want Hope because she’s a genius, why are they wiping out an entire colony devoted to learning? All those bright minds snuffed out overnight. It makes no sense. Either they’re lying about why they want Hope, or there’s some serious plot holes here.

The twist was very good and very unexpected. Everything around Huck’s deception was fantastic. She plays her hand too hard with Iris, but it turns out she does that on purpose, to sow doubt and division. It’s just that it backfires and Hope realizes that there’s something up with the map. She decodes the message contained in it from the CRM to Huck and realizes she’s been double-crossed. So she leaves with Huck in the dead of night, knowing for sure when she agrees to go that she’s working for the CRM.

Hope’s plan is to get Huck away from the others and then take her out, but it doesn’t work that way. Huck talks her down by telling her that if they kill her, the CRM will just come for her anyways, and that the only way to keep her sister and her friends safe is to come willingly. So she does.

When Felix and Iris realize that Huck is a traitor (Huck told Iris a room was full of bodies; it was full of medical supplies instead) they repair the truck and track them down. Felix isn’t so easily convinced and he and Huck get into a pretty epic brawl in a burning down house. It’s one of the best fights I’ve seen in any Walking Dead show. I wasn’t sure who would win, and wouldn’t have been surprised if either Felix or Huck kicked the bucket.

In the end, just when Huck is about to kill her old friend, Hope threatens to blow her own brains out. It’s a clever move. She also agrees to go with Huck, though not before telling her sister that together they’ll find a way to take down the CRM.

Elsewhere, Elton is struggling with the revelations Hope dished his way the week before. He now knows that his mother killed Hope and Iris’s mom and that Hope killed his mother as retribution. He’s not even angry at Hope—she was just a kid, after all—but he is angry at his mother. He rips pages from her manuscript, tossing them away in anger, an action he quickly regrets.

He gathers the pages, but one keeps blowing further and further away. He follows it and finds a streak of blood. It’s Percy. “How did you find me?” he chokes out, clearly afraid, before fainting. Elton drags his bloodied body away, up onto a wide, green hill.

One of World Beyond’s most interesting segments plays out next. Elton has a conversation with Percy, but a couple minutes in we realize that it’s all just in his head. Percy is a figment of his imagination. The real Percy is still unconscious.

Elton examines the wound. “Look at that, it’s a bullet wound,” Percy says over his shoulder (or something to that effect). It wasn’t Silas with his wrench, after all. Zombies appear at the bottom of the long, sloping hill, shambling slowly toward them.

Imaginary Percy urges Elton to run, to leave his body to the dead. Save yourself, he tells him. It’s a big, beautiful world out there. Go live a little. Percy’s a goner.

He almost talks himself into running away. Almost, but not quite. “No,” Elton says, screwing his courage to the sticky place. He turns to fight.

It’s kind of a funny fight. He knocks one zombie down, ties the legs of two others together so they topple (kind of like how they took down the AT-ATs on Hoth in Empire Strikes Back) and then manages to kill the last one. These kids are just terrible when it comes to zombie killing, though they’ve shown some improvement since the beginning of the season. (They still make stupid mistakes, like Hope letting a zombie she knew was coming get all the way up to her from behind and almost snuffing it as a result).

Elton manages to get Percy to safety and tries to walkie-talkie for help. This who has walkie-talkies but uses them far, far more sparingly than Fear The Walking Dead, so it really doesn’t bother me. He radios for help at the same time Huck radios the CRM to tell them she has the asset. This is just before Hope reveals that she knows the truth and pulls Felix’s gun (which she stole) on Huck.

Just as Elton is telling Huck where they are, Percy wakens and grabs the walkie-talkie. “She’s the one that shot me,” he growls. Elton pales.

They carry on, finally coming to where Silas is hiding out. He accidentally started a fire and Elton comes to the smoke. I like how they set this up so that it makes sense for Elton to find Silas. In Fear The Walking Dead they just have people show up in the nick of time for no reason. Morgan just teleports to wherever he’s needed most at any given time basically. World Beyond is much better when it comes to attention to detail. In fact, it’s better than the main show in this regard, weirdly enough. I’d say this season, while slow to start, has been one of the better of any Walking Dead show in the last few years, once you get past the slow burn and if you can ignore the sappy stuff. More on that in a minute.

Elton and Percy meet up with Silas and reveal that he isn’t the one who killed Tony and wounded Percy. He was set up by Huck who is clearly working with the CRM. They need to go find the others and warn them. They just don’t know how or where to go.

Things get worse. Elton wasn’t the only one who saw the smoke. Soon, several CRM trucks filled with security guards show up. They try to run, but Percy is still bleeding everywhere. The CRM forces will track them down sooner or later. So Silas decides to be a hero once again, cutting his hand to make it look like he’s the one bleeding, and then turning himself over to the enemy so that Percy and Elton can get away. It’s a noble sacrifice, and hopefully it doesn’t turn out too badly for him—though I doubt this means lights out for Silas.

Still, Kublek is ruthless. She has no patience for loose ends. She’s not going to leave Felix and Iris alone either, despite what Huck told Hope (and she wasn’t lying, she truly thought she could keep them safe by bringing in Hope). Kublek, we discover, hasn’t told Huck about what happened at Campus Colony—something her daughter will almost certainly be horrified by, and rightfully so.

All told, this was a great season finale that’s really revived my hope for this show and its second (and final) season. They just saved most of the good stuff for the last few episodes, and the season finale in particular.

There’s way too much of the cloying, emotional stuff still, and I hope they tone that way down in Season 2. It’s not that I don’t want emotional character building stuff here, it’s just that it’s always so ham-fisted and saccharine. By all means, have some conversations about your feelings. Just leave out the speechy crap, the motivational platitudes, the “you go girl” nonsense. Iris said something about “that’s how we find our purpose” which, I’m sorry, but this isn’t how real people talk. I still have problems with Iris. She was right about Huck and helped prompt Hope figure out the truth, but she’s just an irritating character.

I think a film like Stand By Me could be a very good model for what to do here. The boys in that movie have some incredibly moving, emotional moments. Those moments, however, are couched between crude humor, butting heads and so forth. The emotional beats work well because they’re rare and intense.

Less is more, as the saying goes. I’d like to see Season 2 of this show do a little less exposition, less narration, and more showing instead of telling. I’ve grown fond of most of the characters. Hope, despite getting kind of ridiculous for a couple episodes, turned out to be an even better character than I thought. And I love Elton, who is such a heroic character, with such big ideas and sturdy morals. He’s someone you want to root for. So is Silas, the underdog.

I admit, I enjoy a little heroism in this series. The Walking Dead is often so bleak, with so few likable characters. Fear The Walking Dead, meanwhile, has given us way too much of the “we need to help people to make up for our past sins” instead of just genuine heroism, like saving Percy because he believes that’s what he’s meant to do. Or Silas saving his friends because they’re his friends. Or Felix on his bad leg—slashed secretly by Huck during a fight with zombies to take him out of the picture—fighting Huck to protect the girls.

Elsewhere, we have more of Felix’s backstory including how he met his boyfriend, William/Bill, someone we’ve heard about but never seen before the season finale. We discover that Felix really wanted to go with Dr. Bennett (the girls’ dad) to help protect him, but Bennett wanted Felix to stay and protect his daughters. Bennett, we learn, has been like a father to Felix. But it’s William who goes to protect him, and Felix isn’t happy about this at first, despite knowing that he’s doing it for him. It’s Dr. Bennett who makes Felix realize he’s being petty, though in the end we discover that William is in danger, and has to escape the CRM when they try to take him out. In the end, Felix and Iris stumble across William and a group of rebels hiding out in the forest like Robin Hood and his Merry Men. The Resistance.

The final subplot in this rather sprawling two-part season finale focuses on Leo Bennett and his colleague and lover, Dr. Lyla Bellshaw. They’ve been romantically involved for some time, and while it’s clear that Bellshaw has genuine feelings for Bennett, she’s also been spying on him for the CRM and lying to him about a whole host of things, including the plot to bring Hope to the CRM. There’s a whole scene with her practicing the speech she’s going to give to him about these lies, about how it was her reports to the CRM that made them spin up this whole plot to bring in Hope.

When the time comes, she can’t do it. She can’t tell him the truth. And it’s too bad, because moments later he tells her that he is starting to have his doubts about the CRM. The other doctor’s sudden disappearance—how does she know that it was really about a sick sister back home? How does she know that his security detail is just delayed and that something more nefarious isn’t going on? He wants to find out, but he’s going to need her help.

Little does he know, she’s the enemy. And now they’ll know he’s been compromised. Time may be short for Dr. Bennett. We’ll see in the second, and final, season.

I sometimes feel like I’m watching two shows when I watch World Beyond. There’s a very good zombie show about a group of quirky teens going on an impossible mission to save the sisters’ dad and uncover mysteries about the CRM and the apocalypse itself. This show is filled with interesting characters, exciting twists and a ruthless enemy.

In the other show, we have sappy dialogue, cheesy teen drama and weird character conflicts that don’t make sense. This show drags down the other with bad pacing and too many shots of people crying or almost crying.

But overall, I’m pleased with the direction World Beyond eventually took. Unlike Fear, which has gotten worse and worse as its sixth season drags on, World Beyond got better and better and is now, without doubt, the better of the two shows. In some ways, I like it even more than The Walking Dead, which suffers from a sprawling cast, too many communities and a general sense that it’s just dragged on far too long and lost too many of its best characters along the way. At least World Beyond has a small cast of mostly interesting and likable characters. I want to know what happens to Silas and Hope, to Elton and Iris and Felix and even Huck, whose turn to the Dark Side is far from certain even still. What happens when she learns the truth about the Campus Colony? Something tells me she’ll be even more unhappy than Barca.

And some scenes—the whole Huck-becomes-traitor sequence, the Elton-talks-to-imaginary-Percy sequence—are genuinely among the best in any of these shows, especially in recent years.

Clearly I’ve gone from almost bored to tears to pretty invested in this story and its characters, and while I would prefer a season that roped me in from the get-go, I’m happy we’ve at least gotten to this point.

Scattered Thoughts:

• Felix really gets the short end of the stick over and over again. The show continues to fail him as a character, and introduces this whole “control freak” concept with William that just . . . doesn’t work. How is he a control freak? If they’d made him more controlling throughout the season, or throughout flashbacks that began sooner than Episode 9, okay. But he’s a pretty trusting dude, and doesn’t see Huck coming.
• I like that the show finally stopped being so self-serious even if it was just at the end. The stick shift scene was hilarious. The fight was badass and over-the-top. Go crazy, World Beyond. Embrace the campy fun stuff and please for the love of god tone down all the “We can save the world!” nonsense. Less moping, less emoting, more action! (And if you’re going to focus on emotional stuff, keep using clever scenes like Elton and imaginary Percy.)
• Still lots and lots of bad dialogue despite this being so much stronger than previous episodes. “I wish I had a map to figure you out” is a little on the nose as a prompt to make Hope decode the map.

What did you think of the Season 1 finale? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.