Is it time to end ‘The Walking Dead’ franchise once and for all?

At what point did the world finally end? The Walking Dead?

Was it when Negan turned Glenn and Abraham’s skulls into mashed potatoes with his bat five years ago onThe Walking Dead? When the series’ nominal leader Rick Grimes was lifted off by a chopper for parts unknown in Season 9? Madison and Nick were both killed in the series’ offshoot. Fear the Walking DeadWhat about a few lesser-known, but still important, charismatic characters? Morgan was forced to shoot Rufus, the zombie baby that was locked in a piece luggage in the current season.

Along with deciding it’s time to give up your land line, thaw out the freezer, or change your passwords, announcing that you’ve finally given up on theWalking Deadfranchise — and then not actually doing it — has become a twisted sort of national pastime. Anyone who’s stayed loyal to the franchise (not counting the current YA-orientedWorld Beyond) has long to deal with the inevitable questions from non-converts: “That show is still on?Why?”It was always easy to tick off a few reasons to stick with them, but it’s time to admit it: In the current 11th and final season of The Walking DeadAnd the seventh (and possibly not final) of FearThe thrill has almost gone. Both series are almost in tandem this year. FunIt’s a dark time Bleak-bleak. (Apparently, many are in agreement: Halloween nightFear 870,000 viewers viewed the video, about half the series’ ratings a year before, and the first batch of farewell episodes ofTheWalking Dead Around 2 million per week — not bad, but way down from the show’s peak of 17 million when Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan entered the picture.)

Many years ago, particularly the first decade of the last decade. Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking DeadThis was a simple but brutally important premise. Meanwhile, survivors of the zombie apocalypse run from one safe area to the next, often fighting each other or with villains they come across. (And sometimes, as when Rick and his posse slaughtered a bunch of Negan’s team with no provocation, those villains could BeThis added a fresh psychological angle to the show. You’d think the setup would have worn thin after a season or two, but credit TWD’s various showrunners for keeping the WTF twists coming and not merely adhering to the comic book’s plotlines. Unexpectedly, pivotal characters were sacrificed. Ingenious ways to kill zombies were also invented (the garbage compactor that transforms them into undead milkshakes!)).

These innovations now feel as old-fashioned as the first Obama presidency.TheWalking Dead2010 was the year that they arrived. Like walkers who weren’t sufficiently stabbed in the skull, the show kept coming back just when you thought it was over for good. Sometimes, it was a welcome return. Rick’s departure about a third of the way into the ninth season should have spelled the point of no return. But later during that run of episodes, the arrival of the Whisperers — who wore masks made from the flesh of the dead — added a chilling new baddie, Samantha Morton’s deranged Alpha; with her shaved head and scowl, she looked like Sinéad O’Connor gone crazy in the apocalypse. Despite the fact that many people saw it coming from the comics, the sighting of all the decapitated heads on poles in the same season was, um, executed. And earlier this year, Morgan’s Negan was finally given the back story we desperately craved: “Here’s Negan”He was one of the most interesting to explore the trauma that made him a warlord. TWDThe episodes are arranged chronologically.

Season 11 sees the series being dominated by the Reapers, a shadowy group of thugs. (Why do all these factions have names that sound like Sixties garage band bands?) As you can see, the Reapers were one of the lamest. TWDThe worst guys ever are perfunctory and hardly scary. Even Maggie (Lauren Cohan), returning champion and the new core of the show comes off as glum. The season is extremely murky and confusing because every scene appears to have been shot in semi-darkness. The Commonwealth is a community that appears to be quite normal. But as with previous such environs they encounter, there’s something creepy and fishy about it, and you know the “dark side of the Commonwealth”It’s right around the corner. You’re left to ponder the truly important questions: Why do so many of the rotters seem to wear frayed flannel shirts? They walked all the way from Seattle.

In Los Angeles was the original location. Fear the Walking DeadThe franchise was given a new location and backstory. The original film did not show the bizarre scenes in which the dead came back to life and how people reacted. Walking Dead. The series has seen some good and bad runs since then; credit to the season that was set at the Texas ranch soon to fall or to John Dorie (Garret Dallahunt), for introducing John Dorie, an ex-cop who is now suffering from torture. John was tragically killed in the wake of a murder mystery involving human beings. That arc demonstrated how effective the series can be when it grapples with more than just zombies but, again, Dorie’s grim death deprived us of another reason for watching.

Season Six concluded this past June. It featured a crazy cult leader named Teddy. John Glover played him like the star of Abraham Lincoln: Serial Killer.In the closing and most startling episode, FearTruly, Teddy did go there. He actually released a group of nuclear missiles still inactive from a submarine. As mushroom clouds rose around Texas, characters watched helplessly and were either incinerated immediately or taken cover in shelters.

For any other series, a scene like that would spell “finale.”But there is a better way. Fear’s seventh season, the survivors continue to dispense with zombies and scavenge for food — but now while wearing home-made Hazmat suits and trudging around in a sepia-toned post-nuclear winter. It is possible to make an otherwise oppressive, dreary situation more frightening. Continue reading oppressive, it’s the Fear crowd. The eternally conniving Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) is now the overlord of his own community, which means he’s destined to become the series equivalent of The Walking Dead‘s General. But given how feckless Strand has long been, that twist isn’It is not surprising at all, and the upcoming fight between him and Morgan Jones (Lennie James), already feels like an exhausting repeat.

It wasn’t always that way, of course. You could spend time with the end civilization in the first seasons of both series. How could it end? How can it be rebuilt? And how would you personally react to it? The constant stress can be overwhelming. You might ask yourself, “How would I handle it?” It would be simpler to stop the zombies from getting you? You might be able to ride a horse and fire a weapon, or build spiked fence posts to keep the zombies away.

But in light of ongoing climate disasters and daily apocalyptic news on nearly every front, the demented thrill of watching a dying world doesn’t seem so thrilling anymore. Even if zombies aren’t in our foreseeable future, watching these series — and their depictions of people being forced to do whatever it takes to survive in a world that no longer resembles anything from their pasts — now feels like it may be like to watch the news in 2045. One of the most recent episodes. FearMorgan and Grace, a new couple, are heading to another safe area far from nuclear fallout with the baby they saved. But it’s all getting to Grace, who tells Morgan it will “take a lot longer and be a hell of a lot more painful.”This feeling is shared by all of us now.