Coming into the last chapter of the final season I was sure Clem was going to die. It made the most sense to me. It’s the only real ending for a character in the Walking Dead world. Everything that has come before has taught me that in this world any thing like safety or happiness is fleeting. I expected Clem to die. I tried to prepare myself for it. I thought I was ready, and when it (kinda) happened I was devastated.
It felt right for all the reasons I mentioned above. There was a nice symmetry between her death and Lee’s. It was even foreshadowed subtly and not so subtly. Then, it happened. I was sure she was dead, but I couldn’t stop hoping she was alive…and she was!! I can’t spell the noise I made when I saw her up and on crutches. The only thing I would have changed about the final chapter is that I would have ended the game in control of Clementine not AJ. After four games she’s really one of the best characters I’ve ever gotten to play, and it was a little disappointing for her to end her final game as an NPC.
Oh one more thing a little more about reality than the game…
Walking down that final hallway with all the names of the TTG team on the walls, knowing that they’d never make another game might have been the most emotional part of the whole thing.
If I’m to be honest, I was a little disappointed with the ending of the story. It felt like fan service, and kinda broke everything the world had built up.
Incoming spoilers:
When Clementine was fighting Minnie, and she had blood spit in her face? Wouldn’t that have infected her? Minnie was covered in zombie bites. I’ll give it a pass.
So what about her leg? She gets her leg either bitten or cut, which she later has AJ amputate. Sure, that’s fine, right? Except she was bitten for two hours or so, the infection would’ve already spread past the wound. Well… maybe not, right? Okay, how do you explain her leg getting amputated by an axe covered in walker blood, by a person covered in walker guts? It’s just so lazy… They could’ve shown AJ cleaning the axe, or… something, but he doesn’t. He smears her leg in walker blood, the very thing that should’ve killed her. Then he, a seven year old boy, managed to carry a 19 year old girl out of a barn surrounded by walkers. He managed to escape, but ALSO find some way to stop the bleeding in her leg with no prior medical knowledge. Maybe Clementine could’ve told him what to do, but even Lee passed out from amputating his own arm.
The ending felt rushed, and fanservice-y. It’s not like they had to hire new writers, they had the same writers from Telltale to finish the final episode.
As much as I hate to say it, Clementine should’ve died. They either shouldn’t have put her in that situation, or they should’ve let her die from her wound and AJ’s incompetence.
As far as having blood spit or splashed on her I think we can forgive them that not causing an infection because its established in TWD world that everyone is already infected with the zombie disease. But you’re 100% right about the late leg amputation thing not making sense. Lee amputated his arm right away and didn’t make it. Beyond that, it just makes thematic sense for Clem to die. In the moment though, I was so glad she lived.
The zombies are the classic slow walking Romero style zombies, which originated in Night of the Living Dead. Following classic Romero-rules, everyone who dies, for any reason, will re-animate as a zombie. Even someone killed by a gunshot wound with no zombies involved at all will re-animate as a zombie. Zombie bites are not how the “infection” is spread. Instead, zombie bites and saliva cause infections that are 100% lethal. Characters have speculated, but cannot confirm, that whatever causes zombies to re-animate is some sort of virus that everyone in the world is technically infected with but is only triggered by death. It is known, however, that upon death, it can take anytime between three minutes and eight hours for the corpse to reanimate.
So we know that saliva and/or bites cause infections. Spitting in someone’s face would likely lead to the activation of the zombie virus, otherwise how would the bites really activate it? I guess nothing is certain with blood transmission, but Negan pulled a tactic of smearing arrows and bullets with zombie blood to infect Alexandrians, and it worked. The game follows the comics, which he did do in that, so… idk. Kirkman isn’t really good with his lore.
Was anyone else tired of James’ bullshit and wanted to hit him upside the head with a big stick ? Also I do agree about the axe probably having infected blood on it should have made the situation worse.
I trusted AJ, so when the time came he shot Tenn in order to save Louis’ life. I’m glad I did it even though I loved Tenn! I’m also sad that James didn’t join our group after all. He’s still alive in my playthrough though so I’m going to headcanon that he does someday!
Re: the ending. I don’t usually fuss over the ‘logistics’ of infection simply because a zombie apocalypse requires suspension of disbelief as is. Shifting lore or facts is palatable enough, for me, because really none of the characters themselves know anything about the virus beyond what a CDC researcher talks about in season 1 of the show, which is a different universe from the comics and game anyway. And whatever Kirkman says (or what fans guess at) is liable to change over the last 16 years since he started the comic. My answers about a WIP change all the time according to need or impulse, so I’m willing to give it some leeway.
Although AJ’s cutting off of Clem’s leg to save her strains credulity, I was glad of it. When the ending was cycling back to her dying in the exact same way Lee did, I was pretty upset. So much foreshadowed it, and I felt the narrative ‘point’ of her dying that way was nihilistic and depressing: that none of our choices mattered in the end, that none of her actions or her struggles to teach AJ mattered or had an impact, that her journey was always going to end in death, and that every character who told her that she was going to get killed protecting AJ was right. That there was a sense of inescapable inevitability in the zombie apocalypse. It just felt like one big fatalistic ‘fate’ that we had no choice but to fulfill, which defeated the purpose of the story being one of choice.
So the fact that Telltale/Skybound subverted this was the best way for the series to go out, in my opinion. While I agree the details could have been tidied to be more believable, I don’t think the ending was fanservicey in that they let Clem live solely for the happiness of the fans. What would have been the point of her (and our) journey for her to die like that? It would only impress upon us that AJ, then, would later pass the torch to someone else and die protecting them, just as Lee did for her and she did for AJ, and it would just be this meaningless and doomed cycle. I’m glad that they broke the cycle, and I’m glad that they gave our girl some peace at last: to let us and her know that everything she went through was worth it.
Whelp. I just started ep 4…i have been putting it off until I needed a good cry. Also I just didnt want it to end. The mourning process has officially begun.
Also - I am like 15 min in and James can already eat several bags of d’s…glad I wasnt into him because F that dude!!!
I get James for feeling that way especially seeing how AJ basically unloads the whole gun into Lilly if he is allowed to.
Also, If you tell James that “You can’t force it on people.” (it being his ideaology), he actually does reconsider and pulls out two knives, ready to take on the walkers and tells AJ, Tenn and Clem to leave. She thanks him and he tells her to be safe and he walks into the horde with knives out and it goes to black. It’s confirmed that he survives it too, so yeah James and Clem can depart on good terms. He was being a bit too much, but I get that he didn’t wanna see a kid go to the dark side.
The mourning process has officially begun.