Telltale’s The Walking Dead has been delivering the goods with its final season. The choices have been difficult, the characters and relationships have been interesting, and the story has consistently been compelling. Now the final episode has been released and Clementine’s story has come to a satisfying end.
Since this is the final episode, there’s not too much I can say about the story of the episode without getting into spoilers so I’m not going to say much past the initial setup for the episode. It picks up immediately after the end of the previous episode’s explosive cliffhanger (quite literally explosive), as Clementine and AJ do what they can to try and make it back to the school with their friends after their attack on Lilly’s group of raiders. Because this is The Walking Dead though, nothing is ever as easy as you would like it to be, so their journey ends up being fraught with danger in many forms.
This episode continues to put a strong emphasis on Clementine and AJ’s relationship, and it absolutely shines here. Every decision that you’ve made so far this season for him and in front of him comes to a head in a heated discussion between the two of you as you’re forced to come to terms with everything you’ve been teaching him, whether it be directly or indirectly. This conversation was a high point of the episode for me, as well as the season, because it made me truly worried for AJ’s well being more than ever before. From the start I had been trying to keep this child who’s never known a world or life without walkers as safe and smart as possible, while at the same time teaching him right from wrong in this harsh world. Talking with him in that moment had a big impact on me and made me genuinely wonder if I had done a good job teaching him.
The other characters that we’ve gotten to know throughout the season do get some time to shine in the episode as well, but they definitely take a back seat to Clementine and AJ in the finale. You really only see the majority of them at the start of the episode as everyone tries to escape the boat, and at the end. There are a few others that you interact with in the middle, but even those interactions don’t take center stage from Clem and AJ. That’s not that big a deal though because the core duo is the one that I care about the most, so I was more than happy to have the cast be drastically reduced for this final episode in order for Clem and AJ to get the attention that they wholeheartedly deserve.
The one character that I wish there was a bit more of in this episode was Lilly. In the previous episode, you were faced with killing her or letting her live. I chose to let her live, so she survived into this episode. It was a little disappointing though that there wasn’t that much of her. I was expecting her to be more of a focus in this episode given how big she had been built up, so her not having a bigger part was a surprise.
One other thing that I wasn’t too hot on this episode was a flashback sequence that happens near the end of the episode. It was surprising and came out of nowhere, and that I don’t have a problem with at all. What the flashback was about though was something that I actually thought would be shown much earlier in the season, so its placement was odd to me. It popping up when it did was a shock and ended up causing me to not really care all that much about it when it happened, even though it was kinda cool. Had this happened earlier in the season, I would’ve cared way more about this flashback.
As for how things wrap up, the story comes to an emotional and satisfying end, but I feel like it could’ve been even stronger than it ended up being had things ended a different way. This is something that I can see people taking issue with, and understandably so. It’s difficult to explain without spoiling how the game wraps up, but it’s something that you’ll understand once you finish the game. Even with the game’s ending not being as good as it could’ve been, I didn’t care because it still ended in such a nice way that I was able to overlook the issue and be happy with the ending on its own.
The Walking Dead: The Final Season had a big task that it had to achieve. It had to introduce us to new characters and make us care about them; it had to make the relationship between Clementine and AJ a deep and complicated one that was also believable; above all else, it had to provide closure to Clementine’s story. We’ve been following her for years now and we needed to get a ending for her that was a good way to say goodbye to the character and the world. After Telltale’s unexpected closure, this final season also had to be a strong sendoff for the popular studio.
This season fired on all cylinders in every department, doing all of the above necessary things for success. Even with the issues that the final episode had, it didn’t cause me to enjoy this final episode any less than I did the previous ones. The issues that are present actually ended up being relatively minor issues in the grand scheme of things for me because of how well done everything else was. It’s tough to say goodbye to Clementine and Telltale Games, but they both went out on a high note.
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