The Walking Dead: World Beyond Season Two (2020) Review
Picking up where the first series left off, it concludes the epic story of Iris (Aliyah Royale – The Red Line, War Paint), her rebellious adopted sister Hope (Alexa Mansour – Unfriended: Dark Wed, Loco Love), the intellectual Elton Ortiz (Nicolas Cantu – The Good Place, The Powerpuff Girls) and the mysterious Silas Plaskett (Hal Cumpston – Bilched, Nine Perfect Strangers) – four friends who journeyed across the country on a mission that transformed everything they knew about themselves and the world.
As they face off against the mysterious Civic Republic Military and fight for control of their own destiny, goals will shift, bonds will form and crumble, and innocence will be both lost and found…
It must be a year ago now that I was introduced to the delights of this Walking Dead spin-off, and I was less than enamoured. It was a bit too twee, a bit too ‘light’ and well, a bit too formulaic American TV. Fortunately, those behind ‘World Beyond’, the second spin-off from the popular zombie franchise, had decided in advance that this was only going to run for two seasons, and here it is, the finale.
Fans of this series are not going to need any convincing to shell out their hard-earned cash, which kind of makes reviewing it a bit of a moot point. By now, folks are going to know whether they are fans of the series or not. I’m unlikely to convert anyone new over to its drab coming-of-age drama set against a zombie apocalypse scenario or change the mind of those that are hooked already. As it goes, I found this much as before, slow, by-the-numbers and rather lazy.
There’s a nifty recap at the start of episode one so that folks get a handy reminder of what happened before, before the main story arc picks off again. As before the pacing is sluggish and grinds things down when the onscreen happenings scream out for a bit more ‘oomph’. And as before, our teen adventurers are dispersed meaning that a straightforward story is stretch out needlessly as we focus on their individual plights.
Julia Ormond normally brings gravitas to her performances, but like everyone else, here they are simply going through the motions rather than giving us memorable performances or even memorable TV. Given that the core group are youngsters it’s fair to say, as I probably did when reviewing Season One, that as a middle-aged man, that I am NOT the audience demographic that it’s aimed at, so it shouldn’t come as much as a surprise that I failed to engage with it.