How I Met Your Terminus

Oh dearie me what a finale! The brain trust (tee hee) behind ‘The Walking Dead” don’t disappoint unless you were looking for some major character deaths in this episode. According to ‘The Walking Dead” creator Robert Kirkman though, that was a calculated move to avoid the trap of becoming formulaic in always killing off major characters near or at the end of seasons.

Where I most emphatically believe they didn’t disappoint is in how much of Terminus they revealed to us in this episode albeit on the run with Rick and the gang. Executive Producer Scott M. Gimple plays Century 21 realtor and leads us on a open house of several thousand square feet of prime railroad connected real estate (location, location, location) and shows us part of this “sanctuary.” Here are some of the amenities I noticed during this open house besides the obvious lack of curb appeal of Terminus.

1. Could they have picked a creepier sounding lady to DJ the drive-time hour of Radio Terminus? I don’t think so. She sounds like something that if I heard it at 3am in the morning all of a sudden I’d piss the bed. “Sanctuary for all. Community for all. Those who arrive, survive”  has to be right up there with “All work and no play, make Jack a very dull boy” in the creeptastic pantheon of famous movie/TV show phrases. They’re somewhat near Atlanta. Why not spin some T.I. or Ludacris? Some of you may be thinking though “At least she didn’t play any Bieber.” Fair point.

2. When Rick and the folks first walked inside of Terminus one thought that might have occurred to them is this place is run by a bunch of aspiring graphic designers. In the first area they walk into are multiple, what look like, drafting tables and Terminus leader Gareth sporting the latest in hipster duds and mannerisms. I kept expecting his buddy Alex who did the frisking to afterwards say “Welcome to Starbucks. What can we get started for you today?” Makes one wonder what they were working on with those tables. We saw what looked like maps and they seemed to be doing some major plotting and calculating.

3. Dem’ Terminus folks sure love their candles. Gareth and Alex must have made a candle run to Crate & Barrel or something at some point. Rick and Co. run into a room filled with lit candles as part of vigils made for god only knows who. They see writings on the wall of ‘Never Again’, ‘Never Trust’  and ‘We First, Always.’ To me this serves as some kind of indicator that perhaps the residents of Terminus trusted some newcomers a little too much before and it cost them in bloodshed, hence the vigils. Perhaps they weren’t evil before but evolved to that out of that cataclysmic event.

4. Either Rambo lived here before or something seriously hostile went down at Terminus because we see several vehicles with bullet holes, shot out windows and the exteriors of several of the buildings have smolder marks from detonations. This may be the aftermath of my cataclysmic event theory. It would seem all those bullet holes are a tad excessive for just mere target practice given that in this world of undead hardcore carnivores, you want to hold onto every round as long as you can.

5. Speaking of hardcore carnivores, we had some pretty convincing evidence that the suspicions of Terminus being a colony of cannibals is indeed true. Right in the middle of “The Amazing Race: Terminus”, Rick and the others run by a fenced-in area that contained what had to be piles of human remains. Makes you glad that Rick started the showdown before Carl and Michonne had a chance to sink their teeth into what we thought could have been a Eugene Porterhouse steak (Ok, that was terrible.) for all we knew until the end. Plus we see Rick notice some bags of powdered milk right outside the train car that they’re marched into. Sometimes calves are fed milk and kept immobilized in the dark to make their veal meat more tender. This may be the sick idea behind feeding their captives powdered milk before killing them.

In closing I think what should be gleaned from all this is, if you’re GPS leads you to Terminus, I hope you like powdered milk.