Lynch apparently hasn't watched a single movie released in the last 5 years, per his Rolling Stone interview. Cool to know that he's not being influenced directly by anything we've seen recently.

Natasha: badass russian character who's been kicking ass for years.

The writing this season seems to be doing a lot to discard much of what they did last season…
Ray's whole S4 arc was basically city council—and they brush it aside.
Shosh's shole S4 is "get a job/boyfriend" and they brush her boyfriend (the ramen guy) aside, then rush through her new job.
Hannah's big S4 revelation was…

So I can't be the only one who watches this show for NON-Hannah scenes, right? I mean…it's kind of stunning how much better the show is when Hannah isn't around. Her character at this point is ruder, more narcissistic, and immature than ever. Jessa used to be this way, but Jemima Kirke has seriously stepped up her…

I completely agree—but the cutting made this episode pretty disjointed. There were several moments where people would just disappear/reappear.
Moving scenes to ep9 now makes sense, but does a disservice to the story and characters—by the time February rolls around, it will have effectively been months since viewers…

To be fair, the S5 premiere remains my favorite episode of the show—but I've long argued that it should actually have been the finale of Season 4. That would have given payoff to the episodes before in a more accurate place. (Other than "The Grove", I thought the back half of S4 was poorly paced and very dull.)

Exactly. Honestly, I'm pretty sure it's just Gimple making these weird calls at this point. After the pointless "screwing with the wrong people" cliffhanger of S4 and the "Beth basically commits suicide" mid-season finale of S5, yet another weirdly-placed cliffhanger like this episode is up to par. Why Gimple would…

I'm not disagreeing—my issue lies with the fact that we got eight episodes of "follow the traintracks" to get to them. After all that build-up…we got a tiny arc that is only remembered for being "how Bob died".

Heh. You actually could watch S6E1 and then jump right into S6E8 having just assumed the walkers did make it back to Alexandria. Glenn's "death" was pointless (E3/7) Daryl meeting the Saviors early on was pointless since we meet them again in this ep (E6), Maggie's ep was pointless since Glenn says she'd pregnant in…

Walking Dead editing has always been puzzling—like when in "JSS" they cut out Rosita's action scene. In the episode, she just shows up all bloody—she had a full scene that they cut.

No clue—but they've cut a lot of scenes from other episodes before. Maybe they didn't want to push Into the Badlands and therefore Talking Dead even later? Or maybe they just wanted an even cliffhanger-y cliffhanger?

Their brief comic arc was amazing—I was just annoying about how they handled the arc in the show after so much build-up.

Oh yeah—I do remember reading about the "Gabriel actually mans up and helps people" scene. That makes sense, because as it is in the episode, he just randomly appears in Jessie's house—to which I said "wait…how did he even get inside?!"
And yes, they're doing the "Dad?" scene—it'll be in Episode 9, though it should've…

Honestly, that's what disappointed me about the cannibals—after so much buildup, they all just died pretty quickly.

On AMC's website there's promo/press images from the episode that show characters that weren't in it at all. (Heath, Spencer, Aaron). And a bunch of early spoiler reports had the episode ending with the iconic "Dad?" moment from the comics.
Personally, I'm almost 95% sure the original plan was to have a 90-minute…

Hmm…I COULD be remembering wrong, but I though they ate Bob's leg before the church massacre? They eat Bob's leg at the end of E2, and die at the end of E3?

Though I disliked much of the episode itself, I've gotta admit that ending was spot-on. Great cinematography, excellent score and slo-mo use.

Did anyone else laugh at the completely terrible and obvious ant metaphor the episode opened with? It was right up there with the "red balloon signifies a loss of innocence" moment from last season. (Gimple really loves his blunt visual metaphors…)

The first 3 episodes were STUNNING—after a completely terrible fifth season, I'd actually stopped watching the show. (It took me months to get through my DVR'd episodes of S5…) And then we got the Morgan episode, which made me hate his useless character. And then we got an episode where the Alexandrians sit around and…

I'm actually hoping it will be someone else—it would shock everyone since all the fans are already expecting it to be [who it is in the comics]. And after already using [who it is in the comics] as clickbait this season, I don't think they'd do it again. We already know Gimple likes to "remix" stuff from the comics.