April 17, 2018

Dr. Henry Goodsir (Paul Ready) in First Shot a Winner, Lads (Image courtesy AMC Studios / Amazon. All rights reserved)

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“First Shot a Winner, Lads” is the fifth episode of the TV show “The Terror”, an adapatation of a novel by Dan Simmons with the same title, and follows “Punished, as a Boy”.

Note. This article contains spoilers about “First Shot a Winner, Lads”.

Dr. Henry Goodsir (Paul Ready) tries to learn the Inuit language from Lady Silence (Nive Nielsen) to get information about the creature that is slowly killing the crew but eventually he and some officers only manage to get a name, Tuunbaq. Captain Francis Crozier (Jared Harris) seems more interested in how much whiskey is left to drink.

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Warning. This review contains several spoilers about the eighth season of the TV show “The Walking Dead”!

On april 15 the eighth season of the show “The Walking Dead” ended.

The eighth season was produced and broadcast with the format has become usual: 16 episodes of which 8 were broadcast between October and December 2017 and the other 8 between February and April 2018. The ratings drop seen in the seventh season has definitely increased, so much so that, if we don’t consider DVRs, compared to the sixth season’s records the ratings have practically halved.

Last year that drop could be a sign that many people were getting tired of the show. This year it’s a clear sign that something really isn’t working anymore. Is that the quality drop? Is that the disappointment for the development of the last story-arcs with respect to their premises? Is that combination of both?

The seventh season of “The Walking Dead” ended with a clash of the Alexandria, Hilltop and the Kingdom’s alliance with Negan’s Saviors. As it was clear right away, it was only the beginning of a story-arc that filled the whole eighth season in which the war between the two factions was developed.