Walk into the new Southern California flagship location for location-based VR company Dreamscape Immersive, and the sights and sounds of the bustling shopping center it’s located in quickly fade away. A large clock hangs over a wooden concierge desk, while a pair of monitors advertises “departure times” for the location’s trio of immersive experiences, using three-letter abbreviations that echo an airport more than a movie theater or arcade.

The transition away from reality continues in the location’s waiting lounge, where physical artifacts from the worlds explored in titles like Alien Zoo and Lavan’s Magic Projector: The Lost Pearl await examination. The props set up backstories and plot details well before audiences get anywhere near a headset or backpack computer, and by the time guests are ushered into the gear-up rooms — designed to echo train cars, decked out in wood and soft overhead lighting — it’s tough to shake the feeling that you’re doing more than stepping into a virtual reality experience. This feels like a journey.

It’s a thought-out, cohesive approach that pulls heavily from the lessons of modern-day theme park queue designs. And as Dreamscape readies an expansion into AMC movie theaters, the company hopes it will be one of the keys to selling a sometimes-skeptical public on the power of virtual reality.

“We want to transcend what I think is a very common perception — or misconception — of what VR is, which is tech and gaming,” says Dreamscape CEO Bruce Vaughn. The former chief creative officer of Walt Disney Imagineering, Vaughn joined Dreamscape in 2012. He explains that design choices like the departure lounge metaphor were made precisely to help reframe how audiences view the medium. “People cross the threshold and come in, and get a sense of like, ‘Whoa, this is not what I was anticipating,’ or ‘It’s certainly different than what I’ve experienced before,’” he says. “Or at a minimum, if you had no idea [about VR], it’s incredibly inviting, and I think it feels like, ‘Okay, it’s a place that I want to trust.’”

As for the VR experiences themselves, Dreamscape’s approach feels like a cousin to the work of location-based VR company The Void. Groups of up to six guests are outfitted with backpack computers, headsets, and hand and foot trackers and are then ushered into a 16-foot by 16-foot walkable space equipped with a vibrating haptic floor. (There are five such “pods” at the Westfield Century City flagship location, including one that will simulate flight, though only three are currently active.) That’s where the VR experience begins, with guests appearing in the digital world as full-bodied avatars. From there, they’re taken on a journey where they can physically touch and feel objects they see through their headsets. Along the way, other senses are engaged with smells, mist, or wind, further grounding the digital experience. Tickets run for $20, and the experiences clock in around 15 minutes each.

The title Alien Zoo, for example, takes guests on a dark ride-style tour of an orbiting interstellar habitat where they may actually pet aliens. The Blu: Deep Rescue, the latest iteration in Wevr’s underwater VR series, casts the group of players as undersea explorers who need to find and rescue a lost whale — an adventure that includes individual missions on underwater “scooters” where guests cling to vibrating, responsive handlebars. And Lavan’s Magic Projector is an Indiana Jones movie come to life, as guests armed with torches explore the ruins of an ancient temple for a lost artifact and end up on a mine-car ride straight out of Temple of Doom.

I experienced Deep Rescue and Lavan’s Magic Projector at the new location a day before it opened to the public. (I’d seen Alien Zoo at a pop-up location earlier in the year.) Each of the three titles offers their own distinctive style and take on the medium. Lavan’s Magic Projector: The Lost Pearl comes across as the most conceptually ambitious title. The conceit is that a magical movie projector allows guests to step inside an old adventure movie, a premise Dreamscape co-founder Walter Parkes notes can naturally lead to future installments. “We think Magic Projector is sort of a series,” he says. “Next time, do we end up rendered in black-and-white and meet Frankenstein? It really is a wonderful platform for telling those sorts of stories.”

The natural inclination is to compare Dreamscape’s work to other mixed-reality hybrid experiences. I found the Dreamscape experiences to be a little less polished than something like The Void’s Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, with occasional graphic glitches and the lack of individual finger articulation testing my suspension of disbelief at times. There’s also less consistency when it comes to physical objects: more often than not, when a guest sees a wall or physical item in a Void experience, they can definitely touch it. That’s less certain in Dreamscape experiences. The walkable space in each pod is encircled by railings that are heavily incorporated into the various VR worlds, but I did frequently reach out to touch various items — machinery in The Blu or a temple wall in Magic Projector — only to find that there wasn’t a real-world counterpart there.

That may sound like a minor quibble, given that the point of virtual reality is normally to create a fantasy experience, rather than a physical one. But when the reality of a virtual world is specifically based on a tight integration with physical touch, even one misfire can be jarring. It’s the last thing designers want when their goal is immersing the audience entirely in the world of a given story. The rough edges do make it feel like Dreamscape’s experiences have room to mature.

But they stand out in the realm of story and narrative. From the beginning, the company has touted its Hollywood creative power as a secret weapon. Parkes is a writer (WarGames, Sneakers) and producer (Minority Report, the Men in Black franchise), and industry titans like Steven Spielberg have consulted on Dreamscape Immersive’s projects. That mainstream Hollywood sensibility comes through in the experiences themselves. There’s a focus on theme and message that often isn’t present in other location-based VR titles, which can feel like arcade adventures rather than proper stories.

Alien Zoo ultimately leaves audiences wondering about the larger implications of the way humanity is treating our own planet. The Blu: Deep Rescue is able to create an emotional bond between guests and the giant whale they’re trying to rescue. Magic Projector feels like a classic movie serial, with guests eagerly wondering about the next chapter and the fate of the creator of the titular projector. The approach is intentional, Parkes and Vaughn say, born out of their desire to make the experiences as satisfying as possible to the largest possible audience.

“Walter and I, our careers have been focused on creating things for the global, popular market,” Vaughn says, “and you still have to have that strong emotional resonance. We don’t get hung up on our own artistic arrogance of what this should be. We absolutely know, at the end of the day, people have to feel it, or we didn’t do our job.” Given how much of the work being produced in VR is still trying to define what the medium can and should be, those more traditional mainstream notions can sometimes get lost in the mix, he says. “There’s a lot of product, especially in the VR world, that is super artistic, and you’re like, ‘I don’t feel anything, I don’t need to do it again, I don’t want to bring other people to do it.’”

“It’s a natural evolution,” Parkes adds. “The first VR companies, people started making VR, and those people tended to be animators, technologists, coders, and special effects people. So it emanates from the tech out. We’re none of those.” Instead, Parkes says, the company is approaching location-based VR as a medium that can empower storytellers with proven chops in other mediums. “This is a really great toolbox to re-interpret stuff we’ve been doing for our careers.”

There is certainly an opportunity there if Dreamscape’s approach catches on. After the initial VR hype wave petered out, a lot of attention moved to location-based VR, with Disney investing in The Void, and IMAX launching its own VR locations, intending to eventually bring VR to movie theaters. The Void’s strategy has been paying off, with the company opening new VR centers across the US as it has rolled out projects based on Star Wars and Ralph Breaks the Internet, with a new Marvel-inspired experience scheduled for 2019. IMAX, on the other hand, opted for a simpler VR arcade model, using some titles that could already be played on a home VR setup. Without the benefits of the mixed-reality approach used by The Void and Dreamscape, the initiative failed to catch on, and earlier this month, IMAX decided to get out of the VR game altogether.

That leaves Dreamscape, with a partnership with the AMC Theatres chain already in place, poised to capitalize. The company plans to roll out four installations at AMC locations by the middle of 2019, and it’s also looking into expansion into Europe and the Middle East with other partners. The aesthetics and designs being tested in the flagship location will be carried over into the AMC installations, turning the Los Angeles center into a testing ground to determine what resonates best with customers. In addition to the company’s original titles, Parkes promises that Dreamscape will soon be “adding truly world-class IP” to its lineup of offerings, all of which should make its take on VR more attractive as the number of locations grow, both with the first wave of AMC locations and well beyond.

“This is our laboratory and where we productize this, discover how it operates, cleanly and concisely, and what are the stylistic elements that then can move into our franchise,” Parkes says of the flagship location. The four AMC locations can then take advantage of what they learn, “so you can pretty much guarantee the same level of experience in Florida that you’ll have here. And then from there is where the big expansion takes place.”

Dreamscape Immersive’s flagship location is now open in the Westfield Century City mall in Los Angeles.

It’s nearly impossible to separate the Transformers film franchise from the creative aesthetic of director Michael Bay. From the slow-motion flag-waving to the copious explosions and visually incomprehensible CG action, the series has become the ultimate expression of Bay’s idiosyncratic style. Audiences may love it — the movies have collectively made billions of dollars at the box office. Or they may hate it — the critical responses have been dire, but even the fans often complain bitterly over these films, while still hopefully turning up for each new one. Regardless, there’s no mistaking a Michael Bay fighting-robots flick for anything else.

But we live in the era of the expanded cinematic universe, where every studio is eager to adopt Marvel and Disney’s template for box-office domination. So just 18 months after Transformers: The Last Knight arrived in theatres, Paramount Pictures is hoping to broaden the definition of what a Transformers film can be. The origin story Bumblebee isn’t just a movie, it’s a trial balloon — a check-in to see whether Transformers die-hards will support a long, profitable run of cinematic spin-offs.  

Bumblebee wasn’t directed by the bombastic Bay: Laika founder and Kubo and the Two Strings director Travis Knight steps in for his live-action feature debut. It doesn’t stars Megan Fox, Shia LaBeouf, or Mark Wahlberg: True Grit and The Edge of Seventeen star Hailee Steinfeld takes the leading role. It’s set in a nostalgia-heavy 1980s instead of the present day, and it doesn’t subject audiences to a punishing two-and-a-half-hour runtime, either.

But ultimately, those are just surface changes. The core difference is that Bumblebee strips out much of the franchise’s wannabe macho excess, replacing it with a Spielbergian story about the friendship that forms between a robotic alien and a teenage girl. It isn’t a flawless movie, and it nearly descends into self-parody at times, but after a decade of Bay’s rock-’em sock-’em battles, Bumblebee nevertheless comes across like a mini-revelation: Transformers movies don’t need to be terrible.

The film opens up by taking a step back from 1987 Earth to the Transformers’ home planet of Cybertron, where civil war has broken out. On one side are the nefarious Decepticons; on the other, the self-proclaimed “Autobot resistance.” Realizing that the battle is lost on their home world, Autobot leader Optimus Prime (voiced by Peter Cullen) tells one of his soldiers, B-127 (Dylan O’Brien), to head to Earth and protect the planet until the rest of the Autobots can escape and regroup there.

After landing, B-127 (eventually renamed Bumblebee, because what origin story is complete without a naming scene) runs into Agent Jack Burns (John Cena), who is part of an elite military force named Sector 7. Burns immediately perceives the giant talking robot as a threat, and those concerns appear to be validated when a Decepticon pursues Bumblebee, nearly killing the Autobot, and permanently damaging his ability to speak.

When Charlie Watson (Steinfeld), a young woman struggling to come to grips with her father’s death, procures a beat-up Volkswagen Beetle from a local junkyard, she thinks she’s just landed her first car. She eventually discovers that the car is Bumblebee in disguise. When the Autobot reveals himself, Charlie is caught between her new alien friend, Agent Burns, and a pair of Decepticons that are trying to take out all Autobots once and for all.

If the idea of an alien making friends with a kid from a broken home while government agents wait in the wings calls to mind E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, that’s because Bumblebee basically is E.T., albeit with more fights, and a much less cuddly alien. Screenwriter Christina Hodson (Unforgettable, the upcoming Harley Quinn spin-off Birds of Prey) tosses aside the franchise’s condescending pattern of using its female characters as accessories, and instead frames the entire story through Charlie’s eyes.

Charlie won’t give her mother’s new boyfriend a chance no matter how hard he tries, and doesn’t entirely know how to fit into the world after her father’s death. Her friendship with Bumblebee becomes a way for her to assert her control over her life, and to overcome her crippling grief. It’s straightforward storytelling, but it’s effective — particularly because Steinfeld is able to add real emotional heft to scenes where she’s playing opposite a giant CG robot.

The film focuses more on that core relationship than on globe-trotting adventure, and scaling back is an effective tactic throughout the story. It’s clear from early on that Knight isn’t interested in the bombast of earlier movies, which introduced dozens of nearly indistinguishable Transformers that blurred together in all the sheer visual chaos. Instead, the opening Cybertron battle in Bumblebee focuses on just a handful of classic Transformers, with characters like Soundwave and Shockwave showing up with simplified designs that hew closely to the original iconic toys, rather than the overwrought monstrosities seen in previous films.

Nostalgia is a clear selling point in this regard — the movie makes the most of its retro setting, with copious use of The Smiths, appearances from Mr. T cereal, and other 1980s pop-culture callbacks. But it also comes across as a matter of confidence. Michael Bay’s Transformers flicks often felt bloated and overstuffed, as if they were trying to justify their existence by throwing as many things as possible at the audience. Bumblebee, on the other hand, focuses on just telling the best story it can, as if Knight is happy to let the performances and a softer touch carry it forward. It’s the kind of movie that introduces a potential suitor for Charlie in her neighbor Memo (a disarming Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), but is comfortable not resolving that relationship with a predictable romantic contrivance. The characters’ presence and friendship are the point, not a tossed-in romance.

Some of the franchise’s other bad tendencies still bubble up in the film, though. While Charlie and Bumblebee have an emotionally affecting relationship, the movie still suffers from tonal swings, particularly around John Cena’s portrayal of Agent Burns. It’s hard to intuit exactly how the character of Burns is intended to come across. He’s so full of bravado and pseudo-military swagger that he seems like a satire of the usual flavor of machismo that permeates Bay’s filmography. But there’s never enough of a nod or a wink to make that intent clear,  and in the end, it seems like Burns is just periodically popping in from some bad Syfy movie to drop awkward one-liners.

Bumblebee also succumbs to its franchise DNA during its third-act climax. In spite of the character-focused story, there’s still a point where Earth’s survival hangs in the balance, and the only thing that can stop it is a bunch of robots punching each other. But even in this, Knight’s more restrained approach is apparent. The action is cleaner, the choreography more coherent. He worked as a stop-motion animator before making the leap to directing, and the discipline that medium requires bleeds through here. After five Transformers movies where it was frequently impossible to tell what was happening on-screen, Bumblebee finally makes Transformers action compelling, and lets the audience actually care about the fate of the robotic characters.

This may all come across as an argument that Bumblebee is better than the other Transformers films simply because it isn’t a Michael Bay film. While that’s no doubt part of what’s going on, it’s also far too reductive. Bumblebee is a legitimately solid movie that demonstrates how a good story, strong performances, and talented direction can make even the most outlandish premises work. (It’s no surprise that Warner Bros. has signed Hodson on for its in-development Batgirl film.) And for Paramount and its Transformers universe ambitions, Bumblebee is a best-case scenario, demonstrating that the franchise can shift gears and expand in new directions, and broaden its demographic appeal at the same time.

Consider it an unintended consequence of cinematic universes. For a decade, Transformers has been tied to Michael Bay’s creative vision, and anyone who didn’t find that vision resonant and compelling was out of luck. But in the name of cashing in even further, Paramount reached beyond the template, and ended up with a story that’s legitimately good. Who would have thought?

I was wearing a VR headset, standing in the middle of a dark, gothic take on A Christmas Carol. A grisly Jacob Marley asked me what I missed most about my childhood, and I told him I missed the hope and optimism of youth, when it seemed like anything was possible. When the Spirit of Christmas Past subsequently visited me, he pointed out a pair of ghostly, shadowy children chasing each other a few feet away. The spirit leaned in close. “Look at them,” he whispered, “so full of hope and potential.” It’s an easy trick, drawing a response out of an audience member and using that response to personalize their experience. But it worked — my own words coming back to haunt me drove home the sad longing in that scene and made it specific to my own thoughts.

As the experience moved toward its conclusion, I wound up in a cemetery with the Spirit of Christmas-Yet-To-Come. My brain knew that the thin, slightly pixelated figure in a shadowy cloak was just a digital character in a VR headset. But when he put his hands on my shoulders, his touch was real and weighty. And as the experience ended, he physically turned me toward a gravestone with a name I immediately recognized…

In Los Angeles, a virtual reality experience called Chained: A Victorian Nightmare is combining VR with live actors and motion-capture technology to create a new kind of hybrid show. It pairs some of the same principles used in location-based mixed-reality pieces like The Void’s Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire with the work being done in interactive and immersive theatre. In the process, it serves as a strong example of the added depth virtual experiences can have when augmented by the simple power of human interaction.

“This one really was a product of my growing love of immersive theater,” says creator and director Justin Denton. An experienced VR creator, Denton has worked on tie-ins for projects like Guillermo del Toro’s film Crimson Peak and the Syfy series Nightflyers as well as the Microsoft HoloLens augmented reality experience for Legion that ran at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con. That HoloLens project also incorporated live actors who interacted with participants, but with Chained, Denton wanted to blend live performance with VR’s ability to transport audiences to wildly different locations and environments.

Before beginning the 20-minute VR experience, I was shown into a dimly lit gallery with concept art lining the walls. From there, I was ushered into a small antechamber with a large door and a foreboding, old-school knocker. I knocked three times, and a young woman answered (actress Haylee Nichele, formerly of the New York immersive shows Sleep No More and Then She Fell). She whisked me into another small room, and as she hurriedly spoke, it became obvious that while she appeared to be a living, breathing person, she was almost certainly playing a ghost. Sitting me down in front of a mirror, she gave me a fountain pen to sign my name inside a large ledger resting on the desk. She warned me that a journey of self-discovery was coming and handed me the VR headset.

Inside the headset, I saw a digital re-creation of the small room — and then a bony hand emerged from the mirror, like a VR nod to John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. I reached out and found a real hand in mine. Then, I was suddenly pulled through the virtual mirror and into a Victorian-era bedroom.

Going through location-based VR experiences like those from Dreamscape Immersive and The Void have trained me over the past couple of years to buy into the physical reality of a seemingly digital space. If you see a wall while inside a Void experience, for example, odds are you can actually reach out and touch it. So being pulled through what had been a physical wall just moments before was unnerving.

The owner of the bony hand was none other than Marley himself. The digital character’s movements and gestures were being supplied in real-time by an actor (Michael Bates, from the LA-based immersive theatre troupe The Speakeasy Society) wearing a motion-capture rig. But Bates wasn’t in some separate, standalone capture space. He was right there, playing the scene next to me, keying off my movements and vocal inflections. When Marley touched my arm, Bates actually touched my arm. When he walked up close to me, I could sense his physical presence, even while cocooned inside the headset. When the actor spoke, I heard his voice — not filtered through digital processing and piped into my ears via the headset, but because he was actually standing right next to me.

That seems like a simple enough idea, and projects like Jordan Tannahill’s Draw Me Close have already explored introducing physical contact with actors while in virtual environments. Oculus is working on a project that will let audiences interact with motion-captured actors from the comfort of their own homes. But Chained demonstrates how live performers can allow virtual experiences to become more personalized than they would if an audience member was just watching an automated digital character moving along programmed rails. The actors can change their performance, cadence, and approach based on participants’ behavior, Denton explains.

“Those magical moments when you’re in any immersive theater experience, when you’ve got a great performer there with you, and you get a bit of that ASMR thing going on where you’re starting to feel the tingles go up the back of your neck,” he says. “Taking the best of immersive theater in those intense one-on-one personal moments, and then also being able to take the best of VR where we can actually take you different places at the same time — combining those two was what I was trying to do.”

For the most part, Chained succeeds in doing exactly that. The show has the lone audience member taking over the Ebenezer Scrooge role in a story roughly following the structure of A Christmas Carol. The participant is invited to feel regret, longing, or fear as the story dictates. Each of the three Christmas spirits present their own vignettes, with Bates playing all four digital characters. They all have radically different appearances and styles of interaction, with their movements driven by a live motion-capture system not dissimilar to the ones used to create digital characters in blockbuster films.

“What we’re seeing in an interesting way in the visual effects space is that a lot of VFX houses have been experimenting with real-time [rendering],” explains Madison Wells Media Immersive executive producer Ethan Stearns, who previously worked on projects like Carne y Arena, the VR collaboration between ILMxLab and Birdman director Alejandro González Iñárritu. “ILM and Digital Domain and all these companies have been trying to work on, ‘How do we work game engines into our VFX pipeline?’”

On the film side, that’s resulted in a lot of tools that have made it easier for filmmakers to realize their respective visions: using VR for set design in Rogue One or letting the camera operator on Thor: Ragnarok see a live version of the Hulk in the camera viewfinder when lining up a shot of actor Mark Ruffalo.

Chained flips that idea. Behind the scenes, one computer rig is dedicated to handling the motion capture from the live actor and turning it into real-time character animation. Another renders the environment and the rest of the experience. When the two systems integrate, they allow the mo-cap actor to interact with the participant in the physical space, while simultaneously reflecting those same movements and performance choices in the digital character.

Combining a scripted show with on-the-fly moments of improvisation and customization allows the story to remain fixed, while still ensuring each participant’s individual experience will be unique. That approach also extends to the show’s pacing and structure. Rather than having the entire piece run on a timed loop, some individual scenes and transitions are triggered by an on-site stage manager, while others are activated by the way the participant handles certain props. When meeting the Spirit of Christmas Present, for example, I was handed an apple; placing that item on a table in the room triggered the next beat in the scene.

But from an audience perspective, innovative approaches and technological solutions don’t matter if the resulting experience isn’t compelling. Chained does a strong job of conveying the potential in combining theater and VR. That said, as with any production that’s experimenting and pushing boundaries, some moments that work better than others. At one point, I’m pretty sure I nearly stepped on Bates as he tried to secretly crawl away during a scene transition. At other points, it appeared a character was looking down at my chest rather than meeting my eyes — not the best way to foster a sense of connection. And in terms of visuals, the project didn’t quite reach the same level of polish as titles like the Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean adaptation Wolves in the Walls, or some of the projects from the now-defunct Oculus Story Studio.

But as a proof of concept, Chained nevertheless does what Denton set out to do. He makes a strong case that some of the most interesting virtual reality experiences today are the ones that incorporate elements beyond the headset and what goes inside it. And with plans to take Chained to different cities after it completes its Los Angeles run, Denton and Stearns say the project will only continue to iterate and improve as more audience members get a chance to explore it.

“In a lot of ways, this is sort of like our preview run,” Stearns explains. “We’ve done this in the lab, we’ve done a lot of workshopping, we’ve done a lot to prepare. But when you run lots and lots of audience members through, you really learn a lot, and we’ll make it better and more seamless and more comfortable for people throughout the process.”

Chained is currently scheduled to run in Los Angeles through January 6th, 2019. The next round of tickets will go on sale on Monday, December 10th.

Warning: Spoilers for The Walking Dead season 9, episode 8 below.

This season of The Walking Dead has had its own meta storyline, complete with ups, downs, and breathtaking cliffhangers. After several seasons of declining ratings, it was announced earlier this year that showrunner Scott Gimple was leaving the show, with Angela Kang set to take over for season 9. The idea was that Kang’s new vision for the show could revitalize The Walking Dead, starting with a reimagined title sequence.

At first, it seemed to work. The pending departure of Andrew Lincoln, who plays series star Rick Grimes, kept viewership numbers afloat. At one point, it seemed that the show was upending viewer expectations by dispatching Rick earlier than expected. It was a gimmick, however, like the departure itself rather than killing Rick off, The Walking Dead just put him on ice, in anticipation of a trilogy of films that will land on AMC at some point in the future. The non-death of Rick Grimes seemed like the final nail in the coffin, the moment when audiences realized that no matter how much they root for The Walking Dead to turn its game-playing ways around, it just isn’t in the cards.

Then, something funny happened. Over the last few episodes, a new vision for The Walking Dead began to emerge — one interested in small character moments and new conflicts that felt very much like The Walking Dead of earlier seasons before the show got weighed down with its comic book-influenced stunts. The midseason finale, “Evolution,” completed that transition. And while the two of us have been frustrated with The Walking Dead at times, we’re now in what feels like an entirely new position: invigorated by the show’s new approach, excited about where it’s going, and eager to find out how the characters get there. Of course, we sat down to talk about it.

How did they do it?

Bryan: I will be completely honest here and say I didn’t think The Walking Dead could pull it off. I’ve obviously had issues with the show for quite some time, and I stopped watching altogether when Glenn died. But I kept tabs on the show’s bigger plot movements, and I eventually came back. Now, I could not be more pleased with how excited I am about the show again.

How did The Walking Dead pull that off? There are a lot of elements to look at, but for me, it comes down a philosophical approach. Over the last few episodes, the show has become much more interested in character-driven storylines and the emotional consequences these characters are all grappling with. In “Evolution,” some big moments with the Whisperers are expertly underplayed, but for me, the most telling example in the entire episode is Henry’s storyline.

In “Evolution,” the audience learns that Henry decided to go to Hilltop not to become a blacksmith, but because he’s still harboring a major crush on Enid. When he learns she already has a boyfriend, he does what any teenager would do: he gets self-destructive and parties with a bunch of other teenagers. They drink, they act obnoxiously, and the other teens torture a walker — which Henry vigorously rejects.

That turn is a good example of Henry’s moral compass, but the fact that The Walking Dead actually took the time to explore what growing up as a teenager would be like in that community is what really struck me. These kids know they are in a dangerous zombie world, but they’ve got just enough stability for traditional adolescent tendencies to take hold. After literally years of debate about various moral high grounds, it was refreshing for the show to look at something beyond The Big Bad Guy Negan and The Big Good Guy Rick. Once upon a time, Carl was used to explore some of these ideas, and it actually seems like Carl’s comic book storyline is being grafted onto Henry here. But this kind of relatable situation has been sorely lacking in The Walking Dead lately. If this is the direction the series is now headed, sign me up.

Nick: Going into season 9, I was worried that Rick’s impending departure would dominate all 16 episodes and overshadow any of the promised turnaround work Kang was hired to pull off. And while the season started off strong, realizing the eventual stunt at play did not have me hopeful the show would much improve post-Rick. The emotional whiplash of “Maybe it’s good again?” and “Oh no, it’s back to its old nonsense” was exhausting. And the show having to shoulder the departure of two major characters (Lauren Cohan’s Maggie left this season, too) made it feel like the writing was on the wall.

But then, multiple time jumps accomplished something miraculous: with Rick gone and the weight lifted off of the show’s writers, The Walking Dead has slowly become the show Kang promised. I think refocusing on characters — how they deal with tragedy and new experiences, and what binds them together — has made it feel revitalized and less like the struggling comic book adaptation it had become. “Evolution” is the best of the last three episodes because it emphasizes all of those changes and really drives home how effectively Kang and the writing team have used Rick’s departure and the six-year jump, which were narrative moves we were both highly skeptical of at first.

I was particularly struck by a scene featuring Gabriel and Negan, in which the reformed pastor tries to help the captive criminal talk through his issues and why he chose to become the man he did in the post-apocalypse. Over the past few seasons, these kinds of vignettes were typically fun, creative detours — The Walking Dead loves a good musical montage — designed mostly to fill time and add some much-needed color. But they rarely said anything profound or contributed to the overall plot.

In this scene, though, when Gabriel accosts Negan for yet again pulling up his tough guy exterior, I was shocked at how clever it all was. Negan, realizing how exhausting he is, pushes Gabriel to open up about Rosita’s injuries and the impending threat they all seem to face. It was as if the writers were acknowledging how poorly they handled Negan’s character by forcing the man to drop his tired schtick. Later on, when Negan discovers his cell door is left open, he walks out with a sinister smile on his face. But the audience knows now not to expect him to become the same old villain. Gabriel’s conversation has smartly set up Negan as a potential ally in the upcoming fight, albeit a wild card with his own intentions. That kind of narrative setup makes even the smallest scenes in the post-Rick world carry so much more weight.

What were the high points?

Bryan: Let’s talk about that Negan escape for a moment longer because it actually is one of my favorite things in the season. Negan has always been such a comical bad guy, capable of only extremes, that I stopped caring ages ago about what did or didn’t happen to him. But that one moment when he discovers the cell door is unlocked defines him more than a year’s worth of monologues.

The door was probably only unlocked recently, but the show doesn’t explicitly state that either way. Instead, what we have is Negan realizing that he may have turned himself into a captive for an unknown length of time because he never bothered to check the door. It calls back to the season 6 episode, “Here’s Not Here,” when Morgan had a similar revelation. In that case, it was part of Morgan’s evolution from murder machine to contemplative man of peace. And while I highly doubt that is where The Walking Dead will go with Negan, I love how the moment so quietly undermines his own sense of bravado. Yes, he does get loose and gives a knowing grin as he walks away, but I still feel like it’s also one of the only times Negan has had an actual moment of self-realization.

I also have to highlight the all-too-short storyline between Jesus and Aaron. It is a textbook example of how Kang’s Walking Dead is doing things in a more satisfying way than in previous seasons.

In the comics, Jesus and Aaron are a couple. In the show, however, we learned an episode ago that they have established some sort of private backchannel communication between their two communities. It’s unclear whether they’re just friends or if there’s a romantic component to their relationship — it could really play as either — but it ends up not really mattering because late in “Evolution,” Jesus is stabbed by one of the Whisperers.

So what we have is a storyline from the comics that is partially adapted by the show in a way that lets comic viewers think they know where things are going, only to have the rug pulled out, giving Jesus’ death more impact. And for everybody else watching the show, it simply plays as a relationship cut tragically short.

There are no games played. No cliffhangers. No nudging-and-winking with marketing materials. The show simply lets the relationship, characters, and events speak for themselves. It’s brutally effective, and it demonstrates a level of restraint I haven’t seen from the show in quite some time. I’ll admit it’s a little odd to include this as a high point, given how legitimately upset I was by Jesus’ death, but that’s also the exact reason I’m including it. The Walking Dead has trained audiences to care about nothing and take nothing seriously. And yet here, almost as a grace note, the show delivers an emotional hit that cannot be denied, as if it wants to let us know what it can do. I watch TV shows to feel something, and this death did just that.

Nick: This is a good opportunity to talk about what I think is one of the best improvements this season: the handling of elements from the Robert Kirkman comics this series is loosely adapting. The Walking Dead has always charted its own course, grabbing what it needed from the source material while introducing new characters like Daryl and playing a smart game of mixing and matching storylines and plot arcs to make it all work. (Rick famously never lost his hand in the show, but poor Aaron has taken up that burden in his absence.) But with the fake Glenn death scene and the eventual introduction of Negan, it felt like the show was becoming far too beholden to its source material. AMC hung big moments from the comics over viewers’ heads as tantalizing teases, and it messed with audience expectations in ways that felt cheap or undeserved.

Season 9 feels different. It’s not just that we’ve said farewell to Rick, Carl, and Maggie, all of whom are still major players in the comics. It’s more that the show now uses its source material in a more seamless way, much like how the show handled big comic arcs in seasons 3, 4, and 5. Why is so much attention being paid to Henry? He’s taking up Carl’s role from the comics. What about Negan’s escape from the jail cell? It’s a major moment in his story arc. The villains who disguise themselves as walkers? That’s the next big comic book saga.

I agree that the handling of the Whisperers, those chatty walkers who seem to have mystical control over large zombie herds, is really well done. It’s a clear departure from how former showrunner Scott Gimple played the Saviors arc. It feels more organic, better written, and less gimmicky. There haven’t been any time-wasting filler episodes dedicated to making the audience believe the zombies were evolving. That becomes a throwaway suggestion from a scared Eugene in “Evolution,” with the group grasping for explanations as to how they’re being followed by seemingly intelligent walkers. Instead, we get a powerful payoff in the form of Jesus’ surprise stabbing, and the immediate reveal of the Whisperers as a profound, cultish threat that the characters now face.

What were the low points?

Bryan: It’s so satisfying that they made goofy Eugene, blathering out of panic and fear, the person to float the talking walkers theory. It’s almost as if the show is mocking itself for hewing too closely to the comics before as a way to distance itself from the tactic.

That said, this wasn’t a clean sweep of reimagined episodes. It feels like season 9 only hit its stride in these last few episodes, and there were a lot of problems along the way. The biggest low point for me is still the Rick Grimes Death Fake-Out™. It was so gleeful, so disrespectful to its audience, so unapologetically cheap that I still can’t believe the show went down that route. And it only diminished any interest I would possibly have in the new Rick Grimes movies. It’s sad to say, but the way the whole scenario was executed turned Rick into the symbol for all the show’s bad tendencies, whereas the new characters and new conflicts represent the way forward. What about you? What stands out the most, as you’re looking back at everything?

Nick: I’m still on the fence about the handling of Rick. I’ve come around to agreeing that it did feel too much like a cheap trick to warrant all the time, effort, and marketing put into making us think he really was going to die. At first, I recognized it as a well-executed trick, one that acknowledges that, at least on a show like this, you can throw the audience a bone (few fans seemed to really want Rick to die) and get away with playing fast and loose with expectations, so long as you reward the audience later on. Whether the trilogy of Rick movies do that, or whether he’s brought back into the show in some way down the line, remains to be seen. And as much I would love to see Rick make a cameo next season or to reveal to the other characters that he’s still alive, perhaps it’s better for the show to move on.

Honestly, what I take the most issue with this season is the handling of Lauren Cohan’s departure. Not only did the show make her the person most singularly responsible for Rick’s sacrifice at the bridge in a contrived way, but they also wrote her out of the show offscreen, using the time-skip to conveniently gloss over the events leading to Maggie’s departure. It feels unfair. I admittedly don’t know the behind-the-scenes workings at AMC that may have resulted in Cohan not shooting more than five episodes this season. Still, I’m desperately hoping we get at least some clarity around that situation, and that Maggie doesn’t just fade away after the long-simmering feud between the Hilltop members and Michonne is exhausted as a plot device.

What do you want to see next?

Nick: My biggest hope for the second half of season 9 is that it doesn’t take its time and drag out the next big conflict. I’m honestly surprised we got a Whisperers reveal so quickly this season, and it has me genuinely excited about how much action and plot mileage the writers can get out of the remaining eight episodes. I’ve long been a huge critic of The Walking Dead’s 16-episode seasons. They’re simply too long and too stuffed with filler to not drag down the show’s quality.

In the Saviors saga, the 32-episode focus on Negan was excruciating, and knowing the season length is historically a product of the show’s massive ratings made it even less defensible since those ratings have plummeted. So hopefully the show will keep up the newly brisk pace it’s established over the last three episodes. I’d also love to see an introduction of the Whisperers as a formal antagonist sooner rather than later, especially since their leader in the comics is one of the series’s all-time best villains.

On the other hand, and I know this is me coming off as contradictory, I would like to see some type of exploration of what happened in the six years between the bridge explosion when Rick “died” and where we are now. AMC has been hinting in social media replies and forum posts that viewers are going to learn about Daryl and Michonne’s mysterious “X” scars, and I think it’s an invaluable and creatively imperative bit of narrative the show needs to explore to help all of these character conflicts come to a meaningful resolution, if that’s going to happen before the communities unify to fight the Whisperers. How Maggie plays into those flashbacks will be interesting, too.

And last but not least, I want to see more Negan. His character was readymade to be an antihero. The moment he stops being the boogeyman in the jail cell and starts to become a vital player in the main ensemble could be hugely gratifying for his character and for viewers who suffered his shallow antics as a villain.

Bryan: I’m not familiar with the comics, so I don’t have a specific wish list of story arcs. I’m just looking forward to learning more about the creative approach this revamped Walking Dead takes. How does a big arc like the Whisperers play out when the show is executing these storylines with such efficiency? What new emotional territory can these characters explore that they’ve never been allowed to before? What does Negan look like in this context, and how does his character change and evolve? (I can’t believe I just wrote that, but yes… I’m excited about Negan, too.)

And plenty of hooks have been dropped in these last few episodes that I’m eager to learn more about: Daryl and Michonne’s scars, what happened to these communities to make them so resistant to collaboration, and how the show uses the threat of the Whisperers to unify them.

I’m also excited to see what happens to Henry and his new possible romantic interest. The Walking Dead used to be really interested in the impact of the extraordinary on the ordinary machinations of life, and for me, that was the show’s most compelling aspect. It hasn’t been focused in that direction for quite some time, but if it goes back to those basics, it stands a chance of overcoming not just this series’s malaise, but the same-old-same-old sensation that now surrounds zombies in general. The post-apocalypse as a story trend has come and gone and come again, but stories with relatable themes and characters are always fresh and appealing. Maybe this new Walking Dead can find them.