Editor's Note: As always, this is a spoiler heavy discussion of what takes place in the season finale of The Walking Dead. If you haven't played the episode and intend to, maybe don't read this yet.

Following up on the heartbreaking conclusion of The Walking Dead’s first season was undoubtedly going to be challenging. Over the course of that first season, Telltale Games managed to develop one of the single most memorable character relationships I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing in a game. Lee and Clementine were an amazing pairing, utterly, believably human in their interactions with each other and the other survivors around them. Even when the plot occasionally veered off into less engaging territory--remember the menacing guy on the radio?--my attention remained transfixed on the screen so long as Lee and Clem were there. As sad and brutal as that first season’s end was, it was exactly the ending that Lee and Clem’s journey required, a moment of pure, tragic beauty.

The Walking Dead’s second season, even in its best moments, has never quite captured that seemingly effortless chemistry between characters. Clementine is still Clementine, but few of the characters she’s partnered up with this season have even come close to matching the kind of relationship she shared with Lee. Kenny, despite being a familiar face, has gone so far off the rails that by the time the final episode opens, he’s barely recognizable as a functioning human. Jane took over something of an instructional role in the second-to-last episode, but her sudden surge in notoriety came so late in the season that she’s barely had time to establish herself at all. The remaining survivors all exist as little more than sketches of emotional states, figures designed to trigger specific story beats when it is convenient. With no one, strong presence for Clementine to play off of, the story has effectively been reduced to the tale of a little girl who does little save but react to the often stupid, irrational things the adults around her constantly find themselves doing.

The whole marketing campaign for this season has been about you being able to create your Clementine. The five episodes of this season have, on paper at least, been about providing opportunities to shape her into the character you envision her as. In order for that to be true, the season’s finale ought to have been about a culmination of your choices throughout the season. But that’s not what happens. Instead, the season closes out with a single, brutal choice that splits the narrative into several distinct endings. That choice ultimately has very little to do with what you’ve actually done over the course of the season. Rather, it requires you to think carefully about how other characters have behaved around you. You are thrust into a situation where you decide which of two characters of presumably equal importance will die. This is certainly not an easy choice, nor is it one that lands without emotional impact. But even in the “best” among the many endings to the game, there is a sense of hollowness that comes along with it.

Before we get there, the episode has to put Clem and her remaining friends through 90 minutes of tragedy and terrible decision making. Things pick up in the middle of the heated gunfight that closed out episode four, with Clem’s group locked in battle against the Russian ambushers aligned with Arvo. That battle turns out to be the only significant bit of action prior to the end, and it concludes with both the convenient (and expected) return of Jane, and without a single friendly survivor dead. Well, except for Rebecca, but we already knew she was gone by last episode’s end. The group barely takes a moment to eulogize her before moving on, callously reminding us that she was never that important of a character, especially once she delivered her baby.

That baby becomes the focal point of “No Going Back.” Kenny becomes obsessed with finding a safe place for the child to grow. While everyone else certainly wants to keep AJ (Alvin Jr.) safe, Kenny’s desire boils over into madness at times, pushing others in the group further and further away from him. This is the one thing “No Going Back” manages to do well. Kenny’s unhinged behavior has a terrific build to it, oscillating between dejected sadness and full-on rage in exhausting fashion. Gavin Hammon gives one of his best performances in this episode, and the writers do a terrific job of making Kenny’s violent swings feel at least reasonably organic.

Sadly, he’s the only character who gets this level of treatment in the episode. Jane remains ever the stoic, socially uncomfortable character she had made herself out to be, but she takes on an air of needling petulance when dealing with Kenny that makes her increasingly difficult to like as the episode goes on. She says smart, reasonable things, then proceeds to badger an emotionally fragile man at every opportunity. When that finally reaches its natural conclusion…well, we’ll get there in a moment.

The biggest issue throughout “No Going Back” is a sense of aimlessness. Following the gun battle, the episode spends an inordinate amount of time making Clem converse pleasantly with other characters. Seemingly, the idea here is to refamiliarize the player with these people to give what happens later more heft. Instead, these moments feel more like stalling for time than anything else. You are certainly reminded that Bonnie, Mike, and Luke are people that you have an acquaintance with, but the way the script tries to reassert their presences is clumsy and mostly kind of dull. I certainly wanted to be more interested in Luke and Jane’s burgeoning relationship, Bonnie’s crush on Luke, or have any idea who Mike was other than a person who reacts to things, but this season didn’t do enough to earn that interest.

So when Luke finally dies in a terrible accident, I can’t say I felt a whole lot about it. I didn’t want him to die, and I did my best to try and keep him alive. I covered him as he tried to rescue himself from the break in the ice we were traveling over, and when he sank beneath the ice, I beat my pistol against it until Clem fell through herself. As is so often the case in The Walking Dead, I tried very hard to save a character who was unsaveable. Because of this, Kenny becomes increasingly furious at Arvo, who he blames for every miserable circumstance that’s befallen the group. And suddenly, Bonnie now hates me, because I wouldn’t run up to use my tiny frame to try to hoist him out of the ice. Bonnie, who had been so kind and friendly throughout the season, had reversed course purely because she felt I hadn’t “done enough” to save her unrequited crush. I had wanted to like Bonnie, but by this point, I was pretty much done with her.

Everything that takes place over the course of the next chapter is just a mess. Kenny flies off the handle and starts beating Arvo, which I tried to stop, only to get smacked in the face for my trouble. Eventually he skulks off to try to repair a pick-up truck parked behind the house we’d taken up in, which leaves everyone else to grouse about his behavior. This is especially true of Mike, who couldn’t telegraph his sudden sympathy for Arvo’s plight any harder outside of just walking up to Clementine and saying, “I like Arvo now.” Jane keeps reminding Clem that Kenny’s one’s step closer to the edge, about to break, etc. Bonnie won’t even talk to me. Then Kenny miraculously gets the truck working, and yet another argument about where to go erupts. Kenny wants to go find Wellington, the rumored settlement that’s supposed to be completely safe. Jane and Mike want to go south where it’s warm. Everybody yells a lot, then somehow ends up agreeing to sleep on it.

While doing so, Clem wakes up in the middle of the night and discovers Bonnie, Mike, and Arvo trying to steal the truck. Because Kenny has so thoroughly alienated these people who claimed to be my friend, they are actually willing to rescue a kid who helped set us up for an ambush, steal our only mode of transportation, and abscond to wherever the hell while leaving the rest of us (the baby included) to fend for ourselves. Look, I get that Kenny is a nightmare at this point, but this is the very definition of an unearned heel turn. Nothing in Bonnie or Mike’s character up to this point justifies this kind of reaction. Maybe they were pieces of shit all along and i just never realized it. I don’t know. But by this point I was done putting in any work to keep them in our group. I called out to Jane and Kenny that we were being robbed, and what do I get for my trouble? A bullet in the shoulder, courtesy of Arvo.

Fuck Arvo.

Here is where “No Going Back” takes a turn. As I said up top, this season’s biggest issue has been its lack of a meaningful character relationship. And as if to further prove that point, the episode plops Clem into a dream sequence featuring none other than Lee himself. I’ll happily admit I was glad to both see Lee’s face, and hear Dave Fennoy’s voice once again. The scene itself takes place on the RV, after Duck’s been bit and Carly had been killed. The conversation itself is a bit of a nothing. Clem expresses some fear at Duck’s inevitable death, they talk a bit about Lily (who I had allowed to come with us following Carly’s death) and at one point, I tell Lee I never want him to leave me. Even knowing what would eventually come to pass, I couldn’t help it. Nothing that happens in this scene is significant to the plot, yet it turned out to be the scene I savored the most, even as it served to highlight the utter dearth of worthwhile relationships this season has managed to build.

Clem snaps back to reality, finding herself in the truck with Kenny, Jane, and AJ. As Kenny drives recklessly through a minor snowstorm, he and Jane bicker back and forth about every stupid little thing. My cries for them to stop acting like children (situational irony very much acknowledged) went unheeded. Eventually Kenny is forced to stop the truck, upon discovering a blockade of abandoned cars on the highway. He goes searching for more fuel, and only seconds later walkers begin swarming toward the truck. Clem tries to drive the truck out of there, but ends up crashing right away. Jane bolts with AJ, and Clem is left to fend for herself in the snow, picking off sluggish walkers and she tries to find her remaining companions. She discovers a rest stop where Kenny has taken refuge. He demands to know where AJ is, and before you can really answer Jane shows up alone. She doesn’t say where AJ is, just alludes to some accident, while leaving Clem only a hint that she should stay out of “whatever happens next.”

Whatever happens next is a full-on death fight between Kenny and Jane. Kenny loses it, and no matter how many times you try to get between he and Jane, you just keep getting pushed out of the way. The fight is brutal and desperate, and in the end, you’re left with a single choice that defines how the season will end. Will you kill Kenny, or will you turn away and let him kill Jane? If for some reason you’ve made it this far but don’t want to read about specifics of the endings, this is your final warning before I start digging into them in detail.

In my first play-through, I shot Kenny. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to kill either of them. If we’re really considering what my Clementine would have done, she would have probably winged both combatants with a non-lethal shot and tried once again to save them. But that’s not an option the game provides, and in the heat of the moment, rapidly thinking through everything that happened over the course of the season, I chose to kill Kenny. I hated that choice the second I made it. Kenny, the last vestige of Clem’s adventures through season one, the guy I couldn’t have hugged fast enough the second I saw him in episode two. I shot him because I believed he was beyond saving. In his dying moments, he seems to echo this notion. He thanks Clem, tells her she made the right choice. I told him he was going to be with Katja and Duck now.

It’s a beautifully sad moment that is, regrettably, robbed of its poignancy by the revelation that Jane had simply hid AJ in a nearby car to prove a point. She wanted Clem to see what a madman Kenny had become, and she was willing to make you kill him to prove it. I couldn’t handle that. I don’t care how right you think you are. Doing something so reckless and insane is beyond forgiveness, at least in the heat of the moment. Rather than going with Jane, I set Clem off alone. Doing so resulted in a scene of Clem, by herself, smearing walker guts on herself as she carries AJ through a horde of zombies. Kind of a bad-ass moment, I guess, but to me it felt oddly empty. Even though it was almost exactly what I thought would happen at the end of the game (as predicted here), it didn’t satisfy me in the least. Maybe it was because of my nagging feeling that killing Kenny wasn’t the right decision, even if he himself had told me it was. In going back and trying the ending where I stay with Jane, that notion was reenforced. None of the Jane endings felt right to me, so I went back again and did the reverse.

The ending that results from allowing Kenny to kill Jane felt a lot more right to me, even if I still hated the situation. The idea that I would just forgive Kenny after he stabs Jane to death is not one I can quite stomach, but I also didn’t feel like shooting Kenny after he’d already killed her (something you have the option to do). So I forgave him, trusted him that had Jane not put AJ in danger, or alluded to him being dead, that Kenny wouldn’t have flipped out like this. His behavior throughout the late episodes of the season felt like a perfect build to this meltdown, though, so in truth no, I didn’t believe him.

It didn’t matter though, because the ending that resulted from staying with Kenny felt much more like a meaningful capper on this season. Kenny gets you to Wellington, or at least as far as the wall that surrounds it. A woman guarding the tower makes you drop your weapons, then proceeds to throw you a bag of supplies, informing you that there’s no room left at the inn. Kenny is understandably apoplectic, but in the midst of his rantings, begs them to take Clem and AJ. Clem won’t hear of it, but Kenny is insistent. He implores you to think of AJ, and to think of your own young life. There is an option here where you can tell Kenny you won’t go, that you want to stay with him, but I didn’t take it (and I’d love to hear in the comments what happens if you do). To me, doing that felt like more of a betrayal than leaving him. Kenny, for all his madness, has wanted nothing more than to see Clem and AJ living in safety, the kind of safety he so badly wanted to provide his own family. Denying him this would have thrown that back in his face, and I couldn’t do it. The final moments between Kenny and Clem don’t quite reach the level of emotional weight those final moments between Clem and Lee had, but it’s the only ending of the available options that felt in any way “right” to me. And I'd be lying if I said I didn't tear up a bit as Kenny walked off into the distance.

Yet no one ending to “No Going Back” ever felt completely satisfying. In one ending, you’re forced to kill one of your last remaining emotional connections in the world to end up with someone who is strong, yet cold and probably a bit sociopathic. In another, you have to let one of your last remaining emotional connections fly off the deep end, murder a friend, and then quickly forgive him in order to get to an ending that feels even remotely correct. In between, you can ultimately set out on your own, but the single scene ending you get there doesn’t provide any meaningful closure to what’s taken place throughout the season.

Maybe none of these endings feel completely satisfying because they simply don’t make good on the promise of creating closure for your Clementine. Again, the choice you are forced to make has roots in the behaviors of the characters Clem has associated with for much of the season, but in reality her actions and choices don’t really come into play in a significant way. It’s not about Clementine as much as it’s about who Clementine has been stuck with. If you want to read deeper into it, I suppose those people do represent highly specific, highly exaggerated paths for Clementine. Kenny is all emotion without reason, a man who feels so much that he’s lost the ability to control it. Jane represents pure calculation in absence of any emotional connections whatsoever, a woman who has abandoned caring about people for the sake of self-survival. In killing one or the other, you are making something of a determination on how you want your Clementine to be. Are you killing Clementine’s emotional self, or are you abandoning pure logic for the sake of retaining human connection? That’s how I read it, anyway, and even if you don’t subscribe to this theory, the only thing that really matters is that no ending completely works. Each forces you to forgive a terrible transgression almost immediately, lest you be forced to set out entirely on your own. Had that solo ending been rendered in anything beyond a scene that felt like a cheap, post-credits bumper, I might have been more okay with that. As it is, it’s not a satisfying capper to the season. And when I say satisfying, I don’t mean “happy.” I don’t ever expect happy endings in The Walking Dead. I do expect endings that make me feel like the journey I’ve just taken has been a worthwhile one.

This is the last, lingering question of The Walking Dead’s second season. Has Clementine’s journey been worthwhile? As much as I love her character, and I’ve appreciated the malleability Telltale has given her in this season, my ultimate answer is that I’m just not sure. This season has been a roller coaster, full of red-herrings and strange choices that often negated my personal involvement in the story. How weird was it that early episodes spent so much time building up a would-be villain in Carver, only to remove him from the picture entirely halfway through the season? What was the point of Sarah’s character arc, if all that time spent trying to protect her was only in service of leading her to an inevitable, gruesome death? Who were these survivors Clem took up with, outside of being bodies for her to talk to, and convenient plot devices? What was the point of the 400 Days tie-in outside of some context for Bonnie’s back story? Even when the first season periodically veered off the rails, that core relationship between Lee and Clem kept the story from coming completely unglued. The events of the story took a backseat to the characters, and the season sang precisely because of it. Here, the character relationships took a backseat to the story, and the season suffered for it.

Random Notes

Thanks again to everyone who’s taken the season two journey with me. It’s been a bumpy ride, to be sure, but it’s also been a fascinating one to write about, and I hope you enjoyed this series of recaps. I don’t actually think I’ll end up doing this for the upcoming Tales from the Borderlands series, as I just don’t have enough personal interest in the Borderlands universe to want to say much of anything about it. But if a third Walking Dead season rears its head, I expect I’ll dive headlong into it as I did this season. Here’s hoping we end up with a new cast of characters. I’ve enjoyed my time with Clementine overall, but I think many of you out there will agree that it’s probably time to move on.

I liked the way that this season ended. It wasnt on the par of season 1 ending but it is really hard for a series to attain that kind of an emotional height year after year.

Though one problem is probably that Telltale has so many games in development at the moment that there are only so many resources and time available for each episode. The wolf among us series has in my mind also suffered from Telltale having multiple games in development at the same time.

I kinda want to see a season 3 where clementine has grown into an adult and is a leader of a community that she has to guide through some tough times.

I personally loved this episode and it was my favourite episode of the season along with 3! The ending you felt was the most meaningful is the one I went with even though I kind of regret the last choice I made but not going to go back and change it so sticking with my "With AJ in Wellington" ending.

I do agree with you on some points in that some of the characters just seemed to be there like Mike who didn't bring anything to the table and his turn just seemed to come out of nowhere in a meaningless way. I liked Bonnie in a way but her just hating me all of a sudden for not trying to save Luke enough was pointless despite the fact I did try and save him and almost died because of it.

I do think the characters in the first seasons were better although I wish Jane was in this season more since to me she was the best new character mainly because she got more development than most of the other characters who were there from the start and I didn't want her or Kenny to die but it had to go that way and my connection to Kenny despite his downward spiral got the better of my Clementine.

I am very interested to see how Season 3 goes now considering the various endings there is to Season 2. I enjoyed the season overall although it had its shortcomings but will still be getting Season 3 when it comes around, which I will guess will be end of 2015 possibly first half of 2016 or later.

I thought it ended beautifully, especially the Kenny ending was emotional. The whole season has been better than the first for me with a slower pace giving characters more room to breathe. They also reduced the amount of immediate hostile big group arguments and made it feel more realistic by layering those moments into the story better. Less thrills and set-pieces than the first season but I thought it was better written.

Seems like Alex had the same opinion I had about the direction of this episode. That was a big issue with this season: there was no ultimate goal. The major plot point they built to was the stuff with Carver but that was dealt with in the third episode (making that episode the most entertaining, by proxy). There are just too many characters in the second season of The Walking Dead and most of them are either undeveloped or are dispatched with too early.

That being said, I got some good (and by good I mean mildly heart-breaking) emotional moments in the final episode. The entire fight between Kenny and Jane was brutal and that decision was legitimately hard to make. I went with letting Jane die, which on one level had to do with her actions regarding the baby which of course is revealed to be in the back of that car. I also then left Kenny as punishment for, well, brutally killing a person. Kenny is the character by far in this season that I grew attached to, even with his overly-emotional tendencies. It was a bittersweet moment to let him go. As Alex said, though, the flashback with Lee was a sobering reminder of the lack of memorable characters this season, and reminded how fucking cool Lee is.

Overall, it was a solid and mildly inconsistent season for The Walking Dead. I do hope they can do better with the third season and try to build memorable relationships that made the first season so engaging. I feel that as a whole it was better than The Wolf Among Us mainly do to, even when TWD was inconsistent, I felt it was still more engaging than the slow/forgettable episodes of TWAU.

I definitely enjoyed this episode more than the last couple, but I appreciate the arguments made here. The cast of this season just never came together, and the Mike and Bonnie moment came off as a last second whim to get them out of the picture to set up the ending choices.

The whole "your" Clementine thing seems trite, though. I just felt I was deciding what I felt Clementine would do or say in those situations. Ultimately the characters still react to her the same in most situations and the status quo never really changes beyond what the story dictates. That's what I appreciate about the ending though. I don't think there's been such a significant branching path yet. I'm curious to see if Season 3 continues this story, and if it will be radically different for each choice made, or if we'll all end up in the same place 20 minutes into episode 1.

You think you might try doing something like this for Game of Thrones?

Regarding the episode, I was satisfied with my choices. I saw through Jane's trick before things played out, so when I saw she was using her trickery in order to excuse killing Kenny, I wanted Clementine to get the gun and shoot her. Didn't have that choice though. Ended up with AJ at Wellington.

It just sucks that nearly everyone ends up being a betrayer or an idiot. Despite Kenny's emotional instability, I knew he was the only reliable person in Clementine's life.

And yet they give you the choice to kill him. It's just weird to me that there are people who are somehow OK with killing Kenny and sticking with Jane. Oh well.

Bonnie was the worst in 400 days, and when she showed up in Season 2 I already knew she was going to be bad news. So her actions in this episode didn't surprise me. Too bad they didn't use any of the other characters more than a brief cameo.

It's too bad that this season there were endings that were clearly better (or at least more satisfying) than the others. I feel like anyone who didn't end choose a certain way missed out.

I think Season 3 can do a lot better if they don't try so hard to make you hate everyone like they did with the first episode of this season.

My depreciation of this season runs parallel with my fatigue for Tell Tell's new adventure formula. For the final episode i, at best, appreciated that Telltell seem to be realizing they're not advancing the adventure game genre and are, more or less, advancing the visual novel genre so i was happy i didn't have to deal with as many shitty quicktime events.

I made the choice to run to Luke when he was falling through the ice, so Bonnie never started to hate me out of nowhere. I let Kenny beat the hell out of Arvo at the cabin, so Kenny never turned on me. I let Kenny kill Jane without a second thought of shooting him, so I never experienced the feeling of shooting a two-season long friend over some idiot who hides a baby to prove a point. When we got to Wellington, I chose to stay with Kenny and we went off happily and hopefully together. In a lot of ways, it seems like I just lucked into a pathway through this episode that made me love it almost as much as I loved everything in Season 1 from episode 2 through episode 5. If I had instead experienced Alex's pathway through the story, I think I would feel very different about it.

I actually liked the fact that where was no clear end goal other than finding food and place to sleep for the night. That kind of objectiveless objective just throws the door completely open for anything to happen.

I agree with a lot of Alex's points, although conversely I really enjoyed the downtime before everything kicked off. I definitely wouldn't call it stalling because it was nice to spend effective time with these characters simply talking to each other about normal things rather than a life or death scenario as is so often the case.

Overall, I'd say this season is a tiny bit weaker than the first but I think they did a very admirable job considering the lofty expectations they'd set up for themselves.

Really hope you do a similar feature for the Game of Thrones series Alex, whenever that might grace us.

I agree that one of the problems with this Walking Dead season has been contrived decisions. For example, in the scene from the last episode where you choose to take or give back Arno's bag of medicines, I would have loved an option to only take the painkillers, but Jane just keeps the whole cache instead. The choices the writers implemented were just not the judgments I would make if I was Clementine's shoes.

The only instance in which I felt the removal of choices was key to the game's message happened during "In Harm's Way." No matter what ultimatums you went with, Carver was ultimately in control. The lack of freedom added to his psychopathic character, and killing him off suddenly left a shadow over the series that ensuing episodes could not escape.

This is what happens when you lose a good writer. Realistically, maybe the problem was having Clem as a protagonist. It doesn't make sense that a child is ALWAYS the most rational person in the room as well as a hero. She's strangely balanced after all the death she's witnessed (especially Lee's).

This is inherently the issue with having a game of choice that doesn't have true branches. Many players decide to be good or bad. Because it is a game, they aren't truly affected by the world in which they exist and therefore have characters like Clem who seem out of place. Maybe if Sarah was more significant, this wouldn't feel so obvious to me. She could have been the relationship the game needed rather than a way of saying 'Can't help everyone'

It was an okay season. I really see it as Kenny's story more than Clem because Clem isn't a very deep character (I know we all love her, but it's true). I wish someone would do a game of choice justice. The Knights of the Old Republic has still done it best in my eyes. Maybe it's because there were no trilogies with which to deal.

Prior to myself playing episode 4 of this season, I was beginning to think people were holding the first season in too high of a regard, simply due to nostalgia. So I played through the first season again before playing the final two episodes of season 2, and I think it holds up tremendously well. But unlike you, Alex, aside from my disappointment over episode 4, I think this season did a pretty bang-up job of carrying the torch. I did have some beef with where the story went over the season, particularly with how predictable some character deaths were, but I really feel they did Clementine's character justice. In my story, she started out shaky, a shadow of Lee's former actions. And by the end of it my Clem marches towards that horde of zombies alone with the baby, as her own self. No longer following in the footsteps of the adults. I'd love it for her story to end there, it not being clear if she's ready to make it on her own.

Was not "mostly disappointing" for me. I enjoyed it.

Pretty much agree with the whole post. I didn't know about the marketing behind this game but I do find it funny that a series which while good, ultimately doesn't have any choices that significantly deviate where the plot goes, paints itself as one where you're significantly changing things with your choices.

I found Alex's choice for the ending interesting. Personally, I killed Kenny and forgave Jane, though I really didn't want to. My problem with Kenny isn't just this season. He's been a selfish, impulsive, bull-headed prat throughout the entire series, even before Katya and Duck were killed. He unilaterally makes decisions for the group, won't listen to reason, makes everyone follow along with him and only feels remorseful when his impulsiveness results in someone's death, whether for the first or tenth time. Yet it doesn't matter how many people he gets killed, he never learns a damn thing. I got so incredibly sick of his bullshit, I felt a twisted sense of relief when I was finally able to remove him from the equation.

I thought what Jane did to make her point was cruel and somewhat sociopathic. Taking the one element of hope an otherwise broken person had and faking its death in order to push him over just to make a point? That's some cold shit. Thing is though, she was right. If it wasn't her who pushed him over, something else would have and where could we have ended up then? I hated what she did and I had the same thoughts Alex did about what kind of person she really was. I ended up forgiving her not because I actually did but because trying to think as I would if I was in that situation, I figured having her and her skills with me gave me a better chance at my own survival than going alone as a young kid who also has a baby to care for. Frankly, I think it's pretty dumb that the game only allows you to either cast her away or forgive her, not go "I'll stick with you for now but we're done when we get out of this." Real world choices aren't that binary.

I think I enjoyed this season more than Alex did but I also agree that season 1 was much better in terms of story cohesion, characters and especially relationships. I'll still play season 3 as soon as I'm able but I hope some lessons are taken from this by Telltale.

Also yes, fuck Arvo.

I thought the ending with Clem, Jane, and AJ back at the department store felt appropriate, given Carver's ruminations to Clem about being an effective leader earlier in the season. It felt like the seeds were being planted for Clem to become the leader of a group later in life, and the last choice you can make concerning the family may set up a future where Clem has to choose what kind of leader she'll be in this new community.

Fuck Arvo.

Great job Alex. I wish they'd given me the option to let Kenny kill Arvo because, as you point out, Fuck Arvo!

I'm trying to think of something meaningful to say, but I just think that the season has been iffy yet potentially interesting, but the ending completely sandbags it. I never saw the "Kenny ending" and it sounds actually pretty good. The problem is that "my Clementine" (what a dumb meta-mechanic by the way) would never have chose him. Kenny was a jerk in S1 and S2 didn't do much to turn that around.

Jane might be almost as bad for all her bickering and forcing opinions on Clem, but the difference is that when I asked, she tried to save Sarah. Kenny didn't do much for anyone else except fawn over the baby creepily and be nice to Clem. Sorry Ken, but Jane IS nice to me, but she tried to help someone else and also came back and saved us. The baby, well you don't get points for taking care of a baby because in a story, a baby is nothing more than a vessel for others' development. A baby can't do 95% of the things a character should do, so it means nothing to me... Ahem, IN a fictional story.

So, Jane's endings are sandbags, Clem's "Alone ending" is even more nothing and Kenny's is good but requires you to help a man who's been a monster to everyone but you and a baby and immediately forgive him for pulling a Larry and killing someone unnecessarily.

Whatever. I'll admit I was barely into this episode. After Sarah's death - which like her character progression, was exactly like Ben's - I lost faith. I also heard unconfirmed rumors that the devs mentioned Sarah was supposed to be hateable. Coupled with the possibility that she seems to suffer from some form of psychological disease, it feels like that would be terrible character design, both fictionally and morally.

It almost seems like Telltale themselves was barely into this season and were just putting out another because that's what you do after a Blockbuster like S1.

Interesting read Alex and I agree with a lot of your points. I'm still excited for the next season but that's only because I like Clementine. The strongest moments for me this season, besides the flashback in the last episode, meeting and later killing Kenny, was probably the dog and the stitching in the first episode. Those moments embodied the horrible world Clem had to deal with and also showed that the things Lee taught her in the first season had equipped her to deal with it. I would have loved it if they had done more with that, but instead they kind of tried and failed to get you emotionally attached to a new group of people.

I really felt that some of the characters were really inconsistent this last episode.

Bonnie: you didnt try to save Luke in impossible conditions? IM EFFING PISSED

Mike: Hey lets escape and side with the guy whose family tried to kill us AND GIVE HUM A GUN #FUCKARVO

Jane: ive been the most calm and rational person in the group. Lets have a CRAZY irrational plan to make you kill Kenny.

Also besides Kenny, no ose's death really felt to have any impact like season one did. They were just bodies piling up.

"Rather than going with Jane, I set Clem off alone. Doing so resulted in a scene of Clem, by herself, smearing walker guts on herself as she carries AJ through a horde of zombies. Kind of a bad-ass moment, I guess, but to me it felt oddly empty. Even though it was almost exactly what I thought would happen at the end of the game (as predicted here), it didn’t satisfy me in the least."

You nailed it for me Alex. This is the exact ending I got and while I predicted it like you, it felt empty to me in a way I can't fully explain.

This season really was a step down. I couldn't have cared less about any of the characters other than Jane and Kenny. And they even ruined Jane with that last part. Also, did anyone else notice how lazy the writers were at times? Clem accidentally drops her water bottle so when she goes to get it, she gets held up. Clem accidentally drops bandages and when she goes to pick them up a zombie grabs her. Nick (who stopped being a character after episode 2) shot a random guy to create drama. It all feels so forced. This season was such a disappointment after the emotional highs of the first season. After this and the disappointing Wolf Among Us finale, I think I'm done with Telltale games for the time being.

I ended up killing Kenny, for some reason I got the idea to trust Jane and I sided with her, I guess she seemed like the best person to survive with. Well we ended up back at the super market were Carver's group was holed up. As they got settled three survivors showed up asking for help, it gave you the choice to turn them away or invite them to stay. I immediately turned them away.

The unfortunate thing was one of the survivors was a child which looked like the same age as Clem during season 1. And the season ended with him staring down Clem as the group walked away from the super market.

The ending where you stay with Kenny to the end is fucking great, Clementine broke my heart when you hear what she says as Kennys trying to get you to stay at Wellington. It felt right to me KENNY FOR LIFE. Also Kenny is a badass motherfucker who saving private ryan stabbed that bitch. why would she try and start a fight by hiding AJ and pretending hes dead, that just seemed crazy to try and deal with kenny that way so I let her get stabbed.

I really enjoyed the season. I appreciated the sense of detachment from the rest of the group as the options presented to Clementine let you play into that. It definitely shaped my Clem into what she ended up being at the end of it all, a bit dickish and a bit ruthless.

Also the point of 400 days was to tell a bunch of short stories, which it did. Not everything has to have some grand impact on all of existence.

When someone you care about dies it's very natural to lash out at other people. Kenny did it one episode ago.

Even Clementine knew (or at least had the option to know) that Arvo was a mostly harmless kid stuck in a really shitty situation. Mike wasn't siding with Arvo as much as he was siding with not Kenny.

Actually the plan came from a place of extremely calculated rationality and Jane had no idea that things would go that far. The idea wasn't to kill Kenny, it was to show how unstable Kenny was so that Clem would see the need to part ways with him. She was conducting an experiment to provide evidence that would prove her arguments. She wasn't crazy, she simply miscalculated.

I disagree with Alex, I thought this was one of the best episodes of both seasons and the season itself was very good. As good as the first? Maybe not, but if the first season was a 10 then this is at least an 8.5 or up...still great stuff and better than most games out there story wise for sure. All the endings were poignant in their own way...and in this episode your choices MATTER more than any other episode of walking dead.

Shot Kenny and regretted it because I could tell AJ Jr was still alive but due to uncertainty and not wanting to let Kenny murder anyone, I made that decision. Unfortunately due to me being to slow to pick a response to finding AJ Jr, my Clementine automatically trusted Jane which I didn't really like so I may just reload as I am not really happy with my ending outcome.

Edit: I also think this season may have been just Telltale trying to come up with a reason to have an older more mature Clementine be stuck looking after a baby.

Did I spot a really subtle Linkin Park reference there @alex?

Clementine is the star of this series and she should absolutely stay in it as the main attraction. Watching her mature from a little girl into a much more battle-hardened veteran has been wonderful to watch. I missed the writing of Gary Whitta in season 2 so it lost some of its believability, but still not a bad effort.

I wound up leaving with Kenny. I saw an image someone made of Clem and Kenny walking away, with a ghost of Lee in the middle, and that's pretty much how it felt for me. I had told myself on a second playthrough that I'd let Kenny walk away, but in the end I couldn't do it.

I always wonder about the characters we never hear about again, like Christa. Do we assume she died? What about the people at Howe's? They aren't there in the Jane endings afaik. Or Nate and the guy with the beanie from 400 Days?

Anyway, I think Alex's train of thought is mostly in line with my own on this season. Good and fairly solid, but with inconsistencies and it had the tough task of living up to Season 1. I'm glad they didn't kill Clementine at the end, though.

I chose to kill them both. When that fight happend, I tried everything to stop them. At the end of it I chose to look away instead of shooting anyone, hoping that someone would come to their senses at the final moment. When Kenny stabbed Jane, I was simply done. Wasn't gonna take anymore shit. So I shot him. Better off alone, than with a random psycho.

I disagree with the sentiment of this article. The ending I got was one I felt I very much had a hand in and the one conclusion that the entire season was driving towards for my Clementine.

The episode is problematic in spots and a lot of that stems from the characters being more poorly defined than in S1 (outside of a few exceptions). Bonnie and Mike are all over the place and I don't think I had the ability to interact with them as I'd like to compared to Kenny and Jane.

Anyways, solid season with a big highlight (Ep. 3) and more than worth the price of admission.

Funnily enough I ended up making the exact same choices that Alex did... at least the second time around. In my initial play-though I shot Kenny and in a daze of confusion stayed with Jane. The ending was very flat indeed (they meet a new group of people and there is the hint of gun related drama before the screen goes black) and overall I left the game feeling quite cold. In fact so much so that after closing the game down and walking away for five minutes my blood pressure shot right back up and I immediately reloaded the final scene. Fuck you Jane! It is interesting that Alex says that the ending where Kenny lives allows you to shoot him down because In truth I think if my first ending had allowed me to do that to Jane I would have done so in a heartbeat. In either case this time around I still shot Kenny (sadly that wounded bear needed to be - wanted to be - put down) but following the confrontation I told Jane that she was a crazy bitch and left on my own. The final moment of the 'alone' ending is at least a great money shot (Clem, bloodied and with baby in arms, staring down the zombie horde - Joss Whedon eat your heart out) if not quite the gut wrenching close to the season I think I had hoped for. I also agree with Alex that overall the season feels incredibly limp and missed many opportunities to get real meat out of its characters and situations, particularly after Carver leaves the picture. I'm still interested to see where a third season will go (the breadth of endings makes me think that this the last time we will play as Clementine, which I have mixed feeling about given the way this season closes out) but I really do hope that TellTale are reading the criticisms and gaining a much better handle on what works and what does not.

I actually appreciated the meaningless relations. They mirrored exactly how I felt about how the situation was without Lee. I can't say "my Clementine" made much of an effort to get to know anyone. At all. They can never be Lee. And I think this was a wholly intentional design choice by the developers.

I've played a sort of "lonesome survivalist" and didn't really care much about the other characters. For instance Sarah. I told her to grow up and left her to die. That's such a terrible thing to do, and I don't think Lee would have been proud of Clem for doing it, but I did it. I guess that's kind of why I got so attached to Jane, because she ended up being the only relatable character.

But then something happened at the end when the ice cracked and Pete - or whatever the hell his name was, it wasn't as if I actually paid enough attention to care - fell through it. That moment was a sort of awakening. Here was this guy who, unlike a lot of the people in this group, actually seemed all right. So my Clementine started bashing the ice. And bashing it. Until she fell through. And all those ideas about survival at all costs were just... gone.

I was actually super happy about waking up with Kenny and Jane in the car. But then they started fighting, and I couldn't make them stop.

I knew exactly what Jane had done when she entered that building without the baby. I didn't blame her at all. I always believed in Kenny, but I've had this bad gut feeling about him all season.

Ended up with Jane at the end.

I actually can't see myself picking up another episode unless that lets me continue the arc and lets "my Clementine" grow into something that would make Lee proud.

You made almost every choice I made Alex except I forgave Jane. @aegon I felt it was the only viable option for my Clem. What she did was wrong but how the hell is the 11 year old girl supposed to take care of a baby on her own.

I agree that no one ending feels truly right and I think they'd have to start over with a new character for season 3. Also agree that the supporting characters were just fodder and no matter how much you wanted to save them they were just zombie food. I hate that I couldn't save Sarah no matter how hard I tried. The thing that irked me the most was you sort of teach her how to use a gun but she never once tries to fire it for real. You do your best to be a big sister/role model for her but she just ends up crying. Never once did they allow Clem to empower her to be something more.

The 400 characters were a joke as well and everything I did was for naught. There was no lasting effect of the decisions you make in that campaign.

Overall though I can't wait to see if they do a season 3.

I actually think this is one of the best Walking Dead episodes. My only real complaint is the Mike and Bonnie betrayal. That felt completely out of no where and felt very unearned.

I played through the entirety of both Season 1 and 2 for the first time over the past 2 weekends so it is all very fresh, and I am happy to be able to read Alex's excellent spoiler filled opinions now. I really enjoyed all of it and I can see now what all the GoTY fuss was about for Season 1. By Season 2 some of the novelty has worn off and you start to see through the tricks they are using, so the writing has to be that much stronger to make up the difference. But it is not.

I went with Jane and had a satisfying and hopeful ending, meeting up with a family that has a boy around Clem's age back at Carver's old compound. I didn't even try to save Luke (how many times do I have to save that guy?) so Bonnie tried instead, and she fell in and died right there. Also, I gave back the meds to Arvo and still he came later and said that I robbed him!

The game mechanics sometimes show through like that. Notice how almost everybody you meet dies? That allows them to give you some choices without it getting too out of hand. eg. Bonnie is around for a couple more scenes or not. eg. The guy or girl you chose to save in S1 just gets shot and killed a few scenes later. This gives me hope for Game of Thrones that they may be able to pull the same illusion of choices that matter, because a lot of people die in that.

The RV dream sequence did have significance to the plot, it very clearly hinted to the player that sometimes logic (and survival) was more important than emotional resonance. Lee spells it out for Clem.

Also, there seems to be a missing link in the line about predicting how the game ends for Clem, and a couple of (I think) typos ;)

Not only was she crazy, but she was a bitch too for doing what her did. I honestly don't see what she was expecting. Was she uncertain that an emotionally damaged loose cannon would lash out when she didn't properly explain the baby's death? She had every intention of killing or getting rid of Kenny. She only ever cared about Clementine, which is pretty consistent with her character.( Leaving her sister to die and all that jazz).

And at any time she could have yelled out that the baby was alive, I mean, she proved her point, Kenny attacked her and was obviously trying to hurt her, so why did she keep fighting when she could have ended it all? I'll tell you why, by simple ending the fight on peaceful terms Clementine might still urge Jane to patch things up with Kenny. She didn't want that, she wanted Kenny gone, dead, etc so she could remain with the one person she possibly cared about.With Kenny out of the way, chance of Clementine sticking with her were pretty huge, so she took it, and hid a new born baby in a blizzard while a zombie horde was on the loose.See my point? She was crazy.

Don't get me wrong, she's a very interesting character and all of her acts in the final episode were consistent to her personality. She is an emotionally distant lone survivor.

One of things I see people complain about all the time with this series is how the characters will act erratically or irrationally when they had previously seemed calm and friendly and it's a complaint that never makes sense to me. When something horrible happens (in Bonnie's case, someone she clearly cared deeply about dying), people are going to act in ways that previously would have not made sense or ways that could be seen as irrational. That's how humans are. It's pretty much the whole point of the series and zombie fiction in general. We are the real walking dead and all that.

@Alex I stayed with Kenny not out of dependency, rather, what if the people inside were just like Carter's group? In the end, the lady told us to check back as there might be room in a few months. She gave us an extra bag of supplies to boot and we walk into the sunset in a scene famille to those that played the first season.

Jane was up to something and had it out for Kenny from the word go. I disagree with you when you said nothing meaningful came from the flashback sequence with Lee. For me, Lee's advice rang true on how essentially terrible things have terrible effects on people. Couldn't be more true in Kenny. I couldn't shoot him because I felt that Clem knew Jane was pressing his buttons. It didn't have to happen, it was a direct cause of her manipulation.

All in all, echoing Lee, we had to keep the group together. Kenny, while unhinged from all the fucked up shit that had happened, proved he only wanted the best for Clem and AJ.

The Wolf Among Us was the much stronger season even if it lagged a bit in the middle. I met Kendall Davis at PAX Prime, he was the lead designer on Wolf Ep 5 and he was very happy that Telltale let him end the season how he did. He is now working on Tales from the Borderlands.

The ending of Wolf made me think back on the events of the entire season in new light, the ending of Walking Dead Season 2 mostly made me want to create a bunch of save files to see how they write around the diverging endings at the beginning of Season 3.

The fifth episode for both Walking Dead S1 and The Wolf Among Us felt focused on wrapping up the events of the season. Walking Dead S1 was able to be very efficient with its time due to the ticking clock paradigm setup at the end of E4. Wolf focused on bringing the Crooked Man and Bloody Mary to justice, they setup some big action scenes and dialog scenes around this.

Walking Dead S2 Ep5 felt like it needed to do a lot of work to set up the endgame. Kenny was well established but they needed to do a lot of setup Jane to be his opposition (they probably should have introduced her earlier in the season) or brought Molly back from Season 1, since she fills a similar role in Clementine's life. Bonny and Mike's sudden turn felt like a contrived way to get them out of the way to focus on Kenny and Jane.

I'll post what I posted in the discussion thread with a few minor changes to address your points.

She had no intention of killing Kenny. Jane draws the knife AFTER Kenny bum rushes her, pushes her into a door and strangles the shit out of her, and keeps coming at her after they stop tangling (by however choice you make). There's a point prior to them tangling that she sheathes the knife when she clearly didn't have to trying to defuse the situtation. What would you do if a maniac kept coming at you? Just stand there and take it? No way in hell!

Do you think Kenny would have stopped if she mentioned that AJ was still alive? He already had so much blood rage going on that there is no way the mention of the baby would have stopped him. He was a loose cannon and Jane was trying to show Kenny what he truly was. A loose cannon like you said!

Take Jane for what you want but she looked out for Clem more then Kenny did. Kenny didn't care about anything else other then the baby once it arrived. Which is good cause that baby needed looking after but you can't put the needs of the group above one little child that may or may not make it. She also didn't put the baby in any more danager then it was already in. They already say the zombies move slow or not at all in the winter due to the cold (consistent with the books) so it wasn't like the baby was in more danger then if they it was in the fight area. Jane knew that fight was going to happen eventually but she didn't plan for the fight to be taken to that extreme.

Kenny hadn't attacked yet so there was no need for a knife, so yeah, I give her props for not slashing Kenny before his attack, but that doesn't really change the fact that she could have at least tried to mention that the baby was alive, that would have at least caught Kenny's attention long enough for her to say that " Hey clem! I was right all along!" Her point was proven, she got the response she wanted.But that being said, lets for over a couple of factors. Kenny was an emotional wreck, he lost everything and he was at the peak of his rage. Tell me, what reaction would you have in Kenny's state of mind? Any normal human being would have lost their shit in this situation. Jane wanted Kenny out of the picture, she specifically teased kenny and told him that even the people he loved feared him way before the fight ever started. You don't say these things to a man who is in a fragile emotional state. Kenny on the other hand, when he wasn't pissed, care about the people around him.What was Kenny's first reaction when the car crashed? He asked Jane in a very concerned voice whether she was okay or not. I'm not saying that Kenny was a nice guy, and he definitely was an asshole, but he is far from the monster jane wanted to prove he was. Furthermore, leaving the baby in some car is definitely more dangerous than having the kid with you at all times. When an you are around, you can keep it warm, protect it, etc. Jane left the baby in a blizzard...with zombies. Sure they were slower but it ONLY takes a second to kill the poor thing. What if a walker was near by? What then? See my point?

I also don't agree with the fact that Kenny didn't care about Clementine, or that the only thing he did care about was AJ. He wanted to protect her as much as he wanted to look out for AJ. Difference is that Clem is old enough to act, and Her actions at times didn't sit well with Kenny because of his emotional nature. Though Kenny did speak out of line, the "You lost your taste of this kind of thing" line really pissed me off. That being said, however, he never really hurt Clem and did his best to protect her.

Still, while I vastly prefer Kenny, I liked Jane. I would have saved them both if I could.

A normal human being would not A) immediately assume that Jane had killed the baby and explicitly state that they had no interest in hearing any explanation or B) try to murder Jane despite her clearly stating that what happened was an accident.

Thanks Alex. I agree with your opinions of this season entirely. Perhaps you'll do a "Previously On" for Game of Thrones? I hope.

#teamkenny #fuckarvo

A normal human being under a normal mind set you mean, Kenny had lost a lot and was specifically in a very dark place. Jane knew this very well. Also she didn't explain herself, she simply blurted out that it was an accident and quickly dropped the wounded act. Doesn't add up well.

And also don't ignore the point that she could have mentioned that the baby was alive at any time. She got her reaction, could have worked, but she didn't even try.

I also got the Clem alone with the baby ending, and I too was unsatisfied by how this is represented on screen. Smearing herself in guts and then walking through a horde, looking sad but strong, and somehow empty...

Maybe empty is the way I was supposed to feel about it. But I don't know, I wonder if they'd come up with something more interesting, have her at least stumble onto something that might lead towards season 3, even to have her see Wellington in the distance, or whatever, that would have given it more of a sense of moving forward.

Or maybe if the scene was paced better, or it was a montage, weeks of difficult survival with a good song over it, leading to the feint promise of hope, a little sign that season 3 is on the horizon. The TV show does that a lot, and it doesn't always work perfectly, but when it does it's fantastic.

If we're going by TV terms, Whitta was just one of the writers, Sean Vanaman was the showrunner. So it's probably him you're missing the most here.