YMMV / The Walking Dead: World Beyond

• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Out of the original cast, Jennifer "Huck" Mallick was most well received due to Annet Mahendru's talent to powerfully portray the complexity of Jennifer's allegiances.
  • Despite being added to the show for clues on Rick Grimes' whereabouts, Jadis has garnered a large fandom due to her being shown as a fantastic counterpart to Huck and an imposing villainess.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many people only watch for clues about Rick Grimes' whereabouts after he was taken away by Jadis and the CRM helicopter.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Lyla’s death. She put all her cards on the table, betraying Leo and his family to Jadis trying to gamble for all of their lives. It worked, only for her TS to reanimate proving she’s not found her breakthrough. Jadis decides she’s not worth any further trouble and has Huck release the walker, and lock Lyla in the room. Lyla can only scream and beg for mercy that’s not coming as she becomes the latest rat fed to a walker, completely unable to protect herself or escape. It’s even more uncomfortable that for all her effort to try to save humanity from the undead, she suffers a helpless death like so much of humanity likely did when they were caught off-guard by the dead.
  • The Stinger of the Grand Finale reveals that a variant of the walker plague has been around in France since the beginning of the apocalypse that causes the dead to reanimate in mere moments as strong, fast, and hyper-aggressive threats. How is this shown? A man executes a French scientist, who is watching a recording from Dr. Edwin Jenner on a computer. She wakes up as a walker just a few seconds after that; by this time, you'd expect that she move towards the computer, which is the closest sound nearby. Instead, she runs towards the same direction that the man entered and left from, relentlessly banging on a locked door. So, it may not be the only variant out there and God only knows if it ever made it to North America... As we find out in the last third of the eleventh season of the mainstream show, it did. It's implied her killer locked her in that room because he knows what Walker they're up against, because they're that dangerous.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Jadis had a divisive reception on the original show due to leading a colony of strange, backstabbing villains who kept getting in the heroes’ way. Even after Jadis herself started to rise in popularity, there still existed a camp of the fandom who still hated her and were only begrudgingly grateful to her for saving Rick’s life. Jadis’s portrayal on this show, however, has been well-received as she puts her previous back-stabbing nature to good use in her new position of power. She comes across as an imposing villain in her own right who also drip-feeds the larger fandom clues on Rick’s whereabouts, meaning she steals just about every scene she’s in.
  • The teen characters improve substantially in the second season. The actors have improved their skills, better portraying their characters’ pain and motivation, and the characters themselves become more developed. They also all become better at fighting the dead and living alike. Iris specifically loses a lot of the selfishness that made her unpopular in the prior season, and instead really takes charge as a flawed but well-meaning girl who dares to take on a military dictatorship.
• The Scrappy: While the majority of the cast tend to be Base Breakers, Iris tends to be singled out as the least popular of them all, mainly due to her poor acting and bland character whose actions in Season 1 are supposed to be portrayed as "heroic" but come off as self-centered.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Elizabeth Kublek was singled out in early critical reviews as one of the best and most intriguing characters on the show, a formidable villain who is central to one of the franchise's most enduring mysteries (the CRM), played by established actress Julia Ormond. So it figures that, after the pilot, she goes on to appear for just one brief scene in the next six episodes, with the action almost entirely centering the kids, Felix and Huck. She does return in a major way in the last quarter of the season, but many feel that, ultimately, far too little time is spent with the character in the first season, especially given she's ostensibly one of the leads. Season 2 does even worse as she only has a few sporadic appearances while Jadis acts as The Heavy - and even worse, Jadis overthrows Elizabeth in the Grand Finale and has her imprisoned.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • For all the hype of a big war in Season 2, the entire season is mostly cloak and dagger plots with only drip-fed hints about the larger plot of the CRM, and the big “war” is a single firefight in the final episode between two small groups.
  • Elton and Asha get some Ship Tease, but their subplot goes nowhere and in the Grand Finale Elton joins the mission to Portland, getting separated from her in the process.
  • Viewers have derided the Grand Finale for being more of a springboard for further installments of the franchise as opposed to a satisfying resolution to any plot regarding the CRM or even hints to Rick’s whereabouts, the main thing people were here to watch.
• Tearjerker: The deaths of Percy, Huck, and Dennis, all of whom die in the last two episodes. Percy’s death hits home because he was a youngster who found a good life with Iris and her friends. Huck sacrifices her life to stop the CRM, which her husband Dennis realizes was always her intent, devastating him. Dennis himself, already wounded, has Silas shoot him dead to claim defense, an act that he knows will traumatize Silas but is necessary for Silas to live.
• Unexpected Character: Dr. Edwin Jenner returns in The Stinger of the Grand Finale, a whopping eleven years to the day of his last appearance in “TS-19”.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Jadis' unflattering bowl cut has been the subject of much derision. To the point where The Ones Who Live has a scene where Rick outright mocks her for it.