Besides, we still don't know how the virus was created or when or how. The big origin story ended up being a group of junkies in an abandoned church that became zombies for some reason. Then the drug-addict son escaped the place and left the door open.
They were never going to answer that. Robert Kirkman has always maintained that we'll never see the origin of the virus in the show or comics. The best we got was a reference to some kind of airborne cough/flu associated with it.
Likewise, the origin of the virus wasn't in the church. Tobias tells Madison the morning after Nick fled the church that he heard reports about the virus in five states. You probably read the clickbait "Gloria is Patient Zero" article and assumed it to be true.
As for my overall impression of the season, I thought it was just okay. Ruben Blades and Frank Dillane basically carried the season on their backs, because Cliff Curtis' acting was crap, Alicia Carey only seemed to be there as fanservice and the rest of the supporting characters (save for Strand) weren't really memorable.
Liked:
- the whole "false utopia" aspect, with the characters believing that things would get back to normal
- the slow breakdown of society over the first three episodes
- some of the setpieces (Tobias and Madison vs. Art, the riot, driving past the hospital and seeing the power grid go down, the horde attack in the finale)
- a look at the military response to the outbreak
- the cinematography
- Strand, who's an absolute badass
- all the foreshadowing over the first couple episodes paying off later on
Disliked:
- the time skip
- how one-dimensional the military characters were
- how useless half the cast was
- some pointless padding (everything in the "safe zone")
- how limited the budget felt
The episodes felt really rushed in general, like they had a start and end point but didn't really know how to fill it and just wanted to get to the finale as quick as possible. It feels like they chopped out a lot of scenes and rushed through storylines. Stuff like Ofelia's "romance" with Adams, where one minute she's introducing herself to him and the next minute he's trying to pull her shirt off and they've had some kind of prior conversation where she asked him to find medicine for her mother. Or Doug Thompson somehow getting outside the safezone with a vehicle before getting captured, sent to the holding cells at the base and then dragged off (maybe to be executed?) after going insane. Or the whole thing where L.A. has become a ghost town in 9 days and there's literally no one on the streets when we see the flyover at the beginning of the finale.