I’m not the first person to suggest that The Walking Dead has exhausted itself creatively. Eight years in, almost any show is going to have trouble feeling vibrant and fresh. But what’s conspicuous about “The Lost and the Plunderers” is how clearly it evinces the sense of a late era version of this show — a show that’s always tried to aim a bit higher than its grindhouse roots — that’s running out of meaningful things to say.
The current topic du jour is war, or more broadly, the seemingly unending cycle of killing that’s taken hold since Rick & Company (which may be, if Simon is to be believed, the official name for our protagonists’ group) first started clashing with the Saviors. And this episode is fixated on the question of whether anything short of one side wiping out the other can put a stop to this conflict, or if painful losses and hurt feelings and desire for revenge and vindication will perpetuate it forever.
And hey, that’s not a bad topic for The Walking Dead to cover. Most zombie-related works focus on the fall of society. TWD’s status as a venerable show gives it the longer runway to dig into how a society is built back up from the rubble. Those efforts would inevitably involve growing pains and lives lost, as different people with different ideas about what the future should look like come into conflict with one another. So now the show has the chance to do some Deadwood-esque thematic work about both the brighter ideals and the uglier side of nation-building that are both at play.
That seems to be what The Walking Dead has been getting at over the last couple of seasons, showing Rick & Company, the Saviors, the Hilltoppers, Oceanside, the Kingdom, the “Garbage People”, and others as different exemplars of how a society might be organized and how viewpoints clash. Those philosophical disputes turn into violent ones, and “The Lost and the Plunderers” seems to be asking whether that perpetual conflict can ever be resolved into something approaching peace and stability.
"No! Please! Help yourself to as much garbage as you want!"
The episode’s answer seems to be firmly in the negative. Rick holds Negan responsible, if not for Carl’s death, then for the death of too many of his friends and allies, to ever just let things stand. Negan holds Rick responsible for the continued struggle, telling Rick that if he’d just gone along with the Saviors’ program, none of this would have happened. And pricks like Simon are too proud not to extract their revenge on the people who’ve disrespect them, when killing is always the easier option for the people holding all the guns.
I doubt The Walking Dead will stick with that answer. In recent years, the show has responded to accusations that it’s overly bleak with episodes that trend more toward the optimistic, even in the face of the grisly day-to-day of its premise. But the bigger problem is that when the show tries to dramatize those ideas in actual scenes and conversations, it ends up feel dull and repetitive.
The episode is nominally chopped up into several different people’s points of view, replete with title cards announcing which character the audience should focus on. But in practice, the results aren’t much different from the show’s usual approach, jumping from story to story within a given episode.
Sure, we get to see Michonne’s efforts to stamp out the blaze on Carl’s favorite gazebo, while zombie slowly overtake it. (File under: “sentences I never thought I’d write in a review.”) Simon gets a little extra development as a character with his own perspective. And the title cards put a band-aid over the “we’re checking in with Oceanside for a while despite it having only a tenuous thematic connection to the other stuff going on in this episode” issue.
"Remember us! We still exist! I know, I was surprised too!"
But man, it’s hard to care about the show’s tedious treadmill of ethical dilemmas at this point, especially when they’re delivered with The Walking Dead’s typical blunt dialogue. Negan gets to give another speech about how his brand of “saving” people is hard, but remains the better way. Enid gets to give a speech about killing being a choice. And Rick gets to have another clunky back-and-forth with Negan over who’s going to kill whom and why.
And then there’s Jadis, the Vulcan-looking head of the Junkyardigans. “The Lost and the Plunderers” means to give her a bit of the spotlight and some backstory. With a bevy of non-linear editing, we see snippets of how the events of this episode have affected her. The parts of the episodes spent at her dump include some baffling decisions – like Rick’s choice to go back to get assistance from her and her tribe after they’ve double-crossed him and his pals twice – and the timeline jumps quickly become confusing.
But there’s merit in what the episode is attempting there. The setup of Jadis luring her zombified compatriots into a refuse-grinder are contrived, but the images are potent. The flashbacks lay things on a little too thick, but there’s pathos in Jadis having to watching her dead friends look her in the eye as they’re ground into slurry. The show’s reach exceeds its grasp when it shows that slurry pouring over an avante garde painting Jadis created — an obvious visual metaphor for this conflict obscuring the beauty of the world — but the episode’s at least going for something with all of this, however ham-handedly.
I’m just tired: tired of this ongoing Negan plot, tired of the show running in place rather than moving forward, and most of all, tired of getting the same reheated moral ruminations over and over again.
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And I love moral ruminations! One of the best things about works in the zombie genre is that they force the viewer to confront which moral values and parts of ourselves we’d hold onto in the face of a mortal threat, and in the absence of those forces of civilization that keep our lesser impulses in check.
But The Walking Dead has been chewing on these same moral questions for nearly eight years now, and it’s almost out of tricks at this point. The promise of this Savior-centric story arc came from taking the well-worn issue of whether community can exist at the end of the world, and refreshing it by expanding it to the question of whether different communities can co-exist within that environment. And yet here, in the back half of a season that’s drawing out its central conflict further and further, that blood-stained navel gazing can’t help but feel boring and sparkless.
Carl hoped for a better world. Rick and Negan both want to bring that about but have very different ideas about how to do it. And bystanders, like the Junkyardigans and the denizens of Oceanside, just want to live their lives, while finding themselves inevitably pulled into this clash of civilizations. The resulting war becomes all-encompassing, and the death of a child, a child whose end became certain after he went out trying to help someone rather than prepare for battle, seems more like an accelerant than a wake-up call for either his real dad or the stubble-faced strongman who seemed to want to play that role.
There’s interesting themes to extract from that, and by god, The Walking Dead tries. But you can only watch characters have those same damn debates, with the same sort of faux-high-minded dialogue, in a wash of greens and grays and the same set of mournful looks, before you start to ask what more, if anything, the show has to offer.
"I find the bat helps me ruminate."
The question of whether it’s okay, let alone wise, to kill and fight in the name of a greater good, or whether to try to sue for peace, to work something out, is a worthy one that shows like The Walking Dead are well-positioned to address. You just can’t keep trying to address it in the same basic way, with the latest death reduced to the same debates, until the issue has been ground into zombie dust.
As it rounds out its eighth year on the air, The Walking Dead can’t keep having these same conversations, the same ethical arguments, without giving us something more or something different, or else the only cycle that seems impossible to break is the one where a television show can’t stop repeating itself.
