The opening few minutes of “Honor” are The Walking Dead at its best. If you want me to give your television show a little slack, to feel a little extra emotional resonance in an important sequence, then you’re hard pressed to do better than employing a little music penned by Conor Oberst (or, as the show has done before, John Darnielle). “At the Bottom of Everything”, the opening track from Oberst’s seminal album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, is the perfect accompaniment to the episode’s opening montage. The song tells a story and offers an anthem about the absurdities we face and the joys we wring even in the face of oblivion.
And that’s perfect for an episode devoted to Carl’s death, a death that is surprisingly satisfying. The reveal that Carl had been bitten felt like it mostly existed for shock value purposes in the mid-season finale, with the promise that The Walking Dead could then display his departure from this mortal coil in a typically overwrought, overwritten fashion.
Instead, “Honor” gives us a glimpse of Carl seeming emboldened, maybe even happy, despite the knowledge of his impending demise.
Rick’s eldest child spends his final hours making plans to help people. He says goodbye to his little sister. He writes letters for those he cares about. He enjoys the fresh air and the sunshine one last time. As befits the song these events are set to, Carl finds a freedom and a joy in knowing what’s to come, in the ideas of what really matters and what decidedly doesn’t emerging in the crucible of a known end.
"Just so you know, this frees me up if anybody needs me for Black Panther 2."
The death of a child — one who has often been the show’s chief symbol for notions of innocence and the risk of it being corrupted in this new world — could easily have been an opportunity for The Walking Dead to wallow. Instead, the show uses this event as an opportunity to vindicate why the things Carl believes in, the idea of a better tomorrow, are worth living for, and worth being happy about, even when a final surrender is in the offing.
That isn’t to say that that “Honor” is a bright, chipper episode filled with warm fuzzies. It’s still an hour full of grief, most of it channeled through Rick and Michonne (which is the right choice given their familial connection).
The Walking Dead plays to its strengths on that front. It lets stark images like Rock and Michonne sitting on a desolate porch having had to bury a son carry the emotion of this event. It allows the show’s performers to convey the magnitude of the moment with the looks on their faces as they look upon Carl dying. Or “Honor” may offer a bit of both, as Greg Nicotero himself, the episode’s director, opts to shoot from below while Rick and Michonne dig Carl’s grave with the sun behind them, only putting Michonne’s devastated expression into focus when a shadow hits the right place.
As much as I give it guff at times, The Walking Dead has always been a strong series in terms of its visuals. It’s also blessed to have plenty of outstanding performers like Danai Gurira (as Marvel superhero fans have learned), and it uses both to great effect here.
"Well hey, now you can at least get your hat back."
What’s more, as much as myself and others have ragged on this show for its sense of unremitting bleakness, “Honor” manages to spin this horrible event into an embrace of hope. Carl dies, but he dies trying to save someone he didn’t have to save, without regret or complaint. He dies surrounded by people who love him having taken steps to help protect them. He dies believing that though his life is brief, it is and was worth it to do those things, even in the crater or civilization, because of the world he envisions bringing about through those actions.
Carl grew up surrounded by all of this violence, all of this horror, all of the worst of humanity on display, and still became someone who thought there was more to this life than that. That is, in its own way, a happy ending for the little boy who would wander around in his dad’s hat when the series began.
Carl’s optimism is contrasted with Morgan’s bleak worldview. Morgan makes for a strong counterpoint in the episode, as a man who first lost his own son, then lost a surrogate son, and now feels that sense of nihilism and brutality creeping over him as the only option his battered psyche has left. As he and Carol maraude their way through The Kingdom in an effort to rescue Ezekiel, Morgan unleashes that brutality on each of the Saviors he comes across.
Here too, the show’s visual panache and strong performances come into focus. The way that Morgan tears through his opponents, in some instances literally, is visceral and disturbing. Interspersed with scenes of Carl preaching the idea of something better than this endless war emerging, of saying “yes” to mercy and kindness, Morgan can only say no.
"This performance of MacBeth is getting kind of extreme."
He kills without hesitation. He rips a man’s viscera out in a tense moment, his hands covered with blood. He cuts the unmistakable image of someone who has lost everything and resorts to the most cruel, determined, atavistic parts of himself to cope.
Nicotero shows Morgan stalking Gavin like a monster in a slasher flick. The camera zooms in on his staff dragging on the ground, creating a sense of tension and horrible anticipation. Lennie James once again projects the image of someone who has lost the most human parts of himself and is struggling to find them again, even when desperately implored by those on the other end of his weapon.
For every bit of light in the darkness from Carl’s part of this episode, there is a corresponding bit of hopelessness and moral and personal descent in Morgan’s part of it. And for a little while, you nearly believe that The Walking Dead might just nail the landing on this one. At around the 2/3rds mark of the episode, it seems poised to give the audience a heartening story of a young man perishing but doing so nobly, contrasted with a good man falling in the face of tragedy, while tying those two conflicting ideas together.
But “Honor” falters where The Walking Dead always falters: when it tries to do too much, to overdo the dialogue that’s supposed to convey overtly what its images and performances already convey more sublty, and to make everything too over the top, too heavily underlined, and too obvious to pass muster.
The strong work “Honor” does of framing Morgan as an increasingly heartless killer (and of Ezekiel as someone willing to sacrifice his life for his people) is undercut by Gavin, an otherwise unique secondary antagonist, giving overly didactic monologues that put too fine a point on the whole situation. The episode defaults to overexplaining the fantasy sequences that were spliced into the season premiere, revealing them as Carl’s vision of the future, including the baffling choice of having him envision Negan as part of this paradise. It’s likely intended as the purest indicator that through it all, Carl has retained his optimism, but it comes off as comical, as the kind of convoluted faux-spiritual nonsense that the show does better to nod at rather than outline with such specificity.
"I'm the ghost of the show's ability to make sense in moments like these."
And, of course, the otherwise heartstring-pulling goodbyes between Carl and those closest to him turn into equally blunt statements about What It All Means. This is, as the show has done a lot recently, an extra-long episode, and boy could it do without the excess girth.
Just when it feels like the show hits its marks in sending Carl off, just when it feels like The Walking Dead is being a bit grandiose, but passably so in the moments where Carl bids farewell to his father, Nicotero & Co. choose to let these scenes go on for another ten minutes while hitting the same notes over and over again. The same excruciatingly-written colloquies that have sunk this show time and time again come back in full force, sucking all the air and emotion out of what had, until that point, been a surprisingly effective exit for one of The Walking Dead’s original characters.
It’s another instance of this series being unable to get out of its own way. There is so much good in “Honor”. There is visual style out the wazoo, with close attention paid to lighting and blocking and composition. There is great work done by the show’s actors, with Danai Gurira and Lennie James turning in their usual strong work, and even Chandler Riggs giving one of his best performances in the entire show. There’s a noteworthy thematic contrast between Carl and Morgan, with conflicting perspectives emerging from opposite sides of the parent-losing-child equation.
"It was nice of the others to leave us some mood lighting."
But then “Honor” beats you over the head with its ideas, and has its characters make grand declarations so far removed from natural speech that they make these moments feel more painfully abstract than realistic, and scenes stretch on forever, robbing them of any sense pace or impact. As is The Walking Dead’s eternal struggle, the show’s continuing pathologies hobble its strengths, leaving the viewer with a sense of frustration and exhaustion that overwhelms the otherwise outstanding work in an episode where we say goodbye to Carl once and for all.
If only the close of this episode could be as strong as the way it opened. But no amount of musical splendor, either from Mr. Oberst or the great Bear McCreary, can fix the problems that emerge when this show inevitably fumbles at the goal line. Farewell Carl. This is about as good an exit as you were gonna get.
