The Walking Dead Tries to Rebuild the World with “A New Beginning”

I spent so much of The Walking Dead’s last major arc wondering “why don’t our heroes just take out Gregory?” Sure, so much of that arc was, yet again, about the battle for the soul of their community, a theme illustrated through choices about whether to spare people in order to remain good Samaritans or to hurt and harm and kill them like The Saviors, because that’s what it takes to beat The Saviors. Not executing Gregory, not sending him out to fend for himself, was meant not just as a sign of mercy, but as a sign that the good guys were morally better than the bad guys.

But good lord, surely at some point after he’s tried to sell you out to those same bad guys, after he’s tried to sow chaos and mistrust for you and your group, after he’s proven to be nothing but a unredeemable heel through and through, you rid yourself of the guy one way or another. Beyond a certain point, practicality has to win out, and someone who practically goes out of his way to cause trouble and threaten your life and the lives of the people you care about has to go.

That couldn’t, or at least didn’t, happen in wartime. Gregory survived until this pax mortis, when the denizens of Alexandria, The Hilltop, The Kingdom, The Sanctuary, and Oceanside could stop worrying about the threat that seemed poised to either bleed them dry or wipe them out, and start worrying about how to build a civilization. They could try to create a broader collection of city-states that could work with one another, rather than work in service of one at all others’ expense.

That’s the most interesting notion in “A New Beginning”, the premiere of The Walking Dead’s ninth season. In some ways this is the happy ending Rick and his allies fought for. We see gorgeous scenes of Rick, Michonne, and Judith laugh and live as a family. We see former Saviors tending to crops in the heart of Negan’s war machine. We see all our favorite characters happy, healthy, and well for once. The passage of time has allowed everyone to make progress, to build something, to remake a world that can be safe for children like Judith (who’s finally old enough to talk) and Maggie’s son, Hershel (who’s finally been born)!

I know I'm applying Game of Thrones logic here, but does the blonde hair mean Judith's definitely not Shane's child?

“A New Beginning” illustrates the spirit of that success, that cooperation, in its outstanding central set piece, where a coalition of almost every main character of note unites to raid the supplies of an art and history museum. The setup has everything you could ask for from The Walking Dead. There’s a clear, logical goal to obtain old time farming supplies and a doomsday library’s worth of seeds. There’s smaller character moments, to indicate what’s changed and what hasn’t since the fall of The Saviors.

And most of all, there’s visual acumen and situational pressure that holds your attention throughout. “A New Beginning” takes pains to setup the threat of the cracking glass floor that our heroes tread upon, with a voracious horde lurking underneath. Director Greg Nicotero holds the tension of the team trying to pull a stagecoach across that floor. There’s great sound design as the noises of crackling glass make you cringe at what may come. The group moves slowly, showing their justified caution while drawing out the minutes and seconds the audience has to sit on tenterhooks. And when a hole inevitably forms and Ezekiel falls through, the crew uses a safety rope to pull him up, which frays on the sharp edge of the broken glass in the perfect way to make you question whether the King’s plot armor will falter within the confines of a season premiere.

Instead, our heroes manage to pull him up and save his life. They successfully scavenge their stagecoach, their seeds, and their plow. There’s an implicit attaboy there, something encouraging that says after all that this group of individuals has been through, after everything they’ve seen and lived down, there’s no challenge that can stop them now.

But of course, that isn’t true. It couldn’t be. There’s not much of a T.V. show in “happily ever after.” Instead, The Walking Dead reminds us that there were always threats beyond a single preening antagonist in the ashes of the world. There are threats like storms that shatter the bridges you use to move your supplies, mud that stymies your ability to transport the latest find, and of course, the mass of undead shamblers who are always lurking, there to make moments small and large lethally dangerous at the snap of a jawline.

"Somebody pick me up one of the audio guides!"

That’s what happens in “A New Beginning” as the perfect storm of route closures, muddy terrain, and an inbound horde ends up bringing down Ken, an otherwise indistinguishable Hilltopper who gets just enough characterization to make it mildly noteworthy (albeit obvious) that his end has come. More than any shock that might come from killing off a no-name, Ken’s death tells us that what comes after Negan’s reign isn’t all peaches and sunshine, that people still die, that our heroes can still lose, and that ending the war was great, but didn’t solve everyone’s problems.

Instead, the main characters on The Walking Dead are left with new problems, threats from within that are just as potent as those from without. Ken’s death exposes the tensions between these communities. Fighting Negan gave the residents of these far flung city-states a reason to work together. But now that the war is over, everyone still needs to eat, and work, and survive, something that remains difficult, with or without a strongman demanding everyone pay what they “owe.”

That concern is particularly acute for the surviving Saviors, who are operating under Daryl’s watch. There’s pro-Negan graffiti at The Sanctuary, and a mild sense of unrest and concern that this new experiment isn’t working. Negan was brutal, and at times unpredictable, but he kept The Sanctuary running, even if it was mostly to his benefit. If there’s one thing I appreciate about the transition this episode starts, it’s that as much as I was ready to be done with the Negan arc, the show isn’t just sweeping it under the rug. There’s still Savior loyalists, people who flourished under the old regime, who aren’t ready to go quietly, and that’s going to be a problem even if their former leader has been deposed.

But their current leader is uneasy and ready to bow out as well. For Daryl, who’s been presiding over The Sanctuary, his desire to bolt is partly due to that same sense that this new thing isn’t working. But there’s also the sense that the transition to the new world is just hard for him. He’s never been good at being domesticated, and the thing that got him through so much of the horrors of the zombie apocalypse was his friends, the original group (more or less) that let him be a part of something. Now, they’ve all been dispersed, finding each other spread out and representing different communities. That’s uncomfortable for him, because it means breaking apart the one community that he felt like he belonged to.

I dare you to find me a Carol/Daryl scene that isn't sad but also heartwarming.

Oddly enough, that’s similar to how Gregory feels, as though the community he built has been taken away from him, by a changing of the times he didn’t sign up for. It’s not hard for Gregory’s pot-stirring in this to feel like political commentary on the part of the show. He questions the legitimacy of any election that would put Maggie in charge; he claims she’s in the pocket of other people’s interests, and he criticizes her communal bent as failing to put the Hilltop first. It veers toward the ridiculous when he actually plots to kill her — first through a grieving father and then himself — but it’s effective because it feels all too real up to that point.

When you have lots of different communities, when you have limited resources, when you see your son dying for something that benefits your neighbors instead of the place you call home and resources going elsewhere when it feels like you’re scraping by, unrest and dissension in the ranks follow. Murder plots may be a bit much, but the conflicts The Walking Dead is teasing out — how the march toward civilization is fraught with internecine conflict (something underscored by the museum plaque Michonne gazes at), how cooperative communities can push to look out for their own interests when the going gets tough, how the end of a war doesn’t mean the end of societal tensions — are a promising foundation for a new season of television.

And that season kicks off with Maggie having had just about enough of Gregory’s crap. His attempted murder plot is a final straw. After so much deceit, so much yellow-bellied manipulation, Gregory receives his just deserts at the end of a noose, and the trouble he causes can finally end. After so many episodes where it was unclear why somebody didn’t do this sooner, Maggie has Gregory executed, and he’s finally gone.

"Don't mind me. Just hanging out."

Except he isn’t. Maggie may have ended his life, but the dirt he kicked up at The Hilltop is still around, and whether she wants to admit it or not, it’s filtered down to Maggie herself. When Rick asks her for more to help keep The Sanctuary going, she agrees, but demands more in return. She doesn’t want her people to see her as someone who always sacrifices their needs for the needs of others. Those types of concerns are going to become more prevalent as the different communities of The Walking Dead chart their new paths. The charter that Michonne wants to create may start on rocky ground, as each of these places begins to mark their own territory, even in the absence of Negan’s boot heel.

“A New Beginning”, true to its name, moves The Walking Dead forward. It asks what the world looks like when an authoritarian regime is toppled and the victors have to pick up the pieces. For as many wins as the show gives our heroes here, little bits of happiness they deserve, as Michonne puts it, after all that they’ve lost, it doesn’t pretend that the process will be easy. The idea this episode sets up for this season — of the difficulty of constructing a humane civilization out of what’s left of the old regime — is poised to be a strong one, but also one that threatens to put our heroes at odds with one another, even when the old thorns in their sides have been subdued, or outright eliminated.