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Tag Archives: Father Gabriel Stokes
The Walking Dead Ponders Divine Intervention and Kindness in “Dead or Alive Or”
I like The Walking Dead when its episodes give us a series of vignettes much more than when it’s trying to pull off a single story that has umpteen tangled tentacles. That’s why Season 4 was such a high point for the show. Rather than weaving and unraveling scores of different characters, episode after episode, the show took time to let each of them have their own stories and gave their individual narratives the space to really breathe. That allowed the audience to get to know those characters and better appreciate their individual struggles and perspectives, rather than letting them be rolled up into the morass of dinge and lopsided plots that otherwise rumble through the series.
So my favorite parts of “Dead or Alive Or” are the interludes with Father Gabriel and Dr. Carson, because they feel like a throwback to those semi-standalone adventures from earlier in the series’s run. That duo’s portion of the episode doesn’t move the overarching plot forward much, but it serves as an illuminating short story in the midst of the larger, ever more tiresome narrative machinations of the Negan/Saviors arc.
The Walking Dead Shows Negan as a True Believer and a Leviathan in “The Big Scary U”
“A war of all against all.” That’s how philosopher Thomas Hobbes pithily explained the “state of nature,” his theoretical account of what it was like when human beings lived without government, without order, and without rule. He imagined a life that was “nasty, brutish, and short” and posited that we all needed a Leviathan, the personification of the force and power of the government, to avoid that unenviable existence. On Hobbes’ account, people needed to give up certain freedoms and turn things over to the Leviathan to ensure compliance with the order of the day, as the price to avoid that endless, indiscriminate war.
In Negan’s mind, he is that Leviathan. The last time The Walking Dead interrogated Negan’s moral philosophy, it left it ambiguous how the leader of The Saviors viewed himself. It was nebulous whether Negan really believed that his brutal ways were for the greater good, or whether he was just spinning propaganda to justify the comparatively lavish and carefree lifestyle he could enjoy while others toiled.
“The Big Scary U” is much less ambiguous. There is a certain sense that Negan may be deluding himself, offering rationalizations and eliding the darker or more self-serving side of the choices he’s made. But it nevertheless becomes clear that, on the surface at least, he is a true believer, someone who thinks that he’s doing what needs to be done to avoid a worse fate for everyone.
