-
Recent Posts
- Better Call Saul: There Are No Happy Endings between a “Rock and Hard Place”
- Black Widow Keeps It in the Family for Natasha’s Last Ride
- Loki Finds New Purpose in the Man behind the Mischief
- In its Debut, Star Wars: The Bad Batch Decides Whether to Obey or Rebel
- Nomadland: A Film Out of Time, For Our Times
Archives
Recent Comments
Meta
Tag Archives: Maggie Rhee
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.
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 Ties Up Loose Ends in a Dull Fashion in “The King, The Widow and Rick”
Episodes like these make me thank Heaven that The Walking Dead didn’t start airing on network television in the era of twenty-two episode seasons. With scores of characters, multiple locales, and plenty of plotlines, the show should be plenty capable of finding enough plot and incident to fill an eight-episode half season with minimal wheel-spinning. Sure, not every episode can advance a major season arc, but there’s still tons of space for character development, illuminating vignettes, or details that make it more meaningful when those major arcs do finally come to a head.
Instead, it feels like every half season has at least one episode like “The King, The Widow and Rick” which cannot, even charitably, be called a table-setting episode. At best, it’s an episode devoted to tying up loose ends. It throws out a few miscellaneous plots here and there, but those storylines don’t move the ball in terms of the overarching story of the series; they don’t really tell us anything new about the characters, and they don’t add much, if anything, to the show as a whole.
The Walking Dead Is One Big Jumble of Plots in “Monsters”
For a while, it felt like The Walking Dead had found a nice, consistent rhythm in its storytelling. Since about Season 4, each season would include a handful of episodes that featured everyone in the cast, but most would be smaller, more standalone affairs that focused on a narrower subset of characters. These episodes would tell individual stories and focus on small facets of bigger events that deepen our understanding of the personalities and problems at play. It gave the show a certain decompressed feeling that raised accusations of “boring,” but which also provided The Walking Dead with the space to flesh out its characters and make those stretches between the big set pieces feel less like wheel-spinning and more like an effort, however variable in its success, to make those grand finales matter.
But Season 8 has seemingly abandoned that tack. While not everyone has showed up in every episode thus far, each installment this season has felt like an immediate sequel to the prior one. The siege that began in the premiere continued in last week’s episode. And this week’s episode, “Monsters,” follows directly from there, depicting the same moral conflicts and the same lingering issues that Rick, Daryl, Carol, Ezekiel, Morgan, Jesus, Tara, and Aaron faced in the prior episode. We’re getting one giant story here, rather than a collection of related, but distinct plots that become part of a larger mosaic.
The Walking Dead: Finding Fault and Absolution on “The Other Side”
Fault is a slippery concept. It’s bundled up with intentions, results, and a host of other complicating factors, all of which affect whom we blame and whom we absolve when things go badly. Some people wrong us without meaning to. Others intend to hurt us but inadvertently give us exactly what we need. And some people simply twist in the wind, unsure or unaware of the damage they do to others. How we credit and blame people for their actions and inaction says as much about who we are as it does about the person we’re judging.
But how we move past those assessments of fault, whether we’re blaming others or blaming ourselves, can be just as telling. It matters how we try to overcome, or avoid, the bad blood, hurt feelings, and guilt. In “The Other Side,” Daryl blames himself, Gregory bends over backwards to avoid any perception of fault, and Sasha and Rosita hash out their awkward, shared part in Abraham’s life and death, each trying to figure out where they fit into this intricate ethical hierarchy.
The Walking Dead Offers Four Great Sequences and Remembers Those It’s Lost in “Go Getters”
So often, the average Walking Dead episode is a mixed bag — a collection of scenes where half of them excite and the other half result in eyerolls. But what keeps so many still watching is the way that the show can put together a few extraordinary sequences — ones focused on character, or a tense interrogation, or even the usual zombie-killing action — that remind us why we started following the series in the first place. There are four sequences in “Go Getters” that show the potential of The Walking Dead, the things that keep us coming back, in an episode centered on how we honor, vindicate, and above all remember the dead.
