Walking Dead Episode Reviews 5.6

This will not be a Walking Dead love fest.  If that’s what you want, reach out to all of the other sycophants.  I’m just here to provide an unbiased opinion on what I think about this show, which is based off of the popular comic series of the same name.

I started watching this show at the behest of my lovely sister, one of the millions of fanatics out there. I caught up through Netflix and first observed  the show to bond with my sister.  Some siblings bond over shopping, others through sports, arts, or culture, we bond over zombies.  I had been viewing Zombie movies long before their most recent glory, but my preference still resides with the initial George A. Romero Trilogy and his initial assessment of this show being a soap Opera with Zombies in it.  There is no new territory ‘seen it all before’, just a extension of what has already been done in film.

So we can get caught up I’ll provide a brief recap of my thoughts of the first few seasons.

Season 1 was a solid start.  Introduced the characters developed two strong leaders in Rick and Shane and the tension between them and Rick’s wife Lori.  It was a bit short in episodes but a solid start.

Second season builds off of the first one, we meet some new characters at Hershel’s farm.  Carl, Rick’s son gets shot, Shane turns “evil”, yada yada yada if you’re reading this you probably don’t need a blow-by-blow on what happens in these early seasons.  Great finish, but the big reveal that everyone is infected and will become a zombie err walker regardless of how they die is rather meaningless and carries no weight.

They served time in the third season spending the bulk of it in the prison.  Daryl becomes the prominent number two to Rick and The Governor emerges as a viable antagonist. This was a strong season and superior to the other two except the season finale which was a total cocktease. They built to a climax where the Governor would fight rick and blood would be shed and more people will be shot in the head than in John Wick. But nope, we got the Governor going into an Empty prison, Andrea dying and the only interesting angle, Carl killing an unarmed person.  I nearly quit watching the series because the ending was such a waste.

Season four, much like season three, is a tale of two halves. The whole first half lead to the Governor leading a new group of folks against Rick after the prison gets the bubonic plague and everyone who they brought over from the Governor’s previous crew was killed off solely for plot convenience. The first half finalie was the ending the season three should have been. The second half was slow paced and meandered around while everyone got on the road to Terminus.  The revelations about Michone’s past were good, but she still is horrible at swinging a katana and there were far too many wasted moments and little direction.  That said, Lizzie’s story arc came to a gripping conclusion. 

The best part of this season is the introduction of Abraham and Rosita, two tough as nails soldiers who are safeguarding Eugene the man who could flip the switch and make things like they were. Awesome!  Finally we’re going to get somewhere.  Much like in Planes Trains and Automobiles there were detours. The ending united the groups at Terminus with a savage Rick. The only thing that was missing was, Beth and Glenn getting killed, but I’m still waiting on that…

Season five thus far has been the best of the entire series.  Even the Beth episode was good! Carol has become the female Snake Pliskin, a one woman wrecking crew that saved everyone and an even bigger bad ass than her partner in crime, Daryl. The cannibals were killed off a bit too quick for my liking.  I liked the character Gareth and wanted to see more of him. On the Road to Washington now, we end the last episode finding out that Eugene lied about being a scientist and that Eugene’s mission prevented Abraham from killing himself.

SO Now we come to tonite and what do we get, a Carol episode.  We are just left hanging after the nuclear bomb that got dropped last week. This is a sort of fill in the blank episode. We find out about what happened to Carol after her being exiled from Rick’s camp in the first half of season 4 and realize how much her character has evolved since the series began. She started off being a weak person worn down by years of abuse by her husband, then slowly evolved into a tough woman after enduring the death of her daughter Sophia. She killed and then burned two survivors who became infected with the plague.

But she’s still a vulnerable person underneath the new armor she has created for herself.  She is clearly still affected by having to put Lizzie down and being reunited with Rick’s crew.  She nearly ran once more before Daryl saw the White-Crossed-Car which has lead them back to Atlanta.  Everything keeps getting burned around her and the smoke is a constant motif for her character. Even her hair has a smoky hue!  My problem with tonite’s episode is that not that it told us a few new things about Carol, but the fact that we’ve already seen what happens to Daryl and Carol. It was a filler episode plain and simple.  I really wanted to see aftermath with Eugene but I can see why they didn’t from a writer’s perspective.  I can’t really complain when I’ve done the same thing!

During the “Beth” episode Carol, ends up at the hospital on a stretcher and in a earlier episode Daryl comes back with someone who we know now is Noah or the grown up version of the “Everybody hates Chris” kid.  It defeats the purpose to see what happens if we already know the ending. 

They wrote themselves into this corner by trying to out think the room.  This is a Zombie show and it should be told in a more linear fashion.  It’s starting to take plays from the Lost playbook (including the Virgin Mary in the van that takes a nose dive off the bridge) and that isn’t for the better. The show used to be straightforward. Once the prison was destroyed in Season 4 and the group got separated, the writers really started to explore the ideas of mixing timelines as they told what happened to the survivors afterwards. In that instance, it was a good move, because you didn’t know what happened to the survivors as they crossed paths.  It was also done subtly like with a pan down to see what shoes someone is wearing or a piece of a candy wrapper on the train tracks.  Now, though it has caused more problems.

It ruins the surprise that Carol got hit by a car at the when you see her already being dragged into the hospital on a stretcher with obvious injuries. Now if you didn’t see the earlier scene where Beth sees her being brought in, you’d actually be shocked seeing her get hit by a car.   It really comes down to what makes someone want to watch the next episode or read the next chapter.  Do they want us to have our theories about something that has already happened and then have those theories confirmed or denied after being filled? Or do they just want to tell a story where and surprises are lurking around every corner and we see them as they happen?

What do you think?

C.J. Foxx 

Author of Super-Hero Bowl VI
@CJFoxxAuthor on Twitter
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