Alrick Riley | Through the Shattered Lens

“We have to get ready. We have to fight.”

“We do … BUT NOT TODAY.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake! Will somebody please fight the goddamn saviors so that the damn show can move on to something other than tense stand-offs and rambling monologues from Negan’s goons!?

*sigh*

Okay, that’s out of my system. Let’s talk about the latest episode of The Walking Dead.

Judging from some of the response that I’m seeing online, a lot of people are proclaiming Bury Me Here to be one of the best episodes of season 7. I really can’t agree, though I will say that those who are saying that Lennie James was “Emmy-worthy” tonight are not incorrect. James had some great moments and it was nice to be reminded that Morgan is actually one of the more interesting characters on The Walking Dead.

For that matter, there was a lot of good acting on display tonight. Not just Lennie James but also Karl Makinen, who made you sympathize with Richard even if you couldn’t exactly blame Morgan for beating him to death at the end of the episode. The title’s episode came from Richard’s request and, by the end of the show, you did feel that Richard had earned the right to pick his own burial site.

(A lot of fans turned on Richard when, a few episodes ago, he suggested sacrificing Carol in order to bring Ezekiel in Rick’s war with the Saviors. Well, Richard shouldn’t have suggested that and yes, he did make some mistakes tonight. But goddammit, at least Richard was doing something other than growing melons.)

You know who else did a good job tonight? Logan Miller. He did a good job, even when the show’s script when out of its way to sabotage him. Has anyone ever been as obviously doomed as Miller’s Benjamin? From the minute Benjamin showed up tonight, we know he was dead. He offered to help out Carol. He looked up to Morgan. He had naive hope for the future. He had a girlfriend. He gave Morgan an uglyass painting for his uglyass room. Benjamin was so doomed and yet, Logan Miller brought at least a little bit of poignancy to his character’s obvious fate.

But, with all that in mind, tonight’s episode still moved way too slowly for me. It felt like a throwback to the first half of the season, before the show’s writers apparently realized how boring it was to have to sit through a new Savior monologue every week. There were hints of the show that we all want The Walking Dead to be. Even Morgan’s murder of Richard was a return to the unflinching yet plot-appropriate brutality that brought The Walking Dead its initial success. There were good moments but there were plenty of slow moments too.

Of course, that’s the way it’s almost always been with The Walking Dead. At the show’s best, the good moments are so good that they cause you to forget about the slow moments. At its worse, the slow moments are so slow that you give up on watching before the episode reaches the good moments. And then you have episodes like the one that aired tonight, where the good moments are good on their own and the slow moments are slow on their own and the whole thing never quite comes together. Tonight’s episode was a good thirty minutes stretched out to an average hour.

One final note — and I realize that I’ve said this a million times in the past and I’m probably say it a million times in the future — the Saviors are so fucking boring! Yes, I know that they’re bullies and they are properly hissable villains. You never feel anything but good when you see a savior die. But the show continues to act as if the Saviors are the most compelling bad guys since Milton inadvertently made Satan the most interesting character in Paradise Lost. Quite some time ago, I grew bored with various Negan lieutenants popping up, rambling on and on about tributes, and then demanding that everyone hand over their guns.

(That said, I am going to give some special credit to Josh Mikel, who, tonight, made Jared into the most loathsome savior of all.)

So, that’s why I say this: HURRY UP AND GET TO THE WAR! If Rick and Negan are not in the middle of an official war by the end of the season, I worry about the future of The Walking Dead….

I’ve been on twitter, reading everyone’s reactions to the latest episode of The Walking Dead, and I’ve noticed a definite pattern.

People who read the comic along with watching the TV show seemed to be pretty excited by tonight’s episode. They were happy that Dwight (played by Austin Amelio) and his wife, Sherry (Christine Evangelista), were prominently featured. I mean, make no mistake. This episode may have technically been a Daryl episode but, for the most part, it was pretty much set up to highlight Dwight and Sherry.

Of course, it was also set up to give us some insight into the way that Negan runs things. We got to see the Sanctuary, the home base of the Saviors, and it’s not really that surprising that it turned out to be the testosterone-fueled Hellhole of everyone’s nightmares. On the plus side, the Sanctuary has power. It has music. It has a TV, though there doesn’t appear to be any good programming. Is a world where the only available entertainment features Tony Danza a world worth saving?

And Negan — well, Negan’s still an asshole. He’s still strutting around with Lucille, bullying everyone that he comes in contact with. Obviously, we were meant to compare Negan’s leadership style to King Ezekiel’s. Ezekiel rules through fantasy. Negan rules through fear. No wonder Gordon tried to leave.

(Gordon’s execution would have been far more powerful if we had more of an idea of who Gordon was meant to be. Then again, that scene was more about Dwight than Gordon.)

Negan is also trying to brainwash Daryl and it’s obvious that Dwight is more than a little jealous. I liked the fact that Dwight didn’t seem to know if he wanted to kill Daryl or beg Daryl to be his best friend. Watching Negan and Daryl, I couldn’t help but think about Merle and the Governor. Of course, that didn’t end well as far as the Dixon family is concerned…

As I said, those who read the comic appeared to enjoy tonight’s episode. On the other hand, viewers who weren’t familiar with the comic seemed to be a bit disappointed. On twitter, they complained that tonight’s episode was too slow and anti-climatic. Interestingly enough, a lot of them said the same thing about last week’s episode with King Ezekiel.

Myself, I have to say that The Cell didn’t do much for me. Last week’s episode may have been slow but, after all the shit that went down in the premiere, I was kind of thankful for a slow episode that featured at least a little humor. But with The Cell, The Walking Dead essentially followed one slow episode with another slow episode, the difference being that this one didn’t really accomplish much.

As I watched day-to-day life in the Sanctuary, I couldn’t help but think about Lost. You remember when Jack, Sawyer, and Kate ended up spending a handful of episodes living with The Others? The society of the Others was genuinely interesting. You could actually imagine watching an alternate version of Lost where the Others would have been the main characters and the Oceanic passengers would have been the rarely seen villains.

You really can’t say the same of The Saviors and life at Sanctuary. The Saviors may be scary and menacing and dangerous but they’re also more than a little boring. I’ve praised Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance in the past but, with tonight’s episode, I started to wonder if there was anything more to Morgan’s Negan than what we’ve already seen. Yes, Negan’s a bully. Yes, he’s an asshole. Yes, I’d love to see him devoured by a walker. But I could say the same about a lot of the characters on The Walking Dead. What is it about the television version of Negan that sets him apart from every other wannabe dictator on this show?

To a certain extent, it reminded me of when Colin Hanks showed up as a serial killer on Dexter. I watched him and I thought, “Yeah, he’s pretty fucked up but who isn’t on this show?” At this point, just being fucked up isn’t enough.

What the show needs is one episode — just one — where Negan isn’t bellowing and threatening everyone that he sees. We need one episode where we can see who Negan was before the zombie apocalypse and who he is now when he’s not hiding behind Lucille. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a seriously talented actor and he’s capable of a lot more than just playing a one-dimensional villain.

I hope that The Walking Dead eventually gives him a chance to show everyone how true that is.

I do want to end this review on a positive note so I will say two things:

This episode was directed by Alrick Riley, who previously directed several episodes of an intriguing British spy show called MI5 (a.k.a. Spooks).
That scene with the walker falling out of the sky totally freaked me out!