Jason Butler Harner | Through the Shattered Lens

This week, The Walking Dead introduced yet another community and also show us the darker side of the way that the Commonwealth does things.

Aaron and, for some reason, Father Gabriel were recruited to accompany the Commonwealth’s Toby Carlson (played by Jason Butler Harner) to a community that was based in an old apartment complex. Toby told Aaron and Gabriel that their mission was one of recruitment. They wanted to check out the Apartment People, learn about their customs and way of doing things, and then bring them into the Commonwealth. Of course, it actually turned out that Toby just wanted to kill everyone in the apartment building because Lance Hornsby believed that the Apartment People were responsible for attacking a Commonwealth caravan.

Normally, I would be opposed to such wanton death and destruction but, in all honesty, the Apartment People were really annoying. They were so annoying that I’m not even bothering to refer to them by the name of their community. Oceanside deserves a name. Hilltop deserves a name. Alexandria and the Commonwealth deserve a name. There’s been a lot of different groups that have wandered through The Walking Dead and they all earned the right to be known by the name that they selected for their community. But the Apartment People were just jerks and, as such, I don’t care what they call their big, ugly home. To me, they’re just the Apartment People. From the minute that Aaron and Carlson showed up, the Apartment People were acting like jerks. Are there any communities in the world of The Walking Dead that aren’t run by some overly loquacious Negan wannabe?

In this case, the Apartment People were ruled by Ian, the Warlord. The Warlord was played by Michael Biehn, so at least he had that going for him. The Warlord had a nice, dark office and a cool display case of skulls. He claimed that all of the skulls came from the enemies of the Apartment People. I’m not sure if I believed him but I guess it’s always good to have a display of some sort. A good leader always used their decorating skills to make their office their own. (Seriously, that’s on page 19 of Somehow I Manage by Michael Scott.)

I appreciated the fact that The Warlord was immediately suspicious of Father Gabriel because I’ve never really felt that Gabriel adds much to the show. Gabriel started out this season as a newly confirmed atheist but now, suddenly, he’s back to being a fire-and-brimstone holy warrior. Pick a persona and stick with it, Gabriel! And, seriously — if you survived the zombie apocalypse, would you really feel like spending all of your Sundays sitting in church? The fact that Gabriel even has a congregation is just weird to me.

As for the Apartment People, it turned out that Negan is living with them! That’s probably good news for the Apartment People because the Warlord was dead by the end of the episode and someone is going to have to step in and be the new guy who gives long monologues while standing in front of a display case of skulls.

The episode ended with Maggie and her crew showing up, set to do battle with the Commonwealth. I guess this is how the war gets started, over a shabby apartment complex that’s populated by some of the most unlikable people to ever appear on the show. If Negan does’t want to take the Warlord’s place, I guess Maggie can take over the Apartment People and make them as miserable as she’s made everyone at Hilltop.

Anyway, this episode probably would have had more impact if we didn’t already know about the darkness at the heart of the Commonwealth. Still, Michael Biehn was an effective Warlord and Jason Butler Harner was effectively fanatical as Toby Carlson. At least now, we know just why exactly Hilltop and the Commonwealth are going to go to war.

Next week is the mid-season finale!

With 2014 rapidly coming to a close, I am currently trying to get caught up on some of the movies that I either missed seeing or did not get a chance to review earlier this year. After all, in just another month and a half, it’ll be time for me to make out my “Best Of the Year List” and I want to have as many options as possible.

With that in mind, I just finished watching Liam Neeson in Non-Stop, an action-suspense film that came out way back in February.

In Non-Stop, Liam Neeson plays Bill Marks. It’s interesting to note that Bill Marks has the same initials as Bryan Mills, the very specifically trained CIA agent that Neeson plays in the Taken films. And really, Bill Marks might as well Bryan Mills because Neeson pretty much gives the exact same performance in Non-Stop that he previously gave in Taken. That’s not necessarily a criticism. There’s a reason why Liam keeps getting cast in these type of roles. He’s good at them.

In fact, I would say that Liam Neeson is one of the few action stars who I can imagine actually killing someone in real life (though only if he had to). He has a rugged, world-weary cynicism about him. You look into the eyes of a character played by Liam Neeson and you realize that he’s had to do things that you probably don’t want to know anything about. At the same time, Neeson also projects a certain old-fashioned decency as well. He’s the epitome of a decent man forced to use bad methods for the good of us all.

As for Non-Stop, I imagine it was probably pitched as being “Taken on a plane.” Bill Marks is an air marshal who is on board a non-stop flight from New York to London. Shortly after the plane takes off, he starts to receive mysterious text messages telling him that, unless he arranges for a 150 million dollar ransom to be paid into a specific bank account, someone on the plane will die every 20 minutes. While Bill tries to discover who is sending him the text messages and various people on the plane die, the authorities on the ground are convinced that Bill is hijacking the plane. Why? Well, mostly because the bank account is in Bill’s name…

That’s right! Somebody’s trying to frame Bill Marks! Can Bill — with the help of a passenger played by Julianne Moore — figure out who is trying to frame him and why? I have to admit that there was a part of me that was hoping that it would turn out that Bill really was the mastermind behind the whole scheme but instead, the movie offers up a solution that is even more ludicrous and illogical. Naturally, there’s a twist. The hijacking is not what it originally appears to be. Perhaps if Non-Stop itself was more fun, the total implausibility of the twist wouldn’t bother me.

Director Juame Collet-Serra (who previously directed Neeson in Unknown) manages a few good action sequence but, ultimately, Non-Stop is really saved only be the presence of Liam Neeson. Regardless of how implausible or silly the film may get, Neeson always brings a lot of authority to his role. He’s never more convincing than when he’s walking up and down the aisles, glaring at the passengers and barking out orders.

It’s the type of performance that leaves us assured that the world will be safe as long as Liam Neeson is around to kill people.