The Walking Dead: Strangers

PinMichael Cudlitz, Danai Gurira, Josh McDermitt, and Chandler Riggs in AMC’s “the Walking Dead”

Well, we’re still in for another week. To repeat something we said last season, “so long as Rick, Daryl, Glen, Carol and Michonne get to band together to be the Justice League of Throat-Rippers and Decapitators, we’re all good.” We may not have gotten any throat ripping or decapitations, but we’re still all good. Or mostly good. We’re entertained; put it that way. Turns out, if you develop your characters and then take that development to the next natural point and work to develop the relationships your various characters have with each other, you can put them in almost any kind of story and the audience will stay. Even a story that feels a little like warmed-up leftovers.

After all the big action and big drama of the last several episodes, this episode was quieter, with a lot of narrative housecleaning and place setting for the coming season. This is both a good thing and a very expected thing,  Very Important Character Interactions had to happen, which means there was a lot of speechifying. Let’s talk about the people we know who have died and remind everyone of their names. Let’s talk about where we left things with each other the last time we had a chance to talk. Let’s talk about what’s going on with you now, since things have changed. Let’s all state our current paradigms and boundaries. And let’s give ourselves a big round of applause because we love life and today is the first day of the rest of it. It was all very therapeutically sound, if perhaps a little fan-service-y at times.

Even Daryl sounded rather uncharacteristically like a grief counselor or something, with his pleas to Carol to talk out her feelings and remember that she was alive. It may have made us go “Hunh?” for a second, just because it seemed so odd, but the point was to give him and Carol a chance to set the fans’ and shippers’ hearts aflutter. And to do that, you’ve gotta drop the pretext and go straight to the subtext. And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that; especially for a show that’s just now getting around to these types of relationship scenes this far into its run. The fact is, they’re the fan favorites right now and the viewers haven’t seen them really interact like this in a long time. Fan service? More like well-earned narrative payoff.

Another extremely well earned payoff was Rick’s poignant “Will you have us?” to Carol. It was a moment long in coming. We still want to slap his stupid face and never stop whenever he starts talking but that’s because he’s an asshole. No, wait. We ended that last sentence wrong. That’s because the writers haven’t always been diligent about avoiding what we like to call (or would, if we hadn’t just pulled it out of our asses just now) “Jack Shepard Syndrome,” where you torture your heroic lead so much and have him make so many epic, tragic mistakes that the viewer just doesn’t want to hear anything come out of his mouth again, let alone anything that presumes he’s in charge.

But everyone looked at each other this episode and said, “Apropos of nothing, but Rick’s in charge, and I’ll do whatever he says.” “I agree!” So we figure Rick’s justified in opening his stupid mouth. Fortunately, he said those four words to Carol, which spoke of the mistakes that he’s made and the respect that he has for her as someone who lived out in the wild after banishment and came back to save them all. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that the two best emotional payoffs had Carol at the center of them. But those two were the only interactions that really worked for us on both a technical and emotional level. Don’t get us wrong; we were impressed that every single character in this suddenly quite large Justice League got a change to say who they are and what they mean to the group. It was all rather deftly handled in terms of balance, when you consider there was also a good chunk of story being put into place at the same time. But very little of it sounded natural.

Under different circumstances, that might be a dealbreaker for a show, but like we said, this is all terribly needed. Not so much scenes of people standing around talking, because God knows we’ve had enough of that in the run of this show. But it’s people talking about shit that actually matters and makes sense for them to be talking about. Remember Lori and all her angry laundry-folding or dish-washing scenes that were all about Lori and her current flow of bullshit? Remember when Andrea didn’t feel appreciated? Or Rick and Hershel, spewing insanely self-indulgent dreck about farming while not doing a thing about  the flimsy-as-fuck barriers they have protecting them from all the zombies and people who want to kill them? No, let’s talk about this year’s cucumber crop, guys. So yeah; self congratulatory “We’re still alive! FUCK YEAH!” scenes and “I stand with Rick” dialogue and “Oh, by the way, in all the excitement, I forgot to mention my involvement in your father’s brutal murder” reconciliations (“You’re one of us now!” *sparklehugz*) may have all been way too on-point, but we see it as a rainfall after a drought. Anything was going to seem like too much. And while we doubt everything that needed to be resolved is forevermore resolved, there was definitely a very welcome feeling of “We good here? Okay, let’s move on.” This show has always had a tendency to beat a dead horse (“Has anyone seen Sophia?”), so these kinds of rapid-fire character-defining scenes were kind of fun; like speed-dating with a bunch of interesting people.

One person we are not interested in is Gareth, who just comes off like a younger, hipster Governor redux with a cannibalism twist. We’re always going to have problems with the relentless and unrealistically bleak point of view that fuels this show, but if they absolutely must fight a new psychopath every season, does it always have to be some obnoxiously self-aggrandizing white guy? Can we see something a little more imaginative and interesting in terms of bad guys? We’re kind of sorry they killed of Denise Crosby’s character, because we might have been down for some crazy middle-aged white lady action this season. We don’t know… we’re into the whole hunting storyline and the idea of people being picked off one by one. That’s something creepy and new to the story, at least. But Gareth is just such a douchebag that it’s hard to feel anything but mild annoyance whenever he’s onscreen. We’re just not feeling him.

The good news is – if anyone cares – that Gareth is just about the only thing we’re not feeling right now. We can’t believe we’re about to say this – and we reserve the right to take it back – but The Walking Dead actually feels freshened up and full of energy.

[Photo Credit: Gene Page/AMC]

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