Spoilers through Season 8 of 'The Walking Dead' follow.
Credit: AMC
Sunday night's episode of The Walking Dead did something that no episode has done in this show in a very, very long time: It made me feel.
Admittedly, I have mixed emotions, but at least I didn't walk away from the midseason premiere just shaking my head at how miserable it all was. 'Honor' actually got a few things right, even if I'm still bothered by the fact that this emotional send-off still seems totally unnecessary.
The Life & Times Of Carl Grimes
Throughout much of the episode, I wondered who would be the one to kill Carl (Chandler Riggs) once he turned. It didn't occur to me that Carl would volunteer himself for the grim task, though it makes perfect sense in retrospect. How could he let Rick (Andrew Lincoln) or Michonne (Danai Gurira) do it? I thought that perhaps Siddiq (Avi Nash) would offer his services since he owes Carl for his life, but a suicide---with Rick and Michonne just outside waiting for it---works better. It was that moment, perhaps more than any other, that really got me. When you hear the gunshot and see Rick and Michonne flinch. I can't imagine the dread and sorrow and horror of that.
As far as character deaths go, I think the show pulled this one off with just about as much respect and class as any Walking Dead death. I do think we see some last-ditch character development at work, especially with Carl and Judith's scenes, but those were still great scenes and my only wish is that we'd seen more of this sibling time earlier on. I hate it how The Walking Dead only builds up relationships or character development right before someone is about to die. At the same time, at least this wasn't just a random bat to the skull, and Glenn's (Steven Yeun) eyes bulging, after months of waiting to see who would die. At least Carl got to say goodbye to his loved ones, to tell his dad and Michonne he loved them.
Carl, in his last day on earth, was remarkably zen. A sort of calm wisdom came over him. You see it when he stares up at the sun and feels the warmth of it for the last time, or as he pens a stack of letters to his closest companions. The problem, of course, is that the writers never earned this conclusion to young Carl's life. It wasn't that long ago that Carl tried to sneak into the Sanctuary to assassinate Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan.) I'm trying to draw a line from that rash, hot-headed young man to this calm, peaceful one talking about how the only thing that really matters is love.
A father's job is to protect his children, Rick tells him, weeping. But Carl disagrees. It's just to love. That's all.
Credit: AMC
I like this version of Carl. I like how zen and at peace he is as he slips toward his own death. I just don't like how they went from point A to point B (or point M, as the case may be, so many character development steps were skipped over.) The same problem occurs over and over again in this TV show.
Suddenly Morgan (Lennie James) goes back to his violence. Suddenly Jesus (Tom Payne) is arguing to not kill the Saviors they've captured. Suddenly Carol (Melissa McBride) is suffering from PTSD. All these things are fine, but they're rarely ever earned. It's as if the writers have a breaker box and can just flip switches to make characters change however they want without any of the requisite revelations or catharsis or trauma.
I did think it was a little weird how some of the characters down in the sewer didn't even bother to say goodbye to Carl. Tara just has this awkward look on her face as though this was just some random stranger about to die. I'm not sure if Rosita even said a thing. Daryl's farewell was in character enough, I suppose. But it's weird that outside of Michonne and Rick, the most heartfelt and powerful goodbye came from Siddiq---who Carl just met. Surely he's formed closer relationships with others in the group than he has with this newcomer?
(That being said, I'm quite pleased with Siddiq if only because Avi Nash has already proven he has better acting chops than half the cast. I hope he becomes a much more prominent character going forward.)
In the end, I found the passing of Carl to be quite powerful and emotional. If nothing else, this episode made me feel very sad, both for the characters and their heartbreak, and because Carl really grew on me during the episode and now I'm even more bummed out he's gone. They keep killing off all the characters we actually care about, and that could be a pretty big problem for AMC. (Especially since Maggie might be leaving after Season 8....)
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Morgan, Carol & Ezekiel
Credit: AMC
Meanwhile, over at the Kingdom, Ezekiel (Khary Payton) is imprisoned but help is on the way. As his Savior overseer rambles on about how he likes Ezekiel and whines about Ezekiel and Rick's betrayal, Carol and Morgan sneak back into the Kingdom. I'm not sure why Morgan came here first instead of going to Rick, but it doesn't matter. These are still two of the toughest characters on the show, and they prove it once again here, stealthily taking out Savior after Savior.
I'm much less fond of the final gunfight between the two and the last handful of Saviors. When they hear gunfire, the Saviors take Ezekiel into his throne room and stand around with guns drawn. Our heroes distract them, making the enemy think they're coming through the door before jumping out onto the stage and firing at them from behind. This bothers me for lots of reasons. First, Carol and Morgan are just standing there on a stage in clear view with no cover. Who just walks onto a stage firing when they could take more defensive positions. There are still more bad guys than good guys at this point.
This is just another example of The Walking Dead really screwing up its action scenes, and in particular any scene involving a shootout.
One of the Saviors jumps Morgan and a struggle ensues. But since Morgan is pretty much totally insane, he reaches into the guys stomach (where he's been wounded) and grabs his intestine and quite literally pulls it out of his body. I have to say, this might be the best kill sequence since Rick ripped that guy's throat out with his teeth. Savage!
The lead Savior manages to limp away, but Morgan tracks him down. While the whiny Savior pleads for his life, Morgan deliberates. He's stuck between his 'Clear' persona, obsessed with killing, and his aikido-based persona. I like that he's struggling, even though I think the show has botched that entire character arc pretty badly.
But whatever moral dilemma he has is cut short when the kid, Henry, sneaks up behind the Savior and stabs him through the neck. This was no surprise. It was obvious that the kid was going to kill this guy ever since we saw him run into the Kingdom (against Carol's wishes) earlier in the episode. I'm more surprised that he managed to somehow walk up behind the guy without Ezekiel, Carol or Morgan spotting him. I mean, I get how we didn't spot him because the camera didn't show him---but how did he sneak up without all three incredibly alert grown-ups standing there spotting him? Magic?
In any case, Morgan is spared the killing and Henry takes an important step toward manhood: Killing an unarmed man who has already surrendered. Good job, Henry! Then Ezekiel and Morgan sing I'll Make A Man Out Of You from Mulan to him and they all go skipping off into the sunset.
The Visions
Finally we come to the visions that we've been getting glimpses of this entire season. Turns out, this is all what Carl's been imagining or...maybe hallucinating? I'm not really sure. Either way he's had a vision that includes an older Judith, a long-bearded Rick, and even Eugene who, I'm sorry, no longer deserves a seat at the table.
But the real kicker comes almost at the very end, when Judith runs through the garden toward a man working the soil. And, just as I expected, when he turns around it's Negan. Nice Negan. Somehow redeemed Negan. Since this is Carl's vision and not actually the future, it's hard to say if this will come to pass, but if the show follows the comics then yes, Negan will somehow join the crew even though he's smashed Glenn's head in with a bat, and Abraham's, and all but killed Sasha, and threw people into ovens, and burned peoples' faces off with an iron, and....well, you get the idea. I have no idea how this show, with its clumsy writing, will pull off this kind of redemptive arc for his character and make it believable that the rest of our crew would accept him (given they barely accept Dwight.)
We shall see.
The episode ends on Rick. We keep getting these close-ups of his teary, red-rimmed eyes and at the end we see him sitting there by a tree, apparently wounded pretty badly. It looks like stained glass squares of some sort are hanging above him. I'm not sure what to make of it, to be honest. But things do not look good for Rick.
Verdict
Credit: AMC
All told, this was one of the better episodes of the season. Maybe the best. It wasn't perfect---nothing in this show is ever truly great anymore---but it did a pretty good job of sending Carl off, even if killing his character was a huge, arrogant blunder in the first place. I know some fans will be sad to see that their fan theories were incorrect---this wasn't a human bite, it wasn't the work of the mysterious Whisperers, etc. But I'm glad they followed through with it and just gave him an emotionally poignant farewell.
The B plot was decent action fun and kept the episode from being too weepy. Without it, we'd have far too much of Rick looking sad. Speaking of Rick looking sad, I'm really puzzled by some of the writing decisions for his character. He was incoherent, which I understand might happen when your kid is dying in front of you, but in such a weird way that it was hard to follow at times. I kept thinking that Carl would die without any of them saying "I love you" and was enormously relieved when they said it. It's not a stretch to think that the writers on this show would forget this basic, human sentiment.
I really hope that the new showrunner brings in some experts who can help to better choreograph shootouts and action scenes in general. Given how many of these we have in this show, it would be nice to see the quality drastically improved. Imagine if the action sequences were as top-notch as the zombie makeup. The same goes for dialogue and plotting, editing and direction. This show needs better people behind the camera pretty much across the board (except for zombie makeup which is absolutely amazing still.)
A Final Note
Credit: AMC
One final, crucial thing I need to point out: I think one reason I enjoyed this episode as much as I did was because what it didn't do. Particularly, the characters it didn't include.
There were no Trash People saying stupid things with their bad hair and nonsensical dialect. Eugene was there only briefly in one of Carl's visions (and even that was too much.) Same with Negan, though his cameo was less intolerable. There was no Gabriel making that one Gabriel facial expression he always makes. No Enid being useless or Aaron fake-crying. No Oceanside women pretending to be psycho Amazon warriors. We didn't have to endure any debates between Maggie, Jesus and Gregory.
Virtually all of the show's worst, most-annoying characters were absent. And guess what? It was better because of that.
I think the only other character we didn't see tonight that I would have liked to see was Simon because you really can never have enough Steven Ogg/Trevor from GTA V.
In any case, I think this says a lot about the state of the show and one very easy, cost-saving way AMC could make it great again (Make The Walking Dead Great Again! #MTWDGA) and that's cutting the cast back drastically and focusing on a tighter-knit group of characters we actually enjoy. Seriously, just cut the wheat from the chaff, stop paying all these actors to play second-tier characters, pay your stars more and focus on telling their story.
So many shows suffer from ballooning casts (see, for example The Flash, Arrow or Vikings.) As seasons mount, character rosters do as well. Budgets go increasingly toward these sprawling casts with a bunch of characters we don't care about sucking up all the screen-time. Now strip all these superfluous characters away and you're left with an episode that you can actually care about again. Imagine that. Imagine The Walking Dead going back to the basics, focusing on a small band of survivors rather than these massive communities and all-out-war.
What did you think of the midseason premiere? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.
Further Reading:
(CNN) The following contains spoilers about "The Walking Dead's" Feb. 25 midseason premiere.
"The Walking Dead" has been an ambling shadow of itself, at times feeling as if the series -- immersed in a wartime footing -- has drifted away from the attributes that made it such a breakaway hit.
The midseason premiere, which featured a major character death, seemed to put the show back in surer, certainly more emotional territory, while again ending on the sort of cryptic note that simultaneously felt intriguing and possibly like another in a series of irritating head games.
Having been bitten at the end of the last batch of episodes, Carl (Chandler Riggs), the son of main character Rick (Andrew Lincoln), gradually met his end. Carl's slow-motion demise contained a sense of warmth, sentimentality and loss that has sometimes gone missing from the show, due in part to its seeming determination to shock and tease.
Part of those impulses were still on display, in the form of a bloody disembowelment. Nobody expects a zombie series to be for the faint of heart, but under producer Scott M. Gimple, "The Walking Dead" has periodically tripped over the line that distinguishes edgy from cheap and gratuitous.
Read More
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, Walking Dead feature-length episodes are like a box of chocolates: the odd one will be good, most are OK and some leave a bitter aftertaste. There have now been 23 bumper eps and – for the past few seasons, at least – they appear to be deployed solely to attract attention to themselves as “event TV”, seemingly without the writers having any idea how to fill the extra minutes with anything of substance. This can make them boring. Very boring. And quite annoying. So it is with some pleasure that I can say that, besides Carl taking about a thousand years to die, Honor was not boring. Far from it.
It helped that the episode’s centrepoint – Carl kicking the metaphorical bucket – was the most well-handled main-character death the show has given us in years. I was surprised by how moved I was, Carl being a character upon whom I used to wish the most profound misfortune. That he spent some of his final hours dwelling on a cold-blooded murder he committed way back at the end of season three showed how much the character blossomed from odious, behatted snot-munchkin to stoic, brave and honourable leader. He received as good a sendoff as anyone could have hoped for.
The show has put a lot of groundwork into the development of Carl’s moral grit over the past couple of seasons. These acts of quiet strength in the face of certain death felt entirely in-character. The same goes for him demanding, in one final selfless act, to end it on his own terms, sparing Rick or Michonne the traumatic task of whisking his brains with a Bowie knife. Respect to you, Carl. I used to think you were a total doofus. Now I only think you wore a hat like one.
How Carl handled his own death is only half the story, of course. The Being Convincingly Sad About Carl Dying award goes emphatically to Judith. She sounded truly devastated. The episode did well to limit the number of people shuffling in to say “Sorry you’re dying, bro”, because too many would have been exhausting. Daryl’s goodbye was nice and understated – and very Daryl. Siddiq’s farewell was necessary to contextualise his future in the show, if so hammy that I was tempted to throw mayonnaise at it, while Rick and Michonne’s was hefty (and rightly so). The only niggle for me was the “revelation” that the “Old Rick” flash-forwards were some kind of made-up Carlotopia. The “It was all a dream” defence didn’t work in Dallas and it didn’t work here. Why was Negan there? Stupid dead Carl, with your dreams.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Going full Terminator ... Melissa McBride as Carol Peletier and Lennie James as Morgan Jones. Photograph: Gene Page/AMC
It wasn’t all Carl-death and crying, though. The episode’s secondary narrative centred on Morgan and Carol’s double-badassed attack on The Kingdom to rescue Ezekiel. This is where the quality started to fray. Initially, Morgan’s brief tangle with the Saviors fleeing the Sanctuary was kinetic and exciting, redolent of the vérité shaky-cam of Children of Men. Things started promisingly with Carol, too – there is something basic and hugely enjoyable about these two going full Terminator, any misgivings they once had about murder long-since abandoned in a pile of someone else’s kidneys. A henchman using a radio, only to discover to his horror that his fellow henchmen are dead and therefore incapable of using radios, is always cool, too – even if the trope has been troped into parody by every action film ever.
I was even prepared to forgive the clobbering stupidity of Carol and Morgan’s plan for assaulting Ezekiel’s throne room – “walk in room with no cover, stand still, shooty-bang until bad men gone, hope don’t die” – because Morgan literally pulled out another man’s gutpipe through a non-natural hole in his body. It was gross, the kind of icky shock the show can throw at you on occasion to make sure you are paying attention.
It is fitting that an episode about the death of Carl, a character who used to make stupid decisions that got people into trouble, would pass this baton on to another: little Henry, whom I now hate. How could he possibly sneak up on all of them? Why did he go straight for the death-stab to the back of the neck? None of it made sense and it dragged the whole episode down several notches. Typical illogical nonsense. Go away, Henry. No one likes you. I miss Carl.
The flash-forward to Rick looking worse for wear, nursing what looked like a gunshot wound to the abdomen, didn’t resonate with me, either. Mainly because it wasn’t so long ago that Rick recovered from a similar gunshot wound over the course of what seemed like a long weekend. If it was a zombie bite, though – and the redness around Rick’s eyes had hints of “ex-alive chic” about it – this changes things. Time will tell.
Oh, and one last thing: there are dark scenes – and then there are scenes in which it is impossible to see what the hell is going on. I get that we are in a sewer, or sneaking around at night stabbing people, but entire minutes went by when I might as well have been listening to someone hitting aubergines with hammers with a pillowcase over my head. Did anyone else struggle?
All in all, though, Honor did the business. Deaths like Carl’s are what The Walking Dead used to do best – and demonstrably still can. It often forgets that, for a loss to pinch, you have to be saying goodbye to something in which you have become emotionally invested. Tara or Jesus or Enid could fall into a hole full of knives and fire and sharks and I probably wouldn’t see it as an adequate reason to shift my weight from one bum cheek to the other. But Carl’s death landed. It made me realise the power the show still has. If anything were to happen to Rick, Carol, Michonne, Daryl, Daryl’s bike, Daryl’s crossbow or Daryl’s hair, I would be inconsolable. It is with this in mind that I go into the next episode with cautious, somewhat renewed, optimism. RIP, Carl.
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