WARNING: Show and Comic spoilers follow
For all the comic readers or already-been-spoiled non-comic-readers, this episode was almost something too big to be real. Possibly the most iconic moment from the comic series was almost surely going to happen, and I think everyone had a different idea in their mind of how this moment should play out. It’d be hard for this episode to perfectly fill the shoes of its paperbound predecessor, and although it did certain things very well, a few things (one probably much more obvious than the others) took away from the episode and keep me from being able to enjoy it as much as I should.
First, the episode did a good job underscoring the amount of character development that’s gone on this season. Gabriel and Eugene have gone from bashful priest and nerdy burden to hardened head of security and an unabashed dick-biting survivor. Even though the focus is on them specifically, it’s representative of how Alexandria as a whole has gone from a passive suburb of mostly sheep to a group of toughened fighters over the course of 16 episodes. And on the flipped side of that coin, we also see Abraham’s character development more explicitly in the reverse direction; once a critic of Glenn and Maggie’s pregnancy, he’s now softened to the point where he’s optimistic enough to want to bring a child of his own into this terrible Mad-Max-esque horrorshow of a world.
The Carol and Morgan plotline went as most of us probably thought it would. The dynamic between the two of them is interesting, but even moreso when we get the two of them alone together and the stark contrast in their entire ideologies is more apparent. As different as Carol is from her comic counterpart (who once asked Rick and Lori to have a marriage-a-trois with her and fell in love with a zombie), she’s now in a similar place emotionally. They both got tired of living in this world, though now it’s because she’s become too badass of a serial killing soldier, and not because she got rejected romantically by every adult in the survival group. The only complaint I have about the Carol/Morgan duo is that the show’s basically already done this before with Tyrese as the staunch pacifist, but repeating plotlines hasn’t been something to stop The Walking Dead yet.
It’s also curiously exciting to see the world of the show open up a bit and get fleshed out. Jesus told them earlier this season that their world was about to get a lot bigger and implied that there were other communities out there, but we’ve seen little of that (apart from the Saviors) until the finale. Even if he was the last survivor of a fringe group and bit the dust in the same episode that he appeared in, it’s nice to know that Hanging-From-the-Bridge guy and his Library group were out there, and maybe it’s smaller groups like this that Jesus implied the Hilltop trades with. And even bigger and more exciting than that, we get our first look (okay, second look, but first real look) at what are surely guards from the Kingdom. This means it’s only a matter of time until we get a tiger on the show, and that is the post-apocalyptic world I want to visually experience every Sunday night.
The build-up to the final scene was by and far the best and most well-done aspect of this episode. Where in the comics the group is surprised by a Negan ambush, here we get a series of roadblocks, each more gruesome than the last, and an underlying sense of dread that just roots itself in the pit of your stomach and grows over the course of the episode. Steven Ogg in particular did a great job playing the quintessential Savior lackey, and people may recognize him as Trevor from GTA V, who was essentially a Savior in his own right.
Up to this point in the episode, I was happy. Gravely queasy, more nervous for a fictional character than I’ve ever been, but happy as a viewer and long-time comic reader. Then the final scene approaches, and the build-up that the episode (and the tail end of the whole season) had worked so vigorously on starts to unravel. When the group first comes upon the massive Savior squad, the music is excellent (Bear McCreary as usual does a fantastic job setting the tone). I don’t have many more compliments besides this for the rest of the episode, so don’t hold your breath.
Again, this scene had big shoes to fill, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan even moreso, so I have to force myself to not be too critical, but Negan’s big appearance felt underwhelming. Rick is shaking with fear (a rare occurrence), and the situation is obviously a scary one for the team, but it’s not entirely believable that it’s because of Negan specifically. Morgan is a great actor, but this introduction just didn’t carry the gravitas that the preceding episodes implied it would (and based on the comics, should have). Everyone has their own vision of Negan in their heads, and mine I now realize was a bit more physically intimidating than what we got. I think I expected a more energetic, enthusiastic Negan, not the calm grim lightly-bearded man. We got the Pee Pee Pants City line, but we didn’t get any laughter or indication that he thinks of himself as funny. It would be like watching a Batman movie where the Joker is played by Tommy Lee Jones. This Negan was a bit too Governor-esque for my taste, and not quite outwardly immature enough.
I would complain that the scene drew out too long in a way that was clearly to put viewers more on edge at the expense of coming off as how a public execution would naturally play out in that context, but that was exactly how I felt reading issue 100 of the comic as well. Robert Kirkman can sometimes make you too aware that you’re reading something written by a writer, and though the show often has me fully immersed, this entire scene felt very “Kirkman-y”. You can fault the scene for that, but at the very least they were sticking to the source material in that regard.
I won’t focus too much on the cliffhanger ending. We all know it was a bad move, we all know that we’ll either find out the identity of who died through leaks or interviews or casting information, and we all know that it sucked both the momentum out of an iconic moment and any emotion we will feel for the character’s death come the premiere in six months. The internet is outraged by the cliffhanger, there’s not too much more to say.
The idea for the POV shot was admittedly a good one, even if the execution fell flat (pun DEFINITELY not intended). I wondered how they could get around showing the level of gore that that scene involved in the comic, and having polaroids of Negan’s work a few episodes ago and a first-person view of the execution is a smart workaround. Again though, the moment didn’t carry the same level of emotion and uneasiness that we were lead to believe it would (regardless of whether the identity of the victim was revealed). We got a couple swings, some unclear background cries, and cut to black. When I read that issue of the comics, I had to put it down and go walk around lest I feel physically sick. I didn’t expect to see Glenn’s eyeball popping out of his skull or his jaw hanging off of his face on television, but I still wanted something more morbid, even if it weren’t visually so. Seeing a bit of reaction from others in the group would have gone a long way, maybe even just a close-up shot of Rick’s face while you hear swinging and squishy crunches in the background.
(I was going to write a concluding paragraph here, but since The Walking Dead writers can get away with cutting their work short, I’m going to follow suit in honour of the anonymous victim of tonight’s episode)
