I love Negan's completely unapologetic personality. He owns his shit and knows there's no use in apologizing. I loved how he put it point blank for Maggie. "You still have to decide."
[7.0/10] Another episode that just barely scraped by into “good” territory. Negan and Maggie spin their wheels, albeit with some cool sequences. Carol, Rosita, Kelly, and Magna go on a Lifetime horse girl adventure, with some dark edges that lift it. And Gabriel continues to...do things, I guess?
I don’t know what we’re supposed to take from Gabriel further descending into darkness by killing the guy he finds after the attack. It feels like we’ve already done this crap for so long with him, that I’m reaching Rick-like levels of “I don’t give a damn how dark or light this guy’s soul is anymore” territory.
Despite that, I liked the Carol-led story. There’s a lot of “Hooray for Metaphors” to it, with this group of survivors finding wild creatures who’ve been tamed and can only feel safe enough not to run when nobody’s trying to catch them. Do ya get it? Do ya get it?!?!
In spite of some didacticism there, the scenes with Carol & company and the horses are beautifully shot. Those images help toy with our emotions from scene to scene. You have the excitement of the team finding a horse, the frustration of it getting away, the devastation of the river full of equine corpses, the relief when they see a herd of them galloping through the bucolic countryside, the catharsis when they’re able to pen them, the triumph when they bring them back to camp, and the hardship when Carol has to cut one’s throat to feed the camp.
That’s a lot of ground to cover in one story in one episode. As usual, The Walking Dead doesn’t exactly do it with a delicate touch. But I appreciate the mix of hope and hardship at the heart of the story, where there’s success and reason to be grateful, but also more desperate, bloody measures that have to be taken in the name of survival. It ties in nicely to the simmering conflict between Carol and Magna over whether she’s giving Kelly false hope about Connie’s fate.
My one gripe in this part of the episode is the shtick with the kids. I get what the writers are going for here. It’s a good thing to explore how the children who’ve been raised in this world react to things like their parents’ absence and having to eat whatever’s available to survive. But child actors are child actors, and there’s only so much even a great director can get out of them most of the time. This was no exception.
As for the other half of the episode, I have mixed feelings about the Maggie/Negan/Alden shebang. The episode keeps replaying the same conflicts over and over between Maggie and Negan without really advancing them. Negan wants to do the pragmatic thing. Maggie wants to take every opportunity to save and feed her people. It’s good to have conflicting motivations and perspectives among major characters, but the specific conflicts between them need to change in order to make that worthwhile, and we get a lot of the same stuff here.
That said, we do get a cool sequence set in an...abandoned shopping mall? (Hello Dawn of the Dead fans!) I wasn’t really sure. But either way, it made for some cool shots of eerie, yawning industrial spaces where death could be around any corner. I’ll confess, I find the society of ninjas who dress and act like slasher villains more silly than scary, but the actual encounters with them, particularly in darkened corridors, makes for some good pulpy action.
The problem is, I don’t really care about the people who die. A bunch of redshirts bite the dust, and we’ve lost so many nameless folks on this show that it means nothing. Maggie loses two of her close associates from the road, but it has no impact because we don’t really know them. They’re props, so their deaths don’t matter.
Even Alden is barely two-dimensional as a character. The decision to keep moving with him despite his injury, and the ultimate decision to leave him behind because he’ll slow down the effort to scavenge food, has some juice to it based on the usual moral debates that are the stock and trade of The Walking Dead. But Alden’s always been light on shading, so there’s not the stakes the episode wants there to be.
Still, despite some dull stretches, this one is perfectly acceptable and watchable by Walking Dead standards, so I’ll take my wins where I can get them with this show.
Maggie says "all we know is that you are dead if you see them". And then "they" are seen by the whole group and so many are still alive?
remember when we had strong connections with characters, and we were shattered when they were killed?
..., awe yeah. i remember those days.
Is this running a week behind the schedule shown, I watched Hunted last Monday!
The people of Alexandria have mixed feelings about Carol and a lot of them dislike her now because she released Negan during the Whisperers war (a lot of fans dislike her too) but I truly don't get it. For one she is a total badass. Look at where she came from and how strong she's gotten but aside from that she puts the community first. She can let her emotions cloud her judgement because she is human but when she gets herself back together she always comes through, she does the hard stuff and makes the hard decisions!
I feel like they're setting up the fall of Negan. Putting him with Maggie. Maggie making it very clear that she wants him dead and I truly believe that when the time comes Maggie will either be the one who kills him out of vengeance or a mercy kill OR they will have somehow made amends given the situation they're in. Negan just feels like a dead man walking.
Also, this episode was just one of those classic filler episodes where some stuff happened but really nothing happened.
BIG tw for all the horrible things that happen to the horses, jfc
i can feel the momentum slow down like the way walking dead does it, I hope they don't make a habit of it in the upcoming episodes.
i hope alden survives n all but maggie has just suddenly changed her morals since the last episode? delusional bitch. she keeps bringing up past shit with negan too like GET OVA IT! ok
Bro they made me so happy with that horse scene and it was so beautiful and then they had to do that to me right after like wtf:sob:
"God is not here anymore."
They even forgot to turn off the camera lights for the intro scene. And they need a new person for the color grading. Avoiding walkers (trying atleast) is the new tactic it seems. And it never works out.
"Really? So we're just gonna go towards the screaming? Cool."
Typical from this TV show ; Introduces new characters. Gets rid of them after 2 episodes.
Why do they give magna good lines when the actress has 0 emotion when she says them
Oh look once again maggie is a terrible leader and all she does is get people killed, and is bringing the reapers to Alexandria
Did Carol made homemade hematogen from that blood? lol
What was the point of killing it like that otherwise?
I don't know who approved the bizarre face light-up fight intro but I'd have the person fired. Not only was the scene dumb but also the lighting was out-of-character for the show itself lol.
I don't think I ever disliked a character more than Maggie. She was never an interested character and after Glen, even if I understand her, I hate when she opens her mouth. Now they made her a really dark shade of grey character and her idealisation of herself.... pisses me off. I don't understand how after her choice about Gage there is a person who stands beside her (other than the priest whose psyche is long gone from the first ep he was introduced). Like, how the F Negan became the sole character I watch this show for?!! Daryl is like the second one but Ive lost hope a long time ago for a meaningful path for him in this show.
There are so many characters that are probably for some seasons now and theyre dying here and I don't know if I ever seen then before this season, not to mention remembering their names. TWD should focus on a bunch of characters and stay with them bc it gets really confusing with so many faces I don't care about/don't remember and the ones we know for half the show at least are just going here and there and maybe kill some zombies sometime.
Alone the start wtf was this lights... and just boring unreal af..
TWD back to spinning its wheels after a couple of interesting if not amazing episodes. I never thought I'd say it, but Eugene and Princess are now somehow the MVPs of this pointless show.
I'm sorry but I skipped 90% of the episode...
Shout by Paul VincentVIP 5BlockedParent2021-08-31T01:15:17Z
Well you knew once Alden was getting more than 2 minutes of screen time he was either gonna get left behind or die by the end. My guess is he still does there, they come back and he's a walker or crucified or some shit. Episode was alright but the momentum is already slowing down again, we're catching horses and taking care of extras instead of advancing the plot. Same shit, different season.