8x02 The Damned

[6.5/10] You are never going to fully get away from “Is it right to kill?” when you’re telling a zombie apocalypse story. Part of the inherent trappings of the genre is forcing people to make life and death decisions outside the normal day-to-day. That’s part of what makes undead movies and T.V. shows both thrilling and thought-provoking, putting the viewer in the shoes of the characters and letting them wonder whether they would be saints or slayers in such a state of nature.

But my god, The Walking Dead has been exploring these issues for seven-going-on-eight seasons at this point, and while it hasn’t dug into every possible permutation of them, it’s come close. There’s some benefit to putting new characters into those situations, to have them vacillate between Heaven and Hell and try to figure out what the right way to life in these harsh environs is. But you can only lean into this sort of “that’s not who we are” back-and-forth for so long on a television show before it starts to become rote, no matter how relevant it may be.

“The Damned” tries to make up for how many times it pushes that well-worn button by turning most of the episode into an endless cavalcade of military assaults, firefights, and action. Director Rosemary Rodriguez and editor Evan Schrodek do a nice job of making the images on the screen visually compelling even if the episode’s dialogue and thematic material is lacking.

The episode balances five major escapades all centered around the same multi-pronged attack by the coalition of the Alexandrians, the Hilltoppers, and the Kingdom. It features Aaron leading a frontal assault against one Savior compound. It has Rick and Daryl sneaking in the back of the same compound in search of guns. It has Carol and Ezekiel hunting down one of Negan’s lieutenants who use a grenade to escape their initial attack and threatens to warn the others of what’s coming. It has Jesus and Tara executing a raid on the same communications building where our heroes first encountered a collection of Saviors, and it has Morgan stalking his way through the same building, running support.

That’s a lot for one episode to juggle, and while it feels overstuffed in terms of storylines at times, it never feels out of sync visually. Schrodek does well at jumping from one setting to another to create a sense of continuity with these sequences. And Rodriguez captures the organized chaos of these attacks happening all at once, whether in the form of the bullet-trading from Aaron (whose boyfriend is potentially a casualty), to the cold and methodical killings from Morgan, to the quieter but ultimately more raw encounter between Rick and an enemy. Given the repetitive notes the episode continues to hit, some of these events feel empty in purpose, but they’re always compelling when conveying the heart-pumping, fraught qualities of these skirmishes.

The problem is that the skirmishes lead to more of the usual dilemmas that our heroes have confronted time and time again to diminishing results. The most obvious of these happens when Tara and Jesus, mid-invasion, come across a Savior with his hands up and his pants wet, having locked himself in a closet. Tara and Jesus argue about what to do with him, with the former arguing that he could be a threat and wanting to take him out and the latter buying his sob story and wanting to spare him given his unarmed, hands-up state. I’m sure there’s some intended social commentary there, particularly that last part, but it’s trite for the show at this point, and it doesn’t help when the Savior uses the duo’s indecision to take Jesus’s gun and hold him hostage.

Naturally, the situation works out for Jesus and Tara, and Jesus ties the guy up rather than kill him after their escape, but not before plenty more back and forths about what separates their group from Negan’s and whether they should violate their principles to end this now. It’s the same debate we’ve seen a million times, with nothing new to add, beyond the idea that there’s some sort of little-mentioned disagreement between Rick and Maggie on this issue that will decide what happens when Jesus and Tara try this on a larger scale with a collection of Savior hostages from the compound.

The episode also dips into the same sort of material with Rick’s hunt for guns in a different Savior compound. He gets into a knock-down-drag-out brawl with a Savior on the top floor, chokes him out, and them improbably impales him on a nearby wall protrusion. This is pretty standard combat and mayhem for The Walking Dead at this point, but the twist comes when Rick takes a key off the guy and uses it to walk into a locked room where he expects to find a cache of guns. Instead, he finds a sleeping baby.

In fairness, Andrew Lincoln does a great job of selling the moment, with the sort of disbelief and denial that Rick, a father to his own little girl, would have to this sight, that could pierce through his determined demeanor and make him realize the horror of taking another parent away from their child. But something about the moment feels unearned for the show, like a cheap trick to remind us that the Saviors, craven as they are, are still human beings, rather than something that’s developed from story or character as with Dwight or other characters we’ve gotten glimpses of in The Sanctuary.

Rick being held at gunpoint by someone he met back in Atlanta, now aligned with The Saviors, has some promise for a “how far we’ve come” reflection, but even that ends on another cheesy cliffhanger and bit of schmuck bait for the show. As I’ve said before, I’m not very interested in the battle for Rick’s soul anymore, and this tack to bring more humanity into his pragmatism does little to change that.

“The Damned” also plays the same game with Morgan to a certain extent. He is still in something of a fog and a rage after what happened with his surrogate son last season, and has turned into a cold killing machine. As much as his story hits the same beats that we’ve been over with umpteen characters at this point, it’s still compelling because Lennie James is a good enough actor to carry it. Like Rick, he’s been with the show from the beginning, but unlike Rick, we haven’t seen enough of him to have watched him go through this transformation and untransformation and retransformation several times over, so there’s still some juice left in the idea.

That said, the show can’t help depositing in on-the-nose flashbacks to signify what Morgan is feeling when the situation as depicted and James’s performance tells the audience all it needs to know. He, like Rick, nearly kills someone he knows from before because of the fog of war and his discombobulated mindset, until he’s stopped via the same moral thought experiment Jesus and Tara are engaging in. Exploring Morgan experiencing his trauma anew after things went wrong last season is a worth goal, but delivering it in these terms is a misstep.

Even the one storyline in the episode that doesn’t play to the same “we are not them” business is a repeat. Ezekiel boasts to his charges about their undoubted success in their mission, while Carol offers skeptical glances and reserved but perturbed questions. The thrust of this plot is Ezekiel dropping his act to Carol for a minute and admitting that he’s trying to pump his people up, encourage them loudly and publicly even if he has his own doubts so that they don’t visualize failure. We played this game already when they first met, and putting it in a combat setting doesn’t change much, despite some nice work from Melissa McBride and Khary Payton.

I can tell you as a committed Simpsons fan that if any show goes on long enough, it’s inevitably going to start repeating itself. You can only come up with so many novel situations, so many new reactions, before you start remixing old ideas. But this isn’t just a familiar beat reemerging in an unfamiliar form. It’s the same, essential zombie apocalypse question being asked and answered over and over and over again. It’s natural, maybe even necessary, to wonder what the ethical line is in the face of a ruthless, mortal threat, but this is the hundredth mortal threat the survivors of The Walking Dead have faced, and until the show finds new ways to explore that idea, it’s just going to feel like old hat, no matter who’s questioning whom and whether to kill this week.