[3.5/10] Woof. This was bad. Real bad. I’ve said my piece about Samantha Morton/Alpha already, but suffice it to say, spending forty-five minutes with her terrible southern accent and stage-y performance was not my idea of a good time. But I don’t want to put this all on Morton’s shoulders. The performances were bad all around, and how could they not be, with everyone having to deliver that awful, tortured Whisperer dialogue? And this one was just thoroughly boring to boot, leaving me literally checking my watch multiple times to see how close we were to finishing this one.
What kills me is that I actually like the idea behind this one! I like the notion that the Whisperers’ whole ethos is detachment, but that even the most hardened and devoted members of Alpha’s flock, including Alpha herself, cannot rid themselves of their human attachments. I like the idea that the Whisperers have resorted to this out of a certain fatalism, with the idea that any chance of survival or a normal life after the zombie apocalypse is a fantasy, and so they’ve stopped pretending.
But god, the dramatization of those ideas is so god awful. Again, Alpha having pangs for her daughter, Beta wearing his brother’s (friend’s? husband’s?) face, Gamma’s sister being unable to let go of the loss of her baby, are all solid enough throughlines. And the back and forth flashback structure does an admirable job of trying to mix and match Alpha and Beta’s becoming a team with their failures to live out their own principles in the present.
But every realization of these ideas is so blunt and on-the-nose, rife with the same corny dialogue and ridiculous cult vibe that makes it hard to take anything seriously. There’s no point on The Walking Dead that the show won’t hammer home until the point of exhaustion, and neither story in the episode is dramatically interesting apart on a standalone basis. The ideas the show’s gesturing toward are interesting, but it has no idea how to grab them or translate them into a story.
Throw in consistently terrible dialogue, a languid pace, and cruddy performances all around, and you have one of the worst TWD episodes in recent memory, which is saying something.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2019-12-22T20:43:07Z
[3.5/10] Woof. This was bad. Real bad. I’ve said my piece about Samantha Morton/Alpha already, but suffice it to say, spending forty-five minutes with her terrible southern accent and stage-y performance was not my idea of a good time. But I don’t want to put this all on Morton’s shoulders. The performances were bad all around, and how could they not be, with everyone having to deliver that awful, tortured Whisperer dialogue? And this one was just thoroughly boring to boot, leaving me literally checking my watch multiple times to see how close we were to finishing this one.
What kills me is that I actually like the idea behind this one! I like the notion that the Whisperers’ whole ethos is detachment, but that even the most hardened and devoted members of Alpha’s flock, including Alpha herself, cannot rid themselves of their human attachments. I like the idea that the Whisperers have resorted to this out of a certain fatalism, with the idea that any chance of survival or a normal life after the zombie apocalypse is a fantasy, and so they’ve stopped pretending.
But god, the dramatization of those ideas is so god awful. Again, Alpha having pangs for her daughter, Beta wearing his brother’s (friend’s? husband’s?) face, Gamma’s sister being unable to let go of the loss of her baby, are all solid enough throughlines. And the back and forth flashback structure does an admirable job of trying to mix and match Alpha and Beta’s becoming a team with their failures to live out their own principles in the present.
But every realization of these ideas is so blunt and on-the-nose, rife with the same corny dialogue and ridiculous cult vibe that makes it hard to take anything seriously. There’s no point on The Walking Dead that the show won’t hammer home until the point of exhaustion, and neither story in the episode is dramatically interesting apart on a standalone basis. The ideas the show’s gesturing toward are interesting, but it has no idea how to grab them or translate them into a story.
Throw in consistently terrible dialogue, a languid pace, and cruddy performances all around, and you have one of the worst TWD episodes in recent memory, which is saying something.