11x07 Promises Broken

[6.8/10] We’re far enough into season 11, or at least this tranche of it, to see the general shape of the major plots. We have the fight to keep people safe and fed in Alexandria (which is all but gone from this episode.) We have double agent Daryl. We have Maggie and Negan’s quest for food. And we have Eugene and company’s adventures in The Commonwealth.

Nearly all of them get a good amount of focus here, and all of them are a mixed bag.

Let’s start with the strangest of them. I like what The Walking Dead is trying to do with Maggie and Negan. They have a lot of baggage, to say the least. If Maggie’s going to be a continuing presence on the show through its final season (or in any of the spin-offs), that bad blood needs to be resolved. The show taking time away from progressing the plot (beyond the “guess we’ll have to use Whisperer tactics” development) to have them hash those issues out is a smart choice.

But the dialogue here is painful at times. Negan feels like Negan, offering self-justifying excuses about what must be done and moral equivalence even after claiming to be a changed man. And as always, Jeffrey Dean Morgan sells the hell out of it. But the whole “promise we’re even” thing and Maggie seeming to accept it, at least a little, feels too quick and unearned, especially when you have to imagine Maggie would be sore for the rest of her life over what happened to Glen. But this is television, and conflicts have to be resolved, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s too good for the show to kill off. So we see the ice thaw in some bizarre exchanges between the two of them much faster than it has any right to.

We also get the snippet of Gabriel choosing not to kill another man of the cloth and lying about it, even when he told Maggie he’d take out any Reaper he found. I don’t know where they’re going with it, but there’s at least some minor intrigue in Gabe finding his faith or at least someone who understands his turmoil.

And the most moving part of the episode is Maggie’s friend seeing his sister as a walker, tearing up, and getting comfort from Maggie while they’re still having to pretend to be zombies. The music sells it superbly, and it’s a sign that despite Negan’s take on cultural relevance, Maggie cares about her people as people in a way Negan never seemed to. All-in-all, there’s interesting ideas in this third of the episode, but the rendition of them leaves a lot to be desired.

The Daryl plot here doesn’t even have good ideas. There’s little tension of Daryl being potentially found out here, which is what’s fueled his other escapades with the Reapers. Instead, again, the show’s trying to do something laudable and deepen Daryl’s relationship with Leah and the audience’s understanding of both with an object lesson in each’s morality and conversations in between the fireworks.

It’s just that those conversations aren’t very good and the “Will you kill an innocent person to protect yourself?” bit has been done so many times on this show that it carries no meaning anymore. Pope’s like a father to Leah but he seems nuts, we get it. Leah still has good in her, and so Daryl feels bad about lying to her. Sure. There’s more moral relativism here too, and it’s a good theme, but again, you need good dialogue and story choices to dramatize it well, and this subplot has neither.

Last but not least, I don’t know what to do with The Commonwealth in this one. Once again, there’s lots of fascination notions at play: classism, the price of maintaining order, and a paradise wrapped in bureaucracy. But once again, how those messages are delivered is wanting. The “What if there was an equivalent to Epcot in the end times?” setup is interesting, but the episode populates it with head-scratching bits.

For one thing, I’m already sick of Yumiko and her brother. The “I don’t want to be a doctor” thing is clearly going to lead somewhere sinister, so the pussyfooting around feels silly. And every conversation between the two feels like something from “My First Act Play.” Yumiko being a golden child in The Commonwealth and trying to leverage that to help her friends is a sound idea, but we get very little of it here.

For another, while classism is interesting, dramatizing it through the bully and his girlfriend from a 1980s sports movie is just not the way to do it. Governor Milton’s son is just cartoonishly obnoxious here, and maybe that’s to be expected, but he feels like a cartoon character in an at least quasi-realistic show. (Then again, I think Princess is great, so what do I know?)

The notion of Eugene, Ezekiel, Princess, and Stephanie having to do walker clean-up duty has juice to it. The more corners of The Commonwealth we see, the more hints we get as to how the place works (and what makes it work) which, I’ll confess, has me hooked. I also like that we hear Ezekiel’s King voice for the first time in a while, signifying the way he’s faking something for Hornsby. Speaking of which, I like Hornsby as one of the rare political characters in the show, trying to trade horses and peddle influence to keep his interests taken care of.

The whole “staged save” and Eugene punching Governor Milton’s son bit feels to contrived to pass muster though. And Hornsby could have at least quietly warned Eugene or something. It feels pretty dopey. At least we’re seemingly poised to have more movement in this one not too long from now.

Overall, this show tackled three major storylines. Two of them were meh-to-fine, and the third continues to have some good ideas to challenge the show’s status quo, but is mainly superficial at this stage.