8x15 Worth

[6.0/10] I’ll often forgive the text of a television show if it gets the texture right. I tend to be more interested in what an episode means than potential plot inconsistencies. Storytelling on the screen is a magic trick, and that means I’m willing to tolerate a fair amount of sleight of hand. That’s exacerbated by fan approaches to stories that seem too left-brained or inclined toward puzzle-solving for my tastes, where rather than taking a work as they find it, viewers go on the hunt for plot holes and inconsistencies as opposed to considering what the film or show made them think or feel.

But that only goes so far. And even, if you’re like me, and can forgive details like most folks in the show not looking unimaginably filthy or constantly complaining about the smell in the ashes of civilization, it matters much more why characters are the way they are and act the way they act. What purpose does a scene serve in the story? What is the motivation behind a particular character’s action? And if the only answer a show can give is “because the plot, or the pre-finale table-setting exercise requires it,” then you’re in trouble.

That’s the sense I’m left with at the end of “Worth,” an episode that basically only exists to fill time and set a few things up the end of the season. Why do Daryl and Rosita capture Eugene, lose him when he runs like five feet ahead of them, and then miss him in a dirt pile? Because the show reminds you that he exists, but can’t pull the trigger on major events ahead of the grand finale, and so the plot requires it.

Why does Aaron starve himself in the woods to persuade the Oceansiders rather than realizing at some point that he should head back and regroup? If you’re being generous, you could say that he either has little to live for after the death of his partner and so is more willing to lay down his life for the greater good. But the truth seems closer to some combination of his survival man routine needing to underline the “anything to survive” theme the episode dabbles in, and because, you know, the plot requires it.

And how and why is Negan able to play thirteen-dimensional chess with everyone in his orbit, being able to play Simon, Dwight, and Gregory off one-another, knowing precisely when certain meetings will happen (while hiding behind a dumpster or something), being certain when and how his sabotaged “fake ass” plans will get to Rick & Co., and deciding who’ll lead the Saviors based on a fistfight with his second-in-command after being in a car crash and kidnapping? Say it with me now -- because the plot requires it.

If you strain, you can come up with mildly passable reasons for all of these things. Maybe the combination of projectile zombies and vomiting gave “save my neck at all costs” Eugene just enough grease to slip away. Maybe Aaron talked to Tara and realizes that a feat of endurance is the only way to get the Oceansiders’ sympathy. Maybe Negan really is both smart and cocky enough to play his lieutenants off one another perfectly and trust his rule to the fortunes of his own two fists.

But none of it feels natural. None of it feels believably motivated. And none of it feels like it could plausibly exist in a world where a T.V. show wasn’t moving the deck chairs around before a long-teased battle between the show’s good guys and bad guys.

Worse yet, when the show does try to convey those sorts of motivations, it’s in the most clunky, ham-handed fashion possible. Father Gabriel literally announces his emotions and impulses, basically guiding the audience through his internal conflict. Seth Gilliam is a talented enough actor that you can still feel the emotion of the scene, but the lines he’s given are downright atrocious.

The same goes for Ross Marquand as Aaron. Marquand gives a hell of a physical performance in the best scene of the episode, where Aaron, barely subsisting in the woods near Oceanside, is beset by walkers in the rain. Marquand communicates the sense of raw exhaustion in Aaron; his joy at the prospect of fresh rainwater; his desperation when fumbling for his knife, his peril when being attack by the soggy zombies who threaten him when he’s sapped of all but last reserves of his strength.

But then, when the Oceansiders come across him, he gives the lamest, least-inspiring halftime speech to try to convince them to join the fight. It’s another in the long line of Walking Dead quotes that feel like they’re stolen from eighth grade fan fiction, which Marquand delivers with all the conviction one can muster for such banalities, which turn out over the top. But what do you know, the show implies that it works to persuade the Oceansiders to take up the cause. Because it has to. Because the show is now less concerned with making sense than shepherding everyone to where they need to be on the board before the endgame comes.

The one element of the episode that does manage to feel well-motivated, that manages to feel like both payoff and prelude, are its bookends, which feature Rick and Negan hearing Carl’s last words to each of them.

Rick seems, if not changed, then at least encouraged by reading his son’s pleas. Maybe it’s just the use of those cinematic tricks -- the swell of the gentle music, the images of Michonne and Judith in the background, the idyllic light that pours over everything as Carl’s words spill out in voice over. (And kudos to Chandler Riggs, who may have become a solid actor right when the show decided to kill him off.) But whatever it is, The Walking Dead succeeds here where it fails everywhere else in the episode in generating an emotional moment with real meaning for where the story goes next.

And it’s contrasted with Negan’s reaction to Carl’s similar plea for peace, for a bigger world and a better tomorrow, to him. It’s admittedly a little convenient that Michonne’s able to get the message to him, but it’s forgivable. When Negan hear’s Carl’s words, he’s just had to kill one of his top lieutenants for a coup attempt with his (almost) bare hands, and realized another’s turned on him. He’s too far gone, too unyielding, to take Carl’s words to heart.

And that sets up the inevitably clash between Rick and his allies vs. Negan and the Saviors better than all the backbiting power plays and vomitous escapes and symbolic stands in the forest ever could. There is a fundamental difference between the two men at the center of this conflict. The show has tried to blur those lines, the show how Rick can be just as stubborn, brutal, or cruel, and how there is, at the very least, an imagined greater good that Negan believes himself to be serving.

But here it draws the fundamental differences between them, how Rick can still be moved, still be pulled back from the brink by someone he loved, and Negan is in too deep to ever remove his iron from the fire. The two embody the episode’s opposing themes of people who will do whatever it takes to survive, and people who believe there’s bigger, more important things, that transcend an individual life and may even be worth dying for.

That’s motivation. That’s storytelling. That’s the stuff that gives weight and meaning to the swords slicing through zombies and bullets going through bad guys. The Walking Dead can pull it off when it wants to, but too often, in episodes likes “Worth”, defaults to spinning its wheels in contrived situations that only exist because the story demands they do, and yet manage to weaken that story given how inessential and forced those developments seem.