8x03 Monsters

This episode felt so awkward. I enjoyed the previous two ones but this, I don't know why but it felt weird. I like that the writers introduced the moral dilema of war prisoners. And of course Jesus would be the moral compass. and we all know what happens to people being the moral compass on the show. But really? The Saviors are ruthless killers. They basically enslave people and threaten them to submission. Of course there're some of them who could arguably be saved but getting them to live in the Hilltop after what they did it's risky to say the least. The fight between Morgan and Jesus was kind of absurd. I just thought someone will come to knock Morgan off. However, it was a good was to show Morgan's inner fight. But leaving the Saviors escape without no one even trying to stop them. Like I said absurd. I get the feeling that Daryl is gonna gun down each of the Saviors right in front of Jesus. I like the extra savage Daryl this season.
I was kinda expecting an ending like this. Sometimes this show is way too predictable. "We will lost no one of our ranks", well, you just did. He totally jinxed it. I just hope Jerry is not among them. but I do like that this is going to change Ezekiel's mentality.
Gregory's ability to become a bigger dick episode after episode is astonishing. Now he steals pancakes? lol. the comic relief with Kal was great.
That Morales' scene. Well, so much for his appearance. He told us everything: no family, no life, no nothing I'm Negan, bye bye. 15 minutes on scene and he gets killed off. He just came back after 7 seasons to monologue Rick. I loved how Daryl gave no shit about killing him.
Seeing Aaron with the baby right after losing Eric was a great touch. Aaron is slowly becoming one of my favourite characters. His performance today was outstanding. His pain looked so authentic. We hook on his grief but honestly, Eric hasn't been given any character development so I didn't feel bad cause he died, but for Aaron.

[5.6/10] For a while, it felt like The Walking Dead had found a nice, consistent storytelling rhythm. Since around Season 4, each season would have a handful of episodes that featured everyone, but the bulk of the run would be episodes that focus on a small subset of characters, telling individual stories and smaller parts of bigger adventures that deepen our understanding of the personalities and problems within them. It’s a decompressed style of storytelling that gave the show space to flesh out its characters, and make those times in between the big set pieces feel less like wheel-spinning, and more like taking the time to make those big moments matter.

But Season 8 has seemingly abandoned that tack. While we don’t get everyone in every episode, each installment this season has felt like an immediate sequel to the prior one. The siege that began in the season premiere continued in “The Damned” and this week’s episode, “Monsters” follows directly from there, depicting the same moral conflicts, the same lingering issues that Rick, Daryl, Carol, Ezekiel, Morgan, Jesus, Tara, and Aaron faced in the prior episode. We’re getting one giant story here, rather than a collection of related, but individual stories that become part of a larger mosaic.

It’s not a mode that The Walking Dead works well in. Game of Thrones does the same thing to some extent (though it’s generally pretty good about telling mini-stories within episodes), but The Walking Dead isn’t nearly as consistent in terms of its writing and performances to sustain that sort of thing. The result is that the first three episodes of this season feel like one big muddle, where we jump from place to place, and person to person, without much of a sense of direction or progress. There’s individual stories being told, but we get them piecemeal, with none able to sustain any sort of momentum.

The other problem with this mode of storytelling is that if something isn’t working, the audience is just stuck with it for the foreseeable future. Last season, if you didn’t enjoy Tara’s seaside excursion, you might enjoy Eugene’s stay with The Saviors. If you didn’t like Rick’s adventures at the dump, you might like Carol’s encounter with The Kingdom. But now, it’s war, and if the war seems dull, if this siege doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere, then you just have to ride it out and hope that eventually, it turns into something more interesting.

So the episode picks up essentially everything it put down last week. Carol, Ezekiel, and the Kingdom soldiers are still on their Savior-attacking plan. Rick and Daryl is still dealing with Negan’s crew inside a different compound, where the former is being held at gunpoint. Aaron is still dealing with Eric being wounded in the battle outside. Morgan, Jesus, and Tara are still wrestling with what to do with their Savior hostages. The only new addition is Gregory returning to The Hilltop where Maggie has to decide what to do with him.

And that results in the same “have we stared too long into the abyss” ruminations that the show uninspiringly dealt with last week. The worst offender on this front is the showdown between Rick and Morales. It’s a neat trick to pull a character we haven’t seen since Season 1 out of your hat to try to show “how far we’ve come,” but the episode doesn’t really capitalize on it. Instead, it indulges in the sort of stilted, blunt colloquies that have been the series’ bread and butter for ages now.

Look, there’s meaning to be wrung from having characters return to the show after long absences and letting the audience see how they’ve changed. That was part of what made Morgan’s return engagements so interesting. But when the only purpose is to have the person show up, make some bog standard declarations about how things are different now and vague pseudo-philosophical statements about everyone being the same, before they kick the bucket, it comes off as cheap rather than meaningful.

“Monsters” similarly squanders the continuing power of Morgan’s breakdown. The fact that he’s taunted by Jared, the Savior from Gavin’s crew who killed Benjamin, is the chance to really test Morgan’s limits at an already fraught time and give Lennie James some good material to work with. Instead, we get a kickboxing match between Morgan and Jesus, which I don’t think anyone was asking for, to somehow settle their brutality vs. mercy debate. Like I said last week, Lennie James is a good enough actor to elevate the material (he even makes the cheesy “I know I’m not right, but I’m not wrong” line sound passably profound), but it’s weak material, and shoehorned-in action.

The same goes for the mandatory walker attack of the Jesus/Tara/Morgan convoy. I understand that the show needs to meet its action quota, but the seams are showing more and more, where the reasons for the horde coming out of nowhere are feeble, and the novelty has thoroughly worn off.

In the aftermath, we’re left with two pairings where half the group is having second thoughts or wants to be “better” than The Saviors, and the other half is all “meet evil with evil” pragmatism. Morales’s cornball speech gets to Rick, but Daryl takes him out with hardly a second thought, and just as readily kills The Savior who gives them info on where the guns are stored. Morgan catches himself before he goes off the deep end, but is still reeling from the loss of his surrogate son and is ready to wipe out The Saviors (with Tara’s approval) while Jesus is still kickboxing for kindness.

The only instance where kindness really wins out is with Maggie, who is still holding court at The Hilltop. She decides to let Gregory in, despite the fact that he’s clearly a scumbag who’s sold them out more than once. And then, to double down on that mentality, she agrees with Jesus to let the Savior hostages stay in trailers in the back of the Hilltop compound. She values that brand of mercy (frankly against all reason) in the name of being better than their enemies, and while the debate over it is tedious, it at least sets up a ticking time bomb that will no doubt go off at an inconvenient, combat-filled time.

That just leaves Aaron saying his unwitting goodbye and then mourning his partner, Eric. As opposed to the rote back and forths on whether to be harsh or forgiving with their enemies, this is the one storyline in the episode founded purely on the human experience of this conflict. But it too falls flat, though no fault of anyone involved.

Much of it comes down to the fact that we barely know Eric, and have barely seen his relationship with Aaron. Ross Marquand gives a hell of a performance when conveying Aaron’s grief over the loss, but that grief basically exists in a vacuum. Eric is a rarely-present tertiary character, and while Aaron’s reaction to his death gives it some weight, it’s hard to be too moved by it when, whether for reasons of narrative economy or cowardly network squeamishness, we’ve hardly seen them together.

And that’s the problem with throwing all your stories together like this. None of them has time to breathe. There’s no room to explore these characters and get to know them better before they’re unceremoniously killed off. In some alternate version of The Walking Dead, the third episode of the season is a spotlight episode on Aaron and Eric, where we learn more about them, see more of them as a couple, to where the severance of that connection has meaning and weight. Instead, it’s just thrown onto the pile of plots in “Monsters”, with the other reheated ruminations and empty deaths that the show throws out in ever-greater numbers to try to mask the fact that it’s been hitting the same notes this whole season, with no end in sight.