MSochist

[6.3/10] If you had told me a few seasons ago that The Walking Dead would do a soft reboot that basically turned over the show to Michonne, Carol, and Daryl, I would have cheered. Danai Gurira, Melissa McBride, and Norman Reedus are three of the show’s best performers, and each of the characters has enough depth and complications in their pasts and motivations to more than fuel this series for a while longer.

But I am tired of time jumps. I am tired of the painful dialogue. And I am tired of this show having the same moral debates over and over and over again.

And lord knows we don’t need another moppet. That’s no indictment of young Cailey Fleming, who does okay under the circumstances as a slightly older Judith Grimes. But man, talented adult performers have trouble making The Walking Dead’s tortured dialogue sound plausible as something a human being might actually say, let alone convincing or moving. Foisting that responsibility onto a child is practically cruel. Nevermind the fact that Carl was, for a long time, a pretty useless accessory to Rick, and it wasn’t until he and Chandler Riggs became older that the became a useful character on the show in his own right. Restarting the clock on that with Judith is a challenging idea for a show already trying to find itself again in a new era.

That new era is roughly six years since the previous episode, with Michonne having become the protective and suspicious head of security for Alexandria, Carol turning into a seemingly softer “Queen” at the Kingdom, and Daryl becoming a hermit who trawls the woods by his lonesome.

Make no mistake, this is The Walking Dead, re-piloting, and it’s more than a little awkward. Part of the inherent tension of this show came from the idea that everything our heroes did was very fraught, because you never knew whether this latest attempt at survival, at finding a home, at building something more permanent, would work. Now, we know that it did work, at least well enough that pretty much all the major characters who haven’t been shuffled off for a three-picture deal are still around, and Alexandria, The Kingdom, and The Hilltop are all still functioning.

That’s the problem with this sort of time jump on a survival show. You need things to have changed or else the passage of time is totally pointless, so we see a harder Michonne, a softer Carol, a lonelier Daryl, and a romantically entangled Gabriel, Rosita, and Eugene. But things can’t have changed too much or there’s too much explaining to do, and the characters aren’t recognizable as themselves anymore. The timeline on this show has always been a little fuzzy, but think how much these people and their situation has changed over just the last few seasons. Stretch that out to six more years, and it feels like by the time we meet our heroes again, both too much and too little has happened.

“Who Are You Now?” at least has the decency to focus on character. It contrasts Michonne and Carol as two people who have both lost and gained families, and are in different places in their reactions to that. Losing Rick, and being chiefly (if not solely) responsible for protecting Judith and her young son (where Rick is presumably the father) has made her defensive, and untrusting. She talks to Rick and Carl. She sees the worst in outsiders and is more interested in protecting their group. She is once again haunted by what happened to the people she loved and in the years since Rick’s “death” she has become closer to the warrior than to the stateswoman she was becoming when we saw her last.

That’s a worthy tack to take. Gurira has always been one of the better actors on the show in terms of giving a layered performance, so while it feels like a waste to have her chatting with ghosts or delivering overblown faux-poetic monologues in voiceover to kick things off, in the episode’s better moments she’s able to communicate the combination of affection, concern, and anger going on beneath the surface.

The problem is that Michonne’s change in character is explored through a really tired device that The Walking Dead has turned to so many times before -- whether or not to let a new group of people into your community. Aside from the usual structural problems like weak dialogue and shoehorned-in zombie scares, this is what brings the episode down. The quintet of people that Judith finds and insists on rescuing is such a transparent effort to restock the show’s roster after some notable departures. And the council meeting scene is an equally hamfisted move to introduce all of the members while basically announcing their personalities and character traits rather than letting them emerge naturally.

Contrast that with what the show does with Carol, Henry, and what’s left of The Saviors. Sure, there’s some on-the-nose dialogue there too, with Carol and Ezekiel have an exposition-filled conversation about the two of them as parents to Henry and being hesitant to let go and letting him be a dreamer. But at the same time, the episode mainly shows you how Carol has changed rather than tells you.

Sure, Henry draws attention to the fact that Carol’s survive-however-you-must attitude has shifted with a line here or there, but for the most part, you just see her as someone who seems happier, more ready to let the idealists have their dreams, and ready to surrender rather than fight if it means safety. The show implies that having a family again has made Carol kinder and gentler, willing to give up plenty and take on a different demeanor if it means keeping her adopted son and her new, happy life safe and secure.

But, of course, Carol is still Carol, and while she’s not willing to risk Henry’s safety in any confrontation, she’s still willing to do whatever it takes -- including burning her enemies alive -- to keep the people she loves safe. It’s jarring, a little badass, and a little scary, but shows that just because Carol has a new family now, doesn't mean she’s left behind who she was when we last saw her. She’s just more selective about when she lets the beast out of the cage.

And that makes her an interesting parallel for Michonne here, who has the opposite trajectory. She seems harsher and crueler, but ultimately bends toward mercy in the way that Rick (at least some of the time) would have wanted her to, and which Judith, who is made to share Rick’s nobility-driven worldview to a painful extent, definitely wants her to now. She’s not willing to let Magna’s crew stay, but she’s willing to take them to Hilltop, to honor Rick’s memory, and the part of him that lives on, in their children and in her heart.

“Who Are You Now?” emphasizes that with pounding visual symbolism: a flower growing out of the asphalt, a mother bird claiming worms from a walker to feed to her chicks, a little cowboy figure. You’d have to be blind to miss the obvious metaphors The Walking Dead wants to call to mind with this imagery, and it hits the cowboy figure especially hard, but it all at least manages to communicate what the show wants it to: there is light in the darkness and the spectre of Rick lingers with the people who came together through him.

That doesn't excuse the tired and/or weird stuff in this episode. I am not on board with a Gabriel Rosita/Eugene love triangle or the usual zombie attack du jour without any real verve or wrinkle to it. I am not on board with walkers seemingly able to speak English all of a sudden. And while the scene between Negan and Judith brought out the best in both characters (and once again underlined the themes of the episode a little too hard), it’s especially odd having this (presumably) reformed butcher giving the daughter of his onetime mortal enemy algebra and/or life advice.

But it ties into the message of the episode -- that everyone in Alexandria and beyond has done things, lost people, and still managed to find second chances. It’s a weak reckoning with Rick’s absence, and the time jump is shaky at best, but it’s something, I suppose. The problem is that it’s a topic The Walking Dead has tackled -- whether or not to accept more survivors and what that says about the people making the decisions -- so many times that it’s become rote.

A soft reboot is a chance to take the show in new directions, to move on from the dead-ends the series often found itself mired in in recent years. Instead, The Walking Dead resets the stage, but gives us much of the same old song at dance, even as it tries to add a few new players.

[7.4/10] There are two battles being fought on The Walking Dead right now, two conflicts in competition with one another for the attention and devotion of the survivors. One is the struggle between the former Saviors and the people who’ve hurt and been hurt by them. The Saviors (or most of them at least) don’t trust Rick’s cohort to protect them, don’t like being denied the weapons to protect themselves, and don’t like the fact that their compatriots keep disappearing without explanation. And on the other side, you have folks like Maggie, Daryl, and Cyndie, who lost people to the Saviors, who don’t believe they know how to be a part of a society, who think that a conflagration is inevitable and that they should stamp out any sparks. There’s so much bad blood and mistrust to be overcome.

But the other conflict is a much bigger one. As Rick puts it, “it’s us versus the dead.” Rick is, more than anyone, trying to move past the war that he both helped start and helped end. (Though, to be honest, he gets a surprising amount of credit for something that was obviously a group effort, but maybe part of the idea at play here is that we need these singular folk heroes and legends to try to unite people.) Making a new world, surviving the hordes of shambling carnivores out in the wild, is going to take a community that moves past the old divisions. Rick is, perhaps, overly optimistic at how likely that is to happen, but he’s not wrong about what the bigger struggle is going to be, a struggle that will take all of them working together to overcome.

And Rick is, through his own personal circumstances, apt to believe that. Rick is enjoying the bliss of a blended family. The happiest and best-shot scenes in this episode see Rick raising a daughter who may or may not be his, with a woman who is essentially his second wife, after they’ve both lost the families they had before the world ended. They know pain, they know loss, and they know the difficulty of starting over and finding something that works. But they’ve also found this beautiful thing in the aftermath of that. They have a beautiful family, the most heartening and human thing on this often drab and depressing show, so it makes sense that Rick would be a little brighter on the prospects of a broader unity forming.

But the blended family of the Saviors and everyone they once tried to subjugate is having a much rockier path. “Warning Signs” has a number of The Walking Dead’s usual problems, but does a good job at highlighting the tensions between those two groups starting to boil over, the doomed efforts to calm things down and deescalate, and how both halves of the community are starting to feel like this arrangement just can’t continue. The mob stand-off in particular, though filled some clunky dialogue, is a great visual representation of this communal bomb about to go off, a mass of bodies in conflict with one another.

And for the most part, I like how “Warning Signs” tries to operationalize that tension, to provide some structure to the episode. It comes down to a pair of mysteries. One is a whodunnit for Justin, the troublemaking ex-Savior who shows up as a zombie here after being killed in the last episode. And the other asks what happened to Arat, another former Savior who disappears while most of our heroes have split up and gone on patrol.

Those mysteries give “Warning Signs” some momentum, an idea to build around, which is often lacking. People get to ask one another about whether they had anything to do with these disappearances. The group gets a clear goal in terms of finding a lost comrade. And it creates a skeletal structure for the show to pack its “house divided” theme onto rather than just spinning from one scene to another.

But this is The Walking Dead so the show falls back into its usual pitfalls with abandon. I’ve beat the drum about the series feeling the need to express everything through a series of two-person exchanges long enough, but it creates a samey feeling between episodes, where no matter what the situation, everyone’s having the same kind of conversation, one designed to reflect in bold letters on whatever the theme of the day is rather than mimicking anything close to actual human conversation. The show comes close with the low key interrogation between Rick and Daryl, with enough shared history between the two dredged up to make it feel like more. But time and again, it feels like we’re refed the same old same old in terms of scene construction and dialogue.

And the show also has to meet its zombie attack quotient, so we have Maggie and Cyndie dealing with an old house’s worth of walkers who break through the requisite barriers at an oh so convenient time. Look, after nine seasons, it’s going to get harder and harder to find new ways to reframe a zombie attack. But the show has hit these same beats -- “This should be easy” to “Oh no something went wrong” to “Last minute save” -- so many times that without some visual innovation from Greg Nicotero and company, it can’t help but feel like going through the motions.

The show also loses me in flavorless, pointlessly cryptic doublespeak and underdeveloped relationships. “Warning Signs” tries to anchor a big part of the drama on the connection and trust between Gabriel and Anne, and the things that threaten it. But we’ve had a single episode, constituting just a few scenes, between the two of them, with pleasant enough but not overwhelming chemistry, so it’s hard to feel the sense of investment or betrayal the episode wants to try to sell here.

What’s worse is that, because we can’t just know what’s going on, Anne speaks to the man on the other end of the walky talky in code. The gist is clear from context -- she’s trading people for supplies -- but it has to be shrouded in more dull teases and nonsense rather than just being straightforward about what’s going on. And naturally, it’s followed up by a ponderous back-and-forth with Gabriel, that can’t carry the emotional weight the episode is trying to load the moment up with.

The same goes for the episode’s closing moments, where Maggie, running down a lead, finds out that Cyndie and the Oceansiders are the ones who absconded with Arat, and are the ones who killed Justin. Rather than having this be a powerful revelation in and of itself, one marked by the reactions of the characters involved, The Walking Dead devolves into another long, pained monologue, from a performer who can’t quite pull it off, to sell a point in 100 words that could have been made in 10. (Hello pot, this is kettle, pleased to meet you.)

But once again, I liked the idea behind the scene. It’s easy for Rick to talk about reconciliation and the needs of everyone as a whole society. He has tranquility, and domestic bliss, and a family he’s been able to construct out of the ashes of civilization, even if he’s still visiting Carl’s grave to start his day.

Not everyone is so lucky. Cyndie lost her brother. Maggie lost her husband. Daryl lost too many people important to him in this way. There’s a bit too much of an “I learned it from watching you” vibe in Cyndie’s speech to Maggie, but the point is clear. Rick’s way is hard, not just practically, but emotionally. It’s incredibly difficult to break bread with the people who slaughtered your family members, even cooperation is for the greater good.

The Walking Dead is a surprisingly symbolic show, and we see the hope that Rick is preaching for represented by a small, ripe, tomato -- a spot of searing red amid the wash of greens and grays that populate the world of the series. Rick plucks one from Carl’s grave, the representation of the better world that his son dreamed of. Another is chewed up by a rebellious savior, trying to intimidate and humiliate Maggie. And in the end, it’s stomped on by the Saviors ready to depart and shatter that dream.

That tomato is a wonderful thing for Rick to look upon and hold onto. It’s a sign of this dead place showing some sign of life in the shadow of all the blood that’s been shed, that there can be something else. But that something doesn't come easy, and too many people, even Rick’s closest confidantes, are ready to let it fade back into the dirt, then forget the blood that watered that same ground.

Walking Dead's strength is always in its focus of character, and this episode shows that well.

We finally get a closer look of Negan through the classic "two characters in one room" scene. We get to look that, beyond his violent act and ill-mannered joke, Negan truly believed he did what he has to do. Classic philosophers have pondered a lot on the question "what would the world without the law be" and in a post-apocalyptic Walking Dead zombie world, that world, Negan believed, would require one despot that can maintain order. "I like killing people," Negan said, "But it's about killing the right people. You kill one right people, and you could save hundreds more." When Simon proposed in massacring The Hilltop to scare away ones who remain, Negan rashly opposed the idea, underlining that "people are resources" and he is "the one in charge".

All the sequences in this whole episode step away from the portrayal of Negan as comical villain who simply love to murder people. It shows that Negan, like many real life despots, calculate his actions and believe in an orderly societies maintain through a balanced oppression. One can easily be reminded with Philipinne's Rodrigo Duterte, Jakarta's Basuki Purnama, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, and other oppressive despots who said things similarly to Negan.

And of course, like real life despot, an authoritarian figure won't stay that long without the support of their people. In this episode we are shown the dynamics of Negan's most trusted elites through their table discussion about the possibility of Savior withour Negan - how different kind of people eventually submit to the ideals of maintaining order through power. People react when their safety is threatened as with the labors in Savior's clutch react when the base is out of power. But as Negan returned, they all too returned to bowing down to him, as if realising that their ultimate source of safety has returned. "Everything will be okay as long as our leader is here" is a common belief in societies with long history of dictatorship like in Indonesia and Singapore - and apparently The Savior's workers also have this mindset.

[6.5/10] Some day, The Walking Dead will end. Sure, theoretically, given the premise, the powers that be could cycle through cast members like Saturday Night Live and go on into eternity, but the practical reality is that the series is likely closer to its end than its beginning at this point.

But it’s hard to imagine what that looks like exactly. One of the creators’ of the comic the show is based on has famously declared that the story could go on forever, with no clear ending in mind. The Robot Chicken special poking fun at the show envisions a “Walker Museum” devoted to the struggle of Rick & Co. (with a nice historical “game of telephone” sense to it). Still, there’s no clear place for the story to close off, no clear way to bring things to series-long catharsis.

“Mercy” dares to dream of what the future, the belabored “tomorrow”, looks like. It gives us a gray-bearded Rick, cane in hand, walking through a loving home with Michonne, Carl, and Judith. There’s a gauzy hue over these images, one that, contrasted with a red-eyed Rick standing much more starkly in interspersed scenes, suggests this may be as much a fantasy as a vision of things to come.

It’s a nice vision though, one where there’s a big festival to plan and everyone seems safe and content enough to have a humdrum, everyday life filled with silenced alarm clocks and Weird Al songs. There’s still gold to be mined from The Walking Dead franchise, which suggests that, despite slipping ratings, the show isn’t likely to depart the airwaves anytime soon. And yet, the season premiere for Season 8 sets up this clash with Negan as “the last fight” before things settle down and Rick has the chance to live out the old man life we see glimpses of.

The meat of “Mercy,” however, is our heroes preparing for that strike, and then bringing the fight to The Saviors’ doorstep. As is most often the case with The Walking Dead, those preparation scenes work best when they’re not laden with the show’s clunky, grandiose dialogue. The forces of Alexandria under Rick, The Hilltop under Maggie, and The Kingdom under Ezekiel, have finally united and are ready to strike back and Negan and his brutes. But before that can happen, Rick has to give his best approximation of a halftime speech, lolling out the usual platitudes about what they’re fighting for and why in the familiar, halting tones of his average motivational speaking appearances.

But the episode fares better when it devotes itself to showing the preparation rather than holding the audience’s hand through the theme of this mission and episode. Watching the current coalition of the willing exert their will on unsuspecting Savior lookouts as locales get crossed off Rick’s handwritten list is a thrilling little sequence. As a viewer, it’s hard not to value competence in our heroes, and seeing how they’re good at what they do, even if what they’re doing isn’t exactly good, can’t help but rouse some cheer.

It all builds to a standoff between Rick’s coalition and The Saviors at the sanctuary, made all the more tense by teasingly-placed act breaks. The season-by-season pacing of The Walking Dead has always been a little odd, with season premieres needing something big but rarely feeling like the beginning of the story, and season finales feeling similarly interstitial. “Mercy” is no exception. This face-to-face confrontation between Rick and Negan both feels like the culmination of the theatrics that took place over last season, but also just a middle portion of a larger story, partly meant to kick off the events of this season, and partly meant to just give us something with scenery-chewing and explosions to grab the jaded audience’s attentions after another year.

But it’s a good stand-off. Rick is all business and grunts and ultimatums. He rolls up in cars decked out in aluminum siding, brandishing and weapon and setting out a mobile layer of defense for him and his cohort. He calls out the Savior lieutenants we’re familiar with (plus Eugene!) and gives them one chance to surrender, before it’s showtime.

Naturally, Negan responds with his usual joie de vivre, taunting Rick about the size of his reproductive organs, issuing his own leering threats, and generally continuing to be the embodiment of toxic masculinity wrapped in a jaunty scarf. It’s a clash of personalities with enough tension to hold the moment, even if you just know things are going to erupt in gunfire sooner or later.

And they do. But it’s not another pointless firefight even if Rick and company do more immediate damage to Negan’s window repair fund than they do any of their actual adversaries. It’s part of a deliberate plan from the good guys, which involves the team assembled in front of the Saviors’ hideout sending through an exploding RV to breach The Sanctuary’s forward defenses, and then having the all-star crew of Carol, Daryl, Morgan, and Tara lure a massive horde of walkers right onto their doorstep. It’s a clever plan for once (even if it feels like Rick could have clipped Negan plenty of times while they were jawing at one another) which sews chaos directly in The Saviors’ home base. And it brings in the necessary quotient of action and excitement.

Eventually, those explosions give way to more heavy-handed underlining of the theme of the episode -- “it’s not about you.” The Walking Dead has never been anything but full-throated about what it’s trying to say, but it’s at least a laudable tack to take as the show seems to be contemplating its endgame here. As much as the fight in “Mercy” is framed as a one-on-one confrontation with Rick and Negan as figureheads, there’s at least lip service to the idea that this is a broader struggle, one between those who believe the world needs to get bigger and more inclusive, and those who believe they have the right to carve it up for themselves.

It leads to our heroes considering the next generation, and how the better world they’re hoping to make, will become theirs. It comes in the form of Michonne trying to nudge Carl to take responsibility. It comes with Rick at least nominally passing the torch to Maggie. It comes in broader notions that Rick and Morgan and Carol are stewards in the midst of an interregnum, ready to settle the last scores so that the world can return to something approaching normalcy and the next batch of leaders and doers can emerge, hopefully less stained and scarred from the harsh transition.

There’s hope for that here, not just in Rick’s bleary-eyed fantasy. It comes from Carl scoping out a decaying gas station in search of fuel, and finding another young man, asking for some of the titular mercy, or at least a bit of food. Before Carl can react, can fully decide what he wants to do about the situation, Rick shoots his gun in the air and scares the kid off, full of the (legitimate) paranoia about who could be working for Negan. Carl, however, still has enough altruism to return to that same spot with a couple of cans of nourishment and a note of apology.

Maybe that’s where The Walking Dead ends when it’s time to close up shop. Too many folks have been too battered by the state of the world as it stands. Rick, Carol, and Morgan have each tried to give up this life, to end their part in its cycle. There is work to be done, and each of them is stone-faced and resolute through most of it. But there might be a light at the tunnel, one where the zombie disease isn’t cured, and there’s still threats that lurk on the horizon, but where the vision Rick so clunkily outlines to his troops takes hold, where people come together and work together to forge something deeper than working for points and deciding who owns and who owes.

It’s a vision that’s going to have to be lived out by Maggie and Carl and the rest of the young folks who have a chance to see it through. Maybe the best end for The Walking Dead, is just one where the world doesn’t need Rick Grimes anymore.

[7.8/10] The moments flash. Crazy ramblings. Lives taken. Lives lost. Morgan. Ezekiel. Richard. Carol. Benjamin. Duane.

It always gets me. The montage of past events, of old faces raced through in a grand dizzying cacophony. It’s how a film like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button can leave me entertained enough through most of its runtime but then pack a wallop for me at the very end. I know the device. I know how manipulative it can be. And yet in never ceases to be at least a little affecting for me.

So when Morgan starts to lose his mind again, starts to crack from equal and opposing pressures of his pacifist philosophy and world a that requires more than pacifism to protect the young men with their futures still ahead of them, I cannot help but be on board. “Bury Me Here” is not, necessarily, the best hour of The Walking Dead, but it’s centered around Morgan’s moral turmoil, the fault lines of his ethical stance, and that gives it power.

Lennie James gives it power too. Bringing Morgan back was a shot in the arm for TWD, not just because his presence ties things back to the beginning, but because James is one of the show’s best assets in selling the calm on the surface, but the swirling emotions within. For so much of this episode Morgan simply seethes. He stands in front of brutal bullies holding himself back from unleashing hell upon them. He glares at Benjamin when the man explains what he did and why he did it and how things went wrong. So much of this season has been about Morgan being pulled away from his Aikido temperament, and gradually reaching his breaking point.

And then, he snaps. Benjamin’s death is too much for him. As Morgan himself put it, he thought he got to choose, to decide whether he could be a part of this fight. Faced with another young man, one who shows promise and esteem, taken down by a cruel, uncaring hand, all those emotions that have been bumbling under the surface, all the rage and pain that he has quelled through his practiced calm, erupt in a scarily efficient, controlled fury that bursts out from the moment he confronts The Saviors again.

It’s virtuoso work from James, who doesn’t always get the best material. Only his erstwhile running buddy Carol (Melissa McBride) can show the conflicted burden of someone projecting one thing while feeling another as well as he can on The Walking Dead. And when Morgan lets the beast off of its chain, James delivers the contrast from the measured man it replaces. Morgan is changed. He is different. He is immediately recognizable as something else, with a demeanor and attitude to match the way his ethical mores have been shattered and replaced with sharp edges. The vast majority of that is owed to Lennie James’s outstanding performance.

“Bury Me Here” needs that type of performance because the episode is otherwise subject to many of the show’s clunkier or more hackneyed qualities. The dialogue is heavy-handed as usual. The scene where one of Ezekiel’s “subjects” tells him about weevils in the royal garden, but reassures him that even if they burn it down and tear it up, they can grow it all back again, may as well have had a giant neon sign that read “Hooray for metaphors!” Words have never been the show’s strong suit, and while a performer like James can still make that work with body language and expressions, other characters suffer in dull or repetitive conversations.

It also doesn’t help when the episode telegraphs where things are going with its focus. I couldn’t necessarily have told you that Benjamin was going to die in this episode, but the attention he received here, from being built up relative to his little brother to his attempt to learn from Carol to his coaching up from Richard made him up to be this bastion of innocent, guileless potential. That sort of thing can’t go uncorrupted in stories like these, and it wasn’t hard to predict that something was going to happen to Benjamin that would make Morgan call his philosophy into question. Not everything has to be a surprise, and better TWD lays a little groundwork than delivering nonsense out of nowhere, but at times, Benjamin may as well have just started singing “I like being alive!”

The show also has a propensity for overly long scenes. The confrontation between Morgan and Richard was an important turning point in the episode, and I understand Scott Gimple & Co. wanting to give the moment enough time to breathe and get everything out. But so much of it is spent repeating things the audience already knows or could surmise on its own, and hitting thematic points the show has already thoroughly driven home. To the same point, we don’t need Morgan to say Duane when he means Benjamin to realize the two are connected in his mind, and doing so turns a subtle enough thematic tie into a ham-fisted shoulder-shake for the audience to ensure we get it.

That said, I actually like the plot of the episode fairly well, even if the execution of it leaves a lot to be desired separated from Lennie James carrying the load. Richard’s plan isn’t a bad one, or an ignoble one. He realizes that tensions between The Kingdom and The Saviors have been running hot, much of it on his account. It’s reasonable to think that if The Kingdom were short, the bad guys would make an example out of him (explaining the “bury me here” sign nicely) and that it might spur Ezekiel to see the need to fight. Or at least it works as the thought process of a desperate man.

(As an aside, Gavin, the leader of the crew of Saviors that interacts with The Kingdom, has quickly become one of my favorite antagonists. I love how the show doesn’t redeem him or show him as reasonable or anything. He is still cruel and coldly uncompromising. But in contrast to Negan or his second in command, Gavin doesn’t really seem to enjoy what he does. Instead, he seems like a put upon middle manager, constantly dealing with crap from the top and from his knucklehead employees, and that gives him a unique character relative to the other baddies who’ve crossed our heroes.)

Things naturally go wrong. Benjamin is killed instead of Richard. Morgan loses it, and yet fulfills Richard’s plan in an unexpected, but arguably more effective way. The no-kill code has been with Morgan since we became reacquainted with him, so when he finally breaks it, and it’s to kill Richard in order to lull The Saviors into a false sense of security, there’s poetry in it. When he repeats the words Richard says to him, it’s a hair too much, but it works as a bitterly ironic fulfillment of Richard’s scheme, and realization of the promise that, as Morgan has been pushed to act, so too will Ezekiel.

But what motivates Morgan is not simply the tyranny of The Saviors. It’s not the possibility of a better world alone. It’s the same epiphany that Rick reached last week in much more hopeful if resigned terms -- that fighting this fight is necessary to secure the future for their children, for young people like Benjamin and Duane and Judith. Morgan has become wrath, the pain of the loss of his wife and son that he’d managed to put behind him rushing back in an uncontrollable flood. And it drives him to cast aside that which healed him, to take lethal action in the hopes that no more such innocents need suffer the same fate.

The three major figures here are those who were changed, those who became something else, when they lost their children. We hear Richard recount how he lost his daughter by not acting. We see how the memory of Duane’s loss lingers with Morgan. And last but certainly not least is Carol, who was turned on a different path after Sophia died, and who gives Morgan another place to leave without leaving, too stew and seethe and turn a blunt object into a sharp one. His turn is a potent one, made all the stronger by the sacrifices, moral and mortal, that the old guard makes in the hopes that the next generation won’t have to.

[7.1/10] Realism is always going to be a tricky needle to thread for The Walking Dead. On the one hand, a big part of the show’s claim to fame is that it takes the premise of the zombie apocalypse and plays it seriously, sometimes overly seriously. On the other, it’s also a show where the dead reanimate and civilians use weapons well with minimal training and zombies show up in some new obstacle course-like form on a weekly basis. The premise of the show means it can’t exactly be as down-to-earth as its hardscrabble style suggests.

But sometimes, it just pushes things too far. The Junkyardigans (my current name for the collective that congregates at the dump until an official one is offered) read as silly from the word go. This show’s run into plenty of exaggerated groups before -- the Terminites, the Wolves, the dibs-based biker gang -- but they tend to run pulpy rather than cheesy. It’s a fine distinction, to be sure, but the difference for me is that as goofy as those groups could seem at times, their outsized characteristics seemed to fit into certain exaggerated, over the top qualities that haunt The Walking Dead all around. TWD isn’t just real, it’s hyper-real, and its more extreme villains and opponents fit into that.

The Junkyardigans, on the other hand, feel like something leftover from a 1970s science fiction movie. Equal parts Logan’s Run, Mad Max, and Cloud Atlas this group of garbage-dwellers has a strange form of speaking that doesn’t work with the tone of TWD. Sure, the show has delved into florid or unusual speech patterns before, with Abraham, Eugene (remember that guy?), and even colloquies between Morgan and The Wolves, but the results have always been hit or miss. Offering this new crowd, with their “we take; we don’t bother” attitude, and their leader, who seems like a Vulcan offshoot of the great Allison Janey, speaking entirely in this confused, primitive patois, starts this group that makes Rick so happy off on the wrong foot.

That doesn’t even get into this week’s zombie set piece, where Rick is forced to engage in mortal combat in a pit of refuse with a walker that’s a rejected design from Pan’s Labyrinth. The look of that undead creature, who’s a cross between the usual zombie and a porcupine, was actually pretty cool, but felt like it belonged in a different show. The entire Junkyardigan encounter did, with the whole exercise feeling like a high production value version of one of those syndicated saturday afternoon action shows. Rick gets the better of the walker thanks to a “use the junk, Luke” pep talk from Michonne, and all’s well, in the latest implausible zombie engagement.

Of course, it leads to Rick having a heart-to-heart with Father Gabriel, who was taken against his will by the dump people. He is touched that Rick didn’t think he’d run away, giving the show time for a bit of unearned sap. It allows the show to turn subtext into text, with Gabriel asking Rick why he was smiling, and Rick responding with a groaner of a line implying that Gabriel taught him enemies can become friends. The storyline, at least in this episode, feels very off-brand, and I can only hope the unavoidable future encounters with the Junkyardigans dial back the cheese a bit.

But it’s cuts such a contrast with the understated, achingly real reunion between Daryl and Carol. The moment of their meeting is one of the most potent in the show, and as I noted in regard to the mid-season finale, proves the benefits of The Walking Dead’s divide-and-reunite tack for the past few seasons.

It’s great acting from both Melissa McBride and Norman Reedus. The shift in Carol’s expression, from annoyance at another visitor to disbelief and joy when realizing who’s come to call, power the moment. And Daryl, with his taciturn, reserved demeanor, melts in Carol’s arms. I don’t know if I necessarily ever want this pair to be romantic, but there is a sacredness to their pairing that the show has not been able to muster anywhere else.

It’s not just fanservice though. As heartwarming as it was to see the two of them together, the moment when they sit in the glow of the fireplace informs the emotional states and connection of both characters. I know I just complained about the show turning subtext into text with Rick, but Carol confiding her reasons for leaving in Daryl, who was clearly hurt by her departure, drives home the severity of what Carol has gone through. The steely, self-assured warrior talking about how being in the world meant having to either suffer when people you love die or suffer when you lose parts of yourself by taking lives drives home the catch-22 of her misery. McBride absolutely sells Carol’s desperation, the difficulty that drove her away, and it’s the kind of vulnerability that works best when the character is speaking to someone she trusts and loves more than any of the other survivors.

But the scene tells us more about Daryl too. Daryl’s time with The Saviors seemed to have changed him, made him more brutal and vicious. His killing of Fat Joey didn’t seem like the measured act necessary for survival that almost all of the survivors have had to make at this point, but something borne out of anger and frustration as much as need. Daryl seems, and has seemed, ready to fight fire with fire, believing that responding to these butchers with more butchery is the only way to win.

And yet, he spares Carol from that. He sees what she has been through, what being a part of that struggle has taken from her, and he lies to her. For as much as he wants to defeat The Saviors by any means necessary, and as much as he wants the group’s best fighter at his side, he wants his best friend to be happy and well more. It is a kindness, one buoyed by their amusing rapport when breaking bread together, and it seems to give Daryl pause. The tiger warming up to him after is a bit too much, but it’s a sign that this visit has softened Daryl a bit, reminded him what’s at stake and who he is, in the way that only a kindred spirit can.

It ties into the episode’s other major narrative through-line, where Daryl and Richard are trying to convince The Kingdom to join the upcoming war against The Saviors, and Ezekiel and Morgan are reluctant to engage in such potentially deadly combat. The focal point of the arc is Morgan, who seems poised to slowly but surely move away from his no-kill stance and, as portended by the Season 6 finale, gradually see the need to use his abilities to protect people in mortal terms, to attack and not just defend.

Much of that is pretty tedious in “New Best Friends.” There’s more of a back and forth with the usual suspects, and another confrontation with The Saviors that feels a good bit like the last one. But the kicker of it, that Daryl is becoming more like Morgan, softening and tacitly acknowledging that he’s “holding onto something” too that keeps him from turning into the butchers he’s fighting, and Morgan is becoming more like Daryl, increasingly feeling the righteous anger at these monsters, is sound.

The cumulative effect is an episode that zips back and forth between tones, from the cartoonish qualities of Rick & Co.’s exposure to the Junkyardigans, to the quiet emotional moment shared between Carol and Daryl, to the Kingdom’s denizens’ waffling, which splits the difference. For a long time now, The Walking Dead has tried to have its cake and eat it too -- deliver a show high on genre thrills and outsized storylines, but grounded in real feeling and characters at the same time. It’s a tricky balance, one that TWD can’t quite manage in “New Best Friends.”

[6.6/10] The Walking Dead is a frustrating show for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is that even in an episode like this -- one filled to the brim with dull speechifying, blatant wheel-spinning, and lame parables -- there’s one or two moments of brilliance that make it hard to just give up on this mercurial series. Even when the show is stalling for time, serving up weak dialogue, and leaning into its weakest tendencies, it sprinkles in a couple of great bits that rise above the rest of the flotsam.

This week, it’s the zombie cheese slicer and Rick’s smile, two dissimilar but connected moments that demonstrate what the show is capable of when it’s not tripping over its own bad lines and plot contrivances. Those faults are out in full force in “Rock in the Road,” an episode that sees Rick and the gang at The Hilltop and The Kingdom in an effort to rally forces sufficient to take on The Saviors. That coalition is inevitable; the arguments over whether to unite and fight or cling to the status quo have already been turned over dozens of times, which leaves “Rock” with only a thrilling walker-killing sequence and a clever way to convey Rick’s state of mind to recommend it.

But hey, many shows don’t even have that much, so let’s focus on the good stuff to start out. If there is one thing The Walking Dead does well consistently, it’s those big zombie set pieces. While the show often struggles to come up with new directions to take the characters, or move the plot, it Greg Nicotero and his team never fail to come up with some new, outside the box walker scenario to breathe some life into action-y side of the series. If that’s all the show were, it would get tiresome (and I imagine some people watch solely for such thrills), but as a periodic, imaginative treat, these scenes never fail to prop up sagging episode like “Rock” and boost the better ones.

The setup is, admittedly, contrived. The line of cars blocking the road, and a set of tripwires and explosives does match up with The Saviors’ ability to set traps we witnessed in last season’s finale. It’s a questionable use of resources, and feels tailor-made to allow the slice-and-dice that follows, but the coolness of that scene makes up for some of the implausibility of what allows it.

It’s also preceded by a pretty uninspired ticking clock scenario. There’s a definite sense that after a dialogue- and exposition-heavy opening half, the folks behind The Walking Dead felt the need to include some death-defying scenario to keep the action quota up. For that reason, there’s little tension, despite the fact that our heroes are frantically defusing bombs and untying bundles of dynamite. Apart from the plausibility issues, the sequence feels like a throw-in, where there’s little actual risk but the gods of empty action must be feted nonetheless.

“Rock” at least has the good sense to come up with a plot-relevant reason, however thin, to put our heroes through these paces. The theme of the episode, to the extent there is one, is that Rick & Co. are outmanned and outgunned, so every bit of odds-evening artillery they can amass is important to the upcoming fight. Still, the sequence of explosives recovery can’t help but seem unnecessary, where the seams of The Walking Dead’s need to fulfill its weekly action requirement start to show.

And then, Rick and Michonne use a pair of cars strapped with trip wire to bisect an entire horde of walkers in about fifteen seconds. It’s just as dumb and gratuitous as the prior bomb-defusing sequence, but it has the advantage of being a cool visual and a novel concept, which allows it some grace the plot obstacle of the week does not possess. Sure, it leads to another scenario in which our heroes are surrounded by zombies and somehow miraculously don’t get bitten or scratched, but in set pieces like these, the show runs on excitement, not logic. I’ve made my peace with that, and learned to enjoy such shallow thrills.

The problem is that The Walking Dead can’t sustain that sort of energy or novelty for an entire episode. “Rock in the Road” is incredibly lumpy in terms of how it’s structured. There’s a rushed recruitment drive at The Hilltop, an extended visit to The Kingdom, the aforementioned walker madness on the highway, and a quick coda of an encounter with The Saviors back in Alexandria.

Despite a general sense, which has permeated the whole season, of the protagonists struggling to survive in Negan-dominated lands, there’s not much of a connection or flow between these settings or beats. “Rock in the Road” simply limps from one to the other, content to offer a collection of barely related chapters in this larger story rather anything with a more holistic feel. Polemics about the “death of the episode” as a standalone unit are premature, but “Rock” conforms to the “here’s a bunch of stuff that happened” approach that old school critics complain about with the rise of serialization.

It also conforms to The Walking Dead’s worst and seemingly most inescapable bugaboos, namely ponderous debates back and forth about whether to act or to kill or whether there’s a fight worth having. Don’t get me wrong, Morgan and Carol’s struggles with their morality in the new order have been one of the strongest elements of the series in the last couple of seasons, and the notion of whether a leader should sign up to fight in a war in the hopes of a better tomorrow or hold onto a fraught, if unpalatable peace is an interesting one. But TWD does nothing but offer trite aphorisms and repeat itself when delving into these topics here.

As with the explosives, there’s a sense of inevitability here that makes the hand-wringing over whether The Hilltop or The Kingdom will join the fight less compelling out of the gate. The other side of the coin though is that great shows often find their best material not from unveiling surprise after surprise, but in making the expected engaging.

Rick’s fable about the titular rock in the road is not the persuasive argument and moving lesson on the rewards for those who fight to save others from continuing ills even when it seems all hope is lost it’s meant to be. Instead, it’s a generic monologue, couched in rhetorical flourishes and a cheesy parable form that robs it of what little impact it might otherwise have. We can only surmise that narrative necessity will lead to the various enclaves we’ve met this season will be united to take on Negan eventually, but “Rock” can’t make the pitch for this inevitability interesting on its own terms.

The closest “Rock” comes is in Benjamin’s argument to Ezekiel for The Kingdom joining the fight. His point that Rick & Co. are going to take on Negan no matter what, and that if The Kingdom doesn’t aid them, they’ll either die anyway, something Ezekiel’s men might have been able to prevent, or they’ll succeed, and free The Kingdom from The Saviors, without Ezekiel’s group pulling its own weight. Ezekiel makes a suitably reciprocal point about the lives lost in fighting the walkers, and Morgan’s gradual acclimation to the idea of taking lives in the name of a greater good has some weight, but on the whole, the various arguments back and forth turn ponderous quickly. “Rock” lingers on these debates, ensuring every character gets their two cents in, to its detriment. The show’s writing just isn’t good enough to sustain that sort of ethical weighing for that long.

Thankfully, TWD is not without some remaining creative flourishes. After their daring, cheese slicer-esque escape from the walkers, Michonne implores her beau to smile, telling him that they’ll win, that they’re the ones who’ll live. Rick puts on a brave face, but can’t quite manage it. The implication is clear -- as much as Rick must pitch this hope for resistance to Gregory and Ezekiel and others, he cannot yet buy it himself.

But in the episode’s final scene, Rick and his band of not-so merry men go looking for Father Gabriel, who has seemingly, once again, gotten scared and run away. (As with Rick himself, the battle for Gabriel’s soul is too well-trodden territory for me to really care about the swerve there.) When following Gabriel’s clues, which call back to the supplies Rick and Aaron found in the previous episode, our heroes are surrounded by a crowd of people who seem organized and well-armed. Rick smiles, and the contrast is just as clear -- with these people, with these supplies, they may actually be able to stand a chance.

It’s the kind of canny narrative device, the kind of subtlety, that’s almost wholly lacking in the rest of “Rock in the Road.” But it’s the sort of thing that keeps me coming back week after week, hoping that such successes will become the norm rather than exception. It is, like Rick’s initial response to Michonne, perhaps more of an aspiration than a reasonable expectation, but hopefully The Walking Dead gives Rick, and the audience, more reasons to smile.

"East" is about cycle, about chain reactions, about the way decisions big and small come back to you in one way or another. Morgan says it himself -- it's all a circle. But whether that circle is good or bad, whether you get out of it what you put in, remains to be seen.

To Morgan's mind, it can be a force for good. He decides to spare The Wolf, and to Morgan, that decision not only leads to The Wolf himself helping to save Denise, but it leads his way of thinking to trickle down to Carol, and make Alexandria's most pragmatic warrior so uncomfortable with the act of killing that she absconds to where she need not risk hurting anyone. And yet Daryl faces the mirror image of that cycle. He chooses to spare Dwight, and to Daryl's mind, that makes him responsible both for Denise's death at Dwight's hands, and for the way that having to bury yet another innocent, drove his dear friend Carol away. Both men made the same kind of choice, but interpret the ensuing events very differently.

But there's another cycle in play in "East". Rick's crew attacked The Saviors, and brutalized everyone they came across. The episode repeatedly features folks in Alexandria worrying about the blowback. It seems inevitable that the remaining portion of Negan's followers will mount a counterassault, and try to return the favor. Maggie and Michonne predicted as such when they agreed to the plan. Rick started something, and the violence he dished out will no doubt come back to him as well.

In the early part of the episode, Michonne grabs an apple of the nightstand, takes a bite, and then offers one to Rick as well. It's a heavy-handed visual metaphor, and the implication is clear. Right now, Alexandria is paradise, a walled Eden where they can be well-fed, healthy, and safe from the tumult of the world. But paradise must fall, according to the demands of both biblical precedent and serialized television. So in each moment of bliss, of peace and pleasure, we wait for the other shoe to drop.

In that way, "East" feels a lot like filler. There's a storm coming; that much is clear. But in the meantime we have to shuffle the characters around the board so that they're in the right place when it hits. So Daryl bolts off, in attempt to clean up his unfinished business; Glenn, Michonne, and Rosita go after him in an attempt to keep him from doing something rash or reckless, and Rick and Morgan head out in search of Carol.

This being The Walking Dead, each of these events is cause for long-winded, not particularly subtle conversations about What The Right Thing Is in the midst of the fall of civilization. Season 6 has done well to examine the morality of the actions of the group to some degree, and putting conflicting philosophies at loggerheads, but "East" feels like a rehash that communicates these ideas by having people blather on about them in an inorganic fashion.

There's some juice to the exchanges between Morgan and Rick, who stand as the devil and angel on either shoulder of Carol for all intents and purposes. They have a history together, albeit one with large gaps. But those gaps allow each to see the way the other has changed in a way that isn't as clear when you're close up the whole time. Rick is pure, Shane-like pragmatism, willing to kill at a moment's notice whenever he feels threatened, and Morgan is pure, nigh-impossible pacifism, constantly trying to find another way. Sure, their views are caricatured to a strong degree, and the dialogue is painful at times, but there's at least a solid foundation for how those ideas clash, and the way Carol is being torn apart from the inside with both sides of the spectrum pulling at her.

The Daryl/Glenn/Michonne/Rosita contingent is less compelling in their part of the episode. Again, it feels largely like a repetition of themes and ideas that have been brought up and dramatized better in the past, without much beyond a slightly different setting to draw them out. And it again involves our supposedly capable heroes getting ambushed yet again (twice actually!) and setting up a pretty standard hostage situation and shooting fake out that will no doubt be a catalyst for the events of the finale.

Despite all of this, Carol is, once again, the highlight of the episode. Credit once again belongs to Melissa McBride who puts on another clinic in how to convey being tortured by both what you've done and what you have to do. Again, both McBride and Carol do a superb job of taking the character's genuine discomfort and distress at potentially having to take another life and mixing it with her attempts to play the timid mouse who's overwhelmed by the opposing threat of violence and thus underestimated by the people who are threatening her. It's one of the few elements in this episode that works at multiple levels, and it's far and away the most striking scene in "East".

The way that Carol trembles when confronted by the prey who think themselves predators, the way the episode opens with close up shots of the aftermath of this grisly scene that lets the audience know before a single shot's been fired that this doesn't end well, the way that she pleads with them that it doesn't have to be this way, add to the inherent tragedy of where Carol is right now.

The guns hidden in her sleeves is a neat trick--Carol is full of neat tricks that show the craftiness she's developed out in the wild--but they come with a cost, with the way she is devastated at having another set of names to add to her journal. Here is a woman who suffered mightily long before the world as we know it ended, and she faced even more hardships after that. But she responded with strength, with a commitment to doing what she had to do in order to survive and protect the people who couldn't protect themselves. And yet those actions have come back to her, the thoughts of the lives snuffed out by her hand haunt her still, and seem inescapable, even as she gives up what little stability she's managed to cobble together in an attempt to elude them.

So much of this episode is focused on when and how good can beget good, evil can beget evil, and violence can beget more violence. These are thoughts TWD has explored time and time again, with enough water-treading in terms of the plot that make the entire episode somewhat tedious. But Carol's part of it, the way that Rick's philosophy and Morgan's philosophy have crashed together within her and left her as the devastated, lethal woman on that road, show that pain can also beget pain. I can only hope that she finds a way forward.

8.3/10. There's been a lot of death, unsurprisingly, on a show called The Walking Dead. We've seen folks in the series take out hordes of zombies, roving marauders, and even their own as a bloody kindness when necessary. But very very rarely are our heroes the aggressors.

That's what made "Not Tomorrow Yet" so interesting and so novel for a series already in its sixth season. Many episodes of the show examine the morality of killing--when it's justified, what makes it a sin, and how those things change after civilization falls--but it's never shown the show's main characters engaging in what amounts to a preemptive strike before.

It is, in a word, kind of uncomfortable, kind of troubling, even when on paper it makes sense, even when you're on the side of the people doing the killing. I think it's meant to be. The Walking Dead has paid lipservice to the moral gray areas that emerge when balancing life and death in something approaching a state of nature, but rarely has it confronted these ideas so directly.

It's telling that the closest thing to a preemptive strike of the kind that Rick & Co. unleash on The Saviors was The Governor's assault on The Prison in Season's 3 "Home". Even then, Rick's group had snuck into Woodbury and gotten into a firefight with his men. (Though it could be argued that Daryl, Sasha, and Abraham's run-in with Negan's group in "No Way Out" is a similar justification.) There, it's portrayed as cowardly, as cruel, as something that makes Andrea begin to doubt the goodness of her companion.

And yet here, it's Rick's group attacking without real provocation. It's Rick giving the speech to his band of survivors that they need to strike before a potential rival decides to strike at them first. It's Rick who startles Heath with how brutal he can be. It's our heroes who put together a surprise attack on a group of people they've never even met, let alone talked to.

It's harrowing, both from an ethical standpoint and a purely visceral one. I've often said that The Walking Dead tells stories better with images than with words, and the show lived up to that branding tonight in the tightly shot-and-edited sequences at The Saviors' compound. There was tension in the moment where Andy stood anxiously in front of the two Savior guards as they examined the faux-head of Gregory, before it deflated with the dark comedy of a one guard using a severed head as a puppet. (Despite the ethical conundrums and heavy thematic material, there was a surprising amount of solid comedy to the episode, in moments like this and in the awkward humor of Eugene asking Rosita about Carol's cookies at a very bad time.)

But from that moment on, Rick's crew moved with precision through the compound in crackerjack sequences that showed how scarily effective they had become in their seek and destroy mission. Director Greg Nicotero does a masterful job; there's a tremendous pacing to this part of the episode, that never loses the tension in the mostly one-sided fight, while still finding time to let the audience breathe between big moments and show the surprises and escalation of the conflict.

That part of the episode also includes the most striking scene of "Not Tomorrow Yet". In a wordless sequence, Glenn and Heath enter a room where two of the Saviors lie sleeping. Glenn kneels over one of them, holds his knife aloft, tears up, struggles, but eventually plunges his weapon into his erstwhile enemy. Then, although Glenn's clearly devastated by what he's done; he stops Heath from doing the same to the other man sleeping in that room, with the implication that after the pair's conversation about killing another human being while on the hunt for a Gregory lookalike, he wants to spare Heath the the pain, the stain on the soul, that Glenn himself just endured, even if it means doubling down on committing the grisly dead himself.

It's a powerful scene, one of the most captivating and poignant of the entire series. In truth, there are plausibility problems with it, It strains credulity that Glenn and Heath wouldn't wake up their prey when entering the room no matter how quiet they were tried to be; Glenn would presumably have to use much greater force to stab his targets, and the fact that the men died instantly without a sound has no basis in reality. But as I've said before, The Walking Dead is a show that runs theme rather than verisimilitude, and the performances of Steven Yeun and Corey Hawkins are so impressive, and the direction of the scene so well done, that it hardly matters, especially in the moment.

That one scene sums up the entire thorny ethical territory the show explores in "Not Tomorrow Yet." I recently wrote about how The Hateful Eight examines the idea of when lethal force is justified, and how that idea changes based on what team or tribe you're on, and this episode dives into similar thematic material. Our heroes seem more like butchers that warriors. We've seen Rick and his crew kill before, but almost always in self defense, always in the heat of battle. Killing a man in his sleep, a man who's done nothing to you, who simply poses a future threat, feels different, feels wrong. It clearly disturbs Glenn in that moment and gives him pause about the path that Rick so confidently sets his band of merry men on.

Suddenly it hits you -- beyond what they've heard from a group of people our heroes barely know (who are, it should be noted) led by an unsavory prick and guided by a man who stole from Rick and Daryl), Glenn and the rest of his compatriots have little basis to know that these people are really bad. Lying there, motionless on their beds, they just seem like survivors, same as anyone. At best, there are two sides to every story, and Rick and Maggie only got half of it, but their needs and the needs of the people they protect make it enough for them to kill unprovoked, to kill by a much less direct form of necessity than the kind that normally motivates the lead characters in this show.

But the episode still muddies the water further from there. After Glenn pains himself to kill the two Saviors they find in that room, he looks up and the camera pans across the sleeping man's collection of photos of people and/or walkers he's apparently shot or bashed through the head. It's morbid, and it speaks poorly of the character of the man that Glenn just killed, but I don't think it's meant to make the audience see the death as deserved. Instead, it's meant to underscore the complexity of the ethical choice here. The way that the folks from the Hilltop paint a picture of The Saviors makes the killing seem righteous, but the manner of it, the defenselessness of their enemies, makes it feel wrong. And yet, those gruesome photos, which imply the harshness of these men who died at Glenn's hand, suggests that as disquieting, maybe even unjust, as these kills feel, they may yet be for the greater good. You just don't know. Things are not as simple as pure right and wrong, and that just makes what it takes to survive in the next world all the harder.

And Carol, who is conflicted in her role in this assault, is on the other side of this moral quandary. She too has become scarily effective at killing at is feeling the weight of that, of the lives lost on her ledger. The show has been setting up this inner conflict for Carol since the beginning of the season, and it serves that conflict well.

From the cold open (which have been some of the best parts of The Walking Dead lately) that depicts Carol attempting to reestablish her shrinking violet bona fides with the community with some Macgyver'd cookies, only to offer a bit of penance for the dead young boy whom she frightened, "Not Tomorrow Yet" plays up the fact that Carol is having trouble dealing with the number of names she writes in the journal of people she's killed.

I wish I could unpack her sweet, earnest, human scene with Tobin as well as it warrants, but for now all I can do is say that Carol has been a paragon of unexpected strength for a long time now. Tobin recognizes that, he sees through the facade of the diffident homemaker, and respects what Carol is capable of. He calls her a mom not as something meant to minimize her, but as an honorific, as a term that means she's the kind of person who protects people, who does the scary stuff so that the people who can't handle it don't have to.

The implication is that she stands parallel to the soon-to-be father Glenn, who stabs one of the Saviors so that Heath won't have to. What Carol has done is a burden; this episode makes that clear. But at the same time, it is a mitzvah, to protect people, to take on the challenging, unpleasant, perhaps even unholy deeds that need doing so that others need not face them.

There's subtext to the scene that's hung in the background of the series for several years now. Carol couldn't do those things; she wasn't strong enough; she didn't know how to survive in this new world, and feels like she couldn't protect Sofia from it. She felt it was a mistake she had to correct for, to become capable, to teach the children of the prison how to defend themselves, to kill without hesitation to defend the people incapable of making that choice.

But it wears her down, weighs on her, the sense of the blood on her hands. She's still trying to protect people, allowing herself a moment of quiet comfort with Tobin, or staying back to look after Maggie, a mother-to-be thrust into a dangerous situation. Carol has become a killer, the kind that aligns with Rick's speech about doing what's necessary to survive. But she's been deeper into that mindset than the rest of them, and it's dragging her down, making it harder for her to go on and make peace with the acts a harsh world requires. In an episode that explores the murky waters of when a kill is right, when it's wrong, and when regardless of that inquiry, when it hurts the soul of human being to commit even necessary, lethal acts, Carol is ahead of the curve, and finds that those choices, and the certainty and necessity that seemed to motivate them, leave her wondering how she can live in the face of all the people who have died.

6.5/10. In the distant, far of year of 2008, an ambitious (and ultimately disappointing) game entitled Spore was released. Nicknamed "SimEverything," the game was meant to capture the progress of civilization from single-celled organisms to space-faring intergalactic communities. Part of the idea was to stage the game using that progression, with parts that let your character evolve individually, and eventually form collectives that trade and war with similar neighboring groups on the way to a more united front.

I like the idea of The Walking Dead taking the same path. For several seasons, we've seen the core group of TWD expand and seek stability. In the beginning, it was all about Rick surviving on his own and finding his family. Eventually, on Hershel's farm and afterward, it became about the group, and finding safety and survival in bigger numbers. This continued with more permanence at the prison, which continued the theme of the group finding temporary safety and trying to protect it from enemies both dead and alive.

Then, with the advent of Alexandria, the show began to pivot a bit. It started to tell a story about building civilization back up again, about creating something sustainable for the foreseeable future, not just until the prison fence collapses. Deanna had her ups and downs as a character, but she was the anchor that held this idea in place, and despite the story of whether or not Rick's battle-scarred compatriots could settle in with the very green and sheltered Alexandrians, the conclusion was the two groups becoming one, and building for the future.

Now, with the idea that Alexandria is a more permanent home, a foothold back to civilization, the reveal that there are other, neighboring groups who are also self-sufficient, who trade and war and have, for lack of a better term, international relations with one another, is an interesting development in the expanding scope of the show and the way it's exploring the way the society is rebuilt after the zombie apocalypse. I don't expect the show to continue this trajectory forever necessarily, and its facility with political ideas has been broad and shallow at best, but it's a worthwhile direction to move after the end of the first major Alexandria chapter of the show in "No Way Out."

The future has been very much on the show's mind since the end of that episode, and the theme continues here, especially with Abraham's story, which was the highlight of "Knots Untie." I've gone back and forth on Abraham as a character. There's a distinctiveness about him, obviously in his look, but also in his demeanor that makes him stand out in a series where it feels like a good percentage of the cast is, by fiat, intended to be little more than bland zombie food. And I'll admit that as tired as I grew of his doublespeak in "Always Accountable," there was something irresistibly enjoyable about his turns of phrase here, whether it be his Bisquick/pancakes metaphor, or his galoshes comment, or simply his standard poetic drawl. Having been raised on a steady diet of Whedon and Tarantino, it suckered me in.

But more than that, what I liked about Abraham's story is that it conveyed his conflict and his decision without either making them too explicit or taking refuge in inscrutability. It's clear that for him, Rosita represents the vagabond, just keep moving and fighting ethos that gave him direction in a directionless world after the reaction and deaths of his family in Season 5's "Self Help." And Sasha represents the idea of putting down roots and trusting that things will be steady for a little while. It's clear that Abraham is nervous about the latter idea, that he's hesitant to make himself vulnerable like that once more, in his colorful conversation with Glen about he and Maggie's child. To have a child is to predict some measure of safety and stability in the near future, and that's clearly an idea that he has trouble with.

But then, still recovering from his PTSD, Abraham nearly strangles one of the men from the neighboring camp, and in a moment of recovery later, the man talks about seeing his wife and children, the people in his life that really matter to him. Somewhat conveniently, Abraham himself is nearly strangled later in the episode, and in artful moment, he hears Sasha's voice in that moment of heightened focus, eventually laughs, and leaves Rosita's necklace behind. His decision is made, and as seen in his little crooked smile at Maggie's sonogram, he's willing to look to the future with a measure of hope again.

What kind of future will that be? That seems to be the question at the heart of "Knots Untie". Negan and the Saviors' outpost seems to run on violence, threats, and intimidation. Gregory and Jesus's camp appears far more docile, but it's run by an obvious creep and seems ill-equipped to defend itself. Alexandria appears to be the pragmatic middle ground, with values of community and kindness du jour, and yet as much as the audience is supposed to recoil at the revelation that Negan is essentially running a protection racket against Gregory's group, our heroes are just as willing to step in and receive the same benefits in exchange for taking out that threat.

It's a move that posits Alexandria's value to the wider world being as fighters and strategizers. Rick points out that their value is themselves, their ability to surivive and the fact that they've made it this long while wandering through the desert, so to speak. In her scenes with the uncomfortably slimy, entitled, self-important Gregory, Maggie uses that as her leverage, and puts up their crew as not only the lesser of two evils, but the best chance Gregory has to keep his people together over the longterm.

The execution of all of this is far from perfect. The dialogue is clunky throughout, the ending conflict feels like a contrived and convenient to throw in some more action and move the plot forward in a less-than-organic fashion, and having a guy named Jesus who's constantly trying to keep the peace and find a better way (replete with Rick's crew telling survivors "we're with Jesus") is on the nose in a way that feels like a bit much even for the fairly blunt stylings of this show. To the same end, Maggie's pronouncements that there will be a cost to going to war makes me think that she and her child are likely casualties meant to show some error or guilt for the rest of the group, and her scenes with Gregory didn't necessarily communicate the power or savvy from her that seemed to be intended.

But again, I like the idea that the show is exploring a wider world beyond the walls of wherever Rick & Co. have holed up for a while this time. I like the idea of different groups out there, with different ideas of how to run their collectives and different strengths and weaknesses being measured against one another and forced to do business. The show's attempted this sort of thing before with The Governor, but that was little more than a rote, separate build to an obvious conflict rather than equal civilizations figuring out how to interact with one another. The Walking Dead could go down that same path again in the lead up to the fight with Negan, but as the series seems to be looking to the future, I hope it spends as much time examining where Rick, and his group, and Alexandria fit into the broader landscape of The New World.

LOL I didn't expect to see Echo at all! So cool :)
"Gee, I wonder who I learned that from?" xD And Vi even hugged him. Such a sweet reunion <3

And that place he built looked so amazing/beautiful! And that huge drawing full of the people they lost was stunning.

And I became concerned about Viktor again... :o Not his health but about him becoming a bad person. But I was so wrong: He is a really good person! He has heart, passion, and cares about people. And I love how he still just casually goes to the undercity. He didn't forget and he isn't just glad that he could escape it and never has to return.

At least Jayce has regrets about betraying his mentor. Mel's "Try not to lose your nuts." was fun :D

I'm a bit concerned about Heimerdinger. I wonder what his undercover mission is.

Silco's power move was great. He is one of a kind!

Caitlin and Vi are so sweet together <3
And those firelights looked awesome. Until it was revealed that they're bombs from Jinx. She's crazy but smart. At least she did get that it's just a goodbye hug. Speaking of that: The hug between Vi and Caitlin was so sweet, again <3

And last but not least: Echo was quite the hero at the end! His hoverboard is so cool and his time abilities just made it epic. And how he saw Powder and still cares about her <3

Such an emotional episode. I never thought I'd rate such an episode 10/10 but I feel like this one does deserve it.

Man I am really enjoying the lore and characters of Arcane. I like this new guy Jayce, someone who grew up poor and was trekking through a snowy blizzard with her near-dead mother, untill a cloaked mage showed up and teleoported the two to a sunny, grassy land across the globe, saving the two, and the mange gave Jayce the gem he used to do that magic. After that experience, Jayce had seemed to dedicate his life to researching how to harness magic with technology w/ a rich family sponsering his work, as Jayce research about creating an artifical form of magic, because he's seen the potential of magic to help others and Jayce believes that, if succesful, he could change the world for the better. Though, and seemingly for good reason, people think its too risky to be tampering with magic in Poltir, especially the 300yr old profresser whose seen what could happen when the power of magic falls into the wrong hands. And sadly for Jayyce, he was punished at a court hearing, after being put on trial for experimenting with illegal and dangerous technology to try and create artifical magic, with him beign expelled from his academy and sent back home, w/ even his own mother, who has firsthand experience of how magic can help others, trying to get Jayce to stop. Man luckily Viktor came in time before Jayce tried to kill himself after he has been completelty stripped of the oppurtunity to continue his research, and looks like Viktor, some academic at the university who also judged Jayce, is intrigued in Jayce's research and luckily saved Jayce's book and gem thing. Looks like Viktor and Jayce are going to be working together now to complete the research. Also, not to tangent of anything, but it really feels like Jayce is going to become a villan, the whole air Jayce gives off just makes me worried about him and what he'll do, to accomplish his research or after he succeeds in his research. Also, man the enforcers really are pillaging through the underground slums in search of the 4 kids who blew up the builidng in Poltir, Vancer wasnt lying about the kids needing to stay low. Also, poor Powder, hhaving to deal with everyone in the crew, besides Vi, thinking she's a failure, and Powder herselrf also internalizing these feelings because she cant be a fighter like her older sister. Also man, im glad we got moore of an explanantion about what happened iin the openeing scene of episode 1, it seems like Vancer lead his accross the brdige connecting the underground slums to Poltir to fight against the Enforcers, who were lviing it rich up in Poltir while the people of the underground are poor, starving, and sick, and it seems liek that war ended with a brutal massacre of the underground people, and even lead to Vi and Powder's parents being killed. The war clearly taught Vancer that war is never a good solution, it just leads to death and destruction, and now, even as the Enforcers are brutally searching for the 4 kids, Vancer knows fighting back will just lead to all the underground people being killed, and as such he has no real solution to this issue (other then poteintlly callign that enforcer ally and sending in one of the underground ppl to accept punishemnet for the building assault). And even worse, all of the underground people are wanting to fight back and start a war with the Enforcers (especially Vi), Vancer is completely stuck and needs to do something otherwise theyll all be fucked one way or another. Although, after pressuring Echo to spill about Vancer's ally within the Enforcers, and the ultimatum she gave Vancer, Vi chose to steal Vancer's contact device and turn herself in to save everyone in the slums from the constant brutality the Enforcers are treating them with to film the underground criminals, and to prvent another war as the undergroudn people get more fed up woith being complacent. Man im really enjoying Vi's character, after her life was destroyed thanks to the Enforcers, with her being parentless and stuck in the slums, Vi started to view herself as lesser than the people of Portir, and Vi just wants to do all she can to make sure Powder doesnt go through thtat and instead has a bright future. Vi knows its unfair how the Enforcers treat them, and how society's structured so that only the people of Portir live lavishly while the ppl of the underground starve and live in poverty, and Vi wants to change this with fighting back against them, starting a war. But luckily, thanks to Vancer opening up about how in war there are no winners, and saying how the death of her parents is Vancers fault for going into war, Vi seems less war hungry. Also damn, Silco is one terryfying man, using the beast-fluid on a human to see the poteiintall of the fluid. Also, more on the counicl hearing, that black woman seemed interesting, I can't wait to see more of her.

[7.0/10] So I’m torn on this episode. On the one hand, the craft on display is high quality. The show looks good, with interesting choices in lighting and composition, and some extraordinary production design. (Though the editing is notably bad in places, which is odd for something that's otherwise this polished.) There’s clearly talented actors on board, an interesting period setting, and some decent ideas under the hood.

But at the jumping off point here, everything about this opening hour feels so mechanical. All of these characters are pretty standard archetypes. The script is clunky as hell, with various bog standard character introduction scenes where the various players all but announce who they are, how they feel about one another, what their general deal is.

To some extent, that's true of most pilots. You have to establish the basics of the show’s premise and players and animating conflict, which means there’s a lot of heavy narrative machinery that gets wheeled into place at the expense of more natural interactions between characters. But for all the flavor that goes into the aesthetics and glossy production values of Peaky Blinders, the writing and storytelling feels very staid and vanilla in the early going.

It also feels pretty derivative. Aping the style of early 2000s HBO groundbreaking dramas is not the worst idea in the world. But if you’ve seen the likes of Deadwood or The Wire or other prestige series of the era, Peaky Blinders’ general vibe will be familiar, only clumsier.

That's not to say that the construction here isn’t sound. While a bit artless, the show does set up all the major characters, from the crafty young brother of the titular crime family, Tommy; to the hard-nosed inspector Campbell; to the spitfire matriarch of the Peaky Blinders, Polly; to the turgid older brother Arthur; to the agitating communist Freddie; to his “Juliet” in the crime family, Ada; to the tepid turncoat barmaid/love interest, Grace. Overly signposted or not, you won’t walk away without getting a sense for who the pieces on the board are.

Likewise, there’s a dutiful sense of setting up the major conflicts here. Tommy has inadvertently stolen a cache of weapons that has the big guys on his tail. His aunt knows but his brother doesn’t, and by the end, he’ll face the heat rather than pass up the opportunity. Meanwhile, Inspector Campbell is bearing down on the Peaky Blinders, the communists, and the “fenians” in the town to figure out who’s up to what. And along the way, there’s various romantic entanglements that are already in force seem poised to be. Who and how to run the crime family, and who and how to run the coppers, is already primed for consternation and narrative hurdles set to explode when narratively necessary. The show may be ham-handed about it, but it does set up conflicts both personal and “professional” to fuel the series.

I’ll give the series premiere this -- it has something on its mind. The show seems chiefly concerned with what it means to be a soldier come home from war, and the different ways veterans of World War I cope with what life hands them once their service has ended. Some become bookies, some become political activists, others just struggle with PTSD. Some do all three! The reflection on where their choices have led them, what sympathies and cynicism they harbort, and how the shadow of what happened during the Great War lingers for all of them is the most interesting thing here, even if it’s not subtle. Many of the show’s figures may be criminal, but you get the sense that they’re taking back a measure of what they feel the state owes them after their mental and physical sacrifices.

The peak of that is Tommy, and I appreciate the idea that he is both someone clever, who can play the long game and get crafty in ways his confederates can't, but that he’s also, as his aunt puts it, a bit devilish and reckless, to where he might fly too close to the sun at times. That dynamic is hardly unprecedented, but you can see the appeal of it.

My hope is that the characters get more distinctive shading as the show goes on and the table-setting and throat-clearing is done. My biggest problem in the early going is that it’s hard to latch onto any of these characters. They’re by and large stock and generic, without a ton of charm to them. The exception is Polly, who has some real personality as a firebrand and an interesting angle as someone who came to the forefront while the men were off to war but has to hang back now. But again, maybe that gets fixed down the line as we play less of the introduction game, and more of the “just being a show game.”

Overall, this is a glossy, well-made, creditably-constructed first hour of the show, that nonetheless left me cold in how mechanical and conspicuous so much of its setup and introductions felt. Hopefully with the game board set up, the show will be more compelling when all it has to do is move the pieces around the board.

Making of a murderer. There are two kinds of populous who watch this show. First, who watch it for the spectacle and politics. Those who are in sync with the latest fan theories. And then there's the other half (maybe even less) who are interested in the characters' development and their arcs. They are the ones who indulge in proper analysis before judging an episode. So no wonder this episode has generated such a negative response. It could have served the former masses like they have for the past few seasons but I'm bloody well glad that they didn't. They threw all fan theories out of the gate and did something that no one expected. They decided to go back to the roots and do something that the OG fans fell in love with. There is no bigger joy than seeing an 8-season arc be paid off so well.

Rags to riches to rags again. This season has been about her losses and failures. Losing her children, best friend and someone who loved her unconditionally were the wheels that drove her to madness. But the final push was her love betraying her. Something that she could never contemplate. Annihilation was the only way out that she could see. This one was a TV version of Carrie.

True Love. Never saw Cersei as a black and white narcissist. So, I totally was fine with her end. Facing death with the only true love of her life while caring about her unborn child. As for Jamie, I don't think he ever loved anyone other than Cersei. He could've comfortably chosen to stay in the north.

I Hope I'm wrong. Varys was in two minds about the queen. But in the end he chose his instinct without considering that it might lead to his demise. He chose the fate of the realm over himself.

Sandor, Thank You. Great moment with The Hound and Arya. Both acknowledging their familial instincts for each other was definitely one of the highlights and looks like it came full circle.

Penultimatum. Calling this the best episode of the season will in no way be fair to other episodes as this one would not be standing if not for the 72 hour experience that was pointing to this. Don't even want to think about the finale right now. Glad that it's a week away since it will take me that much time to digest this one. Hail HBO for not following the Netflix formula

WTF? Are you serious? Hold the freaking door? So you are saying that the entire purpose of Hodor's life was to hold the goddamn door? This kind of cheapens the character's death AND his entire life. I get that self-sacrificing can be moving if done right. But self-sacrifice shouldn't be the entire purpose of character's existence. Since he was a kid Hodor knew he'll have to hold a door at some point in his life and it is his destiny. I don't know, it just seems wrong to me.
Also. Freaking fireballs. Goddammit. The show always had SOME magic in it and it was a vital part of this world. But we didn't really see a lot of it, and if we did see it, it was always subtle. That made the show more real and interesting. But now it's just full-blown fantasy bs in some scenes. The magic is just out the wazoo with those combat-like spells. It just seems cartoonish and cheap to me. The tree-women are throwing grenades at the white walkers who are casting ground spikes spells.
The entire season seems weaker than the previous ones so far. It's still good, but not mind-blowingly good. Bran's storyline is especially weak with those flashbacks.

[7.7/10] I’m impressed with TLoK. I’ll admit, I wondered where the show was going to go now that it seems like the major threat has been defeated and Korra has learned, if not mastered, all four elements. Making the next element, so to speak, be “spirit” is a nice opportunity to explore a different but no less important side of The Avatar that we only got bits and pieces of in AtLA.

I also like how “Rebel Spirit” dramatizes that idea. The notion of spirits attacking the Southern Water tribe because they’re out of sync with the spiritual work creates a unique problem that, as the end of the episode shows, Korra can’t solve just by blasting away at it. It also creates a unique character situation for her, where she feels reigned by both her father and Tenzin, the former who kept her in the South under the guise that it was Aang’s wish, and the latter who’s always had a conservative approach.

Enter Uncle Unalaq, who seems like a bit of a tsk-tsk-ing religious type, casting judgment on how his brother turned the Spirit Festival into a bout of fried foods and spectacle rather than a period of spiritual renewal. But he’s also the only one who can calm the spirits attacking the village, and he offers not only to train Korra, but to, in his own way, show her the world, something very appealing when she feels all cooped up and overdirected. It does what this franchise does best -- connect plot and mythos with something personal, which I appreciate.

Again, I’m not crazy about Mako’s part in all this. There’s a nice hook where Korra keeps asking him for his thoughts and he doesn’t know what to say or how to weigh in, but to be frank he kind of feels superfluous here, especially if, like me, you’re not really invested in his and Korra’s relationship.

Still, there’s entertaining stuff with the unexpected but effective pair of Bolin and Asami, who are trying to drum up business for Future Industries after Hiroshi’s exploits hurt the company’s image. Their interactions with the eccentric magnate who’s half Howard Hughes and half Prince were amusing, and like I said, the two of them make a certain amount of sense in a way I didn’t expect. (Asami tussling Bolin’s hair was a nice touch on that front.)

The stuff on the margins was pretty fun too. I love the relationship between Tenzin and his siblings. Seeing how Bumi has the jocular spirit of his namesake is great, and as a big House fan, having Lisa Edelstein as Kya join in on ribbing her brother is a treat too. Plus, Aubrey Plaza as a disaffected weirdo teen girl? Somehow, I think she’ll be up to the challenge. On top of that, the spirit tentacle creature at the beginning and demon creature at the end were both well-animated and cool-looking.

Overall, it’s a nice reset for the show that checks in with everyone and sends us in an interesting direction, even if there’s more table setting than direction in the premiere.

[8.7/10] I don’t think “epic” begins to describe this one. As per usual, I was a little miffed that we were spending time on the teen drama of Mako and Asami’s relationship troubles over Korra, but the episode even created a nice mirror between Tenzin, Pema, and Lynn that made something out of the usual adolescent romantic angst.

But then the bombs start dropping. Holy crap. That’s not a very professional way of putting it, but it was my genuine reaction. TLoK has spent nine episodes establishing Republic City as a thriving ecosystem -- one that has threats and challenges no doubt, but as a place where the good guys are in control and defending themselves. Suddenly, the tables turn. The Equalist are descending from the sky, explosions dotting the city map, and it’s clear that our heroes are facing more than they bargained for. This is terrorism, war, and siege laid right at their doorstep. There is something terrifying about that, and the images of chaos on the streets provokes a visceral response.

Then, we just get tremendous action scene after tremendous action scene. Watching Tenzin fend off an attack from some disguised Equalists is a thrill. Having our favorite benders (and Asami) team up to take on the mechas once more was just amazing scene after amazing scene. The show really knows how to create these exciting set pieces and have the good guys use their powers in creative ways to combat threats.

Then, just when you think the show has spent its action quota, the Equalists attack Air Island and Lynn is left to fight them off by herself. It ups the threat level, because it’s just one bender against a horde of Equalists, and Tenzin’s family is at stake (not to mention that they are confirmed to be the last airbenders, which, hey, at least you’ve got a plural there now). While the youngest one’s fart attack made me roll my eyes, it’s still cool to see the airbender kids in action, defending their home and their families, and the animation was superb.

But the attack is enough to make our heroes retreat, and even then, it seems like the show will finally have exhausted its ability to excite. Instead, we get a nice wild animal swipe from Naga as New Team Avatar exeunts, and an affecting moment of sacrifice from Lynn Beifong. She follows in her mother’s footsteps, leaping across blimps and tearing them down in the process. Her willingness to put herself at great risk to save the family of a man whom she still has much enmity for speaks to her extraordinary character, and it gives emotional heft to what could otherwise be a cool but weightless moment of action.

Last, but not least, it’s also exciting to see (and more importantly hear) the new General Iroh with the United Forces ready to take back control. Sadly, a spin through Donnie Brasco’s IMDb page during my watch of AtLA spoiled this one for me, but it’s still a nice way to incorporate some more lore and descendents from Avatar into the successor series. I’ll admit, I have my concerns about putting this many Aang Gang offspring in the show at once (I assume it’s only a matter of time before we meet some child of Sokka and Suki) and reusing Donnie Brasco as a voice actor is understandable though a little jarring, but for the time being, it’s a cool note to go out on. Bring on more Korra!

Probably the funniest episode of the show just simply due to how it uses it's own material as a focal point for comedy. It's a meta episode that works as both a recap and a light reprieve before the big finish, particularly since the jokes are genuinely clever here. The references to theater, the fandom jokes, poking fun at their own material constantly - it's a real hoot and riot to see this, and seeing the cast hang out together is especially fun now that all six of them are here in full force.

But the real strength of it is how it actually still manages to advance the story. Aang and Katara have a real heart to heart about the status of their relationship, which has been a big question mark since "The Day of Black Sun" and the answer isn't so clear cut. It's very realistic in that regard and the growth that these two characters have feel earned. And then it happens - the play ends with a grim reminder of both Zuko and Aang's biggest fears of losing to Ozai and Azula, and the truth of the episode becomes clear. Aang's predicament is laid bare and now the real question is "Does Aang have what it takes to kill the Fire Lord?".

[8.6/10] When I think about the Negan arc on The Walking Dead, I think about the central theme -- is it worth it to hurt and kill and wage war if it means we can build a lasting peace? It is it right to stoop to The Saviors’ level if it means we can build a community in their shadow? Is it right to trust no one so that one day we can trust everyone?

Like most things on The Walking Dead, those ideas got tiresome after they were beaten into the ground like so much zombie guts. But it’s a solid animating principle -- that you may have to sully yourself enough to make the future you envision a real possibility, but preserve your soul enough so that this future is one worth living in.

Six years later, our heroes have the paradise that Rick and Maggie and Sasha and Abraham and Glen and all the other friends no longer around wanted to help build. Sure, things aren’t perfect. The Kingdom is low on resources. Alexandria has closed itself off. The Hilltop has lost two of its leaders. But while we don’t know exactly what happened in the six year time jump, we get the impression that the anti-Negan contingent’s dreams were realized, that there was relative peace and prosperity given the circumstances, even if more than a few souls were bruised and battered in the process.

So now, The Walking Dead gives us the reverse of the theme that drove the Negan arc. It’s giving us a question of whether things will revert to the old way. Will The Kingdom have to fight and kill in order to keep from being overrun by marauders? Is this a place where a baby can survive and be transported to different communities, or is the march of the dead something that just can’t be controlled? Can a stranger and survivor be protected and welcome into the group, or is it that, once again, helping someone out is just another liability?

“Chokepoint” gives heartening answers to each of these questions, something that feels a rarity on a show that once wallowed the “living is hell” quality of the zombie apocalypse setting. Time and again, it sets up a scenario in which it feels like we’re doomed to a return to the old way of doing things, only for unexpected kindness, flexibility, and acceptance from unexpected sources wins the day.

Nothing drives this home more than the confrontation between the fighters of The Kingdom and a new group called The Highwaymen. The latter want to hold our heroes hostage, and charge “tolls” for Ezekiel, Carol, and company to use the roads that surround their camp. The tense confrontation between the two groups is well-staged. There’s dark lighting that makes the threat of these unknown figures more uncertain. There’s creepy mannequins that obscure what the numbers are. And there’s an appropriate number of twists and turns in the scene that leave the viewer unsure who has the upper hand.

At first, it feels like a redo of any number of confrontations between Rick & Co. and The Saviors. “We want to negotiate.” “No, just pay us what we want.” [Violence ensues.] Instead, Carol is the voice of reason, not only palpably puncturing the tension with the promise of a movie, but doing so with this chipper cheerfulness that seems genuine but unfamiliar other than as a ruse for her. It’s a fantastic scene, one that plays with audience’s expectations, builds them to the expected crescendo, and then gives you one big but understated moment to drive home how much things have changed from six years ago.

It spills over into the set piece with Tara’s convoy from The Hilltop, which includes the older couple looking after the baby Connie rescued two episodes ago. On the surface, there’s not much to it. It’s yet another zombie attack, and yet another vulnerable party at risk, and yet another “this has made us realize what’s important” epiphany.

And yet, this one feels a little different. Maybe it’s just the direction and staging, which sells the peril of the woman seemingly trapped in the wagon, having to keep the child in a chest, while surrounding by grasping hands. Maybe it’s her risking her own life to save her husband’s, rescuing him in a fashion that’s a little contrived but also endearing. Maybe it’s the Big Damn Heroes moment for The Highwaymen, who go from villains to allies in the span of about ten minutes in as rousing a walker reprieve as this show’s managed to pull off in recent memory.

But that’s not the only trick that “Chokepoint” has up its sleeve. It also picks up right where the last episode left off with Daryl, Connie, Henry, and Lydia running from The Whisperers and holing up to lie in wait for their pursuers. The foursome works surprisingly well, especially considering that three quarters of them are new performers to the series. Connie and Daryl in particular have a nice dynamic, with each having a certain steely resolve and determination. And the combination of Daryl’s terseness and Connie’s necessary pithiness really makes them work as a pairing.

And, heaven help me, I actually kind of like Henry and Lydia here. Sure, Henry is being an idiot who latches on to the first girl who shows him any really attention or affection (even it was just to win his trust). And sure, Lydia is buying into it because she’s so used to love being used as cudgel and a bargaining chip rather than freely given. But by god, that’s how kids are, and the two of them falling in love quickly and being willing to fight and die and turn away from their communities for one another may be sudden and extreme, but kids are sudden and extreme, so I buy it.

It all comes together with the ultimate decision that the four of them will fight together and eventually leave together, but not before one of the best fight sequences in the show. There is such tension and superb framing and staging in this part of the episode. The combat has direction and rises and falls -- little stories being told. It could be one character attacking then suddenly being on defense, or someone sneaking up only to be caught in the act, or one character being unable to sit on the sidelines any longer and helping to save the day. Beyond the sheer visual abilities of the show here, it also creates moments that connect and build on one another, which makes this more than the average skirmish.

That scrapping culminates in the outstanding fight between Daryl and Beta. I’ll admit to being annoyed that Beta essentially becomes a slasher movie villain, surviving an impossible defeat because the next chapter of the story needs him too. Still, he and Daryl’s close quarters fight is the highlight of an episode full of highlights.

The director “puts them in a phonebooth”, to use a football term, keeping the pair in close proximity for most of the fight. It creates an immediacy to the fight that’s often missing elsewhere. At the same time, the show lets Beta get the upper hand through a lot of the combat. It’s easy to know that Daryl probably isn’t going down here given the whole plot armor thing. But it’s believable that this guy could hurt Daryl, could take him off the game board for a while, that he’s a genuine threat and not just an obstacle. That makes it meaningful when Daryl outsmarts him rather than outmuscles him, using a setup and payoff the show established nicely earlier. This is no ordinary triumph; it’s an elegantly choreographed pugilistic ballet through wooden scaffolds and paper sheets.

But beyond the fireworks of this episode’s action scene, what’s striking is that in the end, Daryl changes his mind about taking Lydia with them. He listens to Connie’s demand that Lydia has no friends; he sees how Henry feels about her despite Daryl’s efforts to tamp it down, and he sees Lydia willing to put her safety on the line to protect Henry.

This is not the sort of choice a character would make in the midst of the Negan arc, or at least not one they would make without episodes and episodes of hemming and hawing about it. It’s the choice to trust someone who could put a target on your back. It’s the choice to look after and protect new life because you believe there’s a world out there where it can flourish. It’s the choice to offer fellowship and community rather than blood and bullets because it gives everyone the chance to benefit.

The Walking Dead is never going to be a show without conflict. Inevitably, there will be threats and challenges and obstacles. But for once, we’re seeing a show where those obstacles are solved with genuine reasons to hope, to see the arc of the universe bending towards justice and hope. And it’s hard not be glad to see the hardscrabble world this series has been delivering for nine seasons starting to clean up, just a little.

[5.8/10] The acting matters so much on The Walking Dead. The writing on the show has been questionable almost from day one. The plotting and pacing has been variable at best almost as long. And while the naturalistic aesthetic and still incredible effects work are an achievement for genre television, they’re old hat by season 9. You can only see a ruddy-faced survivor moping in the Georgia wilderness or decaying, shambling corpse hacked to bits so many times before it starts to lose impact.

So that means the failure or success of an episode often depends on the performers. The show’s best actors can elevate the series’s ponderous dialogue, make it sound impactful, and deliver the emotion of the moment. Without that ability, you’re left with the writing as is, which does no one any favors and, frankly, exposes the weaker elements of The Walking Dead in a way that can be hard to watch sometimes.

This is all to say that the scenes with The Whisperers in this episode all vacillate somewhere between “boring” and “atrocious.” Whatever Samantha Morton’s other talents, in her turn as Alpha she has, thus far, proven thoroughly incapable of taking the awful lines she’s forced to spit out and spin them into gold. The terrible attempt at a southern accent doesn't help things. The fact that everyone has to try to emote in a strained stage whisper doesn't help things. And the fact that she has to talk almost exclusively in slow-spun threats and villain one-liners doesn't help things.

When Lydia returns to “The Pack” and Henry follows her, the idea is to (a.) give us a sense of where and how The Whisperers operate and (b.) progress the mother/daughter tension story that bleeds over into other parts of the episode. The former mode is mildly interesting just to get the sense of the society that Alpha has forged. The one big benefit of the Negan arc was introducing the variety of communities in The Walking Dead universe and the idea that there’s a lot of different ways to organize communities. There’s something almost Trek-ian about that, and the notion of people who live quietly and dress like the dead to avoid detection has some juice at the conceptual level.

But in execution it’s just so unavoidably cheesy and overdone. The whole power struggle sequence is supposed to be another coming out party for Alpha, showing her reasserting herself after breaking her own rules to rescue Lydia. Instead, we get what’s supposed to be a showcase for Morton that just exposes the weaknesses of the performer and the character as presently constructed. Negan’s similar speeches and demonstrations walked (and often crossed) the line between outsized drama and utter cheese, but on more than one occasion, Jeffrey Dean Morgan managed to save the show. Samantha Morton has, so far at least, shown only that she’s completely incapable of doing the same.

Thank heaven that Danai Gurira (Michonne) is though. The smartest thing this season’s soft reboot has done is put the show on her back. Michonne gets a storyline here that could be pretty corny. Her whole deal has been that the formerly hopeful and collaborative Michonne has become closed off in the wake of so many losses of people she cares about. She’s closed off from taking the advice of her council seriously; she’s closed off from Negan’s confession and offer to help, and she’s even closed off from listening to her own daughter.

That is pretty stock material in and of itself, and the dialogue doesn't necessarily do these scenes any favors either. There’s the usual back and forth about freedom vs. security, and a “he listens to me, unlike some people” line from Judith that feels like it could have been cribbed from a 1990s family comedy. And yet, Danai Gurira makes it work.

She sells Michonne’s self-assurance and “I know best” certainty at the council meeting. She sells Michonne’s anger at Negan’s transformation and growth story. She sells Michonne’s resistance but eventual bending in the face of her daughter’s pleas and challenges. And she sells Michonne’s reluctant change of heart, to allow Alexandria to send representatives to the Kingdom’s trade fair, to listen to the people even when she thinks they have a bad idea, and to open herself up to others rather than turtling in the same of self-preservation forever. Gurira not only delivers her lines with conviction and believability, but delivers those non-verbal moment that makes Michonne’s emotional trajectory through the episode palpable.

The Rosita/Gabriel/Eugene/Siddiq story is somewhere in between. It’s the clear C-story in this one (despite getting a decent amount of real estate in the episode), and thankfully there’s not a lot of extended dialogue scenes. The show smartly uses reaction shots and visual sequences to carry a lot of the weight here, save for Eugene’s unnecessary and on-the-nose monologue.

But I’ll give the show some credit here. When we had the Rosita pregnancy revelation a few episodes back, I assumed it would be this drawn out soap opera love triangle full of secrets and grand reveals. Instead, everyone seems to have basically acted like an adult, explaining the situation and emotions to one another and offering one another choices and talking things out like grown-ups. I still don’t really know why I should care about any of these barely-sketched character relationships that the show wants to mine for drama, but The Walking Dead managed to avoid a massive pitfall that it seemed headed toward, so that’s something to celebrate.

What can’t be celebrated is the extended interludes we get with The Whisperers here. The other half of that plot in the episode is centered on Alpha’s relationship with Lydia and her concerns that it’s been compromised by the connection with Henry. While this bit does give us a few solid scenes of Daryl and Connie tracking, it mostly provides the show excuses to double down on the over-the-top abuser stuff between Alpha and her daughter. If you want to explore something as serious as parental abuse, then trying to make it grounded and realistic, rather than part of a Big Bad’s mustache-twirling monologues, would go a long way.

Instead, we’re subjected to tons of stilted Alpha lines about lying and being changed and who’s in charge that are meant to be menacing but come off comical. If this is the villain we’re locked into for the balance of a Saviors-length arc, then it’s going to be a bumpy ride. The Walking Dead is not a show that can mask subpar acting with great writing or brilliant plots. It’s a series that lays each of its performers on the line and asks them to carry the show, and when they can’t, the results get dull, or as in “Guardians”, outright awful.

[5.4/10] How many times do we have to have the same “Do you go hard in a world that demands toughness, or do you show mercy and kindness so the world can be better?” debate on The Walking Dead. It’s not a bad debate! What morality means in a society where there’s no overarching authority to keep the peace and enforce order is one of the core, animating ideas in post-apocalyptic fiction. But my god, we’ve been having this same debate since Rick vs. Shane in the show’s first season. How many times can you run over this same old ground before you’re beating (or skinning) a dead horse?

“Omega” tries to add a wrinkle to that well-worn concept by draping it in the notion of parental abuse. The central theme of the episode is that everyone, from Lydia, to Daryl, to the new crew that joined our heroes after the time jump, has experienced some kind of loss or suffering that informs what they’re trying to do now. There’s even references to Carol’s past to try to bolster that theme as a deeply rooted one in the show.

But in attempt to scaffold that idea, the episode only gives us Rashomon-style flashbacks to a cheeseball, unconvincing Lifetime movie about Lydia dealing with her loving father and hard-hearted mother in the early days of the zombie outbreak. These scenes are just the pits, with hokey depictions of familial strife and abuse that undercut the message The Walking Dead is trying to send here. Maybe you can try to chalk the cheesiness up to Lydia fibbing to gain sympathy, or parroting her mother’s exaggerated lies, but at the end of the day, these scenes feel like they’re pulled from a daytime soap opera that just so happens to feature the occasional zombie attack.

The episode is also unbelievably blunt with its parental abuse and recovery theme. Lydia has multiple monologues about it. Daryl gives several speeches about it. And Henry spits out cornball line after cornball line as well. This show often has a tin ear for dialogue, but it was especially egregious here, when the episode is trying to make some grand statement about shaking off past abuses and moving forward, and instead has all the weight and impact of an after school special.

That’s before you get to the nigh-pointless story of the new crew sneaking out in search of Luke and then returning to The Hilltop when the mission proves too difficult. I guess the import of these scenes is supposed to be that this group is used to only being able to depend on themselves, and after past losses, is willing to flout Hilltop rules in order to save their friend. And when their leader expects censure from Tara after being discovered, she instead gets understanding, and a simple request to come talk to her instead rather than defying her wishes.

It connects to the overarching idea of “Omega” -- that outsiders are skeptical, but that The Hilltop, and the broader community this camp is a part of, really is something special. The new crew expects to be kicked out for their transgression, and Lydia expects this place to fall and be overrun because she’s been taught that this new world gives you no quarter, but both soon discover that there’s a sense of altruism and decency and stability within those walls that they didn’t otherwise think was possible.

It’s a good theme, it’s just delivered in such a typically hamfisted way that you can’t invest in any of the characters or plots. Henry in particular is a complete dope here. It’s not necessarily shocking that a teenage boy would be enraptured by a young woman who’s intentionally trying to get on his good side to effectuate his escape, but he still seems impossibly naive here. Then again, “Omega” wants to cast that as a good thing, that Henry has grown up in a safe environment with supportive and loving parents, unlike Daryl or Lydia, which makes him a true believer in the idea that there’s good in people, even in people who are still getting over scars both literal and figurative.

But both Daryl and Lydia devolve into thudding speeches and hacky takes on abuse. At least there’s an interesting idea to Lydia’s character, namely the notion that the genuine altruism and possibility she sees at The Hilltop might help her break free from her mom’s programming. Still, Daryl’s done the “gruff with a heart of gold” routine for so long that Henry uncovering some kindness in him isn’t much of a revelation with any novelty or impact.

That’s before we get to Alpha herself, whom the show does no favors for in the would-be Big Bad’s introduction. Again, it really hurts the character that our first meeting with her devolves into cartoon villainy and mustache-twirling cravenness in the vignettes we’re shown. The Walking Dead seems to want to draw a comparison between her and Carol as opposite sides of the battered spouse coin, with heavy-handed dialogue to make sure the audience gets it. But we get a totally one-dimensional character who’s a rock-ribbed “survival by any means” brute, and one with an atrocious southern accent that takes you out of any dialogue to boot.

That’s the crux of the episode though. Alpha is the living representation of the idea that you can show no mercy, display no hint of softness, if you want to get along in this world. And our heroes are there to stand for the idea that you can be kind and forgiving and merciful and still build a lasting community. Between those two poles, “Omega” puts Lydia and the new crew in the balance, trying to decide who’s right.

But we have just done that so many times! Whether it’s Rick vs. Shane, or the Prison vs. Woodbury, or Alexandria vs. The Saviors, or the scores of smaller scale versions of the same concept, The Walking Dead has just beat this concept to death. Cheesy flashbacks won’t revitalize it. Clunky monologues about abuse won’t reinvigorate it. And poorly-done villains, albeit ones with a cool gimmick, won’t do it either. The Whisperers aren’t the only ones reusing something that’s already long dead and dormant on this series at the moment.

It’s safe to say that I'm obsessed with Arcane.

From countless reaction and analysis/breakdown videos to unhealthy fanart consumption, there aren't many shows in existence that elicit this kind of response from me.

One of my most anticipated shows of 2021 turns out to be absolutely fucking incredible in nearly every way. I imagine some people had concerns or pessimism because of the well-known curse of videogame adaptations, with them being shit or forgettably average most of the time. In my case, I chose to remain cautiously optimistic and it looks like I chose right.

The setting and intoxicating atmosphere are complemented by Arcane's art style, the story is great, the music is wonderful, and the animation is LITERALLY flawless. When people mention "every frame a painting" when describing cinematography, they will now be able to pull any frame from Arcane and hang it on a wall, It’s that beautiful.

There are very few shows I could confidently call a Masterpiece on this planet, especially since most of the things I see rarely score above a 6 or 7, but Arcane is easily a Top 5 tv show nearly but not quite edging out Avatar: The Last Airbender (which is a big deal because that's my #1) and solidifying itself as the best animated anything I've ever had the blessing of seeing.

It will be a herculean task to top anything done in this season and while I pity the staff knowing the pressure they must feel on accomplishing just that, I have every confidence that Riot Games and Fortiche Production will be able to do it and do it well, if not better.

• Medara backstory?
• That moment when Caitlyn's mum busts through the door, rifle in hand

Mel: "I don't need your guidance."
Mel's mother: "We'll see."

• Yo, Vi x Caitlyn? I'm just saying... :eyes:
• Lol, Heimerdinger just looking at those thugs before moving along
• Yo, Heimerdinger :D
• EKKO :O

Jayce: "So thank you for your advice, Mrs Medarda, but I have a city to run."

Mel: "Jayce, you don't know war."

Caitlyn: "What about us?"
Vi: "Oil and water. Wasn't meant to be."
Caitlyn: "You're just saying that."
Vi: "Do yourself a favour, Cupcake. Go back to that big, shiny house of yours and just... forget me, okay?"

• My ship ;-;
• Viktor is running!
• Viktor is turning himself into a machine :O
• OMG THAT WOMAN DESINTIGRATED

Jayce: "Yeah. I want to make Silco pay."
Vi: "I want in."
Jayce: "There is no in. You heard the Council."
Vi: "Fuck the Council."
Vi: "So... we got a deal, pretty boy?"

• Those thugs are terrifyingly fast
• Vi, let's go!
• Did I ever mention how sweet the action is?
• Jayce looks angry!
• He shot a kid! :O
• Caitlyn?? :O

[7.3/10] I watched this one with subtitles first before I read that the consensus is the dubbed version, so I rewatched it that way, and it was an interesting exercise! I definitely feel like I got more of the character and texture coming through with the dubbed version, and helped me to immerse myself in the world a little more. That said, there’s something about hearing the lines spoken in the native language of the author that has power too. I will probably stick with the dubbed version given the consensus, but it made for an interesting double introduction to Cowboy Bebop.

I mostly appreciate the style here. The loose jazz, the extreme character designs and alternatingly halting and fluid motion, the jarring yet poignant use of silence, the blood a neo-noir trappings, the western scène à faire mixed with a science-fiction setting. It has a sense of place and a distinctive flavor, which is a good start for any series.

I’m less enamored with the characters so far. Spike is a pretty generic rogue, a little too reckless for his own good but cunning enough to get by despite that. Jet is a fairly standard tough guy second, with a little more charm. The other hangers on here like the Indigenous fortune teller or the horny barflies are vaguely uncomfortable. And the tastefully-named, drug-using gangster, Asimov, is a pretty standard archetype.

Only the gangster’s girlfriend, Kartina, has a little more distinctive about her. Even she conforms to some standard noir tropes, with a certain sad femme fatale quality and a doomed dream. But her “pregnant belly” full of contraband, her willingness to kill her accomplice when she realizes he has no will to see their dream through, and the tragic poetic imagery of the vial spilling out from her dress like blood as she dies in space, gives her a memorable debut no one else can match.

Still, this one has potential in style alone, and hopefully there’s time to develop Spike, Jet, and what I assume will be other members of the cast better over time. Setting out a pair of bounty hunters to hop across the galaxy and encounter cases of the week is a good premise, and the jazzy rhythms of this one give enough reason to keep coming back to see who’ll they’ll trade blows and bullets with next time.

[7.4/10] More of a grab bag episode than anything else. I’m interested in the plot and the twists, but the show seems less focused this season, which makes it harder to invest in what’s happening.

Homelander just gets more and more messed up though, huh? I like what they do to bring him and Stormfront together. His bad viral video gets out; she finds a way to neutralize it using her meme army, and it brings them together. He’s got a problem; she’s got a solution, and it makes him let his guard down. I still don’t know exactly what Stormfront’s game is, but I’m intrigued to find out, and the way she’s able to blackmail or manipulate or otherwise hide in plain site with everyone makes her an interesting villain.

But good lord, I did not need superheroic S&M between them. I will say this for The Boys -- I can’t recall a time when a show made me so uncomfortable on such a consistent basis. It’s provoking a reaction with this stuff, and I don’t know whether to write these scenes off as edgelord nonsense or the unvarnished screwed up lives of powerful people, but it’s effective in getting a response.

The business with the other superheroes is good too. Filming their Justice League/Avengers-style movie is quality fodder for humor. A-Train being strong-armed into retiring and saying his lines makes a terrible person mildly sympathetic. Starlight and Stormfront’s standoff is tense amid the mutual threats, especially when Starlight’s mom gets involved. And I like that Maeve is concerned enough about Homelander that she’s now plotting to take him down to protect Elena, who’s been wrapped up in her new “loud and proud” image makeover.

The Deep’s stuff is less engaging to me at this point. Him doing the Tom Cruise routine is quickly starting to hit diminishing returns, but I suppose it still has some oomph of a takedown of public rehabilitation tours.

Kimiko feels a little directionless, with her turning into a hitman for reasons that are unclear. Maybe she’s trying to lure Stormfront to try to come stop her or something? Who knows. But her telling a bedraggled Frenchie to stop trying to save her is good. Here too, the show seems to be spinning its wheels a bit.

That just leaves the business with Billy, Hughie, and MM holing up in Billy’s aunt’s house. I like seeing how Billy’s changed by being rejected by Becca a bit. He’s ready to call it quits, whether by retirement or death. Having Billy try to remind him what he’s fighting for is a good beat, and I like that we learn a little bit more about him in the process. Finding out that Billy had and lost a little brother who held him in check, much like Hughie, is intriguing. And his deal with Edgar gives the story some extra oomph.

(Random prediction: Maybe Billy’s brother turns out to be Black Noir? That seems like a twist just wild and shocking and unnecessary enough to be true.)

Otherwise, MM continues to be a great and likable character in all of this, chastening Billy and protecting Hughie where he needs to. Billy’s arc is a tad jumbled here, but I like that they take at least an episode to have him grappling with his rejection from Becca before returning to the usual path. And the scene where Homelander blasts a crowd of protestors was shocking, but felt like a cop out when it turned out to just be a fantasy.

Overall, a solid interstitial episode, but one that plays a bit jumbled.

In the realm of episodic television, the series’ latest instalment has already garnered a reputation as a potential masterpiece. It is also divisive, as it deviates significantly from the source material in some key aspects. While some fans may appreciate the creative liberties taken by the showrunners Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, others may feel betrayed by the changes that alter the characters’ essence and relationships.

First and foremost, we must talk about Nick Offerman’s masterful performance—it’s easily the best of his career and a testament to his acting abilities. He brings the character to life in a way that’s nothing short of skilful. Offerman delivers a nuanced and layered portrayal in his portrayal of Bill, a gruff and paranoid survivalist who hides his vulnerability behind a mask of cynicism and sarcasm.

Yet, while there is much to admire in the third instalment, I can’t help but air out some concerns about the changes made. While I don’t mind the alterations to Bill and Frank’s storyline—since that is par for the course nowadays—I do mind the portrayal of Ellie by Bella Ramsey. Ramsey’s depiction of the character is distant from the Ellie we know and love from the games. The personality traits and characteristics that made Ellie such a complex and interesting character are lost in this adaptation. The acting is tonally inconsistent, lacking in nuance and failing to evoke any sense of empathy from the viewer. Ramsey looks nothing like Ellie from the game, which is not necessarily a problem if she can embody her personality.

The writing is also to blame for not giving the character any complexity or emotion, lacking the fire, bravery, compassion, and vulnerability that made Ellie so real and relatable in the game. Her relationship with Joel also suffers from a lack of development and chemistry. The father-daughter bond that is essential to the story seems to be neglected in the series so far. I hope that these issues will be resolved in the remaining episodes because they are holding back an otherwise superb show.

That said, we’re only three episodes in, and there’s still plenty of time for the show to course-correct and iron out these issues. While I’m not a purist who only insists on 100 per cent faithful adaptations of the source material, changes must be made with great care and attention to detail.

01x03 - Long, Long Time: 7.8/10 (Good)

So good. Everything comes together and we aren't even in the endgame of the season yet, as "Lake Laogai" could easily be a season finale in any other show. However, here, it's just another piece of the cog that is Avatar: The Last Airbender, and it's more important character work as the group goes after Appa. I especially love how Jet is used here - he's never been the most compelling character but he's probably at his best here, and his interactions with Katara are very funny. And when stuff does go down in the second half, Jet's eventual fate ends up hitting like a truck as you start to realize that the supporting cast isn't safe anymore, and that the stakes are really coming down on them now.

And what action! There is so much good here in how the show directs it's action scenes, and the Dai Lee are such great creations in terms of how they use their Earthbending. Zuko's story is also one of the biggest things this episode has going for it, as we see his first true step towards redemption and it feels earned. There is no better feeling then seeing a show actually putting it's development to good use, and this is a great example of that.

[8.0/10 on a post-classic Simpsons scale] Color me crazy, but I really liked this one. Yes, this feels like a retcon, and something about the misdirect feels a touch uncomfortable. But by god, it has a good emotional throughline, an affecting story, and some quality gags. I’m more than pleased with what is, frankly, a pretty ballsy episode to try to pull off.

Rooting the episode in Lisa’s emotional state is one of the most canny choices in the episode. It would be easy to make the frame story in the present little more than a shell for a page from history. But this one provides something more. Lisa is on a desperate hunt to prove that the Simpsons were not all thieves and ne'er do wells. She wants something to hang her hat on, to show that there’s some decent spark within her family tree. That's a relatable impulse, and something that makes us sympathize with her as she's combing her family history to find evidence of something noble among the ancestors.

I also like the historical story this one tells. This is going to sound a bit silly, but in a way, this felt like one of those American Girl Doll stories -- a diary of the life of a girl in a historical period. The small lived-in touches, and the chance to transpose the Simpsons into a different time period pays dividends. But what I like about it is that it doesn’t shy away from the harshness of all this.

“The Color Yellow” isn’t exactly Twelve Years a Slave or Roots or even the movie that provides its namesake when it comes to the horrors of slavery. But it’s frank about the system that reinforced it, with a sense of everyone having to be deferential to the moneyed, landed gentry, even in the face of recognized injustices. This is ultimately a happy story, of a slave escaping and sharing love with the woman who helped him escape, not to mention Lisa discovering something decent on her family tree. But it’s also a story about a Lisa analogue (the not-so-creatively named Eliza) regretting that she capitulated to such a system when she could have spoken up and done good. There’s power in the regret that balances out the triumph.

The twists are good too. The emotional rollercoaster of Lisa thinking all her ancestors are terrible, only to find evidence that they’re decent and back and forth and back and forth brings the audience on the same ride Lisa’s on. Some of it’s a touch contrived, but on the whole it succeeds in what it sets out to do -- make us feel what Lisa feels with the rise and fall of her excitement and sadness over everything.

Aside from the storytelling here, the humor is much better than average for this era of The Simpsons. We get some hilarious freeze frame gags with the Marge analogue’s footnote in the family cookbook. I laughed out loud at Colonel Burns asking for a waltz to be played in four-four time, only for the dancers to crash into one another and fall down amidst everything. And even the pointed commentary in elder generations dancing around the fact that many of them are racist has some teeth to it in a way not a tone of Jean-era Simpsons does. Plus hey, the joke makes no sense, but the interlude with “Honest Abe” is a hoot.

I don’t know. This is undoubtedly a big swing. Making the Simpsons (or Homer and the kids anyway) part-Black is a little cheap, but also a little bold. In truth, I don’t know how to process that, beyond half-admiring it and half-wondering if it was necessary. Despite all that, I felt for Lisa on her emotional journey, I liked the creative piecemeal storytelling that built up the Virgil Simpson story, I audibly laughed much more than the typical Simpsons episode this period, and I appreciated the show doing something bold with its characters history and a bit of baked-in commentary. I can't pretend that the show was pitching its fastball in season 21, but I appreciate post-classic episodes that blend the laughs, the feeling, and the narrative moonshots like this one does.

The premise of this was a bit too stupid for me - I could go into a lot of detail about it but I'll just say, these "scientists" failed to define what morality even means, which is kind of the basic beginning of any real scientific research. Sometimes they defined it as selfishness vs. altruism, but then they also had a question about eating human flesh which is more a basic instinct regarding diseases and cultural conditioning, and then the Stutzer guy also claimed they were aiming for world peace, completely disregarding the fact that the vast majority of wars are waged by people who think they are the good guys, fighting for the good of their own in-group - all of which might also demonstrate that it's ludicrous to imagine a completely culturally constructed and context-dependent concept like morality could be regulated by a single part of the brain, and that even if one might be able to make a violent ape docile, so to speak, that would also entail turning them into a completely different ape - which I guess was the point, but still. That a supposed real researcher would actually believe any of that is mind-boggling.

Brace yourselves, dear viewers, for this episode will undoubtedly spark heated debates among fans. Some will love it, while others will loathe it—much like the game itself.

The Last of Us ends with a masterful coup de grâce, cementing this adaptation's place in the pantheon of prestige television.

It is sombre and dark yet replete with emotions that run deep. Joel, at long last, becomes a man of action. Whether his actions are morally defensible, however, is a subject of endless debate.

Staying true to the game, this episode does not falter in its execution, boasting a master-stroke opening that sets the stage for a gripping narrative to unfold. The strategic use of a flashback adds layers of complexity to already richly-wrought characters, serving as a catalyst for some of the most poignant dialogue between Joel and Ellie to date—dialogue sure to leave the audience teary-eyed.

The action is far from glorified, leaving viewers in a state of visceral shock and awe. The last couple of episodes have served to do some fantastic work for Joel, and this episode is the proverbial cherry on top, truly a beautiful and profound culmination of his character arc. Indeed, the show is a thing of beauty, but beauty that is shrouded in darkness.

Were a flaw to be ascribed, it would be that of brevity. At a mere 40 minutes, the finale feels curtailed. The absence of the Cordyceps is understandable, given the laser-focused narrative, though it marks a deviation from the source material.

By turns harrowing and humane, towering and intimate, this finale buries its hooks deeply in the viewer, capping off a brilliant maiden season. Love it or loathe it, impassioned discourse will assuredly abound in the wake of this uncompromising conclusion to the first chapter of The Last of Us.

01x09 - Look for the Light: 8.5/10 (Great)