MSochist

[7.6/10] Here’s the weird thing about this season for me. Despite the world-changing events going on, the mystical origin stories and threats of uber-spirits reigning for 10,000 years, the plotline in the season I’ve enjoyed the most has been about Tenzin and his family.

In fairness, that’s not crazy for me. I tend to like smaller, more personal stories as much as I like the one with major fireworks and battles to the death, but it seems odd when the universe is supposed to hang in the balance here, and I’m more invested in the Offspraang Gang trying to find Jinora than whether Korra will save the world.

Part of that is because the Tenzin/Kya/Bumi portion of the episode is just so good. It has a few things going for it out of the gate like return engagements from Iroh and Zhao(!) (the latter of whom is still ranting and raving after his adventures with Northern Water Tribe) which helps give the story a sense of place. It also allows us to explore more of the spirit world. The fog of lost souls is a neat concept, as is submitting to a spider creature to get there, and I prefer the spirit world to be this sort unpredictable unknowable place (with humorous talking mushrooms) than just an interdimensional battlefield.

It also gives us a great insight into Tenzin. Sure, Bumi fearing cannibals and Kya fearing being tied down are bit too on the nose, but I love the culmination of Tenzin’s arc here. So much of the sibling’s plot this season has been about reckoning with their father’s legacy and the different ways it marked them. Having Tenzin’s great fear be that he won’t live up to that legacy, that he’s failed to preserve what his father stood for and wanted for him is a deft choice in that regard, and I like the show’s answer too. Tenzin has to stop trying to be his father and start simply being himself. It’s trite, but relatable and understandable, and it works as a key to solving problems plotty and personal.

The other part of my preference for Tenzin & Co.’s story is that the rest of the episode feels so rote and easy. Don’t get me wrong, the show still knows how to do action and design like nobody’s business. Dark Avatar Unalaq has a crazy-looking design that gets by on coolness alone, Korra fighting a giant kite is actually much more exciting than I imagined, and she even gets her own badass Aang like moment, where it looks like she’s down for the count but then comes back with Avatar powers to kick ass, replete with the musical swell. Heck, she even does something really bright -- air-blasting Unalaq out of the spirit realm so that he can’t bond with Vaatu.

But I just can’t get over the easy escalation of this whole plot. The entire concept of the Dark Avatar feels like too much to me. The Avatarverse has always had stories about big bads, but having an almost purely villainous dude endeavor to replicate the mechanism that created the first Avatar to make an Anti-Avatar feels like a lazy way to make a universe-threatening antagonist with the standard “evil reflection of the protagonist” veneer. In a Star Wars prequel sort of way, it reduces the inscrutable magic behind the power of The Avatar to an admittedly difficult but all too understood process that can be replicated, and just gives us a snarling uber-bad guy for the trouble.

There’s some interesting things happening nonetheless. Eska and Desna freeing Mako and Bolin because of love is a bit too contrived for me (and it feels like they probably should have turned on their own by now), but each has something to do here and it largely works. And I’m admittedly curious about where the show is going to go after having Vaatu seemingly kill Rava and thus wipe out the previous line of Avatars. It would be a bold choice if they stick with it, though something about the previous “neither light nor dark can ever be permanently” defeated shtick suggests that they’ll find some means of wiping it all away.

I don’t know. There’s a lot of cool stuff in both parts of the story of this episode, but one of them is founded on something sound -- a man who is both son and father trying to reconcile himself as a child and as a parent, dramatized with neat expansions of the spirit world, and the other is founded on something disappointing -- the reduction of the Avatar to a magical recipe and the usual “I’m the dark version of you” bad guy that often happens when a franchise has run out of places to go. We’ll see whether TLoK can stick the landing and shut me up.

[7.5/10] It’s an inevitable result of any story focused on young adults, but TLoK pushes the “you can’t tell me what to do, dad button pretty hard here to my consistent eyerolls. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a natural reaction for Korra to have, but the backfire is predictable and the episode hits that character beat over and over again.

Still, I like the flashback that we get there. There’s something Thor-esque about the situation with Tonraq and Unalaq. Young Tonraq rushing into battle, thoughtlessly disrupting the spiritual balance, and then being banished for it while his brother rose to power creates a certain Shakespearean epic history between the two siblings. I’ll admit, I’m a bit of a sucker for stories that amount to “you violated the sanctity of this sacred place, and now you must pay the price.” Again, it adds a generational depth to the conflict du jour, even if it leans a little too hard on the “how could you keep this from me, pa?” stuff.

That said, I’m not sure any fight in the Avatar-verse has looked as fluid and gorgeous as the one between our heroes and the spirit demons. The way the baddies dart and ooze from one place to another, while the snow falls and the wind blows, makes for thrilling scenes. Plus, there’s enough comic relief from Bolin’s misadventures with his camping gear and Desna and Eska’s interactions with him to keep things light in the midst of some pretty challenging stuff.

For all it annoys me that the show kept hitting the “independent teenager” material with Korra, I do like how surprised she is when Unalaq sends her off on her own, basically trusting her to handle herself. The escapade in the spirit pool features more great animation, and the burst of light to restart the southern lights make for a nice set piece.

That said, the results are pretty predictable. I could be wrong (as I usually am with Avatar-verse predictions), but my guess is and has been that Unalaq loosed or conjured those spirits himself to attack the Southern Water Tribe as a way to generate some false flag panic to give him an excuse to take over. Either way, you just knew that he wasn’t going to be on the up-and-up so seeing his troops march into the Southern village wasn’t any great shock.

On the whole, the episode delivers some interesting backstory and some great action scenes, which keeps it pretty good the whole way through. I just wish it didn’t underline Korra’s rebelliousness so heavy-handedly.

[7.2/10] I enjoyed the twist in this one. I went on record as suspecting that Asami was a part of a honeypot to lure in Mako for something involving her dad, but I like where LoK went much better. The notion that Hiroshi lost his wife to a firebender and has resented them ever since, forcing Asami to choose between her father, her principles, and her friends brings much more to the table that a simple doublecross. I suspected how it was going to go, but it was still a powerful moment to have Asami discover the truth, take the electric glove from her father as though she were going to join him, and then use it on him.

We also got another pair of great action sequences. The racing segment was a little gratuitous, but it definitely worked to add some life into the middle portion of the episode. And the fight with Hiroshi’s mechas was out of this world. As great as Aang was, it’s pretty cool to see a full-blown airbender going all out in battle. And Bolin and Mako finding creative ways to distract the guards and help out was a nice touch.

I’ll add that it’s so easy, but I bought the fan service hook line and sinker. I laughed audibly when I realized that Cabbage Corp. was the descendent company of the cabbage guy from AtLA, and its CEO going “my cabbage corp!” was the icing on the cake. Plus, seeing Lynn use her mother’s barefoot echolocation bit was a real treat as well. Heck, even the metal walls being made of pure platinum so there’s no impurities for metalbenders to be able to bend is a nice use of the mythos of the franchise.

The only thing I didn’t like about this episode is that Korra basically makes a wild accusation about Hiroshi on minimal proof, and then goes so far as to tell his daughter about it before she or anyone’s gotten to the bottom of the situation,, and the show seems to be on her side for it. Sure, what Korra overheard Hiroshi saying was suspicious, but it doesn’t really prove anything, and Korra making up her mind so quickly and blabbing to people who care about him without confirmation isn’t a good look.

Now the other side of the coin is it fits the character. Korra is a headstrong person and so her rushing to judgment without all the evidence works for her personality and mindset. But the fact that she turns out to be right and that Mako essentially apologizes for not believing her leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe she has magic Avatar perception skills or something, it read to me like someone leaping to conclusions before all the facts are in and worrying family members unnecessarily in the process. I can’t help but wonder how she would have felt if she’d been wrong.

Still, the episode makes up for it a little by having Korra offer to let Asami stay with them on Air Island, and seeming to really feel for her erstwhile romantic rival and the difficulty of the situation. Too much of the episode is founded on her suspicion and certainty for my taste, but once we get to the Hiroshi reveal, business really picks up.

[8.5/10] So, we’ve introduced the new hero and her mentor. We’ve introduced her new sidekicks. Now it’s time to introduce the villain.

And what an introduction! Amon has a presence from his steely calm, talk of revolution, and, unexpectedly, his energy-bending abilities. AtLA fans know that Aang was the first person since ancient ancient times to energy-bend someone, so the fact that this guy can do it relatively easily, and with grace and style to boot, immediately marks him as a unique threat on the show.

Then again, everyone seems a little more advanced as a baseline in LoK. You have entire squads of metal benders after Toph was the first person to do that (as far as we know -- nice to know her metal-bending school bore fruit). Azula and Ozai were the only lightning benders we saw in Avatar, and now there’s enough of them to work shifts in a Republic City power plant (which is a cool detail, by the way).

What’s interesting about “The Revelation” then is that it paints Amon as a bad guy, but also as a little understandable, and his cause a little sympathetic. What’s interesting about the episode is that it ties Amon and Mako together. Both of them lost their parents to firebenders when they were very young, and yet they seem to have taken two entirely different paths, with Mako embracing firebending himself and remaining seemingly noble and stoic, while Amon is vengeful with a certain flair for the theatrical.

(Random prediction: the firebender who mugged Mako’s parents and who hurt Amon’s parents is one and the same, and we’ll meet him at some later point in the series. It’s kind of funny that the show basically cast Mako as Batman here, and I’ll be curious to see if they go Batman Returns and make his parents’ murderer the big bad. Also, Mako’s story about a firebender getting involved at his parents’ farm sounds a lot like a fractured account of “Zuko Alone” from AtLA. I wonder if there’s any connection.)

But Amon and The Equalists’ arguments have a certain intuitive appeal to them. This being an adventure show, something tells me his energy bending is a part of some larger plot, but he’s not going against police officers or spiritual leaders or The Avatar; he’s going against mobsters, the very sort of people whom Korra was roughing up for threatenings innocent shopkeeps in the series premiere. His cause, or at least the way he pursues it in the early going, seems just enough.

There’s something to the notion that the normal people of Republic City live under the yoke of their bending brethren, and depending on them to be safe. It’s natural that people would want to use technology like chi-blockers and electric sticks to try to even the odds, to not be dependent on The Avatar and others for their safety and well-being. Obviously we see Amon’s henchmen as well-trained thugs roughing up our heroes, but there’s an interesting complexity to their position, and understandable quality to their perspective, that makes Amon novel as an antagonist.

But as neat as those ideas are, there’s two ideas that really put “The Revelation” over the top as a great episode. The first is that it tells a really compelling and tightly-written story. Having Bolin take a muscle job to make the money to compete in the championship, and then having Korra and Mako hunt him down, works really well as a story engine.

It also makes for a nice, almost noir-ish mystery and progression. The episode builds nicely, with the pair following a tip from a local moppet leading to a flare up with the local goons. Then they stalk the soapbox Equalist activist from the series’ first episode when their initial effort fails. And then they use the clues they glean from him to piece together where Amon’s “Revelation” is going down and we get a nice little infilitration and rescue story. It’s tightly paced, with enough quieter moments for things like Mako’s backstory or Amon’s speech, and enough high-paced action to keep things interesting.

And wow, what action! Avatar had already upped its game considerably from its first season to its finale, but Legend of Korra seems to have taken the design and animation work up a notch still. The motorcycle chase with Korra and the local goons was a treat (though again, the integration between the hand-drawn stuff and the CGI buildings was a little disjointed.) The fights themselves, though a touch herky jerky, were well-staged and immediately distinguished the fighting styles of the men in hoods. There was almost a roto-scoped sense of the rhythms of their strikes and dodges.

That carried on into the skirmish between Amon and the Lightning mobster, with Amon’s fluidity and chi-blocking pressure point attacks immediately distinguishing him as a clear threat despite the fact that he lacks any bending abilities himself. The very notion of taking away someone’s bending abilities feels so significant, both because it means he poses more than a typical threat to our new Team Avatar, but also because it feels like taking away something holy, of de-spiritualizing someone, given the significance bending philosophy holds in the World of Avatar.

If that weren’t enough, we get a chance for Naga to take her place alongside Appa as a great Avatar familiar, balancing the line between being cute and fluffy when needed, but also teeth-baring and defensive as necessary too. We’re also introduced to Pabu, Bolin’s pet fire-ferret, who I imagine is our new Mono. And the episode also hinted heavily toward Korra and Mako as a couple. I don’t really feel the chemistry between them, but then that’s not unusual for me and main Avatar couples, so we shall have to see.

Overall though, this was a rollicking installment of The Legend of Kora. It had incredible animation that showed off the potential this show has in the action department. It told a well-paced story about a mystery with plenty of stakes and room to motivate our heroes. ANd most importantly, it developed two of what seem to be the show’s major characters, making Mako more comprehensible as an ally, and Amon more comprehensible as a threat. That’s no small feat for twenty-four minutes, and it speaks well of the show to deliver this much this well so early in the series.

[9.4/10] I like Team Avatar. The group dynamic is fun, and the way the connections between them have been tested and strengthened over the series has been endlessly impressive. I like Aang, with the weight of the world on his shoulders despite his carefree personality. I like Katara, trying to hold everyone together despite impossible odds and omnipresent obstacles. I like Sokka, full of irreconcilable insecurity and overconfidence, coupled with sarcastic wit. I like Toph, who’s curt and non-nonsense in a way I appreciate. And I like the animal sidekicks, who provide physical comedy and adorable charm to the group.

But in the end, I’m most invested in Zuko’s story. Despite Aang growing and changing as he masters the four elements and trains to face Ozai, Zuko has the largest and most significant arc across the series. I’m not sure I would have believed it if you’d told me that’s how I’d feel after the first couple of episodes, where Zuko seemed like a generic evil prince with as much depth as a pancake. And yet here we are, where I’m not only glad that he is a regular presence in the show, but more excited and compelled by his turn to good than the course of any other character in the series.

Which is part of why it is so engaging, so endearing, to see him struggle to figure out how to be good, and also to convince others that he has changed. The way that Zuko practices his speech to Team Avatar on a frog, stumbling over his words and trying to apologize for his past misdeeds, state his intentions, and account for a gradual transformation that took fifty episodes is endearing. As Aang often does, Zuko seems like a real kid -- unsure of himself, plagued with self-doubt, and trying to encapsulate feelings and history that he doesn’t fully understand himself. Zuko is trying to outrun his own past, to make amends for it, and that is not and should not be an easy process.

That’s why I particularly love who is resistant and who is more open to embracing Zuko as a part of the group. Each has their reasons for being mistrustful or more welcoming to him. Sokka has the most generalized reasons, noting the laundry list of things Zuko’s done to them over the past weeks and months. Katara’s are more direct, with the events of Ba Sing Se leaving her feeling betrayed after she trusted and felt sorry for Zuko in the crystal caves, only to see him turn on her and Aang at the moment of truth.

And Aang himself harbors the sort of mistrust from being the object of Zuko’s pursuit, but there’s also a moment when Aang betrays his true motivations, or at least, feelings that muddy the water. Zuko rightly points out that Aang once said they might be friends in other circumstances, and both recently learned that the connection between the Avatar and Fire Nation royalty used to be much closer. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but there’s a sense that Aang might want to forgive Zuko, to believe that there is good and him and help it flourish, but that doing so would mean that Aang has a mechanism to learn firebending, and that he must continue on this quest and face his destiny, something he seems very ready to avoid at all costs here.

But Toph is the perfect person to understand and be more willing to give Zuko a chance. For one thing, she hasn’t been with Team Avatar as long, and for much of her tenure, Zuko was figuring himself out rather than attacking the Aang gang, so she has witnessed less of the harm he is capable of inflicting. More to the point,.Toph understands what its like to have a family that doesn’t understand you, that tries to fit you into boxes and punishes you when you act outside of them. She is uniquely positioned to be a bridge between him and her friends, and it’s a nice use of the character.

It also doesn’t hurt that Appa licks Zuko with little-to-no resistance. It serves as a reminder that whatever ill Zuko’s done, he’s also done some good, including freeing the flying bison from Long Feng. It also speaks to a sort of instinctive endorsement from Appa, a sense that if this noble creature likes Zuko, he can’t be all bad.

Of course, it can’t be as simple as that. This is an action show and the people demand action. So beyond a simple, humanizing plea for forgiveness for the terrible things he’s done and for acceptance for the corrective things he hopes to do, we see Zuko lay himself on the line to try to stop Combustion Man even after he’s been rebuked.

It’s a nice sequence. I’ve come around on Combustion Man as getting by on presence and the coolness of his powers, and his (seeming) demise here plays to several things that have been previously set up. For one thing, it represents a present example of Zuko trying to correct for his mistakes, attempting to call off his goon, pay him double to stop, and then fight him when his efforts to implore his henchmen to relent fail, nearly plummeting to his doom in the process. If he were fully accepted after that, it would be too much too fast, but it works as a demonstration of the change he’s trying to convince Team Avatar of, and Katara’s continued mistrust prevents it from being too easy or convenient.

But it’s also a win for Sokka! It’s nice that this provides a unique opportunity for his boomerang to truly come in handy. At the same time, it shows off the incredible “set” of the Western Air Temple. The upside down buildings carved into the underside of a canyon shows great imagination, and it makes for a great playground for Aang and company to fly around in, but also a great setting in which to do battle, which heightens the thrill of the fight.

The funniest part of “The Western Air Temple” is Zuko’s impressions of his uncle and sister. Dante Basco outdoes himself here, not only capturing the affect of Zuko’s mentor and tormentor, but conveying the inner turmoil and abject hope the character has at this crossroads. Those impersonations are humorous in the moment, but call back to those dragons in his fever dream which spoke with the voices of Iroh and Azula, representing the battle of good and evil within him. We hope that this battle has been won and that Zuko is walking down the path of good, but it is an uneasy path, one where he must constantly account for his past mistakes and make assurances that his next steps will be different. That journey has been long, but it’s resulted in AtLA’s most complicated, interesting, and well-developed character, whose induction into Team Avatar is a cause for celebration.

[9.5 /10] Oh man, I love me a format bender! I’ve talked a little bit about how it feels like the show’s momentum has stalled out somewhat with the journey to Ba Sing Se. There doesn’t seem to be the same urgency to the quest that there was in Season 1, even as the quality of the show has markedly improved. But this is the perfect kind of episode to do in the midst of this lull, a series of quick-hit pieces that give nice character moments and mini-adventures.

Things start off nicely with Katara and Toph having a spa day together and running into a trio of mean girls afterward. There’s something cathartic about the two of them using their bending powers to humiliate the bullies. But what really makes this one nice is the way it not only builds the sometimes shaky friendship between the two of them, but reveals some of Toph’s personality and insecurity. There’s a clear sense that Toph’s personality is somewhat a reaction to her princess-like upbringing, but also a reaction to her disability – that she turned an insecurity into a source of strength and part of who she is, but it still tugs at her a bit deep down under the surface. Katara telling Toph that she’s pretty, even though Toph professes it doesn’t matter to her, is a nice moment of bonding, and despite her protestations, it clearly means a lot for her to here.

It packs a punch in just a little bit of time, which is also true for Zuko’s story. Watching the socially awkward kid go on a date with and endlessly patient girl is a treat. (I guess being handsome buys you a lot of slack in Ba Sing Se.) His stilted attempts to make small talk and cover up his Fire Nation past are quite amusing. But the real show comes when he lights up those lanterns for his date, showing that behind his icy exterior there’s a young man who cares about doing nice things for other people. He doesn’t want to give into his feelings in this moment, because he feels he has a destiny, something that means he can’t put down roots or make connections with others in a place like this, but as he tells his uncle, it’s nice to do have those feelings, and it may be one of the few times Zuko’s had that sort of human connection apart from his mother and uncle.

Much of the episode, however, is just interested in providing some fun adventure or humor rather than anything too too deep. Aang leaning into his love of animals and using his Avatar powers to make an shiny, new, impromptu zoo after the old one has fallen into squalor is a nice story about him playing Superman – helping out with every day things and not just saving the world. Similarly, it’s slight as all get out, but Sokka getting into a haiku rap battle with the teacher at a local school is just silly enough to work.

Even Momo’s story is mostly a Warner Bros.-esque caper. I’m always impressed when shows tell stories without dialogue, and while I wouldn’t want a full Momo-episode necessarily (his little interlude with the baby in Omashu recommends against it) watching him run afoul of some souped up alleycats, free them from the chopping block, and then get the first big hint of Appa is a tidy little tale that has a lot of fun and creative direction in it. (His dance is eminently gif worthy.) There’s even the hint of melancholy with Momo missing his big bison-y buddy, and the scene of him curling up in Appa’s footprint is especially sweet and sad.

But holy cow, nothing in the episode can top Iroh’s story in the sweet and sad department. While most of the characters in A:TLA took a while to grow on me, Iroh was one of the few who clicked right from the start. Whether it’s Mako’s delivery, or just the character’s Impish charms, there was always a nice blend of off-kilter wisdom but a well of deep feeling as well. This story was the perfect encapsulation of that. The way he goes around Ba Sing Se as a humble but caring traveler, looking out for everyone and everything, from plants to babies to schoolboys to muggers, is delightful.

You see his helpful bent, and the way he’s apt to help young boys of all ages. His song for the little baby is cute and his manner with this kid is adorable. Him getting into hijinks with some kids player earth-bending soccer is classic. And only Iroh could turn getting mugged into a teachable moment. The way he not only disarms his mugger with ease, but then bonds with him and encourages him to be a masseuse is wonderful.

But then, the scales fall. Iroh goes up to a tree, sets up a shrine to his deceased son, and sings the same song about a lost soldier boy, this time in tears. Suddenly, the reason for Iroh’s kindness, here and with Zuko, becomes much more clear. He wishes he could have helped his own son, to allow him to avoid such a fate. We know that Iroh was broken by this loss, that he might have beaten Ba Sing Se himself if such a devastating personal tragedy hadn’t cracked his spirit in twain.

But in the aftermath, Iroh reassembled himself into the kind, caring, avuncular caretaker we know, who has a connection to this world and its inhabitants deeper than anyone else we’ve seen. It’s a poignant moment, one that casts all his other guidance and care throughout the series into stark relief. That’s what these sorts of episodes do at their best. They don’t just cut the writers some slack by allowing them to write shorts rather than full episodes. Instead, they give you those powerful moments, the ones that are glancing, but which give you insight into who these people are, apart from larger story demands. As Iroh’s heart-rending moment up on that hill illustrates, sometimes those are the most affecting moments of all.

[7.8/10] I keep comparing Avatar to three series: Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s not hard to see why. They’re all “Chosen One” narratives that deal with world-building, and the burden on the chosen, and the complexity of rising to your potential and the friends who help you achieve it. They’ve borrowed and even referenced one another along the way, and it makes sense that A:TLA, a series very much in the same tradition, would feel of a piece.

So when Aang loses Appa, and is not only upset about it, but angry, it’s scary, because it reminds us (or least me) of Anakin Skywalker’s reaction to losing someone he cared about in a desert setting. There is a similar frightening quality when the chosen one, the individual imbued with all this power, turns that power into an instrument of vengeance, rather than a tool for justice. His angry demeanor, is worrying enough, but when he starts taking out bees and destroying sand sailboats and threatening human beings, it starts to get serious.

And when Iroh uses his lotus tile and board game to show his allegiance to a secret club, one that can get him and Zuko safely away from the attackers sent by Toph’s dad, it calls to mind the way that Dumbledore always seemed one step ahead, to have unseen connections and angles on everything that opened doors and showed hidden secrets around every turn. There is a sense of hidden depths to Iroh, that beneath his arthritic gait and off-kilter sense of humor, there is a man of great power and wisdom.

Of course, these properties also gave into goofy side stories that didn’t always work as well, and that definitely fits with Sokka tripping on cactus juice. It’s mildly amusing at first, but the gag goes on way too long, and wears out its welcome. Though it does, at least include Sokka’s amusing response to Katara’s admonition that he shouldn’t just lick things on a cave wall when he says that he has an inquisitive personality.

And to that end, this is really Katara’s episode. One of the great things that all three of those properties would do is give the spotlight to the non-chosen characters from time to time, and show both how much they contributed to the chosen one and their journey, but also how capable they were in their own right. Katara does an amazing job at holding everyone together here. Aang is as upset as we’ve seen him; Sokka is high; Toph is out of her element, and only Katara is there trying to get them to safety and willing everyone to keep going.

That, however, is not her biggest win here. That comes in the moment where Aang’s fury is at its peak. It is, again, a frightening moment, when he confronts the people who stole and sold Appa, and begins to enter the Avatar state. It’s been clear for some time that it’s threats to the people he loves that stoke the Avatar state within him, that the possibility of losing a loved one, like the Monk whom he saw as a father figures, unmoors the power within him.

Thankfully, he has Katara to anchor him once more. Without going into specifics, one of the strongest moments in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer featured one character going mad with power after harm befalls a loved one, and another, a friend who did not possess the same awesome power, standing up and bringing them back from the brink. That sort of moment is just as powerful here. When Aang begins to enter the state, and Katara stops him, embraces him, and eases him out of it, it is an incredible testament to the depth of their relationship, and the fact that she doesn’t run is a testament to her strength.

That alone raises the grade for this one. The earth kingdom lord from the beginning of this season demonstrated that Katara is enough to provoke the Avatar state in Aang, but here, as in those other epic chosen one stories, that loved one is also enough to face that power and bring back the individual who wields it.

6.8/10. I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed. I realize there's a debate about whether or not this show counts as anime, but however you'd like to define it officially, it uses certain tropes and ideas prominent in that strain of art that I've always had trouble jibing with. So when the crux of this episode involves the bad guy capturing a fish whose death, it turns out, destroys the moon and takes away all the good guys' powers, it was just a bridge too far for me. Why is a magical fish too much for me when people being able to manipulate elements telekinetically or Aang jumping to the spirit world or flying bison are not? I wish I could say. It just comes off as a weird to me, and my suspension of disbelief is suddenly and reflexively finished.

It doesn't help that the result of Aang going to his Avatar State, the peak of all of his power, is just him turning into a big glowing blue water Pokemon. The show's fight scenes have been some of its stand out bits, but just seeing a transparent Aquagodzilla smashing ships didn't do much for me. We got scant few scenes of the promised siege, and the liquid dinosaur attack felt like a pale substitute.

That said, there was enough cool and interesting stuff to keep my attention, even if it didn't feel like as epic a finale to the first chapter of this story as I might have liked. The focus on balance, while heavy-handed throughout the episode, was enjoyable, as was the twist that Iroh in particular, who's been shown to have a connection to the spirit world, is the most steadfast defender of the moon fish and the spirit that inhabits it. Iroh's the MVP here, between standing up to Iroh, showing his fire abilities, and giving Zuko a warm sendoff while telling him that he thinks of Zuko as his own, he was the best thing in this one.

I say that, but the other really neat thing here was the art direction. The whole fish-snatching escapade may have landed with a thud for me, but the way the entire screen was tinted red when the moon fish was captured, and the way everything, sans the avatar and the pupils of the Princess's eyes, went grayscale when it was killed, showed a commitment to artistry and a visual shorthand for the consequences of Zhao's actions that elevated the episode even when the plot mechanics were a little ridiculous.

I did appreciate Aang's adventures in the spirit world. The face dealer was nicely creepy, and the effort for Aang to maintain his emotionaless detachment was an interesting conceit for the encounter. Despite my fish-skepticism, I do like the show's commitment to showing this spirit world that intersects with the real one, and which has an ecosystem and figures all its own lurking at the edges of the frame.

Still, so much of what happened here felt pretty convenient. We never get a hint of Zhao having this fish plan until this episode, and then it immediately comes into play. The Princess's sacrifice would have more weight if we didn't get an exposition dump about her connection to the moon spirit just five minutes earlier. Even the tag, with the Fire Lord sending Zuko's sister after him would seem cooler if this wasn't the only episode where we've had any idea he even has a sister. I liked Zuko's monologue, blunt though it was, about him comparing himself to her, noting that he had to fight for everything, but that it had made him strong. Zuko started out as a one-note villain and has slowly become one of the most multi-dimensional and tragic figures in the series.

But overall, this felt less like the culmination of a great journey and more like a weird anti-climax, with a deus ex machina device introduced at the last minute, and other hastily deposited plot points having less impact than they should, even apart from the fish thing or the disappointing nature of Aang's water-beast. It's nice to see Katara become a master (it feels quick, but whatever), and to see the emotional toll of all of this on Aang, Katara, Sokka, Zuko, and even the head of the Northern Tribe, but on the whole, this finale wasn't as satisfying as I'd hoped.

8.8/10. Maybe, just maybe, this is Avatar turning the corner. Or maybe I'm just starting get wrapped up in the awesome mythos of the show. I could be biased by Dave Filoni's involvement, but it feels like there's a lot of very positive Star Wars influence here -- the idea of a young kid with powers he doesn't understand trying to fight against an evil empire that controls the world, while attempting to recapture the powers and spirit of a lost age. I've been conditioned for that sort of thing to appeal to me, as the characters settle a bit, and I get more used to the animation style, Avatar is starting to cast its spell on me.

To the point, the opening sequence where our heroes and Prince Zuko try to run Commander Zhao's blockade is pretty much just empty action, and yet the flaming balls of fire in the sky, Appa ducking and dodging, the smoke billowing out of the back of Prince Zuko's ship, were all pretty stunning images that made for an exciting set piece. The show's started to find a balance of the cool action it's been capable of from early on and the mythos and worldbuilding that are its greatest asset.

There's also some clever writing at play once they get to crescent island. I love the notion of the once noble monks who lost hope and kowtowed the the Fire Nation, but there being one true believer who's willing to go against his brothers for the Avatar. And even the video game-esque plot obstacle of needing to open the giant door was fairly clever. The whole lamp oil plan seemed like kind of a cheat, but then using it as a fakeout to get the Fire Monks to open the door by convincing them Aang's in there and then sneaking in when they do is a very nice way to go about it. Even though the fight, including the renewed presence of Commander Zhao, is cool but a little convenient to getting Aang into the room with Roku by himself, it's a nice progression of events.

Once he gets in there and talks to Roku, things slow down a bit. There's nothing especially novel about Roku's reveals -- there's a big event coming up that will make the bad guy even stronger, it's how he got his powers immediately, and you have to get strong really fast to beat him. That's pretty standard fantasy epic stuff. But still, the comet, the Fire Lord, and the guidance of a voice from the beyond work well enough as hints toward the future, something to direct the trajectory of the series that it works. And Aang coming out as Avatar Roku and destroying the temple had a pretty epic feel in and of itself, something eventful and symbolic of the old era, the era of Roku ending, and a new era beginning.

Overall, these past two episodes have hopefully been the show finding it's groove. They've been exciting and compelling and further developed the contours of the show's world.

[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.

[6.2/10] I’m not the first person to suggest that The Walking Dead has exhausted itself creatively. Eight years in, almost any show is going to have trouble feeling vibrant and fresh. But what’s conspicuous about “The Lost and the Plunderers” is how clearly it evinces the sense of a late era version of this show -- a show that’s always tried to aim a bit higher than its grindhouse roots -- that’s running out of meaningful things to say.

The current topic du jour is war, or more broadly, the seemingly unending cycle of killing that’s taken hold since Rick & Company (which may be, if Simon is to be believed, the official name for our protagonists’ group) first started clashing with the Saviors. And this episode is fixated on the question of whether anything short of one side wiping out the other can put a stop to this conflict, or if painful losses and hurt feelings and desire for revenge and vindication will perpetuate it forever.

And hey, that’s not a bad topic for The Walking Dead to cover. Most zombie-related works focus on the fall of society. TWD’s status as a venerable show gives it the longer runway to dig into how a society is built back up from the rubble. Those efforts would inevitably involve growing pains and lives lost, as different people with different ideas about what the future should look like come into conflict with one another. So now the show has the chance to do some Deadwood-esque thematic work about both the uglier side and the brighter ideals of nation-building.

That seems to be what The Walking Dead has been going for over the last couple of seasons, giving us Rick & Company, the Saviors, the Hilltoppers, Oceanside, the Kingdom, the “Garbage People”, and others as different exemplars of how society could be organized and how viewpoints clash. Those philosophical clashes turn into physical ones, and “The Lost and the Plunderers” seems to be asking whether that perpetual conflict can ever be resolved into something approaching peace and stability.

Its answer seems to be firmly in the negative. Rick holds Negan responsible, if not for Carl’s death than for the death of too many of his friends and allies, to ever just let things stand. Negan holds Rick responsible for the continued struggle, telling Rick that if he’d just gone along with the Saviors’ program, none of this would have happened. And pricks like Simon are too proud not to extract their revenge on the people who’ve disrespect him, when killing is always the easier option for the guy holding all the guns.

I doubt The Walking Dead will stick with that answer. The show has responded to accusations of being overly bleak in recent years with episodes that trend more toward the optimistic, even in the face of the grisly day-to-day of its premise. But the bigger problem is that when the show tries to dramatize these ideas in actual scenes and encounters, it just feels dull and repetitive.

The episode nominally chops the episode up into different people’s points of view, replete with title cards announcing which character the audience should focus on. But in practice, the results aren’t much different from the show’s usual approach, jumping from story to story within a given episode.

Sure, we get to see Michonne’s efforts to stamp out the blaze on Carl’s favorite gazebo while zombie slowly overtake it. (File under: “sentences I never thought I’d write in a review.”) Simon gets to a little extra development as a character with his own take on things. And the title cards put a band-aid over the “we’re going to check-in with Oceanside for a while despite having only a tenuous thematic connection to the other stuff going on in this episode” issue.

But man, it’s hard to care about the show’s tedious treadmill of ethical dilemmas at this point, especially when they’re delivered with the show’s typical blunt dialogue. Negan gets to give another speech about how his brand of “saving” people is hard, but is still the better way. Enid gets to give a speech about it being a choice whether you keep killing or not. And Rick gets to have another clunky back-and-forth with Negan over who’s going to kill whom and why.

And then there’s Jadis, the Vulcan-looking head of the Junkyardigans. “The Lost and the Plunderers” means to give her a bit of the spotlight and some backstory. We see snippets of how the events of this episode affect her with a heavy dose of non-linear editing. Those events include some baffling decisions – like Rick’s choice to go back to get assistance from her and her tribe after they’ve double-crossed him and his pals twice – and the timeline jumps quickly become confusing.

But there’s merit in what the episode is attempting there. The setup of Jadis luring her zombified compatriots into a garbage-grinder are contrived, but the images are potent. The flashbacks lay things on a little too thick, but there’s pathos in Jadis having to watching her dead friends look into her eyes as they’re ground into slurry. The show’s reach exceeds its grasp when it shows that slurry pouring over a non-representational painting Jadis created -- an obvious visual metaphor for this conflict obscuring the beauty of the world -- but it’s at least going for something with all this, however ham-handedly.

I’m just tired: tired of this ongoing Negan plot, tired of the show running in place rather than moving forward, and most of all tired of getting the same reheated moral ruminations over and over again.

And I love moral ruminations! One of the best things about zombie films and books and T.V. shows is that they force the viewer to confront what parts of ourselves and our values we hold onto in the face of a mortal threat and in the absence of those forces of civilization that keep our lesser impulses in check.

But The Walking Dead has been chewing on these same moral questions for nearly eight years now, and it’s all out of tricks at this point. The promise of this Savior-centric story arc was being able to expand on the idea of whether community can exist at the end of the world, to the question of whether different communities can co-exist within it. And yet here, in the back half of a season that’s drawing its central conflict further and further out, that blood-stained navel gazing can’t help but feel dull and sparkless.

Carl hoped for a better world. Rick and Negan both want to bring it about but have very different ideas about how to do it. And bystanders, like the Junkyardigans and the denizens of Oceanside, just want to live their lives, while finding themselves inevitably pulled into this clash of civilizations. The resulting war becomes all-encompassing, and the death of a child, a child whose end became certain after he went out trying to help someone rather than prepare for battle, seems more like an accelerant than a wake-up call for either his real dad or the stubble-faced strongman who seemed to want to play that role.

There’s interesting themes to extract from that, and by god, The Walking Dead tries. But you can only watch characters have those same damn debates, with the same sort of faux-high-minded dialogue, in a wash of greens and grays and the same set of mournful looks, before you start to ask what else the show has to offer.

The question of whether it’s okay, let alone wise, to kill and fight in the name of a greater good, or whether to try to sue for peace, to work something out, is a worthy one that shows like The Walking Dead are well-positioned to address. You just can’t keep trying to address it in the same basic way, with the latest death reduced to set dressing, until the question has been ground into zombie dust.

As it rounds out its eighth year on the air, The Walking Dead can’t keep having these same conversations, the same ethical arguments, without giving us something more or something different, or else the only cycle that seems impossible to break is the one where a television show can’t stop repeating itself.

[7.8/10] The eternal struggle of The Walking Dead is remarkably consistent. It’s unhurried pace often gives it time to explore its characters, to delve deeply into some theme of the week and really chew on it rather than just drive by it. Sure, some episodes are just epic climaxes or piece-moving adventures, but for the most part, even the worst episodes of the show have something they’re trying to say, some notion they’re trying to find the bottom of.

But the show is almost impressively bad at crafting the sort of dialogue for their characters that grounds those explorations in something that feels like real human interaction and experience. There’s various ways around that. Some folks on the show, like Lennie James and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, are good enough performers that they can spit out pretty much anything you give them and have it sound convincing despite the larger-than-life qualities brought to bear. And others, like Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride, are more laconic, which helps, but also so good at the nonverbal side of acting, of communicating the experience of the moment in other ways, that it covers for other flaws in the show.

And then there’s Eugene, who has such a particular flavor of verbiage that it sort of loops back around on the ridiculousness and covers for some of the show’s failings. I like Eugene’s cadence and use of language. He’s an outsized character, or at least one of the ones that cuts away from the veneer of realism the series tries to maintain, but he adds distinctiveness to the stew of different people in various shades of muddy beige and faded green that populates the show.

But here, when they turn a solid chunk of the episode over to him and fill it with nothing but speechifying -- from him, from Negan, from pretty much everyone who trots out on screen save for the traditionally terse Daryl -- it becomes too much. A little ridiculousness, skilfully deployed, can add a certain texture to your world, but overdo it and all you do is undercut the ability to take your serious stuff seriously.

Which is a shame because there’s a solid theme to “Time for After.” It comes down to the question of whether you act or whether you wait, a very Hamlet sort of consideration for the show and it’s characters.

Eugene is the biggest focus of that. The episode spends tons of time with him struggling with whether he should side with his old friends from Alexandria and join Dwight in collaborating with them, or whether he should stay with Negan, the cruel man who he thinks gives him the best chance of survival, or is at least the path of least resistance for the moment. The episode isn’t subtle about that internal conflict, but it’s a good throughline that ties into what we’ve already seen from him.

At the same time, the crew of Michonne, Rosita, Daryl, and Tara continue their clumsily-established mission from the last episode, now joined by Morgan (whom we see for the first time since he stormed off from Jesus). They too are struggling with a big question of whether they should strike now, ram a truck into the sanctuary so as to let the walkers in, or follow the original plan, however impatient they may feel, and let the Saviors starve and rot until they’re willing to surrender on the good guys’ terms.

Philosophically it’s an interesting question. The script injects the sense that this isn’t necessarily a question of strategy for a good contingent of our heroes. For many of them it’s a sense of wanting revenge, of not being able to sit idly by and wait for justice to happen even if it’s what everyone agreed to. For others, it’s a concern of acting rashly, or achieving their goals but taking too many innocent lives in the process, or even just questioning whether this is Something We Do, like the show’s mulled over and over again this season. But there’s legitimate questions of strategy too: whether proud Negan would really surrenders, whether they can win the fight without the Kingdom fighters, whether one ragtag group with speakers could spoil the whole deal,

The problem is that The Walking Dead does what it always does, even when it has an interesting idea. It weighs that idea down with grand, writerly oratories about what all this means where characters announce their emotional states. And when you have an actor like Danai Gurira, you can half pull it off. And when you have someone who can use non-verbal cues like Norman Reedus, you can get away with minimal syllable clichés and make it work. But when you get speech after speech after speech, especially in ways that feel like the show’s killing time before the mid-season finale, it’s easy to just tune it out after a while, particularly in a episode like “Time After” that’s chock full of them.

There’s fewer speeches in Rick’s part of this installment, which bookends the episode. He’s still imprisoned by The Scavengers (who get a name on-screen now) but escapes in close to the least plausible way imaginable. I’m not one to slate The Walking Dead too hard for its lack of plausibility. It’s already a series about the dead coming back to life, and its plot mechanics serve the story rather than the other way around. That’s pretty much what the show’s always been, and it’s a choice I can respect even if it makes me roll my eyes now and then.

But man, Rick managing to not only save his own bacon when tied up and forced to fight against Peggy Olsen’s patented Walker-On-A-Stick, but then convince the Head Scavenger to join his fight is just absurd and insane. Why he thinks he can trust The Scavengers in the first place is loony, but the whole sequence just screams “we needed to keep Rick out of the way for a while because of other things happening in the story, and this is something for him to do” rather than an organic part of the story.

Still, the part of “Time for After” that is organic is Eugene’s vacillating between his impulses to do “right” even as he resists the definition of that terms, and his impulse for obsequious self-preservation that has kept him “vertical when so many have gone horizontal.” There’s a series of one-on-one’s between Eugene and his friends and acquaintances here: Dwight, Dr. Gabriel, one of Negan’s wives, and Negan himself. Each one seems to push him one direction, only for Eugene to struggle to justify his course of action.

It’s solid material. Josh McDermitt does a nice job of showing Eugene ostensibly correcting or rebuking others who try to nudge him toward doing that right thing, while clearly trying to convince himself that what he’s doing is okay. He makes excuses, he sets limitations on himself, he tries to believe that he’s actually saving more people by aligning with his captors.

The episode does well to convey much of this visually too. When Eugene sits by Gabriel’s bedside, the scene is framed with the light bursting in through a window, giving it the sense of a religious painting where a divine presence seeps in. When Dwight has Eugene at gunpoint, Eugene lingers on one side of the screen while Dwight is positioned in a different perspective on the other, communicating the sense in which Dwight is trying to move Eugene when he feels like he has nowhere to go.

And even the big conversation with Negan has Eugene seeming small in the background, while he see Negan loom large in the foreground, his bat in particular jutting out, signifying the way Eugene feels powerless in the face of this larger-than-life man, and how the threat of violence keeps him line. Even when the show can’t muster the dialogue to match its lofty goals, it finds the visual language to say much of what it’s trying to say.

Because of that, and the strength of many of the ideas “Time for After” is playing around with, it’s a still an above-average episode for The Walking Dead, one that ends with Eugene nigh-literally unable to keep down his own self-directed B.S. But like much of TWD the force of that is weakened by how the show piles on, offers speech after speech after speech to hammer the point home, rather than just letting it happen naturally. The Walking Dead has always had a certain operatic bombast despite its nominally realistic take on the zombie genre, but when it goes for those big, blunt monologues, it hurts, rather than helps, the points it spends so many words trying to make.

[9.1/10] “A war of all against all.” That is how political philosopher Thomas Hobbes described the “state of nature” of man without government, without rule. He imagined a life that was “nasty, brutish, and short” and posited that people needed a Leviathan, the force of the government, to enforce laws, and have people give up certain freedoms as the price for avoiding such an unenviable way to live.

In Negan’s mind, he is that Leviathan. The last time The Walking Dead interrogated Negan’s moral philosophy, it left it somewhat ambiguous how Negan saw himself, whether he really believed that his brutal ways were for the greater good, or whether he was just spinning propaganda to justify the comparatively lavish and carefree lifestyle he gets to enjoy while others toil.

“The Big Scary U” is much less ambiguous. There is a certain sense that Negan may be deluding himself, offering rationalizations and eliding the darker or more self-serving side of the choices he’s made, but it becomes clear that he is a true believer, someone who thinks that he’s doing what needs to be done.

The episode explores that with one of the oldest tropes in the book -- two characters, trapped in a room together, deciding to find common ground and reflect on their lives, shared enmity, and personal truths. (Think “Fly” from fellow AMC stablemate Breaking Bad.) “The Big Scary U” catches up with Negan and Father Gabriel, trapped in a temporary building and surrounded by walkers after the events of the premiere.

In those close, perilous quarters, Gabriel asks for Negan’s confession. A brief flashback signifies (in TWD’s typically lofty tones) that Gabriel no longer fears death; he just fears a meaningless death. And in the present, he reasons that maybe the reason he’s survived this long, the purpose he’s been in search of, is hear Negan confess and give him absolution.

But Negan declares he has nothing to attone for. He uses the confinement to lay out his philosophy -- that however bad things may seem under his watch, that it’s better than the alternative, and that what came before, and what would come after him, would be much much worse.

“The Big Scary U” seems to suggest that Negan’s right, at least within his own fiefdom. When the episode isn’t centered on Negan and Gabriel’s heart-to-heart, it’s in the heart of The Sanctuary, where all of Negan’s lieutenants are scrambling to figure out what to do in the absence and possible demise of their leader, and backbiting, disagreement, and recriminations come to a head.

Regina wants to sacrifice the workers to make an escape. Eugene declares that it will never work. Gavin declares that somebody must be collaborating with Rick & Co. given how things went down. Dwight deflects and is ready to read the riot act to whomever needs to hear it. And Simon, who seems to be the closest thing to a second-in-command ready to take over, tries to hold court.

It’s fascinating watching the various forces that Negan has amassed slowly turn on one another, ally with one another, and generally seem lost without him there to guide them. Negan has inculcated a need for a dictator, for an unquestioned leader who can whip people into shape. As soon as the man and his baseball bat are gone, things start deteriorating, with workers staging the beginnings of a revolt, the remaining leaders not knowing what to do, and the situation getting volatile quickly.

But The Walking Dead plays at least a little coy about whether this really is the better alternative, or whether this is simply the world Negan created. It’s easy for Negan to pontificate and preen with Gabriel about how things would fall apart without him, that his presence is necessary to bring order and security, but what if that’s just true for the little ecosystem that Negan has overseen? What if he’s built things to be that way, rather than that things have to be that way.

Rick certainly seems to think there’s another way, even if Daryl remains skeptical and more Negan-like himself by the minute. “The Big Scary U” comes down to, as so many TWD episodes do, to the question of whether it’s okay to kill someone, “the right person,” in order to achieve some sort of greater good. And it positions all its major characters on different sides of the question.

Daryl has turned single-minded and unbothered by the potential loss of life in taking out The Saviors, even if it means that the innocent workers at The Sanctuary perish in the process. Rick pushes back against him, wanting to stick to the plan, even if the fighters from The Kingdom are killed, because he doesn’t want to take innocent lives. Negan believes in killing people, even innocent people, if it serves a greater cause, while Gabriel believes in saving people, even bad people like Gregory, if it serves a higher power. And Gregory himself has no scruples, no principles, one way or another, only caring to keep himself alive whatever that may require.

Negan and Gabriel also have to keep themselves alive, as the walkers slowly but surely start to break through the meager walls and barriers separating them and the two morsels inside. That’s mainly a plot device to ensure that Negan and Gabriel can’t just keep talking forever (thank heaven) but it at least creates some urgency and sense of place in the midst of what is basically a miniature stage show starring these two men.

It’s a real showcase for Jeffrey Dean Morgan in particular. Let’s face it; Negan is a pretty ridiculous character. Some of that is intentional, with the persona being meant to project a certain amount of intimidating bombast. But some of it is just an inherent part of putting such an outsized figure into a nominally down-to-earth take on the zombie genre. Nevertheless, Morgan has the chops to go big and go small as the situation requires, and make it convincing in either guise.

That’s why his pronouncements about “saving” people, his pretzel logic about the difference between “killing the right people” and “letting your people get killed” (blame-shifting logic which Daryl starts to share), don’t sound as insane as they might here. There is a conviction in Morgan’s voice when he delivers those lines, a certainty in the truth of them that informs the character’s perspective and makes it feel true to who Negan is, even if the audience isn’t supposed to take it as true generally.

But we also winces just enough when confronted about his “wives” and grimaces through his excuse that they “made a choice.” His deflection about the state of his “workers” functions as an internalized dismissal of any economy having “winners and loser.” And he even breaks down, such as a proud guy like Negan can, and admits the only time he was “weak” was when he could not put his “real wife” down after she turned. Like much of the show, it’s a little too neat as informative backstory, but the actor makes it work.

It works because Negan believes it. He believes that killing people to create order, that harshness can make people and civilizations stronger, that engendering submission, even in lethal terms, can save lives. There’s a twisted worldview at the heart of Negan’s philosophies on governance and leadership, ones with antecedents across history, but for all the metaphysical and ethical conversations at play here, it’s the truth of this view in his eyes, the palpable sense of belief from Negan as he champions the need for that Leviathan, that makes the villain more than a bunch of cruel deaths and priapic boasts. He represents the worse angels of our nature, the ones that say we need to be cowed less we tear one another apart, and the hints that he may be right, at least for the part of this world he’s overseen, makes him all the more terrifying.

Besides last week's, this is my favorite episode this season. I missed Negan so goddamn much. Listening to him talking about his wife and seeing him, damn, that's his weak spot. It was great.

I loved the Negan-Gabriel interactions so damn much. It had me engaged the entire time, glued to the screen. The more Negan, the better the episode is.

Getting to see the human side of Negan was fantastic. JDM was outstanding in the meeting. The scene when Simon was talking and he just kept on slamming Lucille on the table was so intense and menacing. It was really crazy. He really cares about people. And I've got to say it, killing people in the right time to save others, he's got a point in there, and he's fucking right about it.

I love how this episode was a turning point of who the bad guys are. We've always sided with Rick and his people but it was the same for Negan: re-made yourself to survive or die. It was the same for everyone and I loved how they depicted it this episode. I loved that even though they show Negan as a psychopath, he wants to protect the workers.

I saw the Daryl-Rick fight coming long ago, but I enjoyed it, nevertheless. In all honesty, I hope there's more moral conflict between them.

Is Gavin's "Jesus Christ" while walking out the door his new catchphrase? I loved it. It's exactly the same way I would've reacted, lol.

That ending, though. Could Gabriel have been bitten before and that's why he confessed to Negan? It would make sense considering his intro monologue. That would be an interesting twist but I guess it's simpler than that. He simply got sick because of the guts, even Negan said he knew people who got sick because of it.

In a world with Negan and I choose to hate Gregory. That asshole only got up when he heard the word sorghum.

"I wear a leather jacket, I have Lucille, and my nutsack is made steel". Gotta love Negan.

And after all the freaking garbage people have done and Rick goes straight up to them, probably to show them the photos he took of the Saviors? Screw them.

A helicopter! WTF? Own a helicopter, win the war.

[6.5/10] You are never going to fully get away from “Is it right to kill?” when you’re telling a zombie apocalypse story. Part of the inherent trappings of the genre is forcing people to make life and death decisions outside the normal day-to-day. That’s part of what makes undead movies and T.V. shows both thrilling and thought-provoking, putting the viewer in the shoes of the characters and letting them wonder whether they would be saints or slayers in such a state of nature.

But my god, The Walking Dead has been exploring these issues for seven-going-on-eight seasons at this point, and while it hasn’t dug into every possible permutation of them, it’s come close. There’s some benefit to putting new characters into those situations, to have them vacillate between Heaven and Hell and try to figure out what the right way to life in these harsh environs is. But you can only lean into this sort of “that’s not who we are” back-and-forth for so long on a television show before it starts to become rote, no matter how relevant it may be.

“The Damned” tries to make up for how many times it pushes that well-worn button by turning most of the episode into an endless cavalcade of military assaults, firefights, and action. Director Rosemary Rodriguez and editor Evan Schrodek do a nice job of making the images on the screen visually compelling even if the episode’s dialogue and thematic material is lacking.

The episode balances five major escapades all centered around the same multi-pronged attack by the coalition of the Alexandrians, the Hilltoppers, and the Kingdom. It features Aaron leading a frontal assault against one Savior compound. It has Rick and Daryl sneaking in the back of the same compound in search of guns. It has Carol and Ezekiel hunting down one of Negan’s lieutenants who use a grenade to escape their initial attack and threatens to warn the others of what’s coming. It has Jesus and Tara executing a raid on the same communications building where our heroes first encountered a collection of Saviors, and it has Morgan stalking his way through the same building, running support.

That’s a lot for one episode to juggle, and while it feels overstuffed in terms of storylines at times, it never feels out of sync visually. Schrodek does well at jumping from one setting to another to create a sense of continuity with these sequences. And Rodriguez captures the organized chaos of these attacks happening all at once, whether in the form of the bullet-trading from Aaron (whose boyfriend is potentially a casualty), to the cold and methodical killings from Morgan, to the quieter but ultimately more raw encounter between Rick and an enemy. Given the repetitive notes the episode continues to hit, some of these events feel empty in purpose, but they’re always compelling when conveying the heart-pumping, fraught qualities of these skirmishes.

The problem is that the skirmishes lead to more of the usual dilemmas that our heroes have confronted time and time again to diminishing results. The most obvious of these happens when Tara and Jesus, mid-invasion, come across a Savior with his hands up and his pants wet, having locked himself in a closet. Tara and Jesus argue about what to do with him, with the former arguing that he could be a threat and wanting to take him out and the latter buying his sob story and wanting to spare him given his unarmed, hands-up state. I’m sure there’s some intended social commentary there, particularly that last part, but it’s trite for the show at this point, and it doesn’t help when the Savior uses the duo’s indecision to take Jesus’s gun and hold him hostage.

Naturally, the situation works out for Jesus and Tara, and Jesus ties the guy up rather than kill him after their escape, but not before plenty more back and forths about what separates their group from Negan’s and whether they should violate their principles to end this now. It’s the same debate we’ve seen a million times, with nothing new to add, beyond the idea that there’s some sort of little-mentioned disagreement between Rick and Maggie on this issue that will decide what happens when Jesus and Tara try this on a larger scale with a collection of Savior hostages from the compound.

The episode also dips into the same sort of material with Rick’s hunt for guns in a different Savior compound. He gets into a knock-down-drag-out brawl with a Savior on the top floor, chokes him out, and them improbably impales him on a nearby wall protrusion. This is pretty standard combat and mayhem for The Walking Dead at this point, but the twist comes when Rick takes a key off the guy and uses it to walk into a locked room where he expects to find a cache of guns. Instead, he finds a sleeping baby.

In fairness, Andrew Lincoln does a great job of selling the moment, with the sort of disbelief and denial that Rick, a father to his own little girl, would have to this sight, that could pierce through his determined demeanor and make him realize the horror of taking another parent away from their child. But something about the moment feels unearned for the show, like a cheap trick to remind us that the Saviors, craven as they are, are still human beings, rather than something that’s developed from story or character as with Dwight or other characters we’ve gotten glimpses of in The Sanctuary.

Rick being held at gunpoint by someone he met back in Atlanta, now aligned with The Saviors, has some promise for a “how far we’ve come” reflection, but even that ends on another cheesy cliffhanger and bit of schmuck bait for the show. As I’ve said before, I’m not very interested in the battle for Rick’s soul anymore, and this tack to bring more humanity into his pragmatism does little to change that.

“The Damned” also plays the same game with Morgan to a certain extent. He is still in something of a fog and a rage after what happened with his surrogate son last season, and has turned into a cold killing machine. As much as his story hits the same beats that we’ve been over with umpteen characters at this point, it’s still compelling because Lennie James is a good enough actor to carry it. Like Rick, he’s been with the show from the beginning, but unlike Rick, we haven’t seen enough of him to have watched him go through this transformation and untransformation and retransformation several times over, so there’s still some juice left in the idea.

That said, the show can’t help depositing in on-the-nose flashbacks to signify what Morgan is feeling when the situation as depicted and James’s performance tells the audience all it needs to know. He, like Rick, nearly kills someone he knows from before because of the fog of war and his discombobulated mindset, until he’s stopped via the same moral thought experiment Jesus and Tara are engaging in. Exploring Morgan experiencing his trauma anew after things went wrong last season is a worth goal, but delivering it in these terms is a misstep.

Even the one storyline in the episode that doesn’t play to the same “we are not them” business is a repeat. Ezekiel boasts to his charges about their undoubted success in their mission, while Carol offers skeptical glances and reserved but perturbed questions. The thrust of this plot is Ezekiel dropping his act to Carol for a minute and admitting that he’s trying to pump his people up, encourage them loudly and publicly even if he has his own doubts so that they don’t visualize failure. We played this game already when they first met, and putting it in a combat setting doesn’t change much, despite some nice work from Melissa McBride and Khary Payton.

I can tell you as a committed Simpsons fan that if any show goes on long enough, it’s inevitably going to start repeating itself. You can only come up with so many novel situations, so many new reactions, before you start remixing old ideas. But this isn’t just a familiar beat reemerging in an unfamiliar form. It’s the same, essential zombie apocalypse question being asked and answered over and over and over again. It’s natural, maybe even necessary, to wonder what the ethical line is in the face of a ruthless, mortal threat, but this is the hundredth mortal threat the survivors of The Walking Dead have faced, and until the show finds new ways to explore that idea, it’s just going to feel like old hat, no matter who’s questioning whom and whether to kill this week.

[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.

That ending scene with Dwight was amazing too. Dwight has become one of my favourite characters and I don't want him to be a goner. "Get on your knees". It literally gave me the chills. I really found this delivery really hot. For a sec there I thought he was about to ask him the three questions. But no one wants to be Negan more than Rick. Moreover, the symbolism was perfect. Rick subduing Dwight the same way Negan suppressed him in the premiere and similar to the way Gareth was put down.

This episode really emphasized Negan's persuasion. I love to see him interact with strong survivors like Daryl and Sasha, whom he can't break easily. Trying to turn an enemy into playing his own game and towards his own goals shows how methodic he is and how scary intelligent it is.

One thing that bugged me during the episode were Maggie's bits. I know she's British but her accent was off this episode. It kinda didn't feel right at all. I'm not from Georgia so I can't judge properly,but it sounded a little bit off. Btw, loved her line "He hasn't killed one before. He's learning". I'm sure the people at the Hilltop will remember that. So Gregory certainly considered killing Maggie despite not having ever killed any walker? That guy's brain is pudding.

All Out War. And next episode looks absolutely insane. Can't believe it's almost over. One episode to go and the war is coming. I'm sad Sasha's gonna get Holly'ed. I honestly need to see Negan and Jadis together and he flips out the moment she speaks.

[8.9/10] One of the questions The Walking Dead has been interrogating from the beginning of its run is whether the end of the world changes people, or just reveals what we truly are. Most notably with Shane, the show has played around with the idea that the end of civilization, the lack of rules and orders to keep people in line, forces some to be different, turning them into changed people. But for others, it just gives license for them to be who they were the whole time.

The centrality of that question to “Hostiles and Calamities” is part of the subtle way in which The Walking Dead pays tribute to its network-mate Breaking Bad in the episode. Fans of Vince Gilligan’s seminal drama know the significance of a character hanging onto a cigarette with a loved one’s lipstick on it. We’re quite familiar with the notion of a former science teacher finding himself enjoying the spoils and status of his talents when recognized, producing poisons, puffing himself up, and taking to his new role a little too easily. Most of all, Breaking Bad watchers know the exploration of whether changed circumstances change a person or simply let the beast out of the cage.

But despite those similarities, Eugene is not Walter White, and Dwight is not Jesse Pinkman. The key epiphany for Eugene in “Hostiles and Calamities” is that he is a follower, a coward, someone who knows what will keep him safe, and accepts the path of least resistance in that regard despite the people who will be misled, hurt, or even killed in the process. If there were only a handful of qualities that defined Walter White, it was his need for control, his need for recognition, and his blithe self-denial about his own motivations. By contrast, Eugene knows exactly who he is and the reasons, however shameful, that he does what he does -- kowtow to whoever has the courage and boldness to be in control.

So when he finds himself enmeshed in Negan’s machine, he is both afraid and in awe. The episode plays on the expectation that Eugene will be broken the same way that Daryl was, starved and isolated into compliance. But The Saviors are smarter than that, and quickly see that someone as weak-willed as Eugene is more likely to be moved by carrot than by stick. He exults when he sees a refrigerator of food just for him. He is taken aback by the living space he realizes is to be his own. When he hears “Easy Street,” it’s not the sign of his torturers arriving, but the symbol of the creature comforts he will get to enjoy for the first time since the world fell.

And, like Walt, he changes. Initially Eugene is tentative and tries to be moral. He is reluctant to take anything made by Negan’s workers rather than scavenged. When Negan rewards him for a walker-smelting idea with a visit from a few of his “wives,” Eugene treats them with respect, resisting their attempts at physical interaction because he knows they’re not there of their own volition. While his motives may be a bit mixed, he’s only willing to make a poison pill for humanitarian reasons.

But slowly but surely he settles into his new surroundings. Rather than waiting in line for the tools he need, he turns on that Savior entitlement, dressing down the point-keeper and taking what he wants (including a stuffed animal that, true to form, he gives a silly name). He begins to enjoy those creature comforts, indulge the attentions of those “wives” and give in to the privileged position in which he’s been placed. He is familiar, but seems different than the Eugene we’ve gotten to know over the past few years.

Dwight is the inverse of Eugene here. While we’ve known Eugene as a kind-hearted, if misguided individual, slowly being tempted by what The Saviors have to offer, we’ve known Dwight as a bad guy, one who seems to buy into the cruelty of his position, only now getting wisps of the idea that he wasn’t always this way, and that he’s having his doubts and reservations.

In that way, maybe that lipstick-ringed cigarette is a hint that there is some of Jesse Pinkman in him. Perhaps Dwight had, and has, a moral compass, one that gives him pause about the deaths that have come at his hands. He too may be under the thumb of a tyrant, one who manipulates him, uses the woman he loves against him, and makes him a party to things he wants no part of, but eventually make stains on his soul that aren’t so easy to wash off.

The thrust of his storyline suggests that he was not always this way, and he is starting to remember that. The chief reminder is his wife, Sherry, who it turns out was the one who freed Daryl. It’s an obvious device, and a bit overly sentimental, but her letter to him, read in voiceover, underscores that this life is something Dwight didn’t want, that it was a last resort he and Sherry paid dearly for. The glimpse we had of him in his first interactions with Daryl don’t paint a pretty picture, but there’s the notion that under different circumstances, Dwight might have been a decent person, and with Sherry’s memory burning within him, he might be one again.

But Daryl also awakened something in him. When Dwight goes out in search of Sherry, he’s wearing Daryl’s vest, carrying Daryl’s crossbow, riding a motorcycle. As the shot where he’s reflected in a pool of Fat Joey’s blood suggests, he is a dark mirror of Daryl here. Dwight may have been a burnout going nowhere like Daryl was, one with the misfortune of ending up attached to someone more like Merle than like Rick in the end.

Daryl represents something for him -- the idea that it doesn’t have to be this way. So much of Negan’s philosophy, his method of molding people to his will, is by convincing them that there are only two choices: you either submit or you die. That’s the lesson of the (frankly kind of ridiculous) moment where he throws the doctor into the furnace. But Dwight threw that doctor to the wolves, ostensibly not just to cast suspicion away from himself, but because of the doctor’s embrace of that philosophy, of his statement that Sherry was too “tender-hearted” to last. Dwight is beginning to have doubts about who he is, about who he’s become, in the embrace of The Saviors, and once more, he seems on the precipice of resisting and standing up as Daryl did.

Eugene, however, has the opposite reaction to these events. Witnessing the doctor being so brutally (if ridiculously) disposed of is not a moment of pause for him to contemplate what he’s become and what he’s a part of; it’s a confirmation that he fears that result, that he, unlike Daryl, can be cowed. He sniffs out the assassination plot of the wives who told him those poison pills were for assisted suicide and shuts them down, acknowledging that he is too afraid, too comfortable, too meant for this to do anything but accept his face and the rule of the man who dictates it. Despite Eugene’s typical florid and boastful proclamations that he was self-sufficient to Abraham, he has always been someone incapable of looking after himself, lying and doing what was necessary to attach himself to those who could protect him, whether it’s Abraham, Rick, or Negan.

Dwight seems to be in a state of uncertainty, but Eugene is clear-eyed. He tells his captor without hectoring or pressure that he is Negan, that he was Negan before he even met the acid-tongued head of this operation, and deep down he knew it. He has no illusions when he puts on that black jacket, surveys the enactment of his plans, and bites down on the gherkin that represents his acceptance of the take what you want ethos of The Saviors. Dwight, like Jesse, is in limbo, unsure whether he can go on with all he’s done or whether it requires something more of him to restore the balance. But Eugene, like Walt, is discovering that his new circumstances have not forced him to become someone else, but instead exposed him for what he truly is, however unpleasant, self-serving, and lacking in moral will that person that may be.

[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.

Melisandre: What do we say to the God of good episodes? Writers: Not today!

I feel like the writers are trying to insult people's intelligence this season.
Writer of the episode said that, and I quote ''Dany kind of forgot about Euron's fleet, but they haven't forgotten about her..'' She forgot. Everyone mentions the fleet 3 scenes before they show up and she was in that scene.
Not only did Dany suddenly suffer from concussion and forgot about them, she also couldn't see the entire fleet while flying high in the air. But tbf, they were hiding behind little rocks so she could not see them. Then Rhaegal gets hit 3 times in 3 tries, but when Dany goes straight at Euron (and does nothing) every arrow misses Drogon, of course. But then they destroy Dany's ships in a single minute, no misses there again, I'm afraid.

There were more bad things in this episode, like how no one else noticed Bronn (with big crossbow) in Winterfell, how no one asked for Arya's and Bran's help against Cersei, how Sam didn't ask Jon why he didn't help him in the last episode when he was lying on the ground, why Cersei didn't just kill everyone in that last scene, etc.. but the thing I hated the most was when characters were about to finally learn about Aegon Targaryen and then the show would just cut away from those scenes. We have time for those drinking games and romantic soap opera parts of the episode, but we cut away from Sansa's, Tyrion's and Arya's reaction about AT. Nice writing and directing.

The only scene that I liked and that reminded me of old GOT (S1-S4) was Tyrion and Varys conversation.. until Varys said that he'll betray Dany. Writers are probably going to kill him in the next episode because of that. In earlier seasons that character would never say his real thoughts, he would lie to Tyrion and then quietly spread info about Jon's true identity everywhere.

This is just.. sad.

There's no denying that this season has seen a downturn in the quality of writing. Characters are not acting like themselves and making choices which don't reflect the journeys they've been on. Ridiculous leaps in logic are made and time compression has suddenly made Westeros feel very small. Spectacle has taken centre stage and it feels like the lack of GRRM's own prose has left the show's writers floundering.

And I've got to be honest, it hasn't bothered me all that much, because it's been so incredibly fun. Say what you will, but season 7 has not been dull for a second. Yes, I've found parts frustrating and rolled my eyes in disbelief at the stupidity on display, but there's something to be said for the pure thrill involved in what's going on screen.

I might prefer things to be slowed down a bit and do miss the insightful dialogue and foreshadowing, but I'm not throwing my toys out of the pram over it as so many seem to be. Even in this state, Game of Thrones remains among the best programmes on television. The finale did make up for some of the seemingly moronic writing choices made in earlier episodes and demonstrated that it can still make me care for these characters and fear losing them.

Not perfect and not up to standard, no, but some of the most enjoyable viewing I've had this year.

This episode felt awfully rushed. Episode 3 was amazing, albeit long for what it was; They could've cut some scenes and gave more screen time to other characters, all whilst keeping the exact same impact. Episode 4 and 5 was the opposite, they gave us a baddie that had an immense amount of screen time but packed little to no punch and was gone in a matter of seconds. Another small nitpick with her, although a leader, Kathleen looked immensely well-fed and soft-spoken for someone who just crawled out of a torturous regime wherein they traded apples for people's lives. Bad casting? I think so.

Henry and Sam... where was their screen time? Did Kathleen eat it up? We didn't see enough interactions between the two duos at all. I cried watching episode 3 having had more than enough time to grow attached to the characters, but I didn't have the time to grow attached to Henry or Sam.

I thought the idea of making Sam deaf was fantastic, it wasn't weird or shoe horned in.

TL;DR: They gave too much screen-time to a miss-cast baddie, a slight too much to the couple in episode 3 but very little to Henry and Sam, making their impact significantly less. It's just a good, rushed episode that missed the marks for being a great one.

[8.7/10] One of the great things about Avatar: The Last Airbender was that it was a generational story. Sure, it was a story about what the Aang Gang were doing in the here and now, but it was also a story about what had happened with Katara’s parents and with Zuko’s parents when they were all much younger, and about what had happened with Aang a century ago, and even about what had happened with Avatar Roku and and Fire Lord Azulon. That allowed the show to progress things in the present day, but also give our heroes a sense of place in history, filling in gaps between then and now.

The Legend of Korra is managing to do the same thing, and it’s the benefit that the seventy-year time jump provides. We already know the major events that happened lo’ those many years ago, but the seven-decade skip ahead allows the show to gesture toward Aang’s defeat of a subsequent threat, and to a time when Tenzin and Lynn Beifong were young men and women. If there’s one thing that sets show in Avatarland apart, it’s that these series always use the past to inform the present, and in the process, explore causes and effects.

“And the Winner Is” mostly achieves this in the tension between Tenzin and Lynn. The reveal that there’s a romantic history and bad blood between them adds layers to Tenzin’s dignified stoicism and Lynn’s gruff demeanor. It also gives power to the notion of the two of them setting aside their differences to defend the city from Amon’s threats against the bending championship match.

That match takes up most of the middle portion of the episode. The confrontation between the Fire Ferrets and the Wolf Bats is some of the show’s superb animation coming to the fore. The elemental effects are outstanding, and the sequences tell a nice story of our heroes giving it everything they have and scoring some unexpected points despite the refs clearly being biased in favor of their opponents. (It’s unclear at present whether the payoff comes from the scummy Wolf Bat leader, or more likely, was a ploy by Amon so he could defeat “the best benders in the world” while still leaving The Avatar for Later.)

But the masterstroke of “Winner” is punctuating the moment of defeat and glory and sporting accomplishment with a much more serious encounter. The imagery of fans in the stands slowly donning masks and revealing their arm-tasers amid the fanfare was truly ominous. There’s a cleverness to having electricity-wielders take out a metal-bending defense force. And the way the bad guys slowly neutralize our heroes and make way for Oman was intimidating in the best way.

Naturally, Oman uses the occasion to demonstrate his powers and give a “new world order” speech announcing that the revolution has begun. There’s shades of Syndrome from The Incredibles here, with the idea that technology has allowed non-benders to stand equal with their element-wielding counterparts and that it’s rectifying something unfair. There’s also, naturally, some commentary on the benefits and drawbacks of technology there.

But before we can ruminate too long on the philosophical implications of Oman’s oratory, the incident erupts into a superlative sequence where Korra goes after him and his goons as they attempt to sneak away by dirigible. It calls to mind the many sequences in Batman: The Animated Series where the caped crusader went after The Joker on similar terms. The blocking and animation are superb, with cirque de solei-esque acrobatics in force as Korra struggles to take out her bete noir.

What adds meaning to this fight is that Lynn jumps in to help. Despite her issues with Tenzin and, by extension, The Avatar, she recognizes that Korra’s project is a vital one and risks her own life to fight the Equalists and save Korra’s. It’s adds a nice bit of character to the proceedings which could easily have just gotten by of the coolness of explosions and gravity-defying combat.

All-in-all “Winner” works as a stellar culmination of the first half of this season, combining the pro-bending elements of the story, the Equalist threat, and the generational character dynamics into one tremendous mid-season climax. Excited to see where the show goes from here.

[8.6/10] I have to admit, I am a complete sucker for this sort of thing. I love the novelty of a television show or movie reinterpreting its own story as though it’s a story being told in-Universe. From C-3PO recounting the events of Star Wars to the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi to Arya Stark watching a stage play of the events of Game of Thrones, there’s just something about a story exploring how stories distort and reimagine and reshape real events and people for the sake of poetic license that really works for me.

And it worked for me here! For one thing, I love how meta this whole damn episode is. It’s not the sort of thing you can do too often, or your story becomes a little too much of an ouroboros, but once in a while, it’s a delightful opportunity for comedic reflection. (Though Community made a cottage industry out of it.) I laughed out loud at Sokka talking about the play as the sort of “time-wasting crap” he misses. I really enjoyed the touch that the poster for the show mirrors the cover of the AtLA DVDs. Even just the show being split up into three acts, or Suki noting that Teem Avatar gets beaten a lot, was a nice, self-reflective touch.

I also love the craft of the way the episode turns its story into a stage play. Having Aang be played by a woman on stage, Peter Pan-style, is an inspired move. The attention to detail in how bending was portrayed on the stage – with colorful ribbons and other stagecraft, was very creative. And most importantly, it worked as both a parody of Avatar’s story, of theater conventions, and the way that real events become exaggerated when committed to fiction.

That comes through most in how all of the show’s protagonists are caricatured in the stage version of their lives. Sokka as a guy who cannot stop making meat jokes, Katara as someone who’s always crying and making speeches about hope, and Zuko as someone constantly talking about his honor are mighty fine one-note parodies of our heroes. The dialogue and delivery of the show is hilarious, and it provides a nice opportunity for AtLA to make fun of itself, but also to have its characters make fun of each other, with Toph in particular saying there’s a lot of truth on that stage.

That feeds into the way that the show, cartoonish and outsized though it may be, feeds into everyone’s insecurities about who they are and how others see them. The silliest of these in Sokka crying at the story of Princess Yuweh. It’s a broad moment where she’s talking about having eaten pickled herring, but the magnitude of that event still affects Sokka.

The most heartening of them is Zuko regretting the way he betrayed his Uncle Iroh. As silly as the two are portrayed here, it has enough of a ring of truth that it serves as a reminder to Zuko of one of this greatest regrets. He’s still tortured by what he did, and it’s a nice way to show that even silly or inaccurate art can move us or affect us when it touches on something sensitive in our pasts or personalities. But I love the way Toph reassures him that by staking out his own path and joining Team Avatar, Zuko has redeemed himself with his Uncle even if he doesn’t know it. It calls back nicely to Toph’s conversation with Iroh, and her “sign of affection” for Zuko after telling him that he was all Iroh talked about is a sweet moment all around.

The trickiest of them was Aang being upset by the depiction of Katara and Zuko as romantic in the stage show, with stage-Katara talking about Aang as being nothing more than a little brother. It plays into his concern that he is not masculine enough and that his crush does not see him as anything more than a little kid.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not big on the Aang-Katara shipping business. I never really felt the chemistry between them (save for the moment in the titular Secret Tunnel) and as much as I enjoy the relationship between the two characters, it never really scanned as a believably romantic one, which makes all the teasing and agonizing over Aang’s crush on Katara kind of dull to me.

On the other hand, there’s a realness in their scene together outside the theater. Whether or not they make sense, there’s truth in a young kid having a crush on an older girl and worrying that he is not seen as mature or manly enough to cut the muster. (Hell, it happened with me and my wife!) Aang’s pain and frustration at caring for Katara and his distress when it’s not clear that she returns his feelings, feelings he blocked his charka for, are sympathetic.

But so are Katara’s, who very reasonably says that there are much bigger things going on right now than their romantic feelings, and that she is unsure of how she feels. The heightened environment of being on the brink of war and conflict, is not always the best environment to find your true feelings. As much as the last episode set at ember island devolved into overwrought Dawson’s Creek-style teen angst, this felt realer and believably awkward and painful for both Aang and Katara.

And yet for as funny an episode as this is, and as much as it leans into the character’s feelings about themselves and others, the end turns to the greater task at hand. The depiction of Azula slaying Zuko, and Ozai killing The Avatar, are clearly disquieting to the Aang Gang. The theme of the evening has been the way that even this exaggerated show reflects a truth that can unnerve our heroes. Seeing visions of their own failures and deaths is just as worrisome, evincing a fear that the future these men and women on stage are depicting will have as much truth of the real world in it. It’s a chilling reminder of the magnitude of what’s to come, and the threats that lie ahead. Art, as Shakespeare put it, holds up a mirror to nature, and sometimes the reality of what it reflects can rattle us, in the best and worst ways.

Absolutely shocked that this episode isn't higher up on "best of" lists for the show. "The Beach" is phenomenal, and not just for it's odd, wacky, "let's try something new" tone - it's also a fantastic character study of the show's main antagonists by putting them in the spotlight and giving them a chance to shine. Obviously Zuko is the focus here, specifically centered on his own feelings of isolation and anger that have been festering for so long. It's surprising that Azula of all people is the one to help him get out of it, and while Azula herself remains as deliciously evil as ever it's also nice of her to get some development beyond that as we see just how unable to function in society she actually is, making her character tragic in a way. Both Ty Lee and Mai get important development too, particularly Ty Lee whose feelings of wanting to be noticed finally explain her own willingness to help Azula.

Of course, it helps that this is just a really funny episode overall. Azula trying to woo a boy is hilarious, Zuko and Mai's antics are relatable, heartwarming, and also very funny, and the entire volleyball scene is a laugh riot. And while they aren't in it that much, Team Avatar's encounter with the now revealed Combustion Bender. Amazing stuff all around.

6.9/10. This is a pretty stock story. I was rolling my eyes at Jet from the minute he swung down from the trees as a cutrate Peter Pan with his collection of Lost Boys. There's a fairly hackneyed arc for Sokka where Katara and Aang make fun of him for "trusting his instincts" and leading them into trouble, then of course it's his instincts that save the day when the two of them get hoodwinked by Jet. It's done well enough, even if the bits with Jet flirting with Katara while plays Cassandra about how bad a dude Jet is and no one will believe him feels especially hacky.

Still, the backgrounds and setting of the episode was particularly gorgeous, with the fall colors and vibrant reds contrasting nicely with Aang's robes and Jet's autumn-hued clothing. Their fight up in the trees was a pretty cool setpiece as well, though again the stuttering animation takes some of the oopmh out of it. And I have to admit, I bought into the fake out at the end, and was ready to applaud the show for having the moxie to show the bad guys winning. Still, Sokka managing to Xander it up and find an unorthodox solution by following his instincts, Zeppo-style, is a nice bit of redemption for him despite the stock nature of the conflict.

My only other complaint is that there's something very interesting about the idea of a young adult who's lost his parents due to the Fire Nation's brutality, and is willing to inflict the same level of brutality on the Fire Nation, civilians and all to get his revenge and protect his band of brothers. Instead, the entire focus for Jet is on his ability to smoothtalk and manipulate others, eventually painting him as a fairly one-note villain. There's some thematic depth to the idea behind the character that the episode barely scratches the surface of.

Overall, this one feels like something of a placeholder episode, meant to give a little more depth to Sokka but ending up giving him a stock arc with a pretty obvious trajectory. But it's not without it's charms and it has some quality design work, so it's close to passing grade.

[5.2/10] Notions of reconciliation and mercy are powerful because they invoke the idea that The Walking Dead has been so invested in this season -- that there could be something different, something better, than this endless array of bad blood and killing.

That’s an antidote to the idea that might makes right, that vengeance must be had, and suggests that might can come with grace, that wrongs can be forgiven. For a season founded on the concept of war, to conflicts and alliances and the clash of civilizations, there are worse things to anchor your finale around than the idea that we can break bread with our enemies, and show them kindness when we have every reason to turn them away.

But by god, you have to earn that.

And “Wrath” just doesn't. It tries. It commits. It goes whole hog on these concepts and has character after character reckoning with making a different sort of choice, leaning into a sense of healing, and having the universe reward them for it. Rick spares Negan. Daryl spares Dwight. Gabriel regains his sight, one way or another. Alden gives up the Savior life and wants to help the Hilltop rebuild. Morgan sends Jadis to the Hilltop and seeks the dump as a place to better himself. The Saviors are to be remade as a peaceful community, part of the vaunted larger world.

But it takes every shortcut in the book to get there. Don’t get me wrong, after suffering through what feels like scores of tedious, underfed “extended” episodes, I’m not exactly clamoring for The Walking Dead to bust out ninety minutes of battling and denouement, but at best, at least half of those stories gloss over how the character gets from Point A to Point B to their pleasantries at the finish line.

To some degree, finales should get a little leeway in that regard. These are endings after all. Ideally, the show should have laid the groundwork for everyone’s journeys up until this point, so using the runtime to close out the biggest season-length arcs, while merely putting capstones on other plotlines is forgivable, if not always eminently satisfying. But for a show like The Walking Dead, which has introduced so many characters going through so many different, individual challenges, the whole back half of “Wrath” can’t help but feel like one big drive-by of each story (and that’s not counting the assorted teases for next season).

And my god, that’s before all the speeches. Maybe I would give “Wrath” a little more credit for tying of loose ends in a rushed fashion if it could do so with anything other than a series of undifferentiated, faux-profound oratories stacked on top of one another. Rick gives a speech. Negan gives a speech. Jesus gives a speech. Morgan gives a speech. Daryl gives a speech. Maggie gives a speech. Rick gives another speech (this time with Michonne).

I could even tolerate that tack if there were only some variety! Different characters should have different speech patterns, different rhythms, different verbiage. But everyone in “Wrath” speaks with the same voice, the same stilted, wannabe poetic dialogue, the same saccharine music cues trying to scaffold the emotion those painfully on-the-nose words can muster on their own. You could mix and match half of these speeches and it wouldn’t make much of a difference. It’s The Walking Dead leaning into its worst, most pontificating impulses, and indulging in grand declaration after grand declaration that sputter out of the gate and become exhausting by the end of the episode.

I have to give “Wrath” credit for one thing though. I walked into the episode expecting another epic battle, like the kind we had when Simon stormed the Hilltop. Instead, the show doesn't belabor the lead-up to the inevitable confrontation too much, and the fight itself is almost over before it begins.

There’s a few twists remaining, as Negan baits the hook to lure our heroes (which includes all of the main characters in the same strike force) into his trap, and for a split-second, you believe that the show might go through with at least letting the good guys take some heavy casualties in this conflict.

But then, it turns out that Eugene has had a last minute change of heart, and has sabotaged the bullets he made for the Saviors, Schindler-style. The climax of this 2-season-plus long conflict is not the raucous exchange of bullets, but a couple of ploys and then a fair amount of clean-up. In a show that can and does lean heavy on its action quotient, I appreciate The Walking Dead spending its final hour of this arc focused more on the ploys and choices the characters have made then on the firefights that emerge out of that.

That said, everything feels rushed, a little too perfunctory, and a little too neat. Naturally, Rick & Co. fall right into the trap just as Negan planned (though I do appreciate that the show had Negan double-bluff our heroes, so they don’t seem like complete idiots). Naturally, Eugene’s sabotage goes off without a hitch (or with exactly as many hitches as necessary), and creates the perfect opportunity for him, Gabriel, and Dwight to have their little moments of glory and redemption. Naturally, Alden gets one final shot to prove his loyalty and worth to the Savior-hating Tara, and what do you know, the Oceansiders show up to help defend the Hilltop.

It underlines the ways in which this isn’t just a season finale -- it’s the end of the larger story The Walking Dead has been telling for two and a half years now. That means it feels appropriately final (despite the obvious tease of a giant zombie horde in the distance), but also a little too neat. For an oft-messy show, I suppose I shouldn’t complain if the setups and payoffs are a tad too direct, but it leaves the end results feeling preordained rather than earned victories.

That’s especially true when, of course, this big clash of civilization comes down to Rick and Negan have a one-on-one scuffle. It’s a little tense, but also hard to get past the silliness of this broader conflict being reduced to two stubbly middle-aged guys throwing haymakers at one another. The fight ends when Rick begs for ten seconds of mercy, to give Negan Carl’s vision for the future, and then uses them to slice Negan’s throat with some broken stained glass (in a twist that is a little dumb, but at least nicely set up).

But Rick vows, in another painful, not-so-rousing halftime speech, that he’s going to keep Negan alive (over Maggie’s strenuous, well-acted objections), that this is going to be different, that they are turning over a new leaf as a people and that includes Negan.

It’s an odd choice for this show, but not for the usual reasons. It’s an instance where the episode is running on emotional logic rather than real logic, which is much more the province of, say, Friday Night Lights than The Walking Dead. The latter series tends to stumble more in terms of plot-convenient logic, where characters make confusing, ill-advised, or downright stupid choices so that the story can move along, not because the show’s aiming for particular high-minded bit of sentiment.

But here, we see Rick instructing Siddiq to tend to Negan. We see the other communities allowing the Saviors to start over as a peaceful community. We see almost everyone hit a happy ending (with Maggie and a few disgruntled collaborators the notable exception) and the show hopes we’ll stop scratching our heads as to how this is all supposed to work because we’re enjoying the joy of the destination.

Morgan is suddenly fine, or at least fine enough, that he’s ready to be apart and heal. Henry is a joyful kid again, trading smiles with Carol. The Saviors are planting things and starting over. And Rick fondly remembers his walks with young Carl, writing a letter to his dead son (in voiceover) thanking him for reminding him, and bringing him to this new world.

I can’t fault the show for landing on optimism. It makes Carl’s death into the catalyst for all these people moving past their endless war. It’s striving for something good, at the very least, the value of peace in the midst of a series that is more blood-filled and bullet-ridden but most.

It just makes no sense how we got there. I’m as much a proponent of mercy as anyone, but letting Negan live, not just in the shadow of the lives he’s snuffed out, but in light of the trouble he could cause with his big mouth alone, makes very little sense in the world of The Walking Dead. (And the show bends over backwards to try to account for it as being motivated by anything other than “we like having Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the cast.”)

Wanting to give the Saviors a second chance is a noble ideal, but just leaving a group of people to their own business, after they’ve been actively trying to kill you and, as Eugene can attest, went to absolute hell not long after the last time their fearless leader was out of the picture, seems like a really bad idea.

But I guess The Walking Dead is content to serve up a happy ending, whether or not it’s done the legwork to get its characters or communities there. This is the end of something big for The Walking Dead -- the show’s longest sustained arc; it’s biggest and most prominent guest star, and also a period where the show’s ratings and fanbase have eroded. This ending fits that, both offering a sense of finality, but also the unavoidable flaws that continue to plague the series, even as it tries to adjust.

That means skipping over any realistic path between all-out war and idyllic peace. That means florid oratory after florid oratary that land with all the grace and deftness of a severed zombie head. That means brief check-ins with every character to try to put a final stamp on a series of bumpy, less-than-satisfying arcs. It won’t be, but “Wrath” could be the series finale for The Walking Dead, with Rick having lost the people that kept him going, but started something bigger, and the show offering up some semblance of closure and grander peace to please its audience on the way out, whether it’s earned that or not.

[4.8/10] It’s episodes like these that make me thank Heaven The Walking Dead didn’t debut on network television in the era of twenty-two episode seasons. With only sixteen episodes, scores of characters, and multiple locales, the show should be plenty capable of finding enough plot and incident to fill a half-season with minimal wheel-spinning. Sure, not every episode can advance the major arc of the show, but there’s still tons of space for character development, or little vignettes, or details to make things more meaningful when those major arcs come to a head.

Instead, it feels like every half-season has at least one episode like “The King, The Widow and Rick” which cannot even charitably be called a table-setting episode. Instead, it’s merely an episode to tie up loose ends, to throw out a few miscellaneous plots here and there that don’t really move the ball in terms of the overarching story of the series, that don’t really tell us anything new about the characters, and don’t add much, if anything, to the show as a whole.

Instead, “The King” is a grabbag of an episode, one that finds some miscellaneous thing for pretty much every major character to do, without managing to make much, if any of it, interesting. After two episodes of relative focus, TWD has returned to its mishmash ways, and the results are a cornucopia of dullness.

That starts with what can charitably be called the “main” story of the episode, which centers on what Maggie should do with the Savior prisoners who are currently tied up behind The Hilltop. The episode tries to play coy with regard to what Maggie should do, with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other.

The angel, naturally, is Jesus, who is handing out excess turnips to the prisoners and encouraging Maggie to let them live and treat them humanely. The devil is Gregory, who makes a series of “heavy is the head that wears the crown” appeals to Maggie to convince her to hang their enemies and be done with it. There might be something to this debate if The Walking Dead hadn’t been having this specific argument since the premiere, and a more general version of it for the whole show. Neither Jesus nor Gregory cover any new ground, and the episode’s efforts to leave it ambiguous what Maggie’s going to choose to do are less than compelling.

Naturally, she splits the baby. She has the remaining Hilltoppers build a cage for the Savior captives, reads them the riot act, and tosses them in, but tells Jesus that it’s a temporary measure, and a strategic one, and that depending on how things go in the big battle vs. Negan, she may still send them all to meet their makers. It is, at a minimum, a pragmatic choice from Maggie, without seeming craven, the sort of decision-making that seems in short supply on The Walking Dead these days.

The smartest thing she does, however, is toss Gregory into the Savior cage. The episode only makes the most perfunctory of handwaves as to why Maggie lets Gregory hang around her or the prisoners anyway, so locking him up with the folks he tried to betray them for is a nicely poetic and practical touch. And the way the transparently slimy Gregory turns obsequious and debased as soon as he realizes what’s happening is a tribute to how thin the veneer of his bravado is.

But while she’s telling Jesus about her reasons for all of this, she’s holding the baby that Rick found and Aaron recovered from the Savior outpost, evincing the image of Madonna and Child. And it’s more than a coincidence given the less-than-subtle theme of motherhood and the connection between mothers and their children that the episode explores in heavy-handed fashion.

That peak of this comes in Carl’s portion of the story, where he once again encounters Siddiq, the young man Rick scared off at the gas station earlier in the season, and tries to make amends. The shared reference point for the two teenagers is their mothers. Carl came back because of the values that Laurie instilled in him, of helping other people, even when you don’t have to, that survive in Carl even as Rick has grown more pragmatic (or at least, vacillated between mercy and murder over the course of the show). In the same way, Siddiq feels bound by his mother’s belief that killing The Walkers frees their souls, and so he goes out of his way to set trap and take out zombies to follow her wishes.

Of course, the episode dramatizes that with a corny walker encounter between the two boys and the latest undifferentiated horde, that hits the same old beats, employs the same last minute save, and the same sense that none of this matters since there’s no way they’re going to kill off Carl in a random interstitial episode. And “The King” doesn’t really make hay with the maternal allusions, foregrounding it as the bond between Carl and Siddiq without really doing anything with it.

But the one bright spot on that front, as usual, is Carol’s portion of the story, which, whether through the talents of Melissa McBride or more subtle writing or simply more investment in the situation, pays greater dividends. She seeks out Ezekiel to help bring the next stage of the plan to fruition, but is rebuffed by Jerry, and instead goes out on her own. Or so she thinks. The younger brother of one of the Kingdom Denizens slaughtered in the Saviors’ assault tries to come with her.

The imagery of her instructing this little boy, and her tone she takes with him, is clear. This is an echo of the loss of Sofia, and Carol’s instincts to protect kids like him, to ensure that no one has to suffer what she did, helps drive her to pull Ezekiel back into the world and fight. That effort proves the lone powerful scene in the episode, where Carol confronts her friend, and tries to convince him to rise out of his crestfallen state.

She asks him why he kept visiting her, when she stayed holed up in that house at the edge of his “Kingdom,” and he gives a simple but potent answer -- “You made me feel real.” She gave substance to his fiction, and in return, he gave her the time and space to heal and eventually recover, at least a bit. Now she’s trying to return the favor, and the pathos but kindness in that, and the performances of the actor, offers the one redeeming portion of this episode.

Otherwise, it’s just more tooling around with little purpose or reason beyond faint teases and pointless outings. Michonne and Rosita leave to scope out The Sanctuary, nominally because they just need to see for themselves what happened, but realistically because neither has had much to do so far this season, and so the show throws them into a random bit of business here. Their interlude with the two Saviors at the cache is pretty dull save for Rosita’s use of a rocket launcher, and the fact that they meet up with Daryl and Tara seems like an obvious method of getting various characters in the right place at the right time for whatever comes next rather than an organic confluence of events.

And last, and possibly least, Rick walks into the Junkyardigans’ compound and offers them another deal, which the Vulcan Allison Janney leader of their dump-dwelling crew rejects. It is, in all likelihood, a feint, part of some elaborate Stage 2 that Rick’s concocted. But in this episode, there’s nothing more to it than setup, another piece in place on the board for the next big event, but no rhyme, reason, or intrigue in the initial move.

That’s all “The King, The Widow and Rick” has to offer. It’s hard to call it a skippable episode, if only because it’s so clearly devoted to positioning the characters for the fireworks to come. But It’s one that you’d be just as well off reading Wikipedia summaries for, save for the Carol-Ezekiel scene. While plenty of mild consequence happens here, none of it is especially compelling, much of it feels stitched together, and few, if any of these incidents, have anything to do with one another. In its eighth season, The Walking Dead is not a good enough show to just throw out a bunch of unrelated scenes and let the characters play in the sandbox. Instead, it turns into a rudderless episode, that diminishes the promise of what’s to come by how dull the path to get there is.

Loved the episode. Several storyline smoothly mixed up leading to the final battle. The episode got me on the edge.

Negan alone. He's just amazing. I've got a sweet spot reserved on Hell for these remarks. I like the guy still has morals. He's totally against rape because that's not his style. He rather finds a psychological way to fuck you up. The Negan system: thou shall not rape, but mindfuck. That's his play.

"Tomorrow is gonna be a big day". Who was that little birdie? It's got to be Gregory, right? He wants to join the Saviors no matter what and he just doesn't care about his people's safety. He went to tell Simon, hand held Tequila, about Rick's plan.

I loved the shot of Sasha telling Eugene to bring her a knife. It was too obvious what she was doing, but that shot of her evil grin was perfect. That shot even made it funnier when she saw the pill. She was like "I can't stab Negan with a pill". Poor Sasha, she can't catch a break.

The quote of the day: "Beach-ball-sized lady nuts!" Seriously, Negan is amazing. Maybe it's because of my profound love for JDM, but no one takes over the scene like he does. His delivery that first scene with Sasha right after killing Rapey Davey was among the best. Btw, that quote "You can use that blade to stop ol' Rapey Davey from becoming Dead-Alive Rapey Davey" had me rotflmao. In that scene, JDM took the leaning beyond normal limits. That's the real reason why he needs a doctor, his spine issues are all over the place. That cell scene was amazingly powerful and the "We are not monsters" bit along with that badass music brought chills to my spine.

I love that Rick's idea of negotiating peacefully involves dynamite. What are aggressive negotiations like, then? And Tara is such a good character. I love her way of dealing with homicidal girls "See you later, Rachel".

Those Pirates of the Caribbean walkers were amazing. Nothing brings people together as killing walkers.