8.3/10. There's been a lot of death, unsurprisingly, on a show called The Walking Dead. We've seen folks in the series take out hordes of zombies, roving marauders, and even their own as a bloody kindness when necessary. But very very rarely are our heroes the aggressors.
That's what made "Not Tomorrow Yet" so interesting and so novel for a series already in its sixth season. Many episodes of the show examine the morality of killing--when it's justified, what makes it a sin, and how those things change after civilization falls--but it's never shown the show's main characters engaging in what amounts to a preemptive strike before.
It is, in a word, kind of uncomfortable, kind of troubling, even when on paper it makes sense, even when you're on the side of the people doing the killing. I think it's meant to be. The Walking Dead has paid lipservice to the moral gray areas that emerge when balancing life and death in something approaching a state of nature, but rarely has it confronted these ideas so directly.
It's telling that the closest thing to a preemptive strike of the kind that Rick & Co. unleash on The Saviors was The Governor's assault on The Prison in Season's 3 "Home". Even then, Rick's group had snuck into Woodbury and gotten into a firefight with his men. (Though it could be argued that Daryl, Sasha, and Abraham's run-in with Negan's group in "No Way Out" is a similar justification.) There, it's portrayed as cowardly, as cruel, as something that makes Andrea begin to doubt the goodness of her companion.
And yet here, it's Rick's group attacking without real provocation. It's Rick giving the speech to his band of survivors that they need to strike before a potential rival decides to strike at them first. It's Rick who startles Heath with how brutal he can be. It's our heroes who put together a surprise attack on a group of people they've never even met, let alone talked to.
It's harrowing, both from an ethical standpoint and a purely visceral one. I've often said that The Walking Dead tells stories better with images than with words, and the show lived up to that branding tonight in the tightly shot-and-edited sequences at The Saviors' compound. There was tension in the moment where Andy stood anxiously in front of the two Savior guards as they examined the faux-head of Gregory, before it deflated with the dark comedy of a one guard using a severed head as a puppet. (Despite the ethical conundrums and heavy thematic material, there was a surprising amount of solid comedy to the episode, in moments like this and in the awkward humor of Eugene asking Rosita about Carol's cookies at a very bad time.)
But from that moment on, Rick's crew moved with precision through the compound in crackerjack sequences that showed how scarily effective they had become in their seek and destroy mission. Director Greg Nicotero does a masterful job; there's a tremendous pacing to this part of the episode, that never loses the tension in the mostly one-sided fight, while still finding time to let the audience breathe between big moments and show the surprises and escalation of the conflict.
That part of the episode also includes the most striking scene of "Not Tomorrow Yet". In a wordless sequence, Glenn and Heath enter a room where two of the Saviors lie sleeping. Glenn kneels over one of them, holds his knife aloft, tears up, struggles, but eventually plunges his weapon into his erstwhile enemy. Then, although Glenn's clearly devastated by what he's done; he stops Heath from doing the same to the other man sleeping in that room, with the implication that after the pair's conversation about killing another human being while on the hunt for a Gregory lookalike, he wants to spare Heath the the pain, the stain on the soul, that Glenn himself just endured, even if it means doubling down on committing the grisly dead himself.
It's a powerful scene, one of the most captivating and poignant of the entire series. In truth, there are plausibility problems with it, It strains credulity that Glenn and Heath wouldn't wake up their prey when entering the room no matter how quiet they were tried to be; Glenn would presumably have to use much greater force to stab his targets, and the fact that the men died instantly without a sound has no basis in reality. But as I've said before, The Walking Dead is a show that runs theme rather than verisimilitude, and the performances of Steven Yeun and Corey Hawkins are so impressive, and the direction of the scene so well done, that it hardly matters, especially in the moment.
That one scene sums up the entire thorny ethical territory the show explores in "Not Tomorrow Yet." I recently wrote about how The Hateful Eight examines the idea of when lethal force is justified, and how that idea changes based on what team or tribe you're on, and this episode dives into similar thematic material. Our heroes seem more like butchers that warriors. We've seen Rick and his crew kill before, but almost always in self defense, always in the heat of battle. Killing a man in his sleep, a man who's done nothing to you, who simply poses a future threat, feels different, feels wrong. It clearly disturbs Glenn in that moment and gives him pause about the path that Rick so confidently sets his band of merry men on.
Suddenly it hits you -- beyond what they've heard from a group of people our heroes barely know (who are, it should be noted) led by an unsavory prick and guided by a man who stole from Rick and Daryl), Glenn and the rest of his compatriots have little basis to know that these people are really bad. Lying there, motionless on their beds, they just seem like survivors, same as anyone. At best, there are two sides to every story, and Rick and Maggie only got half of it, but their needs and the needs of the people they protect make it enough for them to kill unprovoked, to kill by a much less direct form of necessity than the kind that normally motivates the lead characters in this show.
But the episode still muddies the water further from there. After Glenn pains himself to kill the two Saviors they find in that room, he looks up and the camera pans across the sleeping man's collection of photos of people and/or walkers he's apparently shot or bashed through the head. It's morbid, and it speaks poorly of the character of the man that Glenn just killed, but I don't think it's meant to make the audience see the death as deserved. Instead, it's meant to underscore the complexity of the ethical choice here. The way that the folks from the Hilltop paint a picture of The Saviors makes the killing seem righteous, but the manner of it, the defenselessness of their enemies, makes it feel wrong. And yet, those gruesome photos, which imply the harshness of these men who died at Glenn's hand, suggests that as disquieting, maybe even unjust, as these kills feel, they may yet be for the greater good. You just don't know. Things are not as simple as pure right and wrong, and that just makes what it takes to survive in the next world all the harder.
And Carol, who is conflicted in her role in this assault, is on the other side of this moral quandary. She too has become scarily effective at killing at is feeling the weight of that, of the lives lost on her ledger. The show has been setting up this inner conflict for Carol since the beginning of the season, and it serves that conflict well.
From the cold open (which have been some of the best parts of The Walking Dead lately) that depicts Carol attempting to reestablish her shrinking violet bona fides with the community with some Macgyver'd cookies, only to offer a bit of penance for the dead young boy whom she frightened, "Not Tomorrow Yet" plays up the fact that Carol is having trouble dealing with the number of names she writes in the journal of people she's killed.
I wish I could unpack her sweet, earnest, human scene with Tobin as well as it warrants, but for now all I can do is say that Carol has been a paragon of unexpected strength for a long time now. Tobin recognizes that, he sees through the facade of the diffident homemaker, and respects what Carol is capable of. He calls her a mom not as something meant to minimize her, but as an honorific, as a term that means she's the kind of person who protects people, who does the scary stuff so that the people who can't handle it don't have to.
The implication is that she stands parallel to the soon-to-be father Glenn, who stabs one of the Saviors so that Heath won't have to. What Carol has done is a burden; this episode makes that clear. But at the same time, it is a mitzvah, to protect people, to take on the challenging, unpleasant, perhaps even unholy deeds that need doing so that others need not face them.
There's subtext to the scene that's hung in the background of the series for several years now. Carol couldn't do those things; she wasn't strong enough; she didn't know how to survive in this new world, and feels like she couldn't protect Sofia from it. She felt it was a mistake she had to correct for, to become capable, to teach the children of the prison how to defend themselves, to kill without hesitation to defend the people incapable of making that choice.
But it wears her down, weighs on her, the sense of the blood on her hands. She's still trying to protect people, allowing herself a moment of quiet comfort with Tobin, or staying back to look after Maggie, a mother-to-be thrust into a dangerous situation. Carol has become a killer, the kind that aligns with Rick's speech about doing what's necessary to survive. But she's been deeper into that mindset than the rest of them, and it's dragging her down, making it harder for her to go on and make peace with the acts a harsh world requires. In an episode that explores the murky waters of when a kill is right, when it's wrong, and when regardless of that inquiry, when it hurts the soul of human being to commit even necessary, lethal acts, Carol is ahead of the curve, and finds that those choices, and the certainty and necessity that seemed to motivate them, leave her wondering how she can live in the face of all the people who have died.
