A bit too on the nose in their attempts to poke the issue on darkly designed terms of service and deepfake, especially in light of the Hollywood actor and screenwriter protest (perhaps even inspired by it). The episode leans heavily toward being a meta humor, but it doesn't really work well. Annie Murphy does her best, and I believe Salma Hayek too, but they were given a rather one-dimensional, uninspiring script. As the episode ended I realized Charlie Brooker is the writer. That kinda explains the weak episode.
James Gunn really liked the idea of shoving stuff into people's mouth huh. He did it in The Suicide Squad, he did it again here.
Is this episode written by 16 years old?
This episode wanted to be Seven Samurai but ended up as that terrible The Walking Dead episode where everyone gets slaughtered (they're not though in Mandalorian, since this is a Disney series).
There is no development and no build up at all in this episode. Like the previous episode, everything is self-contained. All are introduced and resolved in this same episode. A lot of things happened in this episode but nothing actually contributes to the plot - except for exposition dump.
The bandit raid is a terribly weak, villain of the week setup. They just show up as some evil nuisances - no motives, no goals at all. The Mando teams up with an ex-rebel, which debunks a tired cliche, but at this point this feels like a try-hard attempt to make The Mando as a morally righteous hero. There is a half-assed attempts at romance here, but it feels forced as it happens so sudden. Despite being self-contained (or maybe because it is) the episode lacks closure by the end, and the nifty little scene regarding one stray bounty hunter seems like something that appears just because they still have several episodes to go.
The dialogues are terrible: it's a tonne of exposition dumps. I don't have any idea why the writers think it makes sense for the characters to suddenly ask a stranger, "when was your last time you open your helmet?" and, in return, open up a heart-to-heart "hey I got a tragic story" past to a stranger. The banters with Gina Carano's character is okay, but it feels like they have to slip backstory every now and then. As if they're not having a real, human conversation. Every dialogue feels so forced and hurried as if they have to make it fit into this episode.
Also, it seems like they have no idea what an AT-ST is. It's a vehicle, not a droid.
This actually is an overall decent finale. The tense in Camina's fleet is good. The Rocinante battle is good. Naomi's rescue is good. The reveal on the end was also good. However there's one reason that makes the episode feels like a jumble of choppily edited scenes: everything involving Alex's death.
I don't take issue with it being sudden and abrupt, as many deaths are. But everyone feels really disconnected from that one incident that should have affected at least all the main casts. Alex just died, but Holden and Naomi spent their time to listen to Naomi's supposed farewell (and spent minutes on it). Amos was more eager to bring Peaches instead of mourning his close friend; even worse he was only informed about Alex's death off screen. For a fellow Martian and somebody who has spent quite a time with Alex, Bobbie seems largely unaffected at all. And Alex, well... The only tribute they gave to this incident is a plaque, which makes for some emotional moment, but that's it. Heck, that part where Holden talked to Naomi to rekindle the events almost feels like Holden breaking the fourth wall to explain to viewers due to how abrupt it is handled.
It almost feels like the event is not supposed to happen, and the showrunners edited in last minutes.
This season has been nothing but a Naomi season that leads to a reunion of Rocinante crew. That incident stuck like a sore thumb, making the supposedly joyful event with all crews gathering feels really emotionally detached. Not to mention that, barring the reveal at the end, most events still happen off screen. Just like most things that happened this season. We don't get to see the impact of something big happening.
So despite being an overall decent episode, this finale closes the relatively most mediocre season The Expanse has produced. I'd even say that the quality is even lower than Season 4. The first four episodes were nice, but it went downhill and stagnated really fast.
The beginning of the episode left me wishing we could've seen more of this side of Star Wars: regular stormtroopers doing their job, getting into action, and all the unseen dynamics rarely mentioned in the mainstream film trilogies. We did have something in that vein: Republic Commando explored the lives of elite Republic clone troopers; Jedi Academy had us follow the lives of youngling under tutelage of Luke's academy; the original Battlefront showed us the transitioning of a republic to an empire through the eyes of the soldiers.
It's the lives of the mundane, the less than extraordinary, yet still gripping and intriguing. They let us dive deeper to the world of Star Wars beyond the flashy buzzing of lightsabers and spectacles of the magical force.
The Mandalorian wished it could be one of those. Unfortunately, it failed terribly.
In episode 5, @ShrimpBoatSteve has said that the series has became too predictable, and I agree - the finale shows how predictable the whole season is. https://trakt.tv/comments/264475
After the long flashback which most parts we've already seen in previous episodes - seemingly making the scenes feels almost like a filler - The Mandalorian episode 8 seems reluctant to set their foot to the ground with its notable world-building as previously seen in Eps 7 and Eps 1 to 3. As I have previously said, after everyone gangs on The Mando (Eps 7), Baby Yoda/Little One's background (who Baby Yoda is, why is he wanted, what the Imperial remnants wanted to do with him, etc) remains unresolved. As the episode shows us Moff Gideon rising with a darksaber in hand, yet another reference moment: every substance the show can possibly offer will be dealt only in Season 2 (or, worse, more).
Stormtroopers in Star Wars have been infamous for their terribly inaccurate shots, but in this episode it feels like their incompetency is amplified to the point of parody and, of course, plot armors. Scout troopers - which is supposed to be snipers - can't shoot droid right in front of their eyes. Instead of coming in squads, troopers only come individually (incinerators burning the building, a few troopers slaughtered by the blacksmith, a few others guarding the tunnel, and the most stupid of all, Moff Gideon waiting for nightfall just for no reason) which makes for a convenient plot armors for our heroes to trek on their way.
Of course, there are casualties - what is a story without something seemingly at a stake? - but it is nothing more than devices to delay the heroes from their trek. Taking cues from Eowyn's "I am no man" of Lord of the Rings fame, in less than moment-defining fashion IG-11, which himself came as a sort of droid ex machina, said that it is no "living being" while resurrecting The Mando from fatal injuries, remedied every possible threat with its healing devices.
Antagonists can be dumb, but there is a limit to dumbness that can suspend audience's disbelief. This episode has antagonist almost feels like they are intentionally dumb and there is nothing really at a stake when everything can be easily remedied.
This episode is not the worst, certainly, as the action sequence is flashy and satisfying. The one near ending where The Mando utilizes a neat jet jump is clever and actually can show the extent Star Wars can be when the director wanted to think creatively beyond the force. Knights of the Old Republic and the aptly named Star Wars Bounty Hunter played with clever tricks similar to this once a while, and the trick doesn't feel cheap as they stand on a very good storytelling.
The Mandalorian's flashy action, regardless, seems to serve only as explicit fanservice - a style over substance.
There are plenty of action, which, by itself, is quite well-done. The consistently hardly imposing threats, unfortunately, dull down the possible thrill those scenes can offer - in a typical corny action heroes such as Gerard Butler's character in Has Fallen trilogy. The scene, for example, with The Blacksmith let us peek into the martial arts capability a Mandalorian can exhibit. But the rather plot armor of incompetent stormtroopers leave no stake at hand; the martial arts dexterity looks more like a cheap imitation of main trilogies of Jedi's acrobatic feats.
Redemption ultimately ends with nothing to be redeemed about, as the people in this show seems to be forever clumsy. From start to finish, everyone made questionable decisions. Nobody blasted the Mando's group with that large amount of stormtroopers. Nobody checked whether Moff Gideon is dead when the fighter was down (Gideon also miraculously survive the crash), with Carga, a supposedly veteran bounty hunter, lightheartedly saying they are already free of the Empire's grasp.
Everything people said in this episode, just like many episodes prior, are not crafted as if the actors were having human conversation. They were rushed by time - they seemingly appear to be set in motion by the plot's demands, to say X so Y happens; to say A when B moment happened.
This episode almost feels like a filler to conclude the dragging episodes this season has been. Screenwriting-wise, this whole season is nothing but bait-and-switch to justify next season(s).
There is much to be said about this kind of terrible business model, where series is written with nothing exactly in mind but to find reasons to continue producing the franchise - the same business model Disney has been using on their MCU franchise and Star Wars films/spinoffs - but the crowds of gladly willing moms awing for Baby Yoda and nerd dads geeking over Star Wars reference doesn't leave enough rooms for those commentaries.
Those windows won't hurt anybody now. Seriously wtf were they shooting at?
I love the end - but it is not like it would be an accomplishment to the TV Show, they took it from the book and removed so much that it barely makes any sense.
All the political tension is basically removed and replaced with "why are we even discussing this". Not to mention the fact that they completly left out how Inaros fleet got destroyed.
That was really important, because the way they did it, the physics they used in the books (The rings make matter disappear when there is more than a certain amount in transit at the same time) was the reason Earth and Mars actually agreed that a trade union controlling passage through the rings was necessary.
It would have been hard enough to do this properly in 10 Episodes, doing it in 6 was impossible. Too much of the source material has been left out without patching the holes.
Its heartbreaking and not in a good way...
Am I the only one that doesn’t like Marie?
It sucks for Pacifist Clarissa that she's had to kill more people against her will than Amos tried wholeheartedly since they teamed up. :thinking:
Though it is a welcome change, it's kind of weird that Chrisjen is going above and beyond to drill into people's heads that Earth must come first they can't treat Belters as a monolith. She's never had much love for them, she seemed more understanding with Fred Johnson's past than Naomi's, not to mention she was personally responsible for torturing an OPA Belter at the start of the show...
Naomi's jump through the vacuum was the most retarded scene ever. Aren't you supposed to get immediately sucked out into space if a compartment loses pressure instead of softly floating away? Ridiculous...
I'm beginning to think the writing team only had three good episodes in them. Getting predictable and drawn out.
This episode reminds us that The Mandalorian is a Disney product.
The Mandalorian for no reason became soft and sentimental. The only reason possible for this change is the "cute factor" shown more to the audience than the character, just like a Disney show would do. For someone who is supposed to be on this sort of job for a while, breaking a guild code just for some random child is a stupid thing to do - especially for someone who is supposed to uphold honor. The hostiles - supposedly trained soldiers and mercenaries - are nothing but incompetent mooks. Other Mandalorians show up as deus ex machina, almost feels like they are there just so Disney can sell more toys.
There is no build up. Everything in this episode is self-contained. From the appearances of other Mandalorian to the whistling bird, it's all used vulgarly in this episode.
This episode is such a huge let down. And we're still on the third episode.
Another good episode, but I must admit that I was kinda disappointed by it as a season finale. It ended well, but the episode felt a bit off. It felt as though every single character just had a sudden change of heart, as though we had missed an entire episode of development. Obviously we knew certain characters were headed a certain way, but they just seemed to suddenly jump from say 60% of the way that they progressed through the last 7 episodes, to 100% just in this one. It felt kinda weird how Homelander just suddenly showed up and got Ryan too - it came out of nowhere. It was still a good episode, but I thought it felt a bit rushed.
Also kinda disappointed that we're kinda just back where we started at the beginning of the season, with no real way to take down Homelander. I was expecting Soldier Boy to take Homelander's powers and then we'd get to see a new side to Homelander next season since he'd be weak and dealing with having no powers. Instead, it seems we're going to get a lot of focus on Ryan and Homelander together - which I do like. I had also thought that maybe all of The Boys would end up with powers by the end of the season, but that didn't happen either (not that that's a bad thing).
Anyway, I thought this was a good episode, but an ever so slightly disappointing end to a fantastic season of TV. Can't wait for season 4.
I appreciate that they are including a lot of little touches that convey the flavor. The Coriolis gravity effect when pouring water, the ways in which the different environments have shaped humans into almost separate species. So far, they are hewing quite closely to the source material, and I'm liking it.
The episode was pretty enjoyable, but...this may have been the worst dialog I've ever heard on television. There wasn't a second of it that flowed naturally. The actors did their best, but you can't spin garbage into gold.
Where did all the production-value go?
The first two episodes dragged me into the world of Star Wars, but after that it‘s all down hill to me. Acting just meh, almost no good looking alien races anymore, heck even the droid from this episode was a pesky human in a bad costume. Just as bad as both of those Twi‘leks and the horned guy - bad actors in bad makeup. I really hope they fix this soon.
Weird season finale. After all the build up, everything feels anticlimactic. Right down from A-Train--the reason all this mess started--to Homelander.
Before we get to that, let's talk a bit about how weird the whole prison sequences play out. The joke, the attempted rescue, the shootout, all feel really weak especially compared to well-directed sequences in prior episodes. First of all there is really no need for some jocular banter that went for about two minutes or more. Not to mention the pauses. It feels dragging. This includes the attempted rescue which continues the joke.
Second, the shootout looks really weird. We've seen Frenchie did his weird stuff when it comes to the Female/Kimiko, but this doesn't seem logical. He is a professional killer, why the hell he keeps on showing up his head to look at Kimiko when getting shot at? Is he looking to die? Not to mention he got shot prior, on the stomach, how the hell he can walk and help Kimiko walk that easily? Hughie getting to shoot randomly while saying "I'm sorry! I'm sorry" and miraculously hit trained soldiers is even worse. Even the Starlight rescue looks like a cheap deus ex machina for the plot to goes forward.
The Boys had been attempting to mock the quip-ridden superhero genre--that is, the Marvel Cinematic Universe--but the whole prison sequences makes The Boys looks exactly like an MCU episode.
Now we get to the supes.
The Deep. His subplot has been standing on its for quite a while now. There seems to be no direct connection with the bigger plot that has been going on. And this episode his subplot stays that way, while still giving him enough screen time to focus on his emotion. I'm not sure if that is something we wanted to see for a finale. It feels like something to be saved for future seasons. Even if that doesn't mean it's bad, they could have cut it way shorter than what they did.
Then the thing with A-Train feels very anticlimactic. He just popped up there out of nowhere. We were previously shown his desire, his post-power syndrome, his attempt to be relevant. Then in the supposedly final showdown, we finally see Hughie vs A-Train head on. But we don't see A-Train. We see an injured A-Train, a traumatic supe in his mental and physical breakdown. Now this still could be an interesting, emotional confrontation between our protagonist with the one who murdered his sweetheart. Not to mention, the presence of Starlight could make this dynamic interesting--is Hughie done for, how would he cope between his past and present emotion? What we get instead, however, is a slow motion capture with very minuscule combat and almost none of emotional engagement. Then A-Train just went, just like that.
I feel like they are saving him for future episodes, but this being the finale--the culmination of all emotion that has been built up so far--makes this confrontation very lacking. It feels like we are still on Eps 5 or 6, but with worse pacing.
Now Homelander. He is our another main driver of the plot. Everything that has happened so far always leads us back to him. His dynamics with Madelyn the CEO has been a bizarre Oedipus complex-like situation, What happened between them in this episode is actually very unexpected, though one may sense that it would eventually came to this point through the clues scattered so far. This result should have provided a surprising reveal. However, as it turns out, there seems to be something hollow in the encounter. Given the interesting portrayal of their faux-mother-son-sexual-relationship in the first half of the episode, the second half seems to speed up the climax. As if they were being chased by some deadline, that they have to cut it short, while at the same time giving enough spaces for Homelander to give his, in Maeve's words in previous episodes, "boring speeches."
It feels climactic and inconclusive at the same time. And I guess the same can be said with many encounters in this episode. Starlight with Meave. Billy with the CIA. Hughie with Starlight at the church. It feels like they have to speed it up--to shove in the dialogues--for the sake of putting the plot forward. It's shaky and unreliable.
Now, the end of the episode leads us to a quite intriguing reveal. It's not the direction we--or at least, I--expected to take in the season. However, with such really weak build up throughout the episode, the ending feels like forced. As if they have prepared them to be this way, but still unsure how they would bring it up to this moment. As such, while the scene itself is (should be?) surprising, there is not much surprise when I watch the event unfolds. It's less of a "wow, so this is it?" than a "oh okay, so this happens, and then?"
Credits where it's due: Anthony Starr as Homelander and Karl Urban as Billy Butcher display terrific performances in this episode. Especially Homelander with his extremely erratic, unpredictable behavior. But that alone is not enough to pardon the sloppiness of this episode.
Perhaps because they, like MCU and other superhero movies, seem to busy themselves to prepare for the upcoming season instead of trying to give audience a closure of the plot. And that exact reason is what makes superhero movies went boring for these past years. They are focusing to build an universe, instead of writing a good narrative. Unfortunately, this episode robs the fresh air that The Boys has breathe for quite some time. While I hope for the continuation of the series, I am less excited.
[6.0/10] I’ll often forgive the text of a television show if it gets the texture right. I tend to be more interested in what an episode means than potential plot inconsistencies. Storytelling on the screen is a magic trick, and that means I’m willing to tolerate a fair amount of sleight of hand. That’s exacerbated by fan approaches to stories that seem too left-brained or inclined toward puzzle-solving for my tastes, where rather than taking a work as they find it, viewers go on the hunt for plot holes and inconsistencies as opposed to considering what the film or show made them think or feel.
But that only goes so far. And even, if you’re like me, and can forgive details like most folks in the show not looking unimaginably filthy or constantly complaining about the smell in the ashes of civilization, it matters much more why characters are the way they are and act the way they act. What purpose does a scene serve in the story? What is the motivation behind a particular character’s action? And if the only answer a show can give is “because the plot, or the pre-finale table-setting exercise requires it,” then you’re in trouble.
That’s the sense I’m left with at the end of “Worth,” an episode that basically only exists to fill time and set a few things up the end of the season. Why do Daryl and Rosita capture Eugene, lose him when he runs like five feet ahead of them, and then miss him in a dirt pile? Because the show reminds you that he exists, but can’t pull the trigger on major events ahead of the grand finale, and so the plot requires it.
Why does Aaron starve himself in the woods to persuade the Oceansiders rather than realizing at some point that he should head back and regroup? If you’re being generous, you could say that he either has little to live for after the death of his partner and so is more willing to lay down his life for the greater good. But the truth seems closer to some combination of his survival man routine needing to underline the “anything to survive” theme the episode dabbles in, and because, you know, the plot requires it.
And how and why is Negan able to play thirteen-dimensional chess with everyone in his orbit, being able to play Simon, Dwight, and Gregory off one-another, knowing precisely when certain meetings will happen (while hiding behind a dumpster or something), being certain when and how his sabotaged “fake ass” plans will get to Rick & Co., and deciding who’ll lead the Saviors based on a fistfight with his second-in-command after being in a car crash and kidnapping? Say it with me now -- because the plot requires it.
If you strain, you can come up with mildly passable reasons for all of these things. Maybe the combination of projectile zombies and vomiting gave “save my neck at all costs” Eugene just enough grease to slip away. Maybe Aaron talked to Tara and realizes that a feat of endurance is the only way to get the Oceansiders’ sympathy. Maybe Negan really is both smart and cocky enough to play his lieutenants off one another perfectly and trust his rule to the fortunes of his own two fists.
But none of it feels natural. None of it feels believably motivated. And none of it feels like it could plausibly exist in a world where a T.V. show wasn’t moving the deck chairs around before a long-teased battle between the show’s good guys and bad guys.
Worse yet, when the show does try to convey those sorts of motivations, it’s in the most clunky, ham-handed fashion possible. Father Gabriel literally announces his emotions and impulses, basically guiding the audience through his internal conflict. Seth Gilliam is a talented enough actor that you can still feel the emotion of the scene, but the lines he’s given are downright atrocious.
The same goes for Ross Marquand as Aaron. Marquand gives a hell of a physical performance in the best scene of the episode, where Aaron, barely subsisting in the woods near Oceanside, is beset by walkers in the rain. Marquand communicates the sense of raw exhaustion in Aaron; his joy at the prospect of fresh rainwater; his desperation when fumbling for his knife, his peril when being attack by the soggy zombies who threaten him when he’s sapped of all but last reserves of his strength.
But then, when the Oceansiders come across him, he gives the lamest, least-inspiring halftime speech to try to convince them to join the fight. It’s another in the long line of Walking Dead quotes that feel like they’re stolen from eighth grade fan fiction, which Marquand delivers with all the conviction one can muster for such banalities, which turn out over the top. But what do you know, the show implies that it works to persuade the Oceansiders to take up the cause. Because it has to. Because the show is now less concerned with making sense than shepherding everyone to where they need to be on the board before the endgame comes.
The one element of the episode that does manage to feel well-motivated, that manages to feel like both payoff and prelude, are its bookends, which feature Rick and Negan hearing Carl’s last words to each of them.
Rick seems, if not changed, then at least encouraged by reading his son’s pleas. Maybe it’s just the use of those cinematic tricks -- the swell of the gentle music, the images of Michonne and Judith in the background, the idyllic light that pours over everything as Carl’s words spill out in voice over. (And kudos to Chandler Riggs, who may have become a solid actor right when the show decided to kill him off.) But whatever it is, The Walking Dead succeeds here where it fails everywhere else in the episode in generating an emotional moment with real meaning for where the story goes next.
And it’s contrasted with Negan’s reaction to Carl’s similar plea for peace, for a bigger world and a better tomorrow, to him. It’s admittedly a little convenient that Michonne’s able to get the message to him, but it’s forgivable. When Negan hear’s Carl’s words, he’s just had to kill one of his top lieutenants for a coup attempt with his (almost) bare hands, and realized another’s turned on him. He’s too far gone, too unyielding, to take Carl’s words to heart.
And that sets up the inevitably clash between Rick and his allies vs. Negan and the Saviors better than all the backbiting power plays and vomitous escapes and symbolic stands in the forest ever could. There is a fundamental difference between the two men at the center of this conflict. The show has tried to blur those lines, the show how Rick can be just as stubborn, brutal, or cruel, and how there is, at the very least, an imagined greater good that Negan believes himself to be serving.
But here it draws the fundamental differences between them, how Rick can still be moved, still be pulled back from the brink by someone he loved, and Negan is in too deep to ever remove his iron from the fire. The two embody the episode’s opposing themes of people who will do whatever it takes to survive, and people who believe there’s bigger, more important things, that transcend an individual life and may even be worth dying for.
That’s motivation. That’s storytelling. That’s the stuff that gives weight and meaning to the swords slicing through zombies and bullets going through bad guys. The Walking Dead can pull it off when it wants to, but too often, in episodes likes “Worth”, defaults to spinning its wheels in contrived situations that only exist because the story demands they do, and yet manage to weaken that story given how inessential and forced those developments seem.
6.4/10. I enjoyed the season premiere of The Walking Dead better than most. I understand the complaints that it was too bleak, too cruel, and too hopeless, but to my mind, it made sense to establish Negan as a threat and as a character. There have been so many ineffectual bad guys on this show, so many antagonists who seemed like mere speed bumps along the way toward Rick & Co. getting the big win. It makes sense to me that TWD needed to make a big introduction to convince the audience that Negan and The Saviors were something different and something serious.
I also didn’t mind the hopelessness of it. Sure, it’s difficult to see the good guys broken, to see characters we know and love brutalized, to see the bad guys seem to take great joy in the process. But shows like The Walking Dead need stakes. In order for the heroes’ inevitable triumph to feel earned and meaningful, you need to make the villain not only someone whose loss doesn’t seem preordained, but who’s worth beating. The suffering at this point of the arc will, with any luck, pay off down the line when the good guys strike their blow against Negan and his goons.
The problem is that the premiere, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be,” already felt like a lot. It was a lot of blood and guts, a lot of horrible acts, and a lot of Negan preening and chewing scenery. It works as an opening salvo for the character and as the culmination of the build to Negan that had been bubbling up since the midpoint of Season 6, but it’s a lot to take in. The audience can only stand so much of that level of cruelty and velvet-lined venom before it starts to overwhelm.
Which means that an episode that basically acted as a sequel to the premiere, that gave us buckets and buckets of Negan’s routine, that skimped on the violence but doubled down on the lack of hope idea, comes off as rubbing the viewer’s noses in all of this. Making “Service” a super-sized episode to boot, one that packs in an extra twenty minutes or so worth of the same sneering bad guy stuff, the same hammered home message about Alexandria’s weak position, worsens the problem.
It’s especially rough for the character of Negan himself. I’ve enjoyed Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance as the season’s new big bad. It’s a difficult character to find the balance of. By definition, he has to be outsized, someone so grandiose and convinced of his own smoothness, but also someone who feels like a predator and not just a clown. Morgan pulls that off. He has Negan’s shit-eating grin down pat. He lays into his lines with a joy and a casual cruelty that lets you know he thinks of himself as the cock of the walk and the coolest guy in the room.
But again, too much of that begins to wear. The Walking Dead has had outsized characters before -- The Governor probably comes closest to Negan’s theatrical bent -- but so far Negan has really only played that one note. He gives you the sort of gleeful menace, the man who toys with his prey and thinks himself a just and noble ruler. That works well enough in small doses, but pile it on like TWD does in “Service” and you start to see the seams. It begins to feel as though the show is spinning its wheels, repeating itself as Negan simply reestablishes the things previously established memorably in previous episodes.
It also doesn’t help that “Service” has absolutely plodding pacing. Not every Walking Dead episode needs to be eventful of full of fast-paced action, but despite some effort at conflict on the margins, most of this episode is just a big walk around Alexandria for The Saviors. Seeing the effect that Negan has on the rest of the camp, the way the last bits of resistance are meant to be stamped out, is a valid and arguably necessary tack to take in the aftermath of the events of the season premiere, but there’s not enough there, or at least not enough of what we’ve seen, to fill an episode all on its own, let alone one with an extended runtime.
Those conflicts feel fairly tepid. The missing guns provides fodder for Rick to give one of his trademark speeches, albeit one about knuckling under rather than fighting back. This episode is full of reminders, constant conversations, and loud declarations, that “this is our lives now,” that things are different and can’t go back to the way they were. So when Rick finds Spencer’s guns and turns them over to Negan in exchange for Olivia’s life, it’s anticlimactic, feeling like there was never really much of a risk, but that the whole issue was drummed up, forced conflict to give a reason for that speech and to accentuate the mostly forgotten wedge between Rick and Spencer.
“Service” plants the seeds for that growing rift, with Spencer still resentful of Rick after the death of his parents, and laying the Saviors’ new order at his feet. It’s an issue that’s bound to come up at an inconvenient time, quite possibly with Spencer trying to make his own deal with Negan and ending up meeting a grisly end for the trouble after Negan decides to stick with Rick for his greater earning potential. But in the brief time we’ve known him, Spencer’s never been a particularly interesting character, which makes it hard to be too invested in that storyline or its implications.
The same can largely be said for Rosita, though she’s gotten a bit more characterization and adventure over the past couple of seasons. She is part of a different strain running through this episode, of people who are poised and ready to resist The Saviors, even if they don’t quite have the tools or the plan to do so just yet. Her task to retrieve Daryl’s bike (and attempt to find a gun from one of Dwight’s deceased running buddies) mostly serves as yet another opportunity for people to debate whether The Saviors can be stopped or whether the denizens of Alexandria should simply accept that this is how things are now. We’re given plenty of plausible justifications -- that The Saviors have greater numbers, more weapons, and a ruthlessness that makes them a threat to everyone and everything -- but the endless back and forth over it (probably meant to answer the “why don’t they just mount a resistance now?” question from the audience) isn’t particularly compelling.
It also bleeds into an uncomfortable air of rape among The Saviors. We see it in the disgusting way that Negan talks about Maggie (who, in one of the cannier narrative choices, has been whisked away elsewhere before Rick tells Negan she passed away). We see it in Dwight’s uncomfortable treatment of Rosita, and we see it in the particularly unsettling way that one of Negan’s henchmen tries to get Enid to repeat the word please.
I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, as uncomfortable as these moments are, we’re talking about the bad guys here. We’re not supposed to like them, and so deplorable behavior is more excusable. What’s more, rape is about power, and the overtones to Negan’s behavior underscores the way in which he is, despite his violent and sexual appetites, clearly interested in the power of his acts, the way it allows him to act unfettered and unchallenged, than any inherent pleasure he gets from them. On the other hand, in the henchmen especially, it feels like a cheap way to make them seem more villainous, a shorthand in lieu of something better earned or more thematic. It all depends on where the show takes this particular thread in the rest of the season.
The same goes for the episode’s closing scenes. Michonne is exactly the type who, as her experience with The Governor portends, will not sit idly by while someone like this prances around and tries to keep her people under his thumb. But Rick’s speech, while not enough to convince her, at least ties the “we have to do what Negan says” sledgehammer of a point into something emotional and steeped in the history of the series.
The parallels are loose, but when Rick confesses that he knows Judith belongs to Shane, there’s power in it because it’s one of those few plot threads from the beginning of the show that haven’t been tied off yet. And the thematic resonance of it, that sometimes we have to accept hard truths, things that tear us up, in order to do what we need to do to protect the people we care about, is solid. Negan’s actions make Rick’s knuckles tighten up on Lucille when Negan’s back is turned, but his desire to keep the Alexandrians safe loosens his grip, allows him to make all these compromises and admission in the hopes that they’ll stay alive and healthy even under such harsh conditions.
That’s a fine way to dramatize the yoke under which Rick and Michonne and their band of survivors are living, the choices they must make every day. It’s just too much of Negan’s scenery-chewing, self-aggrandizing flotsam to where that resolution feels like too little too late.
It’s important to establish your villains. It’s important to make them notable characters in their own right, and to show them besting the heroes, posing a genuine threat, so that the eventual victory doesn’t feel hollow. But when you spend so much time with this bastard, so much time reinforcing how terrible he is and how little hope there is, those remaining moments when you try to show that there may be a light at the end of the tunnel, a reason behind the capitulation, it feels like a mere tiny bit of salve after forty minutes with your hand in the fire. Strong villains are good, but make them monolithic and give entire, overly long episodes over to their villainy, and the audience will be as apt to give up as Rick is.
One of the best parts of Carol's storylines on The Walking Dead is that they've largely been underplayed. Melissa McBride is such a talented actress that the show can dispense with its often lumpy dialogue and simply let her convey the meaning in the moment, whether it's a sullen look after the events of "JSS" or the harsh tone in her voice when she tells Rick that Maggie shouldn't be out on the raid. This season in particular, The Walking Dead had done a good job at letting the idea of Carol feeling the weight of her actions and gradually pivoting away from the ruthless persona of strength she'd taken on bubble under the surface, thereby making the scenes where those themes are a little more prominent stand out as earned and effective.
But "The Same Boat" basically turns that subtlety on its ear. It's a bleak bottle episode, that spends most of its time keeping Carol in a single room and trotting out an odd version of "This Is Your Life!" There's Maggie as a symbol of uncorrupted innocence and incipient motherhood there to let Carol fight to protect something in another person that she herself has lost. There's the colorful Molly, who offers Carol a view of her possible future, a dead woman walking who's not afraid to do what need doing. There's Donnie, a nearly textbook abusive boyfriend who's mostly a prop to draw out another parallel for Carol. That parallel is Paula, who is both a dark reflection of what Carol has become--a woman who lost her children, dealt with abuse, and resolved to kill when necessary without compunction or hesitation--and a living caution of what Carol is afraid that Maggie could become.
These are all interesting character comparisons in particular, but given that all of these people have to be introduced and die in the same episode, the audience necessarily gets thumbnail sketches of everyone rather than meaningful shades of character development to make them feel like real people rather than narrative devices to elucidate Carol's internal conflict. The episode does a good job in giving Carol's captors texture--Molly in particular is someone I'm sad to see go given how distinct and magnetic she was with little weight to carry here--but their characterization is thin, and that inevitably leads to the feeling that "The Same Boat" is more of a contrived allegory than a story with emotional truth.
That's especially true for Paula, a well-acted, poorly-written character who seems to have little use besides acting as the obvious living wakeup call for Carol she's meant to reflect and turning subtext into brutally on-the-nose text. When she blasts Carol for being weak, when she spits Carol's philosophy back at her in a clumsy fashion, when vocalizes that Carol sees Maggie as the way she used to be, it's all unnecessary emotional exposition about themes the show had already communicated in much subtler ways. I actually liked the idea of Paula as an antagonist because the performance is good, and there's a harsh pragmatism to her that makes her an interesting comparison point to Rick as much as she is to Carol. But when she launches into that monologue it becomes clear that she's only here to be a ponderous, poorly-sketched out doppleganger for Carol, with nothing under her skin but cheesy dialogue and didactic speeches.
Melissa McBride does what she can to save all of this. Her performance does a very nice job of showing Carol's simultaneous cunning and her pain. She's obfuscating timidness to disarm her captors, the same way she used that persona to keep the Alexandrians off guard. But McBride does a great job of selling the moments where Carol's real concerns, her genuine conflicted feelings about the choices she's made, bleed through. More than that, the episode shows her using those real feelings to further the lie, a tactic composed of equal parts canniness and pathos.
There's a bit of Morgan's philosophy that's wormed its way into Carol's thinking, whether she likes or it hates the way it makes her shoot an intruder in the arm rather than in the chest, or hesitate when a single bullet could practically end the whole struggle. Carol become this hardened warrior so that she could protect the innocent, so that what happened with Sofia wouldn't happen again. It's why what rouses her from her mild pacifist streak is Paula's swipe at Maggie's stomach. But as bluntly as the concept is hammered home in "The Same Boat", Carol has been wounded in that process, and when she looks at the deaths she's been responsible for, at the harshness she's perpetrated in the same of doing what's necessary, she doesn't necessarily like the person she sees, and begins to not only question that path, but to slowly feel more and more of the hurt of it all.
I'm hardly a Carol-Daryl shipper, but there's has always been a special friendship on the show, and one of the most pleasant moments in a dark episode was his immediately comforting her after she and Maggie kill the last couple of Saviors. Maybe he can help her find a bit of peace.
But that brutality doesn't stop at Carol. "The Same Boat" also suggests that it's infected the whole group, or at least the ones who embark on the raid of the saviors. Again, it's not subtle. Michelle, who seems intended as an alternate version of Maggie much as Paula is a dark mirror of Carol, outright says, "you're not the good guys." But at the same time, I like the idea of the show broadening its perspective a bit. We literally see the events at the Saviors' compound from Paula's eyes, and it's not necessarily a pretty picture.
The Walking Dead has been toying with this idea since beginning the Hilltop/Negan storyline, and it's fruitful territory. It's cold and nearly heartless when Rick takes out Primo without his enemy barely getting a sentence out before there's a bullet in his brain. To this end, the best scene in the episode is the first, that shows a group no less capable than Rick's looking on with horror but determination at what our heroes have accomplished. But it peters out quickly when the episode tries to draw a moral equivalency while making the Saviors we see too thinly-drawn to feel truly sympathetic.
But as I often say about The Walking Dead, there's the germ of a good idea there. I appreciate the concept of Carol as an agent of change, of someone who's lived by the philosophy of doing whatever must be done, no matter the cost, it protect yourself and your own, who's disillusioned by where that's led her and having serious qualms about the group as whole adopting that view. This episode was a weak attempt to draw out that internal conflict in Carol, but hopefully the way it tied that idea to the larger theme of whether our heroes are really worth rooting for or if, instead, they've become something different, something cruel out there in jungle, will lead to better and brighter things.
A very corny episode, even more so being a season-resumer and a follow-up to the relatively good Season 6. Once again TWD production team falls short on storytelling and tries to overcompensate for that by cranking up the shock-value.
3/10.
This is certainly not The Boys' strongest season finale. The plots feel awkwardly resolved and the key plot points they've been developing just ended up as nothing. It feels really underwhelming. Of course there are some positive notes about this finale as well but bear with me, let's go through three most crucial problems for me.
First, Black Noir. What a disappointment. They've been building up Black Noir for at least four out of eight episodes in this season. They even showed him as a person, a real individual with emotion and vivid imagination this season after the previous two he had only been a mute killing machine. And he went down just like that. Sure the conversation between him and Homelander was tense - but that was it. Unfortunately, Black Noir's imaginative flashback, as I've suspected in the previous episodes, serve as nothing more than plot device to move the story forward.
Second, Soldier Boy. The hunt for the ultimate weapon to destroy Homelander ultimately just ended up in vain. Where did it go, the riled up spirit of The Boys in bringing Homelander down? They have the weakest excuses to portray this change of heart. With M.M.'s plot, well, I guess, okay, as he has his own personal vendetta against Soldier Boy, it's still understandable. This is to put aside that they went with the "Soldier Boy kills my family" plot too easily (we didn't get to ever see what actually happened and it's brushed off as nothing more than "racism", which is quite disappointing since there were plenty of rooms for flashback this season).
But then there's Butcher. He ended up beating down Soldier Boy because Soldier Boy hit his kid? I mean, sure it's his kid, but where's the man-with-a-mission-to-kill-Homelander-no-matter-what-it-takes that we've seen for all these three seasons? If Butcher was a little smarter - and he actually is with his cunning tactics and all! - he could've stopped Soldier Boy for a while, let Homelander pats Ryan's back, then when Ryan is out of sight just finish off Homelander by then. Soldier Boy doesn't even seem to hold anything against Ryan (especially after he knows Ryan is Butcher's son). The whole charade about beating up Soldier Boy is a really weak plot point just to let Homelander alive to be the ultimate big bad in next seasons.
Still here? We'll get to Homelander but let's talk about Maeve briefly. What's her end goal? At first she seems to be an ally ready to take down Homelander, but when it comes to actually facing Homelander she can't see the forest for the trees. Rather than staying true to her goal to kill Homelander, she was just absorbed with herself, punching Homelander around only to get herself beaten. Sure, Maeve isn't the most tactical ones, but she's been supplying Butcher with everything so far.
Last, Homelander. As soon as the fight ends, my biggest question is: what would be Homelander's yet another reason to NOT kill Butcher, Hughie, and co? Our Boys have been picking a fight with him since Season 1. It's clear our protagonists are pests to him, but he keeps giving them leeway. At this point isn't it easier to just get rid of them all when Ryan's not looking to prevent our Boys messing up with him again? There's a fan speculation that predicted Homelander is going to be depowered, then he's going to live the whole Season 4 under Vought's protection while our Boys track down the biggest big bad: Compound V. I think I like that better since it's going to show how Homelander will struggle with his weakness and humanity. But I guess the showrunners wanted to keep on getting Homelander more unhinged and even more unhinged and violent, as shown when he lasered a guy in a parade. With this direction, I'm expecting the show to end in a high note with chaos everywhere like perhaps in the comics. I just hope they don't prolong this much further - maybe Season 5 at most.
Then there's some plot devices like Tempo V, powering the army with V, etc that are left unexplored, which feels a bit like nothing more than filler to get the plot moves forward. And the fact that they kind of go with cliffhanger in this finale reminds me of Season 1's rather weak, cliffhanger-ish finale as well (perhaps that's their pattern: the real season finale is in the even-numbered seasons).
That said, this episode is still quite entertaining as it kept me guessing where the plot would go. It's not as frantic and riled up as Herogasm (Eps 6) and the direction is not quite satisfying, but it's fine. The theme of this season is "family", they stay true to that up to the finale. Soldier Boy's dialogue with Homelander is good. Talk about how toxic upbringing would make you become toxic as well, while thinking you can do better than your parents.
I like that they are planning to use the political plot with Neuman in Season 4 (I thought it was going to be wasted after the nice development in Season 2) as The Boys' forte is taking a jab at politics and corporatism. I do hope we will see what Stan Edgar envisioned as Vought "getting out of the supe business in the next five years."
I also like what they did with Ryan, coming together with Homelander, and the way Homelander is normalizing Ryan to violence. This is the consequence of Butcher's acting asshole-ish to everyone and sure hope our Boys will see the consequences of his action, especially with the sweet reunion with everyone at the table in the end (feels like the calm before the storm).
All in all, not a bad finale, but a bit too disappointing in the way they resolve the plots that have been built up all this season.
This finale feels like not just a finale for Season 2, but Season 1 as well. It wraps up the plot that has been worked on since Season 1, and in some ways turning it to full circle, e.g. Butcher's quest for Becca, A-Train subplot, Hughie's self-discovery, and the rest of The Boys's relationship with each other.
As usual, The Boys does the best job when they take a jab on current corporatist-political climate.
“People love what I have to say. They believe in it," Stormfront confidently said. "They just don’t like the word Nazi." A racist superhero is Vought's darling - one that casually screams lingos like "white genocide" to young boys. Seemingly contradictory considering Stan Edgar, who would be target of racism, is Vought's CEO. But Edgar insisted that it is not about him. "I can’t lash out like some raging, entitled maniac," Stan Edgar responded as he smiled when confronted on what he did, "That’s a white man’s luxury." Anger drives demands for securitization. Demands for securitization drives demands for Compound V. Vought just "play with the cards we're dealt." Like Maeve's bisexuality that Vought plays, racism is just another card to eventually drive profit. Be it racism or empowerment, they are all smoke and mirrors.
But of course the thickest smoke and mirror is not a mere woke capitalism - something we can already obviously see. The thickest smoke is one that makes us think that within this war of attrition, another hero existed, and they would fight for our cause. We follow them as they march - our symbol of hope. This episode reveals something that has been foreshadowed very early in this season: "it's a fucking coup from the inside," said Raynor, before her head got blown into bits. Neuman, an obvious parody of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, raised into the spotlight as an opposition toward Vought and Homelander. But as it is revealed that it was her who was blowing people's head, and she has blown the church leader's head too as soon as she knew he has files on supes, it is revealed that she is actually a controlled opposition by Vought. Like the politicians who hail from Democratic Party, a part of ruling oligarchy, The Boys takes another jab that we should really never trust heroes, be it in the form of supe or another.
This reveal is also a very nice setup as it closes the arcs on Season 1 and 2, and prepares for another arc coming in Season 3. It gets interesting as I had myself asking, "can Homelander end up being our hope now?" This sort of dilemma is what piqued my interest in The Boys; we can't really easily label one as evil and another as good, as - like in real life - today's enemy can be tomorrow's ally, and vice versa.
That being said, I do not think this episode is a perfect ten. Butcher's quest for his wife, for example, was quite unsatisfying. Becca, despite having a lot of screen time, does not possess actual agency, and more like a side character who happens to be involved in Butcher's bigger story. Despite revolving around his infatuation with his supposedly long-dead wife, the way the subplot climaxes leaves much to be desired as Butcher seemingly sidesteps Becca's death. How would Butcher reconcile with such heavily emotional feeling, after years of losing her, finding her, and now he is losing her again? How would Ryan, her son, react to the loss of the only guardian he ever knew in all his life? Those questions remain unresolved. We get to see more time of Hughie and Starlight bonding - while it resolves the tension in their relationship, there is not much resolution or development going on in that aspect.
In addition to that, while watching girls trio beating up Nazi is fun to watch (though it seems to lean more on the cathartic side too much) - and especially funny since it is another parody at Marvel, the forced "girl power" scene in Endgame - Maeve's appearance seems a bit too convenient, deus ex machina that resolves not just the issue with Stormfront, but also Homelander. The Boys has been sort of weak in the last three episodes in employing deus ex machina, something I wish could be worked on more on the next season.
All in all though, this is a much better finale than Season 1's.
FedEx containers? Syfy are you serious?!
The writing is so bad, the story doesn’t have any sense...
[8.6/10] Impostor syndrome. Fake it till you make it. False confidence. There are a thousand phrases and a thousand permutations that if we just project enough strength, if we just put a mask on over our doubts and insecurities, we can become, or at least embody, the things that we want to be. Inspiration can come from within, and flow out to those we’re trying to lead or impress or simply comfort.
But what if you have imposter syndrome because you are, in fact, an imposter? What if you fake it with all your might, but the odds are too stacked against you for you to “make it? What if your false confidence just gets your friends and allies killed.
That’s the reality Ezekiel grapples with in “Some Guy.” His brand, his ethos, since we met him last season, is founded on the idea that with the right inspiration, the right idea, the right star to steer it all by, you can go anywhere. As he confides to Carol in a flashback, he made a choice at a particularly fraught moment in his life, about what kind of person he wanted to be. And since then, he’s used that choice to spur on others, to build something greater than himself, and hopefully lead his people into a better life.
But what do you do when that dream falls apart? The opening seven minutes or so of “Some Guy” is some of the best, most brutal work that The Walking Dead has ever done. We see Ezekiel making that choice once more, in miniature. We see the tired, plain-clothed man getting into character, going from a regular man into a King, using that weekend matinee experience to craft this inspirational figure.
And he rallies his troops. He promises them victory. He fills their hearts and minds with hope and confidence, with the idea that this act will help bring them about. It leads to a performance, a Shakespearean halftime speech that puts Rick’s earlier attempt at the same thing to shame. And it leads to the denizens of The Kingdom rallying around their king.
Then, just as quickly, the episode match cuts to a pile of corpses on the ground.
It’s a brutal, brutal cut. The image of Ezekiel emerging from that pile of dead bodies, gazing at the fallen comrades he walked into this fate, and then looking on as they slowly but surely rise from their decimated states and begin to walk and stalk as is the grim fashion of the age, bores into you. This is what has become of Ezekiel’s well-meaning bravado, of his pie-in-the-sky promises meant to ensure the opposite result. And the grisly scene understandably shakes him, and devastates him.
That’s the thematic pull of the episode. Where do you go, who do you become, when the fantasy you’ve created is punctured and spills blood on your hands. And it’s a compelling one. But “Some Guy” also works on a nuts and bolts storytelling level. In contrast to the first three episodes of the season, it zeroes in on two plots: Ezekiel escaping that lurching horde full of his own men outside the compound, and Carol escaping the lingering Saviors within it, until those stories collide. It creates a throughline for the episode that helps support the headier themes at play.
In the process, The Walking Dead gives us some damn good set pieces, with some well-crafted action movie moments. Ezekiel’s broken leg creates a notable obstacle to the challenges from Savior and Walker alike. The moments where he seems likely to be done in by a captor, only to be saved at the last minute by Jerry, where Carol gets into firefights with the latest crop of Negan goons, where Shiva springs into action to save them, have the right blend of thrilling action and thematic resonance.
Amid these slowly dovetailing stories, “Some Guy” even drops in a pretty badass car chase with Rick and Daryl vs. the Saviors from that same compound. The attempt to prevent those Saviors from getting their weaponry to The Sanctuary creates a clear goal, and between near misses with Daryl, shootouts with Rick, and car-hopping, truck-crashing mayhem, the episode crafts a setpiece that keeps your heart pumping even if it feels a bit tangential to the broader material of the episode.
But what’s so great about the other set pieces is how well the fit into the essential question that the episode is asking. Ezekiel believes himself a failure because his attempts at inspiration led to the deaths of scores of his followers. But while it’s yet to sink in, he’s given example after example of the ways in which what he exemplified, more than what he represented, still made him worthy of being followed.
That first comes in Jerry’s last minute save. Ezekiel, as he does throughout the episode, tells his friends to simply run, to leave him behind, because his injured leg will only slow them down. Instead, they stay and help and fight over his protestations. And despite Ezekiel’s attempts to push back, to say that he doesn’t deserve to be called their king, Jerry remains steadfast, not because of some elegant image Ezekiel has crafted for himself, but because he’s simply a “good dude,” a terminology that cuts through the King’s grandiose presentation and reaches the heart of what he was trying to do.
It also comes in Carol making a choice that parallels the one Ezekiel made with Shiva. After finding a sharp way to outsmart the Saviors she’s embroiled in a standoff, Carol faces a dilemma of her own. Either she can take out the remaining pair of antagonists and ensure that their powerful guns don’t make it back to Negan, or she can let them go in order to save Ezekiel. The Carol we know might tend toward the former choice, reasoning that two lives, even the lives of friends, are not worth the lives that those guns in the hand of The Saviors could cost. But instead she chooses to save the man who helped give her a lifeline in a time of crisis, who’s helped her to internalize that sense of altruism over her effective but brutal (and often fistpump-worthy) pragmatism.
And it comes with Shiva, who offers the last save of the episode. As Ezekiel, Carol, and Jerry attempt to cross a muddy brook, riddled with walkers, Shiva comes out of nowhere at the last second to fight and ultimately sacrifice herself that they may live. It is a hard moment for Ezekiel, almost as hard as returning to The Kingdom and having to look into the eyes of a child whose father he just saw reduced to a pile of fetid flesh.
But therein lies the cinch of “Some Guy.” Ezekiel will, as is the spirit du jour of The Walking Dead, no doubt be haunted by what happened here, no doubt blame himself for using his stories and speeches to send these men and women into battle and ultimately to their deaths. He will likely hold himself responsible, and argue that his embellishments only convinced good people to follow a lie.
And yet, what “Some Guy” reveals is that this theatricality, this impostorhood, this lie, was founded on a truth, a truth about who Ezekiel is and what he stood for, that overcomes any sense that Ezekiel filled his followers’ heads with nothing. He gave them hope; he gave them a reason to go on, and with their help, built a community to sustain them. The choices he made come back to him -- not as much the choice to put tokens in your hair or armor beneath your jacket, but the ones to rescue wounded animals, to be a just and kind leader, to show the same kindness and understanding to strangers. Those are what truly made Ezekiel a king, regardless of what he wears, or how he speaks, or who’s left to follow.
[6.7/10] Fault is a slippery concept. It’s bundled up with intention, result, and a host of other complicating factors that affect whom we blame and whom we absolve. Some people wrong us, and don’t intend to. Some people mean to hurt us and give us what we need. And some people simply twist in the wind, unsure where they are or where they’ll end up. How we credit and blame others for such things says as much about us as it does about the person whose actions we’re trying to figure out.
But so does how we move past that, whether we’re blaming others or blaming ourselves. How we try to avoid or overcome the bad blood, the hurt feelings, the guilt, can decide how long it weighs on us. In “The Other Side,” Daryl blames himself, Gregory bends over backwards to avoid blame, and Sasha and Rosita hash their shared, awkward part in Abraham’s life and death, and what comes next.
It’s a solid idea, but a weaker hour in Season 7. The meat of the episode centers on the fraught relationship between Sasha and Rosita, and while each of the characters is decent enough, they don’t have much chemistry together, leaving the many scenes they share feeling uneven and miscalibrated. So many moments in this episode simply feature two people going back and forth, and when there’s not a connection between the real people having the conversation, those moments quickly suffer.
That may be part of why the episode’s most effective scene was the final one between Daryl and Maggie. The dialogue between them is as trite as anything in the rest of the episode, but in keep their scenes together short, “The Other Side” keeps them punchy and affecting enough before the emotion in the moment from being stretched too thin.
It makes sense that Daryl would refuse to look at Maggie because he blames himself for Glenn’s death. There was a clear warning; Daryl acted, and someone who’d been with him from nearly the beginning died because of it. Despite his warrior’s bent, Daryl is a surprisingly sensitive individual, and it’s not hard to imagine him looking at Maggie and only seeing what he took away from her.
But Maggie gives him absolution. She tells him it wasn’t his fault. However much he sees himself as an avenging angel now, all the more ready to kill to prevent a death like Glenn’s from ever happening again, she tells him to hang onto himself. She calls him one of the good things left in this world, like Glenn was, and her embrace is one of comfort and of strength, that forgives Daryl his trespasses in a way that only a grieving loved one can.
Gregory, however, has no interest in absolution, no interest in carrying the burden of lives lost or saved under his watch. He simply wants to protect his own interests, to keep himself in whatever small amount of power he has. He’s willing to kowtow to anyone, to sell anyone out, to write off any blame or shame as owing to forces beyond his control, in order to ensure things stay that way.
I’ve come to appreciate Gregory as a character. It’s not my favorite performance on the show, but there’s something true to life about him. He is not pure evil like The Saviors. He is not nearly as avaricious as some of the antagonists who’ve peppered The Walking Dead. He is the sort of person who would emerge in a setting like this – a petty tyrant with delusions of grandeur.
While Negan, however horribly flawed he is, shares Gregory’s narcissism, he’s backed it up with his horrid empire. Gregory is the man who shakes hands with power and thinks himself power. He is the quisling, the one who’s cowed but prides himself on being the plumpest bovine at the slaughterhouse. His doomed haughtiness, his faith placed in the wrong places, makes him as intriguing a foil as he is an ineffective schemer.
It helps that he’s often paired with Simon, who seems to find a new level of cheery unctuousness each time he appears. This visit to The Hilltop sees him absconding with their local doctor to replace the one at The Saviors’ compound. (Apparently they’re brothers, in a detail that adds next to nothing to the proceedings here.) Gregory complains to him that he’ll be blamed, that he’ll lose his people’s trust, if this goes down, and that he could be replaced with someone less accommodating.
Simon writes him a “pass” to the Saviors’ compound, and with this imaginary get out of jail free card, one sure to backfire should Gregory ever try to use it, Gregory tries to intimidate Jesus. (Jesus, meanwhile, finally feels like he belongs, which is in no way convenient or setup for him to step up when things inevitably go south with Gregory.) There’s a foolhardiness to the attempt. Gregory’s no chess master, and his threats and misplaced faith in The Saviors to save him from facing the consequences of any blame will no doubt leave him sipping far less tequila.
And then there’s Sasha and Rosita. It’s nice, in principle, that The Walking Dead is having the two of them address the bad blood between them. And there are some good moments between them where the tension between them is present but set aside for their shared goal. But the whole frenemy setup is a weaker one, and neither Sonequa Martin-Green or Christian Serratos can elevate it through performance alone.
That becomes most clear in the scene where they’re enjoying relative safety and have their heart-to-heart. (Really, this could be called “Heart-to-Heart: The Episode!”) We get some perfunctory backstory on Rosita. It turns out she’s so capable because she would drift from guy to guy after the outbreak hit, sticking around long enough to learn whatever skill they had while they were trying to “protect” her, and leaving when she’d mastered it.
But Abraham, apparently, was different. There’s truth and complexity in the moment where she attributes her anger to the fact that Abraham seemed to adjust to life in Alexandria, to not being on the run, while she needed more time to “figure shit out.” It gives shape and depth to her relationship with him, and makes her pain and disillusionment this season more real. And it adds tragedy to the sense that, as she tells Sasha, she was happy that he was happy.
The problem is that, as often hobbles The Walking Dead, the scene is also filled with trite truisms and forehead-slapping dialogue. It’s a long scene, much like the one between Morgan and Richard last week, and it serves the same purpose – to setup and explain the dramatic choice made at the end of the episode. It’s a moment of bonding for Rosita and Sasha, one that makes them part of the same thing rather than opposing forces. That’s a nice idea, even if the episode’s realization of it leaves something to be desired.
The finish to the episode is more setup than resolution. Eugene reaffirms his loyalty to Negan. Sasha rushes into the compound and keeps her comrade out of it so that she may live to fight another day. And Rosita crosses Dwight’s path. These are all steps as much steps toward the next chapter of the story as they are cappers to this one.
Still, the episode is at its best when it depicts its central figures understanding the titular “Other Side” beyond the attribution of fault that haunts them. It stands for Gregory, whose alliances begin to shift to a group who will no doubt set him adrift when he’s no longer useful. It stands for Daryl, who can, perhaps, start to forgive himself after seeing how Maggie’s forgiven him. And it stands for Rosita, who bares her soul, tells her side of the story, and is given, whether she wants it or not, the chance live for something else, no matter whose fault it is.
Superb episode, with only a couple of small stupid points:
- Kimiko shouldn't have been drinking with her abdomen stitched up. Alcohol inhibits clotting and encourages bleeding. She could've died of internal bleeding long before taking the Compound V. (Plus, I feared the alcohol would interact adversely with V, causing her to die or "hulk-out")
- I didn't like how they presented Annie's and Kimiko's decision of "I'll save you, even if you don't want me to" as triumphant, when it's no different from the toxic macho "damsel in distress" crap. Frenchie and M.M. should've objected and easily win that argument, considering their past experiences and discussions.
"V isn't good or bad" yes, but no person is all good or all bad either, nor do they stay good or bad forever no matter what. Of course, there are certain patterns of reinforcing behaviors, but everyone is constantly shaped and ever-changing by their life experiences and decisions. I think this is the most important takeaway from the show.
Despite all the gore and splatter, this episode shows this is still about the characters. And that's why this show keeps being amazing.
I hope A-Train doesn't revert to being a Vaught pawn. It would destroy his developement. Loved the parts with Black Noir. Butcher's really a major prick but why didn't Annie just send Hughie a message instead of trying to call him again and again ?
So, Homelander is Soldier Boy's son, eh ? So, will that mean they team up ? Since there is a forth season coming they need an angle for that. I wouldn't like another season of "how do we get rid of Homalander". On the other hand if they would team up they would be basically unstoppable so that should actually be avoided.
Should be a very interesting finale.
Others might say that this is not as intense as previous episode, which might be true in terms of action and moving the plot forward. But I find this episode is still intense in a different way: more emotional investment.
"Family" and its unfortunately related cousin "abuse" seem to be the the theme that knits together different story arcs of the episode: the obvious Butcher flashback, Kimiko and Frenchie, MM with his family, Soldier Boy, and Homelander.
The episode kind of speeds up the pace in showing Soldier Boy's villainy through a recreation/imagination of Black Noir's flashback; although I'm not too comfortable that they present Noir's flashback at face value (instead of being an unreliable narrator), I think it still kinda works.
It is shown that Soldier Boy is an abusive, selfish bully with anger issues you would typically see among band leads or celebrity groups. While some have defended Soldier Boy's action by comparing him to Homelander ("at least Soldier Boy is not psychotic, emotionally unstable narcissist! He is a normal person not grown in lab!"), I think they missed the point of the show: the biggest issue here is exactly what would happen if people with power (influence) have additional power (literal superpower) while being protected by multi-billion dollar company. They possess all the impunity to wreak havoc. Like MM said, "no one should have the right to wield such power."
This theme of abuse is explicated with Butcher's flashback. No one is inherently "good" or "evil" - you are shaped by your upbringing. As the scenes between his memories, his reflection, and his projection in current time are cut seamlessly back and forth, Butcher slowly realizes that he mirrors the man he hated the most. Yet he fully accepts his succumbing to that darkness while bringing Hughie with him through his personal vendetta against the supes - not caring about the risk towards others who he claimed he loved. Even with parents, one may grow to be a contemptuous person if they live in an abusive family, and it's a cycle that is very difficult to break. Butcher's flashback is certainly the spotlight of the episode for me.
Even with Kimiko's story in the background (her saying that V only explicates what kind of person you are), considering that we've been shown how the character's social lives shaped them into what they are now - Kimiko with her abducted kid background, Hughie's insecurity with his zero to hero job, etc - the message stays strong, countering the superhero cliche of inherently morally good and evil person.
I'm hoping this dynamic could be further explored in the next episode (or season) with the Soldier Boy and Homelander encounter when it's revealed that Soldier Boy is Homelander's father, at least he feels so. An abusive father meets a narcissist kid-who'd-wanna-be-a-father. The ending of this episode becomes revealing when tied up to the earlier convesation between Homelander and Maeve: with Homelander echoing Soldier Boy's words that he "used to dream of having kids" with Maeve, it becomes apparent in this episode that the relationship between Homelander and Maeve (and Soldier Boy and Crimson Countess) it is not something exactly out of pure love.
"Having kids" is not a romantic statement: it's a purely masculine, self-centered ego of having someone of your blood - of your similarity - that you can be proud of. Who the partner is doesn't matter; they are only means to that end. And in that Soldier Boy shares something in common with Homelander as shown through his delight of accepting Homelander readily as his son, albeit lab-grown. He only wants to see a better version of him.
Last but not least, I love the jab at corporate this episode still throws. Ashley spinning breaking news about Starlight in a similar way Disney would spin stories about their abuse and mismanagement; and that A-Train being zombified, again, with the heart of Blue Hawk embedded in his body, serving only as Vought's puppet. I'm not sure if that's the most satisfying end to A-Train's arc, but seeing his disappointed, grim look, his lack of agency, I guess the character suffers a lot. I just hope this will be the last of his arc and the show doesn't squeeze him further.
That said, with the reveal at the ending, I am not sure I am 100% satisfied as I was expecting Soldier Boy bringing down Homelander, or rendering him powerless by the end of the season. Looks like Homelander will continue to be the main villain. I just hope they don't prolong the "mentally unstable" trope too much and find ways to keep the show interesting. Looking forward to the finale.
