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Tag Archives: Carl Grimes
The Walking Dead Ponders Divine Intervention and Kindness in “Dead or Alive Or”
I like The Walking Dead when its episodes give us a series of vignettes much more than when it’s trying to pull off a single story that has umpteen tangled tentacles. That’s why Season 4 was such a high point for the show. Rather than weaving and unraveling scores of different characters, episode after episode, the show took time to let each of them have their own stories and gave their individual narratives the space to really breathe. That allowed the audience to get to know those characters and better appreciate their individual struggles and perspectives, rather than letting them be rolled up into the morass of dinge and lopsided plots that otherwise rumble through the series.
So my favorite parts of “Dead or Alive Or” are the interludes with Father Gabriel and Dr. Carson, because they feel like a throwback to those semi-standalone adventures from earlier in the series’s run. That duo’s portion of the episode doesn’t move the overarching plot forward much, but it serves as an illuminating short story in the midst of the larger, ever more tiresome narrative machinations of the Negan/Saviors arc.
The Walking Dead Can’t Get Out of Its Own Way, Even When It’s Trying to Say Goodbye in “Honor”
The opening few minutes of “Honor” are The Walking Dead at its best. If you want me to give your television show a little slack, to feel a little extra emotional resonance in an important sequence, then you’re hard pressed to do better than employing a little music penned by Conor Oberst (or, as the show has done before, John Darnielle). “At the Bottom of Everything”, the opening track from Oberst’s seminal album I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, is the perfect accompaniment to the episode’s opening montage. The song tells a story and offers an anthem about the absurdities we face and the joys we wring even in the face of oblivion.
The Walking Dead Warns This Is “How It’s Gotta Be” in a Trying Mid-Season Finale
If you’re a Walking Dead fan who’s made it this far, you’ve gone through a lot. As someone who watched that first fateful episode on Halloween nearly eight years ago, it’s easy to feel, in a weird way, like you’re one of the survivors from the show. After all, you’ve stuck this thing out, experienced good stretches and bad stretches, while more and more of your friends and acquaintances drop out, many of them resigned to the fact that things can never go back to how they used to be.
The Walking Dead Ties Up Loose Ends in a Dull Fashion in “The King, The Widow and Rick”
Episodes like these make me thank Heaven that The Walking Dead didn’t start airing on network television in the era of twenty-two episode seasons. With scores of characters, multiple locales, and plenty of plotlines, the show should be plenty capable of finding enough plot and incident to fill an eight-episode half season with minimal wheel-spinning. Sure, not every episode can advance a major season arc, but there’s still tons of space for character development, illuminating vignettes, or details that make it more meaningful when those major arcs do finally 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. At best, it’s an episode devoted to tying up loose ends. It throws out a few miscellaneous plots here and there, but those storylines don’t move the ball in terms of the overarching story of the series; they don’t really tell us anything new about the characters, and they don’t add much, if anything, to the show as a whole.
The Walking Dead Imagines What the Future Looks Like in “Mercy”
Someday, The Walking Dead will end. Sure, with this premise, the folks in charge could theoretically cycle through cast members like Saturday Night Live and go on into eternity. But the practical reality is that, as the show begins its eighth season, it’s likely closer to its end than its beginning.
But it’s hard to imagine what that ending will look like. Comic book creator Robert Kirkman famously declared that his story could go on forever and that he had no clear ending in mind. The recent Robot Chicken special poking fun at the show envisioned a relatively normal future where society has been rebuilt and there’s a Walker Museum devoted to the struggle of the series (with a nice “historical game of telephone” vibe). Others have speculated about who might survive to the end, whether anyone will find a cure, and how a new civilization comes to fruition. Still, there’s no obvious place for this story to end, no clear way to reach a series-length measure of catharsis.
The Walking Dead and the Stillness and Joy of “The Next World”
How rare is it to see people on The Walking Dead actually happy? Sure, the show gives its band of survivors the occasional moments of triumph or brief bits of levity, but how long do we ever really get to see the atmosphere around Rick and Daryl and Carl and Michonne be simple and pleasant?
It’s not often, and there’s a reason for that. Happiness and stability are nice for a while; it’s comforting for the audience to see the characters they’ve gotten to know over the years catch a break here and there. And yet too much happiness or too much stability over the long term becomes boring. Storytelling is fueled by conflict. As shows like Parks and Recreation have proven, that conflict doesn’t necessarily have to be dark or dour, but a good show needs real, meaningful obstacles for its characters to hurdle over or the entire enterprise eventually feels too slack to be truly engaging.
But it’s been such a harrowing season for The Walking Dead, and beyond that, a harrowing series from the very start, that it was incredibly refreshing to have an episode like “The Next World” where, more or less, everything was okay. After the gruesome deaths, fireworks, and bombast of “No Way Out”, this was a quieter episode that let its heroes enjoy their victory for a little while before the next great challenge (Negan?) rears its ugly head.
Posted in Television, The Walking Dead
Tagged Carl Grimes, Episode Reviews, Michonne, Rick Grimes, The Walking Dead S06E10, Zombies
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