The Walking Dead, Season 5, Episode 16: Conquer
That's certainly not how I expected the season to end. We've got various ways of dealing with 'should I kill someone even though he's clearly evil/insane?' and various ways that it played out, and it's nice that the show's not hamfistedly pushing one point. On one hand, we have Glenn ready to shoot Nicholas in the head before deciding that he's not a murderer, despite everything. It might be stupid, but it let Glenn keep his humanity. On the other hand, we have Rick coldly shooting Pete down, and it might cost him his soul, but if he had done it sooner Pete wouldn't have killed Reg. On the other other hand, if Rick had done the same thing when he met insane!Morgan a couple seasons back, then no one would save Daryl and Aaron. On yet another hand, Morgan sparing those two Wolves has left clues to Alexandria for the Wolves to follow.
So yeah, the season ended in a completely different way than I thought it was going to end. I expected the Wolves to attack, or a walker attack to prove Rick's theories true, or an actual shoot-out between Team Rick and Team Alexandria. Or maybe all of them. What we got is distinctly different. It's a lot less cliffhanger-y than season four's finale, yet it's also a lot more tense at the same time with various plotlines racing for breakneck conclusions. We've got Rick's trial. We've got Glenn versus Nicholas. We've got Daryl and Aaron fighting a sea of zombies. We've got wandering monk Morgan fighting the wolves. Oh, and whatever the shit Gabriel's doing. It's not an ultra-large event the way the previous four events were, with multiple smaller climax instead of a big one.
Gabriel is easily the weakest subplot among the multiple stories, and honestly I wanted the zombies to devour him or Sasha to pull the trigger just to get all this nonsense over with. He saunters out, can't bring himself to die via zombie, kills the zombies, cries, forgets to shut the door, and then tries to antagonize a clearly hurt Sasha and get her to kill him by blaming her sins for Bob and Tyreese's deaths. Not only is he a goddamned coward for suicide-by-cop, he did a fairly large amount of damage on Sasha's psyche, not to mention nearly causing the community to be overran by zombies. Maggie gets to talk some sense to Sasha and there's kind of a happy ending at the end with the three of them crying, but Gabriel's been such a horrible shit throughout his arc that honestly having to deal with him next season is not looking to be a fun prospect. It's one thing to have a crapton of guilt over killing your congregation because you're a gutless coward. It's another to try and shift his own deep-seated guilt problem onto others. Plus his rant to Deanna about how Rick's people are all evil bastards? That's just a dick move, bro.
Nicholas proves to be way, way more competent than he has to, but at least he didn't manage to kill Glenn with a cheap shot. I'm sure the fans will riot and burn down AMC headquarters if they allowed Glenn to die like a bitch, but honestly for an established coward Nicholas sure put up a hell of a fight. Of course Glenn overpowered him in the end, beating the little bitch to an inch of his life, but couldn't bear to pull the trigger and actually dragged him back to Alexandria. Whether this will turn out to be a stupid move or one that'll benefit them later no one can really say -- though Nicholas is nowhere as cool as Morgan is and I highly doubt he'll outgrow that.
Speaking of Morgan, he's apparently become one helluva kung fu fighter with a stick, and him calmly staring those two members of the Wolves down, before putting them both on their asses, is amazing. He later ends up saving Daryl and Aaron, again being amazing with his stick, and him having a map written by Rick is all that Daryl needs to bring Morgan back into the fold... and the first thing that the enlightened 'all life is sacred' Morgan sees? A blood-soaked Rick gunning down a man. Gonna be one helluva awkward reunion.
Daryl and Aaron tracks down a dude in a red hoodie, only to run straight into one helluva ambush set up by the Wolves with a horde of zombies hidden in a pretty ingenuous trap that involves multiple trucks, and a crapton of zombies. Wonder how they got those zombies in sitting patiently for the trap, though I guess they might've just found living people and stuffed them there until they die? The Wolves have been foreshadowed all season long, but other than their trap and their callous murder of red-coat, I'm not sure the episode made them out to be that huge of a threat. I suppose there could simply be more of them, otherwise how could they kill entire communities? They are definitely the 'dreaded' by simple virtue of messages left behind by survivors, and it's a great way to weave in the zombie threat which has been increasingly eclipsed by human villains into, well, a human villain group. But the focus is definitely not on them, but on Daryl and Aaron and their very calm conversation in the car. Not even Aaron died, which surprised me -- I thought he was going to be a goner for sure, being likable but not a major character, in a prime position for a dramatic last stand and leaving a widower to mourn. He did leave that backpack of his behind in the scuffle for the Wolves to find pictures of Alexandria, though.
The main plot is still Rick, or rather, what's going to happen to Rick. The community's organizing a forum, a mock trial, to decide what they are going to do with Rick. Multiple smaller plot threads happen while this is going on. We've got Abraham and Eugene bonding and apologizing to each other. We've got Tara waking up. We've got Carol threatening Pete in the most badass way. "You small man" indeed! That has all the 'god Carol is awesome but creepy' factor of her threat to Sam, only I hate Pete so I cheered for him crapping his pants. Honestly I'm not sure if it wasn't Carol's threat that drove Pete over the edge, or if that's actually planned. Carol also telling Rick to not be a liar yet also keep Michonne's loyalty is also well-done, as is her unabashed admission to Abraham, Glenn and Michonne that she's been stringing and playing the entire population of Alexandria and it was absolutely easy. We've got Rick's conversation with Michonne, and telling her the whole extent of his plans to threaten and/or murder the group's leaders if he has to. We've got Maggie (woefully underused this season) and Michonne showing that their loyalty's still to Team Rick and not their new roles in the community, but neither are as willing to shoot-'em-up as Rick and Carol are.
Sadly the debate was way more one-sided than it should've been. Abraham, Maggie, Michonne and Carol wax lyrical about how awesome Rick Grimes is (impact would've been way, way more felt if it was the people of Alexandria instead of all his friends), and where Deanna is debating, of course Rick has to deal single-handedly with a zombie invasion because Gabriel is an idiot who can't shut a door properly on the one day that Sasha's too emotionally drained to man the lookout tower. Rick gets to have a big, dramatic entrance where he's the hero who's willing to go down and gritty and defend their village from walkers because everyone else there are naive simpletons. It's an epic entrance, but it drains all of the moral ambiguity that surrounds Rick's situation between his paranoia and his hardiness.
And to top it off, Jessie tells Rick that he's right (though, to be fair, in regards to defending an abused woman, I'm with Rick on this) and Pete ends up being degenerated into an almost cartoonish threat, gatecrashing the meeting with a katana and screaming like a lunatic, slitting Reg's throat and basically proving Deanna's points invalid in literally every single aspect -- and that felt way, way too clean of an answer that favoured Rick too much. So yeah, in some aspects, the climax delivered a pretty badass moments for Rick to show up, first with the zombie, decide not to go on with the hostile takeover, and then he rants that they all need to wake up and see the real world, damned sheltered rich bastards! And of course Pete shows up at the exact time to prove Rick's point right and kills -- not one of Rick's allies, but the most pacifistic member of the group who also happens to be the love interest of Deanna, Rick's ideological opponent. So yeah. Rick gets a complete victory, with Deanna giving Rick the a-okay to shoot Pete in the head. (Rick's rant is still gives the impression of a pretty deranged man, though, so there's that) We don't get an interesting moral argument, Rick just flat-out wins, because it's Rick. There's no compromise, beyond the fact that Rick and Carol deigned to not murder the leadership and take over. And I'm pretty sure that while I agree with Rick, I'm not 100% down with the show treating him as infallible.
Still, Pete suffered a fair bit in this episode which was what I wanted. Between being threatened by Carol and being gunned down like a dog by Rick, fuck Pete. Shame that Glenn's too nice a guy to murder Nicholas, though.
Overall despite my complaints it's still a pretty fun season finale, lots of stuff happened and the status quo's change is definitely much appreciated.
No comments:
Post a Comment