The Walking Dead, Season 6, Episode 5: Now
That's kind of boring, to be honest. We're just going to wait for the whole rock quarry herd without doing much about it, and it's honestly kind of silly. Yes, having the people at Alexandria wait for Team Daryl to come back and lead the rest of the zombie herd away is indeed their best bet, but did we really need to see that actually going on? Because it's not exciting at all. Yes, the idea of a huge, huge zombie wave that can potentially wreck Alexandria is impressive, but all it seemed to do is to be an excuse to split the entire herd up. Not much in this episode really felt like it deserved 45 minutes plus to tell, and any episode that you keep checking the runtime to see when it ends isn't a good episode.
We get yet another point hammered home that a lot of the Alexandrians are soft, naive fools who are unprepared for the horrors of the zombie invasion, and it would be novel if it hadn't been an anvilicious point we've been subjected to for the entirety of the past season, and it's like every episode that Rick stars in in this season needs to have a doubter of the Rick Method either get killed or get humiliated. But it's really hard to actually care about them when, shit, not a lot of them even have personalities. And the ones that do (Aaron, Spencer, Diana, Jessie) aren't even that interesting to watch.
This episode is more of a montage episode to show what the people of Alexandria are doing, and I honestly... just can't be arsed to care. The doctor lady Denise is depressed, Tara comes to cheer her up, she figures out how to work a syringe, and they kiss. Carl wants to get out, Enid's boyfriend stops him*, Rick teaches said boyfriend how to shoot. Jessie tries to reconnect with her traumatized kid with cookies. Diana realizes she's a shit leader, she tries to think up of expansions but gets shut down by her son, kills a zombie, hands over leadership to Rick because Hail Rick. Spencer gives a huge speech about how everyone fucks up, but they need to really work to survive, and it's all awesome speeches and shit but apparently it's all bullshit he doesn't believe so he can steal drinks for himself, ruining what small hope and confidence Diana has left.
*Who, until I googled his name, I didn't even realize he was Jessie's older son. He really left that little impression on me.
All the interesting characters -- Carol, Morgan, etc -- are strangely MIA, too, and the members of the central cast that actually show up don't do much. There's Rick being Mr. Always-Right, Tara encouraging the doctor, and Carl in his brief role... I think Rosita had a line? and Maggie reveals that she's pregnant (woo..), and she and Aaron go on the least-boring subplots in this episode, where they try to go out there to find Glenn, whose fate is ambiguous. Maggie's desperate because she blames herself for not going out with Glenn, while Aaron blames himself over the whole 'left my backpack for the Wolves to find' thing last season, which he reveals to the crowd. It's the most interesting bit of characterization the episode has to offer, and that's not much. I'm not exactly sure where they are going with this, though, and it seemed like yet another attempt to jerk the viewer's chains as to Glenn's fate. Though at this point it's less 'omg omg what happened to Glenn' and just an eye-rolling bit, that even if Glenn is dead it's going to be anti-climactic.
A lot of the problems this episode has is that it's so much of a retread of everything we've seen before both in this season and the last (in particular, we've seen both Denise and Diana do this exact same song and dance in this very season), and it's just fucking boring. Especially the constant repetitions of how "hey, Rick's great! Alexandrians are naive morons and complete fools!" bit is really, really making me dislike Rick more and more. The entire episode could've been reduced to extra scenes that could be fit in the previous and following episodes. As it is, it's easily one of the most filler-y episodes I've seen on television, and it's honestly worrying for the state of the seventh season. Other than the brief shots of big scenes courtesy of the sea of zombies in the quarry, nothing in this season has actually been super impressive at all. Add to the bullshittery of the whole Glenn thing, which honestly at this point it really seems to be a fake-out, and it's not looking very good for the state of the rest of the season.
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