The Walking Dead, Season 6, Episode 6: Always Accountable
I'm not quite sure why this episode needed to drag on for this long. Last season, I praised the focus-heavy episodes of Walking Dead with only one or two characters being starred, but here it just seemed weirdly unnecessary. And this particular leg of the show seems to be intent on giving us this weird format where the huge zombie horde and the various characters dealing with differing problems on different parts of the world... and after last episode's relatively weak showing, you'd think that an episode that revolves around everyone's favourite character, Daryl, would be amazing. Except, y'know, it's not. And largely because these random mooks aren't as interesting as Daryl's other solo co-stars (be it Beth, Carol or Merle), and Daryl doesn't really do much beyond being a hyper-competent survivalist. He finds a bunch of dudes whose name I don't even remember, there's some talk about what happened in this part of the world (they burned down an entire forest, which accidentally killed some friends of theirs), Daryl decides to trust them because he finds that they're looting insulin for their sick sister, Daryl helps them escape from what I assume is yet another faction of the Wolves (that's what they're called, right?), insulin kid dies anyway when she tries to put flowers next to corpses, Daryl gets betrayed by mr. douchebag and gets his crossbow stolen, he finds a military truck anyway.
Like, what? Why did this need forty minutes to tell? Is it really important to detail in excruciating detail why Daryl lost his crossbow? Why couldn't this just end after the first time the random douches attacked Daryl? I dunno. The entire plotline just felt redundant and boring, and honestly even if it's a setup for them reappearing they were so fucking bland that I hope the Wolves get to them. Like, I guess the whole point was to give us some additional context to how the Wolves operate, which seems to be gang-pressing random people to do their work for them, but honestly I thought it wasn't done particularly well, especially since Morgan has a Wolf tied up in his basement.
The B-plot involves Abraham and Sasha, and Abraham kinda tries to romance Sasha at one point... but he's got Rosita at home. And that bit's weird. We get more reinforcement that Abraham really has that itch to murder every zombie he can find, though he's working on it... and ends up finding a crap-ton of bazookas (missile launchers? RPGs?) in the process. It's nice to give Abraham something to do, the dude's been really thirsting for characterization, but that's honestly the only decent character bit in this episode.
Oh, and Abraham gets a fancy new military suit, so that's a lot of good shit going on for Team Daryl -- a truck, a suit and a bunch of fucking cannons. And a meek 'help' from a walkie talkie, which I guess is Glenn? Or someone? I dunno. This episode really felt like it's trying to do something clever by not giving us much context in regards to the story of the strangers that Daryl met, but all it ends up doing is to give us forty minutes of repetition of beats we've seen so many times repeated in Walking Dead... and when one of the biggest fan-favourites in the show end up feeling boring, you know you have something wrong. I definitely appreciate trying to give Abraham and Sasha some nuance, since they are two of the B-listers that I find the hardest to describe beyond 'badass' and 'has great facial hair' in Abe's case, but if this was their best effort... yeah.
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