The Walking Dead, Season 6, Episode 11: Knots Untie
Far better than the previous episode, and I do concur that the show did need to take its time to introduce us to Paul (a.k.a. "Jesus", I'm still going to call him Paul) and make him look like he's at least somewhat honourable enough for us to buy his spiel that he's part of a peaceful community. A lot of this felt like a rehash of how Team Rick didn't trust Aaron back when he was trying to recruit them for Alexandria, and it didn't feel like the most productive series of episodes because of this repetition factor.
Thankfully, though, the community of Hilltop is relatively different from Alexandria's naive peacefulness. It's clear that Hilltop is involved in the plotline about this mysterious Negan fellow, although while I do appreciate a good buildup it does seem absolutely annoying that it took us 11 episodes (more if you count the final few episodes of season 5) to even get any sort of information about Negan. Yes, in theory, showing us snippets of how random people who seemed to work for Negan's group (the Saviours, apparently) are all trying to work off a debt or something, but it's too long of a buildup with minimal payoff and honestly minimal amounts of information.
Basically, Hilltop is run by this dude Gregory, who not only tries to hit on Maggie (even though she makes it relatively clear early in their conversation that she's married) but basically tries to strongarm the Alexandria population for a far better deal. Gregory's a huge dick, but at the same time he's not cartoonishly or nightmarishly evil about it. He might be on the inept side, but he does exude enough gravitas to make me buy into his role as a weaselly shrewd businessman type of leader. The prospect of multiple settlements across the country, with Paul's line about how "you world is about to get a lot bigger", isn't too far-fetched and very believable, and the little conflict about how Paul's so much more competent as a leader to Hilltop compared to Gregory is whatever. More interesting is how this ties in to the enigmatic Negan, who's basically collecting protection money in the form of a hostage, as well as forcing Hilltop's residents to go around and like looting for Negan's group or something?
Maggie's role as the group's spokesperson is amazingly well-handled, because I definitely buy it -- she's a strong character, she's loyal to Team Rick, and she hasn't gotten much to do beyond Glenn love plots, so giving her something active will hopefully make her more prominent in the future. Absolutely loved how she realized that they're now advantageous as far as bargaining goes, and pushes the deal arguably harder than Negan's people did -- half of their food straight-up on the promise that they'll go bounty hunting for Negan's head.
It's also interesting that unlike Alexandria or Woodsbury, this is the first big settlement where the inhabitants don't have guns, and instead use spears. They have food and livestock in abundance, though, in direct contrast to Alexandria which has just started farming and still relying on scavengers for food. After a murder attempt on Gregory's life, and Rick killing the murderer and Paul defusing the situation, Team Rick decides to play bounty hunter, going off after Negan and destroying him the way they destroyed every other evil group that's come across them before. If nothing else, IIRC Daryl still has one bazooka left over from that one truck. Obviously, things will go seven ways south to hell before the time this season's over, but I definitely appreciate how they're at least expediting the conflict's setup relatively quickly. Ideally it would've started earlier in the season, but hey.
On the way we've also got several smaller moments popping up here and there, like Glenn and Maggie saving one of Paul's Obs-Gyn doctor buddies who gives them an ultrasound checkup, and Abraham's bizarre euphemisms about using a condom which is absolutely hilarious. It's absolutely weird, though -- Abraham is a character that I find really hard to nail down, and I guess the recent episodes are showing him as being kind of a death-seeker... but I find it really hard to buy into his weird love-triangle with Sasha and Rosita, especially since there's barely any buildup beyond that one bad episode earlier this season where Abraham and Sasha find themselves trapped together. Unlike Maggie, where her transformation into the Alexandrian's spokeswoman felt organic and well-earned, or Michonne's transformation from badass samurai road warrior into a calmer, more emotional character, Abraham's jerk-around from badass colonel into this dude thinking about leaving his girlfriend for another lady while having death seeking thoughts is just so weird and hard to care about.
So yeah, it's definitely a step in the right direction IMO, although definitely feels like a retread of the original discovery of Alexandria. Mostly I'm just happy to be having something different than the constant slogging pace of the quarry zombie conflict. We'll see how things go to hell for the next conflict.
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