The Walking Dead, Season 6, Episode 12: Not Tomorrow Yet
After an agonizingly slow post-timeskip episode, and a functional but unremarkable episode previously, the Walking Dead finally kicks things into high gear. Considering these episodes run around 40 minutes each, and considering how much stuff is crammed into this one and it's still paced well, it really makes several previous outings really seem inexcusable, don't they? Regardless, though, Team Rick plan their strike on the Saviours' compound. Alongside with Paul and that one dude who's been inside the Saviours' hideout, they plan their assault. It's honestly very foreboding because we know what kind of a show Walking Dead is. It's a show where huge conflicts are an excuse to kill off characters for shock value, and you're just waiting -- who's going to bite the dust this time?
The episode opens up finally showing us Carol, who's been absent for the past two episodes, and despite being easily the most badass character in the show (with the only real competition being Daryl and Morgan -- sorry, Rick) Carol's human too. Apparently some time offscreen she's struck up a bit of a romance with one off the generic Alexandrians I don't know the name of, which's weird but is portrayed as a 'eh, whatever, why not' bit. He's making cookies for everyone -- an act that's done presumably in honour of Sam, whose death she very indirectly caused via traumatization. She keeps a notebook where she lists all the human kills she's done, hiding a far more troubled soul than she lets on. She doesn't let the knowledge of Morgan's treachery (if you could call it that) in the previous arc out, keeping it hidden but refusing to take part in the responsibility -- and the fact that she keeps track of her kills is a nice and plausible clue as to why she's not being the pragmatic 'hiss you naive fool' like Rick would've been. It's a couple of montages that felt so much like what Carol would do, gathering beets for cookies while stabbing random zombies like it's no bigger bother than swatting a fly.
So yeah, Carol's scenes are amazing, even if they don't really have much to do with the main 'fuck up the Saviours' plotline. There's her insisting that Maggie not be involved in any way, which is another thing that you can easily reconcile with the character, but otherwise she takes a backseat during the majority of the action, electing to stay and guard Maggie.
Morgan doesn't participate in the assault, and is the main voice of dissent during Rick's talk in the church, wanting to reason with the Saviours (because that worked so well the last time) but gets outvoted, by a particularly vocal Aaron. Both sides of the argument is done well -- Morgan's naive if he thinks the Saviours can be reasoned with, considering the chaos they unleashed earlier this season when they assaulted Alexandria. But on the other hand, what Rick is telling them to do is a proactive, cold-blooded and surgical strike to basically murder these people in their sleep, a far different situation than defending their town from raiders.
Meanwhile, the other characters all have their brief moments both when they are about to get out, and when they do the surprisingly entertaining bit of trying to find a zombie head that resembles Gregory. Glenn and Heath (remember him? I totally forgot) talk about how many people they've killed, and, huh, I've never realized that Glenn never actually killed a person. You'd think he shot someone in the head at least once during the conflicts with the Governor, but I guess he didn't? Abraham breaks up with Rosita in a spectacularly horrible fashion "You aren't the only woman left in the world!" and I... I can't say I like Abraham much after this exchange, jeez. Tara and Denise have their farewells, and later Tara confides to Father Gabriel about how she's done something similar while in employ of the Governor (nice bit of continuity-driven angst there). Gabriel himself also steels himself to actually be productive to the community, even if it means participating in this raid.
The raid in the Saviours' compound actually goes smoothly! Nobody died, nobody even got severely injured, and Team Rick is a well-rounded fighting machine. I honestly expected someone like Heath to bite the dust, and both Tara and Rosita's tragic pre-action scenes really kind of made me afraid for them (and they're unimportant enough to kill off, really) but not even the random doublecrosser dude from Hilltop died. It's portrayed as dishonourable as Rick and the others go and slit people's throats while they're sleeping, machinegunning them down as they're running away, and even Gabriel gets to shoot one of them down.
Glenn and Heath are the heart of the team, the relatively innocent among them. The likes of Daryl, Abraham and Rick execute their targets with not much in lieu of restraint, but the long, lingering scene as Glenn and Heath's knives hover over their targets, as they look at the polaroid pictures of bashed-in heads (what sick fucks keep those things as a collection?) adorning the walls of their prey as justification... and the final fight they're in, where they barricade themselves in the armoury and just open fire with machineguns through the door -- killing like a half-dozen Saviours without seeing them and breaking down because of it...
It's a brutal action movie and we go quickly from the slower Glenn/Heath or Tara/Gabriel scenes to far more hectic scruffles for our heroes, but everything goes relatively smoothly and even when the alarm is sounded the Saviours still fall. Of course, it's too easy. Too easy. And Carol prevents Maggie from going into the fight, and apparently this caused the two of them to be captured by another group of Saviours off-screen, so yeah, as usual, the show leaves the thing that's wrong for the end of the episode. And it's ironic that it's Carol reverting from her clinical 'destroy the enemy' mode she's been in for the past two or three seasons back into something more human... only for that second-guessing regarding Maggie to cost them dearly. (To be fair, I know Maggie skipped out on the previous mission that caused Glenn to be separated, but come on, this is just dumb) At least nobody died, though, which leaves me to dread the next few episodes.
Man, imagine if all this cool Saviour stuff had happened earlier in this season before it burned me out. Like, the foreshadowing and plotting throughout this entire season has been a godawful mess, but at least I can enjoy the odd episode where they go absolutely wild in action scenes.
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