The Walking Dead, Season 7, Episode 8: Hearts Still Beating
It's a bit of a less well-written episode, this one. And it's a shame, really -- season seven has been successful at both world-building and being so much more interesting than the previous season, so to see one of the supposedly 'bigger' episodes ends up kind of feeling... 'well, that happened'. Basically the entire episode is just a powdered keg waiting to explode as Negan continues to have dinner and muck around in Alexandria, and don't get me wrong -- seeing Negan ham it up as he eats spaghetti with Judith and Carl and putting Lucille on the chair meant for Rick, or playing pool is entertaining and everything, but even that cannot sustain an entire 40 minute long episode. Rick and Aaron try to scavenge a crapton of things from a boat with river-zombies with a hilariously inept fake-out with Aaron's apparent death. Carol, Morgan and Richard (Ezekiel's security dude) talk a bit about fighting against the Saviours and both of our favourite pacifists refuse to help out. Daryl escapes. Michonne's side-quest finishes. Spencer tries to make a power play and suck up to Negan, but gets disemboweled for his reason. Rosita unleashes her assassination mission, but fails. Negan kills Olivia and kidnaps Eugene, and Rick gets super angry and decides to fight back and everyone regroups in Hilltop. Oh, and someone mysterious with boots wrapped with wires sees Rick and Aaron.
In theory, this should be one of the season's most tense episodes. So much things go down, three named characters die, pieces are being moved all over the board and at the end of this episode, a good chunk of our separated badasses are returned together. But the execution is a bit suspect. This isn't necessarily as bad an episode as the worst that the sixth season has to offer, and it's definitely still watchable, but there are some points that really do feel off.
Take Rick and Aaron's trip to the weapons/resources cache on the boat. It should be a tense scene knowing Negan's in Alexandria waiting for Rick, as well as the whole cool bit of zombies in a lake threatening to drag people down, but I never really felt like even Aaron was in danger, and just how he survived being dogpiled by like six zombies in the water without a weapon -- and somehow not even getting bit -- is a particularly silly bit that seems to just try fill in an arbitary 'protagonist in danger of zombie death' quota. I actually felt more threat to Aaron when the random Saviour goons start beating him up.
Also silly is Rosita missing her one shot at killing Negan from like two meters away for no real reason other than it happened to hit the bat instead. Like, I know Negan's not going to be taken out this early in the season by Rosita of all people, but honestly, that takes suspending disbelief a bit too far. The fact that Negan doesn't even kill or injure Rosita, or even do his 'well someone close to you has to be punished' bit makes it a bit odd. Sure, he has Arat kill minor character Olivia, but that was more of an attempt to get the bullet-maker more than anything. He does get away with Eugene, presumably to break him like he did Daryl (and Carl? That whole Negan-Carl thing didn't really have a conclusion) but I have a feeling Eugene's probably going to cooperate, or pretend to cooperate, a lot sooner than Daryl.
Perhaps one of the more interesting storylines in this episode is the Spencer subplot, which extends from last episode. As Gabriel notes, Spencer is a 'tremendous shit' and he has been -- to no fault of his actor, who portrays his smarminess well -- absolutely kind of boring. I guess last episode has him buy completely into Camp Negan, and now as Negan is playing pool he tries to suck up to the man in charge, telling him where to find pool tables and telling him about how Rick's never going to give up no matter what... to which Negan makes a note that if Spencer is so fucking capable, he would've killed Rick himself. And in any case, Rick's still out there scavenging supplies and Spencer's indoors trying to suck up to someone who can kill Rick. In a death scene that's easily needlessly gory to the point that it's a bit hilarious, Negan guts Spencer to find if he actually has 'guts'. Shame, really, that Spencer was such a flat character that all his dickbaggery ends up obscuring any valid points he might have had towards Rick's style of leadership.
Of the many subplots that ran in this episode, Daryl's escape, hinted last episode, was the best realized out of them. It's not the most intricate scene, but showing how much Daryl is broken still in this episode, yet still manages to find time to ransack Dwight's room for resources, and beat the holy motherfuckin' hell out of Fat Joey is a pretty cool scene.
In the least well-done subplot is Michonne's bit, where she sees a crapton of Saviours, and... decides to follow the one she held hostage, shoot her in the head and dump the body? I'm not sure where the episode's going with Michonne other than it's just showing that she's doing something active in fighting Negan. That's absolutely weird and the fact that neither Michonne's Saviour car-mate or what she's attempting to accomplish is ever made clear is a bit odd.
Carol is still a pacifist, and her scene really is just an excuse for the writers to remind us that she still exists (and also to introduce Richard to us as the war-happy one in the Kingdom) though on the other hand neither she nor Morgan have heard of what the Saviours have done to Abraham and Glenn. So.
Whatever the case, while it is still weak in some parts, at least we're getting the plot moving on, Rick's finally out of his BSOD, and the pieces on the board for the inevitable confrontation are being moved. It's not entirely uninteresting, it just didn't quite have enough substance to last for the whole 40 minutes.
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