Wednesday 26 July 2017

The Walking Dead S04E10 Review: Anthology

The Walking Dead, Season 4, Episode 10: Inmates


It's a stark contrast to the previous episode, where 'Inmates' jumped from one group to another as a way to catch up. I honestly don't really know if any of the zombies or the father-son pair that Tyreese stumbles into are supposed to be any particular people I should be sad about, because I don't recognize any of them. We just jump from various groups -- Daryl and Beth; Tyreese, Judith and the creepy girls (Judith is alive!) who meet Carol; Maggie, Sasha and Bob; Glenn and... er... lady from Brian's army whose name I cannot remember -- at a pretty fast pace. Most of them got out okay, we're just establishing where they are. There's a distinct difference between the tones and pacing of the first two halves of Walking Dead's fourth season, in a way similar to the newer Gotham seasons, and it really feels like we're having two mini-seasons instead of one longer one. Which is perfectly fine, I think.

Daryl and Beth are basically there to show that they're still alive. We get a bit of a long monologue about Beth talking to her diary about how they need to have hope that the prison will be good juxtaposed against the two of them being pretty fucked up while running from zombies, and her being insistent that they'll meet survivors soon and getting pretty broken down when said survivors turned out to be zombie chow. 

Tyreese apparently saved Judith (something that's honestly not a big surprise -- I knew one of the group made out with Judith, I just don't know who) and the two creepy kids, Mica and Lizzie. Who are still indistinguishable to me -- one's a bit of a coward and the other is a hardass survivor, but damned if I can tell them apart. Tyreese and the kids, naturally, stumble across Carol, because, y'know, maximum drama! Carol is the mother-figure of the creepy girls, but at the same time she killed Tyreese's girlfriend. Tyreese doesn't know about this, though, so he treats Carol's return with a hug. Future drama! This group meets a little map leading to 'Terminus', which is... the next sanctuary they're going to hole up in, I guess? Man, I missed Carol. She's been gone for a good chunk of episodes now. 

There was a pretty tense sequence where Tyreese is forced to leave the two girls with baby Judith as he goes off to investigate screaming people (RIP Christopher, who I'm not sure if we ever met before), and it's pretty tense -- the coward girl, understandably, freaks the fuck out, but the timely arrival of Carol saves them. Judith's a baby so she's more or less dead weight that's crying and demands milk and diapers all the time, and for a moment I thought the show was going to have Lizzie (?) kill her by suffocating her but thankfully that didn't happen.

Maggie, Bob and Sasha reach the bus that drove off on its own during the fall of the prison, and they find it filled with zombies. It's a bit of a horrifying moment as Maggie basically wants to make sure whether Glenn is alive or dead -- with her father recently murdered and her not knowing what happened to her husband and her sister, she's really, really desperate and it's a very palpable bit as Sasha and Bob lets the walkers out one by one as Maggie stabs them in the head, praying that none of them are Glenn. Of course, this means every single background extra from Woodbury is freaking dead, with only Bob, Lizzie and Mica ending up mattering. Well, I guess it's for the better -- none of them actually mattered.

But apparently Glenn's left in the prison, hanging on a concrete edge with zombies all below him. Didn't he go with the people in the bus? I have no fucking idea what happened, because last I remembered Glenn went with the people on the bus, but hey, apparently he got off, and found himself at one end of a collapsed walkway. After waking up, Glenn has the time to gather riot gear, an assault rifle and a backpack full of resources, go through some badass moments as he charged the crowd of zombies, recruit... random Governor-allied lady as an ally, before collapsing out of tiredness, and they're confronted by this new group of people in a military van who don't look to be particularly nice folk. 

More story got told in this episode, and there are some great moments, but all in all I think they could've done better by not being so... filler-y, I guess? It really felt like the show was too slow-paced and too fast-paced at times in this episode, and neither the slow pace nor the fast pace happened in the right bits... which is probably the fault of the anthology method of storytelling in general. Eh, overall it's still pretty enjoyable, I guess, with lots of setup including this 'Terminus' place and the group of people Glenn met at the end of the episode.

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