The Walking Dead, Season 5, Episode 6: Consumed
This is a pretty good episode! The previous two episodes played on the late-season-four formula of focusing on small groups at a time with varying results -- Beth was uninteresting, and while Abraham and Eugene's story gave two underused characters a chance to shine it was fully predictable. Here, we follow two fan favourites and the two biggest contenders for 'main character' other than Rick's designated status. It's a moody episode that was less strong for the first five to ten minutes, but quickly picks up pace.
On face value, even less happened in this episode. Daryl and Carol track Beth's kidnappers, find themselves fighting a bunch of zombies, encounter Noah and have a brief conflict with him, before Noah finally fills them in about Beth's situation. Oh, and apparently the hospital's recruitment method is to use their car to run into people so they can fix them up and call on their debts. Utter douchebags! Also, they hunt runners down like cattle. Jeez, what jerkasses.
We did get a couple of flashback scenes that I really think wasn't fully necessary, showing us Carol breaking down after Rick exiled her, as well as her returning to the prison to find it burnt to the ground. But the real meat of the episode is seeing Daryl and Carol go on their little trek together. Added with the novelty of them sweeping through an actual city instead of the endless forests and suburbs, it gives us a pretty nice, moody episode as both Daryl and Carol show off their demons and their angels at different points of the story.
Daryl tries to get Carol to move on, to talk about what happened with Lizzie and Mica. There's the great moment of introspection as they stumble upon a care house that Carol once was in, before she ran back to her abusive husband. There's Daryl telling Carol to go to sleep, while he off-screen cleans up all the zombies that Carol knew pre-change. Noah gets to steal Daryl's crossbow and how to deal with Noah brings up a bit of a different methodology in Carol and Daryl. Daryl doesn't let Carol shoot Noah in the back even after he stole his crossbow, but later when Daryl knocks a wardrobe down on Noah and leaving him to the tender mercies of a walker, it was Carol that advocates to rescue the kid, while Daryl very nearly walks away. Strange, but makes sense, maybe? Daryl holds a grudge, but Carol can't bear to execute someone when he's helpless?
Carol's words about loss, about how she lost Sophia, about how she lost her two adoptive daughters, about how she lost the prison, coupled with her backstory as an abused woman thanks to her jerkwad of a husband, has broken her. She's not even fully on-board with saving Beth, so broken as she is, and she's just initially going on with Daryl's flow. Daryl gets to shake her out of her flunk, telling her that she's not ashes, she can move on and all that. It's something that Beth did to him back during their time high on moonshine, and now it's his turn to help Carol out of her flunk... because while Daryl tries to hide it under all that bravado, he's also abused by his father, and he understands.
Oh, and we did get a pretty cool action scene of Daryl and Carol dropping an ambulance off a highway to escape a zombie horde. That was awesome. Also cool are the zombies trapped in sleeping bags and tents -- that was an unnerving bit.
So yeah, while the actual events that happened in this episode is predictable -- Daryl and Noah returns to bring an army to liberate Beth and Carol from the hospital dickwads -- the journey and character beats that Carol and Daryl have are far more interesting. Highly doubt that we needed the full 45 minutes, because there are definitely times where the episode dragged on, but it's still very fun to watch nonetheless. We're finally building up to a confrontation with our next group of villains. Part of me is a bit annoyed that we're just moving from one group of barely-defined psychos to the next (I miss Shane) but hey, at least we're not drawing out conflicts longer than their expiry date.
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