The Walking Dead, Season 5, Episode 11: The Distance
So, yeah, this episode mostly raises the question of whether this mysterious newcomer Aaron (and his boyfriend Eric, who shows up far, far later into the episode) is really a nice dude, or a con artist that's just great at being nice. They've been burned so many times with Woodbury, Terminus and the hospital, with people who pretend to be nice but are actually sinister villains, that Rick's absolute paranoia is understandable. And hell, Aaron even expects it. He lays all his cards on the table, with the only real warning sign being that he didn't get to take a photograph of the people in the community and that he's using some kind of eavesdropping device. He brings photos, he tells them where the car is, he brings gifts of food, lets Rick's team tie him up, was the person responsible for the water bottles before... basically, Aaron and Eric have been scouting Rick for at least the length of the previous episode, and they're recruiting for strong, good people.
And yes, everything that's presented here really made it like Rick was just being overtly (and properly) paranoid, yet his decision to listen to literally everyone else and head to Alexandria ends up benefiting because he can hear the sounds of children playing when he reaches there. Michonne even acknowledges how she used to be the 'crazy lady with a sword' that no one in their right mind will take in, but here she's far from the antisocial samurai she has been, but rather she's the most vocal in voicing that they needed to give this mysterious community a chance.
Of course, as a watcher who knows that the season still has five or six more episodes to go (and that's not talking for the next two seasons) so it's definitely not the happy ending that this episode built up to, but at the same time the jury's still out on whether Aaron's really an evil actor or if he's just a nice dude.
It's all a great way to make not just Rick (and the other characters with him) be paranoid, but the audience as well. Rick's building aggressiveness and coldheartedness has been a running story this season, and he's asking the same questions that a genre-savvy viewer would. Is the food he's bringing poisonous? Is the flare the sign of an ambush by Aaron's hypothetical allies? How many people does Aaron have waiting to murder them? And the various choices that the team makes -- Glenn freeing Aaron and giving him a gun, Michonne campaigning for them to go to Alexandria -- all rewards them with... well, arriving on the doors, anyway, because we didn't get to see the paradise. In fact, the biggest danger was Rick's insistence that they drove at night, which caused them to crash headfirst into a walker swarm.
That glowing-skull Ghost Rider flare zombie was an awesome visual, by the way.
Overall it's a stark contrast to the depression of the last episode. It's cautious, with the team deciding that, yeah, they are good people and they could use the hope and the nice little settlement. So it's a nice little episode, even, again, if it ran a little slow and the ensemble is definitely underused -- only Rick, Michonne, and a little bit of Glenn and Noah really do anything here. It's still a decent episode, though, definitely stronger than the previous one though it doesn't really take much to do that.
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