The Walking Dead, Season 5, Episode 14: Spend
Well, it's a pretty nice episode as, well, more conflicts sprung up. Rick's group's split into several smaller groups, and some of the plotlines worked, some didn't. Thankfully it's more hit than miss. Father Gabriel is such an inconsistent character that him going from one of Rick's team to disappearing to ripping out pages of a bible to going to Deanna (apparently that's how you spell her name) and crying about how Rick is Lucifer, the devil disguising himself as an angel, came out of nowhere. It doesn't really help that Gabriel hasn't been anywhere close to being an interesting person after the whole mystery as to why he's hiding something is cleared out.
Abraham's subplot is perhaps unnecessary as well, but damn you can't tell me that isn't awesome. The people of Alexandria may have survived, but they're (Aaron and Eric aside) not fighters, and when a huge walker army shows up, they panic, and the leader of the construction crew Abraham signed up with leaves one of their own to die. Though to be fair, they didn't all run but stood to shoot them up. With some deft action hero-ing around a payloader Abraham managed to rescue person-in-distress Francine, survive, and inspire the others to bail him up.
Rick patrols town and sees that Jessie's owl statue was beat up to hell, and have a passive-aggressive talk with her husband Pete. "We have to be friends." indeed. You... you don't really want to mess with Rick, buddy. Sam's apparently this couple's child, and he's chosen to hang around Carol despite her cold threat. I guess some part of him knows that if Carol wanted to hurt him, she would've done so already? From Sam's meeting as Carol kind of shows him how to make cookies (albeit to get him out of her hair) Carol realizes that Pete's an abusive jackass, and she basically gets Rick to see this. That's one conflict.
The other is a lot more gruesome. The jackass pair of Aiden and Nicholas, which we saw two episodes ago, go out with Glenn, Tara, Noah and Eugene to get some supplies, but as these things generally go, big zombie assault! And Aiden and Nicholas are two total idiots. Let's not canvas the perimeter! Let's shoot an armoured zombie even though it's down, thus erupting the grenade! Though to be fair, despite him being the bigger douchebag, Aiden's not the one to blame beyond shooting the grenade -- Nicholas leaves Aiden for dead, telling the others that he's killed by the blast (he's not), the first to run away even though they could've pulled Aiden out of where he's impaled (Aiden actually tells Glenn to run before it's too late), and in that awesome scene with the spinning door, Glenn and Noah really should've spun the door the other way and left him to die.
So instead, Noah gets devoured, a far more tragic and brutal death than Aiden's, because we actually like Noah. Shit, this season's really not kind on Team Rick, is it? And I think Noah's death may be more brutal and visceral than any death the good guys have suffered other than Lori. Fuck, man, that jaw!
Tara gets wounded by the grenade explosion, and an earlier conversation with resident coward Eugene ends up inspiring him to go from panicking at the sight of a zombie to carrying Tara out into their escape route, and actually beating Nicholas to the ground when he realizes that Nicholas left Glenn and Noah behind. He doesn't suddenly become an action hero, but he did slow Nicholas down enough for Glenn to knock him unconscious. So yeah, Deanna's definitely not going to be happy when the team comes back with her son dead and left to the walkers, with the other Alexandria resident beaten up by Eugene.
It's nice that the conflict is being set up to be ambiguous. On one hand, Pete's an abusive jackass, Aiden and Nicholas are twats, Gabriel's being nuts and Carol's not being entirely good with her child-threatening and gun-stealing. On the other hand, people like Noah, Abraham and Michonne genuinely want to help out, Deanna and her architect husband are genuinely good and competent people (unlike 95% of Alexandria), Rick and Carol are working on their own moral compass (Rick because he fancies Jessie and Carol because of her own experiences as an abuse victim), and Glenn and Eugene do have cause to beat up Nicholas. The Team Glenn stuff's going to end in a big 'I say, you say' conflict, I think, and it's going to be interesting to see how this ends up going. It's nice that the conflict is actually, for once, various shades of gray, which is something we haven't gotten since Shane-vs-Rick, except here none of the parties are deluded and dreaming of murder. Very interesting, Noah and Aiden's death were gruesome and tragic, and the Alexandrians do a great job of being portrayed as not being cartoonishly incompetent, just inexperienced and prone to panicking.
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