The Walking Dead, Season 8, Episode 2: The Damned
As much as I like this huge 'big war!' storyline, after 40 minutes last episode, and 40 more minutes this episode, it's just.... mind-numbingly repetitive. You just swap in Morgan for Rick for Tara for Jesus for Carol for King Ezekiel for Aaron and it's just the same general shot of 'holy shit the Rick Army is a badass and they're taking over Negan's operations' over and over again. It's... entertaining enough, but I was not paying full attention and playing Hearthstone all throughout the episode. There's a lot of gun shooting, a lot of neat gore, some zombies jumping on people, and some random nobodies die... and I guess it could get worse than this (Walking Dead certainly has) but there's easily a problem when you have an episode of awesome gun battles and it's brain-dead boring. Hell, it's like watching someone play a video game. It'd be exciting in the long stretches between story cutscenes of doing nothing but shooting enemies, but without any exciting commentary, watching someone play a video game just feels like having half of the experience.
Add that to the sheer lack of scale given to us from the show. Okay, Morgan's in front of a building. Ezekiel and Carol is in another. Jesus and Tara is in another. Team Aaron is besieging another building. Are they in the same building? Are they assaulting different parts of the same building? Are those close to each other? There's a jack shit amount of context delivered to the viewers, and if there are, it's so muddled that I missed a lot of it. Certainly when I realized that Jesus, Tara and Morgan are attacking the same building, and that Rick, Daryl and Aaron are attacking the same one, I was bamboozled.
Add that to the fact that Rick's whole plan seems to be 'go to all the bases, shoot some people' and it's hard to really care about, say, Ezekiel and Carol's little subplot of whether the random Saviour mook is going to blow the whistle on them. How many facilities are left? Didn't episode one sic a zombie horde on the biggest Saviour facility? A quick scene listing the big facilities wouldn't have hurt. Also, Ezekiel's tiger eats some dude, and he repeats his speech about why he's putting on the whole 'thy king' spiel which... is something we know.
Morgan dealing with his Morgan stuff? Also relatively familiar, although Terminator Morgan is a whole less interesting than conflicted pacifistic monk Morgan for the simple reason that Morgan's became like everyone else in the show. Like Rick and Daryl and all the rest of the badass mofos in the crew. Tara and Jesus also has an argument on whether they should kill the surrendering Saviours, which is the same old argument we've been dealing with ever since season two in Hershel's farm... and while this one put s in some new faces and gives Jesus some actual character work, it's just... eh.
Bunch of minor people die, with some 'Andy' and 'Freddy' and 'Francine' getting shot and killed. I'm not sure if I should care about Francine, because the camera lingers on her just that second longer as if going 'oh no, the tragedy' but I looked her up on google, apparently she's been around as an extra since season five... and I don't remember any of her scenes. Eric also gets shot in the gut... but Eric's always been a satellite character to Aaron, who himself hasn't actually done jack shit since Alexandria, so... I don't really care?
Oh, and the final shot is Morales returning. Remember Morales? I certainly don't! At least googling him got me to go 'aaah' when I realized he was that one dude that drove away in season one when everyone else was driving off to go to the super-futuristic medical facility (remember when the show had a tinge of sci-fi to it?) but really, bringing him back doesn't have any real impact, so... I dunno. Not a big fan of this episode.
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