The Walking Dead, Season 8, Episode 4: Some Guy
I've been absolutely negative about season 8 of the Walking Dead, and it seems that season 8 is shaping up to be one of the worst out of the Walking Dead's output. I've been reviewing Walking Dead's every single episode for a while now, doing them as I catch up on the series on my cousin's DVD box sets, simply because most of the time it offers a show that I can review easily -- each episode has enough content for me to talk about, but not too much that I'd have to spend a long time reviewing each episode, which would be what would happen if I ever get to reviewing Game of Thrones or Lost or the likes of those. But in the eighth season, however, I find myself just... exhausted. There's really not much to talk about simply because the show doesn't really give me much of a reason to honestly even care about these characters. We just jump from one character to the next without much attempt at trying to develop them.... until this episode.
It's not the best episode, and it doesn't automatically redeem the eighth season, but 'Some Guy' focuses almost exclusively on King Ezekiel, a character introduced last season that I really enjoy. But even Ezekiel has been grating on me in season 8's first three episodes because the writers essentially force the actor to say the same three or four 'and yet I smile' speeches. This episode takes the concept of King Ezekiel and deconstructs it hard for the titular king himself, showing just how over his head he is, and how he's just some guy.
And the episode's essentially that -- we get some neat stuff with Carol (who's in her machinegun people dead mode again... wasn't she supposed to be a pacifist now?) and good ol' big fun Jerry, but everyone else in the Kingdom that's been recurring extras -- there's this muscular dude with a crew cut that gets killed halfway through the episode who I recognize as one of Ezekiel's main advisers but I don't remember the name of. But the execution is good enough, and Ezekiel's eventual despair, and his insistence that Jerry, Carol and the other survivors he meets just leave him for dead because he's no king, he's just a charlatan. Yet I think the episode shows that Ezekiel's inspiring enough that people do treat him as such, and while he walks away defeated at the end of the episode... it does make his character grow from being a one-note character. It's something we've seen before, but at least it's something beyond just rah rah machinegun rah rah headshot rah rah zombie.
Oh, and that scene of Ezekiel seeing all his Kingdom soldiers slowly get up into the walking dead? It's been so long since the zombies are a major threat and this episode really hams that particular aspect of Walking Dead's mythology, as it were, really well.
Ezekiel, in addition to losing everything and having his character utterly admonished by the glasses-wearing Neganite (who, in turn, gets hacked apart by the badass return of Jerry) also loses poor Shiva, who shows up to buy enough time for Jerry and Carol to drag Ezekiel away. Shiva's death is something I expected to happen, but I didn't expect her to die from zombies but from some heinous act by the Saviours. Ezekiel's broken, which is a little alarming considering how many times we've done the 'an optimistic character is broken by the reality of the world' storyline with Rick, Morgan, Carol and so many others in the past, but hopefully this is a turning point for Walking Dead to be entertaining again.
There were some weak moments -- like, as mentioned above, Carol's sudden transformation into a stone-cold killer that plays up her 'oh no I'm so weak, spare me' act after the last season revolved so much about her transformation to a pacifist is a weird one. Rick and Daryl's extended action scene cameo is cool, but I'm not sure it's necessary or believable considering where they were last episode. And the flashbacks were wholly unnecessary. It's still a more or less pretty solid episode, though, and hopefully the rest of the season can pick up the slack and continue to be somewhat decent.
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