The Walking Dead S08E06 Review: Muddled As Hell

The Walking Dead, Season 8, Episode 6: The King, The Widow and Rick

Wow, this episode was pretty muddled and bad. It's just a montage of random scenes focusing on characters as they recover from... the big messy 'war' arc that happened for the past five episodes. After two somewhat decent episodes with focus on Ezekiel and the pair of Negan and Gabriel respectively, Walking Dead's eighth season has devolved back to some real silly blandness.

And this episode is just... so muddled. I'm not sure where it's all going, and I'm not sure I care. We jump from a lot of characters, some of  which who haven't received much screentime in seasons 7 and 8, like Enid or Aaron or Tara or Rosita, and I'm just somewhat... apathetic. That's one of the problems when you have a show like the Walking Dead where anyone can die, but you don't want to kill off too many characters or death will be cheap, but you introduce so many characters that so few of them ended up mattering.

And this episode is just... messy. In quick bullet-form fashion, we've got:

• Ezekiel mourning and Carol trying to get him out of his funk.
• Carol has some scene with some little kid who wants to fight the Saviours.
• Michonne and Rosita (I forgot Rosita was still alive, even) attacking a random bunch of Saviours for... some reason. Rosita gets to bazooka some dude, though, which is probably the only highlight of the episode. 
• Daryl and Tara, wanting revenge on Dwight, meet up with Michonne and Rosita and bring them to the compound.
• Carl meets some random stranger and has an extended sequence protecting him from walkers? God, this was so tedious. 
• Maggie and Jesus deal with the bunch of completely-treacherous people they can't kill and build a prison.
• Gregory gets dumped into the prison after trying to suck up to everyone.
• Aaron and Enid take a ride for... some shit, I dunno.
• Rick meets up with the scavenger junkyard people and gets put in one of those 'A' cargo crates that the cannibals put people in a couple seasons back. 

It's just... none of these really end up mattering beyond reminding us that these characters exist, but by doing that they don't actually do anything with the characters and the whole episode ends up like a vignette of scenes that I really don't care about. The only real scene that felt organic was Daryl and Tara talking about how they still  want revenge on Dwight despite him helping them out, and Carol and Ezekiel's brief exchange which was rooted in their interactions in the previous season.

But so much of this war arc is so oblique and ambiguous that I find it really hard to care. How badly is Team Rick that he needs to go and offer a peace offering to the treacherous junkyard people? And why go alone instead of giving a show of force? And the whole storyline with Jesus, Maggie and Gregory would've really felt so much better if it had been handled well, yet it's just so blandly obvious that Gregory is just trying to butter his way up and they're being naive since all the prisoners are not actual characters beyond the one treacherous dude that killed Morgan's apprentice.

So yeah, more than ever, this is Walking Dead at its absolute worst, and episodes like this is what earned season eight of Walking Dead its well-deserved, notorious reputation as being a hot steaming pile of poorly-executed shit. In previous seasons, when we needed episodes to pad out the season to act as buffers and filler scenes between one crisis and the next, they at least attempted to give one of the minor characters an interesting arc or some shit. Not here. Like, I guess theoretically they're building up the junkyard people and the Hilltop prisoners as plot arcs, but they're both so poorly executed and so bland, and Carl's other storyline with the random stranger (Siddiq, google tells me he's called?) are all so bland, muddled and poorly done that I can't really bring myself to give a shit.

Beyond Rosita bazooka-ing a dude, because that's darkly hilarious.