The Walking Dead, Season 8, Episode 7: Time For After
I'm not sure why I'm still doing Walking Dead episode reviews, sometimes. Force of habit, I guess. At the very least, at least I'll get through season 8 and we'll see if we'll continue after this. Season 7 had potential despite its pacing problems, but season 8 was such a huge, huge stumble in terms of magnitude that I've never quite seen in any other TV show before.
Like, the Walking Dead is hardly the pinnacle of TV shows. It's got its moments, and it certainly has got a lot of talented actors stuck with a crappy script and a shambling direction that's marginally less interesting than the titular walking dead itself. But this episode? Hell, this episode emphasizes how far Walking Dead has fallen since its glory days. Eugene is actually very much fine this episode, as he's one of the few characters that is well-served throughout the Negan arc with a proper character arc and a change of allegiance that makes sense from what we know of the character, making Eugene absolutely unique in being a character that's not constantly buying into the Rick-is-god hype that so much of the show's characters believe for no real good reason.
But here, we've got Rick stripped and photographed and forced to fight a spiky-headed zombie by the Scavengers, and I literally cannot give a shit for the simple reason that Rick has so much plot armour that I cannot be invested in the fact that this could cause any sort of lasting harm -- and in that case, why not warp up the Scavengers subplot two episodes ago? I mean, the Scavengers are probably the least interesting part of the differing societies in the setting at this point, so why spend so much time with them?
And most gallingly, we have a huge sequence with characters that I should care about. Rosita and Tara might rank pretty low on people's list of characters you care about (I do like Tara mostly due to her fun one-off episode back last season) but Daryl, Michonne and Morgan should really rank way, way up high on the 'people you care about' list. And they're just... not. The scene has them discussing whether they go on a potentially suicidal run to finish off the Saviours while Rick's off dicking around with the garbage people, and I literally don't care who leaves and who stays -- and apathy is the exact reaction you don't want your audience to experience when you're writing fiction. You want them to root for the heroes, to hate the villains... but when you enter apathy? Yeah.
Let's talk about how dumb Rick's plan is, by the way. So much of how the K-A-H alliance (as Eugene puts it) resides on Rick's badassery as a leader and how everyone respects him because he's awesome and yadda yadda yadda, how he's a great tactician and all that... (to be fair, we assume he came up with the pretty decent lead-walker-horde-to-the-Saviours-doorstep) but he really isn't, as emphasized in his dumb faith to single-handedly talk the Scavengers down before they shoot him, skin him alive, feed him to zombies or whatever. Nevermind the fact that the Scavengers aren't the most mentally stable of people, but apparently Rick just doesn't have a contingency plan beyond threatening the Scavengers that 'my people will fuck you up if you kill me!' which is just... plain dumb. Really, is gaining the Scavengers so necessary that they delayed the final push to the Sanctuary just to let Rick dick around there for a couple of episodes?
And well, the episode's biggest proportion of screentime is devoted to Eugene, which is a great decision. Josh McDermitt is blessed with playing one of the more unique characters in the increasingly generic sea of generic characters that populate the Walking Dead, and his character's unique linguistic verbal tics of speaking in what TVTropes would say sesquipedalian loquaciousness makes it a bonus that I actually have to pay attention to the words Eugene is talking. Eugene's insistence to a wounded Gabriel or to Dwight that he is a survivor, and he doesn't give a shit about Team Rick because they were just travelling companions and he's just going to do what it needs to do to survive and protect the people of the Sanctuary is really well done. Also well done, however, is the conflict brewing within him -- he doesn't sell out Dwight in the climactic scene, but at the same time he's trying to help Negan get rid of the zombie swarm with an iPod remote-control plane (which is awesome). He insists everything is fine and he's kowtowing to Negan, but he has to get drunk to sleep at night.
In a sea where everything is just predictable or just random bwaaa-surprise-come-back-next-week-plot-twists it's very refreshing to have a character whose allegiance isn't up into the air and isn't two-dimensionaly following Rick or Negan 100%. And it's not like Eugene's treachery comes out of nowhere either. Negan genuinely treats him well and respects him, whereas among Team Rick he's actually been treated kind of like an afterthought for much of the previous seasons (his friendship with Abraham notwithstanding), and his justification that he's doing this and sending the zombie horde away to save the workers and people in the Sanctuary is definitely well done.
Mind you, Eugene's very strong acting doesn't quite save the episode from being drab and dull. Or when you come and stop and think of the logistics of it all it doesn't really make sense -- there's the stupidity of Rick's plan, the stupidity of how literally no one does anything beyond Daryl's truck run, the stupidity that the Scavengers don't actually kill Rick, the stupidity that apparently scary-prepared Negan and his lackeys all are just waiting for Eugene to come up with something... yeah.
Overall, better than the previous episode, but that's an absurdly low bar not to clear.
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