The Walking Dead S08E09 Review: Tonight A Main Character Dies

The Walking Dead, Season 8, Episode 9: Honor

I've had drafts of the second half of season 8 rattling around the blog for a while, and I've had them more or less completed, but didn't really felt like there was a neat point to sneak it in. But with me getting a new job, and things being really hectic, I've been simply not having the time to catch up with a lot of the projects I'm doing. I'm way behind on the weekly manga, I'm very much behind on the schedule I want to be for Hunter x Hunter, the Pokemon anime or Swamp Thing, and I haven't really touched either Punisher's second season and Jessica Jones' third season. And let's not get into my attempted review of Rick and Morty, or Batman Beyond, or series/seasonal reviews for things like Kamen Rider and the Tick. Those are definitely mostly going to be shelved for a while. Hell, I'm not even sure if I have the energy to semi-regularly go through the CW superhero shows or Titans or any of the upcoming stuff. (Monster reviews should continue on after a while, I've got a fair amount of those ready, I just need to proofread them.)

Anyway... that is why I end up sort of publishing these -- and I do apologize if the quality of these aren't as up to snuff with my usual work. The bullet-point drafts of these reviews were written around a month after I did the first half of season 8 where I powered through the second half of the season, and I proofread them over the course of around half a year... and then decided to just shelve them. But hey, here they are, out for you guys to read. They'll be published piecemeal over the first half of this month while I get my shit together.

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I mean, I guess maybe by some miracle Walking Dead could end up being good again instead of having a title that describes the condition of the show? And to be fair, this ninth episode after the eighth season's winter break, "Honor", wasn't quite as bad as Walking Dead's last few excursions. That's not to say it's particularly good either, though. 

This entire episode is just one protracted goodbye to Carl, with one of those egregious and self-indulgent "oh look what could have been" dreamy-filtered flash-forwards being tossed in that really aren't anywhere as poignant as the show thinks they are. (The random addition of Negan at the end of the episode, and just how obvious that the show's never going to go in that direction, is unintentionally hilarious) And I guess as a long-running character that's been around since the first season, Carl is a character that is worth giving an entire episode to. But god damn, as much as Chandler Riggs and Andrew Lincoln try their best in giving a very heartfelt farewell, the episode really feels hollow. It doesn't really help that Carl himself hasn't been the most consistently written character either -- he's either the child figure that Rick (or whoever) is going to rush to protect, or he's trying to grow up to be Rick and protect others. Carl's got scant little storylines he can call his own, although thankfully what little we have -- his cold-blooded murder of that one kid in season three (four?) which he admits to Rick, and his intent to not go as far as his dad into zealously killing every single member of Negan's crew in saving... doctor dude whose name I can't recall on the top of my head. 

I really am of two views about this episode. On one hand, it drags on and on and on and is just one ball of sadness trying to force in some "inspirational" words from Carl to motivate Rick and Michonne to not go the genocide route, but on the other hand it would be even worse storytelling if they just killed off Carl within ten minutes and buried him and not just a sudden brutal death like some other less-fortunate characters got. 

There were some B-plots going on, with a bit of a flashback to the very obvious way that the Saviours escaped from the zombie-sieged Sanctuary (they used dead zombies as shields) before having Morgan and Carol go on a rescue mission to get King Ezekiel back. There's a bit of a drama between Ezekiel and Carol trying to get Morgan to relapse to his old Punisher ways (he rips out some random dude's intestines!), especially when the one likable Saviour dude, Gavin or whatever he's called, is the one that Morgan has to kill or not kill. It does help that Gavin is perhaps the only reasonable member other than Dwight who's been long enough to be recognizable... but of course Morgan's drama ends up being sort of moot as Henry, the brother of Morgan's old padawan, stabs Gavin from behind. 

Eh. It's an okay episode with focus, and as I keep saying in Walking Dead reviews, all of the best episodes are the ones with some sort of focus. This one isn't particularly good, of course, but it's okay. We'll see if the rest of the season will manage to maintain this sort of mediocre quality or not.