The Walking Dead, Season 8, Episode 13: Do Not Lead Us Astray
Yeah, we're continuing on with the whole war storyline, and it's... it's pretty bland, I'll be honest. The episode's good for some neat action and gore, and I'll give the episode that. There are some neat moments, like the payoff of the whole 'we're infecting them with zombie guts' deal which played out in a pretty horrific way that Walking Dead's zombies have failed to do for a while, there's a couple of neat bits from the always excellent Simon, there's a cool bit with a machinegun mounted on a motorbike. There's a cool action scene later on with shutting off all light and then stunning the Saviours with headlights. There's the whole Tara/Dwight/Daryl stuff... but ultimately it didn't really feel like much has happened to justify 50 minutes of television, other than an action episode can't last for 5 minutes.
But ultimately, the episode really leaves me pretty hollow, even by Walking Dead standards. Simon's Saviours and the Hilltop people fight it out, we get some characters shooting bullets and zombies are scary for a scene again, but ultimately no one of real importance dies other than Tobin (who still forces himself to sneak in the late Carl's koans about 'there must be something after'), Carol's boyfriend from Alexandria (or is it the Kingdom?), and he's a character so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things that when he shows up I didn't even realize I was supposed to recognize him until Carol did. Oh, and Bruce also dies later on, sick in bed, and I was flabbergasted to find that he's apparently a recurring character since season four.
There's also a sub-plot that pays off on all the times that Little Henry's seen glowering and being a creepy angry Batman-wannabe throughout the past few episodes. The kid insists on being allowed in the brutal shootouts, which, fair enough. It's Carl at his worst, but he's mostly inoffensive. And then, of course, his moronic desire to kill someone to pay for his brother's death and opening the Saviour prisoner cage while brandishing a machinegun like a big boy causes them to escape at the first sign of things going bad for them. And I can't bring myself to care for Henry, or the token nice Saviour who joins Maggie's group at the end, because... I don't really care. We don't spend enough time with any of the new characters to really make any of them memorable at all. Oh, and all the Little Henry drama seems to feed to the running scenes throughout this episode of Morgan hallucinating and seeing dead Gavin over and over.
And the characters that we do have a connection with? We follow up on the whole Daryl/Tara/Dwight stuff, and Dwight tags Tara with a crossbow bolt to maintain his cover as being part of the Saviours, while saving Tara's life from Simon's far more lethal weapons... but Daryl's angry, because you gotta have some drama. While it's neat that they're not repeating the same dialogue from their previous appearance, the random inconsistency as they swap their stances on Dwight really just seems insanely weird and out of nowhere. It really feels odd, and it's not justified by anything -- it's not like Rick (who buried his kid) or Henry (who's an angry child) -- if anything, I really feel that it's Tara, who has a fresh wound on her arm, who should be the angry one.
There's also the point where I kinda wanna argue about the consistency of walker bites -- we've seen walker bloods and gore being used as body paint multiple times before, the people at the farm drink some water from a well contaminated with walkers, Carl was straight-up bitten by a walker and took more than a couple of days to turn... it really feels weird, but I guess we really shouldn't expect consistency in the in-universe rules of the zombies when they barely keep a handle on their actual storylines.
Eh. It's enjoyable for the action scenes, at least, which is far better choerographed and far easier on the eyes compared to the messiness we've been getting throughout a huge chunk of the Saviours/#TeamRick battles.
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