The Walking Dead, Season 8, Episode 14: Still Gotta Mean Something
And we're back to another episode that's basically kind of another tosser. It's a blatant episode to fill in the gap between one crisis and the next, but they don't really have much to talk about so we just try to follow a pair of characters around -- mostly Rick and Morgan, but we also get a bit of Carol, Henry, Negan and Jadis -- and trying to bill this as a 'character focus' episode. But it doesn't really work. I don't think this episode really does anything new other than to hammer with absolutely no subtlety into our heads that "HEY RICK AND MORGAN ARE KER-AAAAZY VIOLENT NOW" as they hunt down the escaped Saviours, pretend to help them out, and then suddenly throwing axes and stabbing people in the jugular with sharpened sticks. It's clearly wrong and dishonourable as none of the Saviours there other than scumbag Gavin (who gets a very grisly death, held against a chain-link door from the other side as zombies descend on him) are outright malicious, so it's a case of Rick and Morgan descending further and further away from the whole "please try not to kill everyone and try to make peace" mentality that the dying Carl tries to impart to them.
It's a mildly interesting direction to take Rick in, in that it's a different Rick at last other than "broken-down man clinging to his honour", and this duo dues end up being driven by their dead children. I'm curious if somewhere down the line Rick and Morgan's extremism will lead to them being kicked out of the Hilltop/Kingdom community.
Meanwhile, the other focus characters sort of learn the other lesson. Carol's story isn't especially intriguing. Ezekiel basically tells her to get off her scared ass and go find Henry, and while Carol was pessimistic that Henry's still alive, she goes out anyway, in stark contrast to Morgan, who just wants to kill some shit. Carol ends up saving Henry and bringing him back home, and that's about it. There is Tara and Daryl arguing, too, basically repeating their argument from the previous episode. It's still bad, but at least we're having Daryl descend into Rick/Morgan-levels of sociopathy, albeit far subtly, by going off to kill Eugene.
Negan and Jadis are a bit... weirder. I'm not sure how long the show can justify Jadis's sheer weirdness, because she really seems to be a sane woman hiding behind a facade of crazy art trash-lady, as shown by her having a very impeccable room and flares and the ability to summon a goddamn helicopter out of nowhere (who leaves her behind?). Jadis and Negan sort of bond over their shared connections to their past life -- Negan's bat Lucille being named after his late wife, whereas Jadis's never-before-mentioned photographs are apparently placed near enough for Negan to threaten with a flare? With a random zombie on a contraption that Jadis wants to use to kill Negan or some shit? That scene was weird. But Negan apologizes -- not for ordering the massacre of the Scavengers (which he insists wasn't him) but for being unable to keep his men under control. There's the theme, I suppose, of Rick promising Gavin's group with his word and then stabbing them in the back (quite literally) whereas Negan, for all his haminess and brutality, really believes in that whole 'word is my bond' shtick. It's neat and ever so slightly weird that the two of them end up being allies of sorts, and Negan returns to the Sanctuary to presumably have some words with Simon and, let's be honest, Negan and Simon's confrontation is built up way, way better than anything involving the good guys right now.
Overall, the episode mostly feels humdrum. As potentially interesting as Rick going completely mental is, and as interesting as the Negan/Jadis stuff might be (and there's Jadis's connection to the helicopter) the episode is still trapped in a lot of bad dialogue, dragged-out scenes and characters that are just stuck repeating the same thing more or less over and over again, just in different permutations. If we're being generous, I think we can say that this is a barely-below-average episode of the Walking Dead, but, again, it really doesn't give much faith for the serialization ending in anything concrete or interesting.
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