Good & Bad: 'The Walking Dead' (11/23/14)

Season 5, Episode 7: "Crossed"

Paste Magazine

Plot: For the first time all season, the gang was all there last night. Except for Bob, who’s no longer with us. Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing the baby, but I assume she was there somewhere. For all intents and purposes, the gang was all there.

                In no particular order, Daryl returned with “Everybody Hates Chris” to raise an army to go rescue Carol and Beth from the clutches of the evil hospital. Rick and the gang – minus the ones he sired, Michonne and Fr. Gabe leave for Atlanta. In the church, Carl tries to teach Fr. Gabe to fight, Fr. Gabe loses interests and secretly escapes the church like it were Shawshank prison, if Shawshank were the easiest place in the world to escape from.

                On the warfront, Rick is all gung ho to storm the compound and start killing some dudes, but Ty is like “There’s another way” and Daryl agrees. Instead, they capture some cops and plan to conduct a prisoner exchange. Things go mostly according to plan until one of the cops headbutts Sasha and escapes.

                Elsewhere, Eugene is still unconscious and Abraham has stopped doing anything other than knocking water bottles out of the hands of pretty Latina gals. Maggie gets left behind to babysit them while Glenn, Rosita and Fist Bump girl go to get water, which they do and on the way, they find a yo-yo. So that worked out. Eventually Eugene wakes up and Abraham decides that making love to Rosita is probably enough to fill the void no longer needing to drag a mulleted weirdo across the country has left in his life.

                Finally, Carol is also unconscious, but the cops decide to pull the plug on her because she’s an older gray-haired lady. What could she be good for? Secretly, leader cop lady tells Beth to keep Carol alive because this hospital is just the world’s biggest failed marriage where everyone hates each other and each of them will stop at nothing to undermine what the other says or does.  

Good & Bad: 'The Walking Dead' (11/16/14)

www.amctv.com

Season 5, Episode 6: “Consumed”

Plot: This week opens with Daryl and Carol in hot pursuit of the mysterious car with the white cross on the back, which they suspect will lead them to Beth. Said pursuit leads them back into Atlanta, but before they can do anything touristy (like visit the spot where Daryl’s brother was be-handed and left for dead), their car runs out of gas and they’re forced to travel through the walker-infested city on foot. After a few brief pauses for Carol backstory, they find a clue that leads them pretty much right to the hospital where Beth is being held. Also along the way, they have multiple run-ins with “Everybody Hates Chris” who manages to successfully steal their stuff but who then can’t seem to stop accidentally following them, which leads to them stealing all their stuff back. “Chris” lets it slip that he knows Beth and she is, in fact, in the hospital. Before they can storm the gates and heroically rescue her, Carol is hit by a car and taken to that hospital and Daryl and “Chris” head back to the church to gather an army.

Thoughts:

Bad: Carol deleted scene dump. This episode features several flashbacks to things that have happened to Carol since Rick booted her from the group for burning a couple of sick people alive. Usually I’m on board with flashbacks, but the bits and pieces we get here really don’t matter or accomplish anything. For example: After her banishment, we see Carol being upset, then surviving in a nearby town, then seeing the smoke from the burning prison and going back. I could have guessed that. I did guess it. In another clip, we see Carol burying the bodies of the two little blonde girls who died while in her care. Again, that’s cool, but it’s not adding anything. It feels like this episode clocked in a little short and so to pad the run time, the producers put in all of these extra scenes featuring Carol which had been cut out of other episodes for being unnecessary. Presto! Instant “back story.”

Good(?): There’s an English major take on the reason why these clips were included that I guess needs to be addressed. You could, if you really think about it, make the case that these clips showed her dealing with the consequences of her actions: crying alone in the car after the group cuts her loose, burying the two girls, umm ... having to wipe walker guts off her face with and then subsequently throw away a formerly good poncho. Ok, well, maybe that last one really was just a deleted scene. Unless we find out in the next Carol episode that she had that poncho since she was a little gray-haired girl.

Bad: Worst pursuit ever. Now look, I understand some leaps in logic are occasionally necessary in order to keep the plot moving along and that this isn’t a documentary and so on and so forth, but seriously, people? The guy driving the car with the white cross didn’t notice there was exactly one other car moving on the roads in the state of Georgia and that said car happened to be like 20 feet behind him? C’mon, guys. C’mon. Maybe it would have been better to have the car break down and then Daryl could use his expert tracking skills to follow the driver back to town? You’d think that would be a long walk, but remember, “Walking Dead” has pretty much already established that all of these locations are all on the same street.

Good: Did love the shot of the burned out, rumbly mess that is Atlanta. Very reminiscent of season one when Rick rode into town proudly on horseback.

Bad: This shelter seems significant to Carol, but I have no idea why. Oh well.

Good: Who could this mysterious stranger lurking in the shadows be????

Good: Walker camp-out on the skywalk. So while Carol and Daryl  are making their way from building to building, they come across a group of people who’d decided to camp out in a skywalk … then things took a turn and everyone died somehow. Now the skywalk is full of walkers trapped in tents, in sleeping bags and it is awesome. The tent walkers were an especially nice touch.

Bad: Oh it’s “Chris.” Yay.

Good: Carol hasn’t learned why she can’t kill people yet, Daryl has a giant hillbilly heart of gold. “Chris” is gradually getting away with almost all of their supplies and Carol is all, “Well, guess I gotta shoot this punk kind in the back, yawn, another day in my life,” and Daryl is all “Na brah, live and let live!” and stops her. I don’t love this pairing like I love Baryl (Beth+Daryl), but I guess Dar-ol is pretty good.

Good: Carol explains it all. So the shelter was a place where she went to escape her abusive husband, Christ remember when that was a thing? With her daughter! Remember when that was a thing? Also, she was leaving the group because she didn’t want to see people die. This is good characterization. Her tossing the poncho … less good. Unless that poncho comes back into play later. I reserve the right to change my mind.

Good: Carol and Daryl go to investigate a van hanging off an overpass marked with the same white cross. It’s tense, you know they’re probably going to be fine but I don’t know and then it falls! AHHHHH!

Bad: Boy that fall, somehow landing on all four tires, so anticlimactic.

Bad: “Chris” is the worst ever. He can’t help accidentally following the two people he just ripped off and his big secret hiding spot is like a block from the place he just escaped from. Dude needs to expand his horizons a little bit. Get out and stretch his wings.

Good: Switching gears. Carol almost gets killed saving “Chris” then Daryl tackles him into a bookcase, which then falls on “Chris.” Daryl’s ready to leave Chris to a nearby walker, but Carol is a learning computer (“T-3” was on AMC a lot lately, so I’m just going to carry on with these “Terminator” franchise references) and now understands the value of human life so she goes to kill the walker when out of nowhere…

Good: Maybe the most badass moment in “Walking Dead” history. Daryl, bathed in shadows with a cig just hanging out of the corner of his mouth, casually offs the walker, saving “Chris” and behold a new partnership is born. By the way, at some point “Chris” mentioned he knows an adorable blonde girl named Beth, so there’s that.

Good: The trio is one their way to save the day when SPLAT! Carol gets run over by a car with a white cross on it. She’s taken to the hospital, Daryl and “Chris” head back to the church to gather their army and get ready because another “Walking Dead” battle sequence seems to be coming. Let’s thin the herd a little this time though, huh? We really don’t need ALL of these characters.  

Good & Bad: 'The Walking Dead' (11/9/14)

www.unleashthefanboy.com

Season 5, Episode 5: "Self Help"

Plot: Alright, so I’m way behind schedule on this, so let’s all try to refrain from turning this into one of those long and meandering recaps that takes about the same time to read as it would to actually watch the episode, yeah? I’m looking at you people, it’s not my fault. I’m usually nothing if not brief. See there you go, distracting me already.

            Focus. Focus.

Luckily, this week’s episode of “The Walking Dead,” contains about 1/90 of the story that was crammed into this past week’s Beth episode like ground up people parts into an intestine casing which Gareth would then have eaten for breakfast had he still been with us.

On Sunday, we learned: a terrible secret from Abraham’s past, a terrible secret from Eugene’s past/present, an awesome secret from Abraham’s present (from his POV) and, AND, Rosita (formerly Latina Sarah Connor), Glenn, Maggie and Fist-Bump Girl all get to be mildly-functioning people. In the case of Rosita, for the first time!

Good and Bad: 'The Walking Dead' (3/23/14)

www.sheknows.com

Season 4, Episode 15: “Us”

Plot: For the first time in a long time, we have very nearly everyone left over from midseason’s big prison showdown in the same episode. Glenn and Tara are still teaming up with Rectangle head, Danny McBride and Latina Sarah Connor. They’re following the messages Maggie left for Glenn in walker blood along the route to Terminus. Eventually, they come to a dark and scary tunnel that sounds like it’s full of walkers. Rectangle head don’t play tunnels so everyone decides to split up. Tara and Glenn head to tunnel town, while the other three are back off to Washington. Trouble ensues in the tunnel, things are looking bleak for  Glenn and Tara when BAM! Reunion time. Maggie, Bob, Sasha and Rectangle head’s gang show up from the other end of the tunnel and mow down some walkers.

                Elsewhere, Daryl is palling around with Joe’s crew of delightfully unhinged survivalists. Daryl’s there but not for the long haul. There are some disagreements over claiming stuff – the term the gang uses for marking their territory on stuff they want. At first Daryl resists, but by the end of the episode he’s claiming all sorts of stuff. Has Daryl found his new Merle? Late in the day, Daryl finds out that Joe’s crew is also on the way to Terminus. Not for shelter, but because they’re tracking some guy who was hiding in a house and killed one of their buds. (Whisper: It was Rick!)

                Rick, Carl and Michonne make a cameo appearance in a cute little scene where the latter two are playing games for candy bars on the way to Terminus.

                The episode ends with Glenn, Maggie and all the rest of that crew showing up at the massively undefended Terminus, walking right in the front door and meeting Mary, a mysterious hippie gal who may or may not be the leader of Terminus, its only resident and/or completely insane. Who knows?

Good: Danny McBride talking about zombie dinosaurs. More and more I’m starting to get the idea that “Walking Dead’s” Danny McBride is as much a scientist as the real Danny McBride. But as long as he keeps coming up with zombie-based theories on dinosaur extinction, whether or not he’s actually furthering the show’s big picture will be completely meaningless to me. In fact, it’s probably better if he doesn’t actually do anything. Four seasons in and this show could use some real comedic relief.

Good: Rectangle  head and Tara talk missions. Pretty sure this speech was crucial to Rectangle head’s character. I’m convinced this idea of needing a mission is the reason why he’s ignoring the fact that purported scientist Danny McBride seems like wouldn’t know a beaker from Beaker from The Muppets. He needs something to do and right now that’s getting a mulleted weirdo to Washington to talk to the President or something. Huzzah.   

Good: Joe. There’s a slight Charlie Manson vibe to this guy that is just awesome. He’s reduced the world to an incredibly simple concept: If you claim it, it’s yours. Done. Sure, there’s not any thought being given to if whatever’s being claimed is on board, e.g. a lady type. I guess that’s the least delicate way I could put that. But anyway hey, rebuilding society takes time. I’m sure he’ll get around to that whole equal rights stuff soon, right?

Good: Carl and Michonne. No doubt making Carol interesting last week as an achievement, but it still pales in comparison to making Carl a tolerable character. Props belong to Michonne for doing a lot of the heavy lifting as far as this chore went. Turns out all he needed to come out of his irritating shell was a mother figure who wasn’t a gigantic wet blanket and who knew her way around a katana. That simple.

Bad: Joe tracking Rick. I don’t want the finale to be all about resolving this minor angle that’s only had time to gestate for one episode. I’m way more interested in Terminus. You know, that thing we’ve been building up to all half season? Let’s focus on that instead.

Bad: The reunion. Glenn and Maggie are back together. Showing up out of the blue and gunning down a bunch of walkers at the last second? Meh. Didn't do it for me. Glad they're back together though.

Bad: Almost everything that happens involving Glenn’s crew that doesn’t involve Danny McBride. Everything he has a hand in, awesome. The rest of it, I had a hard time caring about. Glenn trading his armor to keep the band together for some reason, Tara hurting her leg, getting trapped in the tunnel. All seemed like a lot of filler. Didn’t care. More dinosaur  talk from the guy with the mullet please.

Good: The tunnel. Cool setting. Wasn’t used all that well, and a better example of the exact same sequence can pretty much be found in “The Stand,” by Stephen King, but oh well. The dark is always scary.

Good: Terminus. Just walked right in the front door. No locks, no walls. Just a lady at a grill. Hmm. Didn’t see that coming. I’m underwhelmed, but unlike the end of season three, this feels like it’s in a good way.  

               

Good and Bad: 'The Walking Dead' (3/16/14)

www.comicbooked.com

Season 4, Episode 14: “The Grove”

 

Plot: The episode follows the mostly unlikable team of Tyreese (the sole reason for that mostly), Carol, Baby Judith and the two blonde sisters, who from this point on will be known by their Christian names: Older one and Younger one.

                The gang finds a farmhouse to hole up in, they putz around for a bit, Younger one refuses to kill anything that isn’t a walker. Older one refuses to kill walkers because …  she thinks they’re still people? She thinks there’s a cure? It’s unclear. What is clear is that she definitely won’t kill them.

                Except she helps gun down a bunch of crispy walkers that have escaped from the giant forest Daryl and Beth apparently set a few weeks back. The price of catharsis.  

                But other than that one time when she really didn’t have to kill them because there were three other people already killing them, she absolutely positively will only sign off on killing walkers sometimes.

                Later, Carol and Tyreese head out into the woods around the house to find food or something, they have a heart to heart where Tyreese unknowingly takes a giant dump on Carol’s soul: she killed his sick girlfriend back at the prison to protect everyone. Tyreese is unaware of this.

                When they arrive back at the farmhouse, they find that Older one has killed her sister and was ready to off the baby next.

                This doesn’t sit well with the adults in the group, they misdirect us into thinking Carol is going to take Older one somewhere away from people – because of that whole murder thing – and she eventually sort of does.

Sometimes around here, we also learn the answer to one of the show’s longest running mysteries:  Older one was the person feeding rats to the walkers at the prison, which led to them overwhelming the fence.

                Carol takes her into a clearing, tells her to look at some flowers and then shoots her dead.

                Later that evening, over a puzzle, Carol tells Tyreese she’s the one that killed his girlfriend. Tyreese considers ripping Carol apart and presumably eating her – I’m basing this off of his body language – but goes a different road and forgives her.

                So yeah, not much happened when you really think about it. 

Good and Bad: 'The Walking Dead' (3/2/14)

http://www.hitfix.com/

Season 4, Episode 12: “Still”

Plot: When we last left our huggable band of survivors, Daryl and Beth (formerly: Herschel’s blonde daughter) were tracking an unknown party towards the mysterious settlement called Terminus. Well, we knew the party they were tracking was Tyreese and his harem of irritating white women, but Daryl and Beth didn’t know that.

                This week, we find Daryl and Beth in a rather harrowing state. They seem to have given up on tracking and struck off on their own … or something. They’re wandering around in the woods, food is scarce, walkers are plenty and worst of all, one of Daryl’s crossbow bolts breaks. That’s called symbolism, yo.

                At a certain point, Beth gets sick of walking around in the woods like a hobbit, and decides that now, right smack in the middle of the end of the world, is the perfect time for her first drink. So they set off to find her some booze.

                Their search takes them to a walker-infested golf course clubhouse which also features some hanged folks and some rather menacing-looking scrawled messages. It also contains a bottle of peach schnapps, but Daryl and his discerning pallet won’t allow that to be Beth’s first drink. Instead, he takes her to a cabin in the middle of nowhere for some moonshine.

                They drink, they play “Never have I ever,” Daryl gets belligerently drunk, urinates in doors and then tortures a zombie … It’s basically a post-apocalyptic Katy Perry song about Friday nights.

                Once things settle down, Daryl finally shares the grand secret of his pre-walker life to Beth: he was a drifter. Right around then, the time seemed right for some catharsis, so they set the cabin on fire, flip it the bird as one does and head out into the night.

Good and Bad: 'The Walking Dead' (2/23/14)

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Season 4, Episode 11: Claimed

Plot: So now that we know where everybody is, it’s time to start giving them stuff to do. And boy do they get stuff. Michonne and Carl spend the episode wandering around town looking for food, but all they find is cheese in a can and backstory. We learn a little about Michonne’s life before Z-day, but sadly no mention of her ninja training with a goateed Liam Neeson.  

Also this week, Rick proves once again why he should never ever be allowed to go to sleep. This time, not only does he wake up in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, but he wakes up in the middle of a zombie apocalypse with a heavily armed gang of crazies taking over the first floor of the house he was napping in. A heavily armed gang of crazies that are more than willing to choke each other out for the right to sleep in what looks like the world’s least comfortable bed. After hiding under said bed like Kevin McAllister for a bit, Rick sneaks out, kills what we can only hope and assume was a gang member on that toilet and then saves Carl and Michonne from wandering right smack what seems to be a pretty bad situation.

Meanwhile, Glenn and Tara are headed to Washington, D.C. with Rectangle head, Danny McBride and Latina Sarah Conner. Well, they are until Glenn wakes up and decides to go find his wife. A large scuffle ensues, a herd of walkers descends on the scene and Danny McBride valiantly, heroically manages to completely destroy the group’s truck with a machine gun while killing almost no walkers. But before you start calling him “The Walking Dead”’s mulleted Gilligan, the man does seem to have a purpose. Rectangle head, who seems to prefer going by the less geometrically accurate name of Abraham, informs the gang that the reason they were headed to D.C. was because Danny McBride knows what started the zombie apocalypse and presumably how to stop it. Sure saving the world is important and all, but first Glenn needs to find his wife and because Ladies Love Cool Glenn, Tara and Latina Sara Conner follow suit, dragging their two male companions along for the ride.

Good and Bad: 'The Walking Dead' (2/16/14)

At least you're not stuck with Carol

Season 4, Episode 10: “Inmates”

Warning: Here be spoilers

                Plot: In last week’s midseason premiere, “After,” we caught up with the team of Carl and Rick and Michonne, who was flying solo, as they tried to find their way in a world after their prison-home was blown up by a tank. This week, we touch base with everybody else. The episode opens with the most huggable pair of survivors on the show – Daryl and Beth (formerly known as: “Herschel’s Blonde Daughter”). They run around in the woods, Beth narrates from her diary, it’s seriously awesome. Eventually, they wind up tracking what they hope is another group of survivors through the woods.

When we come back from commercial, we meet up with Tyreese, who is in a very unenviable state: He’s wounded – maybe bit – and worse: He’s saddled with the two small blonde girls and Rick’s infant daughter Judith. Things go from bad to worse for Tyreese when Carol (you know, the one who he doesn’t know incinerated his sick girlfriend back at the prison) shows up completely out of nowhere to join their little gang. They kill some zombies, older blonde girl secretly tries to suffocate baby Judith in order to keep her from crying and   attracting zombies. We realize that this is the group Daryl and Beth are tracking and the segment ends with Tyreese, Carol and the kids making their way towards a settlement called Terminus.

Next it’s Maggie, Sasha and Bob, who is the drunken black dude in case the name Bob doesn’t ring a bell. Bob is also hurt, but he seems to have been shot, Maggie decides she’s going to leave them to go follow the bus that Glenn was in, they decide to tag along, they find the bus and surprise, it’s full of walkers. The gang works together to off the walkers, Maggie goes inside to look for signs of Glenn. She’s attacked by and kills one last walker, who keeps his back to the camera, but who has sorta long, string hair. She breaks down. Did she do it? Did she kill Glenn?

The last segment of the night answers that: No. You see, Glenn never got on the bus. He ended up stuck on a catwalk at the prison, finds his way off, goes to take a nap, decides against it. When he finally gets the memo that it’s time to leave the prison – seeing as though it’s on fire and deserted, that seems like a plan – he stumbles upon Tara, one of the Gov’s old pals. She’s pretty bummed about the whole let’s start a war for that one-eyed guy we just met thing. Glenn, being the peach that he is and not wanting to go it alone, asks her to come with. As per the usual, they run into and mow down a bunch of zombies and then, as the episode concludes, a military vehicle pulls up and out steps Rectangle Head, Danny McBride and Latino Sarah Conner all decked out in military fatigues.

Busy episode, but a very strong one.

Good and Bad: 'The Walking Dead' (2/9/14)

A locked door. Carl's greatest nemesis.

Season 4, Episode 9: “After”

Warning here be spoilers:

Plot: Following their unceremonious eviction from their prison fortress and the breakup of their group, Rick and Carl set up camp in a seemingly abandoned suburban neighborhood. Rick’s in terrible shape after his fight with the Governor and soon slips into unconsciousness after helping Carl secure a house for them to stay in. Carl wanders the neighborhood, works out some daddy issues, loses a shoe, gains a giant can of pudding and eventually Rick wakes up. Meanwhile, Michonne makes herself a couple of new arm-less, jaw-less zombie pets so she can walk around un-harassed by the un-dead. We get a little backstory from her and even some emotion. As the episode ends, she stumbles upon the house where Rick and Carl are staying, reuniting with her friends.

Good: No more Gov. It’s risky to say that anyone’s ever really gone on a show whose basic premise is about people coming back from the dead. But for all intents and purposes, the Governor seems to be no more. For now. Seeing him lying there all dead and such at the beginning of this episode was sorta sad because it meant no more David Morrissey, who was a delight and who made the best out of a wildly uneven character. It seemed like the show never really knew what to do with him. Instead of giving the Gov – who comic book readers swear by – a bad ass run on the show, they hemmed and hawed through one up and down season and then tacked another half season to boot. And then the show used that bonus time to make him just go and re-do everything he did during the previous season. Fare thee well, Gov. Please don’t come back.