There’s a scene in The Walking Dead’s latest episode—‘Hunted’—that perfectly encapsulates all of my frustrations with this new-and-improved zombie show. Things have gotten better since the embarassment that was Seasons 7 and 8, but quality control is still nowhere to be found when it comes to the script, which the show’s writers under Angela Kang continue to fumble.
The scene I’m talking about involves several of Alexandria’s surviving women who have gone out to retrieve the community’s horses. Carol, Magna, Rosita and Kelly set out to find the horses and instead find many of their corpses. Feeling defeated, they decide to return home before it gets dark.
Then, miraculously, the horses appear over a crest, galloping across a field. They’re headed toward the dairy farm, one of the women exclaims. We can pen them up there! And so off they go, on foot, to catch the horses.
We cut ahead to the dairy farm where the last of the steeds is being successfully corralled. A job well done. But how? How did these four women, all on foot, wrangle all these horses up? How did they manage to catch up with them in the first place, let alone herd them through a gate?
In an earlier scene they attempt to catch just one of these beasts and all four of them at once couldn’t get a lasso ‘round its neck. How, then, are we to believe they caught all the rest? It’s preposterous.
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All The Pretty Plot Holes
It reminds me of the first episode of the season when Ezekiel, Yumiko, Eugene and Princess manage to get out of their cage, steal two suits of Stormtrooper armor and almost make good their escape from the Commonwealth.
Sure, we knew that two of the guards were bumping ugly on break and had to take off their armor in order to do the deed—but how did our heroes know where that was taking place, let alone reach the armor without detection—let alone get out of their cage to begin with? It’s not just an oversight, it’s lazy—and arrogant—writing. Angela Kang may as well say it out loud: “We think our audience is stupid, so we’re going to write these ludicrous, implausible scenarios and not even show our work and our stupid audience will just lap it up anyways.”
That’s been the arrogant attitude of The Walking Dead’s showrunners since Scott M. Gimple was in charge. Either that or they really don’t understand that even though this is a zombie show, we expect things to make sense. We expect characters to act in ways that are plausible and sensible and to suffer consequences for making stupid or selfish decisions.
Things can’t just happen and that’s especially true offscreen. Carol’s little group of cowgirls wouldn’t have stood any reasonable chance of wrangling a dozen or so horses up on foot so easily, so they just don’t show it. Why even have the sequence to begin with? Why not just have the horses wander into town?
The better scene, by far, is Carol’s painful decision to kill one of the horses so that the people of Alexandria could eat, but even that was confusing since we see the kids eating bits of meat at the same exact time as Carol is out in the stables killing the poor creature. Was that not horse meat, then? Were they eating something else? It’s confusing.
Don’t Fear The Reapers
The Carol horse-whisperer stuff is the side-plot in tonight’s episode. The real meat of the story (well, the figurative meat of the story, in any case) is entirely focused on the survivors of the Reaper attack. (At a certain point the names of all these groups gets so stupid and annoying—Wolves, Saviors, Whisperers, Reapers and yet our own heroes have no such moniker, why is that?)
The opening scene is a poorly choreographed disaster pretending to be an exciting action sequence.
What’s with the weird lighting on Maggie’s face during each close-up? Why is this shot filmed from such a distracting angle, with our heroes all sort of running here and there while the off-screen Reapers throw hatchets and knives at them? When the big guy is hit with those knives they look like they’re moving in slow-motion. Why does the one Reaper just nick Gabriel’s neck? It’s just a distractingly bad opening segment.
From here, things pick up a little. Maggie finds herself suddenly, inexplicably alone and wanders off I guess either to just get away or to find other survivors? She goes to an abandoned department store and almost gets a throwing knife to the back. When she gets inside, the Reapers are apparently already there—I guess one of their superpowers is knowing exactly where the good guys will be.
She finds Alden in a big, open room at the top of the building. He’s hurt and how he made it this far on his own remains a mystery. Two Reapers appear quite literally out of nowhere and tackle Alden and Maggie to the ground. Another Reaper superpower is being able to move with absolute silence and invisibility. Maggie’s almost a goner when Negan shows up to save her.
He almost manages to save the episode as well, but not quite. Still, things do get better once he’s around. They help Alden out of the building and find two more of Maggie’s people. A woman named Agatha and the big guy, who is on death’s door. Why bother learning any of these peoples’ names when they’re just used as cheap deaths? Maggie has now lost almost all of the people she brought with her to Alexandria.
Elijah—Maggie’s own masked friend who apparently sports a similar style as the Reapers—was taken prisoner, it appears, though I’m not 100% certain about that. So it’s just Agatha left, and a few minutes later she gets bitten by a zombie. Maggie tries to save her and Negan is forced to carry her off—saving her a second time from certain death, not that Maggie is grateful. She gives another speech about how he’s not one of them, never will be, blah blah blah. Maggie you left for years. Negan’s more a part of the group than you are at this point.
They leave Alden on his lonesome after Negan tells Maggie she needs to make the call and she goes on some silly monologue about how he doesn’t get to decide who lives and dies anymore. “You still need to decide,” he says, looking tired more than anything. So they leave Alden behind and promise to return for him after they . . . well I’m not really sure what the plan is at this point. Negan kills a zombie outside and the blood dripping from his crowbar reminds them both of the time when Glenn met Lucille.
It just reminds me of when this show took such a massive turn for the worse and I find myself puzzled at how much I’ve come to like Negan and how much I’ve come to dislike Maggie.
Watch my video review of this episode below:
Verdict: Negan And Gabriel For The Win
The best female characters in this show are not its stars. Carol is almost constantly irritating with her constant wishy-washy melodramatic nonsense. Maggie is a one-note bore and we were better off without her.
Give us more of Rosita’s level-headed sensibility; more of Princess’s zany weirdness. Magna and Yumiko, when not being written into a silly relationship corner, are more interesting and layered.
But The Walking Dead insists on making Maggie and Carol this show’s female stars whether they bring anything to the table or not, and Michonne is gone after losing all credibility when she left her children behind during the middle of a desperate and terrifying war with the Whisperers. So here we are.
Gabriel, meanwhile, continues to be one of the show’s most surprising characters, having gone from sniveling coward and rat to one of the most cold-blooded killers in our merry little band. When he tracks down the wounded Reaper, the man asks him to pray with him (exposing the group as a band of religious zealots) and Gabriel gets the best line of the episode.
“I thought you were a man of God,” the Reaper says.
“God isn’t here anymore,” Gabriel replies before killing him.
In many ways, Negan and Gabriel are the two characters who have changed the most and the most consistently. Carol changes constantly but with no real consistency in her arc; Rick was the same way. Daryl changed long ago but he’s remained pretty much the same dude for many seasons now. Negan and Gabriel have had the most dynamic and interesting arcs.
All told, this was a pretty weak episode. The opening two were better (though better still as one long episode) but when you stand all three next to each other, it’s a pretty shaky start to The Walking Dead’s final season that does little to make me optimistic for what comes next. Maybe this was just a bad episode tucked in among good ones. We shall see.
What did you think? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.
Oh, and don’t forget to watch this World Beyond Season 2 trailer!
Previous Season 11 Reviews:
- Episode 1 Review
- Episode 2 Review
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