The Walking Dead has been a lot of things this season.
In turns, it’s been a spectacle-driven drama, a siege thriller, a gory horror flick and then a quiet, thoughtful two-hander. This week? It’s just a typical episode.
‘Now’ is Scott Gimple’s iteration of The Walking Dead in default mode: a relatively slow character piece that examines the psychological effects of the apocalyptic world upon the characters. Like the best of the Gimple-era episodes, there’s some incisive, impactful emotion here. And like the worst, it’s more than a little meandering and suffers from a poor structure.
The issue with ‘Now’ is that it feels as if Season 6 is in a holding pattern, filling up an episode before delving into more exciting material. The pre-titles sums it up: there’s a huge herd at Alexandria’s gates, but it just kind of sits there until the episode’s cliffhanger while ‘Now’ passes the time.
Admittedly, it’s harsh to term this episode as being pure filler: The Walking Dead did need to stop and take a breather and examine the emotional impact of the first three episodes on the characters, so this episode was certainly necessary in the grand scheme of things.
However, despite the necessity of the episode, ‘Now’ doesn’t quite go about the character development in the strongest way. It spreads itself far too thin, attempting to service a whole herd (ahem) of characters with an emotional arc, some of which are so obscure that I wouldn’t be surprised if many viewers briefly forgot who they were even meant to be.
In some ways, it’s nice to see characters like Tara, Spencer and Jessie get some time in the limelight, and they’re not uninteresting characters. It’s just that in trying to service so many characters, ‘Now’ never quite delivers a satisfying arc for anyone, as it simply doesn’t have the time.
What we get are a series of mini-arcs that are passable and well-acted, but don’t have nearly enough time to breathe before ‘Now’ hyperactively heads to the next character.
To make matters worse, the material for the ancillary characters isn’t really balanced by a healthy amount of screen-time for heavyweights like Carol or Michonne – and while no one is anywhere near as insipid as the worst characters The Walking Dead has served up, the ancillary characters are too thinly sketched to really carry an episode between them with only relatively brief appearances from the central players, aside from Maggie. As a result, ‘Now’ feels a little deflated at times, lacking the spark of say, last week’s episode, and suffering from a dearth of building tension throughout the episode.
If all of this sounds like a scathing critique of ‘Now’, it’s worth taking a look at the fact that there’s a lot of really great stuff in this episode.
Maggie’s story, in particular, really works, meaningfully exploring the emotional impact of Glenn’s ambiguous fate in a way that makes it almost possible to forgive the frustrating obfuscation of whether Glenn is alive or not. Lauren Cohan, hugely underutilised this season, shines here, even imbuing the soap-esque revelation that Maggie is pregnant with strong, genuine emotion.
Likewise, Deanna’s arc is generally excellent. Season six hasn’t really had the time to slow down and explore how Deanna is coping post-Reg, but ‘Now’ rectifies that with an intriguing look inside the head of the rapidly deteriorating (ex?) Alexandrian leader.
Deanna is spent, and ‘Now’, through both capable direction and a performance from Tovah Feldshuh that ably portrays Deanna’s shattered psyche, compellingly illustrates just how ill-equipped she is to deal with the psychological stress of the real world. Deanna’s story in ‘Now’ is a tale of a woman very close to snapping, and it sets things up in tantalising fashion for when the carnage truly begins.
‘Now’ is pretty much encapsulated by its first and last scenes. At the beginning, we have a huge threat surround Alexandria, and at the end, we have the first signs that it could very soon break through.
In the middle, there’s a mixed bag of inconsistent character development that sometimes sparks, and sometimes fizzles, but ultimately fails to really come to that much.
It’s hard to really begrudge this episode, however, as it’s merely a mostly harmless stopgap before things go bananas in the last few episodes (maybe not next week, which is a Daryl/Sasha/Abraham bottle), and it leaves things in fairly good stead for the final salvo of the 2015 run.
Onwards, and upwards…
Aired at 9pm on Monday 9 November 2015 on FOX.
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