It was world-building time on this week’s The Walking Dead, as the show began the steady build-up towards a major confrontation in the season finale.
‘Knots Untie’ is a classic table-setting episode – light on action and resolution, but chock-full of new characters and locations. It’s all about setting up the chess pieces for the confrontation with Negan and the Saviors in the forthcoming episodes – and how the first half of the season was stuffed to the gills with set-up for a resolution that took nine episodes to come along, that’s not a hugely exciting proposition on paper.
However, ‘Knots Untie’ overcomes its uninspiring premise because the elements being introduced here really are intriguing. Take the Hilltop Colony, a new settlement that acts as the gateway into a new conflict for Rick’s group. The Walking Dead has been so focused on Rick’s group that it’s never really had much time for sketching out how other characters have adapted to the apocalypse.
Alexandria was the first step, but it’s with the Hilltop that The Walking Dead appears to be exploring how humanity is attempting to recreate the political and societal structures of the old world, and how these attempts to forge a new, complex society, are challenged and inhibited by the brutal, primal way of life that many have adopted in post-apocalypse.
There’s clearly much more to be explored with the Hilltop, considering that ‘Knots Untie’ is more focused on introducing the mechanics of this new settlement rather than delving into them. There’s a lot of intrigue and enjoyment to be taken, however, from what we learn and who we meet at the Colony – take Gregory, the settlement’s leader. Xander Berkeley is a very talented actor, and he’s perfectly suited to convey the slimy, arrogant but ultimately hollow bluster of Gregory, imbuing his scenes with a smug, lackadaisical disdain for the new survivors he meets and grabbing all of the episode’s best lines.
Likewise, the Hilltop’s introduction efficiently leads us onto the first real bit of exposition regarding the infamous Negan and his Saviors. With one scene, ‘Knots Untie’ conveys the personal, manipulative nature of Negan’s dealings with the Hilltop to a palpable degree, showing a seemingly honest and familiar Hilltop resident forced into an assassination attempt on Gregory, underlining in an instant how Negan uses blackmail and manipulation in order to turn perfectly good people into his pawns.
The approach of slowly building up to the villain’s introduction is markedly different to the way The Walking Dead handled its other main villain, the Governor (who, in retrospect, was badly mishandled), but that different approach ensures that this all feels new – it doesn’t feel as if The Walking Dead is rehashing previous stories with Negan and the Saviors, and that’s mostly down to the effective way that ‘Knots Untie’ compellingly sketches out the nature of their threat.
Notably, ‘Knots Untie’ uses Rick’s group’s experience in confrontations to its advantage – backed up by a history of victories against hostile survivors, it seems natural on paper for Rick to take on a group of people who, for all they’ve seen, work by bluffing their way through negotiations.
There’s a very real sense that, in this new society, Rick’s group has, in their own minds, worked their way up to the top of the food chain, with just about every other group appearing to be beatable in their minds – that’s a really intriguing idea that goes well with the expansive world-building that this episode partakes in. Not only does this idea act as a good way to slot Rick’s group into this new society as the ‘best at confrontations’ (we’ll see about that), but it’s also grounded in a tangible feeling of horrible inevitability – because it’s very hard indeed to imagine that the Saviors will be as easy to defeat as Rick is predicting.
‘Knots Untie’ appears to be building Rick’s group up in anticipation of a gut-wrenching fall by the end of the season, and that idea is already lending the second half of the season a coherent through-line that, last year’s back half lacked.
The flipside of the brisk way that ‘Knots Untie’ motors through plot points is that it’s not particularly emotionally resonant. It’s intriguing to see The Walking Dead explore this larger world, certainly, but it all feels a little bit like a box-ticking exercise at points – a way of efficiently moving from A to B with not much character material to add emotion to it all.
The only real major character arc here is Abraham’s, whose doubt over Rosita and Sasha fails to really spark to life – it’s admirable in that it doesn’t seek to spell out Abraham’s turmoil through clunky expository dialogue, but ‘Knots Untie’ goes a bit too far the other way, making Abraham’s struggle so vague and uncertain that it all feels a bit ill-defined and therefore hard to invest in. This plot-heavy approach, combined with the flat execution of Abraham’s story, means that ‘Knots Untie’ feels a tad mechanical – a table-setter that doesn’t have any ambitions beyond setting up admittedly interesting stories.
I’ve complained regularly about The Walking Dead’s slow episodes in which the overall plot arc inches forward, so it’s churlish to rag too much on an episode that really does push forward the season’s story a great deal – but ‘Knots Untie’ could have taken a tip from those more character-focused episodes in order to be a little more well-rounded.
Nonetheless, this was another solid episode with reams of potential for the future, setting up a conclusion to the season that could be one of the most exciting and compelling arcs that The Walking Dead has done in some time. Now, we wait for Rick’s first clash with the Saviors – will they really be as easy to take down as Rick expects?
Aired at 9pm on Monday 29 February 2016 on FOX.
> Buy the complete Seasons 1-5 boxset on Amazon.
What did you think of this week’s episode? Let us know below…