As we near the fateful first confrontation with Negan, The Walking Dead span its wheels this week in a table-setter that hits hard in places, but misses badly in others.
Season 6 appears to be repeating itself. After a thrilling run of episodes in which a whole new chapter of the story was opened up, The Walking Dead has once again let its momentum leak away as we head into the finale, just as it did in the season’s first half.
After last week’s piece-moving episode, ‘East’ ups the table-setting while offering very little gratification on its own – a recipe for a frustrating episode that doesn’t quite leave the show surging into the finale.
This is a step up from last week’s clunker, mostly because of the one genuinely solid plotline – Rick and Morgan’s search for Carol. It’s the first time in yonks that the two characters have had an extended conversation – which is quite baffling, as ‘East’ acts as an impressive showcase for Andrew Lincoln and Lennie James’ dynamic together; a relationship tangibly steeped in past experiences in a way that’s unmatched by nearly every other relationship on this show.
Their philosophical debates are also the meatiest and most genuinely substantial material ‘East’ has to offer, despite their repetitiveness – we’ve heard these kind of debates before in the first half of the season, but with the added weight of all that’s happened since then to support Morgan’s belief that people do change, their debate has a newfound balance and equality to it.
Morgan no longer seems like a deluded, naïve idiot, and that’s a credit to the way that The Walking Dead has solidly worked towards justifying and giving credibility to this radically alternative viewpoint instead of just continuing to allow Rick to be right all the time.
It’s this equality that makes Morgan and Rick’s scenes, if too low-tempo to be gripping, then at least stimulating and entertaining – an interesting relationship founded on substantial and compelling morality debates rather than unfounded, artificial drama.
The other major plotline on display was Daryl’s search for vengeance… and this, unfortunately, was where ‘East’ really missed the mark. The entire plotline is packed to the gills with trite tortured anti-hero clichés such as Daryl’s utter refusal to listen to any other reasonable viewpoint to the point of getting shot at the end, and it seems entirely, transparently crafted to push characters into certain positions, with very little concern for what these characters would logically do.
It’s deeply dumb, packed with credulity-straining moments such as the Saviors sneaking up on the heroes time after time without a single sound, fails to accomplish anything new other than rehashing old storylines, and all these problems are compounded by poor editing and structuring.
It’s an unusual complaint for me to make, partially because this usually isn’t a problem for TWD, but this storyline really gets pushed over the edge by the choice to begin it in the middle of the episode, robbing it of the chance to build throughout the 45 minutes, and then the cutting away with 10 minutes left only to return for the final minute and the cliff-hanger.
It means there’s absolutely no momentum because the episode spends very long periods away from Daryl and co, and the cliff-hanger, given only a minute to build-up, feels tacked-on and comes from out of nowhere because there’s simply no time to build any tension. It’s a poor storyline, and though the actors do their best with what they’re given, it can’t rise above the clichéd scripting and stop-start structure.
A lot of ‘East’ revolves around the search for Carol, but she’s actually barely in the episode. Her only extended scene is certainly a memorable one, in which she massacres a group of Saviors who ambush her, but I’m still not sure how well The Walking Dead is selling her ideological transformation.
It’s especially difficult to invest in her change of heart when her grief at having to kill people jars uncomfortably with the purportedly ‘badass’ image of her hiding a machine gun in her sleeve, and the idea that she’s been artificially changed to give credence to Morgan’s worldview has a lot more weight when Morgan makes several direct references to her to support his argument.
It’s a fascinating idea on paper, and Melissa McBride is selling the hell out of it, but it still feels like character development that’s dictated by the story rather than the other way around.
And then there’s the cliffhanger – recent cliffhangers leading into finales have been truly memorable, including the toppling of the guard tower leading into the last mid-season finale and Rick’s crazed speech to Alexandria last season, so how does ‘East’ match those seminal moments?
With another fake-out, of course!
Off the bat, Daryl’s shooting is a lame and contrived moment that’s sapped of any tension it might have garnered by the weird decision to have Dwight say ‘you’ll be alright’ after the cut to black. It’s a random moment that screams ‘shock value’, and it’s extremely hard to believe that it’s anything more than a fake.
The real issue here comes when the context is considered – most pertinently, the fact that this is the second fake death moment this season, after the Glenn debacle in the first half. It’s a worrisome trend, because while The Walking Dead has been packed full of slightly gratuitous shocking moments from the start, these shocking moments were at least followed through on, with plenty of tangible consequences creating ample opportunities for interesting drama that organically stemmed from these moments.
Fake-outs like this cliffhanger, however, are a cheap bag of crisps in comparison – tasty for a moment, but ultimately full of air and devoid of true substance. There’s no value to this cliffhanger other than getting the show to trend on Twitter due to a horde of shocked fans, so it just comes across as cynical and calculated – when the Glenn moment is also taken into account, it can easily be seen as a trend towards prioritising water-cooler, ratings-friendly moments over moments of true dramatic substance.
The Walking Dead has showed signs of becoming a compelling drama over Scott Gimple, but there’s some troubling indicators that it’s back-sliding towards being fuelled by shock value, as it was in the forgettable third season.
This review may have been a little harsher than ‘East’ deserves – it’s relatively harmless, and while the cliffhanger is laughably cheap, there’s nothing as egregiously problematic as Denise’s death from last episode, and the Rick and Morgan material does yield some entertaining drama.
Still, this was hardly the ideal episode to lead into this much-vaunted season finale, and it doesn’t feel like The Walking Dead has really worked up the momentum it needs to hit the ground running next week.
Finally, then, next week, it’s the 90-minute finale – the episode described by cast members as ‘sickening’, ‘sleep-depriving’, leaving them speechless, to name just a few superlatives thrown at this one.
After weeks of build-up, it’s finally time to meet Negan…
Aired at 9pm on Monday 28 March 2016 on FOX.
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