How much pressure can something survive before it cracks?
It’s a question that The Walking Dead has been fascinated by this season. The arrival of Negan has allowed the show to indulge in the empty cruelty that’s becoming more and more TWD’s stock in trade, and that above question seems to be the only real question fuelling it all.
Right now, The Walking Dead is just piling on pressure on its characters, moving their free will out of the equation and heightening their despair. In a different, more varied season, that might be thrilling.
Yet the show’s fixation with Negan’s tyranny has caused it to lose its balance. ‘Service’, this week’s painfully overlong ‘special episode’, scrambles for any incident, any source of mild tension it can find within its sparse narrative.
Yet the tempo is never really raised – for 90% of the episode, it’s the same emotion all the way through, because ‘Service’ is only interested in one thing: how cruel Negan and the Saviors can be. This was a fixation of both episodes one and three, and ‘Service’ barely brings anything new to the table in that regard – if it does, such as Negan’s merciful nature, you can be sure that the idea will be (ahem) battered into the ground before it’s done.
There are themes, if you look closely enough, but they’re the same surface-level explorations of tyranny and abuse that have been covered intensively in prior episodes – ‘Service’ seems to almost think that there’s no real need for depth and variety when you can add in another minute of Jeffrey Dean Morgan mugging at the camera.
Somewhat rarely for a show that likes to diverge from its source material, ‘Service’ is a pretty straightforward expanded adaptation of a comic book issue (Issue 103). That’s a problem in of itself – at its most propulsive, The Walking Dead has chewed through three or four issues’ worth of material plus original stories in a regular episode.
The central conceit of the narrative, made for a brief comic that made its point and wrapped up sharply, is clearly stretched to its limits to fit the inexplicably extended 60-minute run-time. There’s even a subplot in ‘Service’ about missing guns created for the narrative to pad out the story, one that ends predictably and makes no deeper points than the other storylines do.
The Walking Dead has played around with expanded run-times more and more lately, and sometimes it’s worked – last year’s extended Morgan bottle episode almost felt like a quiet little indie movie that used its extra minutes for greater character development.
Yet here, as with the season six finale, the extra run-time comes across as needlessly self-indulgent – there’s so much flab and artificial incident within ‘Service’, such as a deeply dull Rosita/Spencer subplot that it’s hard to even imagine the episode having enough plot for the standard 45 minutes.
The central idea of ‘Service’ returns to that question I posed above. It’s all about establishing the Saviors’ dominance over the everyday lives of their heroes beyond the visceral impact of the Lucille one-two, and ‘Service’ does, to its credit, make that point. And then it makes it again. And again. And… you get the picture.
To that end, there’s lots of Negan walking around and making ‘funny’ comments to Rick asserting his total dominance, lots of reminders that Negan is a reasonable man (the deep irony, of course, is that he isn’t really!), and lots of slightly unnecessary moments where the Saviors, firmly established as dislikeable people, are pointlessly mean to someone.
All of this takes away from the pathos and character development that could so easily have been found in an episode returning to the shattered survivors of the Lucille incident – there’s comparatively few scenes genuinely fleshing out characters’ psyches in any real depth (Eugene, Abraham’s closest friend, isn’t given any development beyond fixing a radio) after experiencing his horror.
Similarly to the premiere, ‘Service’ fails to latch upon the humanity that such an onrush of despair like this needs to truly balance out, and thus it’s a limp, long parade of pessimism and cruelty that shows so much of it that the episode almost seems to begin to revel in the cruelty at points.
Problematically, even Negan himself and the humour he provides isn’t a counterweight.
My problems from last week about his characterisation persist, as his fixed role within the show as the provider of false tension and one-note menace becomes clear – as with ‘The Cell’, Negan’s stuck between quips and threatening violence for the entire episode, and any vulnerability or psychology beneath that is unclear.
There’s also some mounting issues with Jeffrey Dean Morgan, whose flawed performance oddly speaks to the overall attitude that I found to be pervasive within ‘Service’. Morgan’s giving it his all, and it’s hard to fault his commitment to the role. Yet his performance is becoming part of the problem, leaning into the caricature rather than hinting at further depth – there’s vast swathes of his screen-time where the extent of his performance seems to be a deliberately weird cadence and an abundance of funny faces.
Morgan’s performance masquerades as something deeply frightening and menacing – intended to be the type of magnetic presence who holds up scenes with the sheer force of his charisma, like any vintage crime boss villain. Yet it’s, like his scripting, fixated to the point of tunnel vision on Negan’s scenery-chewing gleefulness, and this drains the novelty value of the character rapidly, leaving nothing tangible left.
Unlike the villains Negan is meant to evoke, all there is to this villain is limited, cheap novelty.
Somewhat strangely, ‘Service’ still makes it clear that The Walking Dead is capable of terrific things when it tries. The scene where Rick confesses he knows Judith’s not really his biological daughter as an explanation for his subservience is an easy highlight of the season so far, leaning on the pathos and raw emotion of Andrew Lincoln’s superb performance to create a moment of humanity that shows, if just for a couple of minutes, that The Walking Dead can find something unexpectedly moving from nowhere.
It’s not as if the show has lost its ability to anchor all of its trauma and pessimism in character journeys that we can latch onto and root for, which makes the failure of ‘Service’ to prioritise character above cruelty all the more frustrating.
All of the problems found within ‘Service’ can perhaps be encapsulated by one small but significant change made to the source material. In the comics, Negan’s visit was preceded by a scene between Rick and Andrea (still alive in the comics, and playing the role Michonne fills now) where Rick reveals that he hasn’t given into Negan, and plans to fight back.
The ensuing visit, therefore, had subtext and urgency – it was a cat-and-mouse game where Rick had to keep up a façade of loyalty in front of Negan while searching for weak spots and opportunities for attack, and was clearly part of a building escalation towards a war. ‘Service’ removes that moment, and thus removes that subtext and forward-looking momentum.
What we’re left with is a slog that enthusiastically piles on the misery as its eye slips off character development and themes, yet always feels sparse in terms of tension, with the only moments of unpredictability blunted by the overuse of Negan’s shtick of threatening violence. It’s an incredibly bloated episode that has so little to really contribute, and so little to truly get excited about.
This feels like a pivotal episode for TWD’s fortunes, and not in a good way. The first three episodes weren’t all good, but they felt like individual experiments – three standalone viewpoints of ‘a larger world’ that told their own close-ended stories. ‘Service’ is the first episode to get the ball rolling on the main plot of season seven and set up ideas for the future, so it’s troubling that it’s a flat, violence-free rendition of the season seven premiere’s main themes and ideas with negligible narrative progress.
The Walking Dead is having significant problems in this post-Negan world, and it feels like the show has lost that spark and vitality that distinguished episodes as recent as some of season six’s early Saviour instalments. Season seven has mostly just been dark and grim so far, and the specks of light and humanity are few and far between.
If this post-Negan world will just be a plodding, misery-filled path where characters lose hope and find themselves facing increasing levels of cruelty, why should any viewer care about what happens?
Aired at 9pm on Monday 14 November 2016 on FOX.
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