The Walking Dead is, of course, based on a long running (and still running) comic series -- one which several people I know speak of quite highly. The writers of the show have chosen something akin to the True Blood method of adaptation for television, using the source material for inspiration, and often certain plot points, without slavishly following it. But in the long doldrums after season one, particularly during the material with the Governor in seasons three and four, they got cute with it. They'd go to silly lengths to twist things up in their storytelling, just to surprise comic readers with how things worked out differently. In doing so, I felt they often lost sight of the primary goal: telling a story on their show that was still entertaining and made sense.
From my friends the comic readers, I knew that this cannibal storyline came from the books, and one of its most memorable moments came in the death of Dale (a character who on the TV series was lost back in season two). He'd been bitten, and took perverse glee as the cannibals chowed down on his "tainted meat." The TV writers transferred this moment to Bob. But if they took anything more from the comics than this one beat, they did it effectively and seemlessly. I detected none of the awkwardness that marked season three's clumsy reengineering of the source material.
Instead, the Termites used this as a jumping off point to really go after Our Heroes. They weren't certain if eating Partially Zombified Meat was going to do them in or not (understandably, they didn't get the CDC memo -- everyone's a carrier), but they were pissed off enough about the whole thing to want to go on a killing spree. They were also pissed off enough to go about it with a rather insufficient plan. Dropping Bob off at the church to provide misinformation sounds good, but appropriately, Rick and the Gang were bright enough to see through that obvious trap.
The slaughter that ensued was shocking. You really can't argue with Rick's point -- even if you could possibly believe a promise from these people to leave you alone (and how could you?), leaving them alive would just put them out there to torment and consume someone else. There might be a debate about capital punishment to be had in there somewhere, if the stakes of the apocalypse didn't quite thoroughly put a thumb on the scales. But even if you agree with Rick in principle, it's still quite another thing to watch him brutally machete someone (as his friends bludgeon several other people) to death inside a church. Gabriel's stunned declaration, that this was a house of God, was only one-upped by Maggie's cold counter that gave the episode its title.
The one false note for me came in the sudden urgency to get Eugene to DC that somehow didn't exist for half a season before now, an urgency that somehow (in)conveniently split up the team again. Don't get me wrong, it will probably be a good thing from a writing standpoint to have the team split. One of the strengths of the back half of season four was in the way that different characters took the spotlight as the narrative traded around from group to group, and now we have two groups to track. (Not to mention going back to see what happened to Carol and Daryl as the events of this week's episode were going down.) But I felt the writers' machinations in setting up this situation.
Still, I think the show is clearly back on high ground. It's certainly back in my good graces. I give this episode an A-.
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