No Sanctuary

As the last season of The Walking Dead was winding down, I noted that the show had finally pulled out of a two-and-a-half year slump and was once again as great as it was in its first brilliant season. I even threatened to start reviewing new episodes again. Well, since I know a lot more of my blog readers are watching The Walking Dead than, say, Gotham (I still haven't even gotten around to last week's episode myself; I guess I'm already losing interest), here we go!

The fifth season premiere was, quite simply, a great episode. The bookending scenes of the "original" Terminus folks suffering at the hands of torturers we never got to see made the thesis statement of the episode abundantly clear: when you come into contact with pure evil, it can change you. And within those bookends, we got to see exactly that happen to many of our characters.

Poor Tyreese, trying to walk the straight and narrow after past transgressions in his own mind. He'd done things he wasn't proud of and was trying everything he could to become a better person. But one afternoon in a cabin with a guy from Terminus, and he's beating a man to death with his bare hands -- all the while declaring how we wasn't going to kill anyone. If there's any kind of moral justification for murder, protecting an infant would almost have to cover it... and yet it's a complete descent into exactly what he'd sworn not to be.

And then there's Rick. We'd already seen him earning "Dark Side points" in last season's finale when he bit a guy in the jugular vein. (As with Tyreese, for the ultimate reason of protecting a child.) But remember that not long before that, Rick had been trying to embody the pacifism of Hershel. When meeting anybody new, one of the only things he wanted to know is "how many people have you killed and why?" -- the (quite reasonable) implication of that being that the answer to that might instantly disqualify you as someone worth knowing. Well, last night, Rick mowed down half a dozen people with a machine gun. In the back. In cold blood. And then (at least, before reuniting first with Carol and then his daughter Judith), he was ready to go back to Terminus just to make sure that every last person there was dead. "Farmer Rick" is clearly gone.

Speaking of Carol, while it seems unlikely she'll ever have another moment as dark as having to kill a little girl, she certainly shows no signs of turning around. It was incredible watching her become the one-woman army that stormed Terminus like an 80s action hero. But mixed in with those great moments were glimpses of the emotional cost. Yes, it was "kill or be killed" when she ran into the woman in the warehouse. But her way of "kill"ing was to torture for a bit and then watch as the Walkers dined on what remained.

These dramatic threads were woven in throughout some truly amazing action, with dozens of eye-popping zombie kills (kills of zombies) and zombie kills (kills by zombies). Indeed, it was such a spectacle that it leaves me a bit concerned about what's to come in the rest of the season. I was certainly not a fan of the show staying in place too long -- not at the farm, and not at the prison. But this was the way the show would defray production costs. So I was expecting at least a few episodes set in Terminus. The premiere left no chance of that, and seemingly blew half the year's budget on explosions and zombie gags in a single hour. Given the show's history, I'm worried what budget counterbalancers that leaves for us in the next few episodes. But I'm hopeful that the clear emotional transformations this episode set up in several characters means there's much less chance of the series stagnating again.

In any case, I think I'd have to give "No Sanctuary" an A. Whether it hurts what follows, or sets up something great, the fact remains that it stands on its own as one of the best episodes ever of The Walking Dead.