Consumed

I was unpleasantly surprised and disappointed by last night's new episode of The Walking Dead -- along with everyone else in my regular "viewing party," who displayed increasing boredom in various levels of intensity as the hour crawled along. In a nutshell, nothing really happened. And considering this was finally the episode bringing us the adventures of Daryl and Carol, that's a real missed opportunity.

One way the episode could have gone was to have virtually wall-to-wall action. It might not have been emotionally fulfilling, but it sure would have been great on a visceral level. Put the show's two greatest ass-kickers together (though Michone and Rick would probably debate that), write them in Die Hard in and/or around the hospital or something, and I think everyone would have satisfied.

Alternatively, and more akin to what I think the episode tried to actually do, you could have had a more introspective and soulful hour where these two characters really communicate with other in dramatically meaningful ways. Except that they both largely had their walls up for the entire hour, and the "schedules" were off whenever one of them felt like opening up. Daryl asks at the beginning about whether Carol "worked here or something," but Carol only answered "something" and closed off a potentially interesting scene. Later, Carol wanted to tell Daryl what had really happened with the girls, but Daryl didn't want to hear it. The trains just kept missing each other all hour, meaning we were deprived of a meaningful dramatic meal too. At one point, Carol finally got a nice monologue about different "versions" of herself that have been burned away, but that felt almost more like the writers patting themselves on the back for the the character's transformation than a natural reflection by the character herself.

Perhaps recognizing their episode was fairly inert, the writers borrowed their clumsy device from last week, giving us micro-flashbacks to open up each act of the story. This still feels more like a device from Lost than a device for The Walking Dead; if this was to have been a tool in their kit this year, they should have been using it from the beginning of the season rather than introducing it several episodes in like this. But what was merely awkward last week was actually tedious this week. Nearly all of Carol's flashbacks were moments we could easily have imagined on our own. Weirder still, they almost amounted to "look at all the fires Carol has seen in the last few weeks." (We get it. "Consumed" is the episode title, and fire is a metaphor. This isn't open mic night at the beatnik coffee bar.)

Speaking of recycled plot devices that don't work for me, this episode marked the return of the inelegant scripting of early season four, where writers from one room (working on the character stuff) seemingly mashed up with writers in another (working on some silly zombie gag). The scene of the van teetering off the bridge felt like a wedged-in way to have a bizarre zombie fighting stage, while its actual fall felt like fuel for a future Mythbusters episode to show us "it wouldn't work that way."

So, it was an hour in which ultimately, not much happened. Disappointing filler to slow down the "assault on the hospital" until the mid-season finale. I give it a C-, lifted that high only because Melissa McBride and Norman Reedus gave it their utmost.