Slabtown

This week's episode of The Walking Dead featured just one of the regular characters, and one of the less central characters at that -- this is the episode that showed us what happened to Beth since her abduction last season.

I found this episode to be more interesting as an intellectual exercise than in providing tension or moral dilemmas as most good episodes of the series do. Certainly there were some tense moments, chiefly the threat of the creepy Gorman and his sexual designs on Beth. (There was also some suspense in when Beth's one ally would die during their escape, with the twist being that he didn't.)

But the moral dilemmas had apparently already been asked and answered by this group of hospital survivors... and that's where the "interesting" came from. This group seems to have been living in comparatively luxurious conditions compared to Our Heroes (and almost everyone else Our Heroes have encountered, for that matter). They've absolutely had more access to live-saving supplies than anyone else. Yes, we know that Dawn had to make a hard choice at one point with a personal cost. And granted, it's not like we know many other details about their history. Still, it seems a fair statement to say the hospital people haven't been through nearly as much as Our Heroes.

Thus, it's rather remarkable to see how much these people have already lost themselves. They have a leader looking the other way as her security people rape fellow survivors. (It's their duty to serve.) They have a doctor killing off a person who threatens his own position in the group. They've slipped pretty far from civilization, considering their environment... which is ironic, since Dawn, I think more than anyone else we've ever encountered on the show, harbors the notion of regular civilization one day returning to the world.

So yes, intellectually interesting. But frankly, not as dramatically interesting as what we've seen so far this season. Not until the last ten seconds, anyway, when Carol showed up on the gurney. We learned earlier in the episode that this group's standard procedure is to take the people they think are weak and leave the strong people behind, so I'm guessing we'll discover next episode that Daryl was left behind while Carol was taken. Of course, them identifying Carol as weak should prove to be a hell of a miscalculation on their part.

I think I'd call this episode a B. By far the weakest episode of the fifth season so far. But in my book, still a damn sight better than anything in the Governor years.