Coda

Last night's mid-season finale of The Walking Dead had a few good moments sprinkled throughout, but overall I think it missed the mark a bit. Unfortunately, it seems as though every time the writers come up with a few new tricks to make things interesting, they inevitably go back to the one trick that is their bread and butter: the "shocking death." But they use this trick so frequently, and with such predictable timing (it's the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead) that all the shock value has been stripped away from it. So what we're left with each time a character meets his or her demise is whether the death severed any other narrative purpose besides "shocking" (not shocking) the audience. And here, the answer is, "sort of." You can see what the writers were trying for, but their execution (pun intended) was flawed in several ways.

One aim was clearly to gut-punch Maggie. After having been separated from her sister since the prison, she receives news that Beth has been found at last, only to have that hope cruelly ripped away from her. The problem is, Maggie hasn't exactly been broken up about her missing sister. It's probably true that she wrote off Beth as dead a long time ago, but we never got to see any of the moments associated with that. There wasn't really any "we left Beth" angst last season during the flight from the prison. They didn't really play any "sense of hope" scenes when the group reunited and Daryl told Maggie that Beth was still alive. Maggie never wanted to make even half the effort Daryl did at finding Beth, even deciding to traipse off to DC and leave her sister in the wind. So yes, while I ultimately understand that this is her sister, and learning of her confirmed death will deal Maggie an emotional blow, it has long since taken on the dimension of a sister who moved across the country years ago, rather than a sister you've lived with in one house all your life. In short, if this was about dealing Maggie a blow, then the writers needed to earn that by showing us at any point before now that Maggie actually cared. They failed utterly in that regard.

The other narrative aim seemed to be the maturing of Beth. She had learned what a terrible place the hospital was, a nest of vipers doing greater evil than the zombies, in the name of doing good. And she decided in the final moment that putting a stop to it was worth sacrificing her own life -- which, given her last line of dialogue, she surely knew she was doing in her final moment.

The trouble with trying to give Beth this heroic end is that she didn't really accomplish a damn thing. In just the few episodes we've seen in the hospital, we've seen a procession of bad cops who rape women and bully the elderly. Some of these villains have been killed, but there's always a new one to fill the gap. Take this week, for instance, and the showdown at the elevator shaft. I don't even remember whether the cop who confronted Dawn is a guy we've seen before or not -- that's how numerous and generally anonymous the evil cop characters are at the hospital. And so there are two problems with killing Dawn to somehow make this all right. First, I have no faith that the end of Dawn brings any kind of end to this regime. Tomorrow, I'm sure another Evil Rapey Cop will pop up somewhere. And second, it's implying that Dawn as the figurehead-enabler is somehow worse than any of the perpetrators. Guilty, sure. Worse? I question that. Beth's big sacrifice thus felt misplaced, which cheats it out of being heroic. I think the writers figured it would be tragic, at least... but that takes us back to the problem that death is so common on The Walking Dead that the audience can't even say to itself, "what a sad waste."

Unless, that is, I'm thinking about wasted plot opportunities. It is a sad waste that the show will now not be able to explore the emotional aftermath of the hospital for Beth. She killed people, and had to make a number of moral compromises. That would have left a mark that fundamentally changed her, probably straining her relationship with people, Maggie most of all. But we won't get to see any of that.

So, what was good in the episode? For one, the return of Abraham's crew to the church, crashing in with their fire engine. (We'll overlook the infuriating artificial jeopardy of that situation caused by the insufferable Gabriel.) For another, the continued dark descent of Rick, who clearly saw nothing wrong in how he handled "New Bob" during the teaser. There's one character, at least, that the writers are keenly interested in tracking as he rappels at breakneck speed down into an amoral chasm.

But generally, I feel I'll have no trouble waiting until February waiting for the series to return. After a burst of quality that spanned that back half of season four and the start of season five, I feel like The Walking Dead is now rapidly sliding back down the hill into the predictable doldrums that marked the years before that. I give this episode a B-.