Them

I struggle to come up with much to say about this week's episode of The Walking Dead, as it seems like very little happened to comment on. If this were perhaps one chapter of a novel, making its tonal point while allowing the reader to immediately turn the page and go to the next chapter, it might have worked. As a single hour of weekly television, though, it just didn't do it for me.

There was a tiny sprinkling of decent little character moments scattered throughout the episode. But between those moments was more walking than in a Lord of the Rings movie. And not a lot going on. It felt like the show has done this sort of "basic survival is difficult" thing before, and achieved it using a few quick scenes within an episode, rather than devoting a whole dry episode to it. The basic day-to-day of existence is simply not the intriguing part of this series' premise, nor what it does well.

The stuff that felt like it could have been interesting got introduced without really being explored. For example, there seemed to be a world of back story implied by that (zombie) woman bound and gagged in the trunk... but we'll never know it. The (maybe poisoned?) water on the road was an interesting little set piece -- except we'll probably never know who left it and whether their intentions were good. Not that either of those elements, expanded, would have amounted to an interesting episode either. The Walking Dead excels when it's about facing hard choices, and this was an episode with no choices; there was nothing they could do.

And... I'm really trying to find something more to say about this installment, but it was just too empty and boring. It felt like only in the last minute of the episode did it even really get started -- when the new character of Aaron finally showed up to inject an actual plot into the proceedings. So I'll just put as much effort into this review as it felt like the writers put into creating the episode, and cut things off here. I suppose I'll give it points for deviating from The Walking Dead's formula. But I'd still call it a D at best.