What Happened and What's Going On

The Walking Dead returned for the back half of its fifth season with an episode that's likely to please some viewers and enrage others. I'm a bit torn in my reaction.

On the one hand, they really told a story in which character was vital. Tyreese was really the only character on the show they could have told this story with. None of the other characters who have so many demons in their pasts continue to be haunted and tormented by them. The return of so many specters was not just fun fan service, but really fed into an interesting and poetic death for Tyreese. And amazingly, four years into the show, they haven't really done a death like this. We've seen "death comes quickly and you just gotta keep going." We've seen "how death affects the survivors." But we haven't really seen an exploration of "death from the perspective of the dying." It was interesting, and it worked.

But, because Tyreese was the logical character for such a story, it felt to me like the writers were maybe putting the cart before the horse here. They decided to tell this sort of story, and then decided to kill Tyreese to do it. I have a hard time seeing how Tyreese's death is going to help push the long-term narrative forward. (They'd already lost Beth. Characters were already changed by that, such as Michonne, who suddenly wanted to settle down.) Sure, it made for a need bait-and-switch where the funeral at the start of the episode turned out not to be the one we assumed it was... but that seems awfully capricious.

They also had to have Tyreese make rookie mistakes to die in such a manner. In the group I watched the episode with, at least one person simply couldn't get past how dumb Tyreese was to get caught with his pants down so thoroughly -- not when he had been so cautious entering the house, not when he knew there was still at least one Walker in there. It almost felt like "Suicide by Zombie," and perhaps given the content of some of Tyreese's hallucinations, maybe it should have been that, directly. That might have been a stronger exit for the character.

But he did at least exit in one of the series' most visually striking episodes. It's interesting to me that in a show based on a comic book, featuring many of the plotlines from that comic book, that The Walking Dead hasn't really ever experimented with looking like a comic book. Last night it did, in a big way. Camera angles looked considered and composed, and were often evocative of comic layouts, right down to leaving large spaces near characters' heads for "speech bubbles." This style was not just evident in Tyreese's feverish visions, either, but in straight-up real world scenes too, like Tyreese's conversation with Noah in the van, early in the episode. I certainly don't think the series would want to regularly play around with the blown-out, "old photo" gags, or get too liberal with its use of slow motion. But it could certainly stay more in this visual space.

I think I'd call the episode a B. It didn't leave me itching for what's next, but it did feel to me like it at least stopped the slide that had begun in the last few episodes.