Oh, The Walking Dead. I don’t know what to do with you.
Last week, I talked about how I felt as though the show had slowed down – not enough forward momentum, not enough going on. But last week, Carl woke up. Otis and Shane ran from a herd of zombies. After this week’s episode, where the most action we saw was Glenn taking his shirt off for Maggie, I feel like I spoke too soon.
I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but everything I talked about last week remains true for this week’s episode: The Walking Dead needs to progress, and it hasn’t. A show that has been driven by alternating moments of quiet and absolute fear on the part of the survivors has slowed to a complete halt; rather than building up to action, the show has taken to all but teasing it. Carl is still in bed – fair enough. The survivors are settling in – fine. But it’s been pounded into our head that right now, the most important thing to the group is finding Sophia… and no one seems to be doing anything about it except Daryl, who’s rapidly becoming my favorite character on the show.
Why? Because he’s doing things.
I don’t know if enough can be said about Norman Reedus for his portrayl of Daryl. He’s a gruff, not entirely pleasant person who still manages to show heart and empathy. From his no-bullshit attitude while looking for Sophia on his own to his quiet, yet equally sincere time in the RV with Carol, he is absolutely believable. Throughout the entire search for Sophia, Daryl has showed a sense of urgency and empathy that I feel the show has lacked for a couple of episodes now. But even this ultimately has no results: Daryl looks around an abandoned house and comes up empty, then comes back with no help from anyone else and… a flower?
I understand that the show doesn’t want to rush things. There’s nothing worse than a show where a major problem is presented, then solved within the week. But a month into The Walking Dead, and master tracker Daryl hasn’t managed to find a thing, yet nobody else in the party seems to have a driving urge search for her. It didn’t seem possible that less could happen on a show about the impending zombie apocalypse.
This feeling extends to everyone else on the ranch. Rather than taking the time at Hershel’s farm to regroup, everyone seems to be taking the reprieve as a vacation – the writers included. We see two conversations at Carl’s bedside, a completely awkward, forced, and unprompted implied sex scene with Glenn and farmer’s daughter Maggie, and watch Carol get surly about her missing daughter again. Then again, so would I, when literally only one person in the entire party is bothering to keep looking for her. Why Rick finds “we’ll look for her tomorrow” to be an acceptable answer on a day when the most that happens is Glenn getting laid, I’ll never understand. Other than that, and the scene at the well, we’re standing in zombified dead water.
Not only is there an entire lack of action, but it’s disheartening as hell when, in a show called The Walking Dead, you see only one zombie in the entire episode. That’s all well and good (see what I did there?), but when a scene involving ripping a zombie in half makes me laugh more than it terrifies me? Something is wrong.
Let’s get some Cliff’s Notes here:
- Rick is tired and wants to stay on the ranch. Hershel doesn’t want Rick to stay on the ranch.
- Neither of them do anything about it.
- Sophia is still missing.
- Daryl is the only one who bothered to let search for her. And is also a badass.
- Meanwhile, it apparently takes seven people to pull a zombie out of a well.
- Glenn and Maggie had sex.
- Lori’s pregnant.
And there you have the entire episode.
Consensus: I don’t think that the events of the episode in and of themselves were bad things – but they’ve just been drawn out two episodes too long. With nobody making a real effort to find Sophia, no plans being made for the survivors’ future plans, and not even so much as a decent headshot, The Walking Dead seems to have slowed from a zombie shuffle to a dead stop. I’m hoping that this is the calm before the storm, but I don’t have my hopes up.
