Okay. Okay, so... I have some thoughts. I'm going to try and proceed with some semblance of coherence, but it's difficult to talk about what exactly is annoying me so much with this episode.
Cons:
A character like Negan only works in moderation. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is hamming it up to perfection, but using him too much instantly makes him less threatening. There were one or two legitimately intimidating moments in this episode with Negan, but every other time he was on screen, I wasn't at all freaked out by him, and that's a problem. With all the Negan stuff, we also got a rehash of Negan's compound. We saw the same stuff play out. Dwight is subservient, but he and his former wife Shelly are still drawn to each other. Negan is creepy towards women. He tortures people, but they respect him. Daryl gets abused. Negan makes speeches. This might have been an effective episode to introduce Negan's whole situation, but we already did that back in the Daryl-centric episode! I don't need to see this stuff twice!
Also, holy sexual assault, Batman. Trigger warnings up the wazoo. I mean, you don't actually see Negan touch any of these women other than one super creepy kiss with Shelly. But we do walk in and see his harem, and he keeps them all well-groomed and wearing slinky black dresses, and it's just... deeply disturbing. Now, I know what you're going to say: it's supposed to be deeply disturbing. And, sure, I'll agree with that. But I always get very suspicious and perturbed when shows use sexual assault or rape as a shortcut to showing how despicable somebody is. Like, we get it. You don't really have to fall back on that. Women are sexually exploited enough on TV as it is.
For the past several weeks I've been complaining about each episode focusing only on one place, and in this one we actually get away from that and have a number of subplots. However, unfortunately I wasn't thrilled with some of them. First of all, we bookend the episode with Michonne setting a trap, catching a member of the Saviors, and demanding to be taken to Negan. Cool, I guess, but we haven't really had enough time to explore her motivations or the complexities of her plan. We also see Rick and Aaron off looking for supplies for Negan, and we see them find a well-guarded place where they think they might hit the mother-load. That's fine, but we're so busy with other aspects of the episode that we don't actually have time to see how this turns out, and as such the opportunity is kind of wasted.
Jesus is in this episode at the very beginning, as he and Carl are both hiding in the Saviors' supply truck to make it to Negan. However, Carl tricks Jesus into jumping off the truck, and Jesus sort of shrugs affably and then disappears for the rest of the episode. This was just... weird. If there was any character who I wanted to actually follow this week, it would have been Jesus. Where the heck did he go? Finally, we've got Spencer continuing to hate Rick and mistrust him, as he and Father Gabriel go for a drive and discuss the morality of hatred. I really don't know what's going on in this guy's head, and I also find myself not caring.
Pros:
I should be clear, though: it was refreshing as hell to have an ensemble-based episode where we got to spend time with multiple POV characters, and go to several different locations. Just because many of the subplots didn't have enough time to breathe doesn't mean I disapprove of the idea on principle. To prove it, let's talk about the subplot that I loved: Eugene and Rosita. Rosita continues to insist that Eugene make her a bullet, but Eugene is having second thoughts. Rosita tears into him, calling him useless and pitiful. He doesn't take kindly to that, but he does agree to make her some bullets. As the episode ends, Negan has come back to Alexandria, and Rosita now has a working firearm.
The great thing about this subplot was that it didn't take a lot of screen time to get across the whole idea. Rosita and Eugene have obviously been through a lot together, and they are probably the two people going through the most intense grief about Abraham's death. And yet clearly there are some resentments brewing. What Rosita said was really harsh, but maybe true. It seems like maybe Eugene is being set up for a hero moment, what with Rosita reaffirming that she considers him a coward. I really like where this is going, although Eugene has grown on me enough that I'd definitely feel a pang if he died next week.
What really made this episode a success, generally speaking, was Carl Grimes. Wow. I don't think I've written a sentence like that ever when reviewing this show. But, it's true. With Rick being a subservient coward, it's up to the younger Grimes to take matters into his own hands, and the results are glorious. He sneaks in to the compound in a truck, and then kills two of Negan's men before getting taken down. He spends the rest of the episode getting the tour of the place with Negan, who is fascinated and impressed by his gumption. Negan makes him take off his bandage and reveal his disgusting missing eye, and then he forces Carl to sing to him.
The stuff with Negan and Carl is infinitely more fascinating than anything else we've seen with Negan thus far. There's this amazing scene where Negan makes Carl reveal his eye, and then Negan goes on and on talking about how disgusting it is. Carl, who has been very stoic up to this point, starts crying, and Negan... Negan seems to actually feel bad. He tells Carl that it's easy to forget that he's just a kid. He then tells him his eye looks bad ass, and that he should show it off because nobody will mess with him when he looks like that. It's Negan's warped way of... apologizing. Now, I don't forgive Negan for a second for all the crap he's done. I don't feel a spec of sympathy or understanding for this character. But these interactions with Carl make him so much more interesting than just a chaotic evil bastard who does what he wants and gets away with it because he's the strongest. We can see that he has his own moral code. It's a warped, twisted, evil code, but he does have it, and taunting a kid for a physical deformity is clearly crossing Negan's personal lines. I don't know about you, but that adds all sorts of delicious depth to this situation.
Earlier I was talking about how less is more with Negan, and I stand by that. The few moments that made my skin crawl were the ones where he wasn't swearing up a storm or speechifying about the power of ball-busting in order to get respect or sex or whatever. It was moments like at the end, as he comes back to Alexandria to deliver Carl back to his father. Rick isn't there, so Negan decides to stick around and wait for him to come back from his supply run. He finds baby Judith in the house and picks her up, dandling the little one on his knees and kissing her forehead. That right there is what makes him an effective villain. I don't believe he's going to kill the baby for no reason, but I would certainly believe him capable of taking Judith away from Carl and Rick because he knows it will hurt them. And this, this is the consequence of Carl's actions. Earlier, when he was watching a disobedient Savior get his face ironed like Dwight's, Carl was disturbed. When Carl was forced to sing "You Are My Sunshine" to a smirking Negan, he was a little freaked. But it's the end of the episode, when watching his little sister being held by that monster, that we see Carl realize the full impact of his hasty revenge fantasy. That's powerful stuff, folks.
I want to give Daryl a shout-out here. Almost no dialogue, and yet you can really tell how freaked out he is when he sees Carl. At the end of the episode, as Negan drives off to take Carl back to Alexandria, Daryl says, anger in his voice: "If you do anything to him..." As punishment for this unfinished threat, he's sent back into solitary. While there, he receives a note with a lock pick, telling him to leave immediately, which is an intriguing mystery to say the least. Who gave him the note? Dwight? Shelly? Did Jesus make it onto Negan's compound? I don't know what to think!
I think Negan was right when he points out to Carl that Daryl is falling apart, but I think he's wrong about why. Negan thinks he's breaking Daryl, and maybe that's true. But I think Daryl's at the point where the very idea of death just doesn't phase him. So what if he dies? He's wracked with guilt about Glenn, he's devastated over the loss of his home and family. What more can Negan do to him? And then Carl shows up. It warms my heart to see how much Daryl cares for Carl, how he was actually willing to show a spark of defiance when he thought Carl was in danger. I'd love to see that play out.
As we go forward into next week's mid-season finale, I'm of two minds about how I want this to go down. Will Negan be killed off? It seems way too soon for that, but I've been less than impressed by this villain so far, so I wouldn't really mind it if his time on the show was cut short. After all of these weeks of setting up different communities and characters and all that, I guess the final question becomes: who's going to be the one who gets to kill off Negan? Will it be Carl? Daryl? Sasha and Jesus? Rosita and Eugene? Michonne? There are a lot of plans in the works, and I'm just praying that one of them pans out without too much collateral damage!
7.5/10
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