The Walking Dead: The Big Scary U (8x05)

I like that this episode breaks up some of the monotony of the continuous battle we've been seeing the past four weeks. There were some really high highs in this installment, but there was also a fair bit of mediocrity.

Cons:

We spent too much time with the Savior characters. I don't care about Dwight. I've written off Eugene. I don't even know the rest of these punks. All of these scenes were supposed to show us why Negan is necessary - the delicate balance of his organization falls completely apart without him. But I guess I just don't care enough about learning details of the other side. They're the bad guys. I'm getting bored of them and I just want them to die now, please and thank you.

Gabriel has always bored the hell out of me. Finally, we get an episode where he has some real material to work with in the script, and he's starting to emerge as a dynamic character. And then? The episode's cliffhanger is that he's all shaky and sick, ostensibly having been bitten by a Walker when escaping with Negan. How many times is this show going to pull the same trick? Take a character who isn't one of the main leads, and give them a spotlight just to make us like them enough so that their death has impact. We've seen it dozens of times. I was just complaining about this with Eric a few weeks ago!

Daryl and Rick get a few brief moments, wherein they manage to get into a stupid fight and then accidentally explode the truck with the supplies they fought so hard to get. In that moment, they made the sacrifice of the Kingdom's people a total waste. That could have been an interesting avenue to explore, but oddly the moment was almost played for laughs. That rubbed me the wrong way.

Pros:

Although... I'll admit I love Daryl and Rick so much that I still enjoyed their brief moments onscreen. Their tension, unspoken in the last few episodes, has risen to the level that they're attacking each other physically. I get this sense that they were both letting off some steam, that Rick gets tired of having to be in charge. The fight was not tragic, and there's the great moment where Daryl has Rick in a choke-hold, and then they both notice that the truck is about to explode and Daryl gets up, grabs Rick by the arm, and tugs him back. These two assholes are family.

There are a lot of people on the internet who salivate over Negan, and I just do not get that. Sure, Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a good looking guy, but... come on. He's a monster. The thing is, after this episode I am no more inclined to sympathize or connect with this guy than I was before. I'm not buying the idea that we can discuss the two different sides of this. Negan straight up admits that he enjoys killing people. But, Negan was more interesting to me in this episode than he's been in a long time, probably since his scenes with Carl. We saw a softness to him, a lack of his usual bluster. He still makes a couple of crass jokes and whatnot, but it's tempered to the point where you can see a person behind the dark cartoon. The interesting thing is that it's hard to tell what Negan is really thinking during these scenes with Gabriel. We can assume he's telling the truth about his first wife, but did he tell this story as a real attempt to confess, or as a way to get Gabriel to trust him enough to help save his life? I like not knowing.

Ultimately, an episode without any shootouts was a good idea at this point in the season. I was feeling a little fatigued after four weeks of excessive violence. Although not everything here was a total success, I found myself enjoying quite a bit of the episode nonetheless.

7/10