The Walking Dead: Promises Broken (11x07)

This felt like a "arranging things on the chessboard" episode in that a lot happened but a lot of it felt like a ramp-up to something more down the line. That's not necessarily a bad thing, although I do have my complaints...

Cons:

At this point the whole Pope thing, with Daryl and Leah and whatnot, is just... not working for me. I like Daryl, I like seeing how he's going to be able to make it out his various scrapes, but I'm... bored and annoyed and I feel like there's nothing new to explore with this concept.

The scene where Eugene punches a guy for being rude felt so overprescribed, like, it was obvious from minute one that this performatively douchey dude was going to wind up being the son of someone important and it would mess with their chances. I had (and still have) such high hopes for this weirdly sheltered community and where the story might go from here, but that moment was such a cliché that I couldn't really get behind it.

As I keep saying, there's not a lot of promise in the Negan and Maggie stuff, because the concept is fundamentally flawed. Maggie is annoying and one-note, she's become a very bland and uninteresting character over the years. Negan is being played by a very charismatic performer, and he's managed to retain his bite as a character even through his "redemption" or whatever. But... of course I'm on Maggie's side. It's ridiculous to even contemplate differently. Negan is a monster and he took pleasure from the harm he inflicted. Maggie's corresponding sin is that she left the show and came back boring.

Pros:

For once, I have something kind of nice to say about Maggie and Negan's story, though. I did think there was a nifty bit of writing, and a nifty bit of acting from Jeffrey Dean Morgan, in the scene where Negan talks about how if he could go back and do things differently, he wouldn't have just killed Glenn and Abraham, he would have killed them all. His reasons are frightfully pragmatic - the world is a place of vanishing resources now, and Negan was a leader of his community. He didn't protect them. He lost. He'd do better if he had it to do over again. See, that's an interesting perspective for a de-fanged villain to have. Sure, he's part of this new community now, and doing what he can to survive, which frankly makes him more interesting than Alpha or the Governor, or so many other villains we've seen who have no real adaptive powers and don't know how to function once removed from the context of the cult they started. I do think Negan as a character has promise in this show insofar as interesting ideas are concerned, I just think getting me to sympathize with him is a lost cause.

Yumiko and her brother's conversations were another highlight for me: obviously we've got sinister vibes ahoy in this place, but we still don't have a full picture of the situation. There appears to be different factions, different folks who are trying to position themselves on the side of the newcomers in case there's an advantage down the line. I worry about the fate of our friends back in Alexandria, given the obvious strength and resources of this potential adversary. I also think, as long as they're chill about it, there's no reason why this community shouldn't share the love a bit more, invite additional people to come inside. We'll have to see how it shakes out.

Short reviews tend to be a sign of my lack of investment. Oh hey look, another short review.

7/10