The Walking Dead: Warlords (11x13)

Eh.... I mean... okay, I guess.

Cons:

Does anyone else just get very tired whenever we meet a new group of people, get a new weirdo or warlord or whatever, who has to do the whole macho routine and be intimidating in some new way we haven't seen before? Because we have seen it before. Come on. There's this showdown between Aaron, Gabriel, and some people of the Commonwealth, with this new community they want to assist, and the whole time the tense scene was going on, I was sitting there trying not to yawn. There's nothing new under the sun.

I found the way this episode was structured, with flashbacks and an out of order series of scenes, to be largely unnecessary. It was clearly done that way because Toby Carlson needed to be a twist surprise assassin. But honestly, the tension of us, the audience, knowing what he was up to while Aaron and Gabriel did not, would have worked far better from my perspective. It just felt convoluted for the sake of being convoluted, almost as if they thought making it confusing would trick us into thinking it was good as a matter of course.

Pros:

I do have a real soft spot for Aaron, and I liked how much of a bad-ass he was here, while still keeping his focus firmly on wanting to help people. Gabriel has also become more interesting to me over the years, that interesting balance between a devotee of God and a battle-hardened killer. I liked seeing them work together in a situation of peril. They make for a good team.

While thoughts of Negan vs. Maggie fill me with irritation as a matter of course, I did actually enjoy seeing Negan this week. Mostly because I knew he was going to come back, and I was prepared to be annoyed when he was revealed at some super dramatic moment way further down the line. Instead, no, Negan has been with this group of people for a while, things seem pretty normal except for their leader's extremism... and he manages to get a message to Maggie to come help. This should be interesting.

I do like what we're seeing of Hornsby and Carlson and how the inner machinations and messy politics of the Commonwealth can cause all of these outsized problems for the little guy. It feels like one of those complicated consequences of actually having a large society with some level of complex structure. Of course the people with power are going to be corrupted in some cases, and we're seeing that here. Hornsby's ambitions for the Commonwealth cause problems, so he pulls in an ex-assassin buddy of his to clean up his messes. Boom, people die who didn't need to die, and our main characters are left in a rotten situation because of it.

This is a short review, which I think should tell you that while this episode was by no means offensive to me, it also wasn't something I feel inclined to rave about. Sounds like most of The Walking Dead these days, huh?

8/10