Okay, honestly, this episode woke me up a little bit. It wasn't necessarily "good" by most metrics, but it avoided the cardinal sin of being entirely boring. Let's discuss!
Cons:
In a strange way, the fact that the Commonwealth is going up in flames and Sebastian is dead and all is chaos, kind of pisses me off. Not because I wanted to spend more time on this whole mess. No, quite the opposite: I've been ready to close the door on this for quite some time, and now that it seems I'm finally getting my wish, I am paradoxically even more annoyed about the time wasted on it. I'm glad Sebastian's dead, and I'm glad we got an over the top chaotic death for him, because that was fun to see. But I'm also just... annoyed at how long this story took to get to its resolution, if indeed we've even reached it.
Some of the quieter character moments of this episode really worked for me, and I'll talk about those in a second, but a lot of them really didn't register. Ezekiel talking about staying behind to take care of a new kingdom felt like a really lackluster way to sunset his character. Again, if that's what's even happening. We've got Negan at the bedside of his pregnant wife, contemplating fatherhood. Yawn. We've got Lydia apparently with a new boyfriend, telling Carol that she'll never forget Henry. So much of these last few episodes of The Walking Dead are now slated to feel like setup for the bajillion spinoffs happening next year, and I for one am already sick of it. I can tell you that I will not be tuning in!
Pros:
I gotta say, Max getting to have her revenge, secretly recording Sebastian, playing that recording with Eugene's help, inciting a riot... all that stuff was really fun, even if it's extremely muddy thematically and probably not actually "good" TV if you really think about it. I'm at the stage with this show where I'm just happy to be entertained with some zany schemes paying off, and bloody zombie violence is just the cherry on top.
As always, as I look for things to sustain me through the dying embers of this show's fire, I look to the character moments. I look to Lydia and Carol having a little check-in, I look to Judith's reluctance to leave yet another home, wanting things to be better and more stable. Daryl isn't always great at the parenting thing, but he gives it his best shot, speaking to Judith like an equal. I think he's better at it than he at first assumes. The payoff, Judith shooting a Walker through the head after it kills Sebastian, was so brutally sad but also honest. Judith tried to reject the violence that a gun represents earlier in the episode, but she cannot escape the world she lives in.
Another short review, for another episode that frankly doesn't give me a ton to talk about. Still, this one felt way more coherent and interesting to me than anything we got last week, so I'll take it happily!
8/10
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