♥♥ “The Cell”
For some reason, the producers of The Walking Dead, a show I’m convinced is just trolling its audience these days, opened up with a sandwich-making montage, complete with a rousing, upbeat pop music soundtrack. It’s off-putting, unpleasant, and completely out of place (or, at least it would be had last week not featured an actual minstrel choir), as we follow Dwight, the Savior first introduced way back in the first half of last season, slowly assembling the ingredients to a pickle, tomato, lettuce, and fried egg sandwich.
That sandwich is then dropped at the feet of Daryl, who was taken prisoner by Negan, and is in a holding cell somewhere in the Saviors’ headquarters. The juxtaposition of Daryl, naked and plagued with guilt over his idiotic outburst causing the death of Glenn, with a teeth-gratingly infectious pop tune seemed to be played with some sense of looming artistic pride. Like some kind of sobering reminder of this hopeless and depraved world that we never once actually forgot about, despite how much “ye olde English” got spouted off in last week’s 60 minutes of televised embarrassment.
So, things are still bad. So bad they’re bleak. So bleak that we spent yet another episode without so much as a glimpse of the characters in Alexandria and how they’re doing with the devastating losses to their community.
What we did get was Gordon, a former Savior who left the compound, only to be hunted down by Dwight while he pleaded about how he survived the first couple months of the outbreak, not realizing that (cue suspense) humanity would be the real monsters (cue gasp). So, thanks for that insight into your struggle, completely anonymous character who’s monologue was used to restate a plot-point of the show that’s been going on for the better part of five or six seasons now.
Humanity is evil. We get it.
Anyway, as far as the actual plot, Negan wants Daryl to work for him, Daryl refuses to do so, and the groundwork is laid pretty obviously for a Dwight/Daryl team-up. Possibly including Dwight’s ex-wife, Honey, another character whose soul purpose is a plot device to illustrate the demented rule of Negan.
So, to recap, things are still bad. There’s still no hope, and the greatest villain is really humanity, and Daryl’s choices look to be somewhere between eating dog-food sandwiches (the quality of his food really deteriorates over the course of a single montage) and becoming a zombified version of himself chained up in a pen in front of the Saviordome, which is what I’m calling The Saviors headquarters from now on.
In short, another full episode spent over what could’ve been neatly explained away in about 15-or-so minutes. So, here’s to the 90-minute (ugh) episode next week, which I assume will be almost entirely Negan making a few spreadsheets to help decide how much Alexandria owes him from week-to-week. Bleak, hopeless spreadsheets.
The post The Rudderless Momentum That Has Become ‘The Walking Dead’ (TV REVIEW) appeared first on Glide Magazine.
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