Five thoughts on ‘The Walking Dead’s’ midseason premiere
“The Walking Dead” is back after taking the holidays off, apparently so that we could all stock up on facial tissue.
Sunday’s midseason premiere of Season 8 of the AMC zombie series was — except for a jolt of a surprise toward the end — pretty much the tryingto-be-weepiest episode yet offered. And for a show that isn’t afraid to wallow in the frequent demises of main characters, that’s saying something.
The doomed one this episode — here is where we issue the by now pro forma “spoiler alert” — is Carl Grimes, son of Rick, loser of an eye, seeker of peace, wearer of the miraculously never-dirty cottongauze eyepatch.
When all around it was streaked in blood, and sweat, and viscera, and the general grime of a world in which showers must be an ultimate luxury, Carl’s eye patch gleamed drugstoreshelf white like a beacon of virtue.
But that was before Sunday’s episode, which picked up from where the midseason finale left off, with Carl revealing that he had been bitten by one of the zombies that shuffle around the show’s postplague hellscape.
They can’t do much, the sluggish, titular characters of this aptly named series — we would have also accepted “The Lurching Dead” and “The FootDragging Dead” — but when they do manage to sink their teeth into you, it’s curtains.
And young Carl’s curtain call, as it were, took up a whole episode and then an extra 23 minutes into the next hour, sharing screen time with the story of the show’s previous holder of the title of scenery chewer-in-chief, King Ezekiel. In one more note of import this week, we finally got an answer, of sorts, to what’s going on in all those glimpses into the future, where Rick has a long white beard and Vaseline has been smeared all over the lens.
So let us strap on the yoke of organization and deliver 5 thoughts recapping “The Walking Dead” Season 8 Episode 9, the One in Which Rick Gave His Only Begotten Son:
1. The show continued at its, let’s say, careful pace. Before even getting to “real time” in the season’s chronicle of the AllOut War between Rick’s people and the Saviors loyal to the villain Negan, we had to step into flashback to see how Carl got bit. It was in the battle to save the solo stranger Siddiq, as every single viewer had surmised. Despite our knowing this, there was, nonetheless, a lingering closeup on the actual moment of the walker gnawing on Carl’s torso.
More interestingly, we saw Carl’s reaction to this in subsequent minutes, a demeanor I would call more beatific than horrified. Was he wearing a crown of thorns? I couldn’t tell. But before heroically leading the people of Alexandria to safety from the coming attack by the Saviors, Carl, of course, wrote to, seemingly, everyone who has ever been on the show.
As I’ve said before, this is the writing-est series in TV history; I look forward to warm evenings by the fire, perusing the surely forthcoming, “The Collected Letters of the Characters of ‘The Walking Dead.’” Or maybe they could be made into a Ric Burns-style documentary: (Cue violins.) “Dearest Michonne, The sorghum is growing thinner this harvest season …”
Meanwhile, we got a flashback for Morgan, too, which answered the lingering question about how the Saviors escaped their compound. It seems not to have been Daryl’s illfated, Rick-defying truck crash into the compound so much as an all-out Savior machine-gun attack on the zombies who were besieging them in order to create a path of exit. For the sake of the first eight episodes of this season, it was good of them to wait to try this achingly obvious move. (Maybe Daryl’s crash thinned the herd a bit? It’s possible.)
So, yeah, as with the beginning of the season, little time passed in Episode 9. The show is not “24,” delivering one hourlong episode for each hour of the day in series time, but it’s close.
2. That said, Carl’s flashback scene had perfect musical accompaniment. Take a bow, genius person among the “Walking Dead” showmakers who came up with this one. Because setting Carl’s post-bite maneuvers to Bright Eyes’ “At the Bottom of Everything” was as eloquent as it gets, and a little bit sly, as well.
Conor Oberst’s superb song, about people reckoning with life on a plane plunging oceanward, talks about “get(ting) eaten,” and, as we watch Carl dress his wound, Oberst sings, “We must stare, we must stare, we must stare.” There is a line about taking “all of the medicines too expensive now to sell” and one about plunging into caverns “with just our flashlights and our love.”
It fits the apocalyptic moment and the character — the father “loads his gun,” for heaven’s sake; more on that later — and it also works on a macro level, as kind of a wink and a nod to who Carl has been.
Oberst and his band Bright Eyes, out of Nebraska, are usually characterized as an emo band. And Carl, as he has aged, has often acted as the show’s resident emo personality, so very caught up in the turbulent anxieties of American teenhood. It made the song all the more powerful that it worked on an emotional level and as a wry observation at the same time.
3. It was sad to see Carl go, but the Kingdom storyline was the more compelling one. So the onetime community theater actor King Ezekiel, having woken from his self-pity over his battlefield loss, got his remaining people to safety before Negan’s troops came in December’s midseason finale.
Now he is under capture, willing, he says, to accept his fate. But he engages in an eloquent interrogation of his captor, telling the man that he need not live as Negan’s minion. “I made a choice I could live with,” Ezekiel says. “Now it’s your turn to do the same.”
But, alas, just as his words seem to be having some effect, Morgan and Carol attack. Ezekiel is saved when he might have saved a soul. In the battle Morgan defeats one attacker by reaching into a wound and literally pulling the man’s guts out because “Walking Dead,” when given a choice between showing viscera and not, will almost always choose to show the viscera.
Then it is Morgan’s turn to choose. Does he kill the Savior captain, or does he let him live, as Carol and Ezekiel urge? The question is settled when young Henry, the kid brother of Morgan’s murdered protege, shows up almost out of nowhere and — “Walking Dead,” remember — throatstabs the fellow. Gore aside, that’s a tight little story, thick with both triumph and regret.
4. But most of the show was spent on Carl’s deathbed receiving line. I came to like the kid, don’t get me wrong. But the farewell scene with Siddiq — who turns out to be a doctor, silver lining! — and the quick moment with Daryl and then the scene with Michonne and then the extra long scene with his dad all worked, I would argue, to dampen the impact of losing Carl. While the lingering goodbye was taking place, my mind flashed, improbably, to the line, attributed to Benjamin Franklin and oft rendered in bathroom needlepoint, about guests and fish overstaying their welcome.
Just as you thought the lad was yielding to the zombie infection, his skin looking like a morning-after firepit, Rick and Michonne decided they needed to move him out of the sewer drain hideout and into his second deathbed. And, wouldn’t you know it, there’s a nearby bombed-out church, in case you were missing some of the symbolism about Carl’s peace-love-and-understanding message.
It was sad to see Carl go as shards of light poured in through where the stained glass used to be. He grew as a character. He made some powerful points to his father about the vengeful path the man is on.
“You can’t kill all of them, Dad,” he said, not quite snarling and teeth-gnashing yet. “There’s got to be something after.”
But I am willing to bet this would have been a more resonant death if producers had to edit it down to 60 minutes of TV time instead of letting it sprawl to 83. Yes, that would have meant fewer ad breaks for AMC to sell, but our role as viewers is to root for art over commerce. Anyway, so long, Carl. Thanks for passing your hat on to sister Judith. And may the band in your Valhalla be Bright Eyes all day long.
5. Before he went, Carl offered one solution to the mystery of that future the show has been teasing us with — and delivered a zap of surprise. We’ve been getting gauzy visions of a wizened Rick, with Michonne by his side and Judith looking about five years older, living in a peaceful-seeming agrarian community, a version of the presentday Hilltop.
That, Carl explains, is his vision. “You can’t see it yet,” he tells his father. “But I have.” In one of those visions this week, we even saw — hold on to your baseball bat — cartoon uber-villain Negan as one of the happy farm workers, greeting Judith cheerfully. Well!
Carl hammers this ideal of reconciliation home until Rick and Michonne move tastefully and cinematically out to sit on the ruined church’s porch so that we can see them wince when they hear Carl’s farewell gunshot.
But before that, Rick repeatedly told his son on the boy’s (second) deathbed, “I’m gonna make it real,” meaning the vision of a peaceful future.
Or maybe not. The postshow preview of coming episodes shows Rick repeating his vow to Negan that he is going to slay the Saviors leader. Miss ya, kid. Big fan of forgiveness. Looking forward to growing some vegetables. But right now there’s killing to be done.