Premiere zaps energy into Walking Dead
The first episode of Season 8 gives aging show opportunity to shed problems, hit reset
Spoiler alert: This story contains spoilers for The Walking Dead.
This is not last year’s sad and slow Walking Dead.
If there’s one thing we can glean from the explosive but cagey Season 8 premiere (and 100th episode) of AMC’s zombie apocalypse series, it’s that the show is actively trying to shrug off its creative problems from last year and perhaps win back some viewers after a ratings decline.
“Mercy” is nowhere near the best episode The Walking Dead has ever aired, but it’s an effective season premiere that manages to add some energy to the aging series and at least partially hits the reset button. (I’d argue that until Negan is dead and gone for good, The Walking Dead won’t be truly great again.)
It righted a few of the wrongs of Season 7, focusing on our heroes, allowing them agency and keeping them together. That Team Rick actually had numbers and good strategy on its side was only an added bonus.
The premiere was a promising start to the season, but it will be hard for the series to follow through with equally gripping and smart episodes from here on. The new season (according to the trailers, the cast and filmmakers), is an “all-out war” between Rick and Negan, and it seems we’re nowhere close to the conclusion of that war yet, even if Rick won a battle.
We happy few The episode opens with flashes of what we are going to refer to as Old Man Rick from here on, which some fans may have noticed were also in the trailer the series debuted at Comic-Con this year. We’ll get to what Old Man Rick might mean later.
But the episode’s first few scenes have the benefit of rallying the citizens of Alexandria, the Kingdom and the Hilltop, and the audience mem- bers that need to be persuaded back onto the show. Rick, Maggie “they say you can wage war through the second trimester” Green and King Ezekiel do their St. Crispin’s Day best with speeches as the troops ready for battle with the Saviours. We see flashes of the characters not intimately involved in the battle: Carl is feeling sympathetic to a stranger while scavenging for gas (he’ll later return and leave the man food); Michonne and Rosita appear to be recovering from last season’s injuries; and baby Judith is now a small child, further muddying the series’ notoriously ill-defined timeline.
The team kicks off the day’s battle plan and a regiment rolls up at the Saviour compound to confront Negan. There’s a lot of back and forth, because Negan loves nothing more than the sound of his own voice, and he reveals that Gregory did indeed flee to the Saviours last season. He tries to convince the Hilltoppers to desert, but Jesus affirms what we all already knew: They’re following Maggie’s leadership now.
Rick gives Negan’s lieutenants (including Eugene) an opportunity to defect and save their lives. He counts down from 10 but, sneaky man that he is, starts firing on “seven.”
We band of brothers Once the battle got started, “Mercy” really took off.
One of the most disappointing aspects of the Season 7 finale was how poorly the final battle sequence was shot, especially considering Dead’s history of great horror and action filmmaking. In contrast, the siege of the Saviour compound was thrilling to watch, smartly edited so that it was easy to follow despite all the moving parts.
The troops assaulted the windows of the compound while Daryl/Carol/ Morgan/Tara orchestrated a herd of walkers to follow in an attack. The real star of the episode was Daryl, as you might expect. His triumphant and explosive ride felt akin to the kind of energy and goodwill the series had in the Season 5 premiere when Carol burned Terminus to the ground.
Despite Rick’s best efforts, Negan is able to duck out of the way of the hailstorm of bullets and the team is forced to retreat (but not before, for some wild reason, Rick takes a Polaroid of Negan’s hiding spot).
Father Gabriel stays behind to try to rescue Gregory, who (of course) double-crosses him and takes off with Gabriel’s car. The priest is left with few options as the herd advances, so he jumps into a trailer that just so happens to have Negan inside it. Now, I’d like to be the first to say Gabriel is holding a gun and Negan is just standing there making lewd comments and smiling, so we could all save ourselves some time if Gabriel took care of the series’ worst villain.
It’s unlikely that will happen and the episode leaves those two stuck in the trailer together.
The three faces of Rick Grimes OK, let’s address the greying elephant in the room. The episode jumped away from the present multiple times to two different versions of Rick. In one, a red-eyed, wet and distraught Rick is standing on what looks like a porch, where he solemnly intones, “My mercy prevailed over my wrath,” which it appears is where the episode got its title from.
In the other, more extended flashes, Rick awakes in a pristine and dreamy bed in what appears to either be years in the future, or a fantasy/ dream sequence, an alternate reality or something else. He’s greyed, wrinkly and walking with a cane. Eventually, we find out Old Man Rick can’t be too old because we see an elementary-school-age Judith in the house, along with Michonne (seemingly devoid of aging makeup) and hear Carl.
Everything is hunky-dory and the sequences have a hazy quality to them, supporting the idea that this is not really the future. Nothing on this show is ever that happy.
What these scenes really portray and what that means for the series going forward remains to be seen. But either way, it seems like it’s going to be an exciting season.