[rating=7.00] “Heads Up”
With the underscore of sappy piano music and the cheap trick of the camera angle veered slightly to one side revealing the truth about Glenn’s fate, there was much glee and celebration throughout The Walking Dead’s rabid, meme-generating fan base. After weeks of speculation and theories, yes, Glenn did manage to squirm his way under a dumpster and stab himself a little barricade to wait out the zombie horde.
Truthfully, on its own merit, the sequence itself was well done, even staying away from using Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” like so much ingrained pop-culture irony, but was it worth the wait? After showrunner Scott Gimple’s first attempt at looping back around the narrative to tidy up loose ends goes back to his earliest days in charge, with the fate of the Governor and the conflict with the Woodbury Army so mishandled it needed to be re-told, he’s tended to apply that formula liberally, really indulging it in the current season.
While Glenn makes it out alive, his path intersects with Enid, the moody, turtle-eating orphan whose tragic backstory we got a few weeks back, and was last seen scaling the walls outside of Alexandria just before the attack by The Wolves. What should be a simple hop, skip, and a jump back to their home, Glenn has to contend with a teenage girl’s shitty attitude, though she’s easy to disarm.
Back inside Alexandria, Rick begins bonding with the locals over reinforcing their walls while Deanna, possibly the result of the strangest manifestation of PTSD imaginable, shares her plans or expansion, to make their community even greater. He also holds a meeting with Morgan, along with Carol and Michonne, to discuss his lack of bad guy killing that put Rick directly in the line of fire (and a cliffhanger that they simply leapfrogged over).
As Morgan starts his plea of “all life is precious,” (which, again, was not worth a 90-minute flashback episode dedicated to where that all came from), his cool, Zen-like calm starts to dissolve, revealing a still-very unstable man whose sole purpose before was killing everything he came into contact with. He admits he doesn’t know what’s right anymore, a common theme, but the entire plot feels like a regression both for the plot as well as for Morgan’s character, as a hesitancy to kill, for whatever reason, is a well-worn trope by now.
Speaking of well-worn tropes, an Alexandrian, specifically Spencer, does something stupid without discussing it with anyone first, and almost dies in the process, a glaring reminder of the utter stupidity Rick’s group used to engage in, who look positively sophisticated next to these behind-the-wall-dwelling yokels.
Anyway, to bring it back to the subject of moody teenagers, Ron has a loaded gun with the intention of using it on Carl, which seems like a severe way to react to a breakup, but then again growing up in the apocalypse is bound to have some traumatizing effects, especially for a kid who’s been through a crash course in the matter of a few days.
Finally, in the name of rational thinking, special shout outs to Rick’s shooting lesson, as well as Rosita’s seminar on the basics of edge weapons to Alexandrians, and Eugene, both of whom are reminders of the show’s increasingly bloated cast. Although with the burned out tower crashing down, and bringing with it a good portion of the wall, that may not stay a problem by next week’s Fall finale.
