[rating=1.00]
Seriously, what the fuck was that?
After last week’s hopelessly bleak premiere that saw the demise of both Glenn and Abraham at the hands of Negan, followed by an extended breaking down of Rick’s ego, The Walking Dead decided to push the pendulum into the other direction. Of course, it did so in the only way it knows how to, with a clumsy, ham-handed storyline that follows Carol and Morgan into yet another new settlement, The Kingdom.
Of course, you can’t have a kingdom if you don’t have a king, so we get Ezekiel, a dreadlocked amateur theater actor with a Monty Python dialect and a pet fucking tiger. He rules his kingdom fairly and justly, he welcomes in strangers and fosters a community of reciprocity. Again, in case your suspension of disbelief was already hanging on by a thread, he has a pet fucking tiger!
All this is supposed to instill some sense of hope in viewers, an about-face antidote to last week’s episode. Instead it comes off like some kind of Hanna-Barbara animated adaptation of The Walking Dead, a hokey, cartoonish subplot compiled entirely out of mad-libs, the direct result of a narrative that is fast running out of ideas. In the end, it’s little more than a desperate, manipulative attempt to remind viewers off-put by last weeks offering that the show’s not all bad.
Just in case this happy-go-lucky tone wasn’t made clear enough, we got an extended segment where an a cappella group sang Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice,” because with Beth gone, we have no one left to sing pop songs at wildly inappropriate moments. An added bonus, we have a new champion for worst Walking Dead moment of all time. Conveniently located in the worst Walking Dead episode every produced. So far.
Besides the show’s self-lauding over its about face in terms of tone, scenery, and characters, it’s incredibly mangled, plot-wise. Morgan, who brought Carol to the Kingdom to recuperate, does his part to contribute to Ezekial’s society. So much so that he’s let in on all sorts of secrets, namely Ezekial’s deal he made with The Saviors, which he normally keeps to himself and few members of his inner circle. And the new guy, because why the fuck not?
Even better, Morgan “knows” who The Saviors are, based on a limited encounter Carol had with a few stray members, apparently. And, befitting the awkward, terribly cartoonish tone of this week’s episode, The Saviors are little more than caricatures of the imposing, outright terrifying army we saw in full effect last week. They get into a fistfight with a member of The Kingdom. The two groups shout at one another. One of the Saviors makes a vague threat, and tries to use the word “produce” as a verb and a noun in the same sentence. It fails. Just like this episode.
Finally, Carol, who went from one the show’s best character to someone whose dialogue feels like it was written by a committee is once again given no consistency whatsoever. She acts impressed with Ezekiel, then scoffs at everything he’s built seconds later. He even tries to level with her, ditching his bullshit king-speak to sit down and ‘get real’ about how he and his Kingdom came to be.
It was a moment so captivating I just couldn’t stop staring at the wig’s hairline on actor Khary Peyton, who plays Ezekiel.
Anyway, Morgan led Carol to some house out in the middle of fucking nowhere. On horseback, just a day or so after she was being pushed around in a wheelchair, so either she’s got amazing healing abilities, or outpatient lawsuits are still a concern inside the walls of The Kingdom.
