Cody looks back on each episode of The Walking Dead season 9.
Season 9, Episode 1: A New Beginning
PLOT: The communities are trying to move on from all-out war, but there are leadership issues to deal with.
REVIEW: With new showrunner Angela Kang at the helm, the ninth season of AMC's The Walking Dead is the show's shot at redemption. A redemption that's going to be hard to achieve, with it set to lose its lead actor / character - Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes - somewhere within the first eight episodes. I wasn't feeling a lot of hope for the show's future after the frustrating disappointment of the eighth season, but I'm open to giving Kang and her crew a chance and would love to see The Walking Dead improve.
The season 9 premiere comes with the promise that it's "a new beginning" for the show, and it even features a literal new beginning, as a new title sequence has been created to reflect the current setting. We're years down the line from the start of the zombie apocalypse, eighteeen months have passed since the season 8 finale, and the characters are now living in a world where buildings and roadways are crumbling, nature is reclaiming property, dark rooms are lit by candlelight, and horses have replaced gas-powered vehicles as the primary mode of transportation. If season 1 was NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, we've now reached the DAY OF THE DEAD stage of the apocalypse - and there's even an homage to that film in this episode. A New Beginning was directed by special effects artist Greg Nicotero, who serves as an executive producer on The Walking Dead and got his film career started by working with George A. Romero and Tom Savini on DAY OF THE DEAD. The influence Romero had on him is evident in a sequence set in what remains of Washington D.C., which is very reminiscent of the first scenes in DAY.
As we catch up with the characters, we find that Alexandria community leader Rick has been living a happy domestic life Michonne (Danai Gurira) and his young daughter, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) has given birth to the child she had been pregnant with for multiple seasons and recently won an election to lead the Hilltop community, Carol (Melissa McBride) is officially in a relationship with Kingdom community leader Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Cyndie (Sydney Park) and the women of Oceanside are part of the community alliance, the Saviors are struggling to carry on without their former leader Negan, and Daryl (Norman Reedus)... well, he's still Daryl, but after growling his way through season 8 he has gone back to being able to speak full, coherent sentences. Which makes sense, because AMC reportedly wants Daryl to take over as the lead on this show in Rick's absence.
After an eventful trip into Washington D.C. to score some old supplies, A New Beginning shifts focus to the drama, and it's all about who leads the communities, who should lead them, and who wants to. It's an odd structure for the episode, because after a first half that's packed with zombie attacks and dangerous scenarios, most notably a scene that involves moving equipment across a cracking glass floor that gives a view of a whole lot of zombies waiting below for someone to go busting through (and someone does), we settle into a second half that's slow and talky. We find out what Daryl thinks about the community alliance and his part in it, we see former Hilltop leader Gregory (Xander Berkeley) scheming against Maggie, and we're introduced to Hilltop resident Tammy Rose, a grieving mother played by Brett Butler, who I grew up seeing on the sitcom Grace Under Fire. Butler is a stand-up comedian, but there's nothing funny about Tammy Rose.
There are some interesting things going on with the characters, but to start out with thrills and then segue into quiet conversation after quiet conversation made the second half of the episode feel like a slog to me. I did appreciate, to some degree, the amount of screen time given to Gregory in the second half, as I have always gotten enjoyment from watching this weasel at work... But his story was really played out at this point, and I think the Gregory situation was resolved in the correct way here.
A New Beginning was a middle-of-the-road, decent episode. I liked the first half, which proved that The Walking Dead can still be somewhat cool when it wants to be, but that second half was a drag that leaves me unable to stir up much enthusiasm for what might be coming next. The structure of this episode was not the best way to go with a season premiere. Front-loading the action was a mistake.
I'm rooting for The Walking Dead to become a show I can get completely wrapped up in again, but it didn't achieve that with this episode.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: A New Beginning contains an image that will be the ultimate nightmare fuel for some viewers: Siddiq (Avi Nash) comes face-to-face with a dried-out zombie that has a stream of spiders crawling out of its eyes, nose, and mouth.
GORY GLORY: There are no "Glenn's head" level gore effects in this season premiere, but some zombies do get their heads damaged - like when Rick and Michonne, riding on horseback, take out a couple of zombies with the use of a sword and a club weapon that looks like Rick's own version of Lucille.
FAVORITE SCENE: Cyndie and Daryl have a brief exchange about being stricken by memories of lost loved ones. Seeing that she's troubled, Daryl asks Cyndie if she's alright, and she replies that she was thinking of a fight she had with her brother. "It's funny, you know? How certain things just bring up random memories like that. Does it happen to you?" He says, "Most of the memories I got of my brother, we're fighting. But I had friends that fought with me. They wanted to be here. They didn't make it. So yeah, it happens to me." A nice, emotional moment, with a bonus Merle reference!
Season 9, Episode 2: The Bridge
PLOT: The communities are united and fixing a bridge together, but there are leadership issues and some former Saviors don't work well with others.
REVIEW: The second episode of The Walking Dead's ninth season was a "patience will be rewarded" kind of episode. Much of its running time was built on dramatic conversations that were logical and (mostly, probably) necessary for the overall story, but that didn't exactly make them fascinating to sit through.
So Michonne (Danai Gurira) is uncomfortable with the way Maggie (Lauren Cohan) handled the Gregory situation at the Hilltop community, I get that. That seems to be building toward the communities establishing some sort of crime and punishment guideline, that makes sense. But I wasn't riveted. Nor was I engrossed or invested in the storyline about Hilltop prisoner Earl (John Finn) and his unclear sentence in his subterranean cell, although Finn did well delivering the material he was tasked with. Do I care about Earl's back story? Not at all, but Finn gave a good performance.
Did I have any interest in watching Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) embark on a romantic relationship with Anne (Pollyanna McIntosh), the character formerly known as Jadis, leader of the Scavengers (a.k.a the Garbage Pail Kids)? None at all. But sure, I'll sit through a couple scenes of this. Besides, it's good to know Anne might finally have a chance to "lay with" someone years after she was rejected by Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln).
I also didn't care about the communities working together to fix a damaged bridge, but sprinkled in those scenes were some interesting references to the fact that some of the remaining Saviors aren't working well with members of the communities they used to be at war with. There were intriguing mentions of Saviors disappearing. And we got to watch the building of contention between Daryl (Norman Reedus) and one Savior in particular, a fellow named Justin (Zach McGowan) who reminded me of other Savior douches like the thankfully deceased Jared.
It was Justin's general worthlessness that finally made the episode become interesting. When he failed to divert a herd of zombies that were approaching the bridge workers, The Bridge reached the point at which it decided to reward us for sitting through all the dull stuff that had come before. The zombie action scene at the work site was worth the wait, providing some excitement and splattered brains. Even once the zombie issue was dealt with, the episode continued to be more interesting, with Daryl doling out a deserved beating and Aaron (Ross Marquand) undergoing an emergency procedure performed by "med student" Enid (Katelyn Nacon)... That was all good stuff.
In the end, The Bridge was merely okay, but I appreciated getting some reward for sitting through so much I didn't care about. The episode also planted seeds that could become storylines I will be very interested in. What's happening to the former Saviors? What is going on with this helicopter that has been flying around the Alexandria area the last couple seasons? Of course, I'm very interested in seeing how the show is going to handle the simultaneous departures of Rick and Maggie. Is that helicopter going to be involved somehow? Is Maggie going to change her mind about accepting an open invitation she apparently has to join helpful traveler / record collector Georgie? I'm eager to find out the answers to these questions.
And I'm curious to see if the officially re-introduced Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) really has reason to still be so cocky while sitting in his cell at Alexandria.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: There was only one option for the best zombie moment in this episode. A zombie herd that was supposed to be diverted instead comes striding right into the middle of a logging operation, causing all sorts of trouble.
GORY GLORY: I thought the best gore was going to be when Rick swings his hatchet into the side of a zombie's head so hard that the sharp edge goes all the way through the skull and sticks into a log on the other side. But then Rick snapped the rope holding a bunch of logs together, sending them rolling over walkers and leaving their heads a smashed mess.
FAVORITE SCENE: The log rolling scene has competition from the final moment involving a Savior being attacked while walking down a lonely country road, because the way that scene was shot reminded me of the way Steve Christy was killed in the original FRIDAY THE 13TH.
Season 9, Episode 3: Warning Signs
PLOT: Communities work together to solve the mystery of the missing and murdered Saviors.
REVIEW: It's going to be such a relief once The Walking Dead can finally, completely move past the "war with the Saviors community" storyline and start focusing on other things. Circumstances with the Saviors have changed drastically by this point on the show, the remaining members of the formerly villainous group now have a tenuous alliance with the other communities, but three episodes into season 9 the tension between the Saviors and the others is still the primary focus. These issues started back in season 6. I'm sick of hearing about the Saviors.
I'd like to think Warning Signs was a big step toward wrapping up this storyline, but it's clear that the Saviors situation and the disagreements people have over how they should be dealt with is going to be milked for at least another episode or two. Which also happens to be how much longer Alexandria community leader Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), the main person pushing the ideas of "peace with the Saviors" and "every life counts", is going to be on the show.
As tired as I am of all this, I did find this to be a somewhat interesting episode, since it was a special murder mystery episode of The Walking Dead. The threat of another All-Out War hung over the characters' heads as Rick and his companions had to work together to solve the case of the missing Saviors, who turn up as zombies sporting wounds that show they were murdered. The last thing I want to sit through is another All-Out War with the Saviors, so I was rooting for the characters to do whatever they needed to do to defuse this situation. It was kind of funny to see The Walking Dead turn into a mystery show for an episode, including a moment where Rick switched back into Officer Friendly mode to interrogate Daryl (Norman Reedus).
Wounds were examined, suspects were named, weapons were looked over. The mystery was solved just in time for the end of the episode, as if this were CSI with zombies... Except the mystery was solved by the exact people you would not want to solve it if you were an abducted and threatened Savior.
That was entertaining, but the mystery that I'm even more intrigued by involved a cryptic walkie talkie exchange referring to people as As and Bs. I'm thinking that has something to do with how Rick is going to make his exit from the show, so I'm looking forward to seeing how that's going to play out.
Mysteries aside, there were some nice character moments with Daryl and Hilltop leader Maggie (Lauren Cohan) as they try to work out how they feel about Rick's approach to dealing with the Saviors. I also liked seeing Rick enjoy a "family fun day" with his girlfriend Michonne (Danai Gurira) and little daughter Judith (Chloe Garcia-Frizzi). The fact that Michonne is taking care of things at Alexandria while Rick focuses on the bridge re-building project the communities are working together on is probably setting her up to become the full-time leader once Rick leaves, but it's surprising to me how little set-up is being done for his departure otherwise. Rick so clearly intends to be around for the long haul, there was even implication that he's interested in having more children with Michonne.
It wouldn't seem so odd to me that they're not setting up his exit if I didn't have a feeling that he's not simply going to be killed off. Maybe he will be, but I'm not sure they should risk upsetting the viewers to that degree at this precarious moment in the show's run. The ratings are already dropping, they don't want more people tuning out because they set up a happy future for Rick and then gave him a tragic death.
There's obviously a bit more fighting over Saviors and their former leader Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) ahead of us, but hopefully other issues will overshadow that.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: Maggie and Oceanside leader Cyndie (Sydney Park) discover a house full of zombies at the place the Oceanside community used to call home.
GORY GLORY: Cyndie is nearly killed by a zombie, but the shot is framed in such a way that you can tell something, like an arrow, is going to come smacking into the zombie's head to save her life. While she waits to be saved, though, she has to try to hold the zombie away from her as its neck skin tears off in her hands.
FAVORITE SCENE: We get to see Rick having a peaceful moment in Alexandria. As he walks out of his house in the morning, he takes a second to place his hand on a decoration hanging on the wall. This decoration is the piece of wood porch his son Carl left his handprint on in paint (along with Judith's handprint) before he died.
Season 9, Episode 4: The Obliged
PLOT: Michonne has a chat with Negan while others argue over his fate.
REVIEW: A couple days ago, I revisited some episodes from early in the third season of AMC's The Walking Dead, and it was fun to go back and see how much of a brooding badass Michonne (Danai Gurira) used to be. These days she's living a happy life with Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), helping him raise his young daughter and becoming a leader at the Alexandria community, helping rebuild structures and civilization. She's still one of the best characters on the show, but seeing how she used to be really made me miss the ass-kicking Michonne of season 3. So while watching the season 9 episode The Obliged, I was glad to find out I wasn't the only one who missed that version of the character. Michonne apparently misses her old self as well. On restless nights, she leaves the bed she shares with Rick, grabs her sword, and goes out to kill every zombie she comes across. That was a fun sequence that got the episode off to a great start.
The rest of the episode didn't live up to that Michonne sequence for me. For the most part, it felt like one of those episodes where the show spins its wheels while building up to something bigger. Its centerpiece was a philosophical discussion between Michonne and imprisoned villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and I can't say that conversation held much interest for me. The hero and the villain debating whether or not they're truly the same deep down inside is something we've seen many times before. But oh my God, Michonne used a baseball bat to kill a zombie earlier, so maybe she really is a female Negan!
The best thing to come out of the Michonne and Negan chat was the final moment, when Negan gets emotional over the idea that his beloved baseball bat Lucille might be lost forever.
Meanwhile, Rick caught word that Hilltop leader Maggie (Lauren Cohan) was out to get some delayed revenge on Negan, and his mission to intercept her was derailed by the fact that he caught a ride with the wrong person - his buddy Daryl (Norman Reedus), who is siding with Maggie on this "Negan needs to die" issue. When Rick and Daryl decide to fight over this disagreement, they tumble into a pit and get stuck in there for most of the episode. Of course they do, because the writers need to kill some time for some reason. So we get Rick and Daryl talking while standing in a hole.
A side plot that momentarily had me very interested was a scene in which Anne (Pollyanna McIntosh), the artist formerly known as Jadis, threatens to feed her almost-love-interest Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) to a zombie. As that rotting flesh-eater got closer and closer to being able to chow down on Gabriel's face, I began to really wish it would. The death of a side character, one I've never connected with all that much, coming out of nowhere might have saved this episode for me... But the episode was not saved. Instead, it fell down further with some of Negan's former followers declaring that the war between communities, the overly drawn-out story that ran this show into the ground last season, is back on. Hopefully this renewed war won't last more than a couple minutes.
Maggie didn't make it to Alexandria in this episode, but there was another hint at how she's going to be leaving the show, as we know Lauren Cohan only has a couple episodes left before she moves on. But first Rick Grimes / Andrew Lincoln is going to be leaving the show. Next week is his final episode, and while he was left in a very bad situation in the final minute of The Obliged, I'm not buying that he's going to get feasted on by zombies because of a skittish horse and some inconveniently placed rebar. That can't be how they're going to finish the story of Rick Grimes.
Before ending up in that bad spot, Rick had to get out of the pit he was sharing with Daryl, and was I imagining an homage that wasn't there or was Daryl's exit from the pit purposely reminiscent of INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE? I hope it was intentional, because if so that would be a bright spot in an episode I found to be pretty dull overall.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: The Father Gabriel scene would have taken the win if the zombie had gotten the chance to snack on him. But since Gabriel got out of that scenario unscathed, the best zombie moment was Michonne's killing spree at the beginning of the episode.
GORY GLORY: There was some nice gore on display while Michonne was slicing up walkers. The first zombies she kills in the episode are having a very messy supper when she finds them, and there was an excellent effect when one of the several zombies she kills gets its head cut in half.
FAVORITE SCENE: Although that last shot of Rick was an epic one, the opening sequence with Michonne pulls off the hat trick this week.
Season 9, Episode 5: What Comes After
PLOT: While Maggie confronts Negan, Rick might have to sacrifice himself to get rid of a huge herd of zombies.
REVIEW: Lori Grimes died while giving birth to baby Judith back in the fourth episode of The Walking Dead's third season, which is something I've been looking back on fondly while watching recent seasons of the show. Not the death itself, but the fact that it happened in a random episode. Recently The Walking Dead has seemed to be afraid of having anything major happen outside of premieres and finales. That changed with the episode What Comes After, which saw the exit of Lori's husband Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln). Rick leaving in a random episode three episodes before season 9's mid-season finale is probably just the result of contract negotiations, I'm sure AMC and the producers would have loved to wait for the mid-season to see him off, but whatever the reason was I'm glad we saw this happen in the fifth episode rather than the eighth. It's good to shake things up. I'd add "when viewers aren't expecting it" to that thought, but these first five episodes have been marketed as Rick Grimes' last episodes, so this was very expected.
Expected or not, the loss of Rick is an event that shakes things up so much, it could lead to a lot more viewers giving up on a show that has already been losing viewers steadily for the last couple seasons... But that's a concern for a later date. The idea that The Walking Dead can continue on without the character we followed into this world is a strange one, but if the show had to lose Rick, I'm satisfied with the way it went down. The way Rick left had been set up so well over the previous four episodes, it was predictable by the time it happened. With the glimpses those episodes were giving us into his homelife, to kill him off would have been cruelty on a level the show wouldn't dare go to after the backlash to the death of Glenn Rhee. Rick had to survive, but how could he survive but not be around on the show? Of course, the helicopter Anna, a.k.a. Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh), has been in contact with. So Rick is taken away in the helicopter, off of the show. As it turns out, he's going to the same place Heath disappeared to.
Before we got to that point, though, most of the episode was spent on a wounded Rick having hallucinations while trying to lead a massive herd of zombies away from his people. One of my least favorite episodes in The Walking Dead history is What Happened and What's Going On, the season five mid-season premiere that had a wounded Tyreese hallucinating while succumbing to a zombie bite. That's one of director / executive producer / special effects artist Greg Nicotero's favorite episodes, so when I saw that he was going to be directing a hallucination-filled last episode for Rick as well, I was bracing to dislike What Comes After. Nicotero has directed some of the best episodes of the show, but hallucination episodes aren't for me. Rick's drifting in and out of consciousness did start to annoy me toward the end, but the hallucinations here weren't too bad, even if I had next to zero interest in the content of the dialogue spoken in them.
It was nice to see the actors who returned to reprise the roles of long lost characters in the hallucinations. The scene with Hershel Green (Scott Wilson) was especially powerful, because not only is Hershel gone, so is Wilson. He passed away just last month, and it was touching to have this final goodbye to him. I'm not really sure why Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green), of all characters, appeared to Rick, but it definitely made sense to have him chat with Shane (Jon Bernthal), and the content of that scene actually was interesting to me. It was awesome to see Rick and Shane talk again, joking about the fact that Shane is Judith's biological father. I hated Shane when he was alive on the show, and yet I still miss Bernthal's presence on it.
Also nice was the shot of a mailbox with the name Cardille on it, a nod to both Pittsburgh area horror host "Chilly Billy" Cardille, who had a role in George A. Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and his daughter Lori Cardille, who starred in DAY OF THE DEAD.
Rick and his ordeal dominated the episode, but we also saw the resolution of the mission to kill Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) that Hershel's daughter Maggie (Lauren Cohan) has been on. That storyline went out with a whimper, literally, and it allowed Morgan and Cohan to do some strong dramatic work. I'm not sure if Maggie will be back in the next episode, but it has been said that Cohan would be in six episodes this season, so either the count was wrong or she has one more appearance coming up. I'm guessing she'll be leaving Hilltop, though. She has other things to do now that she can feel content with Negan's imprisonment.
We knew to expect Rick's exit and I guessed the basics of how it was going to happen, so the true surprise of the episode was, fittingly enough, what came after. The last scene of this episode totally blindsided me. I was not expecting another substantial time jump this season, and the show just leapt ahead much further than the 18 months we already got between the season eight finale and season nine premiere. Something like six years have passed, and it will be interesting to see what the world of The Walking Dead is going to be like in the next episode, since structures were already collapsing and gas tanks were running dry in these first five episodes.
It seems odd that there would still be so many zombies around nearly ten years into the apocalypse, but okay, I'll go along with it. If the next episode were taking place the day after Rick left, I'd be shrugging about it, but by throwing this time jump at us showrunner Angela Kang has me intrigued and hooked to see what happens next.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: The herd of zombies continuing forward over the blown-up bridge, catching on fire before plunging into the river below, was an awesome visual.
GORY GLORY: There was some head bashing, but none of it stood out as something exceptional to me. Rick spent the whole episode bleeding, so I guess Rick's blood was the gory glory.
FAVORITE SCENE: Shane giving Rick a pep talk, encouraging him to tap into the feelings of rage and hatred to survive, almost took this honor, but then the late Scott Wilson appeared on the screen as Hershel.
Season 9, Episode 6: Who Are You Now?
PLOT: Six years after the previous episode, the people of Alexandria have to decide whether or not to accept a new group of survivors into their community.
REVIEW: Just when I was wondering how AMC's The Walking Dead could continue, and if it should, without the presence of Rick Grimes, the man we followed into this world eight years ago, last week's episode threw me for a loop by including an epilogue that moved the show's timeline forward six years. The story wasn't going to continue the day after Rick "died",it's now going to show us a world that has changed while Rick has been gone. They held my interest and attention with that move, I had to see how this was going to play out.
One episode later, I'm not feeling blown away by our first glimpse into a world six years removed from Rick Grimes. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose. There are some new structures around, like windmills and Old West style buildings, and some characters have different relationships than they had before - Carol (Melissa McBride) and King Ezekiel (Khary Payton) are now married, and I never would have predicted that Rosita (Christian Serratos) and Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) would hook up. That's two love interests for him over the course of just six episodes! Still, the most notable change as far as I'm concerned was all the new hairstyles. Eugene (Josh McDermitt) has grown his mullet out into a ponytail, Carol is wearing a long white wig, Michonne (Danai Gurira) has a cool cut that doesn't seem practical in a land infested by zombies, having the sight of one eye obscured by hair.
Of course, another major change is that Judith Grimes (Cailey Fleming) is now 10 years old and an active character on the show, having grown up to be the Little Ass Kicker that Daryl (Norman Reedus) once predicted she would be. She's a fun, precocious kid who has an entertaining scene with incarcerated villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and is, like her older brother Carl in his final days, dedicated to helping people. That's how we get the main focus of this episode, the introduction of the new group of characters Judith has brought to Alexandria and the town's decision whether or not to let them stay in Alexandria. The council that will decide their living situation includes Michonne, who is very clearly against the idea of letting them move in; Gabriel; Dr. Siddiq (Avi Nash); Aaron (Ross Marquand), now sporting a prosthetic hand similar to the one Ash wore in ARMY OF DARKNESS; and, most surprising of all, former Savior Laura (Lindsley Register), who isn't given much to do but is recognizable by her neck tattoo.
I was very curious to learn more about this group of outsiders, as I expect they'll be playing a prominent role throughout the rest of the season, especially since they're all characters from the comic book source material. I don't read the comic book, so I have no preconceived notions of who these people are, all I'll know of them is what the TV series shows us. The most promising of the bunch to me is Luke, partly because he seems like a good guy, and mainly because he's played by Dan Fogler, who is awesome. I would like to see Fogler remain on this show for a long time. Also intriguing are the sister pair of Connie (Lauren Ridloff), who is deaf and only communicates through sign language, and Kelly (Angel Theory). I understand that Kelly is a male in the comic book and actually Connie's boyfriend, but this sister duo works for me, and we have plenty of love stories going on here already. Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura) has been sidelined with an injury, we'll have to find out more about her later, but the leader of the pack of Nadia Hilker as Magna, apparently a badass with a troubled past. I have to admit, I wasn't too impressed by Magna in this episode, as it just came off like she was doing a lot of posing and posturing. The only thing I liked about her was one line delivery, when she hissed out a "Yes" in response to something during the council meeting.
It would have been a drawback if the time jump had been used as an excuse to not have to deal with the loss of Rick, but that was, thankfully, not the case. His absence still clearly tears Michonne up daily, as we see her talking out loud to his memory on more than one occasion in the episode. While I'm on board to check out the trilogy of TV movies they plan to make about Rick's experiences while he's away from Alexandria, it's really tough to know that his friends and family have been hurting so much while he's been away for six years (and beyond) doing whatever it is he does out there.
My greatest hope for the time jump was that it would finally get us far past the whole "can the Saviors be good or not?" issue. The presence of Laura on the Alexandria council was a positive sign in that regard, but then this episode had me groaning when they through more villainous Saviors into the mix with a group that menaces Carol and her adopted son Henry (Matt Lintz, brother of Madison Lintz, who played Carol's daughter Sophia during the first two seasons). For a moment I thought I had figured out why they would bother to do this. Some new villains are about to be brought onto the show, and I thought they had decided to save one last group of bad Saviors so we could see them get destroyed by the new villains. A way of saying, "If you thought the Saviors were bad, you haven't seen anything yet."
But sure, okay, they can be used as a way to show that Carol is still tough and not be trifled with even when she's married and rocking the old lady hair. I could have done without the CG fire effects that came with that revelation, but it was hardcore nonetheless.
Who Are You Now? wasn't a great episode, and yet The Walking Dead always finds ways to keep me holding on to hope and wanting to see more. We're only just getting started with the new characters, and I'm looking forward to spending more time with them. We're also about to meet the new villains, the build-up to their reveal begins in the final moments of this episode as Rosita and Eugene try to escape a herd of zombies, and I'm anticipating seeing them in action, as I've heard good things about them from readers of the comic book.
So this was a stepping stone episode, a chance to settle down a bit after the exit of Rick (and, to less fanfare, Maggie) last week. I'm ready to see what comes after.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: That moment at the end when the zombies seem to be talking to each other is the one that's going to get viewers stirred up, but my favorite zombie moment came at the beginning, when a bird plucks a worm off a zombie that has been rotting for a long time.
GORY GLORY: The fire scene didn't get gory, so there wasn't much other than zombies taking it in the head like always.
FAVORITE SCENE: Judith and Negan discuss math, airplanes, and whether or not "strays" should be trusted.
Season 9, Episode 7: Stradivarius
PLOT: Michonne leads her new acquaintances to Hilltop while Carol reconnects with Daryl and Rosita runs for her life.
REVIEW: The Stradivarius episode of AMC's The Walking Dead marked the return of actor Michael Cudlitz to the series. Cudlitz used to play the character Abraham Ford on the show, making his first appearance near the end of season 4 and then making his exit back in the harrowing premiere episode of season 7. In a better world, Abraham would have been the Walking Dead character who moved over into the show's companion series Fear the Walking Dead instead of the weirdness they pulled with Morgan, but Abraham is gone - and even now that Cudlitz has worked on another episode, it wasn't in an acting capacity. Instead, he was behind the camera, as Stradivarius was his directorial debut. He did a good job with it, throwing in some interesting shots, and the script written by Vivian Tse gave him a chance to direct action, emotional scenes, humorous moments, and pure horror.
Stradivarius caused me to think of the days when The Walking Dead would only focus on one character or pairing of characters in each episode. That was always a bad idea, as it caused storylines to be stretched out beyond reason, and an episode like this really casts a negative light on those past episodes, showing how much better the show can be when it's juggling multiple stories at once. This one had a lot going on: Rosita (Christian Serratos) was running for her life from those strange whispering zombies glimpsed in the previous episode, Carol (Melissa McBride) visited an isolated Daryl (Norman Reedus) while on the road with her adopted son Henry (Matt Lintz), and Michonne (Danai Gurira) was leading the recently introduced new group of survivors to what will be their new home at the Hilltop community, which is now being led by a reluctant and overwhelmed Jesus (Tom Payne), who sneaks off to have Cato and Clouseau sparring sessions with his martial arts protégé Aaron (Ross Marquand). At one point, these little stories would have provided three or four episodes worth of material, but this episode was much more interesting for having it all packed into one 40-something minute running time.
The most interesting section of it all for me was the journey Michonne goes on with the newbies, accompanied by trusted companions Siddiq (Avi Nash) and DJ (Matt Mangum), a character who used to be part of the villainous Savior community but sometime during the recent six year time jump became Michonne's right hand man. I'm intrigued to hear stories of what happened in those six years, as the writers and producers are having fun teasing viewers with vague hints at events we haven't witnessed or been told about. A X-shaped scar on Michonne's back is a wound that happened during that lost time, as are scars seen on Daryl, and something also happened between Michonne and former Hilltop leader Maggie that has her trying to avoid the woman, not knowing she isn't living at Hilltop anymore. One of these characters needs to catch us up on what we missed.
Even more clueless about events and characters than viewers are the aforementioned newbies; sisters Connie (Lauren Ridloff) and Kelly (Angel Theory), music enthusiast Luke (Dan Fogler), brooding Magna (Nadia Hilker), and Magna's girlfriend Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), who is more willing to play by Michonne's rules while Magna just oozes attitude. This Magna character is being hyped as a new fan favorite in the making by the folks behind the show, they say we're going to love her, but she's not winning me over so far. I haven't been able to connect with her yet, and have actually found Hilker's performance to be off-putting in these first couple episodes.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Luke, as Fogler won me over the moment he stepped on screen. He's always a fun presence in a cast and a welcome new addition to the show, even if Luke's monologue about how music sets us apart from the animals and Neanderthals felt like a revision of the character Jim going on about the importance of beer in the fourth season of Fear the Walking Dead.
We find that Daryl has taken to living in the wilderness after an unsuccessful search for the corpse of Rick Grimes, which seems fitting for him. The six year time jump is mainly shown on characters through the fact that they have different hairstyles now than they had on episode 5 before the jump, and Daryl was given longer hair that didn't survive this episode. It was amusing to me that Carol gave him a hair trim that only took him right back to episode 5 length.
The best thing about Daryl's new situation is that he now has a dog named Dog, and this dog better not just be around so it can be given a tragic moment like the tiger Shiva. They're already using this dog to manipulate our emotions, and I don't want to see too much of that.
I was expecting to see more of the whispering zombies in Stradivarius, I'm anxious to see more of them, but there were plenty of regular zombies around to make up for the episode not advancing that idea. It was eventful and held my attention even without whisperers. I'm sure we're going to be seeing a lot of them soon enough anyway - but hopefully not too much of them, like what happened with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and the Saviors.
Earth-shattering Stradivarius wasn't, but it moved things forward and was a fine episode. Cudlitz is certainly welcome back anytime.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: There was a good amount of zombie action on display in Stradivarius, but I would say the best moment was an intense scene involving Daryl, Henry, and Daryl's dog... And yes, it did earn some of its intensity by putting poor Dog in danger. Daryl had to deal with a bunch of zombies to get Dog out of a bad situation, while ordering Henry not to help him.
GORY GLORY: Both contenders for this honor in tonight's episode involved feet. I thought the winner was going to be the moment when Connie smashed a zombie head under her shoe, but then later in the episode we got a wonderfully gross moment where a zombie tears off its own foot to get out of a trap set by Daryl.
FAVORITE SCENE: The group of newbies proved to be trustworthy when they were given their weapons back and jumped into action to take on a herd of zombies alongside Michonne and her pals.
Season 9, Episode 8: Evolution
PLOT: While various characters settle in at Hilltop and Negan finds hope at Alexandria, Daryl, Aaron, and Jesus observe strange behavior among a herd of zombies while searching for the missing Eugene.
REVIEW: For the first time in a long time, AMC's The Walking Dead legitimately had me creeped out while watching an episode, although I will admit that the uneasy feeling I had while watching the season 9 midseason finale Evolution was largely due to the fact that I already knew the SPOILER of what was going on with the herd of zombies Daryl (Norman Reedus), Aaron (Ross Marquand), and Jesus (Tom Payne) observe moving through the countryside in an unusual way and steadily growing in number. Although I haven't read the comic book source material, I knew why Eugene (Josh McDermitt) and Rosita (Christian Serratos) had heard the sound of whispering coming from that herd... And I'm glad I knew that, because I'm not sure I would have been feeling very positive about the situation if I really thought the zombies on this show were evolving to the point that they were starting to talk.
But before delving into the whispers among the dead, I'll get the less cool stuff out of the way first. While Evolution gradually built up to the climactic zombie action, we got some character work at the Hilltop community, as Michonne (Danai Gurira) delivered the new group of survivors we recently met to their potential new home at Hilltop.. and she continued to talk very cryptically about events that occurred during the six years between episode 5 and episode 6 this season, events that pushed communities apart. I guess we'll know what she's talking about someday, but for now this teasing stuff is kind of irritating.
There was also a portion of this episode that was dedicated to a character I do not care about at all, Henry (Matt Lintz), the adopted son of Carol (Melissa McBride) and Kingdom community leader Ezekiel (Khary Payton). The show obviously has to spend some time building Henry up, because storylines that involved Carl Grimes in the comic book are now going to be falling on his shoulders since the previous showrunner made the regrettable decision to kill Carl off last season. But I'm not caring about this kid so far. Henry is at Hilltop studying to be a blacksmith now, and the only thing I found interesting about that situation was when Henry witnessed blacksmith Alden (Callan McAuliffe) kissing doctor Enid (Katelyn Nacon).
I was surprised by that sight myself, because when Alden was introduced on the show last season I thought he was meant to become a love interest for former Hilltop leader Maggie. He had to look for love elsewhere now that Maggie has moved on, though, and I never would have guessed he would find it with Enid. I was actually kind of grossed out by their kiss, it seemed inappropriate for a moment because McAuliffe comes off as being older than his years and I still think of Enid as a little kid. McAuliffe and Nacon are actually not far off from each other in age.
After being disappointed to find out that Enid isn't available, Henry falls in with a trio of Hilltop teenagers, and I didn't trust these kids for a second. I found them to be almost as creepy as the walkers in this episode, because I had a feeling they were up to no good. They did indeed turn out to be a collection of shitheads, and I don't think Henry is going to be hanging out with them anymore. I liked his reaction to the secret they shared with him, that was a positive moment for the character.
Back in Michonne's home of Alexandria, there was an unexpected turn of events with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) - at least, I didn't expect that turn of events to happen quite so soon. What happens with the character in this episode could open the door to some interesting stuff down the line, but there's a chance it could lead to some annoying stuff. I've had more than my fill of watching Negan play villain on this show, so they need to do something different with him now that he has spent six years locked up in a cell.
Now the really good parts of Evolution. The reward for sitting through the Hilltop and Alexandria scenes. I thought the situation with the roaming herd of zombies was masterfully handled, from the opening moment with Daryl, Aaron, and Jesus noting from afar that they were moving around in an unusual way. The building dread as the trio realized the herd was doing more unusual things, getting ahead of them in the countryside. The fear exhibited by Rosita at Hilltop when she finds out Daryl, Aaron, and Jesus are out there dealing with the herd while searching for the missing and injured Eugene. "They have no idea what they're dealing with!" The information delivered by the terrified Eugene when the guys locate him, that the zombies have been circling through the area, actually searching for him.
Eugene presents the theory that the zombies are evolving. Again, if I actually thought the living dead on this show were going to gain the ability to speak, I probably would have been thinking this episode was ridiculous. But I knew that SPOILER. I knew there were people wearing zombie skin moving among that herd, leading it. Directing the zombies in the way they wanted them to go. That's an even creepier idea to me than the idea of zombies on their own, and it gets me wondering what sort of people these Whisperers are. I know of them, but I don't know what they're like in the comics, and right now I can understand why people would disguise themselves as the dead to move unharmed among the herds, the main characters on both The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead have done that before, but I can't understand why they would be such douchebags that they would purposely lead the zombies to kill other people. Why are the Whisperers are so determined to kill Eugene and his companions? I look forward to finding out why they do what they do.
As the herd grows and relentlessly pursues Daryl, Aaron, Jesus, and Eugene, night falls and thick fog rolls in, bringing us to an awesome climactic sequence set in a fog-enshrouded cemetery. For me, this felt like one of the highlight sequences of the entire series, something that's going to be a positive memory as fans reflect on The Walking Dead down the line. The cemetery fight and the reveal of the Whisperers.
With this episode, we say goodbye to a character who has been around for a few seasons, but that character goes out with their all-time greatest scene. Aaron and Jesus fighting zombies in the fog with their martial arts skills provided some great visuals, and while I was enjoying the action the dread was also continuing to build, as I knew one of these zombies they were fighting was eventually going to reveal itself to be more than just a zombie. When that did happen, it was a hell of a moment.
There was plenty in Evolution that I didn't care about, but there was enough badass stuff in there involving the zombies and the Whisperers that I was left feeling more entertained by The Walking Dead and more enthusiastic about what I had just seen than I have been in many episodes.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: The zombies and the Whisperers closing in on Eugene, Aaron, and Jesus in the foggy cemetery is one of the best zombie moments in the history of the show, as far as I'm concerned.
GORY GLORY: A good number of zombies are dispatched with slashes and stabs in the final moments of this episode, but the best bit of gore comes when Jesus smashes a zombie's head into a headstone with his boot.
FAVORITE SCENE: That cemetery fight scene leading up to the Whisperers making their presence known.
Season 9, Episode 9: Adaptation
PLOT: While the communities seek to learn more about the Whisperers, Negan finds that the Sanctuary isn't what it used to be.
REVIEW: Who would have thought that the way to make the zombies on AMC's The Walking Dead scary was to drop humans in among the herds? Well, apparently The Walking Dead comic book creator Robert Kirkman thought that, since he wrote about this stuff in the source material, but it wouldn't have crossed my mind. We have been told again and again that other people are a bigger threat than the flesh-eating living dead in a zombie outbreak scenario, but I never considered that people might someday be disguising themselves as zombies to attack other humans. What sort of maniacs would do that?
Those maniacs are called The Whisperers, and it looks like we're going to be learning a lot about them in the second half of The Walking Dead season 9. This group, wearing zombie faces as masks and walking among the dead, revealed themselves in the midseason finale, and this midseason premiere picks up right where the previous episode left off, with several characters still standing in a fog-enshrouded cemetery as zombies and Whisperers advance toward them. Jesus (Tom Payne) is dead on the ground, blood still running from the wound that killed him.
If you like zombie slashing and bashing (and who doesn't?), this episode delivers a good amount of it. You get a bit of action right up front in the cemetery, then as Michonne (Danai Gurira), Daryl (Norman Reedus), Aaron (Ross Marquand), Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), and Magna (Nadia Hilker) make their way back to Hilltop they're confronted by more zombies and Whisperers - and during this confrontation they reveal a way of weeding out Whisperers that is both ingenious and amusing.
Later Luke (Dan Fogler) and Alden (Callan McAuliffe) will be running into zombies while on a poorly timed search for their pals, and we get former villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) - who has just escaped from Alexandria after spending seven years in a jail cell - returning to smashing heads as he takes a stroll back to his former home, the Sanctuary, and has to protect himself from the dead as he goes.
Now every time a character faces off with a group of zombies I'm on edge, just waiting for one of the walkers to reveal themselves to be a Whisperer, to dodge a head strike or pull out a weapon and start running. And every time one of the Whisperers does something like this, or even reaches out to unlatch a gate for their zombie pals, I get freaked out by them.
Still, I was wishing very hard that one of the zombies Negan comes across would turn out to be a Whisperer, just so I could see those worlds collide.
There's quite a bit of action in Adaptation, but it slows down for a stretch for some more soap opera-esque moments. We have Negan sadly realizing that the Sanctuary isn't what is used to be, young Kingdom "prince" Henry (Matt Lintz) wondering what his place is now that he has moved to Hilltop, and - most soap opera of all, I found this part to be pretty funny - the development of a complicated love square between Eugene, Rosita (Christian Serratos), Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam), and Doctor Siddiq (Avi Nash). There are also a couple adorable scenes in the episode, courtesy of "little ass-kicker" Judith Grimes (Cailey Fleming).
Cassady McClincy plays a new addition to the cast in this episode, and her character is not off to a great start with me. McClincy's performance is good, but the character is proving to be quite annoying and frustrating at this point. I know she has a journey to make on this show, though, and I look forward to seeing how that's going to play out.
Adaptation is a mixture of the interesting and the bland, but the positive outweighs the dull overall. This was a solid episode, and indicates that The Walking Dead is on track to be a better show than it has been in a while.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: Daryl demonstrates the perfect way to figure out whether the "zombie" shambling toward you is actually a living dead creature or just a person in disguise.
GORY GLORY: During his travels, Negan finds a severely burned zombie in the bed of a burnt out pickup truck. This zombie's legs became fused to the truck in the fire, so it has to tear itself in half to go after Negan. That was pretty gross, and the effect is followed up by a nice decapitation.
FAVORITE SCENE: Daryl reveals to some zombies that there's a Whisperer in their group. This was a delightful moment, because I'm already hating these Whisperers and wanting to see them get destroyed.
Season 9, Episode 10: Omega
PLOT: The Whisperers move in on Hilltop while the leader's daughter gives information on her history.
REVIEW: Omega is an episode of AMC's The Walking Dead that I didn't expect to get any time soon, if ever. It's basically an origin story for the new villain, Alpha (Samantha Morton), the leader of the group called The Whisperers that go around wearing masks of zombie flesh and prending to be zombies themselves. This is a character we haven't even been properly introduced to yet; she only showed up to speak one line while capturing Luke (Dan Fogler) and Alden (Callan McAuliffe) at the end of the previous episode. So we're getting a glimpse of her back story before we even get to know her in present day, which is something this show has never done for a "big bad" before.
This was a strange but interesting way to tell an origin story, because the person telling it - Alpha's daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy) - gets details mixed up along the way, giving Alpha credit for things Lydia's dad Frank (Steve Kazee) did, saying Frank did things Alpha actually did. Did her mom used to sing to her when she was little, or did her dad? Did her dad cut his beard once the zombie apocalypse began, or did her mom cut her hair? Some viewers could have been as confused by her jumbled up memories as Lydia was, and I'm not even 100% sure I got all the facts straight... But I'm going with the idea that the zombie outbreak that happened in the safe haven Lydia and her family were hiding in was indeed caused by the dead body Alpha left lying around after she killed a guy while trying to shut him up. And that happened because it was at the point in the timeline before people realized that anyone who died would become a zombie, they didn't have to be bitten. I was shocked to find that characters in The Walking Dead stayed clueless to that fact for so long, since that's information given within the first night of the outbreak in the movie that started all this stuff, George A. Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. If these people don't know that any dead person is a danger, they deserve to get munched.
The majority of Omega involved Lydia sitting in her cell at Hilltop, giving out details on her history to Daryl (Norman Reedus) and fellow jailbird Henry (Matt Lintz). This could have been quite dull, but the episode managed to hold my attention and McClincy really impressed me with her performance. I thought it was a clever touch that all three of these characters have either suffered abuse or are close to someone who did. Henry mentioning that his adoptive mother Carol (Melissa McBride) used to cut her hair short because she had an abusive husband but has now grown it out because she finally feels safe was nice. It was also nice that the show tapped into Daryl's back story of being abused - we saw long ago that he sports scars on his back from the beatings his father used to dole out - as a way to get him to connect with Lydia.
Daryl is a deeper character than he often appears to be, and Reedus always does great work when he's given more to do than just growl his way through scenes, when he's able to show Daryl's emotional side.
The few scenes of side plot in here involve the search for Luke and Alden, and my favorite thing about those scenes was how we got to see Tara (Alanna Masterson) taking her wobbly steps into becoming the leader of the Hilltop. Tara gets bashed a lot, but I'm a fan of the character and like to see her evolving.
Omega could be called a filler episode, since it ends with a moment I had thought would arrive much earlier in the running time, but in the end I think there was enough drama and character work to make it worth being part of the season. It wasn't just another example of the show spinning its wheels, something it has done quite often in the past.
The episode also earns some bonus points with the song that was sung to Lydia when she was a child. That's "Lydia the Tattooed Lady", first heard in the 1939 Marx brothers movie AT THE CIRCUS. Morton and Kazee both sang it in Omega, but neither could live up to Groucho's performance.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: The zombie attacking the people who hadn't seen NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was a good one, but a zombie scene earlier in the episode had more action, with zombies taking knives, arrows, spears, and slingshot ammo to the head. I liked Tara doing a checklist to make sure a zombie wasn't a Whisperer before trying to take it down, "Funky walk, check. No weapons, check. Okay."
GORY GLORY: Those early-in-the-episode zombies are seen munching on some horse guts.
FAVORITE SCENE: Lydia finds some worms to eat while taking a night walk with Henry. When your significant other sucks the dirt off a worm snack before passing it over to you, you know they're a keeper.
Season 9, Episode 11: Bounty
PLOT: King Ezekiel goes on a mission to revive cinema while the Whisperers try to negotiate a captive exchange at Hilltop.
REVIEW: Any viewers who skipped airings of AMC's The Walking Dead tonight in favor of watching the live broadcast of the Academy Awards missed less than I thought they might. While Bounty does feature the first tense face-to-face with new villain Alpha (Samantha Morton), leader of the "Whisperers" group that likes to walk among the dead wearing masks of zombie flesh, the interaction between her and representatives of the Hilltop community did not go as far, and didn't get as heated, as I was hoping.
Maybe I was disappointed by the interaction because I'm still feeling burnt out by the over-extended "all-out war" that was fought between the communities and the Saviors run by Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). I watch Alpha facing off with the Hilltop folks and Daryl (Norman Reedus) and I just feel tired of this villainous community leader stuff. I think, "I can't believe we're going through this again so soon after Negan." The characters have had a seven and a half year break since Negan was strutting around making threats, we've only had a handful of episodes. In concept the Whisperers are awesome and creepy, so as great as Samantha Morton is, and as fun as it is to watch her eyebrows dance around as she plays Alpha, I think I'm going to need her to stop talking and put the mask back on so I can really enjoy their presence.
The Hilltop has Alpha's daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy) in their custody, the Whisperers have Hilltop residents Alden (Callan McAuliffe) and Luke (Dan Fogler). Although Alpha takes a very cold approach to her people, even ordering one female Whisperer to abandon her baby in a field as zombies approach because the infant is making too much noise, something within her has made her break her own code of conduct and go after her daughter, offering a trade of captives. Daryl isn't very receptive to this trade offer, since he knows Alpha beats Lydia, much like his own father used to beat him. That's a great set-up for emotional interactions between these characters, but they're still holding back in Bounty.
I also felt that the stand-off scenes were weakened by the amount of cut-aways to the B plot, which involves King Ezekiel (Khary Payton) leading Kingdom residents on a mission to acquire a projector bulb from a movie theatre full of zombies. As Ezekiel says, the bulb isn't something they "absolutely need", and I wasn't convinced this mission was something we absolutely needed to see right now. Every time we bounced over to the theatre, it deflated the tension of the Hilltop scenes. Ezekiel gives a nice speech about "bringing cinema back from the dead" and I would have been fine with seeing this mission in most other episodes... but it didn't seem right to pair it with the situation at Hilltop.
This cinema mission did have fun and action in it, though. One of the bright spots was when the Kingdom bunch uses a boombox playing a tape labeled "Mission Mix" to draw the attention of the zombies away from them - and there's a shot of Jerry (Cooper Andrews) lip syncing to the music. Jerry got a good amount of screen time in this episode, which makes me very concerned that they're starting to build him up toward a tragic end. I know this fair the Kingdom is planning is not going to go well.
Some of Jerry's screen time comes in an opening flashback, where he tells Ezekiel that his wife is pregnant. In present day, we find that Jerry has three kids, so we know this flashback occurs several years ago, sometime during the six year jump between episode 5 and episode 6 this season. It occurs at a time when the communities are not very happy with each other for reasons that have yet to be explained, so it really just serves to tease us over the fact that there are story details being kept secret. And to give us one more scene with Jesus (Tom Payne).
There was one sequence in Bounty that I thought was truly great. It involves that baby the Whisperer sets down in the field. The baby is rescued by Luke's friend Connie (Lauren Ridloff), who runs off into a cornfield with both zombies and Whisperers coming after her. That would be a troubling situation for anyone to be in, but it's even more frightening that Connie is the one enduring it because she's deaf. We experience this sequence through Connie's perspective; the sound drops out as she moves through the cornfield, zombies lunging out at her from behind the stalks. This scene is the biggest thing anyone who watched the Oscars missed out on.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: There were a lot of zombie moments to choose from in this episode, King Ezekiel and his pals take down a whole bunch of them at the theatre, but the "Connie in the cornfield" sequence is the winner.
GORY GLORY: A zombie scalps itself while crawling through an old popcorn machine to get to the Kingdom group.
FAVORITE SCENE: If Jerry hadn't won my heart a long time ago, he would have in this episode when he pronounced the word "fragile" just like the dad in A CHRISTMAS STORY does. Just like I do every time I see the word "fragile"... My favorite scene is, of course, the one where Connie escapes through the cornfield with the baby, I just wanted to give a nod to that Jerry moment.
Season 9, Episode 12: Guardians
PLOT: Daryl and Connie track Henry while leaders are questioned at both Alexandria and the Whisperer camp.
REVIEW: Actor Ryan Hurst is well known for playing a character called Opie on Sons of Anarchy, which is a series I have never watched. I did watch Bates Motel, though, and when Hurst appeared on that show as Chick Hogan he quickly became one of my favorite things about it. So I was looking forward to this episode of The Walking Dead, which marks Hurst's first appearance as Beta, a member of the Whisperers group that loves to wear masks of zombie flesh. His introduction did not disappoint, as Beta came off as a hulking beast of a man whose size and loyalty to his leader Alpha (Samantha Morton) should make him a great threat to the heroes of this show.
I was a bit put off by the previous episode because the scenes of Alpha standing at the gate of the Hilltop community and talking about whether or not there will be conflict between the groups gave me unwelcome flashbacks to the days of Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) lording over everybody. I was much more on board with this episode, which gave us a look inside the Whisperer camp as Alpha brings her daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy) back into the group... and finds that Lydia's normal (i.e. not a Whisperer) love interest Henry (Matt Lintz) has followed them from Hilltop.
Alpha also had to fend off one of the most pathetic attempted coups of all time in this episode, a scene which served to confirm things we already knew - Alpha isn't someone to mess with, and she has no problem with killing people - and was a showcase for a nice gore effect.
She wasn't the only one being questioned in this episode, as Michonne (Danai Gurira) also had to butt heads with several people at the shut-off Alexandria community. At this point it's getting a bit annoying that the show is holding back information from us that would explain why Michonne is so troubled by the idea of the communities working together. We need to be told what happened in the six years since Rick Grimes disappeared so we can understand why Michonne has become a pain in the ass... but at the same time, it's going to be tough to find a place for that info dump where it won't be too much of a distraction from the interesting stuff that's going on with the Whisperers.
There is less interesting stuff to be found even within Guardians, though. Namely the continuation of the extremely soap opera-esque storyline going on with Rosita (Christian Serratos), Eugene (Josh McDermitt) and his unrequited crush on her, her current lover Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam), and Doctor Siddiq (Avi Nash), the father of the child she's now carrying. Do I care whether or not Gabriel is going to stick with Rosita after finding out she's carrying another man's child? I can't say I do. At all.
A relationship I'm more intrigued by is the bond that's forming between Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Connie (Lauren Ridloff) as they track Henry to the Whisperer camp. When we heard that Rick Grimes was being written off the show, the news was accompanied by reports that the focus was going to shift over to Daryl, and I wasn't quite sure how that was going to work. He's a character who stays off to the side, he's not a community leader type... But if the last few episodes are any indication, this show is going to work just fine with Reedus in the lead. The stuff with Daryl dealing with the Whisperer issue and digging into the relationship between Alpha and Lydia has been great. He's not leading any community, but he is taking charge in this confrontation.
There has been speculation that Daryl and Connie are going to become an item, and after seeing him compliment her slingshot skills ("Nice."), I can buy that it's actually going to happen. Nine seasons in, Daryl might indulge in some romance. With a potential love interest and a dog who retrieves his arrows for him, it looks like Daryl's getting a good life set up, even if the arrow retrievals aren't always 100% successful. Soon he might even be showering.
Everything at Alexandria in this episode - Michonne arguing with people, the baby drama - earns a shrug from me, but the scenes at the Whisperer camp and with Daryl and Connie out in the wild had me captivated. The preview for next week's episode promises more Daryl vs. Whisperer action, and I'm looking forward to it.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: In the final moments of the episode, Daryl and Connie use the Whisperers' own tactics against them. I only wish we had seen more of them working to pull this off.
GORY GLORY: There are two major contenders for this category this week. The episode did feature an excellent human decapitation, but I think I have to give the top honor to the moment in which we see Beta peeling the flesh off a zombie's head. That was awesomely gross.
FAVORITE SCENE: A walk in the woods with Daryl, Connie, and Dog.
Season 9, Episode 13: Chokepoint
PLOT: Daryl battles Beta and the Whisperers while the Kingdom deals with a new group of survivors.
REVIEW: After The Walking Dead season 9's mid-season finale aired back in November, a trailer was released for the rest of the season, and three and a half months later it turns out that tonight's episode contained two of the most intriguing moments from that trailer: the fight between Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Beta (Ryan Hurst), the hulking second-in-command of the Whisperers group, and the shot of a mysterious Angus Sampson wearing a cowboy get-up and walking through the Kingdom.
I was interested to see who Sampson would be playing on the show, but the introduction to his character had me cringing. Sampson's character Ozzy is the leader of a group called the Highwaymen, who make their presence known by informing the Kingdom that they have taken control of the roads around their community and will be charging visitors to their upcoming fair a toll to get by. It seemed like an odd time to bring a new antagonistic group onto the show when we're in the middle of dealing with the Whisperers, and honestly I'd be just be fine if The Walking Dead never again shows us another douchebag group that has picked a name for their little club. The Saviors mess has put me off from that, so much that I didn't even like it when Whisperers leader Alpha (Samantha Morton) was standing at the gates of Hilltop a couple episodes back. Thankfully, the Highwaymen are quickly dissuaded from being jerks and become allies when presented with the chance chance to watch a movie. Cinema brings people together even in the post-apocalypse.
So Angus Sampson is on The Walking Dead now. That's cool, I liked him in the INSIDIOUS films and look forward to seeing what he'll be contributing as Ozzy.
It was also a nice touch that the Highwaymen were able to move in on the Kingdom's territory as a consequence of Carol (Melissa McBride) killing off the previous adversarial group that was hanging out in the area, the one led by former Savior Jed, in the episode Who Are You Now? Luckily, killing Jed to make way for the Highwaymen doesn't appear to have been a terrible mistake. Yet.
While Carol and King Ezekiel (Khary Payton) were dealing with the Highwaymen, who went on to prove themselves by saving visitors from a zombie attack, Daryl was preparing for the main event. On the run from Beta and a "fighting unit" of Whisperers, Daryl and his companions - Connie (Lauren Ridloff), Henry (Matt Lintz), Alpha's daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy), and Dog - seek shelter in a building Connie is familiar with and hole up on a floor that can only be reached by two stairwells that are barricaded enough that zombies won't be able to pass through. The Whisperers are going to have to confront them with no zombies to hide behind.
The stage is set for that fight, but before we get there we see the advancement of the romantic relationship that's developing between Lydia and Henry, and hints at a potential relationship between Daryl and Connie. I'm trying not to look too deeply into this, but it does seems like they're building up a Daryl / Connie love story. He gives her a lot of compliments, she keeps winning him over in their discussions, and sometimes his dog would rather follow her than him. You have to trust your dog about these things.
But never mind the romance for now. I've been excited to see the Daryl vs. Beta fight for months, and got even more excited when Hurst revealed in a recent interview that the fight took up three pages in the script. I could have watched this thing go on for thirteen pages, but I'll take three. It was awesome to watch these two go at each other, with Beta tossing Daryl around and bashing through walls. Daryl was obviously physically outmatched, but he's a badass, so you knew he was going to find a way to do some damage. The way it ended reminded me of the sort of thing that would happen when James Bond would battle the hulking henchman Jaws back in the day. Beta even has metal in his grill like Jaws did.
That fight did not disappoint, and I enjoyed watching the fight with the rest of the Whisperers unit as well.
Chokepoint delivered some fun action and got Angus Sampson onto the show, that's the making of a good episode in my book.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: I grew up catching episodes of the sitcom Grace Under Fire on TV, and never imagined that I would someday see the star of that show, stand-up comic Brett Butler, bashing zombies in the head. Now I have seen that sight, and it was my favorite zombie moment of the episode.
GORY GLORY: Plenty of zombies get dispatched, but the moments of gore weren't really anything special. It's the same zombie head smashing, slashing, and spearing we've seen hundreds of times. Some Whisperers are killed as well, but it's not that gory. I'll go with the moment where Daryl axes a Whisperer in the chest through a sheet of plastic. There was only a bit of blood, but it was something different.
FAVORITE SCENE: Daryl vs. Beta!
Season 9, Episode 14: Scars
PLOT: While pondering the Kingdom's fair and the Whisperers situation, Michonne has flashbacks to the events that made her decide to isolate Alexandria from the other communities.
REVIEW: Scars is the fourteenth episode in this season of AMC's The Walking Dead, but a good portion of its events take place at a point in the timeline that would have made it the sixth episode if the producers had chosen to tell the story in chronological order. When Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Connie (Lauren Ridloff) show up at the gates of the Alexandria community while on the run from the Whisperers with a wounded Henry (Matt Lintz) and Lydia (Cassady McClincy), daughter of the Whisperers' leader, Alexandria leader Michonne (Danai Gurira) starts having flashbacks to a time when another group of people arrived at the gates of Alexandria seeking help.
We've seen that Michonne and Daryl are both sporting X-shaped scars on their backs that they acquired sometime during the six year jump that occurred between the last couple scenes of episode 5, and that Michonne became very paranoid sometime during those years, so much that she decided Alexandria should be isolated from the other communities in the area. As it turns out, the event that left both physical and emotional scars happened just months after the disappearance of Rick Grimes, even before Michonne gave birth to the son Rick never got to meet.
After dragging out the mystery for several episodes, it's pretty impressive that showrunner Angela Kang and the writers found a way to give an answer that can be told within just one episode. At other points a Walking Dead show might have tried to make the explanation last much longer - just last year on Fear the Walking Dead, the show was jumping back and forth between two timelines for half a season. I could imagine The Walking Dead trying to do the same, wrapping up the flashbacks just in time for Michonne to leave the show next season (Gurira will only be in a "handful" of season 10 episodes), just like the Madison character left Fear at the end of its half season of flashbacks. But thankfully they decided to get this time jump flashback story out of the way quickly... And that means they had to put Michonne through a very traumatic situation, to show how one episode of events could make her withdraw from her friends in the other communities.
By the end of the episode, I could understand, especially after seeing the incredible emotional performance Gurira delivered here. Members of the group that showed up seeking help when Michonne was pregnant with R.J. made her deal with some seriously messed up stuff. It's made even worse for Michonne by the fact that one of those people was someone she had reason to trust completely: it's a friend from her college days, Jocelyn (Rutina Wesley). It's quite a coincidence that Jocelyn just happens to stumble up to Alexandria, which is in the Washington, D.C. and far from where Michonne's travels began back in Georgia, but the world of The Walking Dead can be very small when they want it to be.
The story that plays out with Jocelyn and the small army of children she travels around with, an army she's always looking to recruit more children into, is a very twisted tale, with disturbing content along the lines of that Lizzie and Mika episode of season 4 (which also happened to be the fourteenth episode of that season).
Between the flashbacks we get some present day scenes that relate nicely to what happened in the past. Because of Jocelyn, Michonne nearly lost her young daughter Judith (Chloe Garcia-Frizzi) - not to mention R.J. and her own life. In the present, she nearly loses Judith (Cailey Fleming) as a result of the decisions she made after the Jocelyn situation was resolved.
I was entirely satisfied by the answers Scars provided, and appreciate that the show was able to get those answers out of the way like this. It sort of felt like an odd time to interrupt what's going on with the Whisperers to show us these flashbacks now, but this was such a dark, horrific aside that I don't mind. Now we can put the past behind us and keep moving forward with whatever's going to happen with Lydia's mom and former companions.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: Michonne hacks her way through a small herd of zombies to save Judith's life while having flashbacks to a time when she hacked her way through multiple other bodies to save the life of a younger Judith.
GORY GLORY: A lot of zombies bite the dust in this episode, and Michonne's X scar looked pretty nasty when it was first burned into her, but my favorite gore effect was at the very beginning of the episode. A zombie gets its head sliced open and half of its face falls to the ground in a close-up.
FAVORITE SCENE: Michonne faces off with a bunch of maniac kids like she's been dropped into a post-apocalyptic CHILDREN OF THE CORN sequel.
Season 9, Episode 15: The Calm Before
PLOT: While communities reunite at the Kingdom fair, the Whisperers are plotting to ruin their good times.
REVIEW: AMC's The Walking Dead hurt me a bit with the penultimate episode of season 9, even though I went into it knowing that tragedy was approaching. I haven't read the comic book source material past the first TPB, but it's hard to avoid story spoilers while keeping an eye on the Walking Dead online fan community, so while King Ezekiel (Khary Payton) has spent a large portion of this season working toward a fair being held at his Kingdom community, I knew that once we reached the fair something terrible would happen. The comic book readers have been talking about "heads on pikes", put there by the Whisperers, the recently introduced group of people who move among herds of zombies by wearing masks of zombie flesh. The comic book fans had the knowledge of which characters were killed in the book so their heads could end up as part of the heads on pikes collection - an assorted dozen - but the TV show drifts away from the source material often enough that it was safe to assume that we'd be seeing a very different collection of heads once the event happened on AMC.
In The Calm Before, the Kingdom has its fair. Members of several different communities are there to participate in the fun and games; Hilltop, Alexandria, and Oceanside are all represented. The leaders of these communities come together for the first time in about five years and make a formal agreement to watch each other's backs. They have hope for the future. It seems like this is going to be a rare happy episode of The Walking Dead.
Then the Whisperers abduct ten people from the gathered communities. They kill them, decapitate them, and put their heads on pikes as a warning to these groups who are attempting to return to the old ways of life not to stray into their territory, where they embrace what the world has become and live with the dead.
It's not often that I'm bothered by a character death on this show, because I tend to enjoy the drama of these tragedies and like The Walking Dead's brand of "carnage candy". The majority of the characters are expendable as far as I'm concerned. I was sad to see Glenn go back in the season 7 premiere, because I had enjoyed following his relationship with Maggie since season 2. I disagreed with the decision to kill off Carl Grimes in season 8 because his presence was too important to the story of Rick Grimes. I never envisioned a day when Rick Grimes would be written off the show, but he's been gone for a while now, so killing off Carl didn't mean much after all. Most of the people who end up on pikes were completely expendable, even if a couple of them were played by actors I liked seeing on the show. But there was one death tonight that really disappointed me. The death of someone who has been on the show for several years, a character I have been rooting for. Tara (Alanna Masterson).
Recently Tara had been promoted into a leadership role, which I was glad to see happen. I was interested in seeing where that storyline was going to go... But it came to a dead end tonight, thanks to the Whisperers. She wasn't the most popular character around, in fact there was a lot of mocking and complaining when she got her own episode a couple seasons back, but I'm going to miss her. She's the only one of the ten I'm really sorry to see go, and I did not expect her to make her exit at this point.
Another death had an impact on me not because I cared about the character, but because of the heartbreak it's going to cause for a different character I care about. Carol (Melissa McBride) had finally been given the chance to live a happy life in this season, and that just got torn apart. She has been devastated again and I feel bad for her, while also being eager to see how she's going to carry on from this episode.
The "heads on pikes" scene is, of course, the standout event, it's the thing most worth talking about in this episode, but it is preceded by something interesting. A sequence in which Alpha (Samantha Morton), the leader of the Whisperers, infiltrates the fair by killing a woman and stealing her hair and fashion sense. She walks the streets of the Kingdom, even interacts with Ezekiel. It was kind of creepy seeing her take on a different identity to move undetected among the more civilized characters, and this also gave Morton a chance to show a different side of her devious, deadly, dirtbag character, so it was a great to have this in the episode on the way to the big reveal.
In previous seasons, the "heads on pikes" moment would have been one of the final scenes in a season finale. Like Rick leaving the show in a random episode earlier this season, the fact that we have a full episode left to watch after this one is a great example of new showrunner Angela Kang deciding to shake up the show's formerly predictable structure. Things like this are appreciated, even if I'm not happy that Tara's not going to be around for the season finale.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: Daryl (Norman Reedus), Michonne (Danai Gurira), Carol, and Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura) take down a bunch of zombies together, and do so very quickly.
GORY GLORY: The heads on pikes aren't extremely gory, they're just zombified heads on the top of wooden poles with a bit of blood on them, but it's the most prominent and memorable effect in the episode.
FAVORITE SCENE: Siddiq (Avi Nash) tells the story of what happened in the moments before the decapitations.
Season 9, Episode 16: The Storm
PLOT: The Kingdom has to be evacuated when a blizzard hits.
REVIEW: The Walking Dead comic book creator Robert Kirkman and Greg Nicotero, an executive producer and head of the special effects team on the AMC series, have both expressed a desire to show what it would be like to endure a snowy winter during the zombie apocalypse, but neither seemed to think we'd actually see a snowy winter on the Walking Dead series, since the show is filmed in the Georgia heat and creating a snowy atmosphere in those conditions would be costly. Well, for the season 9 finale the show's producers finally managed to put together a budget for at least one snowbound episode. As The Storm begins, a blizzard is about to hit the communities of survivors the show centers on.
In the previous episode, the weather was still nice enough that the Kingdom community was throwing an outdoor fair, presided over by a happy King Ezekiel (Khary Payton), who was very hopeful for the future of the Kingdom. To get us to blizzard weather the show undergoes a time jump, the third time jump this season. A few months have passed since The Calm Before, and in that time the Kingdom has completely crumbled - its condition reflecting the emotional states of Ezekiel and his beloved Carol (Melissa McBride), who lost their adopted son in a horrific way at the end of the previous episode. It's quite a turnaround from how things were going before Queen Carol saw that Prince Henry's severed head had been stuck on a pike by the villainous Alpha (Samantha Morton) and her followers, the Whisperers.
The Kingdom won't be inhabitable when the blizzard hits, so its residents have to venture off through the snowy wilderness to seek shelter in other communities, namely Alexandria and the Hilltop. Most of this episode focuses on their trek, with Alexandria leader Michonne (Danai Gurira) and the wild card Daryl (Norman Reedus) being among those who accompany Ezekiel, Carol, and their people on their journey... Which eventually takes them through Whisperer territory.
The Whisperers were not a threat in this episode, though. Instead, Nicotero - who also directed the episode - and his FX team took the opportunity to show us how zombies function, or don't function, once cold weather hits. Kirkman has said they go dormant, like alligators in frozen lakes, and we do see some examples of that. Zombies frozen in place, waiting for warmer weather to thaw them out so they can continue moving and seeking flesh to eat. We also get to see zombies stuck in ice, and others rising from beneath a blanket of snow. Other zombie projects have shown zombies in the snow, this isn't a first, but this episode dealt with the concept of the walking dead existing in a freezing cold winter in a more interesting way than I've ever seen before.
In any other season, The Calm Before would have been the season finale. Season 9 goes out on a quieter note with The Storm, simply offering a glimpse at the aftermath of the major events that occurred in The Calm Before. We see the effect the loss of the characters killed by the Whisperers has had on the survivors - especially Ezekiel, Carol, and Henry's love interest / Alpha's daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy), who is feeling very out of place with these people after the things her mother has done to them. There is a lot of focus on emotions and living situations, so it's good that we have the winter zombie element in there as well to spice things up.
The people moving on from the Kingdom aren't the only ones we see dealing with winter and a change of heart, either. We also check in with characters at Alexandria, including Michonne's daughter Judith (Cailey Fleming), who has a tendency to wander off just like her late brother Carl used to, and the show's former villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who must have spent about eight years sitting in a jail cell by this point. We're definitely seeing the softer side of Negan these days, and I'm intrigued to see where his redemption arc will take them in season 10. I'm hoping it will take him to some kind of badass confrontation with the Whisperers.
The Storm doesn't contain anything shocking or earth-shattering, that sort of thing already happened at the end of The Calm Before, but it was a good episode and I enjoyed finally having the chance to see what happens to The Walking Dead during winter.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: The sequence in which the survivors are attacked by zombies that rise up from beneath the snow was very cool.
GORY GLORY: There is a moment in this episode that is directly lifted from DIE HARD 2. Daryl is knocked to the ground by a zombie, but manages to dispatch his attacker by sticking an icicle through one of its eyeballs.
FAVORITE SCENE: The attack from beneath the snow may have been the best active zombie moment, but my favorite scene involved zombies that weren't able to move or react. The survivors come across some frozen zombies and find that their heads are quite easy to shatter.
PLOT: The Whisperers move in on Hilltop while the leader's daughter gives information on her history.
REVIEW: Omega is an episode of AMC's The Walking Dead that I didn't expect to get any time soon, if ever. It's basically an origin story for the new villain, Alpha (Samantha Morton), the leader of the group called The Whisperers that go around wearing masks of zombie flesh and prending to be zombies themselves. This is a character we haven't even been properly introduced to yet; she only showed up to speak one line while capturing Luke (Dan Fogler) and Alden (Callan McAuliffe) at the end of the previous episode. So we're getting a glimpse of her back story before we even get to know her in present day, which is something this show has never done for a "big bad" before.
This was a strange but interesting way to tell an origin story, because the person telling it - Alpha's daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy) - gets details mixed up along the way, giving Alpha credit for things Lydia's dad Frank (Steve Kazee) did, saying Frank did things Alpha actually did. Did her mom used to sing to her when she was little, or did her dad? Did her dad cut his beard once the zombie apocalypse began, or did her mom cut her hair? Some viewers could have been as confused by her jumbled up memories as Lydia was, and I'm not even 100% sure I got all the facts straight... But I'm going with the idea that the zombie outbreak that happened in the safe haven Lydia and her family were hiding in was indeed caused by the dead body Alpha left lying around after she killed a guy while trying to shut him up. And that happened because it was at the point in the timeline before people realized that anyone who died would become a zombie, they didn't have to be bitten. I was shocked to find that characters in The Walking Dead stayed clueless to that fact for so long, since that's information given within the first night of the outbreak in the movie that started all this stuff, George A. Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. If these people don't know that any dead person is a danger, they deserve to get munched.
The majority of Omega involved Lydia sitting in her cell at Hilltop, giving out details on her history to Daryl (Norman Reedus) and fellow jailbird Henry (Matt Lintz). This could have been quite dull, but the episode managed to hold my attention and McClincy really impressed me with her performance. I thought it was a clever touch that all three of these characters have either suffered abuse or are close to someone who did. Henry mentioning that his adoptive mother Carol (Melissa McBride) used to cut her hair short because she had an abusive husband but has now grown it out because she finally feels safe was nice. It was also nice that the show tapped into Daryl's back story of being abused - we saw long ago that he sports scars on his back from the beatings his father used to dole out - as a way to get him to connect with Lydia.
Daryl is a deeper character than he often appears to be, and Reedus always does great work when he's given more to do than just growl his way through scenes, when he's able to show Daryl's emotional side.
The few scenes of side plot in here involve the search for Luke and Alden, and my favorite thing about those scenes was how we got to see Tara (Alanna Masterson) taking her wobbly steps into becoming the leader of the Hilltop. Tara gets bashed a lot, but I'm a fan of the character and like to see her evolving.
Omega could be called a filler episode, since it ends with a moment I had thought would arrive much earlier in the running time, but in the end I think there was enough drama and character work to make it worth being part of the season. It wasn't just another example of the show spinning its wheels, something it has done quite often in the past.
The episode also earns some bonus points with the song that was sung to Lydia when she was a child. That's "Lydia the Tattooed Lady", first heard in the 1939 Marx brothers movie AT THE CIRCUS. Morton and Kazee both sang it in Omega, but neither could live up to Groucho's performance.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: The zombie attacking the people who hadn't seen NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was a good one, but a zombie scene earlier in the episode had more action, with zombies taking knives, arrows, spears, and slingshot ammo to the head. I liked Tara doing a checklist to make sure a zombie wasn't a Whisperer before trying to take it down, "Funky walk, check. No weapons, check. Okay."
GORY GLORY: Those early-in-the-episode zombies are seen munching on some horse guts.
FAVORITE SCENE: Lydia finds some worms to eat while taking a night walk with Henry. When your significant other sucks the dirt off a worm snack before passing it over to you, you know they're a keeper.
Season 9, Episode 11: Bounty
PLOT: King Ezekiel goes on a mission to revive cinema while the Whisperers try to negotiate a captive exchange at Hilltop.
REVIEW: Any viewers who skipped airings of AMC's The Walking Dead tonight in favor of watching the live broadcast of the Academy Awards missed less than I thought they might. While Bounty does feature the first tense face-to-face with new villain Alpha (Samantha Morton), leader of the "Whisperers" group that likes to walk among the dead wearing masks of zombie flesh, the interaction between her and representatives of the Hilltop community did not go as far, and didn't get as heated, as I was hoping.
Maybe I was disappointed by the interaction because I'm still feeling burnt out by the over-extended "all-out war" that was fought between the communities and the Saviors run by Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). I watch Alpha facing off with the Hilltop folks and Daryl (Norman Reedus) and I just feel tired of this villainous community leader stuff. I think, "I can't believe we're going through this again so soon after Negan." The characters have had a seven and a half year break since Negan was strutting around making threats, we've only had a handful of episodes. In concept the Whisperers are awesome and creepy, so as great as Samantha Morton is, and as fun as it is to watch her eyebrows dance around as she plays Alpha, I think I'm going to need her to stop talking and put the mask back on so I can really enjoy their presence.
The Hilltop has Alpha's daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy) in their custody, the Whisperers have Hilltop residents Alden (Callan McAuliffe) and Luke (Dan Fogler). Although Alpha takes a very cold approach to her people, even ordering one female Whisperer to abandon her baby in a field as zombies approach because the infant is making too much noise, something within her has made her break her own code of conduct and go after her daughter, offering a trade of captives. Daryl isn't very receptive to this trade offer, since he knows Alpha beats Lydia, much like his own father used to beat him. That's a great set-up for emotional interactions between these characters, but they're still holding back in Bounty.
I also felt that the stand-off scenes were weakened by the amount of cut-aways to the B plot, which involves King Ezekiel (Khary Payton) leading Kingdom residents on a mission to acquire a projector bulb from a movie theatre full of zombies. As Ezekiel says, the bulb isn't something they "absolutely need", and I wasn't convinced this mission was something we absolutely needed to see right now. Every time we bounced over to the theatre, it deflated the tension of the Hilltop scenes. Ezekiel gives a nice speech about "bringing cinema back from the dead" and I would have been fine with seeing this mission in most other episodes... but it didn't seem right to pair it with the situation at Hilltop.
This cinema mission did have fun and action in it, though. One of the bright spots was when the Kingdom bunch uses a boombox playing a tape labeled "Mission Mix" to draw the attention of the zombies away from them - and there's a shot of Jerry (Cooper Andrews) lip syncing to the music. Jerry got a good amount of screen time in this episode, which makes me very concerned that they're starting to build him up toward a tragic end. I know this fair the Kingdom is planning is not going to go well.
Some of Jerry's screen time comes in an opening flashback, where he tells Ezekiel that his wife is pregnant. In present day, we find that Jerry has three kids, so we know this flashback occurs several years ago, sometime during the six year jump between episode 5 and episode 6 this season. It occurs at a time when the communities are not very happy with each other for reasons that have yet to be explained, so it really just serves to tease us over the fact that there are story details being kept secret. And to give us one more scene with Jesus (Tom Payne).
There was one sequence in Bounty that I thought was truly great. It involves that baby the Whisperer sets down in the field. The baby is rescued by Luke's friend Connie (Lauren Ridloff), who runs off into a cornfield with both zombies and Whisperers coming after her. That would be a troubling situation for anyone to be in, but it's even more frightening that Connie is the one enduring it because she's deaf. We experience this sequence through Connie's perspective; the sound drops out as she moves through the cornfield, zombies lunging out at her from behind the stalks. This scene is the biggest thing anyone who watched the Oscars missed out on.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: There were a lot of zombie moments to choose from in this episode, King Ezekiel and his pals take down a whole bunch of them at the theatre, but the "Connie in the cornfield" sequence is the winner.
GORY GLORY: A zombie scalps itself while crawling through an old popcorn machine to get to the Kingdom group.
FAVORITE SCENE: If Jerry hadn't won my heart a long time ago, he would have in this episode when he pronounced the word "fragile" just like the dad in A CHRISTMAS STORY does. Just like I do every time I see the word "fragile"... My favorite scene is, of course, the one where Connie escapes through the cornfield with the baby, I just wanted to give a nod to that Jerry moment.
Season 9, Episode 12: Guardians
PLOT: Daryl and Connie track Henry while leaders are questioned at both Alexandria and the Whisperer camp.
REVIEW: Actor Ryan Hurst is well known for playing a character called Opie on Sons of Anarchy, which is a series I have never watched. I did watch Bates Motel, though, and when Hurst appeared on that show as Chick Hogan he quickly became one of my favorite things about it. So I was looking forward to this episode of The Walking Dead, which marks Hurst's first appearance as Beta, a member of the Whisperers group that loves to wear masks of zombie flesh. His introduction did not disappoint, as Beta came off as a hulking beast of a man whose size and loyalty to his leader Alpha (Samantha Morton) should make him a great threat to the heroes of this show.
I was a bit put off by the previous episode because the scenes of Alpha standing at the gate of the Hilltop community and talking about whether or not there will be conflict between the groups gave me unwelcome flashbacks to the days of Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) lording over everybody. I was much more on board with this episode, which gave us a look inside the Whisperer camp as Alpha brings her daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy) back into the group... and finds that Lydia's normal (i.e. not a Whisperer) love interest Henry (Matt Lintz) has followed them from Hilltop.
Alpha also had to fend off one of the most pathetic attempted coups of all time in this episode, a scene which served to confirm things we already knew - Alpha isn't someone to mess with, and she has no problem with killing people - and was a showcase for a nice gore effect.
She wasn't the only one being questioned in this episode, as Michonne (Danai Gurira) also had to butt heads with several people at the shut-off Alexandria community. At this point it's getting a bit annoying that the show is holding back information from us that would explain why Michonne is so troubled by the idea of the communities working together. We need to be told what happened in the six years since Rick Grimes disappeared so we can understand why Michonne has become a pain in the ass... but at the same time, it's going to be tough to find a place for that info dump where it won't be too much of a distraction from the interesting stuff that's going on with the Whisperers.
There is less interesting stuff to be found even within Guardians, though. Namely the continuation of the extremely soap opera-esque storyline going on with Rosita (Christian Serratos), Eugene (Josh McDermitt) and his unrequited crush on her, her current lover Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam), and Doctor Siddiq (Avi Nash), the father of the child she's now carrying. Do I care whether or not Gabriel is going to stick with Rosita after finding out she's carrying another man's child? I can't say I do. At all.
A relationship I'm more intrigued by is the bond that's forming between Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Connie (Lauren Ridloff) as they track Henry to the Whisperer camp. When we heard that Rick Grimes was being written off the show, the news was accompanied by reports that the focus was going to shift over to Daryl, and I wasn't quite sure how that was going to work. He's a character who stays off to the side, he's not a community leader type... But if the last few episodes are any indication, this show is going to work just fine with Reedus in the lead. The stuff with Daryl dealing with the Whisperer issue and digging into the relationship between Alpha and Lydia has been great. He's not leading any community, but he is taking charge in this confrontation.
There has been speculation that Daryl and Connie are going to become an item, and after seeing him compliment her slingshot skills ("Nice."), I can buy that it's actually going to happen. Nine seasons in, Daryl might indulge in some romance. With a potential love interest and a dog who retrieves his arrows for him, it looks like Daryl's getting a good life set up, even if the arrow retrievals aren't always 100% successful. Soon he might even be showering.
Everything at Alexandria in this episode - Michonne arguing with people, the baby drama - earns a shrug from me, but the scenes at the Whisperer camp and with Daryl and Connie out in the wild had me captivated. The preview for next week's episode promises more Daryl vs. Whisperer action, and I'm looking forward to it.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: In the final moments of the episode, Daryl and Connie use the Whisperers' own tactics against them. I only wish we had seen more of them working to pull this off.
GORY GLORY: There are two major contenders for this category this week. The episode did feature an excellent human decapitation, but I think I have to give the top honor to the moment in which we see Beta peeling the flesh off a zombie's head. That was awesomely gross.
FAVORITE SCENE: A walk in the woods with Daryl, Connie, and Dog.
Season 9, Episode 13: Chokepoint
PLOT: Daryl battles Beta and the Whisperers while the Kingdom deals with a new group of survivors.
REVIEW: After The Walking Dead season 9's mid-season finale aired back in November, a trailer was released for the rest of the season, and three and a half months later it turns out that tonight's episode contained two of the most intriguing moments from that trailer: the fight between Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Beta (Ryan Hurst), the hulking second-in-command of the Whisperers group, and the shot of a mysterious Angus Sampson wearing a cowboy get-up and walking through the Kingdom.
I was interested to see who Sampson would be playing on the show, but the introduction to his character had me cringing. Sampson's character Ozzy is the leader of a group called the Highwaymen, who make their presence known by informing the Kingdom that they have taken control of the roads around their community and will be charging visitors to their upcoming fair a toll to get by. It seemed like an odd time to bring a new antagonistic group onto the show when we're in the middle of dealing with the Whisperers, and honestly I'd be just be fine if The Walking Dead never again shows us another douchebag group that has picked a name for their little club. The Saviors mess has put me off from that, so much that I didn't even like it when Whisperers leader Alpha (Samantha Morton) was standing at the gates of Hilltop a couple episodes back. Thankfully, the Highwaymen are quickly dissuaded from being jerks and become allies when presented with the chance chance to watch a movie. Cinema brings people together even in the post-apocalypse.
So Angus Sampson is on The Walking Dead now. That's cool, I liked him in the INSIDIOUS films and look forward to seeing what he'll be contributing as Ozzy.
It was also a nice touch that the Highwaymen were able to move in on the Kingdom's territory as a consequence of Carol (Melissa McBride) killing off the previous adversarial group that was hanging out in the area, the one led by former Savior Jed, in the episode Who Are You Now? Luckily, killing Jed to make way for the Highwaymen doesn't appear to have been a terrible mistake. Yet.
While Carol and King Ezekiel (Khary Payton) were dealing with the Highwaymen, who went on to prove themselves by saving visitors from a zombie attack, Daryl was preparing for the main event. On the run from Beta and a "fighting unit" of Whisperers, Daryl and his companions - Connie (Lauren Ridloff), Henry (Matt Lintz), Alpha's daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy), and Dog - seek shelter in a building Connie is familiar with and hole up on a floor that can only be reached by two stairwells that are barricaded enough that zombies won't be able to pass through. The Whisperers are going to have to confront them with no zombies to hide behind.
The stage is set for that fight, but before we get there we see the advancement of the romantic relationship that's developing between Lydia and Henry, and hints at a potential relationship between Daryl and Connie. I'm trying not to look too deeply into this, but it does seems like they're building up a Daryl / Connie love story. He gives her a lot of compliments, she keeps winning him over in their discussions, and sometimes his dog would rather follow her than him. You have to trust your dog about these things.
But never mind the romance for now. I've been excited to see the Daryl vs. Beta fight for months, and got even more excited when Hurst revealed in a recent interview that the fight took up three pages in the script. I could have watched this thing go on for thirteen pages, but I'll take three. It was awesome to watch these two go at each other, with Beta tossing Daryl around and bashing through walls. Daryl was obviously physically outmatched, but he's a badass, so you knew he was going to find a way to do some damage. The way it ended reminded me of the sort of thing that would happen when James Bond would battle the hulking henchman Jaws back in the day. Beta even has metal in his grill like Jaws did.
That fight did not disappoint, and I enjoyed watching the fight with the rest of the Whisperers unit as well.
Chokepoint delivered some fun action and got Angus Sampson onto the show, that's the making of a good episode in my book.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: I grew up catching episodes of the sitcom Grace Under Fire on TV, and never imagined that I would someday see the star of that show, stand-up comic Brett Butler, bashing zombies in the head. Now I have seen that sight, and it was my favorite zombie moment of the episode.
GORY GLORY: Plenty of zombies get dispatched, but the moments of gore weren't really anything special. It's the same zombie head smashing, slashing, and spearing we've seen hundreds of times. Some Whisperers are killed as well, but it's not that gory. I'll go with the moment where Daryl axes a Whisperer in the chest through a sheet of plastic. There was only a bit of blood, but it was something different.
FAVORITE SCENE: Daryl vs. Beta!
Season 9, Episode 14: Scars
PLOT: While pondering the Kingdom's fair and the Whisperers situation, Michonne has flashbacks to the events that made her decide to isolate Alexandria from the other communities.
REVIEW: Scars is the fourteenth episode in this season of AMC's The Walking Dead, but a good portion of its events take place at a point in the timeline that would have made it the sixth episode if the producers had chosen to tell the story in chronological order. When Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Connie (Lauren Ridloff) show up at the gates of the Alexandria community while on the run from the Whisperers with a wounded Henry (Matt Lintz) and Lydia (Cassady McClincy), daughter of the Whisperers' leader, Alexandria leader Michonne (Danai Gurira) starts having flashbacks to a time when another group of people arrived at the gates of Alexandria seeking help.
We've seen that Michonne and Daryl are both sporting X-shaped scars on their backs that they acquired sometime during the six year jump that occurred between the last couple scenes of episode 5, and that Michonne became very paranoid sometime during those years, so much that she decided Alexandria should be isolated from the other communities in the area. As it turns out, the event that left both physical and emotional scars happened just months after the disappearance of Rick Grimes, even before Michonne gave birth to the son Rick never got to meet.
After dragging out the mystery for several episodes, it's pretty impressive that showrunner Angela Kang and the writers found a way to give an answer that can be told within just one episode. At other points a Walking Dead show might have tried to make the explanation last much longer - just last year on Fear the Walking Dead, the show was jumping back and forth between two timelines for half a season. I could imagine The Walking Dead trying to do the same, wrapping up the flashbacks just in time for Michonne to leave the show next season (Gurira will only be in a "handful" of season 10 episodes), just like the Madison character left Fear at the end of its half season of flashbacks. But thankfully they decided to get this time jump flashback story out of the way quickly... And that means they had to put Michonne through a very traumatic situation, to show how one episode of events could make her withdraw from her friends in the other communities.
By the end of the episode, I could understand, especially after seeing the incredible emotional performance Gurira delivered here. Members of the group that showed up seeking help when Michonne was pregnant with R.J. made her deal with some seriously messed up stuff. It's made even worse for Michonne by the fact that one of those people was someone she had reason to trust completely: it's a friend from her college days, Jocelyn (Rutina Wesley). It's quite a coincidence that Jocelyn just happens to stumble up to Alexandria, which is in the Washington, D.C. and far from where Michonne's travels began back in Georgia, but the world of The Walking Dead can be very small when they want it to be.
The story that plays out with Jocelyn and the small army of children she travels around with, an army she's always looking to recruit more children into, is a very twisted tale, with disturbing content along the lines of that Lizzie and Mika episode of season 4 (which also happened to be the fourteenth episode of that season).
Between the flashbacks we get some present day scenes that relate nicely to what happened in the past. Because of Jocelyn, Michonne nearly lost her young daughter Judith (Chloe Garcia-Frizzi) - not to mention R.J. and her own life. In the present, she nearly loses Judith (Cailey Fleming) as a result of the decisions she made after the Jocelyn situation was resolved.
I was entirely satisfied by the answers Scars provided, and appreciate that the show was able to get those answers out of the way like this. It sort of felt like an odd time to interrupt what's going on with the Whisperers to show us these flashbacks now, but this was such a dark, horrific aside that I don't mind. Now we can put the past behind us and keep moving forward with whatever's going to happen with Lydia's mom and former companions.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: Michonne hacks her way through a small herd of zombies to save Judith's life while having flashbacks to a time when she hacked her way through multiple other bodies to save the life of a younger Judith.
GORY GLORY: A lot of zombies bite the dust in this episode, and Michonne's X scar looked pretty nasty when it was first burned into her, but my favorite gore effect was at the very beginning of the episode. A zombie gets its head sliced open and half of its face falls to the ground in a close-up.
FAVORITE SCENE: Michonne faces off with a bunch of maniac kids like she's been dropped into a post-apocalyptic CHILDREN OF THE CORN sequel.
Season 9, Episode 15: The Calm Before
PLOT: While communities reunite at the Kingdom fair, the Whisperers are plotting to ruin their good times.
REVIEW: AMC's The Walking Dead hurt me a bit with the penultimate episode of season 9, even though I went into it knowing that tragedy was approaching. I haven't read the comic book source material past the first TPB, but it's hard to avoid story spoilers while keeping an eye on the Walking Dead online fan community, so while King Ezekiel (Khary Payton) has spent a large portion of this season working toward a fair being held at his Kingdom community, I knew that once we reached the fair something terrible would happen. The comic book readers have been talking about "heads on pikes", put there by the Whisperers, the recently introduced group of people who move among herds of zombies by wearing masks of zombie flesh. The comic book fans had the knowledge of which characters were killed in the book so their heads could end up as part of the heads on pikes collection - an assorted dozen - but the TV show drifts away from the source material often enough that it was safe to assume that we'd be seeing a very different collection of heads once the event happened on AMC.
In The Calm Before, the Kingdom has its fair. Members of several different communities are there to participate in the fun and games; Hilltop, Alexandria, and Oceanside are all represented. The leaders of these communities come together for the first time in about five years and make a formal agreement to watch each other's backs. They have hope for the future. It seems like this is going to be a rare happy episode of The Walking Dead.
Then the Whisperers abduct ten people from the gathered communities. They kill them, decapitate them, and put their heads on pikes as a warning to these groups who are attempting to return to the old ways of life not to stray into their territory, where they embrace what the world has become and live with the dead.
It's not often that I'm bothered by a character death on this show, because I tend to enjoy the drama of these tragedies and like The Walking Dead's brand of "carnage candy". The majority of the characters are expendable as far as I'm concerned. I was sad to see Glenn go back in the season 7 premiere, because I had enjoyed following his relationship with Maggie since season 2. I disagreed with the decision to kill off Carl Grimes in season 8 because his presence was too important to the story of Rick Grimes. I never envisioned a day when Rick Grimes would be written off the show, but he's been gone for a while now, so killing off Carl didn't mean much after all. Most of the people who end up on pikes were completely expendable, even if a couple of them were played by actors I liked seeing on the show. But there was one death tonight that really disappointed me. The death of someone who has been on the show for several years, a character I have been rooting for. Tara (Alanna Masterson).
Recently Tara had been promoted into a leadership role, which I was glad to see happen. I was interested in seeing where that storyline was going to go... But it came to a dead end tonight, thanks to the Whisperers. She wasn't the most popular character around, in fact there was a lot of mocking and complaining when she got her own episode a couple seasons back, but I'm going to miss her. She's the only one of the ten I'm really sorry to see go, and I did not expect her to make her exit at this point.
Another death had an impact on me not because I cared about the character, but because of the heartbreak it's going to cause for a different character I care about. Carol (Melissa McBride) had finally been given the chance to live a happy life in this season, and that just got torn apart. She has been devastated again and I feel bad for her, while also being eager to see how she's going to carry on from this episode.
The "heads on pikes" scene is, of course, the standout event, it's the thing most worth talking about in this episode, but it is preceded by something interesting. A sequence in which Alpha (Samantha Morton), the leader of the Whisperers, infiltrates the fair by killing a woman and stealing her hair and fashion sense. She walks the streets of the Kingdom, even interacts with Ezekiel. It was kind of creepy seeing her take on a different identity to move undetected among the more civilized characters, and this also gave Morton a chance to show a different side of her devious, deadly, dirtbag character, so it was a great to have this in the episode on the way to the big reveal.
In previous seasons, the "heads on pikes" moment would have been one of the final scenes in a season finale. Like Rick leaving the show in a random episode earlier this season, the fact that we have a full episode left to watch after this one is a great example of new showrunner Angela Kang deciding to shake up the show's formerly predictable structure. Things like this are appreciated, even if I'm not happy that Tara's not going to be around for the season finale.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: Daryl (Norman Reedus), Michonne (Danai Gurira), Carol, and Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura) take down a bunch of zombies together, and do so very quickly.
GORY GLORY: The heads on pikes aren't extremely gory, they're just zombified heads on the top of wooden poles with a bit of blood on them, but it's the most prominent and memorable effect in the episode.
FAVORITE SCENE: Siddiq (Avi Nash) tells the story of what happened in the moments before the decapitations.
Season 9, Episode 16: The Storm
PLOT: The Kingdom has to be evacuated when a blizzard hits.
REVIEW: The Walking Dead comic book creator Robert Kirkman and Greg Nicotero, an executive producer and head of the special effects team on the AMC series, have both expressed a desire to show what it would be like to endure a snowy winter during the zombie apocalypse, but neither seemed to think we'd actually see a snowy winter on the Walking Dead series, since the show is filmed in the Georgia heat and creating a snowy atmosphere in those conditions would be costly. Well, for the season 9 finale the show's producers finally managed to put together a budget for at least one snowbound episode. As The Storm begins, a blizzard is about to hit the communities of survivors the show centers on.
In the previous episode, the weather was still nice enough that the Kingdom community was throwing an outdoor fair, presided over by a happy King Ezekiel (Khary Payton), who was very hopeful for the future of the Kingdom. To get us to blizzard weather the show undergoes a time jump, the third time jump this season. A few months have passed since The Calm Before, and in that time the Kingdom has completely crumbled - its condition reflecting the emotional states of Ezekiel and his beloved Carol (Melissa McBride), who lost their adopted son in a horrific way at the end of the previous episode. It's quite a turnaround from how things were going before Queen Carol saw that Prince Henry's severed head had been stuck on a pike by the villainous Alpha (Samantha Morton) and her followers, the Whisperers.
The Kingdom won't be inhabitable when the blizzard hits, so its residents have to venture off through the snowy wilderness to seek shelter in other communities, namely Alexandria and the Hilltop. Most of this episode focuses on their trek, with Alexandria leader Michonne (Danai Gurira) and the wild card Daryl (Norman Reedus) being among those who accompany Ezekiel, Carol, and their people on their journey... Which eventually takes them through Whisperer territory.
The Whisperers were not a threat in this episode, though. Instead, Nicotero - who also directed the episode - and his FX team took the opportunity to show us how zombies function, or don't function, once cold weather hits. Kirkman has said they go dormant, like alligators in frozen lakes, and we do see some examples of that. Zombies frozen in place, waiting for warmer weather to thaw them out so they can continue moving and seeking flesh to eat. We also get to see zombies stuck in ice, and others rising from beneath a blanket of snow. Other zombie projects have shown zombies in the snow, this isn't a first, but this episode dealt with the concept of the walking dead existing in a freezing cold winter in a more interesting way than I've ever seen before.
In any other season, The Calm Before would have been the season finale. Season 9 goes out on a quieter note with The Storm, simply offering a glimpse at the aftermath of the major events that occurred in The Calm Before. We see the effect the loss of the characters killed by the Whisperers has had on the survivors - especially Ezekiel, Carol, and Henry's love interest / Alpha's daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy), who is feeling very out of place with these people after the things her mother has done to them. There is a lot of focus on emotions and living situations, so it's good that we have the winter zombie element in there as well to spice things up.
The people moving on from the Kingdom aren't the only ones we see dealing with winter and a change of heart, either. We also check in with characters at Alexandria, including Michonne's daughter Judith (Cailey Fleming), who has a tendency to wander off just like her late brother Carl used to, and the show's former villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who must have spent about eight years sitting in a jail cell by this point. We're definitely seeing the softer side of Negan these days, and I'm intrigued to see where his redemption arc will take them in season 10. I'm hoping it will take him to some kind of badass confrontation with the Whisperers.
The Storm doesn't contain anything shocking or earth-shattering, that sort of thing already happened at the end of The Calm Before, but it was a good episode and I enjoyed finally having the chance to see what happens to The Walking Dead during winter.
BEST ZOMBIE MOMENT: The sequence in which the survivors are attacked by zombies that rise up from beneath the snow was very cool.
GORY GLORY: There is a moment in this episode that is directly lifted from DIE HARD 2. Daryl is knocked to the ground by a zombie, but manages to dispatch his attacker by sticking an icicle through one of its eyeballs.
FAVORITE SCENE: The attack from beneath the snow may have been the best active zombie moment, but my favorite scene involved zombies that weren't able to move or react. The survivors come across some frozen zombies and find that their heads are quite easy to shatter.
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