by Thom Yee

The Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC.

6×05: “Now”

Party’s over, everyone.  We now return to your regularly scheduled The Walking Dead.

I don’t think anybody could reasonably expect the type of pacing we’ve seen since the beginning of this season to continue indefinitely, and it was more than reasonable to expect a breather episode sometime around now, but all of the forward momentum we’d gained from the first three episodes of season six really just ground to a full-stop hault in “Now”, and it’s that comparative storytelling inertia that made it hard to care or latch on to any of the stories being told this week. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

The Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC.

6×04: “Here’s Not Here”

Boring!

It was clear from the moment that Morgan showed back up in our television-viewing lives to save Daryl and Aaron from that zombie-horde trap in last season’s finale that he’d been through a lot since the last time we saw him. The character had gone from crazy, bitter, vengeful, and barely there after the death of his son at the hands of the zombified wife he had, till that point, been unable to put down, to some sort of staff-wielding, peace-loving Zen master, spouting lines like, “all life is precious”. At the time it was a breath of fresh air, not only for the character, but for this continually downtrodden show that we’ve been watching for the past five years, but that was before seeing things like the Wolves attack on Alexandria and how every one of the people that Morgan left alive tended to come back and hurt or kill (or at least try to hurt or kill) our heroes. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

The Walking Dead images courtesy of AMC.

6×03: “Thank You”

I don’t think it takes that much thought to reach the conclusion that being eaten alive until you die (and obviously we’re talking about being eaten in pieces, not just swallowed whole) probably isn’t a great way to go. A lot of people died this week on The Walking Dead… not as many as last week, but a little more personally… and a lot less quickly. Obviously we’ve seen people bitten, eviscerated, and dismembered by walkers before on this show, but with how detailed these onscreen deaths are becoming as the show’s effects budget increases alongside its ratings, it’s getting tough to sit through these prolonged death scenes and not think about the value of mercy killing. When you’re in a situation where almost all of you made it to the other side of the fence, don’t just watch the one unlucky member of your group that didn’t make it die. Shoot him in the head or something, he’s being eaten alive! That’s gotta hurt! Continue reading →