That title isn’t a joke, y’all: my mom fell asleep during this episode, and honestly I was pretty close a couple of times. It was BORING. This 45 minutes of television EASILY could’ve been broken up with other storylines, like Maggie and Sasha going to Hilltop or a return to the Kingdom. Even all three!
The recap is short stuff because noooothhhhiiinnnng happened, but here goes.
Recap
The episode opens with Michonne and Rick in bed together, but with their backs to each other, each as far away from the other as they can get. Hum. That doesn’t look good.
Michonne gets up and sneaks into the living room to get a rifle out of the chimney. She’s practicing target shooting through the scope, but she’s really terrible at it. You can’t be good at everything, guys.
Spencer and Rosita are leaving to hunt for when Negan and co. show up, but as Eugene goes to open the gate for them, there he is! Early! Oh goodie.
The rest of the episode is literally just Negan’s CONSTANT. NEVER-ENDING. TALKING. Oh my god please shut up!! Hit ME with the baseball bat ffs!
He makes Rick give him a tour, and they take all the medicine, the guns, some furniture, and most of the mattresses. He leaves the food, though. He threatens to kill Olivia, the woman in charge of rations, because 2 of the guns are missing. After a meeting in the church and a frantic search, Rick finds them stashed in Spencer’s house.
Daryl is there, acting all Stockholm-y. I guess they amped up the torture back in Saviorland, because he is whipped.
At one point he asks to see Maggie, and Father Gabriel appears and offers to let Negan pay his respects. He takes him to a series of fresh graves, one of them marked for Maggie. She isn’t really dead of course; she and Sasha went to Hilltop to see the doctor; but Negan doesn’t know that. He says it’s too bad, because he was planning to ask her to come back with him. Quick thinking, Gabriel. You creepy shit.
Michonne returns with a dead deer, and Rick convinces her to give the rifle over to Negan. He’s afraid if she doesn’t and they find the gun, Negan’ll kill someone. Which he most likely would. Rick tells her he won’t lose her or Carl, which was one of the few highlights of the episode.
Later he’s making up a bed on the floor when Michonne confronts him about giving in so easily to Negan. He tells her about Shane, and admits that Judith isn’t his biological daughter. He says it’s something he’s had to accept so that he can raise her and love her, and now he (and everyone) has to accept that Negan is in charge.
Earlier, Dwight sent Rosita and Spencer to look for Daryl’s bike. While they’re out, Rosita kills some zombie saviors and gets a gun off of one of them. It’s empty, but once she’s back in Alexandria she finds a shell casing on the ground. She goes to Eugene and asks him to make her a bullet.
Michonne goes out again the next day (sans rifle, obviously) and she discovers a fire on the road. It’s their mattresses. The ones the Saviors took.
Nice.
Review
Why does The Walking Dead do this to us? Why do they insist on filling an entire episode with nothing but…filler? We know Negan is a bad guy (though he doesn’t done much bad since episode 1). We know the Alexandrians have to give him their shit. We don’t need a 45 minute reminder, 30 minutes of which is Negan monologuing about it.
I had to laugh at the episode review on forbes.com:
Negan talks and talks and talks and won’t ever shut up. It’s far from frightening. It’s far from the intimidating, scary Big Bad we were promised. It’s more like fingernails on a chalkboard. Negan is like an annoying bully who spends most of his time taunting rather than doling out villainy.
I’m honestly. Sick? Of Negan? He’s boring. I don’t particularly like the way JDM plays him, either. I know the character is supposed to be all jokey, yadda yadda, but what works on the page doesn’t necessarily work on screen, and so far Negan just doesn’t…work. He’s not scary; he’s just disgusting, obnoxious, and, again, boring. Also I wish he’d stand still. Did he once get really bad heatstroke or something? He reminds me of Trashcan Man from The Stand miniseries after we walks through the Nevada desert to get to Las Vegas.
Negan made Rick carry Lucille through the whole day, and a couple of times it looked like Rick might take him out. But of course not. When he was on the other side of the gate, Rosita really should’ve blown his damn head off. Yeah, there were a bunch of Savior dudes with him, and they have Daryl, but I think a lot more than Daryl are going to die before all’s said and done. If Negan decides to actually start making good on his threats, that is.
As it is now, I feel no immediate danger. Obviously he’s not going to kill Daryl; not just because he’s Fan Favorite White Guy, but also because he needs Daryl as collateral, and he wants to break him and make him his right-hand man. Maybe replace Dwight, but I dunno. They too recently killed Glenn and Abraham for another major character to die, so I mean. *shrug* I guess we’re in Walking Dead stasis for a while.
Oh and there’s another thing. So after last week spent trying to humanize Dwight, this week he was back to being the same asshole. He was petty and nasty to Rosita, and of course he took Daryl’s bike. Last week feels like as much of a waste as this week was; I don’t know if we gained anything at all from our inside look at the Saviors, or from watching Daryl’s torture. Especially considering how cowed he was this week, making you wonder what they did differently since he was so defiant last episode.
One quick note: the thing about the mattresses. I read that somewhere, because honestly I couldn’t tell what the hell she was looking at. It looked like a wreck to me, but I thought maybe bags of something? It was unclear. Maybe they’ll actually mention it in a later episode.
Next week will focus on Sasha and Maggie at Hilltop. Maybe something will happen? We can hope? Wish? Dream? Not just another hour of people talking and talking and talking but not really doing anything.
Episode Grade: Ugh. D. This was so boring and wasted.
