WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THIS EPISODE
While The Walking Dead is edging towards to
the mid-season finale, which happens to be next episode, we must have an episode
before to it set everything in place to make the finale epic. Episodes that do almost
nothing but set up for a future episode tend to be very boring, but this is
something different.
We start off
with The Governor and his replacement daughter talking while he hangs up
laundry and she tries to make her move at chess. It switches between then and
the times right after the episode premature to this one. I am glad that we did
not get a boring prologue, because if the episode started at the point of which
the past episode ended, it might have come off hard to enjoy, but we good some
good dialogue this way. The Governor is asked by his new daughter if they are
all good, including him, and he ignores her question.
After the
intro, we get a quiet, slow buildup to something big during the first half of
the episode. We are slowly introduced to this camp and the innocence of their
lifestyle. Tough there is an action sequence; most of the first half of the
episode is just quiet buildup. But now I am already addressing my first and
only really true flaw of the episode: The attempts of the action scene. During this
short sequence, there is a quite loud score playing while we get rushed camerawork
moving quickly throughout the scene. This tells me that this scene was meant to
be intense. But while the scene was fun to watch, I still hate The Governor
enough to not feel intensity when his life is possibly at stake. I know that
there were other people in the scene, but the focus is on The Governor, as most
of the quick shots I can remember from the sequence are on or focused on him.
While this
madness is going on, the women are getting to know to camp. This portion of the
episode is slow, but I enjoyed it. Other than that, I cannot say anything about
that portion of the episode.
As the
episode progresses, it gets more and more near that halfway mark, and something
happens. After Martinez hints that he may not be able to keep these people
alive, The Governor decides to hit him on the head with a golf club and throw
him into a pit of walkers in this terrifyingly intense and even riveting scene
of just the right amount of violence to keep the audience on the edge of their
seat. The scene was very well directed to point in which I started feeling like
Martinez, struggling for life.
Later, we
see The Governor and some other people go on a run. They see a camp they
stupidly decide not to steal from, and when they come back to it, they realize
that someone else decided to clear the whole camp out. We now know that there
is another big camp that could possibly get thrown into this big mess. I want
the episode to explore that subplot deeply, but in the second half of the
season.
That night,
when The Governor takes his daughter, girlfriend, and his girlfriend’s sister
on a trip away from the camp, he reaches a human-constructed moat of walkers.
Maybe we have a bit of a connection here between the people clearing out the
camp and the people setting up some traps. I have no idea who in the right mind
would do this, but it was obviously to keep people in or out of somewhere. I am
very interested in that and I hope the show gets back to this in a future
episode.
The next
morning, The Governor decides to kill another one of these people, Pete, and
then goes to Mitch’s place and points a gun at him. The scene in which The
Governor kills Pete is another “Wow!” but is not as big as the dialogue between
The Governor and Mitch. Because in this scene we get a conversation that, for
some odd reason, reminds me of Pulp
Fiction. Anything that reminds anyone of Pulp Fiction is automatically awesome, but I do not know if this
was supposed to remind me of Pulp Fiction.
Anyway, this back-and-forth dialogue is great. It illustrates anything and
everything in The Walking Dead’s
scripts that makes them as powerful as they are. Then, The Governor lets Mitch
go.
Shortly
after that, a walker very expectedly attacks The Governor’s new daughter, and
the walker conveniently sucks at killing people. It looked very stupid holding
the little girl’s leg while it very well could have bitten into the leg. Then,
of course, The Governor decides to take ten seconds to get over there to shoot
the walker. That whole scene is my other flaw with the episode.
Then, after
The Governor goes by the lake, he decides to go on a walk. That walk takes him
to the prison. When he gets to the prison, he finds Michonne and Hershel on the
trip they left for at the end of episode five, “Internment”. He then points a gun at Michonne and the episode cuts
off. That is a masterpiece of a cliffhanger that will leave me hanging until
the mid-season finale airs. This episode did exactly what it needed to do in
setting up a fantastic mid-season finale and setting everything into place for
the finale.
The first fifteen-thirty
minutes of the episode were good. The next fifteen-twenty minutes of the episode
were very good. The rest of the episode, until the conclusion of the episode,
which was fantastic, was great. This episode, while having some underwhelming
action sequences, showed breakthroughs in the writing with riveting scenes
unfolding the plot, a great setup ,and fantastic conclusion leading up to the
mid-season finale in this great buildup episode.
I give this
episode an A- and an 8.7/10.
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