A lot has happened in the two or three days The Walking Dead‘s sixth season has depicted so far: zombie hordes, violent attacks, crises of faith, and the deaths of many random Alexandrians have made for a busy 48 or so hours since we saw Rick, Glenn and company be forced to kick their zombie herd plan into high gear. “Now” is a direct byproduct of all that movement: it slows down the season’s breakneck pace to a slow-motion sloth crawl, an hour spent in an echo chamber yelling “Wow, these Alexandrians are idiots!”, delivering the kind of Walking Dead episode we haven’t been privy to since the doldrums of Season 2.
In fact, this episode almost seems constructed as a direct copy of The Farm arc in Season 2. There’s one character who realizes she can’t go find someone she loves (then it was Carol, now it’s Maggie), a bunch of people who are clearly unprepared and delusional about what’s happened in the outside world, and Rick trying to convince the leader of said strangers that it’s time to let life get a little bit darker, a little more real (which is his case, usually means loud and sweaty). There’s wholesale swapping of speeches – led by “We fight, or we die,” sealing the creepy sexual relationship about to commence between Rick and Jessie – and the overwhelming feeling The Walking Dead writers are twiddling their fingers as they leave the audience hanging between Point A and Point B of this first half a season, with only a few real plot threads to carry them through eight hours.
So like those early Season 2 episodes, The Walking Dead has to look inward with its unfamiliar characters, both to repopulate its world (Season 5 of TWD saw the departure of numerous regulars), and double down on the season’s themes. Unfortunately, the only way TWD knows how to do this is by having characters either explain their feelings to another person, or have said other person explain their feelings back to them: from Tara/Denise to Maggie/Aaron and back around to Rick/Deanna, every pairing in this episode feels like embarking on an expository journey to nowhere: the only real issue at hand (while roughly half the zombie horde throws themselves limply against the fortified walls of the town) is reality hitting the Alexandrians like a ton of dull, weightless bricks. This leads to moments like those two idiots who think its a good idea to raid the entire food pantry because they’ve completely given up on their chance for survival, or the women who are just stunned by Jessie killing a zombie, even though the just watched half their town get brutally murdered by actual people, who move at human speeds; and these are not avenues for rewarding, thoughtful television.
That leaves “Now” with a lot of nonsense, obfuscating the few strong moments the episode had to work with. Instead of getting a stronger sense of Maggie’s emotional journey through the hour, we spend time with stupid Ron and stupider Sam, the latter of which doesn’t want to come downstairs because it’s “still the same” upstairs. With the lives of major characters, it’s hard to care about the lives and concerns of these people who refuse to recognize the realities of the world they’re living in. But it’s not just them: even some of those that are accepting it and moving forward come off as childish and annoying, be it drunk Spencer yelling at his mom, or Deanna still refusing to learn that if you’re going to rage on a zombie body in frustration, you should probably still make sure you kill it, and not just stab it in the chest a bunch with some stuff you stole (right? That stuff must have come from the pantry, which makes her a big ol’ hypocrite).
Clearly, The Walking Dead is wasting its time, and we can assume next week’s episode is going to move back away from Alexandria to focus on the others still trying to keep half the zombie horde on the pre-determined path, further massaging the show’s brief timeline for the first eight episodes just a little bit longer, until the last two episodes, when everything meets and moves forward. However, unlike the show’s last attempt at split timelines (The Road to Terminus arc, arguably the best arc this show’s ever had), there’s no poignant character transformations or creepy mysteries (besides the horrid way they’ve handled/are handling/will probably handle Glenn) to help deflect and hide its narrative stalling tactics. Without it, what we’re left with is the redundancies of “Now,” the most lifeless episode of The Walking Dead in recent memory.
Other thoughts/observations:
- Where the hell is Carol and/or Gabriel? Morgan’s barely a presence, save for the one time he nods at Rick.
- “The wall will hold – can you?” Groan.
- When the hell did Jessie have time to make cookies? They look like snickerdoodles, though, which would certainly get a young Randy down those stairs, and quickly.
- The longer this Alexandria arc goes, the more it begins to feel like The Farm 2.0… this is not a good thing.
- They are clearly setting up Ron trying to shoot either Carl or Rick; how Ron suddenly goes from hating Carl and Rick to being all cool about everything is horribly obvious.
- Hey Rick – YOU. ARE. CREEPY. Plus, this show’s done nothing to make me think these two are actually attracted to each other for any meaningful reason.
- Tara was as surprised by Denise’s long kiss as I was.
- “Being afraid sucks.” Ugh, we’ve had this conversation twenty times on the show!
[Photo via AMC]
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