Things are slowing down real fast for The Walking Dead
The Governor (Morrissey) and Rick (Lincoln) finally met face-to-face this week, but it wasn't all that exciting.
It's been painfully clear every season that The Walking Dead struggles to maintain momentum through the start of the final third of a season. The midseason episodes have been great, and the finales are generally outstanding, but it always feels like the show is running in place, waiting for the final moment to get rolling towards a finale. That's exactly what happened this week, which is unfortunate for an episode that could have been so much more.
The majority of this episode focused on the meeting between Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and The Governor (David Morrissey). It was also the highlight of the episode, which isn't to say it was without its faults. Neither character really brought he gravitas you would expect to their first time on screen together. It was rather a bland series of negotiations, and nothing out of the ordinary happened. On the other hand, we got to see Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Hershel (Scott Wilson) bond a bit with Milton (Dallas Roberts) and Martinez (Jose Pablo Cantillo). It was interesting to watch these men treat each other as equals for a moment, though everyone knew that peace couldn't last. On the tail end of all of this was Andrea (Laurie Holden) acting stupid as always. It's too bad that the writers seem to like her character so much, because she doesn't inspire sympathy, even with the terrible situation she has put herself in. She is constantly making mistake after mistake and delivering dumb line after dumb line, and at this point, I'm just tired of her.
The only other real chunk of time in this episode was spent developing Glenn (Stephen Yeun) and Maggie (Laurne Cohan). I like both of these characters, and it's always nice when they get something of substance to work with, but this entire plot felt like a missed opportunity this week. We had Glenn squaring off against Merle (Michael Rooker) again, and then Maggie taking him off watch to have a little romance. Neither of these instances developed into something major for the group.
This was the biggest problem facing this week's episode. We all know it isn't quite finale time for The Walking Dead, but it's very difficult to admire an episode that spends so much time accomplishing nothing. There was no change form the beginning of the episode to the end, and we all knew where this was heading. The writers could have helped themselves by throwing some sort of curveball in there, but instead they opted to play it safe, presumably saving all of their cards for the next four episodes. At least, we better hope so, because things are slowing down real fast for The Walking Dead otherwise.