After a week break to check on what’s up with Abraham, Eugene and the rest, things shift back to the phonetically aligned pair of Daryl and Carol as they try to bust Beth out of the friendly neighborhood hospital she’s chilling in back in Hotlanta. So let’s dig into that storyline and wrap that jazz up, shall we?
As per usual, avoid this review until you’ve watched last night’s episode. Spoilers will be discussed at great length.
1. This Show
A while back when I wrote about how great “The Walking Dead” has become in the fifth season (although the fourth season started building everything), I was genuinely concerned that I jinxed it. There was a comment related to that, and that was a huge consideration for me. I had grown to REALLY like “The Walking Dead” and I didn’t want to see that go away.
Man, it hasn’t gone away at all. Last night’s episode was one of the finest episodes of television I’ve watched in 2014 for any show, not just “The Walking Dead”, as Carol and Daryl’s search for Beth ended up being an endlessly fascinating search for who they are and what their relationship is in the aftermath of all of the hell they’ve gone through in the past couple years. To say that Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride did well in performing that task is an understatement; this was just utterly brilliant acting from two of the best performers in the cast.
“The Walking Dead” has finally turned into a show that builds characters out, and episodes like this one simply didn’t exist in years past. I couldn’t be happier that they do now.
2. Daryl and Carol
As I said, this was an exceptional episode centered on those two characters, and McBride and Reedus just crushed it. One of my favorite things the episode did was, while ostensibly centered on McBride’s Carol, it still went and pursued emotional truths about Reedus’ Daryl as well. And it really nailed some key bits, and they tie into the overarching themes of this season very well. This season – hell, this show – is all about maintaining your humanity in the face of great horror. There was one moment where Carol looked on at Daryl with great sadness because she feared that the man she likely loved was gone.
The secret about Daryl as a character is, while his capability is great, his kindness was the thing that set him apart amongst the rest of the cast. He always had the group’s back even when Rick was nuts, he named Little Asskicker, and he was the leader when there never was one. When he almost left Noah to die…you could just tell in McBride’s face that she was destroyed by that almost. “It’s like you were a kid, and now you’re a man,” Carol said to Daryl, but really, it’s like he was losing who she loved. But Daryl found it still in himself, and in that moment he brought happiness back to Carol.
Meanwhile, the interesting thing about Carol is unlike everyone else in the show, the zombie apocalypse in a weird way has led to a life upgrade for her. She was in a horrible place before, but as she admits, she was able to embrace who she was, and find new parts of her in the process. This has been a story of an awakening for the character since the start, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more impressed with the gradual growth of a character like I have been with Carol. In this episode, both Daryl and Carol proved they’re way more than ashes, and I loved watching it.
3. Character
It’s important I emphasize this again: this episode didn’t exist in the first three seasons. Hell, it didn’t exist until the second half of the fourth season, really. But this type of episode, which did wonders for building two of the characters who were already at the top of the cast rankings, is so necessary and so welcome to me as a viewer.
The thing about “The Walking Dead” as a comic that made it special wasn’t ever that Kirkman wrote crazy twists or that it shocked us or it was gory or things like that. It was that it had such marvelous small moments for its characters, and that we really knew and cared about them as people. The show missed that for a long time. It gets that now, and that’s the biggest reason for the show’s turnaround.
Continued below4. The Little Things
The way Atlanta looks when it’s a dead city.
The haunting, simple score.
The unbelievable capability Carol and Daryl have as people today.
The tent zombies.
The beat, beat, beat the show took before the zombies started raining on the flipped van after Daryl and Carol took a huge risk to survive.
The little things were part of what made this episode so exceptional – particularly that last one, which was maybe the most genuinely creepy moment of the series so far – and I couldn’t have loved them more. What was your favorite little moment?
5. Carol’s Future
Carol has to die, right? In fact, the first thing I wrote was “Carol’s dead. Lock it in.” when I was taking notes for this review. I hope I’m wrong, but they are taking so much time to build the character that I can’t help but feel that way. I hope I’m wrong and that it’s more of the point I made in #3, but if this half season doesn’t end with Carol dying, I will genuinely be surprised.
But god, I really hope I’m wrong, especially after all of the amazing, small insights into her past we got here. She’s so much more valuable than being a woman in a refrigerator.
