There’s no way they can make four straight episodes I really enjoy, can they? After the success of “After“, “Inmates” and “Claimed“, it seems unlikely that “The Walking Dead” could keep this gravy train rolling on its ever so flimsy biscuit wheels, could it?
Could it?
As per usual, details from the episode will be discussed. If you have not watched it yet, do not read past here!
1. View from the trunk
This is a growing theme. The cold opens to “The Walking Dead” are fucking awesome.
This week’s edition was a particularly stunning and intense wordless section featuring Beth and Daryl letting a herd pass as they are in the trunk of a car, and they sleeplessly wait out the night hoping to survive just one more time. It was a particularly great demonstration of the terror and intensity that the show is capable of. Certainly a great start to this one.
2. Dealing with adversity
This episode mostly deals with how Beth and Daryl are coping with the aftermath of the Governor’s raid on the prison, and they are handling it in rather diametrically opposite ways. Beth, the person who casually blew off the death of her boyfriend(ish) last season, is rosy about things generally and looking to try alcohol for the first time. Daryl on the other hand is in a dark place, and seemingly all he wants to do is beat the ever loving shit out of some zombies.
Both get their chance to do what they are looking to do, as Beth gets her first foray into alcohol thanks to some good ol’ fashioned moonshine, and Daryl has some rather rad showdowns with zombies.
However, while this plot is clearly designed to drive character moments, it’s hard not to admit that from a plot standpoint, this joint be a little thin. Beth’s ongoing quest for alcohol is certainly not something I’ve been avidly campaigning for, and even when she does get it, the fact that she can drink grade A quality country moonshine and still function – while being a first-time drinker as well as dehydrated and moderately starved, assuredly – and doesn’t basically go into a coma is maybe the least realistic thing the show has ever done.
AND IT IS ABOUT ZOMBIES.
3. Light as a feather, stiff as a board
As the Talking Dead said afterwards, this is the episode where we learn more about Daryl and Beth than we previously knew. We’ll talk about Daryl soon, but with Beth, getting to know her was not a super successful venture.
Well, if it was, Beth just isn’t that damn interesting.
In the previous point, I touched on the fact that her sole goal for the episode and primary coping mechanism was to drink booze for the first time, but besides that, it seemed like her goal was to pursue some level of normalcy. Whether that means finding a cute sweater/polo combo or playing “I’ve never” terribly incorrectly, Beth – in a lot of ways – just came across as fairly vapid. Part of that is certainly tied to the extreme lack of development she’s received in the past, but when it came down to it, I just didn’t find her arc in this story to be that interesting.
Really, the only point where she was interesting was when she was talking about Daryl. When she pointed out that Daryl is “going to be the last man standing”, it shows that while not that interesting herself, she at least has been written to make good points about other characters. So that’s neat.
4. “Just because you’re bad guy, doesn’t mean you’re a bad guy.”
Thank you to “Wreck It Ralph” for the title to this point, and this one goes out the the show’s resident badass and redneck with a heart of gold – Daryl Dixon.
For the character that you’d probably be able to call the most universally beloved member of the cast, we haven’t really known that much about Mr. Dixon. We know he had a brother that he kind of let run the show, we know he’s a good person with a maybe questionable past, and we know he’s an amazing shot with a crossbow and a hell of a tracker. Past that? Not much, to the point where one character perpetually guessed what he did for a living before the apocalypse (that’s pretty much all that character did before he died).
Continued belowThis episode revealed a lot about Daryl as a character in a far more successful fashion than what they did with Beth, as we learned a) what he was doing before (drifting with Merle being idiots), b) what his earlier life was like (pretty horrible with a noted lack of Christmases), c) what he’s feeling (lots of repressed pain) and, most surprisingly, d) what kind of drunk he is (pretty angry and unreasonable, to be honest).
If you could boil this second half of the fourth season down to a word, it’d be catharsis, and Daryl finds that in this episode, as he gets his shot at therapy by burning down a house that was very similar to one his father had when he was a kid. As Beth told him, “be the man you are, not the man you were.” After a couple episodes of wall-to-wall solemn brooding, hopefully Daryl is back on the right track.
One point of annoyance: how did neither of them suggest that they take the night to sleep at the house after going sleep deprived two nights in a row? Maybe the therapeutic burning could have waited ’til the morning? Don’t you think?
5. Good episode, questionable focus
While I’d say I generally enjoyed this episode – particularly for the cold open and the Daryl bits – it’s hard not to note the general thin nature of the plot and the rather questionable focus of it.
You had an entire episode dedicated to just Beth and Daryl when you have everyone separated to high hell and one other team who hasn’t been seen in two episodes. Given that we’re already halfway through this half season already, dedicating so much time to the organic extraction of a few character bits is maybe a bit mishandled, and certainly could have been executed in other ways that would have allowed the episode to achieve more balance.
“Still” was a bit of a step down from the previous three, but it accomplished a lot of good things and feature two solid performances. I just can’t help but feel it could have been improved if this story was half of the episode, rather than all of it.
