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Five Thoughts on The Walking Dead‘s “The Key”

By | March 19th, 2018
Posted in Television | % Comments

As Season 8B of The Walking Dead continues, the season’s corpse continues to rot much like those of the Walkers in “The Key.”

1. A Key Without Teeth
For all of the hype the modified weapons are getting, we saw exactly none of them actually get used on the first mission out that involved them. Much like many of the developments in the show of late, it seems like little more than a missed opportunity. In fact, the only prominent one, Lucille herself, has her use as such eradicated as soon as it is relevant to combat.

Instead, we’re treated to a car chase (in a world where there’s probably low oil, especially in communities that are kept to one area) and a gunfight early on, though at least Rick actually runs out of bullets eventually.

2. Rick the Maniac
Well, we finally heard what Rick Grimes has to say about Daryl Dixon’s nearly incredible act of stupidity back last half-season, the one that caused this war to continue despite not needing to do so. What does Rick think of the assault plan?

Oh, he agrees with it in hindsight. The way New Rick thinks, everyone is fair game now. By his reckoning, the problem he had was that he cared about the innocent people with the Saviors who were forced to work for them. Now he only cares about himself and his people, and the rest of the world can just go to hell as long as he can survive.

Is this honestly the kind of guy we want to follow? It gets worse when he abandons any hope of subtlety as soon as he sees Negan (who again, is not at fault for what happened to Carl, but he seems to be using as a coping mechanism) and decides to crash his car, causing the aforementioned chase. Negan of all people seems to be the reasonable one, and this is the guy who beats people’s heads in with a bat. New Rick thinks that the best way to deal with Negan is to set his beloved bat, Lucille, on fire at the first opportunity and try to beat him to death with “her.” Not only does this do him absolutely no favors when one considers the only reason he’s doing this is based on information he does not have (and Negan doesn’t bother to tell him regarding what he realizes Simon actually did), but he can’t even kill the guy with it. Even a flaming bat with zombie guts isn’t enough to seriously inure him. Then again, the guts may have been burned away, but the point stands that even surrounded by burning zombies, Rick remains both crazy and ineffectual at the same time.

3. Maggie-Go-Round
Maggie Greene Rhee’s arc seems to be nonexistent at this point. In each of the last few episodes in which she appeared, she has been faced with an opportunity to turn down a darker road, only to turn back and decide on the high road. This week, it’s one of the weirdest ones yet, and that’s not entirely on her.

Georgie, Midge, and Hilda form an outright weird trio that falls squarely into deus ex machina. How do they scavenge so much food when all they have to give is a bunch of books (unless they have their own location that somehow nobody has come across)? Why do the two kids behind Georgie just act like a Greek chorus? They have no real reason to exist beyond giving the book at the end with farming techniques, and even that could have been done by just finding it somewhere. If this is their way of introducing what would become the Commonwealth (a group from way later down the line in the source), it just goes to show that the writers continue to have very little idea as to what they’re doing in terms of pacing.

Still, let’s look back to Maggie. While Enid’s nihilism makes sense in the wake of Carl’s pointless death (in universe and out), Maggie is an adult. She shouldn’t have to learn the same exact lesson every week, that lesson being “don’t be a horrible person.” You’d think that the farmer’s daughter would know not to beat a dead horse. The fact that she and Rosita agree that they will be totally okay once Negan dies isn’t doing her any favors either, considering that’s just fundamentally not how memory works.

Continued below

Tune in next week, when Maggie will learn not to burn her own farmland because of some timely advice from Michonne about What Would Carl Do!

4. Negan the Ninja
As usual, Negan is sent out into combat (despite having no reason to go himself) and ends up getting out without dying despite Rick making a beeline for him the entire time. At this point, though, in keeping with the turn to the supernatural that has come up repeatedly this half-season, he seems to have spontaneously become a ninja.

How else would one explain the fact that when he falls from an extended height on broken stairs, he lands in a cloud of dust that didn’t exist a second ago, just enough for Rick not to be able to find him one story down? Or the fact that when he escapes out a window, Rick sees absolutely no sign of the person who ended up kidnapping him, despite her doing so in a car?

More and more, Negan’s survival is becoming frustrating. It’s not just that he has no-one coming to kill him. It’s that he’s become practically immortal. Even when he gets caught, he gets out okay. Even when he’s beaten up, it’s conveniently in a way that leaves him relatively unharmed, even if he’s hit with the business end of his own weapon that is both on fire and covered in guts.

Maybe if the writers want to make it less unbelievable that he keeps living, they should let him be a leader from the back and have others do something more. This whole “frontline general” thing he’s got going on is not working for credibility, and that counts for Rick as well.

5. Rise of Simon
Through this episode, Simon’s rise as a villain has extended, but at the same time, is pretty weird. The weird part is more “why doesn’t anyone kill him” than anything else, so let’s go into the other half of it.

Leading on from his last foray into completely abandoning Negan’s command, he seems to have become the traitorous leader archetype of the crew, actively trying to get Dwight to join him in passive rebellion against Negan’s orders by not following him anymore. He continues to think this is all just a waste of time, but it’s his reasoning that is really striking.

The way Simon sees it, an adult moves on from past mistakes and incidents and paves the way forward. The only thing is that he sees the problem factor as Negan, who won’t move on from the existing trio of groups. In actuality, his talk of immaturity can more easily be directed at himself, given he basically wants to throw a game board away and destroy it because he’s losing. His plan is fundamentally stupid, as using the effort to take everyone out just won’t work, whereas use of the modified weapons might.

Of course, that would require this show to actually experiment and do something that looks like an actual apocalyptic scenario instead of “modern times, but less people and more zombies.” It’s unclear if they can actually handle that.

Might be best to throw away “The Key.” The writers don’t seem to know where the door is, anyway.


//TAGS | The Walking Dead

Gregory Ellner

Greg Ellner hails from New York City. He can be found on Twitter as @GregoryEllner or over on his Tumblr.

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