The Walking Dead - “Arrow on the Doorpost” - Review

The Walking Dead is a severely uneven. Its characters’ actions are often inconsistent and its plotting is just as haphazard. I don’t expect every series to be as perfectly plotted as a season of The Wire. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and be taken along for the ride to wherever a show might want to bring me, no matter how occasionally uneven, if it feels like I’m ultimately being rewarded. Plenty of great series were uneven. Many series often stumble in their later seasons. Friday Night Lights after its first season was uneven but still very good. Breaking Bad’s fifth season thus far has been doing things that are really pushing that show to a point where it’s questionable. Arrested Development’s third season was becoming much more hit or miss.

But unlike these much better series, The Walking Dead has almost always been inconsistent. The series has this odd tendency to go from very good to borderline bad, and often within the same episode. After “Clear”, last week’s excellent episode and a season high, “Arrow on the Doorpost” was likely not going to live up entirely. Much of the literary quality of “Clear” is gone, which isn’t a bad thing; no one ever said a show had to be literary to be good (Archer, Cougar Town, Parks and Rec, Bob’s Burgers are all examples of series that I would likely never describe as literary but are some of the best shows on television). However, instead though we’re back to the odds and ends hemming and hawing that’s been an irregular death trap for the series. 

It’s not all bad. Darryl and Martinez’s conversation, as well as Hershel and Milton’s are both nicely observed. Maggie and Glen finally talking through their issues was well played by Steven Yeun and Lauren Cohen; even if this happens a bit too fast, the two actors have too much chemistry to not buy it. I appreciated Glenn standing up to Merle, especially as it calls back to his recent character development.  Rick’s hesitation about handing over Michonne also fits well into the plot movements from last week’s episode. 

Its moments like these (and some of you might disagree or choose other ones) that the series occasionally pulls off in the midst of fragmented episodes (which is to say most episodes). But as for the moments that should really count, it somehow never seems to stick these; the real biggie here being the Governor and Rick finally meeting for the first time. 

Part of the problem is shorthand. Television does this often; it sometimes doesn’t tell us everything and has us fill in the gaps ourselves. This isn’t always a problem but it is on a series like The Walking Dead which rests upon constant pressing human (or at least zombie) conflict. In media res isn’t a bad plot decision but it doesn’t make sense for this episode. It hasn’t been established that Rick and the Governor were going to negotiate.  Sure it was hinted at that Andrea would try to set something up, but immediately jumping to this huge plot moment without having built up to it means that what should be an intense and exciting moment has to be spread out for far longer than it can sustain itself. Andrew Lincoln and David Morrissey are pretty good actors and so they cover for some unsatisfying, repetitious dialogue. Thus I wasn’t feeling anything during their sitdown, the most important part of the episode. 

The shorthand on a much larger scale is even more disconcerting. To me, the whole “war” between Woodbury and the prison doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. The Governor is crazy and so it’s reasonable that he’d want to be further crazy and destroy our merry band. But Rick and co. have no logical reason to fight this war. They may have a stockpile of guns now, but they’re still outnumbered and the prison isn’t as defensible as they keep convincing themselves it is. Some may have vendettas against the Governor, but in a world with zombies, shouldn’t your first priority above all else be to survive. Zombie stories are partly interesting because the main thrust is that the only true meaning in life anymore is to survive for the sake of surviving. Not only that but with their ad hoc family formed, these people have more meaning to their lives than a lot of people still alive must.  When Hershel said that some people wanted to leave, I yelled out, “THANK YOU!” None of them have been acting like real people on this count; they’re being irrational, paranoid, and gung ho with no extensive, well founded basis for it. 

I’d say this is better than the first three episode of the mid-season return, but it’s a step down from last week’s episode which showed so much of the promise this series has. Its untapped potential is truly depressing. The first eight episodes saw improvement and it’s still a better season overall compared to both season one and two, but it’s still a series that continues to take the easy way out. Now we’re on track for another showdown and the uncertainty surrounding the protagonist, particularly Michonne, is a direction that has some serious potential, but then again I never enter an episode of TWD with high hopes. I’m usually amused but it just doesn’t enthrall me like I wish it would.