The Walking Dead - Season 5, Episode 11 - "The Distance"

Blair Fink (Twitter: @BlairMFink, Instagram: @BlairFink)

Steve Bethel (Twitter: @the_lazy_gamer, Website: steveisthelazygamer.blogspot.ca)

Trivia: Into the Woods was filmed entirely in Andrew Lincoln's beard

The Walking Dead, Season 5, Episode 11, "The Distance"

ISN'T IT PRETTY TO THINK SO?

Well at least there was some action...in this episode we find Rick has trust issues, Glenn is a damn good driver, high speed, stays on the road, all despite his windshield being totally covered, we find out Abercrombie prefers Fitch, and walker heads make poor lamps.

There were two things about this episode that I really liked. The first was the palpable tension amongst Rick’s group about trusting this hope of a new haven and the dynamics of how they dealt with it. You really feel like they’ve been together long enough that they knew how to disagree and communicate constructively. Michonne has slowly become co-leader of the group and when she simply states “we’re going,” Rick begrudgingly but respectfully consents (albeit with a few conditions of his own). It felt like everyone trusted each other to do what was best for the group and if they had concerns, they would be heard. The potential to generate interpersonal conflict was there but would have been unnecessary and tiresome and I was thankful we got to see them work it out without any contrived drama. After being burned time and time again, the prospect of safety, of success, has to take a lot of courage to open themselves up to. Hope makes you vulnerable, something that can get you killed in this world, or at least make you want to die.


While Rick gets some push back from some the group he does have a few who are just as weary. Daryl is always on edge but down for whatever Rick decides. Glenn seemed to come back into a leadership/lieutenant role, taking point to look for the vehicles. Carol seemed to agree with Rick, although that isn't stated at all until the closing line from her. A few odd choices though, as Rick talks to Michonne (a fair share of relationship building in this episode between these two) about how he will make his decision based on what he hears when they get there, yet the whole plan was to go at night. What do you expect to hear at night Rick? Going along a walker infested road at night was also a poor choice. I'm also baffled at how the RV managed to get away from the walker road. It seemed to be a straight road, otherwise how would Glenn have been able to drive without being able to see. So my question is: where did the RV go? And if the car was clearing a path why not follow? 


The second thing I liked was the portrayal of the drive up the walker infested road. The aerial view of the path Glenn was clearing, along with the red of the car lights, flare and blood made for some tasty visuals. While the whole thing was a big chaotic and confusing, I didn’t really mind because it was pretty to look at.


The woods were a very confusing scene...I didn't much care for this part of the episode. How did they get separated so easily/quickly? How did Rick's revolver have so much ammo? Where did Glenn get an AK? How did they find the RV group so quick? The flare went off and I assume they followed that direction...that is if they didn't get all turned around in the woods, in the dark, while dealing with walkers.

Finally, we find out Aaron is gay and is in a relationship with his co-recruiter Eric. The scene where they reunite is both good and bad in a way. It is good because they allow these two new characters their own scene to show us their relationship and more about who they are. The introduction of the first gay relationship on the show could have easily been tentative before being quickly pushed to the side but thankfully it was acknowledged head on and given room to breathe. On the other hand, you could feel how big of deal the scene was supposed to be when it really isn’t be that big of a deal at all. It both should and shouldn't have been a big deal. Regardless, Aaron and Eric are already more interesting and fleshed out in one episode than a lot of past characters on this show ever were (Looking at you, T-Dogg).

The episode speeds up near the end. Group reunites, make camp, drive, pull up to the gate. Where is this place? In Washington? Was that Washington in the distance? How far from Washington are we? So what's the consensus? Do we trust Aaron? He seems to have come prepared, photos, peace offerings, honesty(?), jokes...too bad it's a tough crowd. However there were a few things that make you say "Hmmm".  

Personally, despite a few red flags, I think Aaron and Eric are good dudes. I would like to think that, after the way Woodbury and Terminus worked out, the writers wouldn’t put us through the same formula a third time. While the people-less photos are suspicious, I’m going to guess that while Aaron and Eric and good guys, their portrayal of the people of Alexandria is…less than accurate. Aaron describes a utopia, complete with Friday night dancing, but I’m guessing we’ll be looking at more of a safe but mostly empty stronghold. I think Aaron and Eric are lonely.

QUESTIONS AND OBSERVATIONS

-Another new name for the zombies: roamers.
-Rick's face when trying the apple sauce: 'damn, that is pretty good…'
-The apple sauce was likely the deciding factor in Rick’s decision.
-Shady Aaron: no people in the photos, lame excuse for not eating apple sauce.

-HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES!?

-All the past focus on the 3 questions, why did Rick not ask them right away?

-Do Rick and Michonne suck face before the end of the season? Fingers crossed!

-Good call on Rick hiding the gun? I would have been a little annoyed with Rick if I was there. They are broken down and Rick just sits there, they get the RV running and he decides to go for a stroll through the woods. Come on!!

-At first, I was like…Rick’s lost it! He’s trying to make a Gun Milkshake! But seriously, do we have another Chekhov’s Gun situation on our hands. No way they show us that and never revisit it, right?

-Andrew Lincoln can do magic with his face/eyes. 

-Andrew Lincoln’s beard was the rosebush in The Secret of NIMH.

Blair's Rating: B+

Steve's Rating: 3.7 jars of apple sauce out of 5

Blair's MVP: Aaron

Steve's MVP: Glenn

Blair's Deadpool Pick: Eric

Steve's Deadpool Pick: Tara

The Walking Dead, Season 5 Episode 10 - "Them

Blair Fink (Twitter: @BlairMFink, Instagram: @BlairFink)

Steve Bethel (Twitter: @the_lazy_gamer, Website: steveisthelazygamer.blogspot.ca)

"Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I guess I'll go eat worms."

The Walking Dead, Season 5, Episode 10, "Them"

DEAD INSIDE

Well...not a whole lot to talk about in this episode. I sure hope something interesting happens soon. I'm not sure I can take another forty minute walking montage. But let's try to open this up a bit.

Don't Open. Dead Inside. It's what was written on the chained-up doors in the hospital in the first episode of the entire series. Then, it meant there were literally dead beings inside the doors. Now, it's the characters who are dead inside. But I'll be gosh darned if they don't start opening up by the end of the episode anyway. Doesn't it just warm your cold, shrivelled, little heart? No. It doesn't. I get they have to address the impact of Beth and Tyreese's death, but it is so painful to watch these sad sacks drag their defeated selves down the road with metaphorical (and now literal) rain clouds hanging over them. Daryl is turning into more of a loner and has to resort to burning himself with a cigarette to actually feel something, Maggie is stoic and pessimistic, and Sasha is destructive and hostile. What a pleasant crew.

Sasha: broken. Maggie: broken. Noah: broken. Daryl: about to break. Preacher: losing faith. Everyone: thirsty (except Abe). This is getting ridiculous, it's so depressing, it hurts my soul to watch it. I have to hop on YouTube and watch adorable animal videos to get my spirits back up.

I may have spent more time on finding this video than on my part of the writeup.

I'm a little surprised it took so long to show wild dogs. I would imagine that packs of dogs would be a very real threat in a situation like this, mind you I would have thought that would have happened a lot sooner. Unless they were all in hiding and scavenging, but now are starting to get desperate. Which I suppose is what they were trying to depict. Add a little more desperation to the episode. As exciting as that scene could have been ol buzz kill Sasha buts an end to it before it can even begin. I wanted to see some "The Grey" style, circling pack hunter, showdown shit, not a stand off that caused about zero intensity.

When the zombie horde attacks the barn, the show lays it on pretty thick that only the power of teamwork miraculously saved them from both the zombies and the wrath of God. *rolls eyes*

That is one sturdy ass barn. Massive trees are uprooted in the storm yet they are all save and sound, cozy and dry(!?!) inside. That is craftsmanship!

The Walking Dead is at its worst when it gets too talky. For me, it didn't get any worse than Rick's little speech in the barn about his grandfather and how...wait for it...”We are the walking dead.” REALLY? How very meta of you, Rick. I can only imagine the lobbying in the writers room to take it one step further and for Rick to show Daryl the “From a friend” sheet of paper in the style of his character from Love Actually. Sheet one: HERE'S SOME WATER. Sheet two: TO ME, YOU ARE PERFECT FRIENDS.

So what do we know? They've been wandering for three weeks. A quick Google maps check tells me it would take 200+ hours to walk from Atlanta to Washington. That's a long trek, even with driving portions of it. Let's do some math; If you assume 8 hours of walking a day, which they probably do more(as well as drove part way). Times 3 weeks since Atlanta, that is 168 hours. Which is good. Because that means they better be close and they better start doing something more interesting.

As for the water, "From a Friend'? Ok, I admit that would seem fishy, for a moment lets not focus on the fact that someone has been watching them for some time. Instead let's look at the clues here. Clean, crisp sheet of paper/card stock; so whoever left that is clean (no finger smudges or dirt), and have clean, storage/living spaces, so they are obviously in a better position than our group. They left about 20 liters of water; that is a lot of water to give as a handout in this situation, so again, this/these "friends" are much better off than our heroes who spend about 2 minutes collecting rain water before rushing off for cover. I thought they were in need of water? You can't just sit in the rain for a few minutes and boom there goes your dehydration. Then we meet our "friend". At least there was some tease at something exciting happening soon-ish...hopefully, because I was ready to give up like some of the members of the group. 

It isn't until the last minute that my interest is piqued, when Maggie and Sasha are about to Instagram the sunrise until some dude named Aaron wanders straight out of an L.L. Bean catalogue and into their field of view. We've seen this a bunch of times before, obviously, about trusting strangers claiming to be friendly (and it hasn't gone well yet) but I'm still interested, if only because it will mean things might start happening, instead of the entire freaking cast doing the Charlie Brown sad walk down the road.

QUESTIONS AND OBSERVATIONS

-Carole seems fine after being on life support a few weeks earlier. She really is the John McClane of this show.

-How does Daryl still have smokes? How did he open, clean and fix the music box? This is no ordinary man!

-So Gabriel seemed to be straying from his faith, at least until the rain came and he asked forgiveness

-Why didn't Michonne and Sasha wrestle in the rain? (If that had happened I might have brought it up more in the above write up)

-Where are we at on Rick's beard? Awesome? Too much? Ladies, your thoughts?

Blair's Rating: C-

Steve's Rating: 2 shitty music boxes out of 5

Blair's MVP: Judith

Steve's MVP: Judith (I've never seen such a quiet baby)

Blair's Deadpool Pick: Noah

Steve's Deadpool Pick: Maggie (I'm really rooting for her)

The Walking Dead - Season 5, Episode 9 - "What Happened and What's Going On"

Blair Fink (Twitter: @BlairMFink, Instagram: @BlairFink)

Steve Bethel (Twitter: @the_lazy_gamer, Website: steveisthelazygamer.blogspot.ca)

I wish Tyreese was hallucinating E.T. in this screenshot.

The Walking Dead, Season 5, Episode 9, "What Happened and What's Going On"

HEAVEN KNOWS I'M MISERABLE NOW

“My eyes can hardly believe this highly discolored garbage.” 

–Ignatius J. Reilly, A Confederacy of Dunces

*drinks a tall glass of Haterade*

So not super impressed with the episode. For jumping back into the second half of the season I was hoping for a little more than an episode full of depressed, beat down heroes.

I hate dream sequences. I’m sure they’re a blast to write but as a viewer, I find them incredibly frustrating and irritating. Knowing that, it will come as no surprise when I say that I hated this episode. It’s arguably the worst episode the show has ever done. I mean, I guess The Ghosts of Walking Dead Past were more hallucinations than a dream, but it felt like just lazy writing and a cheap way to bring back dead characters. If they were going to have ghosts talk to a character, they could have at least had it happen to Carole so the A Christmas Carol jokes land better.

We open with some foreshadowing, someone digging. Generally digging means someone died as they "don't burn their own.”

Not only did I hate the ghosts/hallucinations, they had to team them up with some choppy, out of order, slap-on-an-Instagram-filter editing in an ill-advised attempt at serving up artful existentialist musings that instead spewed out as pretentious, hackneyed navel gazing. I instantly hated the opening foreshadow montage but I assumed that was the end of the dabble into artsy editing.

His whole hallucination trip was a bit weird, that has never been explored before when others get bit, so why now?

Because…art?

Obviously Noah's home was going to be a bust. What hasn't been a bust lately? So we see Noah lose hope, Rick and Glenn are gloomy. Michonne and Tyreese were the only real hopeful ones. That ended poorly for the latter. But to be fair he let his guard down. He didn't fully sweep the house, he knew there was at least one walker present. What the hell T? You know better than that! This whole 'house of a few corpses' was a bit weird. I get the metaphor and what not but it was just weird and maybe even a bit contrived. I get they all had their wounds at first and once they were in the car telling him to let go they were clean and that was obvious. I just don't understand why Tyreese gets this whole letting go montage. Complete with musical back drop too. Fun fact, the voice on the radio was Andrew Lincoln in his native dialect.

What did this episode accomplish? 

1.       Lets us know everyone is struggling with Beth’s death.

2.       Shocks the audience by killing off another character right after Beth’s death.

3.       Developed Noah’s character a tiny bit, I guess

4.       Hinted at future plot points (see Questions and Observations below)

5.       Made me angry.

One of the reasons the first half of this season was so good was the growing sense of humour and occasional fun the characters were having amidst all the grimness. Now everyone is sad and grumpy. This is not what I want to watch. I get that they have to react to Beth’s death but now the pit of sadness they have to rise out of is twice as deep. I feel like this episode destroyed all the momentum the show had built as well as me looking forward to watching it. What happens now? The next episode has to be everyone just lying around super depressed or ugly crying, right?

QUESTIONS AND OBSERVATIONS

-The most interesting part of the episode for me was the strange, chopped up walkers scattered throughout the episode. Is someone building a Super Walker made from only the finest walker pieces?


-The torso truck was weird, considering it was so far from the dismembered parts that Rick and co came across. As stated we aren't the comic readers but the 'W' scored on the heads will probably be our next villain(s) at some point. If they are heading to D.C. I'm sure they will run into them sooner rather than later.

-I didn’t even notice the W’s.

-Does the 'W' stand for Warriors? Are we getting a crossover?

-It stands for…WASHINGTON! We’re going back!


-There's always an evil twin!

-For a split second I thought the pictures on the wall were of young Noah and a twin brother he didn’t mention. It was all a trap! His evil twin brother was alive and was going to capture Tyreese. Alas…nope.


-Where are the rest of the group? Where is their temporary base? Still in the city?

-I think they’re moping in a ditch somewhere being sad and listening to The Smiths.

Blair's Rating: D

Steve's Rating: 2 out of 5 model airplanes

Blair's MVP: The end credits

Steve's MVP: Michonne

Blair's Deadpool Pick: Noah

Steve's Deadpool Pick: Maggie