The Walking Dead Season 8 Episode 3 Review
The Walking Dead
'The Walking Dead' Season viii, Episode three: Cutting to Black
Flavor eight, Episode 3: 'Monsters'
A evidence as determinedly dismal as "The Walking Expressionless" can't allow for outright comic relief, but the serial has recently plant a more broadly leavening influence in Ezekiel, who begins and ends this calendar week's episode. The role player Khary Payton has done a marvelous chore of extending the character across his colorful accouterment — the elaborate wig, the slinking pet tiger — to create a cohesive, winning personality.
Payton plays Ezekiel as a kind rex with a magnanimous spirit that endears him to his many subjects. In the opening sequence, His Majesty delivers a rousing oration to his warriors as they ready for a battle nosotros glimpse in snatches of crosscuts. He energizes his soldiers with grandiloquence bordering on the Shakespearean, warning of "bloodthirsty rogues and unrepentant cutthroats bent on zero short of our pitiless devastation."
The writers couldn't have called a more ill-suited character for the show's latest hot seat of crimson herring non-death. This week'southward episode grants Ezekiel some other stirring oral communication in the last scene to mirror his oral communication in the beginning, ultimately cuing upwards a cluttered bump-off attempt. The episode cuts to blackness with his fate notwithstanding hanging in the balance, the latest in a long series of manipulative cliffhangers designed to goose like shooting fish in a barrel, brusque-term suspense. Just when three of his loyal compatriots leap on him the moment bullets start flying, seasoned viewers run into the writers leaving themselves a mode out. Information technology's the same old flim-flam, gone from enraging to simply tiring.
For its abiding decease fixation, this series has handled the topic carelessly and clumsily in its new flavor. Gabriel vanished without a trace, and later sustaining a mortal gunshot wound concluding week, Eric joins the ranks of the departed this week in another tearful good day that comes off as perfunctory. Gear up aside the inevitable pushback from the same fans who cried foul the final fourth dimension this show tore a gay human relationship asunder; Aaron's guilt-stricken farewell to his lover gets an near insultingly small corporeality of screen time, a articulate indicator that the show isn't all that committed to its ain emotional stakes. The show speeds through their teary farewell every bit if it's an obligation that must be completed before it's time for the good stuff.
Regrettably, the A Plot isn't particularly worth rushing dorsum to. The coalition of survivors continues to take a argue over dignity and danger. Negan's militia loses ground this calendar week, with many depression-level flunkies landing themselves in custody while their leader remains at big. Their makeshift imprisonment in flimsy rope restraints poses all the same another upstanding quandary to our collected heroes, who must once more reconcile their bones decency with practical concerns of resources and security.
After betraying Maggie and the denizens of the Hilltop, Gregory slithers back to their stronghold and pleads for a safety haven, claiming he but worked with Negan under duress — a dystopian take on the "good German language" argument. The larger caravan of prisoners follows soon after, and both requests for sanctuary leave those in ability with a Hobson'due south pick: Employ their precious food and h2o on people who were trying to kill them just hours earlier, or abandon the civility they've spent years working to constitute. This same push-pull betwixt respect for human rights and the imperative to punish feels meaty in the existent world, but when the writers briefly castor up against this wider significance, information technology's incidental.
Final week's discord amid the Hilltop-Alexandria-Kingdom alliance has grown fifty-fifty stronger, as Morgan and Paul come to blows over strategy planning while Maggie bickers with Gregory over their course of action for the disarmed enemy forces. The arrival of the infant Gracie adds a complicating emotional component to the moral puzzle, linking the fate of a true innocent to those already marred by sin. Whether that additional wrinkle can truly refresh the testify's get-to engine for drama has yet to be seen.
Now, though, this all amounts to the same kind of pessimism the show has e'er known. Rick and Daryl'south side quest is a reminder that cold hearts stand a better chance of survival. Rick's standoff gets cutting brusque when Daryl guns Morales down, a brutal but necessary measure out. Daryl is rough-edged simply defensible in this episode, until he passively murders a defenseless Savior once he'south provided information and outlived his usefulness. Even judging by Daryl's grittier standards, the violence feels unwarranted. And maybe it is, just the prove would rather nosotros believe he's being diligent and tying upwards loose ends that could spell problem after on.
As ever, the writers side with the shrewd and dispassionate, punishing those characters foolish enough to exude a trivial warmth. The line "I'yard not right, but that doesn't make me wrong" stands out during the extended squabble over how best to deal with the prisoners. This bit of dialogue doubles as a mission statement for a show guided past moral compromise. The characters have accepted that they cannot sally from this bloody crucible completely unscathed; their only solace is the knowledge that they're not "incorrect," and that they're victims of circumstance.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/05/arts/television/the-walking-dead-recap-monsters.html
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