RECAP, I GUESS: The Walking Dead, S06E04, “Here’s Not Here”

This episode is not worthy of a recap.  It wasn’t bad, necessarily, it’s just that nothing that happens in it is anything we didn’t know already.

WHAT WE KNEW BEFORE: Morgan met a dude who converted him from the half-crazy killer he was in “Clear” into the calm, life-preserving Aikido master we see in the most recent season.

WHAT WE KNOW NOW:  Morgan met a dude who converted him from the half-crazy killer he was in “Clear” into the calm, life-preserving Aikido master we see in the most recent season.  That guy had a goat.

Here is the goat:

I am a goat. I die at the end.

I like goats. I would have liked this goat more had, at any point, it made any of these noises:

Sadly, it does not.  It does screech at one point, because zombies are trying to eat it, but Morgan saves it.

So, yeah.  Morgan’s all I CLEAR NOW, SO EVERYBODY DIES, including a couple of normal humans who just, like, get in his way for a second so he kills them both, and he’s being all crazy and burning bodies, and he finds this guy’s house, and this guy locks him up, and then it turns out that the locked door was never locked and Morgan coulda just walked out of his prison at any time, and that’s a metaphor for Morgan’s mental state, and oh let’s learn Aikido, and the dude who played Eastman should have been played by J.K. Simmons because this guy is totally J.K. Simmons with about 20 pounds of Aikido master vegans in the zombie apocalypse shouldn’t be pudgy where did that come from added on him.

And eventually one of the people Morgan killed but apparently did not prevent from rising attacks him, and Morgan freezes up for some reason so dude kills the zombie and the zombie literally bites him in the love handles, making this easily the dumbest death the show’s had in a while, and then the goat’s dead too, and it turns out Morgan has been telling this story to the tied-up Wolf he didn’t kill in the other episode the whole time, so I guess Chekhov’s getting another chance.

Here is the most funny and/or interesting thing about this show:

Ignore the meme; this is the only picture I could get of the shirt.  That’s Eastman.  HIs name is “Eastman.”

Lennie James was trained in how to fight by the same guy who did the fight choreography for Donatello in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

One of the guys who created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is Kevin Eastman.

And here Eastman is, wearing a shirt referencing turtles.

Ha!  I get references!

Here’s another picture, included only to show just how ridiculous the place where this dude manages to get bitten is, plus Lennie James is all being a ninja and stuff:

Here’s the thing: I don’t actually mind a Morgan-centered episode at all, and I’m genuinely not terribly concerned about whether Glenn’s dead or not if I’m being honest.  I can wait another week.  I’m actually expecting to not find out for two weeks, because I betcha tomorrow’s episode is entirely Alexandria-centered and we don’t find out a single thing about Glenn one way or another.  But this episode was so one-and-done that… shit, these guys are both great actors, so maybe give them an episode that matters somehow?  Because this one doesn’t.  You’ve missed nothing if you skipped it, and that sucks.  Leave Eastman alive!  He’s interesting!  He and Morgan have great chemistry!  Why bother killing him off, especially in a really dumb way?

I think if they’d let the guy live, I might be more inclined to agree with the people who really liked this episode, and I found at least one reviewer who thinks it’s the best episode the show’s ever done, although that guy’s take on the rest of this season is sorta booty.  I can’t agree with either of them, because there’s nothing new here and nothing changes.  And that’s a shame, given how good the two actors are who had to carry this ep.

The worst thing?  We never find out about the peanut butter protein bar.  I really am going to have to go back and watch “Clear” again to see if Michonne steals that damn protein bar.

Is it next Sunday yet?

RECAP: The Walking Dead, S06E03, “Thank You”

Man, this has been an amazing season so far, but this is probably going to be my shortest recap ever, because a whole lot of stuff happens but really nothing happens.  Here’s the tl;dr version:  We go back to the group that was herding the Walkers in the first episode.  Everyone from Alexandria dies, except for Heath and another new black (!!!) guy whose name I don’t recall.  And Glenn dies.  Sorta.  Maybe.  Probably?

Uh, spoiler alert.  You don’t still need spoiler alerts for these things, do you?

A couple quick bullet points and then we’ll get into the important bits:

• Basically everyone spends the episode trying to redirect the herd and get back to Alexandria.  There’s a lot of splitting up and a whole lot of people get killed.
• This episode maybe coulda had some more mercy shots, because all but one of the Alexandrians who get killed by zombies get torn to shreds.  There was one guy who Michonne really could have sworded to the head and she just let him get eaten.
• Rick injures his hand, which could be leading to something but probably nah, since we’ve already seen one survivor get cut by a knife covered in zombie blood and nothing happened.
• Amazingly, other than Rick and Abraham, Sasha, and Daryl, who don’t really have anything to do, the only people who definitively survive the episode are Michonne, Heath, and the other Alexandrian, who is also black.  He’s got a bullet in the leg but he’s alive.
• Every single time I write one of these I have to double check to see how many Rs are in Daryl.  You’d think I’d know by now.
• There’s more than a few teleporting zombies, where Alexandrians are safe one second and getting munched on by a zed nobody saw a second later.
• At the end, Rick has killed off five Wolves, including the one who stole the gun (great job there, Chekhov) and found some baby food in one’s pocket.  So, uh, there’s really only one place nearby where he might have found baby food, and Rick’s kinda frantic about it, except oops the Winnebago he’s in won’t start because Winnebagos don’t do that and also he’s completely surrounded by zombies now.
• Seriously, that’s not Dale’s Winnebago, right?  Where’s Dale’s Winnebago?

Okay.  Yeah.  On to Glenn.  This happens:

They’re cornered, standing on a dumpster, and note that there’s a barbed-wire fence behind them.  Nick’s about to shoot himself in the head.  Then he’s gonna fall off the dumpster, only because Nick really can’t ever do anything right he’s gonna take Glenn with him, and he’s gonna fall on top of Glenn.  And then this happens.  This image is a little more gruesome than what I usually post but I feel like it’s kinda necessary:

And then this happens:

My theory: Glenn is alive.  And that’s bullshit, because Glenn should be dead, but next week is a 90-minute Morgan episode and they are sure as hell trying to capitalize on tension and Glenn should be dead.

In bullet points:

• Remember, Nicholas fell on top of Glenn.  We never get a clear shot of him other than the one above, where he appears to be crying more than he appears to be in pain. 
• Also, it appears that his intestines are being pulled out of his chest, which is kinda weird.
• Glenn was not listed in the “In Memoriam” portion of The Talking Dead after the show.
• Steven Yeun was not present on The Talking Dead after the show, and they always bring major cast members on after they die.
• Glenn rather incongruously calls Rick “Dumbass” at one point over the radio.  When was the last time Glenn called Rick a dumbass?  When Rick was hiding under the tank in the first episode.
• Steven Yeun has been photographed in costume and on set since this episode was filmed.  Granted, flashbacks are possible.
• Nicholas died too, meaning that no surviving cast member saw Glenn die. Which is not how this show rolls.  They couldn’t leave Beth just missing and it led to the worst storyline in the show’s history; there’s no way they’re gonna leave Glenn’s death ambiguous, and I don’t see his reanimated body making it out of that mob to conveniently walk past a cast member.  Nobody alive even knows where he is.
• Glenn’s death in the comic books was one of the biggest deals the series has ever done, and while I’ve always felt that moment had a good chance of being given to Daryl, it’s surprising that they’d kill him off so ignominiously when they’ve been teasing us with baseball bats for two seasons.
• There is also a fan theory that the whole bit is a hallucination, because supposedly Nicholas has already fired his gun dry before shooting himself in the head.  I don’t buy this theory but I’m mentioning it for completion’s sake.

So, basically, the theory goes that he’s gonna roll under that dumpster, and that he’s already covered in blood and guts (don’t they have to be walker guts?) or maybe he’s gonna pull one under with him or something and somehow he’s gonna survive.  I mean, on the one hand, it’s Glenn.  Dude once killed a zombie while tied to a chair.  Glenn is the best survivalist on the show, hands down.  If anybody can get out of this, it’s him, and I like the character a lot, and I want him to be alive, but… yeah.

Next week, Morgan becomes a Ninja Turtle.  The week after that, zombies attack Alexandria, so I’m betting it’s at least three episodes from now before we find out what happened.

So… uh… is it November 15 yet?

RECAP: The Walking Dead, S06E02, “JSS”

TL;DR version:  Holy crap.  Holy crap.

PREVIOUSLY ON THE WALKING DEAD:  Everybody’s gonna die.  That’s it.  I’ve been a writing teacher, right, and one of the things I’ve done AS A JOKE a few times is suggest that kids end a story with an asteroid strike and just kill everyone.  I mean, it’s final, right?  The third episode of this season is gonna be an asteroid strike, only the asteroid is going to be made of biting, and they’re just gonna kill everyone and go home.  Holy crap.

The episode begins with Enid in a cold open, as we see some of her life before joining the Alexandria crew.  We see her parents get eaten.  We see her find a turtle.  We see her eat raw turtle, which… god, that’s gotta be a salmonella risk or something.  We see her walking through a driving rainstorm but her hair isn’t wet, which is kinda weird.  Maybe she’s Jesus.  We see her bloody and messy and gross and oh she keeps putting JSS everywhere:

RAW TURTLE!!

Eew.

I know that’s a lot of pictures all in a row, but it’s really a quite striking couple of minutes– one of the best cold opens the show has ever done– and it’s also nicely mysterious and gross.  And Enid’s already way more interesting than she was last season.

So, yeah.  Back to Alexandria, where Carol is teasing somebody in a sort of passive-aggressive I really hate you sort of way about her smoking, and that lady’s still looking for her pasta maker, and then Carol gets back home and Sam is sitting on her porch.  Showing that maternal side we all love her for so much, she says “Your dad used to hit you, and he got himself killed.  It happened.  You live with it, or it eats you up” to the kid.  Yeesh, Carol.  Maybe at least avoid the phrase eats you up?

She makes a casserole, sets the timer for 45 minutes and looks out the window.  Smoker Lady is out in her front lawn having a cigarette.  And then she is suddenly HACKED TO DEATH OH CRAP THE WOLVES ARE HERE and this is the rest of the episode:  MURDER DEATH STAB BULLET BLOOD EXPLODE BURN DIE FIGHT MURDER BLOOD BLOOD STAB HATCHET MACHETE BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD AAAAAAAAHHHHH

I could credibly end the recap here: the Wolves attack Alexandria, they kill a whole lot of people, mostly horribly, except they don’t kill everybody because Carol.  I mean, that’s it.  The rest of the episode takes place basically in real-time; at the end, Carl takes the goddamn casserole out of the oven when the timer goes off.

Let’s bullet-point everything else I need to say.

• This scene with Jessie and Ron actually happens before all hell breaks loose, but it’s better to recap it here: Ron’s all I’m angry at you, don’t hang out with Rick, he cray cray and Jessie quite sensibly and appropriately and no-this-isn’t-bringing-a-nuke-to-a-gunfight challenges her brat son to lift his left arm above his head.  He can’t, because Pete did something horrible to him at some point in the past.  More on Ron later.
• Eugene’s line of the episode is “It hams my biscuits.”  That’s supposed to be a bad thing, I think, but I think ham and biscuits belong together.  Be better at Southern, Eugene.
• So the killing starts right away, and it’s mostly Wolves hacking unprepared Alexandrians to death, sometimes taking the time to take their arms off, too.  Carol kills one right off.  This is what she looks like the next time we see her:

• So, in quick succession, she’s killed a couple of Wolves, stolen their clothes, painted a W on her forehead in blood, and figured out to head for the armory.  She uses the disguise to good effect repeatedly.
• The big horn from last episode?  They strapped a Walker into the driver’s seat of a big rig and pointed it at the wall.  It didn’t quite work the way they wanted it to; eventually Morgan pulls the zombie off of the horn and it stops.  Morgan’s back in town already, by the way.
• I don’t think a big rig horn is really as loud as the horn we were hearing at the end of the first episode– that sounded much more like a civil defense alarm, something massive— but whatever.
• Carl actually tells Enid to stay in the house.  For serious.  Carl himself actually stays in the house, for the most part, guarding his little sister, only leaving once to deal with this:

• He shoots the guy, but doesn’t quite kill him, and there’s a brief moment where dude is begging for his life and you almost think he’s going to let the guy live, and the guy goes for his gun and Carl ends up having to kill him.  He tells Ron to come inside (yes, that’s a second person Carl has told to get into the house) and Ron runs off.
• Ahem.  Remember this, assholes?  From Season 3, I think?

• This was basically the exact same situation, except the guy in the .gif had a gun, and the Wolf almost got the drop on him.  I was arguing with anyone who would listen that Carl did the right thing here (shut up, Herschel) and this episode absolutely proves that I was right.
• Incidentally, this is the second time in two episodes that someone named Grimes has saved Ron’s life, so maybe you shut your stupid mouth about how Rick is daaaaaaangeroussssss, you little ingrate.
• HAVE I MENTIONED BLOOD AND DEATH AND MAYHEM EVERYWHERE YES EVERYWHERE HOLY CRAP?
• So, yeah, Morgan’s back in town already, and he really doesn’t want to kill anyone, and Carol thinks he’s a moron and basically keeps killing people Morgan wants to keep alive, at one point shooting a guy in the head that Morgan’s actually got tied up on the ground.  Morgan thinks he can stop people, and they don’t have to kill.  Carol’s having none of it.  She knows she needs to get the armory secured before they find it, and she enlists Morgan’s help to do it.  At one point they walk past Gabriel, who is on the ground being attacked, and she totally doesn’t care, because securing the armory is more important.  Even Rick would have broken off to save Gabriel.  Morgan manages it, though, so Gabriel survives the episode.
• Morgan helps with the disguise:

• Tara and Eugene get some good scenes with the town’s new post-Pete doctor, who isn’t a doctor so much as about half a psychiatrist.  She’s not super effective, but the acting is good.
• Gabriel asks Morgan how he learned to fight.  He answers “From a cheesemaker.”  ‘Kay.
• At some point Jessie has to leave Sam in a closet because she can hear a Wolf breaking into their house.  She feigns unconsciousness for a moment and then kills the shit out of the Wolf with her haircutting scissors.  It’s as gruesome a scene as the show has ever had.  I mean, seriously, check this out:

• Damn.
• At one point I swear Carol puts two bullets directly into a Wolf’s lungs through his back and he’s still able to run off.  I’m not sure how.  Toward the end of the episode, after the Wolves have been driven off, she actually breaks down and cries for a minute.
• Aaron finds his old backpack, the one with the pictures of Alexandria in it.  He realizes he’s probably the reason the Wolves found the compound.  He doesn’t appear especially happy with this information.
• Morgan is confronted– separately– by both of the two Wolves he let live at the end of last season.  One of them is part of a group of five.  He convinces them to leave, but not before one of them grabs a gun, which, hell, I’m sure that won’t backfire on the Alexandrians at all.  It’s actually a pretty badass scene:

• He finds the other Wolf ransacking a house.  This one, he actually kills, or at least I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to think he did.
• The final scene of the episode is Carol and Morgan walking past each other, Carol still dressed as a Wolf, and not saying a word.
• JSS stands for Just Survive Somehow, by the way.  Enid leaves it on a note for Carl; she’s presumably fled.  There are people online yapping about how she’s a Wolf in disguise; I doubt it.  Hopefully we see her again.
• There’s still thousands of zombies coming, by the way.

Is it next Sunday yet?

RECAP: The Walking Dead, S06E01, “First Time Again”

WALKING DEAD’S BACK!!!!!!  WOO!

PREVIOUSLY ON THE WALKING DEAD: Reading through my recaps of last season, I really hated the first half of the season, but the second half was so good it made me forget I hated the first half.  Anyway, they’re in Alexandria now and Rick is sliding back into Ricktatorship.  Go read the recaps; you can find links to some of them at the bottom of this post.

Also, Fear the Walking Dead happened.  I recapped that too!

So, this episode jumps around in time.  A LOT.  So much, in fact, that they’ve adopted a black and white color scheme for all the scenes set in the past.  It means that recapping it in a traditional way is going to be… well, annoying to write, at least.  So I’m gonna bullet-point this one, I think.  It’s actually a deceptively simple episode, to be completely honest.

• FACT:  You can tell where we are in the past by the number of butterfly sutures Rick has on his face.  The “past” starts immediately after the end of last season.  If Rick looks like this, we are in the way-back:

• Tara wakes up from her coma.  Upon seeing Eugene, she says “Thank God.  Nothing happened to your hair.”  I cannot figure out when I started loving Tara as much as I do.
• The basic plot of the episode is that part of the reason Alexandria hasn’t been overrun by walkers is that there’s a huge ravine wrapped around it that the walkers keep falling into.  Both ends of the thing have been barricaded by someone else so that they’re getting stuck in there.  The problem is, uh, there’s a lot of them.  Quite a lot of them.  And at the beginning of the episode, one of the tractor trailers barricading them in falls into the ravine.  Rick had a plan to lead them away from town, and they’ve gotta get it in place immediately.  This is what I mean by a lot:

That’s a lot of zombies.

• The plan basically involves Daryl, Abraham and Sasha leading the herd away at very low speed to… somewhere, because we never really find out where the endpoint is for this plan.  “Twenty miles away,” Rick says, but is there, like, a thing twenty miles away, or did you just pick that number?  The plan’s a bit more complicated than that but that’s close enough.
• When there are four thousand zombies behind the one you’re shooting an arrow at, Daryl, maybe you don’t waste that arrow, because you’re not getting it back.  I know you’ve got a signature weapon theme going and all that but dude somebody’s got an AK-47 with more ammo than your little crossbow.  Use that instead.
• Meanwhile, Morgan’s adjusting to life in Alexandria and there’s a lot of backstory about how Ethan Embry doesn’t trust Rick, and blah blah blah we should kill him blah blah blah no one takes you seriously, shut up, Preston.
• Ethan Embry’s old, guys:

Jennifer Love Hewitt’s totally not dating you now, dude.

• True story:  I spent a week in grad school many years ago basically doing nothing but watching Can’t Hardly Wait three or four times a day.  I suspect that gets you instantly committed nowadays.
• I also suspect I am not the only person who has done that.
• The DVD was a rental, that’s how long ago it was.
• Rick is totally still trying to bang the blonde hairdresser whose name I can never remember.  Pete’s wife.  Except, y’know, Rick just killed Pete, and in any other situation than the zombie apocalypse I feel like that should hurt your chances a bit.
• Heath’s here!  He has a completely hilarious conversation with Eugene when he gets back to town, because Eugene doesn’t know who the hell he is and he reacts to him in a predictably Eugene way.  Eugene’s last line to him is “It’s nice to see someone like me!  I fully respect the hair game.”
• Heath does not appear to think he is like Eugene.
• The actor looks exactly like Heath from the comics, except for the part where I always think Heath from the comics is a lesbian and forget he’s a guy until someone calls him Heath and I remember he’s supposed to be a dude.  Real-Heath looks way less like a lesbian.

• Heath is still alive in the comics.  They also added Morgan back to the regular cast this season.  Therefore: I’ll miss you, Gabriel, because you’re totally dead next episode.
• I won’t actually miss Gabriel.
• The zombies are now so soft-headed that some of them manage to destroy their own brains just by bonking them into one of the walls designed to herd them.  Either that or the group has a sniper that we never actually see, and that seems like a terrible idea because Rick and Michonne and Morgan are on the other side of that corrugated metal wall.
• Nicholas and Glenn are all buddy-buddy now.  Maggie at one point tells Tara about what happened between the two of them and Tara’s all IMMA KILL HIM but it’s okay because Glenn saves people.  Maggie calls Tara “one of the most important people in the world to me,” which initially felt weird.  Being in Team MEATRAG was apparently more important to Maggie than I thought.
• Lauren Cohan totally over-Southerns Maggie’s accent during this bit.  She’s out of practice.
• There’s a lot of yammering online about how Rick should have come up with a plan to kill all of the zombies instead of leading them away to wherever he’s (well, Daryl and Sasha and Abraham are) leading them away to.  None of the yammerers really have a good idea of how this is to be accomplished; there’s lots of talk of molotovs and fire from people who have apparently never thrown a molotov outside of a video game nor dealt with an uncontrolled, ambulatory wildfire.  There’s no good way to do this, y’all.  They don’t have the ammo.
• I reserve the right to decide Rick’s plan is dumb if we ever find out where they were going and it turns out to be somewhere dumb.
• Remember this from last season?

• Anyway, they’ve got Abraham speaking in haiku again.  I swear to God this is an exact transcription of some of his dialogue with Sasha in the car:

Just grabbing the bull
by the nutsack; I’m living,
darling, just like you.

• There’s a brief subplot where Rick refuses to allow Pete to be buried inside the walls and Pete’s son follows him and Morgan out into the woods.  That’s how they find the ravine full of zombies, actually.  It’s kind of dumb.  He’s dead, Rick, and he’s got kids.  Let him be buried in the town.
• Morgan sees right through Grandma Carol.  Which is awesome.
• Noticeably missing from the horde: child zombies.  There was one in the very first episode, and there was Sophia, and the kid zombie that bit Tyreese, and that may have been it for the entire series.  I get the real-world reasons why there are never kid zombies, but there should be some kids in this group.  Lots more than there are, actually.
• Old Ethan Embry gets his face messily eaten, because he’s on some other show.  He won’t stop screaming and Rick stabs him dead.  Bye, Old Ethan Embry.
• I am not convinced that Rick’s knife was angled to even touch OEE’s brain.  He may be a walker by now.  He basically stabs him horizontally in the base of the skull.  That’s a tricky angle to hit brain with.
• Daryl spends the entire episode driving three miles an hour with this look on his face:

• There’s a wonderful conversation between Morgan and Michonne about whether Michonne took one of Morgan’s peanut butter protein bars during “Clear” like three seasons ago.  I almost want to go back and rewatch it to see if they actually show her taking it.
• I got wondering at some point: Does anyone remember what happened to Dale’s Winnebago?  We see one at one point but I’m pretty sure it’s not the same one.  They haven’t had it since… what, before the prison?
• Anyway, the big plan works, mostly… right up until the point where what sounds like an air defense alarm starts sounding from somewhere.  Wait, did I say somewhere?  I meant Alexandria.  For some reason.  And all the zombies– thousands and thousands and thousands of them– turn and start heading for home.  Uh-oh.
• No, srsly, uh-oh.

• Is it next Sunday yet?