It is a hard and fast rule that on The Walking Dead, big, insurmountable obstacles are always, always overcome by big, unrealistic actions. Kidnapped by cannibals? Carol will singlehandedly blow them all to smithereens. An enemy shows up with a tank? Don't worry a bunch of people with handguns have got this. Zombies attack your obscenely peaceful farm? Somehow solved by Rick declaring himself a dictator! A herd of thousands of zombies overruns a town? All you need is a truck that has some fuel and a bazooka onboard. Problem solved.
The parallels between Sunday's mid-season premiere, "No Way Out," and the season five opener of the show, "No Sanctuary," are pretty striking. Like when Carol and Tyrese saved our survivors from the clutches of Terminus, trapped characters were rescued by outsiders presumed to be dead or missing, explosions played a prominent role, as did the old walking-around-covered-in-zombie-guts trick, and a problem that got an entire season of build up is solved in the course of a single episode.
None of this is necessarily a bad thing, as the show very often likes to move on from one arc to the next, taking us from the CDC to the farm to the prison to Woodbury back to the prison to Terminus to the hospital to Alexandria. As the beginning of the episode proves, the train has very much departed for the Negan station. And clearly, there is no room for any of the Alexandria dreamers there. Only the ones strong enough to be part of our group.
Bazookas are officially the most effective weapon in the zombie apocalypse. "No Way Out" started exactly where those first four minutes that we got to see early left off, with Sasha, Abraham and Daryl at a standoff with a group of men who appear to follow someone named "Negan." Abraham's big mouth gets them into trouble (as per usual) and it looked like he and Sasha were done for. In, perhaps, the third-most-violent but second-coolest scene in the episode (that's a very technical ranking, mind you) Daryl finds a bazooka in that fuel truck they took (remember the fuel truck) and blasts the bikers to smithereens.Chekov's bazooka is ready to go for later.
We should have known when they got Judith out of the way.
In order for the very slow, very violent series of events to happen to take out all remaining members of the Anderson family, the baby had to be out of harm's way. So did Father Gabriel, to be entirely honest, since any zombie death that is entirely the result of a mixture of fear and stupidity would surely have taken him out, too. We should have been doubly sure that Sam was a goner when her refused the relative safety of the Father Gabriel exit to stay with his mom. We should have known Jessie wasn't long for this world when she let him. We should have known Ron couldn't survive too long in his game of chicken with Carl and Rick. We all should have known.
But let's break this down.
On the way to try to get to the cars, covered in zombie guts and walking arm in arm, Sam the scared child starts to get even more scared. And the terrifying words of the world's least-nurturing woman, Carol, come into his mind. And he freezes. Because he is surrounded by monsters who want to eat him alive. And that's truly terrifying. Paralyzed by his fear, Sam is the first to be taken by the walkers, exactly what Carol warned him of coming true right before his mother's eyes as she holds his hand. She screams, she sobs as her son is torn to pieces in front of her, and she is the second to go down, holding tight to Carl's hand. Rick, meanwhile, never one to freeze, never one to be trapped by his emotions or fear (not for awhile anyways), watches the woman he could have loved suffer in front of him, in danger of taking his own son with her, and so he does what he does: He reacts, chopping off Jessie's arm off to save Carl. That was not a sacrifice worth it to the already homicidal Ron, who points his gun straight for Rick and Carl. Just as he shoots, Michonne does what she does: She reacts, stabbing Ron clear through the chest, but not before the gun goes off and Carl loses an eye.
It was a horrific, mesmerizing scene that did a lot of what this show does best. It was violent, for sure, but there were emotional beats behind every single move made by every single character. And while the whole thing probably only lasted around two or three minutes, the bloodshed felt interminable. Even for this show, there was a lot of death. But, considering that he has Glenn-like powers of immortality in the face of gunshot wounds especially, we can all at least expect Carl to make a full recovery. And not just because a newly confident Denise was there in the nick of time to stitch him up. Because we are stuck with Carl forever.
Team Glenn and Enid, fresh off all their first-half-of-season-6 bonding, are ready and raring to take on the zombie herd all by themselves. First stop? Gun shopping in a chapel, where Enid gets to be moved by a handy Bible quote etched on the wall. Of course plan number one for these crazy kids is rescuing one miss Maggie Greene, stuck up in a literal high tower surrounded by monsters. Will her knight in shining armor and his cute kid sidekick save her? Well, they'll try in a plan that perhaps is stupider than anything Jessie and Sam do (more on them below) where Enid joins Maggie up there and Glenn distracts all the zombies by making a lot of noise until they all start coming after him?
But don't worry, it was actually a fool-proof plan since Glenn is an immortal being who will never die, and Sasha and Abraham were there in the clinch with very well-aimed machine guns. And don't you guys forget, someone has to tell Glenn that he's going to be a dad. What a great baby shower for those crazy kids.
If you thought that whole zombie-herd taking over Alexandria and Denise getting kidnapped by the Wolf dude would bring Carol and Morgan together despite their differences, you were very much wrong. Carol makes clear that she and Morgan are by no means on the same team, outright saying that she wished she had killed him when she had the chance. And while she may not have won the moral argument of the day, she did win in the actual sense by finally taking out the Wolf after he may or may not have changed into a good person when he saved Denise. Either way, the Wolf is gone, but surely he will not be the only source of conflict between two of our most powerful players. We can only hope for a common enemy (that they both think should die) will bring them together later this season.
Angry over Carl, grieving over Jessie and generally full of that Rick Grimes adrenaline, Rick leaves his bleeding son on the operating table and heads out to take on the whole herd of walkers all on his own. He inspires (for some reason) the rest of the people hiding (including quite a few Alexandrians and even Eugene) to join him. It's a 300-style last stand, and as stupid as it seems, it is a genuinely moving sequence only slightly undercut by how easy it was for Sasha, Abraham and Daryl to save the day. Regardless, as Rick says to an unconscious Carl at the episode's close, the last stand was what they needed for the Alexandrians to finally and fully bond with our survivors. A particularly telling moment was when the episode cut from character to character to character in the same frame, hacking and slashing as one united being. It was a powerful sequence, and a necessary moment if the show, as it seems to be doing, is going to move so quickly to a new enemy. There's no more time for infighting (you hear us, Carol and Morgan?). It's time to stand together, or nothing else is going to matter.
We mean, unless you have a bazooka. That helps.
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