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The Walking Dead Is One Big Jumble of Plots in “Monsters”
For a while, it felt like The Walking Dead had found a nice, consistent rhythm in its storytelling. Since about Season 4, each season would include a handful of episodes that featured everyone in the...
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The Walking Dead Confronts Whether Ezekiel Is Just “Some Guy”
Imposter syndrome. Fake it till you make it. False confidence. There are dozens of phrases in hundreds of permutations that each stand for the proposition that if we can just project enough strength,...
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The Walking Dead Shows Negan as a True Believer and a Leviathan in “The Big...
“A war of all against all.” That’s how philosopher Thomas Hobbes pithily explained the “state of nature,” his theoretical account of what it was like when human beings lived without government,...
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The Walking Dead Ties Up Loose Ends in a Dull Fashion in “The King, The Widow...
Episodes like these make me thank Heaven that The Walking Dead didn’t start airing on network television in the era of twenty-two episode seasons. With scores of characters, multiple locales, and...
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The Walking Dead Has Good Ideas and Bad Dialogue in “Time for After”
The continued struggle of The Walking Dead is remarkably consistent. The show’s unhurried pace often gives it time to delve deeply into the theme of the week and really chew on it rather than just...
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The Walking Dead Warns This Is “How It’s Gotta Be” in a Trying Mid-Season Finale
If you’re a Walking Dead fan who’s made it this far, you’ve gone through a lot. As someone who watched that first fateful episode on Halloween nearly eight years ago, it’s easy to feel, in a weird...
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The Walking Dead Can’t Get Out of Its Own Way, Even When It’s Trying to Say...
The opening few minutes of “Honor” are The Walking Dead at its best. If you want me to give your television show a little slack, to feel a little extra emotional resonance in an important sequence,...
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The Walking Dead Ponders the Same Old Moral Quandaries in “The Lost and the...
I’m not the first person to suggest that The Walking Dead has exhausted itself creatively. Eight years in, almost any show is going to have trouble feeling vibrant and fresh. But what’s conspicuous...
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The Walking Dead Ponders Divine Intervention and Kindness in “Dead or Alive Or”
I like The Walking Dead when its episodes give us a series of vignettes much more than when it’s trying to pull off a single story that has umpteen tangled tentacles. That’s why Season 4 was such a...
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The Walking Dead Tries to Rebuild the World with “A New Beginning”
I spent so much of The Walking Dead’s last major arc wondering “why don’t our heroes just take out Gregory?” Sure, so much of that arc was, yet again, about the battle for the soul of their community,...
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