“Protect the people from the people.”
(SPOILER WARNING!)
After last week’s (admittedly well-written) two-hander saw Rick and Michonne solving all their relationship difficulties in the most effective day of couples counselling the world has ever seen, this week saw them going on honeymoon.
Yes, you read that right. Even in the bleak, post-apocalypse world of The Walking Dead, there’s room for romance. This ep was another game of two halves, its first half showing that our heroes’ run of luck was quite definitely continuing after their implausible survival of falling from a helicopter followed by finding the comfiest sanctuary a post-apocalyptic world could offer. We were back in the rural wilderness so familiar from the original series; but unlike there, where despairing characters kept failing to find a supply of food, the first thing Rick and Michonne came across was a truckful of dehydrated ramen noodles.
OK, I guess noodles could get boring after a few days. But after the original show had so consistently portrayed the brutal difficulties of survival in a world where food was becoming near impossible to find, I’m betting the formerly starving inhabitants of previously shown communities would have been willing to kill for it. How lucky for Rick and Michonne just to stumble across it like that.
All right, I’m carping, I know. The point of this portion of the ep was to show them continuing to rebuild their relationship in a new spirit of harmony, which they could hardly do if they were starving. And I’m glad we didn’t have to endure episode after episode of them just struggling to survive. But the noodles – and the comfy cabin they found as a refuge – went the other way, seeming just too convenient.
To be fair, Andrew Lincoln and Dania Gurira played this section with such easy panache that it was (almost) possible to overlook things like that. They still have an easy chemistry, and sold the script well as their all-too-brief period of bliss progressed. There was even a nice callback to way, way back in season 9 of the original Walking Dead, as Rick finally came across the toothpaste Michonne had asked him to find all those years ago.
But this is The Walking Dead, and they can’t do an entire episode of just romance, so our heroes had to be briefly menaced by the most incompetent trio of bandits the show has ever depicted. I mean, really, the zombie apocalypse started, what, twelve years ago now – how these three idiots managed to survive this long stretched credulity more than somewhat. Of course Rick and Michonne dealt with them easily, but there was an unusually imaginative new kind of Walker to deal with too – heads calcified by steam from the local geysers, these critters effectively had impenetrable stone skulls, making the usual machete tactic quite ineffective.
They weren’t much of a menace either though – fortunately their eyesockets were still eminently penetrable by the handy length of steel rebar Michonne has taken to carrying. The ep needed some real jeopardy – after all, it’s the penultimate one of what (we’re told) will be these iconic characters’ final appearance in the franchise. Step up, then, Jadis, who of course never bought into the heroes’ apparent death in that helicopter crash. And as the ep progressed, it became clear it was more about her than them.
Jadis has been a hard character to like since her introduction way back in the middle of the interminable All Out War with the Saviors. It’s a credit to some strong writing, and an excellent performance from British actor Pollyanna McIntosh, that she’s always sailed just this side of likeability. You never knew which way she was going to jump in terms of loyalties; while she often seemed utterly self-serving, occasionally she would do something so altruistic you could find it in yourself to forgive her.
That continued in World Beyond and here – while she’s been ostensibly loyal to the CRM, she’s always held back on actually harming the heroes of either show. This ep fleshed out her motives by means of a series of flashbacks showing that she’s been meeting with former love interest Father Gabriel once a year on the same day, and he’s been her confessor.
While it was great to see Seth Gilliam back as everyone’s favourite one-eyed, machete-wielding badass priest, it seemed a little unlikely that these meetings – and the existence of Jadis’ “community” – never got mentioned in the last few seasons of the original show, whose timeframe this would have been taking place in. Episcopalians like Gabriel have the same ritual of confession confidentiality as Catholics, but Gabriel’s played fast and loose with the rules of his religion before, not least by killing a surprising amount of people in cold blood – why would he have kept all this a secret when Alexandria was desperate for food, and he was having a nice little picnic with a former antagonist once a year?
Plausibility aside, these scenes (calling to mind a post-apocalyptic take on romance staples One Day and Same Time Next Year) worked to give us a glimpse into Jadis’ conflicted motivations. She honestly believes the Civic Republic has a higher purpose, but she finds it hard to reconcile that with the military’s ruthless killings of the innocent.
These scenes were neatly interspersed throughout the narrative, as Jadis engaged in a game of cat and mouse with our heroes. We got an actual car chase, a staple of the original show (usually with Negan involved somewhere), followed by an almost tense standoff in a former tourist resort as Jadis perhaps unwisely recruited the assistance of the three incompetents from earlier. These scenes provided a modicum of tension, but let’s face it, none of us seriously believed she would succeed in killing either of the main characters in the penultimate episode.
No, this episode actually served as her swansong. As so frequently on genre shows, such close focus on one character means they’ll be dead by the end of the story, and so it was to be here. Pollyanna McIntosh, in her last go in the part, was as good as ever. So good, in fact, that it wasn’t until later, thinking about it, that I realised how improbable her final volte-face was. Yes, the scenes with Gabriel had shown us that she was conflicted; but everything in the present timeframe of the episode showed her to be a remorseless ideologue, prepared to (regretfully) off Rick and Michonne for the Greater Good of the Civic Republic.
I suppose the sudden certainty of one’s own death can bring about an abrupt change of priorities, but even with the Gabriel scenes, it seemed unlikely Jadis (or Anne, the name she finally embraced) would instantly change her mind and spare the heroes and their families from certain death at the hands of the CRM “reclamation squads”. It did, though, give McIntosh a cracking death scene, with Rick and Michonne (as with the death of Carl in season 8) reduced to little more than bystanders while another of the cast acted their heart out.
Ultimately, while I liked this ep giving Pollyanna McIntosh a showcase as Jadis, it left me feeling unsatisfied. It’s the penultimate episode of a story about the two best-loved characters in the franchise, and yet, in terms of building momentum for the Big Finale, it just sort of ambled along until Jadis died.
I was also disappointed to see Gabriel return and not have a part to play in the main plot, though that’s perfectly understandable. Most damning of all, these last two eps have left me unsure what the main plot actually is. We seem to have returned to the big idea of toppling the CRM, but with only one episode to do that, I’m sceptical about how convincing it could be. Next week’s series finale has a LOT of things to do – and at least this time, I’m prepared to believe Rick and/or Michonne really might not make it.
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