Simon Fernandes

The Walking Dead: Season 5, Episode 9–What Happened and What’s Going On

“To face it. Keeping your eyes open. My dad always called it ‘paying the high cost of living’.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

As ever this time of year, I’ve been absent from blogging while having a whale of a time at the Los Angeles Gallifrey One Convention. It was as much fun as ever, but once again, I’m behind in looking at The Walking Dead, which returned from its mid-season break the night I arrived in California with a typically bleak but unusually experimental episode. On first viewing, I found it confusing and hard to follow (though that might have been the jetlag), but interestingly a second viewing gave me quite a different perspective.

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Doctor Who–Last Christmas

“Do you know why people get together at Christmas? Because every time it might be the last time.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

Do you know what, for me, is the biggest disappointment when I’m reading or watching a story? When it ends with some variant of “he woke up and it was all a dream”. For me it cheapens and discredits everything that went before, however good it might have been. It also provides licence for some very dodgy writing, with the inevitable defence that, if it’s a dream, it doesn’t have to make sense.

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Your Christmas TV Highlights!

It’s the time of year again when normally sensible TV genre shows abandon all logic in favour of doing “the Christmas episode”. While Christmas episodes sit well in comedy shows, they always seem oddly forced in shows like, say, The X Files, Supernatural or Grimm. Unfortunately it now seems de rigeur, especially for US shows – though we in the UK have the wildly fluctuating in quality annual Doctor Who special, which this year seems to have outdone itself by actually including Santa.

It’s only a matter of time before even critically acclaimed dramas will be obligated to produce a “Christmas episode” every year. What could that look like? Let’s find out…

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The Walking Dead: Season 5, Episode 8–Coda

“You keep telling yourself you have to do what it takes just until this is all over. But it isn’t over. This is it.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

So this week we bid farewell to The Walking Dead for a little while – till February, anyway. As has been traditional since season 2, the show has taken a mid-season break, giving rise to that new style of cliffhanger, the “mid-season finale”. Compared to previous years – and indeed to this season’s slam-bang opener – this was a surprisingly low key affair, both in action and in stakes. In season 2, the mid-season finale brought an unusual bit of excitement to Hershel’s farm when the barn zombies broke free and we discovered the tragic fate of Sophia; season 3 brought the reunion of the Dixon brothers after Rick’s ‘terrorist attack’ on Woodbury; and season 4 had the spectacular destruction of the prison along with the deaths of several established characters.

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The Walking Dead: Season 5, Episode 7–Crossed

“We all owe Carol.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

This week’s Walking Dead had a welcome return for Rick and the rest of the gang at the church, as the three narratives we’ve been following for the last four episodes finally came together, much as I’d expected, in readiness for the big mid-season finale. After three eps which focused very heavily on particular characters while gradually driving the plot forward, this week had a lot more action as Daryl and Noah led the increasingly hardass Rick on a rescue mission for the captive Beth and Carol.

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The Walking Dead: Season 5, Episode 6–Consumed

“You’re not who you were, and neither am I. I don’t know if I believe in God any more, or Heaven, but if I’m going to Hell, I’m making damn sure I hold it off as long as I can.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

This week’s The Walking Dead found us rejoining the plot thread involving the show’s two fan favourite characters with the rhyming names, Carol and Daryl; though the ep as a whole was properly devoted to her rather than him. And that’s a good thing. No disrespect to Beth or Abraham, who’ve been the focus of the last two eps, but Carol’s a fan favourite for a reason – her character arc has been probably the most powerful of the show, played with quiet dignity and intensity by Melissa McBride. Some extremely good writing this week from Matthew Negrete and Corey Reed gave her plenty of meat to chew on this week, and the result was another quietly devastating episode to rank with last season’s The Grove.

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The Walking Dead: Season 5, Episode 5–Self Help

“We don’t stop, we don’t go back. We’re at war, and if we stop, we lose.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

Another week, another group of survivors in The Walking Dead. Having sensibly split up the ever-growing gang of main characters, it looks like showrunner Scott Gimple’s approach for this year is to jump between numerous storylines involving each group. If nothing else, it presumably means that some of the gang will get a bit more time off; after all, we haven’t seen Andrew Lincoln for two episodes now.

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Doctor Who: Series 8, Episode 12–Death in Heaven

“Turns out the afterlife is real – and it’s emptying. Every graveyard on Earth is about to burst its banks.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

One of the frequent (and justified) criticisms of Steven Moffat’s tenure in charge of Doctor Who is that he tends to undercut the sense of jeopardy by presenting death as something that can always be revoked. He even made a running gag of it with the many deaths of Rory Williams. But now, in a story that was far darker and far bleaker, he’s confronted the reality of death – and its consequences – head on.

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The Walking Dead: Season 5, Episode 4–Slabtown

“Everything costs something, right?”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

Having handily split the show’s growing ensemble of characters into several groups last week, this week The Walking Dead had another of those interesting out of format episodes which focus on one or two of the regulars isolated from the rest of the group. Ever-surprising though, it wasn’t the expected catchup with Daryl and Carol after their departure from the church, but a follow up on the only loose plot thread from last season, as we finally found out what happened to Beth Greene.

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Doctor Who: Series 8, Episode 11–Dark Water

“You asked me what we’re going to do. I told you. We’re going to hell.”

(SPOILER WARNING!)

After a very divisive season of Doctor Who, we’re finally at the endgame, where all those seeded themes throughout the year may (or may not) pay off. It’s been a new approach for Steven Moffat; while there was an overall plot arc, it was kept very much in the background. Meanwhile, the real arc of the season has been its main characters, and how they’ve developed. The new Doctor, abrasive and hard to like, questioning whether he’s “a good man”; Clara, recast from part one as a “control freak” and more believably fallible as a result; new boy Danny Pink dragging her back to the real world in a kind of relationship many have interpreted as passive aggressive manipulation.

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