8x07 Time for After

[7.8/10] The eternal struggle of The Walking Dead is remarkably consistent. It’s unhurried pace often gives it time to explore its characters, to delve deeply into some theme of the week and really chew on it rather than just drive by it. Sure, some episodes are just epic climaxes or piece-moving adventures, but for the most part, even the worst episodes of the show have something they’re trying to say, some notion they’re trying to find the bottom of.

But the show is almost impressively bad at crafting the sort of dialogue for their characters that grounds those explorations in something that feels like real human interaction and experience. There’s various ways around that. Some folks on the show, like Lennie James and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, are good enough performers that they can spit out pretty much anything you give them and have it sound convincing despite the larger-than-life qualities brought to bear. And others, like Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride, are more laconic, which helps, but also so good at the nonverbal side of acting, of communicating the experience of the moment in other ways, that it covers for other flaws in the show.

And then there’s Eugene, who has such a particular flavor of verbiage that it sort of loops back around on the ridiculousness and covers for some of the show’s failings. I like Eugene’s cadence and use of language. He’s an outsized character, or at least one of the ones that cuts away from the veneer of realism the series tries to maintain, but he adds distinctiveness to the stew of different people in various shades of muddy beige and faded green that populates the show.

But here, when they turn a solid chunk of the episode over to him and fill it with nothing but speechifying -- from him, from Negan, from pretty much everyone who trots out on screen save for the traditionally terse Daryl -- it becomes too much. A little ridiculousness, skilfully deployed, can add a certain texture to your world, but overdo it and all you do is undercut the ability to take your serious stuff seriously.

Which is a shame because there’s a solid theme to “Time for After.” It comes down to the question of whether you act or whether you wait, a very Hamlet sort of consideration for the show and it’s characters.

Eugene is the biggest focus of that. The episode spends tons of time with him struggling with whether he should side with his old friends from Alexandria and join Dwight in collaborating with them, or whether he should stay with Negan, the cruel man who he thinks gives him the best chance of survival, or is at least the path of least resistance for the moment. The episode isn’t subtle about that internal conflict, but it’s a good throughline that ties into what we’ve already seen from him.

At the same time, the crew of Michonne, Rosita, Daryl, and Tara continue their clumsily-established mission from the last episode, now joined by Morgan (whom we see for the first time since he stormed off from Jesus). They too are struggling with a big question of whether they should strike now, ram a truck into the sanctuary so as to let the walkers in, or follow the original plan, however impatient they may feel, and let the Saviors starve and rot until they’re willing to surrender on the good guys’ terms.

Philosophically it’s an interesting question. The script injects the sense that this isn’t necessarily a question of strategy for a good contingent of our heroes. For many of them it’s a sense of wanting revenge, of not being able to sit idly by and wait for justice to happen even if it’s what everyone agreed to. For others, it’s a concern of acting rashly, or achieving their goals but taking too many innocent lives in the process, or even just questioning whether this is Something We Do, like the show’s mulled over and over again this season. But there’s legitimate questions of strategy too: whether proud Negan would really surrenders, whether they can win the fight without the Kingdom fighters, whether one ragtag group with speakers could spoil the whole deal,

The problem is that The Walking Dead does what it always does, even when it has an interesting idea. It weighs that idea down with grand, writerly oratories about what all this means where characters announce their emotional states. And when you have an actor like Danai Gurira, you can half pull it off. And when you have someone who can use non-verbal cues like Norman Reedus, you can get away with minimal syllable clichés and make it work. But when you get speech after speech after speech, especially in ways that feel like the show’s killing time before the mid-season finale, it’s easy to just tune it out after a while, particularly in a episode like “Time After” that’s chock full of them.

There’s fewer speeches in Rick’s part of this installment, which bookends the episode. He’s still imprisoned by The Scavengers (who get a name on-screen now) but escapes in close to the least plausible way imaginable. I’m not one to slate The Walking Dead too hard for its lack of plausibility. It’s already a series about the dead coming back to life, and its plot mechanics serve the story rather than the other way around. That’s pretty much what the show’s always been, and it’s a choice I can respect even if it makes me roll my eyes now and then.

But man, Rick managing to not only save his own bacon when tied up and forced to fight against Peggy Olsen’s patented Walker-On-A-Stick, but then convince the Head Scavenger to join his fight is just absurd and insane. Why he thinks he can trust The Scavengers in the first place is loony, but the whole sequence just screams “we needed to keep Rick out of the way for a while because of other things happening in the story, and this is something for him to do” rather than an organic part of the story.

Still, the part of “Time for After” that is organic is Eugene’s vacillating between his impulses to do “right” even as he resists the definition of that terms, and his impulse for obsequious self-preservation that has kept him “vertical when so many have gone horizontal.” There’s a series of one-on-one’s between Eugene and his friends and acquaintances here: Dwight, Dr. Gabriel, one of Negan’s wives, and Negan himself. Each one seems to push him one direction, only for Eugene to struggle to justify his course of action.

It’s solid material. Josh McDermitt does a nice job of showing Eugene ostensibly correcting or rebuking others who try to nudge him toward doing that right thing, while clearly trying to convince himself that what he’s doing is okay. He makes excuses, he sets limitations on himself, he tries to believe that he’s actually saving more people by aligning with his captors.

The episode does well to convey much of this visually too. When Eugene sits by Gabriel’s bedside, the scene is framed with the light bursting in through a window, giving it the sense of a religious painting where a divine presence seeps in. When Dwight has Eugene at gunpoint, Eugene lingers on one side of the screen while Dwight is positioned in a different perspective on the other, communicating the sense in which Dwight is trying to move Eugene when he feels like he has nowhere to go.

And even the big conversation with Negan has Eugene seeming small in the background, while he see Negan loom large in the foreground, his bat in particular jutting out, signifying the way Eugene feels powerless in the face of this larger-than-life man, and how the threat of violence keeps him line. Even when the show can’t muster the dialogue to match its lofty goals, it finds the visual language to say much of what it’s trying to say.

Because of that, and the strength of many of the ideas “Time for After” is playing around with, it’s a still an above-average episode for The Walking Dead, one that ends with Eugene nigh-literally unable to keep down his own self-directed B.S. But like much of TWD the force of that is weakened by how the show piles on, offers speech after speech after speech to hammer the point home, rather than just letting it happen naturally. The Walking Dead has always had a certain operatic bombast despite its nominally realistic take on the zombie genre, but when it goes for those big, blunt monologues, it hurts, rather than helps, the points it spends so many words trying to make.