9x04 The Obliged

[8.1/10] You can have the best of intentions, try your hardest, and still fall short due to circumstances beyond your control. That’s an underexplored idea in television and film, but a truer one. Storytelling is geared toward narratives where our heroes triumph due to their pluck or luck or determination, or fail tragically due to some fatal flaw. But left to the side are stories about those who do their best, follow noble ideals, and still lose because the world is more random and complicated than for good intentions and effort alone to win the day.

That’s the type of story The Walking Dead seems to want to tell about Rick Grimes in his final season with the show. When we meet our heroes in “The Obliged” all of Rick’s grand plans seem to have deflated. Eugene tells him that despite all their efforts, the bridge won’t be finished or hold in time to withstand the rising waters. Carol is breaking up camp and, without The Saviors, planning to take all her people back to The Kingdom. And Maggie is done waiting for Rick’s plan to work and ready to take out the man who slaughtered her husband.

There’s a sense that Rick was the one with his finger in the damn, trying to hold everyone together long enough to build the bridge, trying to forge a community through common purpose, and trying to establish a higher morality for this new society. But even Rick, the man The Walking Dead has placed so much importance and nigh-magical ability to lead on, can only fight the tide for so long. Things are disintegrating, and not even the show’s short-timed protagonist can stop that.

At the same time, Michonne is trying to keep something at bay. It might grow tiresome after a while, but honestly, I wish every episode of The Walking Dead opened with one of those nigh-wordless montages. Seeing scenes of Michonne waking up in the morning, working on her town charter, looking after Judith, doing the hard, golden-lit work of founding a community by day, contrasted with her stacatto slices through zombie viscera at night, is striking and symbolic. The way the balance of those scenes starts to shift, the pace of the editing starts to quicken, tells the audience everything it needs to know about the internal push and pull between Michonne the founder and Michonne the warrior.

And then she sees a man hanging as Gregory did, and holds a bloody bat as Negan. It’s fairly blunt as symbolism, but also effective. There are two sides of Michonne: the one who exists in broad daylight and excels at leading her people and raising a daughter, and the one who stalks through the night, taming the undead and letting off steam. The visual makes clear what Michonne is feeling: the joy of building a new life and a new society, the release of the physical violence, and the fear that there’s a colder part of her, the kind that would act like Maggie or Negan, that she can’t suppress.

Of course, this being The Walking Dead, that’s not just expressed through images, but through a series of one-on-one conversations where pairs of characters layout the exact themes of the episode. But you know what? I was on board here. I don’t know if it’s just writer Geraldine Inoa, who gets her first “written by” credit here, bringing something new to the table for the show, or simply some of the show’s best actors getting to share the screen with one another, but I genuinely enjoyed most of “The Obliged”’s extended colloquies -- the sort that generally irk me.

Seeing Michonne and Negan match wits, and meditate on whether there’s a place for them as warriors or statesman or something else in the new world, clicked better than I might have expected. Again, it may just be the strength of the performers, but you feel something when Michonne goes from barely tolerating, almost mocking Negan, to rebuking him for bringing her children into this. Negan’s usual preening schtick takes on a new context when he has no power, is wearing a Sadam Hussein spiderhole beard, and is going on hunger strikes rather than issuing threats. And I couldn’t help but be a little moved when Michonne, in calm but forceful terms, disabuses Negan of the notion that her son*s* make her weak.

Because Michonne is the walking antidote to Negan. The show, as usual, underlines it a little more than I might like, but raises the point that while there’s commonalities between the two of them -- a fighter’s impulse, a self-certainty, a survival instinct that’s served them well -- Michonne believes in something bigger than herself, in a world where they don’t have to be the bad guys in order to survive or make a society. She wants to do that for Andre, for Carl, and for Judith. While the spectre of departed loved ones only make things harder for Negan, they inspire Michonne to achieve more, and that sets them apart.

The impact of the deceased is just as much an issue between Daryl and Rick, who find themselves trapped in a pit and forced by circumstance and narrative fiat to hash out their differences as well. The situation is a bit contrived, between Daryl distracting Rick from Maggie’s plot and the plummeting zombies necessitating a bit of “hooray for metaphors!” teamwork. But again, the actual conversation between the two of them is a winner, something I didn’t necessarily expect.

There’s a lot of history, tension, and affection between Rick and Daryl. Giving them a private moment to deal with that, in Rick’s last go ‘round is a good choice that pays dividends. Daryl is, traditionally, not a very emotional character, so when he tells Rick that he would die for him, that he would have died for Carl, and looks at him with the ghosts of all their dead friends in his eyes, and all the love and respect in the world, you can’t help but take it seriously and meaningfully. Daryl has been through the ringer for Rick, and he sees it as a disservice that the man he trusts more than anything in the world, would let those people, people like Glenn who made it possible for both of them to be here and find one another, die in vain.

But Rick sees it the exact opposite. He too is worried about the dearly departed, but in the other direction. He’s driven by Carl, by his son’s view of a better future, where people could set aside their differences and come together to build something bigger, kinder, and gentler. For him, letting the cycle of bloodshed continue, letting Negan become a martyr, would be a betrayal to his little boy’s memory, in the same way that letting Glenn’s killer breathe feels like a betrayal to Daryl.

And yet, of course, in the end, they help one another. Sure, there’s some strained bits about Rick having not asked for leadership, but Daryl complimenting him in his curt manner and saying maybe he should have. There’s a fairly convenient escape for the duo when the going gets rough, even if it manages to create some near-literally cliffhanger tension. And Rick has to perform one more big selfless act to try to keep it all together, resulting in a Cordelia Chase situation.

But chances are, it won’t be enough. Because it couldn’t be. The Walking Dead will shamble on, with or without Rick. So he can’t win. He can’t have solved these problems. All he can do is try: try to save people’s lives however he can, try to stop his friends and allies from losing their souls, try to hold this fragile thing together for as long as he can. It may not work. In fact, the need for conflict and challenges in the realm of longform storytelling practically guarantees it won’t. But the best version of Rick, the most admirable shade of the man who is, too often, given a “Father Knows Best” veneer, is the one who fights the good fight because it’s the good fight, even if his life is one the line, and he’s fated to come up short.