9x12 Guardians

[5.8/10] The acting matters so much on The Walking Dead. The writing on the show has been questionable almost from day one. The plotting and pacing has been variable at best almost as long. And while the naturalistic aesthetic and still incredible effects work are an achievement for genre television, they’re old hat by season 9. You can only see a ruddy-faced survivor moping in the Georgia wilderness or decaying, shambling corpse hacked to bits so many times before it starts to lose impact.

So that means the failure or success of an episode often depends on the performers. The show’s best actors can elevate the series’s ponderous dialogue, make it sound impactful, and deliver the emotion of the moment. Without that ability, you’re left with the writing as is, which does no one any favors and, frankly, exposes the weaker elements of The Walking Dead in a way that can be hard to watch sometimes.

This is all to say that the scenes with The Whisperers in this episode all vacillate somewhere between “boring” and “atrocious.” Whatever Samantha Morton’s other talents, in her turn as Alpha she has, thus far, proven thoroughly incapable of taking the awful lines she’s forced to spit out and spin them into gold. The terrible attempt at a southern accent doesn't help things. The fact that everyone has to try to emote in a strained stage whisper doesn't help things. And the fact that she has to talk almost exclusively in slow-spun threats and villain one-liners doesn't help things.

When Lydia returns to “The Pack” and Henry follows her, the idea is to (a.) give us a sense of where and how The Whisperers operate and (b.) progress the mother/daughter tension story that bleeds over into other parts of the episode. The former mode is mildly interesting just to get the sense of the society that Alpha has forged. The one big benefit of the Negan arc was introducing the variety of communities in The Walking Dead universe and the idea that there’s a lot of different ways to organize communities. There’s something almost Trek-ian about that, and the notion of people who live quietly and dress like the dead to avoid detection has some juice at the conceptual level.

But in execution it’s just so unavoidably cheesy and overdone. The whole power struggle sequence is supposed to be another coming out party for Alpha, showing her reasserting herself after breaking her own rules to rescue Lydia. Instead, we get what’s supposed to be a showcase for Morton that just exposes the weaknesses of the performer and the character as presently constructed. Negan’s similar speeches and demonstrations walked (and often crossed) the line between outsized drama and utter cheese, but on more than one occasion, Jeffrey Dean Morgan managed to save the show. Samantha Morton has, so far at least, shown only that she’s completely incapable of doing the same.

Thank heaven that Danai Gurira (Michonne) is though. The smartest thing this season’s soft reboot has done is put the show on her back. Michonne gets a storyline here that could be pretty corny. Her whole deal has been that the formerly hopeful and collaborative Michonne has become closed off in the wake of so many losses of people she cares about. She’s closed off from taking the advice of her council seriously; she’s closed off from Negan’s confession and offer to help, and she’s even closed off from listening to her own daughter.

That is pretty stock material in and of itself, and the dialogue doesn't necessarily do these scenes any favors either. There’s the usual back and forth about freedom vs. security, and a “he listens to me, unlike some people” line from Judith that feels like it could have been cribbed from a 1990s family comedy. And yet, Danai Gurira makes it work.

She sells Michonne’s self-assurance and “I know best” certainty at the council meeting. She sells Michonne’s anger at Negan’s transformation and growth story. She sells Michonne’s resistance but eventual bending in the face of her daughter’s pleas and challenges. And she sells Michonne’s reluctant change of heart, to allow Alexandria to send representatives to the Kingdom’s trade fair, to listen to the people even when she thinks they have a bad idea, and to open herself up to others rather than turtling in the same of self-preservation forever. Gurira not only delivers her lines with conviction and believability, but delivers those non-verbal moment that makes Michonne’s emotional trajectory through the episode palpable.

The Rosita/Gabriel/Eugene/Siddiq story is somewhere in between. It’s the clear C-story in this one (despite getting a decent amount of real estate in the episode), and thankfully there’s not a lot of extended dialogue scenes. The show smartly uses reaction shots and visual sequences to carry a lot of the weight here, save for Eugene’s unnecessary and on-the-nose monologue.

But I’ll give the show some credit here. When we had the Rosita pregnancy revelation a few episodes back, I assumed it would be this drawn out soap opera love triangle full of secrets and grand reveals. Instead, everyone seems to have basically acted like an adult, explaining the situation and emotions to one another and offering one another choices and talking things out like grown-ups. I still don’t really know why I should care about any of these barely-sketched character relationships that the show wants to mine for drama, but The Walking Dead managed to avoid a massive pitfall that it seemed headed toward, so that’s something to celebrate.

What can’t be celebrated is the extended interludes we get with The Whisperers here. The other half of that plot in the episode is centered on Alpha’s relationship with Lydia and her concerns that it’s been compromised by the connection with Henry. While this bit does give us a few solid scenes of Daryl and Connie tracking, it mostly provides the show excuses to double down on the over-the-top abuser stuff between Alpha and her daughter. If you want to explore something as serious as parental abuse, then trying to make it grounded and realistic, rather than part of a Big Bad’s mustache-twirling monologues, would go a long way.

Instead, we’re subjected to tons of stilted Alpha lines about lying and being changed and who’s in charge that are meant to be menacing but come off comical. If this is the villain we’re locked into for the balance of a Saviors-length arc, then it’s going to be a bumpy ride. The Walking Dead is not a show that can mask subpar acting with great writing or brilliant plots. It’s a series that lays each of its performers on the line and asks them to carry the show, and when they can’t, the results get dull, or as in “Guardians”, outright awful.