11x03 Hunted

[7.0/10] Another episode that just barely scraped by into “good” territory. Negan and Maggie spin their wheels, albeit with some cool sequences. Carol, Rosita, Kelly, and Magna go on a Lifetime horse girl adventure, with some dark edges that lift it. And Gabriel continues to...do things, I guess?

I don’t know what we’re supposed to take from Gabriel further descending into darkness by killing the guy he finds after the attack. It feels like we’ve already done this crap for so long with him, that I’m reaching Rick-like levels of “I don’t give a damn how dark or light this guy’s soul is anymore” territory.

Despite that, I liked the Carol-led story. There’s a lot of “Hooray for Metaphors” to it, with this group of survivors finding wild creatures who’ve been tamed and can only feel safe enough not to run when nobody’s trying to catch them. Do ya get it? Do ya get it?!?!

In spite of some didacticism there, the scenes with Carol & company and the horses are beautifully shot. Those images help toy with our emotions from scene to scene. You have the excitement of the team finding a horse, the frustration of it getting away, the devastation of the river full of equine corpses, the relief when they see a herd of them galloping through the bucolic countryside, the catharsis when they’re able to pen them, the triumph when they bring them back to camp, and the hardship when Carol has to cut one’s throat to feed the camp.

That’s a lot of ground to cover in one story in one episode. As usual, The Walking Dead doesn’t exactly do it with a delicate touch. But I appreciate the mix of hope and hardship at the heart of the story, where there’s success and reason to be grateful, but also more desperate, bloody measures that have to be taken in the name of survival. It ties in nicely to the simmering conflict between Carol and Magna over whether she’s giving Kelly false hope about Connie’s fate.

My one gripe in this part of the episode is the shtick with the kids. I get what the writers are going for here. It’s a good thing to explore how the children who’ve been raised in this world react to things like their parents’ absence and having to eat whatever’s available to survive. But child actors are child actors, and there’s only so much even a great director can get out of them most of the time. This was no exception.

As for the other half of the episode, I have mixed feelings about the Maggie/Negan/Alden shebang. The episode keeps replaying the same conflicts over and over between Maggie and Negan without really advancing them. Negan wants to do the pragmatic thing. Maggie wants to take every opportunity to save and feed her people. It’s good to have conflicting motivations and perspectives among major characters, but the specific conflicts between them need to change in order to make that worthwhile, and we get a lot of the same stuff here.

That said, we do get a cool sequence set in an...abandoned shopping mall? (Hello Dawn of the Dead fans!) I wasn’t really sure. But either way, it made for some cool shots of eerie, yawning industrial spaces where death could be around any corner. I’ll confess, I find the society of ninjas who dress and act like slasher villains more silly than scary, but the actual encounters with them, particularly in darkened corridors, makes for some good pulpy action.

The problem is, I don’t really care about the people who die. A bunch of redshirts bite the dust, and we’ve lost so many nameless folks on this show that it means nothing. Maggie loses two of her close associates from the road, but it has no impact because we don’t really know them. They’re props, so their deaths don’t matter.

Even Alden is barely two-dimensional as a character. The decision to keep moving with him despite his injury, and the ultimate decision to leave him behind because he’ll slow down the effort to scavenge food, has some juice to it based on the usual moral debates that are the stock and trade of The Walking Dead. But Alden’s always been light on shading, so there’s not the stakes the episode wants there to be.

Still, despite some dull stretches, this one is perfectly acceptable and watchable by Walking Dead standards, so I’ll take my wins where I can get them with this show.