6x10 The Next World

How rare is it to see people on The Walking Dead be happy? Sure, the show gives its band of survivors the occasional moments of triumph, or simple sweetness, but how long do we really get to see the atmosphere around Rick and Darryl and Carl and Michonne just be pleasant?

It's not often. And there's a reason for that. Happiness and stability are nice; it's comforting for the audience to see the characters they've gotten to know over the past several years catch a break here and there. And yet too much happiness or too much stability over the long term is boring. Storytelling is fueled by conflict. As shows like Parks and Recreation have shown, that conflict doesn't necessarily have to be dark or dour, but you need real, meaningful obstacles for the characters to jump over or everything feels too slack to be truly engaging.

And yet it's been a harrowing season, if not a harrowing series, for The Walking Dead that it was incredibly refreshing to have an episode where, more or less, everything was okay. After the deaths and fireworks and bombast of "No Way Out", this was a quiet episode, that let our heroes enjoy their victory for a little while before the next big challenge (Negan?) rears its ugly head. We get to see them enjoy a little peace; we get to see Rick and Darryl feel like buddies rather than brother's in arms; we get to see Michonne and the Grimes coalesce into a family; and we get to see Alexandria seem like a town of hope rather than a tinderbox waiting to catch fire.

Despite that sense, and despite the sleepy, gentle piano-heavy score that flitted around behind many of the scenes, there were still obstacles to be jumped over in "The Next World," the most obvious of them being Rick and Darryl's cat-and-mouse game with that crafty Jesus fellow.

That part of the episode wasn't perfect necessarily. For one thing, we've seen the two of them go back and forth on the "every man for himself" versus the "all for one and one for all" spectrum so many times that their debate over whether to take in Jesus feels a bit trite. Their shifts are well-motivated, with Rick seeing Alexandria rise to the occasion in the prior episode with Denise saving his son's life and thus giving him faith in the kindness of strangers once more, while Darryl has twice been accosted by folks he met out in the wild since he and Rick's last conversation in this vein, and in one instance, he stuck out his neck for a group of people and was taken advantage of. Still, we've played this same game with these same characters so often than it just feels a little tired.

Likewise, the truck with badly needed supplies falling into the lake while Rick and Darryl are unnecessarily going after Jesus feels a little too on-the-nose for a metaphor. We get it. We spend so much time fighting each other, and so much time fighting the external zombified threat that we neglect the tools for basic survival we so badly need when there's plenty to go around if we could just stop screwing around and share with one another.

But you know what? I can forgive all of that, every last bit of it, because the scenes with Rick and Darryl were just so much fun. We've seen the two working together for nearly the whole show by this point, and there's a clear rapport between the two of them, that their storyline in this episode feels like something of a strange, sort-of-breezy buddy cop movie, with Daryl getting annoyed by Rick's choice in music, and the pair's laugh-worthy response to Jesus inquiring whether or not their guns are even loaded, and the delightfully staged and shot scene where the two of them look like they're basically playing freeze tag with Jesus near that barn.

The Walking Dead is many things. It can be an onslaught of bloody spectacle, a meditative show about mortality and human nature, an overwrought prime time soap opera, but rarely is it this freewheeling and yes, fun. So give me Rick and Darryl palling around together, with an amusing wildcard like Jesus to chase around for good measure, any day of the week.

The other half of the episode, featuring Carl, Enid, Spencer, and especially Michonne dealing with the reanimated corpse of Deanna wasn't nearly as fun. These scenes were a lot slower, a lot more contemplative and deliberate than the scenes concerning Rick and Darryl's adventures. And in truth, there were problems there to.

For one thing, it strains credulity that Deanna made it out there and somehow wasn't killed in last week's fray. But as I've said before, TWD is a show that runs on theme instead of logic, and that simply is what it is. What was more bothersome is another "it's too hard to kill the zombie of a loved one" story. The Walking Dead has been doing this type of shtick since literally its first episode (with Morgan and his wife), and while there's a certain amount of realism to the idea that the issue would come up more than once in the universe of the series, there wasn't much of a new take on with Spencer in the moment to make it feel fresh or different.

At the same time, Carl and Enid's teenage adventures continue to hew a little too far toward Dawson's Creek-meets-Night of the Living Dead territory for my tastes, but again, the show seems committed to the idea of the two of them, and I'm willing to give them some leeway to see where they're going with it, even if I don't necessarily have high hopes.

But the place where those two parts of the story converge, and then dovetail with the aftermath of Rick's adventure, was one of the more emotionally resonant and earned finishes that The Walking Dead has managed to pull off.

"The Next World" leans in a little hard into the Michonne-as-mom motif here, with the opening little domestic scene with her and the Grimes boys. But the moment when, taking on that maternal role, she scolds Carl and questions what he was doing out there, why he was taking those risks by not killing Deanna, and then melts upon hearing his explanation that not only was it because he believed that someone who loved her needed to do it (as he had to do with his own mother, in a nice touch), but that he would do the same for Michonne. And she embraces him, and the look on her face conveys everything about how touched she is to hear this that we don't even need to hear her say that she would do the same for Carl, as an act of kindness.

Like Carol, Michonne has had one of the more interesting arcs over the course of the series. From her introduction as a nigh-mute, frosty assassin who seemed to have little to no interest in making friends beyond Andrea, nor really in anything beyond mistrusting The Governor, she gradually warmed to this group, and slowly but surely found that it was the place she belonged. "The Next World" is the culmination of that, and it's one of the best slow burns The Walking Dead has done.

She's particularly warmed to the Grimes children. Her and Carl's adventure together back in Season 3's "Clear" is one of the first time we see Michonne smile. The first time we see her cry and have hints at the past life she's lost was when she was holding Judith. And those connections have grown stronger and stronger, with nice character beats like her quick kiss for an unconscious Carl in "No Way Out' before storming out to help Rick. She has become family to Carl and Judith, and not suddenly either, which makes Carl's affirmation all the more sweet and meaningful.

But, of course, the affection doesn't stop at Carl, and the final sequence in the episode pulls the trigger on a romantic relationship between her and Rick. That too feels as earned as it is a bit surprising. In the great scattering of Season 4, where Rick, Michonne, and Carl were grouped together, there was an easy bond between the three of them forged in their joint survival. And in the last season, when Rick started to lose his marbles a bit in Alexandria, Michonne was the steady hand, there to protect him, from the rest of the town and more importantly from himself. Their relationship, though not romantic until this point, has been built and built over the past few seasons, to where their taking it to the next level feels organic to that growing bond.

And when they sit on the couch together after a pair of exhausting events of the day, and each asks the other how their day was, and they make casual jokes about silly things like breath mints in the way that people who are close do, the romantic development feels like a natural progression. And once again, Michonne laughs. She's thought about what Deanna said, about what she wants from this world, and realizes that she's already found it; she just has to give into it.

Like I said, The Walking Dead is not an especially happy show. Take away the undead shuffling at the gates, take away the horrific deaths that seems to crop up every third episode, take away the bleak remnants of humanity, and you still have a show about people constantly struggling, with trust, with survival, and with each other. But if there's a silver lining to all of that misery, it makes the episodes like "The Next World", that take the time to show some of the show's best characters enjoying a measure of peace and tranquility and, yes, even love, shine like a beacon in the darkness. There's sure to be more pain and more misery around the corner, but for now, it's enough to enjoy that happy stillness, even if it's just for a little while.