10x17 Home Sweet Home

[7.7/10] I’ll confess, I was halfway dreading the return of The Walking Dead. I’ve struggled with the show for a long time now, but I’ve been watching it for so long that I feel like I can’t just give it up. I’ve jokingly compared it to a witch’s curse.

But then we get an episode like “Home Sweet Home” and I remember not only the things I like about the show, but about how that long, eleven-year history helps give it a certain richness and allows it to do things that even shows that are pound-for-pound better can’t match.

That’s evident in the return of Maggie, a character who’s been with the show since season 2, seen some of its harshest developments, and been absent since the time jump (save a cameo in last season’s quasi-finale), giving her the sense of a familiar face who’s done and seen a lot since we last saw her.

The smartest choice this episode makes is to focus on her readjustment and all that’s changed since we last saw her. The episode is, outside of a few intense sequences, mostly dialogue, which is something that often rankles me on TWD given its writing limitations. But here, the prose and the performances are so good that I wouldn’t mind if more episodes followed in its footsteps.

Lauren Cohan in particular deserves major kudos for this one. I’ll be honest. I didn't remember her as a particularly great actress in prior seasons of the show. But this episode puts a lot on her shoulders as a performer, and she’s more than up to it. Her conversation with Daryl about what happened while she was away is the kind of “tell don’t show” series of monologues that, in lesser hands, could have fallen completely flat. But she infuses such emotion into the description of how things “went sideways” everywhere she went, and the dashed dream of an escape with Glenn that never came to pass, that it not only works; it’s incredibly poignant.

Likewise, her non-verbal acting is really good here too. The director and editor teams make some showy choice in terms of shot selection and presentation, but you also feel the tension and anger when she comes across Negan. You feel the desperation when she’s looking for her son, Herschel. There’s an overall resoluteness and presence that we only saw sporadically from Maggie before. It shows development in the character and, frankly, in the actor who plays her.

I also appreciate the introduction and camaraderie forged with the new characters. Cole is pretty generic, but I like Elijah as a silent, mask-wearing, but plainly emotionally affected survivor in all of this. The mask and silent demeanor feel like a gimmick, but one the show is taking advantage of, and despite the good dialogue here, it’s nice to have a character that the show has to have express themselves via actions rather than words. The bond he forms with Kelly (who I supposed no longer qualifies as new!) through their shared losses is endearing in just a few scenes.

I like that the show’s method of bringing together is focusing on the loss of siblings. Kelly is hunting for Connie, to the point of shirking her watch duty to ivnestigate. Elijah recently lost a sister as well, and Kelly figures out that Maggie is in the same boat. It’s a sharp way to unite these people whom we haven’t seen interact before but need to feel like they’re on the same team. It’s also, retroactively, a good way to show that Beth mattered to Maggie despite the fact that the show seemed to gloss over it at the time.

The action scenes aren’t bad. The zombie fighting bit among the storage containers is pretty standard stuff from TWD, but the show having the crew smush a walker’s head in the door of one made for a striking enough image. Likewise, their run-in with the sniper (and presumed Reaper) hunting them down was nicely harrowing, with the show playing the attacker like a horror movie villain, giving it a different flavor. His grenade suicide not causing anyone else any harm is waaaaaay too convenient and implausible, but otherwise, I like this as an introduction of (presumably) the new antagonists for the series post-Whisperers.

True to the title, there’s a lot of discussion and themes about what really constitutes home for anyone anymore. The scenes of Maggie surveying the ruins of Hilltop and rebuilding Alexandria are impactful with the weight of events the series has set at both locations. The presence of Negan, and to a lesser extent Carol, looms over these familiar places and makes them a source of unease and anger and pain that sent Maggie packing in the first place. But we also see the sweet smiling face of her son, and get a hint of the things we set aside to find a safe place for the people we care about, even amid reminders of the people we’ve lost.

Overall, this was a great start to the new season (and I intend to treat it that way, since I figure the “season 10” designation here is more for actors’ contracts than for how best to divide this story into chapters), one that takes the time to dig into Maggie’s experiences and readjustment into the world of TWD we know, in both emotional and practical terms.