10x19 One More

[7.8/10] Don’t look now, but The Walking Dead is three-for-three on the season so far. And these episodes haven’t just been good. They’ve been intimate, challenging, introspective about life after the apocalypse in a way we’ve only seen in fits and starts before. As I’ve said before, I’m not naive enough to expect it to last, but I’ll take it.

“One More” has the quality of an old short story, one that, of course, gains added resonance given what we know about Gabriel and Aaron from past adventures, but which could frankly work as a standalone T.V. movie about two random survivors contemplating good and evil in the ashes of the world. It’s a refreshing approach from the show, and I hope they stick with it.

I’ll admit, I don’t care a lot about Gabriel or Aaron despite how long they’ve been with the show at this point. They’ve rarely been in focus and frankly feel more like living character sheets than actual characters. But this episode breathes some real life into them. In the early portions especially, you feel their exhaustion and desperation, as they hit site after site in the hopes of finding food to help feed their people, and instead only find images of death.

There's a lot of potent symbolism in this one. The most obvious is the image of blood splattering on flowers, a contrast between the beauty of nature and the harshness of the new world that represents the weighing of benevolence and cruelty that takes place here. There’s also a number of skeletons in poses that suggest families huddling together and dying, a constant reminder of the costs of this new order to two men with daughters they’d like to see again and forge a world better than this one. There’s a sense of how or why someone could hold onto hope or faith in the face of such imagery.

“One More” makes our two protagonists here (with Gabe taking the bigger role) avatars for those different ideas. Aaron wants to believe in the potential for a better world, that there is still kindness and mercy worth cultivating in this place because it’ll be needed when things get back to something approaching normal. Gabriel, ironically, is a cynic, who doesn’t think things will ever get back to normal and who, deep down, seems to believe that lethal pragmatism and matter-of-fact determinations are the only real orders of the day.

I like the first half of the episode better than the second, because it’s just the two of them reacting to different things, good and bad, in the world, in ways that reveal that perspective. There’s some well-staged set pieces that evince their sense of exhaustion and frustration at how fruitless this mission has been, and the wear on them from having to do so much killing, even if it’s just for walkers.

But there’s also a moment of relief for them, when they stumble their way into dinner and fancy drinks. They feel more human in these moments, letting their guards down, having the chance to relax, to scoff at the materialism of the world before the fall, to nab toys for their kids and play cards and sit in comfy chairs for once.

There’s also a chance for Gabriel to give a stunning monologue about his mentor, a man of the cloth who didn’t believe in doctrine so much as he believed in being with people, speaking from the heart, connecting with them at their level to give them ease. You can hear the way Gabriel admires the man with every word he utters and feels like he falls short in following his example.

He gets a chance to try to do that in the second half, which I liked less but still appreciated. It turns out that their shelter for the night isn’t an abandoned outpost, but rather one man’s hideout. The man, named Maize (and played by Robert Patrick) is incensed that these interlopers killed his boar and drank his whiskey, and so decides to play a sick game. He forces Gabriel and Aaron to play a version of Russian Roulette where each has to decide whether to point the gun at themselves or one another.

His aim is to try to show that all that’s left are murderers and thieves, to show that when the chips are down, people will turn on one another to save themselves, the way his brother did to him. It’s a tense sequence, with some good acting from all involved. But it feels like such a contrived, theatrical scenario, which lessens its impact.

There’s some power in Gabriel and Aaron proving him wrong, not just by choosing to turn the gun on themselves even when they believe the bullet’s in the chamber, but through Gabriel seeming to live up to his mentor’s model, speaking his heart to Maize and convincing him that there’s is still light in the world, that he can join their community and find a better way. The form is semi-novel, but it’s a pitch we’ve seen our heroes make in tons of situations when confronted with amoral or brutally cynical adversaries.

What is unique, though, is that it’s all an act. When Maize lets his guard down, Gabriel clobbers him with Aaron’s arm. Gabriel had preached the word and gotten through to his attacker, and seemingly Aaron for that matter, but he didn’t believe it, or at least didn’t believe that someone who killed his own brother deserved that sort of grace. (Which, hey, if you’ve read the story of Cain and Abel, isn’t a biblically inconsistent approach, I suppose!). There’s a bitter but potent irony to that.

The capper is that they find the (twin!) brother stowed away in the building’s upper floor, clearly being imprisoned and tortured and forced to play similar games. And when they try to free him, he grabs a gun, looks at the wife and child he was forced to kill in another of those Saw-esque exercises, and kills himself, unable to live after everything he’s seen and done.

It’s dark, and I know folks complain about the grimness of the show sometimes. Hell, I have. But there’s something more personal and specific about this. It’s not just wanton death and cruelty on a wide scale. It’s meant as a testament to the shadows in the human soul, the people whose hearts have been blackened by the last ten years and may or may not be able to be redeemed. The biggest irony, of course, seems to be that in the moment, Gabriel does live up to his mentor’s legacy. He’s with Maize. He seems to persuade the wicked that it doesn’t have to be that way. Only to show that he buys into the very dogma that he was trying to talk his captor out of. It’s dark, but it’s a sort of personal darkness that is harder to take while also feeling more visceral and piercing than more blood and guts.