10x03 Ghosts

[9.0/10] The Walking Dead is infuriating, if for no other reason than that sometimes it’s brilliant and sometimes it’s terrible and somemitmes it’s boring, and you never know which one you’re going to get. “Ghosts” isn’t a perfect episode of television by any stretch, but it’s scary and affecting and roots everything it does in human, understandable impulses. It’s episodes like these that make me loathe to give up on this show, despite being sorely tempted to on a number of occasions (as recently as....the prior episode).

It helps when you put your best foot forward in terms of your performance. Letting Carol taking the spotlight, and play off of Daryl and Michonne is a great choice for getting a good episode. Jeffrey Dean Morgan is the only thing that saved the Negan arc from being wholly exhausting. I don’t have strong feelings about the actor who plays Aaron as a performer, but he did a good job here too.) And Josh McDermitt does a great job of rescuing a kind of crappy scene with a good performance. Actors matter a hell of a lot to whether something works, and “Ghosts” leads with its best ones.”

But it also builds everything that happens in a conflict between the personal and the practical. Everyone is rightuflly seething with hate against Alpha and the Whisperers, and is ready to slice her head off, but Michonne (rightfully) feels like, given the events of last season’s finale, keeping the peace if better for everyone, even if it means capitulating (in the form of a land grant), to that monster. The standoff between the groups is tense, and the philosophical root of it helps add to that.

But you see that theme comes through in the town hall scene, where a member of the HIghwaymen demands “justice” but admits she doesn't have a plan. There’s an impulse to be hot-blooded here, to not give into the bad guys, but there’s also a pragmatism in folks like Michonne who isn’t any happier about the situation than the rest of her friends, but who also wants ot maintain the fragile peace they’ve forged so far.

You see it especially in the scenes between Negan and Aaron. The two guys hate one another, as the moment where each brings up the other’s lost partner helps establish, but at various points they need one another. That balance between loathing and necessity make the sequences where one is injured, or overwhelmed, or in dire straits and has to rely on the other thrilling and emotionally fraught. It’s a zombie situation built out of committed character work and earned interpersonal tension.

The only bit I didn’t really like in this one was the Eugene/Rosita stuff. Frankly, this whole storyline has been kind of a misfire from the start, and it seems like a weird time for Rosita to have a “we will never happen” moment with Eugene. But even if this storytline is an odd one, Eugene at least gives a pretty heartfelt, pathos-ridden speech that’s worth something, full of self-realization and “sorrow by the spoonful.” I still have no idea where they’re going with all this (and I’m not super interested, to be frank), but a good performance can help rescue an odd scene.

There’s also some nice formall adventurousness here. Depicting everyone’s tiredness through the montage of zombie slaying mixed with title cards indicating how much time has pass really gives the sense of the relentlessness of the threat facing our heroes and the state of exhaustion it leaves them in well.

But the piece du resistance of the episode is Carol’s work here. I am always a sucker for when TWD goes impressionistic, and having Carol hepped up on pep pills is a great excuse for some meaningful hallucinations. I particularly liked the implicit reveal that Carol isn’t jjust taking these pills to be awake and at the ready, but that it’s because in sleep, she dreams of a different, better life, with Daryl and with her son, that she knows can never be. That is a haunting thing to have to live with, so her choice to try to turn away from it is an impactful one.

Beyond that, there’s a nuts and bolts coolness to not knowing whether Carol is hallucinating at a given time or not. The scene where Daryl describes his dad’s truck-driving past is a great one, and it pulls the rug out from under the audience when you find out it never happens. Blurring the line between reality and reverie is cool for a show as visually adept at this one, and Melissa McBride does great work throughout the episode. With Carol especially, you see the conflict between her wanting to do what’s necessary and protect her friends, while also having that hindered by her rawness of Henry’s death and utter anger at Alpha for it.

All of this makes for a fantastic episode of the show, one that makes me wish we got this sort of quality on a weekly basis.