11x01 Acheron (1)

[7.2/10] I don’t want to belabor the point, but I feel like I’ve seen everything The Walking Dead can do at this point. The show isn’t bad. If anything, it’s floor is higher now than it was during the series’s cultural peak. But it’s just played out. We’ve seen its conflicts before, in pretty much every flavor on the menu, so they just don’t have the impact they might have if all this were fresh.

To the point, the opening scene where our heroes retrieve a bunch of MREs from a zombie-infested military bunker is superb. Like a lot of the best stretches of The Walking Dead, it’s near-wordless, with the action and acting telling the stories. It’s the kind of big setpiece, filled with most of the major characters, some well-staged action, and a little gore and combat to remind the casuals what they signed up for with this show.

And yet, we’ve seen variations on this same sort of thing from the beginning. There’s only so many ways you can kill a group of zombies. Sure, there’s tension in having to repel in and out, but it’s a new coat of paint on a standard routine as TWD begins its eleventh season.

(Also, not for nothing, we’ve pretty much given up the ghost on realism. Everyone on the show is a badass now. To be generous, maybe to survive for eleven seasons’ worth of stories, you’d have to be a badass, and all the more timid or clumsy folks have perished by now. But it’s amusing how quickly a capable but ragtag group of survivors are all basically Rambo when the walkers started stirring.)

And yet, once it’s done we’re back to another interminable scene where characters sit around in a room debating competing needs without the dialogue or performances able to make this theoretically momentous decision seem interesting.

Thankfully, the two major missions here are. Maggie, Daryl, Negan, and some redshirts (or at least some newbies) go off to find Meridian, the camp near Washington D.C. where Maggie had been staying all this time. Beyond the rain, which forces them to travel underground via a subway tunnel, there’s the continuous tension between Maggie and Negan for obvious reasons that hangs in the air.

Even that runs over a lot of familiar ground and familiar sorts of set pieces. There’s an interesting dynamic with Negan’s treatment throughout all of this. He wants to hunker down till the storm passes, worries about the obstacles that might lie ahead in this tunnel, and generally questions the wisdom of how they’re going about things. It’s compelling in a “Terrible News: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” sort of way. It does seem foolhardy, and for that matter, Negan’s probably right about Maggie just waiting for the right opportunity to off him.

Likewise, we feel for Maggie, because she has a fair claim on wanting righteous justice against Negan for what he did to Glen. She makes a good point of the necessity of their trip and the process that put her in charge. But she seems pretty unreasonable here, to where even though you want to root for her, you feel for Negan’s shabby treatment as the mangy mutt brought along only to sniff out the way, and you can comprehend why he doesn’t rush to hoist her onto the subway car and save her, even if you don’t agree.

But it is, like so much here, the sort of debate over Negan and situation with an untrustworthy party member we’ve seen a dozen times now. So even if there’s still power in Maggie wanting to avenge Glen that should theoretically electrify the situation, it’s all still a bit rote.

The scenario with Eugene, Ezekiel, Yumiko, and Princess in the Commonwealth is a little better on that front. The bureaucratic mumbo jumbo and mini-fascist state the leader has going gives their captivity a slightly different flavor. The interrogation montage is smartly written and edited, and I particularly like how, despite her eccentricities, Princess continues to prove herself useful in what she observes and internalizes from the people she meets.

But this is still just another “meet another group of survivors with their own weird rules/society” story, and you can only go to that well so many times. Maybe these Commonwealth guys are totally different from anything we’ve seen before, but after the clash of civilizations that climaxed with the Saviors arc, all the business with the Governor and Terminus and scads of other groups before that, and god help me, the Whisperers too, it’s all just a little too familiar.

Is there juice in our heroes almost making a grand escape only to see an indicator that Yumiko’s sister might be in there? Absolutely. It’s a reason for Yumiko in particular to stay, and the complicated motivations of each member of the foursome bodes well. It’s just hard to generate too much excitement when we’ve done the “get to know a new group and navigate their mysterious, possibly dangerous method of organizing things” dance so many times at this point.

I’m glad that this is the last season of The Walking Dead. When a show is doing things well enough but failing to engage you from overfamiliarity, it’s a sign that the series is out of gas. Maybe that’s naive to say, with spinoffs and T.V. movies galore in the offing, but it remains true. Hopefully with an end, if not the end, on the horizon, the show can dust off a few more surprises it’s otherwise been saving for a rainy day and provoke some genuine enthusiasm.