11x16 Acts of God

[6.0/10] I think Maggie is the new Rick. I don’t just mean that she’s a rough-hewn parent shepherding her young son through a dangerous, post-apocalyptic world. I mean that the show wants me to care a lot about her -- in whom she chooses to trust and whether she’s being a good leader -- mostly by dint of the fact that she’s been around for a long time.

And I just can’t. Somewhere along the way, I stopped caring about what happened to Rick Grimes, let alone the battle for his soul. It’s hard to say why, but it had something to do with how much focus he got relative to more interesting characters, to where his scenes started to feel like a chore. The Walking Dead is more of an ensemble now than in Rick’s heyday, but still, I find myself waiting for the show to move its spotlight to someone else whenever Maggie’s front and center. Sometimes characters run out of gas or just lose your interest. Whatever the reason, I’m there with Maggie.

Which is rough since she is, more or less, the main character of “Acts of God”, the show’s mid-season finale. She’s not the only person with stuff going on. Daryl, Gabriel, and Aaron have to evade Hornsby’s extermination attempt. Leah makes a pact with Hornsby to eliminate a common enemy. Max has to thumb through Pamela Milton’s files to find fodder for an expose. And the muckraker squad of her, Connie, Kelly, Magna, Eugene, and Ezekiel is pooling their resources to expose the dark underbelly of the Commonwealth. There’s plenty going on.

But the main story here centers on Maggie. She decides to hide little Hershel away. She looks for Negan’s group, seeks out his friends and allies, and decides to trust him as a temporary caretaker. She’s the target of Leah’s hunt. And she’s the one who directs her people out of and back into Hilltop in order to “end it” with Hornsby. She’s the main character for this one, and if you’ve run out of interest in the character, that makes this a less-than-engaging capper to this block of episodes.

There’s a good story to be told about whether someone like Maggie could ever forgive someone like Negan after what he did, no matter what personal changes he may have made in the meantime. And it’s not like TWD is failing to do the work. There’s major choices and scenes devoted to the question throughout season 11. But in the end, it comes down to the same big speeches and on-the-nose conversations that don’t have the power they ought to.

Likewise, it’s striking to see our group of survivor’s returned to their roots -- wanderers scraping by in a rough landscape. Alexandria and Hilltop have been a part of the show for so long at this point. Seeing Hornsby turn them into his personal colonies, replete with Commonwealth banners draped across their gates, is jarring. Our heroes had found some measure of stability in these places, and seeing them torn away makes this into Serious Business.

But Maggie leading the charge against Hornsby doesn’t, if for no other reason than she comes off like the same sort of “generic leader guy” Rick once did, and because it’s episode 16 of 24, so we know there’s plenty more that has to percolate before things come to a head. The survivors skulking around is fine enough, but also plays as interstitial ahead of the real fireworks.

Though we get some of those too. Daryl, Gabe, and Aaron have a shootout with some Commonwealth goons, including one soldier who gets just enough shading for us to get the mildest bit of satisfaction when Daryl neutralizes the dude. Maggie and Leah have a mutual stalking session when trying to locate and stop one another. And they also have a knock-down, drag-out fight once things settle out.

All of it’s fine. It all features the fast and loose presentation of trifling things like physics, combat effectiveness, and human anatomy. But if you’re not used to that on The Walking Dead after eleven seasons, this show has nothing for you. None of them are bad. The Maggie/Leah fight in particular is sufficiently raw and intense as befits the emotions at play. But none of them can muster the level of big thrills or emotional investment to bump any of them above a mild thumbs up.

The most interesting part is Daryl choosing to shoot Leah to save Maggie, something he was more reluctant about earlier in the season. That's a big deal, given how much has gone on between him and Leah. But unfortunately, we have to leave the processing of such a big decision until months from now given where this episode’s focus is.

(Side note: If anyone should have stumbled into the “Rick Grimes vortex of apathy” it’s Daryl. He hasn’t changed much in ages and falls into some pretty traditional archetypes. So why do I and so many others still care about the lug? I’d chalk it up to two factors: (a.) Norman Reedus is so good and so natural in the role and (b.) he’s one of the more taciturn characters on the show, which means he’s less subject to the show’s big dumb speeches. Both of those things help spare the him from the worst of TWD’s flaws in the writing department.)

The other storylines have their ups and downs, with some truly baffling choices along the way. With the explicit “act of god” talk, I expected this to be some kind of Exodus riff just in time for Passover. But the presence of locusts or some other insect infestation doesn’t really mean anything to the plot. I guess it’s just symbolism, a sign that the Heavens themselves look poorly upon the Commonwealth’s largesse, but who knows with this show.

What I do know is that the decision to turn Hornsby into a store brand version of Two-Face, replete with scarred cheek and a propensity to flip coins, seems downright bizarre. I like Hornsby as the smiling bastard, but making his two-facedness more literal is a step down. He’s a mustache-twirler rather than a chilling, conniving baddie here, and it weakens one of the better new characters from this arc.

The strongest material here comes from the muckraker. Watching Max and Eugene find the comfort they’d sought and missed out on before is really heartening. And despite the cheesy attempt at tension when Sebastian finds Max rifling through his mother’s files, I love that Max gives Pamela one more test. The asks her boss if the extra money could go to a scholarship for the less fortunate and is rebuffed in a politician-friendly fashion. It’s on-the-nose, like so much in this show, but a good use of a small test of character to tell the story of whether and why Max is willing to go that far.

But like so much here, it’s mostly a tease. We get Leah as the terminator, Hornsby and the Commonwealth rounding up survivors from Alexandria to Oceanside, and one glimpse of Connie’s expose. The bulk of this one, though, is centered on the adventures of Maggie and her troupe of loyal followers. I’m ready to tap out on that story, and my only hope is that over the final eight episodes, TWD is more willing to spread the love to the rest of its cast, who have more to offer and more worth caring about at this point in the show.