8x10 The Lost and the Plunderers

[6.2/10] I’m not the first person to suggest that The Walking Dead has exhausted itself creatively. Eight years in, almost any show is going to have trouble feeling vibrant and fresh. But what’s conspicuous about “The Lost and the Plunderers” is how clearly it evinces the sense of a late era version of this show -- a show that’s always tried to aim a bit higher than its grindhouse roots -- that’s running out of meaningful things to say.

The current topic du jour is war, or more broadly, the seemingly unending cycle of killing that’s taken hold since Rick & Company (which may be, if Simon is to be believed, the official name for our protagonists’ group) first started clashing with the Saviors. And this episode is fixated on the question of whether anything short of one side wiping out the other can put a stop to this conflict, or if painful losses and hurt feelings and desire for revenge and vindication will perpetuate it forever.

And hey, that’s not a bad topic for The Walking Dead to cover. Most zombie-related works focus on the fall of society. TWD’s status as a venerable show gives it the longer runway to dig into how a society is built back up from the rubble. Those efforts would inevitably involve growing pains and lives lost, as different people with different ideas about what the future should look like come into conflict with one another. So now the show has the chance to do some Deadwood-esque thematic work about both the uglier side and the brighter ideals of nation-building.

That seems to be what The Walking Dead has been going for over the last couple of seasons, giving us Rick & Company, the Saviors, the Hilltoppers, Oceanside, the Kingdom, the “Garbage People”, and others as different exemplars of how society could be organized and how viewpoints clash. Those philosophical clashes turn into physical ones, and “The Lost and the Plunderers” seems to be asking whether that perpetual conflict can ever be resolved into something approaching peace and stability.

Its answer seems to be firmly in the negative. Rick holds Negan responsible, if not for Carl’s death than for the death of too many of his friends and allies, to ever just let things stand. Negan holds Rick responsible for the continued struggle, telling Rick that if he’d just gone along with the Saviors’ program, none of this would have happened. And pricks like Simon are too proud not to extract their revenge on the people who’ve disrespect him, when killing is always the easier option for the guy holding all the guns.

I doubt The Walking Dead will stick with that answer. The show has responded to accusations of being overly bleak in recent years with episodes that trend more toward the optimistic, even in the face of the grisly day-to-day of its premise. But the bigger problem is that when the show tries to dramatize these ideas in actual scenes and encounters, it just feels dull and repetitive.

The episode nominally chops the episode up into different people’s points of view, replete with title cards announcing which character the audience should focus on. But in practice, the results aren’t much different from the show’s usual approach, jumping from story to story within a given episode.

Sure, we get to see Michonne’s efforts to stamp out the blaze on Carl’s favorite gazebo while zombie slowly overtake it. (File under: “sentences I never thought I’d write in a review.”) Simon gets to a little extra development as a character with his own take on things. And the title cards put a band-aid over the “we’re going to check-in with Oceanside for a while despite having only a tenuous thematic connection to the other stuff going on in this episode” issue.

But man, it’s hard to care about the show’s tedious treadmill of ethical dilemmas at this point, especially when they’re delivered with the show’s typical blunt dialogue. Negan gets to give another speech about how his brand of “saving” people is hard, but is still the better way. Enid gets to give a speech about it being a choice whether you keep killing or not. And Rick gets to have another clunky back-and-forth with Negan over who’s going to kill whom and why.

And then there’s Jadis, the Vulcan-looking head of the Junkyardigans. “The Lost and the Plunderers” means to give her a bit of the spotlight and some backstory. We see snippets of how the events of this episode affect her with a heavy dose of non-linear editing. Those events include some baffling decisions – like Rick’s choice to go back to get assistance from her and her tribe after they’ve double-crossed him and his pals twice – and the timeline jumps quickly become confusing.

But there’s merit in what the episode is attempting there. The setup of Jadis luring her zombified compatriots into a garbage-grinder are contrived, but the images are potent. The flashbacks lay things on a little too thick, but there’s pathos in Jadis having to watching her dead friends look into her eyes as they’re ground into slurry. The show’s reach exceeds its grasp when it shows that slurry pouring over a non-representational painting Jadis created -- an obvious visual metaphor for this conflict obscuring the beauty of the world -- but it’s at least going for something with all this, however ham-handedly.

I’m just tired: tired of this ongoing Negan plot, tired of the show running in place rather than moving forward, and most of all tired of getting the same reheated moral ruminations over and over again.

And I love moral ruminations! One of the best things about zombie films and books and T.V. shows is that they force the viewer to confront what parts of ourselves and our values we hold onto in the face of a mortal threat and in the absence of those forces of civilization that keep our lesser impulses in check.

But The Walking Dead has been chewing on these same moral questions for nearly eight years now, and it’s all out of tricks at this point. The promise of this Savior-centric story arc was being able to expand on the idea of whether community can exist at the end of the world, to the question of whether different communities can co-exist within it. And yet here, in the back half of a season that’s drawing its central conflict further and further out, that blood-stained navel gazing can’t help but feel dull and sparkless.

Carl hoped for a better world. Rick and Negan both want to bring it about but have very different ideas about how to do it. And bystanders, like the Junkyardigans and the denizens of Oceanside, just want to live their lives, while finding themselves inevitably pulled into this clash of civilizations. The resulting war becomes all-encompassing, and the death of a child, a child whose end became certain after he went out trying to help someone rather than prepare for battle, seems more like an accelerant than a wake-up call for either his real dad or the stubble-faced strongman who seemed to want to play that role.

There’s interesting themes to extract from that, and by god, The Walking Dead tries. But you can only watch characters have those same damn debates, with the same sort of faux-high-minded dialogue, in a wash of greens and grays and the same set of mournful looks, before you start to ask what else the show has to offer.

The question of whether it’s okay, let alone wise, to kill and fight in the name of a greater good, or whether to try to sue for peace, to work something out, is a worthy one that shows like The Walking Dead are well-positioned to address. You just can’t keep trying to address it in the same basic way, with the latest death reduced to set dressing, until the question has been ground into zombie dust.

As it rounds out its eighth year on the air, The Walking Dead can’t keep having these same conversations, the same ethical arguments, without giving us something more or something different, or else the only cycle that seems impossible to break is the one where a television show can’t stop repeating itself.