8x12 The Key

[8.2/10] The Walking Dead is constantly asking where your tolerance level should be. In a world where there are man-eating monsters around every corner, and no laws to keep people in line, the show is centered on the notion of how much a survivor should let themselves change with the times and how much they should hold onto the morals and values of who they were, and what society was, before civilization fell.

“The Key” offers three little morality plays, three little parables, to put that idea into relief. Two are mirror images of one another -- Maggie deciding whether to deal with or rob a stranger who’s promising them the titular key to the next phase of whatever this is, and Simon deciding whether to try to save Negan or remake the Saviors in his own image.

And each, in its way, is asking the same question: this war between the Saviors and the Alexandrians can’t last forever, so what should we do to stop it and who will we be afterward? Maggie gets to choose, once again, whether to become hard or to become hopeful, trying to decide whether the best thing for her starving people is to take what seems to be a hopelessly naive woman at her word, or to take her supplies from her before somebody bigger and badder does.

That woman is Georgie, another Walking Dead figurehead who seems a little larger than life. She rolls up in a van, asking for records and food in exchange for what she claims is something worth even more -- her knowledge. It sounds insane. Enid says as much and Maggie seems inclined to agree. That van is full of food, and after some debate, Maggie resolves to take it, to feed her people, both because she has no idea whether she can trust someone offering such vague promises and because she has every reason to think Georgie’s brand of high-minded barter will get her and her compatriots killed somewhere down the line anyway.

Simon is thinking about how to best serve his people (and, you know, himself) at the same time. “The Key” brings Dwight back into the fold of the Saviors, and gives Simon the chance to make his appeal to another top lieutenant who might aid his coup. Simon’s suggestion is oblique and florid, as Savior dialogue tends to be, but his suggestion, and his point is surprisingly reasonable.

He’s tired of Negan’s tactics. He’s tired of Negan trying to “save” people, of trying to scare them into submission. There’s an almost meta quality to it -- Simon realizing that the Saviors and “Rick, the Widow, and the King” have been doing this dance for some time now, and that Negan’s enemies “don’t scare.” The status quo can’t hold, either for a television show like The Walking Dead or for an impatient second-in-command who thinks the current strategy isn’t work and is ready to let a new wave of leadership take over.

Fortunately for Simon, fate (or rather T.V. writers) leans in his favor, as Rick mounts a surprise attack on the Savior convoy that’s headed to the Hilltop, aiming to take his revenge on Negan. It’s one of the show’s better sequences, directed by series stalwart Greg Nicotero. There’s shades of the grindhouse, as Rick runs down Negan in a claustrophobic cityscape, the element of surprise on his side and the hot blood of grief in his veins.

That’s the third little vignette in “The Key”, as Rick and Negan go toe-to-toe, with Rick in a position of power for once. He manages to flip Negan’s car, foolishly waste his bullets scaring him into some abandoned building, and starts stalking the guy. He is reckless, rather than calculating. Furious rather than deliberate. He blows through ammo, tosses his axe, and almost toys with his prey rather than finishing the job.

It’s almost psychological warfare. There’s some problems with these sequences -- chief among them being that the show has to find a pretty contrived way for Negan to get out of this scrape -- but there’s a tension here that’s absent from a lot of Walking Dead confrontations. Maybe I’m a sucker, but for a little while, I thought this show would have the stones to go through with it, to take out its Big Bad with four episodes left in the season, to let the fall out fill the time from here to there.

But even if The Walking Dead isn’t that brave, it shows us a different side of Rick, or at least a side we haven’t seen in a while. There’s times when Rick has lost it, has been willing to protect his people no matter what. But we so rarely see him so vengeful, so out of control not because he’s damaged, but because he’s in mourning and ready to exercise his grief by taking out the symbol for all his misery, for everything he hates about this world.

The problem, then, is that in doing so, Rick becomes Negan. Rick carries Lucille. He whistles. He taunts his opponent. Part of it is obviously just to mock Negan, to give him a taste of his own medicine and try to make him feel what Rick had to go through at Negan’s hands. But part of it is a sign that while Carl hoped his death, or more importantly, what he did in life, would be enough to inspire both Negan and his dad to set aside their differences in the hopes of building a better word, it may have, instead, been the thing that sent Rick over the edge.

Sure, it’s hollowly cool to watch zombies catch on fire and wander their way through a dark, crowded basement. It’s exciting to watch Rick and Negan tussle their way through that tumult, coming at one another from different angles, swinging bats and taking damage. At some points it become too much, too honed for the presentation, but there is an intimacy to this fight, a sense of two personalities finally approaching one another on something approaching an even playing field, that heightens this confrontation.

But more than that, it’s a sign of Rick and Negan having flipped. It’s Negan who can’t be saved by his people, who wants to make some kind of deal, who thinks there’s a way to work this out. And it’s Rick who’s had enough, who thinks it’s his way or the highway, and who believes the only way to make things right is to cut off the head of the Saviors. He is done being a farmer; he’s ready to be a butcher.

And Simon quite agrees. He plays the part of the diligent commander, holding his troops in position, claiming that he’s being deliberate in his tactics so as not to spoil the plan. But in reality, he’s checking to see whether Negan is gone, whether he can position himself as the next leader of this group, and take them into the next phase of this world they’re building for themselves.

It’s a world where they stop trying to save people and start killing anyone who stands in their way. It’s a world where Negan’s means of “saving” people have become too hard, and slaughter is too easy. At the end of the day, Simon burns Negan’s car, gives a rousing speech to his men and women, and asserts himself as the answer. It’s Simon who has the key, and the key is taking out the people who would challenge them, swiftly and heartlessly. Whatever comes next, Simon wants it to be on his terms, and his terms are bloody as all hell.

For a minute, it seems like Maggie is intent on making the same choice, on doing whatever needs to be done, condemning whomever needs to be condemned to whatever fate they need to be condemned to, in order to see that her people survive. But Michonne implores her otherwise. She tells Enid that Carl didn’t want them to stop fighting for that better world, but wanted to keep their altruism, their trust, their kindness, alive.

So in the end, Maggie relents, and her trust is paid off. Georgie takes one crate of records from Maggie in exchange for a crate of food to help sustain the Hilltop, and the titular key. It’s photocopied binder that serves as a compendium of modern and medieval techniques to help bring civilization one step closer to being what it was. It’s a simple gesture, one of kindness and compassion and also hope -- that when this whole thing is over, this seemingly endless war, there will be something to build, and people worth building around, at the end.

That’s where “The Key” ends things (beyond another semi-corny tease for the next episode). It’s a slower episode at first, one that lets the pauses hang in the conversations between Maggie and Rosita, between Simon and Dwight, between Rick and Daryl. It lets those silences linger, to have the viewer fill in the spaces as each wonders what the fabled “tomorrow” will look like. It brings the camera close to the viscera as the Saviors bathe their implements in the infected blood of fallen-but-ambulatory.

And it asks whether the infection that the dead have succumbed to goes beyond the physical, whether it’s afflicted how these people think and feel in the wreckage of society. Simon sees what comes next as a land to be conquered, an open battlefield where anyone who doesn't have the good sense to stay out of their way deserves to be cut down. Negan sees his way of life, his fragile stability falling apart. And Rick doesn't see anything but the red in his eyes as he tries to fell a man he hates with every fiber of being having lost his mercy, lost his tolerance, lost his belief in the good of this world when he saw the light go out of his son’s eyes.

But Michonne, and eventually Maggie, see something more. They see a world where those individual choices -- to trust someone rather than mug them, even when you badly need what they have -- can amount to something much bigger. When this war ends, the time will come to decide who to be, to see how much of this blood the survivors can scrub off of their souls, and as angry, as hurt, as wronged as all of these people are, only some of them want to hang on and stay clean enough to rid themselves of the Saviors, not become them.

There are three fables in “The Key”: two stories of people getting worse, and one story of people getting better. The laws of television say there’s a greater fight to come, but before that happens, The Walking Dead takes a moment to imagine what the world after it will look like, and for once, in this harsh, unforgiving setting, there’s promise that it might look like something more, something better.