8x06 The King, the Widow, and Rick

[4.8/10] It’s episodes like these that make me thank Heaven The Walking Dead didn’t debut on network television in the era of twenty-two episode seasons. With only sixteen episodes, scores of characters, and multiple locales, the show should be plenty capable of finding enough plot and incident to fill a half-season with minimal wheel-spinning. Sure, not every episode can advance the major arc of the show, but there’s still tons of space for character development, or little vignettes, or details to make things more meaningful when those major arcs come to a head.

Instead, it feels like every half-season has at least one episode like “The King, The Widow and Rick” which cannot even charitably be called a table-setting episode. Instead, it’s merely an episode to tie up loose ends, to throw out a few miscellaneous plots here and there that don’t really move the ball in terms of the overarching story of the series, that don’t really tell us anything new about the characters, and don’t add much, if anything, to the show as a whole.

Instead, “The King” is a grabbag of an episode, one that finds some miscellaneous thing for pretty much every major character to do, without managing to make much, if any of it, interesting. After two episodes of relative focus, TWD has returned to its mishmash ways, and the results are a cornucopia of dullness.

That starts with what can charitably be called the “main” story of the episode, which centers on what Maggie should do with the Savior prisoners who are currently tied up behind The Hilltop. The episode tries to play coy with regard to what Maggie should do, with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other.

The angel, naturally, is Jesus, who is handing out excess turnips to the prisoners and encouraging Maggie to let them live and treat them humanely. The devil is Gregory, who makes a series of “heavy is the head that wears the crown” appeals to Maggie to convince her to hang their enemies and be done with it. There might be something to this debate if The Walking Dead hadn’t been having this specific argument since the premiere, and a more general version of it for the whole show. Neither Jesus nor Gregory cover any new ground, and the episode’s efforts to leave it ambiguous what Maggie’s going to choose to do are less than compelling.

Naturally, she splits the baby. She has the remaining Hilltoppers build a cage for the Savior captives, reads them the riot act, and tosses them in, but tells Jesus that it’s a temporary measure, and a strategic one, and that depending on how things go in the big battle vs. Negan, she may still send them all to meet their makers. It is, at a minimum, a pragmatic choice from Maggie, without seeming craven, the sort of decision-making that seems in short supply on The Walking Dead these days.

The smartest thing she does, however, is toss Gregory into the Savior cage. The episode only makes the most perfunctory of handwaves as to why Maggie lets Gregory hang around her or the prisoners anyway, so locking him up with the folks he tried to betray them for is a nicely poetic and practical touch. And the way the transparently slimy Gregory turns obsequious and debased as soon as he realizes what’s happening is a tribute to how thin the veneer of his bravado is.

But while she’s telling Jesus about her reasons for all of this, she’s holding the baby that Rick found and Aaron recovered from the Savior outpost, evincing the image of Madonna and Child. And it’s more than a coincidence given the less-than-subtle theme of motherhood and the connection between mothers and their children that the episode explores in heavy-handed fashion.

That peak of this comes in Carl’s portion of the story, where he once again encounters Siddiq, the young man Rick scared off at the gas station earlier in the season, and tries to make amends. The shared reference point for the two teenagers is their mothers. Carl came back because of the values that Laurie instilled in him, of helping other people, even when you don’t have to, that survive in Carl even as Rick has grown more pragmatic (or at least, vacillated between mercy and murder over the course of the show). In the same way, Siddiq feels bound by his mother’s belief that killing The Walkers frees their souls, and so he goes out of his way to set trap and take out zombies to follow her wishes.

Of course, the episode dramatizes that with a corny walker encounter between the two boys and the latest undifferentiated horde, that hits the same old beats, employs the same last minute save, and the same sense that none of this matters since there’s no way they’re going to kill off Carl in a random interstitial episode. And “The King” doesn’t really make hay with the maternal allusions, foregrounding it as the bond between Carl and Siddiq without really doing anything with it.

But the one bright spot on that front, as usual, is Carol’s portion of the story, which, whether through the talents of Melissa McBride or more subtle writing or simply more investment in the situation, pays greater dividends. She seeks out Ezekiel to help bring the next stage of the plan to fruition, but is rebuffed by Jerry, and instead goes out on her own. Or so she thinks. The younger brother of one of the Kingdom Denizens slaughtered in the Saviors’ assault tries to come with her.

The imagery of her instructing this little boy, and her tone she takes with him, is clear. This is an echo of the loss of Sofia, and Carol’s instincts to protect kids like him, to ensure that no one has to suffer what she did, helps drive her to pull Ezekiel back into the world and fight. That effort proves the lone powerful scene in the episode, where Carol confronts her friend, and tries to convince him to rise out of his crestfallen state.

She asks him why he kept visiting her, when she stayed holed up in that house at the edge of his “Kingdom,” and he gives a simple but potent answer -- “You made me feel real.” She gave substance to his fiction, and in return, he gave her the time and space to heal and eventually recover, at least a bit. Now she’s trying to return the favor, and the pathos but kindness in that, and the performances of the actor, offers the one redeeming portion of this episode.

Otherwise, it’s just more tooling around with little purpose or reason beyond faint teases and pointless outings. Michonne and Rosita leave to scope out The Sanctuary, nominally because they just need to see for themselves what happened, but realistically because neither has had much to do so far this season, and so the show throws them into a random bit of business here. Their interlude with the two Saviors at the cache is pretty dull save for Rosita’s use of a rocket launcher, and the fact that they meet up with Daryl and Tara seems like an obvious method of getting various characters in the right place at the right time for whatever comes next rather than an organic confluence of events.

And last, and possibly least, Rick walks into the Junkyardigans’ compound and offers them another deal, which the Vulcan Allison Janney leader of their dump-dwelling crew rejects. It is, in all likelihood, a feint, part of some elaborate Stage 2 that Rick’s concocted. But in this episode, there’s nothing more to it than setup, another piece in place on the board for the next big event, but no rhyme, reason, or intrigue in the initial move.

That’s all “The King, The Widow and Rick” has to offer. It’s hard to call it a skippable episode, if only because it’s so clearly devoted to positioning the characters for the fireworks to come. But It’s one that you’d be just as well off reading Wikipedia summaries for, save for the Carol-Ezekiel scene. While plenty of mild consequence happens here, none of it is especially compelling, much of it feels stitched together, and few, if any of these incidents, have anything to do with one another. In its eighth season, The Walking Dead is not a good enough show to just throw out a bunch of unrelated scenes and let the characters play in the sandbox. Instead, it turns into a rudderless episode, that diminishes the promise of what’s to come by how dull the path to get there is.