8x08 How It's Gotta Be

[4.2/10] You’ve stuck through a lot if you’re a Walking Dead fan who’s made it this far. As someone who watched that first fateful episode on Halloween night nearly eight (oh god) years ago, it’s easy to feel like in a weird way, you’re one of the survivors from the show. You stick things out, finding ways to go on, as more and more of your friends and acquaintances drop out, many resigned to the fact that things can never go back to how they were.

And I’m ever the optimist, always the one who, even when the show has a bad stretch, likes what TWD is trying to do, even if it can’t always get there. Make no mistake, the fact that we have a prestige-aiming, big budget, zombie show, that aims to make statements about humanity and society as much as it wants to deliver the latest gory scene of the week is no small thing. Even when it stumbles, I’m apt to cut it some slack for the boldness of what it’s trying to accomplish.

But everyone has a limit, and I’m not there just yet, but Season 8 has been a test. It’s been the first season of the show where I almost dread flipping on the T.V. to watch, not because I cannot take the gore, or because I’m affronted by the show’s willingness to depict evil, but because I’m just tired, tired of this show waxing and waning but not really moving.

It’s time for the Negan arc to end. For a long time the bead on the show was that it was “find a safe haven/haven gets destroyed/go out in search of a new one.” And there was a certain amount of truth to reducing the show to that formula. But the minute the Alexandria acclimation arc ended, and the Negan arc began in earnest, there was the promise that we were entering a new chapter of the show, one about ideas of community, about existential threats, about international relations through the lens of his zombie T.V. series, that felt like exciting new ground.

But now, it feels like the show, and by extension the audience, is just stuck in the mud. This season’s assault on The Sanctuary felt like the perfect prep for the culmination of the arc. It provides a good enough reason our heroes to get into gear, but also to wait a little while to fully confront and resolve the issues with The Saviors. I expected, perhaps naively, that we would see that confrontation this week.

And maybe, TWD will continue with it’s unorthodox season structure and instead we’ll get the finale of this arc in the first episode back from the break, as the the show’s done before. But “How It’s Gotta Be” doesn’t feel like that. “How It’s Gotta Be,” true to its name, feels like an affirmation that this is what the show is now -- a neverending fight against the same bat-wielding thug and his coterie of evil, if compelling henchman. And as much as I appreciate this show, as much for its continuing potential as its intermittent execution, I can’t help but wonder how long I want to stay signed up for that.

In the meantime, we’re left with a series that had the opportunity to put a big period at the end of this sentence, and instead turned it into a semicolon. The name of the game in “How It’s Gotta Be” is jumping around the map and checking in with the various good guy leaders and their bad guy counterparts.

So we have Maggie running into Simon on the road, who shoots her two-line lieutenant; gives her the new marching orders, and sends her back to The Hilltop. We have Gavin going to The Kingdom and reluctantly reading the subjects there the riot act, while Ezekiel tries to give himself up to get his people to safety. We have Aaron and Enid getting into a brief but deadly firefight with the denizens of Oceanside. We have Daryl, Tara, Rosita, and more running into Dwight going full quisling at the end of the battle. And we have Rick returning to Alexandria to find it being blown to smithereens by Negan himself.

Stitching all of these plotlines together doesn’t make “How It’s Gotta Be” feel epic; it makes it feel overlong and overstuffed. The episode never builds any momentum or coherence, just jumping from place to place and rubbing the audience’s nose in how these grand plans have turned to crap. I don’t always mind that sort of thing. The Walking Dead is a show that deals with harsh things, and sometimes that leads to harsh ends. But there’s a sense of wallowing here, of just trying to reset the clock so that we can do this same song and dance with Negan all over again, and the prospect of that is miserable.

So whether we’re watching Eugene take a half-step toward doing the much ballyhooed “right thing” despite allowing this whole backlash to happen, or watching Michonne lose her cool and hack and slash at one of her enemies, or watching the wall-smashing crowd debating whether or not it was their actions that led to this or watching Rick and Negan get into a contrived slugfest,, it all comes off like the ultimate running in place, going over the same old ground, with no end in sight.

And then there’s Carl. I’ve never had a particularly strong investment in Carl. He has his moments now and then, often when he’s dealing with his omnibus parental issues, but mostly he’s a prop, something for Rick or Michonne or someone else to worry about or fight for or have tender moments with to advance their character more than they advance his. It doesn’t help that the kid’s not really the best actor yet, so his attempts to seem steely or haunted or protective have trouble landing.

But for some reason, mostly his impending demise, Carl is the closest thing to a focal point of “How It’s Gotta Be.” He makes a stand against Negan and offers to sacrifice himself. He wanders around looking mostly blank but nominally in awe of his explosion-filled surroundings. And for some inexplicable reason, he’s in charge.

Has Carl ever really shown good leadership? Has he ever seemed posed to take over as a decisionmaker? Besides one failed attempt on Negan’s life, has he ever even seemed fully competent about much of anything? It strains credulity that hardened, battle-tested folks like Michonne or Daryl or Rosita would turn everything over to his uninspiring kid when the rubber meets the road. The show is giving Carl his final moment of glory, and it wants to try to make that meaningful, but it thrusts Carl into the spotlight as though he’s always belonged there rather than genuinely earning that, and it weakens and already sputtering episode considerably.

And yes, in the end, he has a walker bite on his torso.

I wish I could give a damn. I really do. Carl is one of those last remaining links to the beginning of the series. He is, while still something of a prop, that initial, animating impulse for Rick, the thought that helped him strive to get out and find his family despite the undead marauders and more human threats between him and them. He’s been the symbol of the future, the walking representation of what the future may hold if Rick can secure it. Carl meeting his end, in a nominally noble and brave way, while saving someone Rick refused to bother with, should feel momentous and tragic.

Instead, it’s just another brick in the wall. It’s just another character meeting their demise in a way that lacks any oomph beyond the momentary surprise that the show’s willing to pull the trigger, so to speak. Carl’s death isn’t out of nowhere; it’s something that the show, or at least the episode, sets up and draws out. That removes the shock, despite the plot armor Carl’s amassed over the years, but it doesn’t imbue the meaning. It’s another empty death for a mostly empty character that the show bends over backwards to try to inject some sentiment into too little too late.

Maybe that’s where I am with this show as a whole. There’s still parts of it that move me, characters I’m invested in, ideas that I connect with. But more and more, The Walking Dead is whittling those down, until all that’s left is a few worthy souls, some amazing zombie effects, and a husk of what used to be.

I’m not done with this show. I’ve come too far to stop now. But the survival of my interest, like the survival of so many characters, is increasingly precarious, unpleasant, and dull.