9x01 A New Beginning

Loved the new opening.

Two things that didn’t make sense for me (except to develop the plot/tension):
* the scene where they go over a glass floor that’s supposed to hold so much more weight than that... then, why are they going with the heavier stuff first... then, why are they using ropes (a lot of them) but some people still need to put their life on the line by walking on the glass while it’s obviously cracking???
* after, they are on the road with the stuff they got almost killing themselves to get. Some walkers are coming. We have the 4 more badass walker killer of the show and they decide to leave everything there. One guy decide to go back to free the horse and is bitten and knocked out in the process. So everyone comes back and they finally decide to face the small number of walkers and it takes 5 seconds to bring them down. But hey, they couldn’t do it before, right?

Otherwise, pretty solid episode. Was a bit afraid of the previous season’s finale. Going for the internal Game of Thrones political struggle but in a more subtle way than it was suggested.

We’ll see how the next couple of episodes will unwrap. Hope they will keep the pace. Not ready to drop this show... like... ever!

[8.5/10] I spent a decent chunk of the Negan arc asking “why don’t they just take out Gregory?” I know that so much of that season was once again about the battle for the soul of the community, whether they spare people like the kind-hearted good samaritans that they are, or whether they break down and hurt and kill like The Saviors because it’s what to take to beat The Saviors. Not killing Gregory, not sending him out to fend for himself, was not just a sign of mercy, but a sign that the good guys were morally better than the bad guys.

But good lord, surely at some point, after he’s tried to sell you out to The Saviors, after he’s tried to sow chaos and mistrust of you and your group, after he’s proven to be nothing but a heel, you rid yourself of the guy one way or another. At some point in this state of nature, practicality has to win out, and someone who almost goes out of his way to cause trouble and threaten your life and the lives of the people you care about has to go.

That didn’t happen in wartime though. Gregory survived until peacetime, when the denizens of Alexandria, The Hilltop, The Kingdom, The Sanctuary, and Oceanside can stop worrying about the threat that seems poised to either bleed them dry or wipe them out and start worrying about how to build a civilization, how to create a broader collection of city-states that work with one another rather than in service of one at the expense of the others.

That’s what’s most interesting about “A New Beginning”, the premiere of The Walking Dead’s ninth season. In some ways this is the happy ending for Rick and all of his allies. Negan has been defeated. We get to see gorgeous scenes of Rick, Michonne, and Judith as a family. We get to see crops being grown at the former war engine of The Saviors. We get to see all our favorite characters happy, healthy, and well for once. The passage of time has allowed everyone to make progress, to build something, to make a world that can be safe for children like Judith (who’s finally old enough to talk) and Hershel (Maggie’s child, who’s finally been born).

The spirit of that success, that cooperation, is found in the episode’s outstanding central set piece, where a coalition of nearly every main character of note teams up to raid the supplies of an art and history museum. The setup has everything you could ask for from The Walking Dead. There’s a clear, logical goal of obtaining olden times farming supplies to help them and an impromptu doomsday library of seeds. There’s smaller character moments, to indicate what’s changed and what hasn’t since the fall of The Saviors.

And most of all, there’s visual acuity and tension. “A New Beginning” takes pains to setup the threat of the cracking glass floor that our heroes tread upon, with a voracious horde lurking underneath. Director Greg Nicotero holds the tension of the team trying to pull a stagecoach across that floor. There’s superior sound design as the noises of crackling glass make you cringe at what may come. The group moves slowly, both showing their caution and drawing out the amount of time the audience has to sit on tenterhooks. And when a hole inevitably forms, an Ezekiel falls through, they use a safety rope to pull him up, which frays on the sharp edge of the broken glass in the perfect way to make you call into question whether his plot armor will falter in the confines of a season premiere.

Instead, our heroes manage to pull him out. They get their stagecoach. They get their seeds. And they get their plow. There’s an implicit attaboy there, something encouraging that says after all that this group of individuals has been through, after everything they’ve seen and lived down, there’s no challenge that can stop them now.

But of course, that’s not the case. It couldn’t be. There’s not much of a show in “happily ever after.” Instead, The Walking Dead reminds us that there were always threats beyond a single grinning antagonist in the ashes of the world. Those threats are storms that shatter the bridges you use to transport your supplies, mud that stymies your ability to move the latest find, and of course, the horde of shambling zombies who persist at all times to make moments small and large lethally dangerous in the snap of a jawline.

That’s what happens in “A New Beginning” as the perfect storm of route closures, muddy terrain, and an inbound horde ends up bringing down Ken, an otherwise indistinguishable Hilltopper who gets just enough characterization to make it mildly noteworthy (albeit obvious) that his end has come. More than some shock from killing off a no-name, Ken’s death tells us that what comes after Negan’s rain isn’t all peaches and sunshine, that people still die, that our heroes can still lose, and that ending the war was great, but didn’t solve everyone’s problems.

Now, the characters on The Walking Dead are left with new problems, threats from within that are just as potent as those from without. Ken’s death exposes the tension between these communities. Fighting Negan gave the residents of these far flung city-states a reason to work together, but now that the war is over, everyone still needs to eat, and work, and survive, something that remains difficult, with or without a strongman demanding everyone pay what they “owe.”

It’s true for the surviving Saviors, who are operating under Daryl’s watch. There’s graffiti at The Sanctuary, and a mild sense of unrest and concern that this new experiment isn’t working. Negan was brutal and at times unpredictable, but he kept The Sanctuary running, even if it was mostly to his benefit, and that spilled over to a lot of people. If there’s one thing I appreciate about this transition, it’s that as much as I was ready to be done with the Negan arc, the show isn’t just sweeping it under the rug. There’s still Savior loyalists, people who flourished under the old regime, who aren’t ready to go quietly, and that’s going to be a problem even if their former leader has been deposed.

But their current leader is ready to bow out as well. For Daryl, his desire to shove off is partly due to that same sense that this new thing isn’t working, but also the sense that the transition to the new world is just hard for him. He’s never been good at being domesticated, and the thing that got him through so much of this was his friends, his group, the original band (more or less) that let him be a part of something. Now, they’re dispersed, finding each other spread out and representing different communities. That’s uncomfortable for him, because it means breaking apart the one community that felt like it was his.

Oddly enough, that’s a little like how Gregory feels, like the community he built has been taken away from him by a changing of the times he didn’t sign up for. It’s not hard for his pot-stirring in this to feel like political commentary on the part of the show. Gregory questions the legitimacy of any election that would put Maggie in charge, claims she’s in the pocket of other people’s interests, and criticizes her communal bent for not putting the Hilltop first. It veers toward the ridiculous when he actually plots to kill her -- first through a grieving father and then himself -- but it’s effective because it feels real up until that point.

When you have lots of different communities, when you have limited resources, when you see your son dying for something that benefits your neighbors instead of the place you call home, resources going elsewhere when it feels like you’re scraping by, unrest and dissension follows. Murder plots may be a bit much, but the conflicts The Walking Dead is teasing out -- how the march toward civilization is fraught with internecine conflict (something underscored by the museum plaque Michonne gazes at), how cooperative communities can push to look out for their own interests when the going gets test, how the end of a war doesn't mean the end of difficulties -- are promising to fill a new season of television.

That season kicks off with Maggie having had enough of Gregory’s crap. His attempted hit is a final straw. After so much deceit, so much yellow-bellied manipulation, he gets his just deserts at the end of a noose and the trouble he causes can end. After so long wondering why Maggie or Rick or somebody else didn’t do this, Gregory is gone.

Except he isn’t Maggie may have ended his life, but the dirt he kicked up at The Hilltop is still around, and whether she wants to admit it or not, filtered down to Maggie herself. When Rick asks her for more to help keep The Sanctuary going, she agrees, but demands more in return. She doesn't want to be seen by her people as someone who always sacrifices their needs for the needs of others. The charter that Michonne wants to create may be on rocky ground, as each of these places start to mark their own territory even in the absence of Negan’s bootheel.

“A New Beginning”, true to its name, moves The Walking Dead forward. It asks what the world looks like when an authoritarian regime is toppled and people have to pick up the pieces. For as many wins as the show gives our heroes here, little bits of happiness they deserve, as Michonne puts it, after all they lost, it doesn't pretend that the process will be easy. The idea this episode sets up for this season -- of the difficulty of constructing a humane civilization out of what’s left of the old regime -- is poised to be a strong one, but also one that threatens to put our heroes at odds with one another, even when the old thorns in their sides have been subdued, or eliminated.