9x03 Warning Signs

[7.4/10] There are two battles being fought on The Walking Dead right now, two conflicts in competition with one another for the attention and devotion of the survivors. One is the struggle between the former Saviors and the people who’ve hurt and been hurt by them. The Saviors (or most of them at least) don’t trust Rick’s cohort to protect them, don’t like being denied the weapons to protect themselves, and don’t like the fact that their compatriots keep disappearing without explanation. And on the other side, you have folks like Maggie, Daryl, and Cyndie, who lost people to the Saviors, who don’t believe they know how to be a part of a society, who think that a conflagration is inevitable and that they should stamp out any sparks. There’s so much bad blood and mistrust to be overcome.

But the other conflict is a much bigger one. As Rick puts it, “it’s us versus the dead.” Rick is, more than anyone, trying to move past the war that he both helped start and helped end. (Though, to be honest, he gets a surprising amount of credit for something that was obviously a group effort, but maybe part of the idea at play here is that we need these singular folk heroes and legends to try to unite people.) Making a new world, surviving the hordes of shambling carnivores out in the wild, is going to take a community that moves past the old divisions. Rick is, perhaps, overly optimistic at how likely that is to happen, but he’s not wrong about what the bigger struggle is going to be, a struggle that will take all of them working together to overcome.

And Rick is, through his own personal circumstances, apt to believe that. Rick is enjoying the bliss of a blended family. The happiest and best-shot scenes in this episode see Rick raising a daughter who may or may not be his, with a woman who is essentially his second wife, after they’ve both lost the families they had before the world ended. They know pain, they know loss, and they know the difficulty of starting over and finding something that works. But they’ve also found this beautiful thing in the aftermath of that. They have a beautiful family, the most heartening and human thing on this often drab and depressing show, so it makes sense that Rick would be a little brighter on the prospects of a broader unity forming.

But the blended family of the Saviors and everyone they once tried to subjugate is having a much rockier path. “Warning Signs” has a number of The Walking Dead’s usual problems, but does a good job at highlighting the tensions between those two groups starting to boil over, the doomed efforts to calm things down and deescalate, and how both halves of the community are starting to feel like this arrangement just can’t continue. The mob stand-off in particular, though filled some clunky dialogue, is a great visual representation of this communal bomb about to go off, a mass of bodies in conflict with one another.

And for the most part, I like how “Warning Signs” tries to operationalize that tension, to provide some structure to the episode. It comes down to a pair of mysteries. One is a whodunnit for Justin, the troublemaking ex-Savior who shows up as a zombie here after being killed in the last episode. And the other asks what happened to Arat, another former Savior who disappears while most of our heroes have split up and gone on patrol.

Those mysteries give “Warning Signs” some momentum, an idea to build around, which is often lacking. People get to ask one another about whether they had anything to do with these disappearances. The group gets a clear goal in terms of finding a lost comrade. And it creates a skeletal structure for the show to pack its “house divided” theme onto rather than just spinning from one scene to another.

But this is The Walking Dead so the show falls back into its usual pitfalls with abandon. I’ve beat the drum about the series feeling the need to express everything through a series of two-person exchanges long enough, but it creates a samey feeling between episodes, where no matter what the situation, everyone’s having the same kind of conversation, one designed to reflect in bold letters on whatever the theme of the day is rather than mimicking anything close to actual human conversation. The show comes close with the low key interrogation between Rick and Daryl, with enough shared history between the two dredged up to make it feel like more. But time and again, it feels like we’re refed the same old same old in terms of scene construction and dialogue.

And the show also has to meet its zombie attack quotient, so we have Maggie and Cyndie dealing with an old house’s worth of walkers who break through the requisite barriers at an oh so convenient time. Look, after nine seasons, it’s going to get harder and harder to find new ways to reframe a zombie attack. But the show has hit these same beats -- “This should be easy” to “Oh no something went wrong” to “Last minute save” -- so many times that without some visual innovation from Greg Nicotero and company, it can’t help but feel like going through the motions.

The show also loses me in flavorless, pointlessly cryptic doublespeak and underdeveloped relationships. “Warning Signs” tries to anchor a big part of the drama on the connection and trust between Gabriel and Anne, and the things that threaten it. But we’ve had a single episode, constituting just a few scenes, between the two of them, with pleasant enough but not overwhelming chemistry, so it’s hard to feel the sense of investment or betrayal the episode wants to try to sell here.

What’s worse is that, because we can’t just know what’s going on, Anne speaks to the man on the other end of the walky talky in code. The gist is clear from context -- she’s trading people for supplies -- but it has to be shrouded in more dull teases and nonsense rather than just being straightforward about what’s going on. And naturally, it’s followed up by a ponderous back-and-forth with Gabriel, that can’t carry the emotional weight the episode is trying to load the moment up with.

The same goes for the episode’s closing moments, where Maggie, running down a lead, finds out that Cyndie and the Oceansiders are the ones who absconded with Arat, and are the ones who killed Justin. Rather than having this be a powerful revelation in and of itself, one marked by the reactions of the characters involved, The Walking Dead devolves into another long, pained monologue, from a performer who can’t quite pull it off, to sell a point in 100 words that could have been made in 10. (Hello pot, this is kettle, pleased to meet you.)

But once again, I liked the idea behind the scene. It’s easy for Rick to talk about reconciliation and the needs of everyone as a whole society. He has tranquility, and domestic bliss, and a family he’s been able to construct out of the ashes of civilization, even if he’s still visiting Carl’s grave to start his day.

Not everyone is so lucky. Cyndie lost her brother. Maggie lost her husband. Daryl lost too many people important to him in this way. There’s a bit too much of an “I learned it from watching you” vibe in Cyndie’s speech to Maggie, but the point is clear. Rick’s way is hard, not just practically, but emotionally. It’s incredibly difficult to break bread with the people who slaughtered your family members, even cooperation is for the greater good.

The Walking Dead is a surprisingly symbolic show, and we see the hope that Rick is preaching for represented by a small, ripe, tomato -- a spot of searing red amid the wash of greens and grays that populate the world of the series. Rick plucks one from Carl’s grave, the representation of the better world that his son dreamed of. Another is chewed up by a rebellious savior, trying to intimidate and humiliate Maggie. And in the end, it’s stomped on by the Saviors ready to depart and shatter that dream.

That tomato is a wonderful thing for Rick to look upon and hold onto. It’s a sign of this dead place showing some sign of life in the shadow of all the blood that’s been shed, that there can be something else. But that something doesn't come easy, and too many people, even Rick’s closest confidantes, are ready to let it fade back into the dirt, then forget the blood that watered that same ground.