9x09 Adaptation

[7.6/10] One of the episode that still stands out to me among the now 100+, oft-undifferentiated episodes of The Walking Dead is “Live Bait” from season 4. For those of you who don’t know the episode titles off the top of your head, that’s the aftermath episode for The Governor, the one where he wanders the land and tries to cobble something together after his initial defeat at the hands of Rick and company.

It’s not a perfect episode, especially when it pivots from some measure of reform and recovery for The Governor into a “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” sort of situation. But it was striking for most of its runtime because it explored what the villain does when their plan fails but they don’t go down with the ship. It humanized a figure in the show who’d been more caricature than character. There was the sense of him standing in the ashes of his failures and trying to climb his way back out that we don’t really get most places, let alone cable television.

“Adaptation”, or at least the Negan-focused parts of the episode, feels like an echo of that one, a better version of it even. It sees Negan making good on his escape from the last episode, scaling the walls after a run-in with Judith, and seeing what the outside world looks like for the first time in six years.

It’s one of the show’s strongest stories in a long time. It is wistful, slow, and meditative, in a way The Walking Dead often tries to be, but rarely pulls off. But doing so much with Negan in isolation -- seeing what it’s like to live on the outside again, visiting the coffin that used to be his empire, playacting the part of the bat-swinging dictator he was stripped of by his enemies -- it carries a weight and a gnawing solitude that helps tell the story of him realizing how nothing is left out there for him now.

The episode can’t give us nothing but steak though, so we also get a storyline about Michonne and Daryl capturing and interrogating one of the Whisperers and deciding what to do with her. We have Luke and Alden going on a reconnaissance mission and bonding a bit in the process. And god help us, we even have a frickin’ love quadrangle to deal with.

Let’s get that last part out of the way by noting that it’s one of the most cliché, hackiest plots The Walking Dead was ever unveiled, and that’s saying something. Having Rosita be pregnant with Siddiq’s baby, while she’s dating Gabriel, and Eugene has an unrequited crush on her (while having overheard about her pregnancy) is some soap opera bullshit. It doesn't help that only Rosita and Eugene have any real history that we’ve seen on screen before this season, and that it’s one of the hardest relationships to root for in the first place.

But that unpleasantness aside, the rest of the episode is mostly fine. There’s not much to Luke and Alden’s storyline beyond teasing us a little before their run-in with The Whisperers. Still, it works thematically with the episode’s vague connective tissue about people figuring out what they want and need to do to survive out beyond the safety of those clunkily-noted “walls.” And more than that, it has some character interactions that are genuinely fun and endearing, not just dour and morose! I don’t know if I definitely need to see Luke and Alden playing and singing in their two-man band at the fair, but I officially give half a damn about their budding friendship, which is more than I can say for most of the shakily-established relationships on the show.

Speaking of shakily established relationships, Jesus’s death and the arrival of the Whisperer captive spurs the show to bounce around to plenty of them, most of which glancing and do more to gesture toward which issues the show might be dealing with for the rest of the season then actually explore any of it. But the meat comes from Michonne, Tara, and Daryl trying to decide whether their prisoner is telling the truth about her cohort or whether they have to kill her.

Naturally, this being The Walking Dead, there is a lot of hemming and hawing and jawing about whether to spare her or trust her and what the difference between mercy and justice is in this topsy turvy world. In the end, Henry speaks on her behalf and seems to show Daryl that there’s flies to be caught with honey rather than vinegar, only for the episode’s close to reveal that there’s some dissembling going on. It’s all material we’ve seen before in one form or another, but it’s got a good helping of Danai Gurira and Norman Reedus, which makes it more watchable than the standard scrap.

The same goes for Negan’s part of the episode. I’ve often said that The Walking Dead is a better show the more taciturn it is. Dialogue has never been this show’s strong suit, and so letting a strong actor like Jeffrey Dean Morgan tell the emotional story with his facial expressions and body language elevates an already interesting storyline. Between the glee in his eyes when he prances back into the Sanctuary and whistles again, to the hangdog, wistful look he gives when he realizes how hollow his return is, and the genuine distress when he’s being chased by dogs and confronted walkers and realizes he’s no longer the badass he once presented himself as, Morgan carries the day with a layered performance.

God help me, I even like his interactions with Judith. There’s something admittedly cheesy about a six-year-old who talks like an adult, chastises her elder, and acts like the boss. But damnit if isn’t inexplicably adorable how she tells Negan off and he, in his own silver-tongued way, manages to stay in her “barely tolerating you” good graces. Her warning to him about how the outside world has nothing to offer him, and his gentle admission that she was right, make for solid bookends with words to explicate what the episode otherwise conveys with score and visuals alone.

I’m on record as believing that Negan’s time on the show should have ended when The Saviors arc did. There’s thematic purpose to keeping him alive, and commercial reasons to keep Jeffrey Dean Morgan on the show, but he’s an albatross from a storytelling perspective. And yet, I think seeing Negan as a deposed, chastened man, stumbling through the wreckage he once presided over, is the most I’ve cared about him.

The show once seemed like it was leaning this director with The Governor and then quickly shifted to another bullet-filled confrontation. But if Negan has to stick around, if the show has to find something to do with a character whose actions ought to put him beyond redemption, then giving him the chance to return to what he was, or at least leave the meager place he has behind, and choose not to because of how empty a geture it would be, then color me interested in him, for once.

Oooooo, I love talking zombies. From now on I should name those guys "The Walkie Talkies".
So. In S9E9 of the Walkie Talkies there were a couple of cool things:
• Negan search for a Lucille 2.0. But not much luck there. Plus, he is one of my all time favorite of this show, Ho-ly Sh¡T. Thank you JDM.
• Leather jaaaa-cket! Hell yeah. this whole episode is just obsessed about leather.
• The return of the [insert new type] walkers. And on today's episode: the burn truck hugging walker. It's just like Pokemon now. Keep these coming TWD. I love to see your make-up team doing wonders.
• I don't know what to do with the hottnes of Magna. Maybe it's just Nadia Hilker's voice and vibe.
• Oh, Judith you little ass kicker you. Of course Daryl new that since season 4. Also "language you asshole! I'm a kid".
• Judith is just "meh"ing everything. Why you poking me with cool kids TWD?
• Damn it Jesus. Just as he started showing of his fighting skills since his first episode with Rick, Daryl and the supply truck.
• There is nothing quite as good as and as pants painter as a walkie talkie staring at you doing nothing, SUDDENLY, pointing a sawed off shotgun at your face.
• Dog's name is still 'Dog' and no one cares. Plus he has a sense for luxurious barn suits.

not so cool things:
• Judith passed her bed time during the apocalypse.
• Michonne is the only one that really whispers. But ALL THE TIME.
• Little Dolf Lundgern is not as half as cool as the OG one. So for me, right now it's "if he dies, he dies".
• What the heck with Jesus being dead and white but still, after at least 2 hours, he still has his supratrochlear vein (forehead vein) as pumped as a "show me the money" screaming Jerry Maguire?.
• Probably mama walkie talkie doesn't have spooky blue eyes. I expected to see those from a far so I could be "oh boy, oh boy, oh boy". I still did, though.

"I am thrilled for next week. Over.
... is this thing's working? I push the ptt but I can't hear anything. Stupid walkie talkie."