*Huge Spoilers for the show ahead!*
Stylish has never been a word I have used to describe The Walking Dead. That isn’t to say the show doesn’t have style, it maintains a consistently impressive look and feel to it’s world, but the extent of its visual flair has gone to the show’s inventiveness with its shambling, decomposing, namesake. Tonight’s episode offers something a little different, at least until it all starts to feel like more of the same again.
The episode starts off with a disorienting opening that offers random images and dialogue that only fully makes sense by episode’s end and the show doesn’t stop its artier streak there. The entire episode feels like a fever dream and I’m impressed with the show’s ability to mess around with it’s conventions and try something new. It’s even more commendable when you consider that this is a show where, even just a season ago, the possibility of setting an entire episode around the looming death of a character would seem tedious.
Said character turns out to be Tyreese, who gets bit when heading with Rick, Glenn, Michonne, and newcomer, Noah to Noah’s old community. Naturally, the community has been destroyed and Noah does not take it well. Tyreese attempts to comfort him and then, while admiring photos of Noah’s family, he is bitten.
Tyreese is bitten about a fourth of the way into the episode and the vast majority of it is spent in the artsy haze I previously explained. We get to see bits and pieces of how the others are dealing with Beth’s death but by and large, this is Tyreese’s episode, as he must examine who he is and what he stands for all while heading toward an inevitable fate.
The problem is that fate and its ultimate meaning ends up being more of the same. We get some nice guest appearances, most notably from The Governor and the twins who were offed back in “The Grove.” Most of those hallucinations end up doing the talking for Tyreese, which makes sense considering he’s by himself for a large part of this ordeal. But what it all boils down to in the end seems to be another case of a compassionate and decent man who is killed because the world of this show is harsh and cruel.
This is hardly new territory, both Dale and Herschel’s deaths were built around this theme and the show constantly needs to mention to us how desperate living in this world makes you. It has begun to feel like the show only has a few distinct themes that it can go to when killing off a character.
That, ultimately, is my biggest issue with the episode, not that Tyreese dies but that his death feels so rudimentary, even with the added style. He is yet another in a list of characters who were too good to make it.
I don’t want it to sound like I hated this episode, it was still an enjoyable hour to me, but I know that The Walking Dead has become capable of much more like in, possibly the show’s greatest episode, “Four Walls and a Roof” which managed to offer us a brutal, borderline nihilistic, view on what the group had become in order to survive while still giving us a meaningful and heartfelt death scene for Bob.
“What Happened and What’s Going On” may have more flair to it than that episode but by the end it feels like more of what we’ve already seen from this show.
Bits ‘n Pieces
- I left it out of the main review but Tyreese’s death hit me pretty hard. Mainly because I’m not a completely unfeeling monster!
- Seeing Bob one more time was great, as was The Governor. The twins were take it or leave it and the less said about the Terminus guy the better.
- The one odd omission from that group was Tyreese’s old flame, Karen. He even talks about her with Noah!
- Even after her death we still have to put up with Beth singing.
- It seems like a bit of an odd choice to not bring Daryl or Carol along for this trip. Would Tyreese have met the same fate if either one was around?
- This sort of counts as nitpicking but it’s kind of amazing that they made it all the way up to Virginia just fine when Abraham’s gang couldn’t make it to Washington with a group roughly the same size.
If you’d like to give me feedback or just chat about The Walking Dead you can email me at theSuperAlbino@gmail.com or hit me up on Twitter @JesseSwanson