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The Walking Dead: Season Five Mid-Season Finale – “Coda”

04 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by Ben Whittaker in Television Reviews

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Tags

Andrew J. West, Andrew Lincoln, Beth Greene, Breaking Bad, Chandler Riggs, Christine Woods, Coda, Comics, Danai Gurira, Daryl Dixon, Emily Kinney, Game of Thrones, Josh McDermitt, Lauren Cohan, Maximiliano Hernandez, Melissa McBride, Michael Cudlitz, Norman Reedus, Rick Grimes, Robert Kirkman, Seth Gilliam, Sonequa Martin Green, Steven Yeun, Television, Terminus, The Walking Dead, The Walking Dead Season Five, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombies

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via postapocalypticmedia.com

This season of “The Walking Dead” started with a bang, as the group took on Gareth (Andrew J. West) and his team of cannibals with brutality and aggression. Things didn’t just stagnate at Terminus, as we might’ve seen in previous seasons, and the story quickly evolved into something very interesting. There’s been a lot more action this time around than we have seen before, and from my perspective that makes this show a whole lot better, because it doesn’t have (and never has had) amazing writing or acting week in week out. Along with this new focus on action we’ve seen some really impressive makeup on the walkers, and with Rick (Andrew Lincoln) almost in full-Shane mode, I’m actually looking forward to each episode ahead of time.

The mid-season finale, entitled “Coda” typified both the good and the bad aspects of this season so far, and despite a few underwhelming scenes, it was quite entertaining on the whole. As with most of the episodes so far, there was always something going on to keep you invested in what was happening on screen, which hasn’t always been the case on this show. It wasn’t a slow burning or boring episode, even though a lot of what occurred was clearly intended to build tension, leading up to what I’m sure was intended to be an emotional climax.

Nevertheless, because this is “The Walking Dead”, there’s only so many positives you can find before running into a negative, and in keeping with the rest of the season, how the characters behaved in “Coda” was both strange and slightly idiotic. Rick could’ve been a completely different person at the end of the episode than he was at the start, given that his actions in these moments were clearly in conflict. He begins the episode as a cold blooded killer, showing no mercy to an innocent man, but just hours later he’s offering sanctuary to his enemies!

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via wetpaint.com

In the opening scene of this episode we see Rick chase down the runaway police officer who Sasha (Sonequa Martin Green) so foolishly allowed to flee in the previous episode. As we watch the attempted escape play out it’s clear that Rick has the upper hand. The police officer, who happens to be called Bob (Maximiliano Hernandez), still has his hands cuffed together, and as such he can’t really make the swiftest of getaways. Eventually Rick decides it would be fun to run him over, and with absolutely no regard for the value of human life he does so, incapacitating Bob and soon after killing him with a bullet to the head. It was an interesting way to show that in the zombie apocalypse no one is really the good guy, it’s just survivor vs. survivor, and the last man standing takes the spoils. I really liked how this was portrayed to the audience with a clever nod to the first episode, as Rick uttered the words ‘you can’t go back Bob’, which Gareth had so fatefully said right at the start of the season.

Despite the fact that this was an enjoyable scene to watch, it wasn’t the finest moment in the first half of this season when you think about it more carefully. The fact that the issue was dealt with so quickly after the events of last week’s episode made the final scene of that episode seem pointless. The dramatic tension built by that scene was knocked down in an instant, just as Bob was by Rick’s reckless driving. That might not seem like the biggest of issues right now, because that tension carried over from last week to this week as everyone emotionally involved in the show had so much time to think about what could happen next, but to me it felt like a kick in the teeth, because I was expecting a much more worthwhile pay-off.

Also, I’m not sure that killing Bob was the best thing for Rick to do in the first place, and I don’t believe that he would’ve actually done it, given the fact that it didn’t really make his life any easier at all. He could’ve easily given Bob a little push with the car once he reached him, and that would’ve been enough to knock down a man who was running desperately with no regard for his balance whatsoever. Rick could’ve then picked him up, taken him back to the group or simply left him in the car (presuming it could be locked), and he would’ve had more to trade with Dawn (Christine Woods) at the end of the episode, possibly avoiding the untimely demise of Beth (Emily Kinney). In short, Rick is completely and solely to blame for Beth’s death.

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via squarespace.com

Rick wasn’t the only character acting irrationally in this opening scene, Bob’s decision making skills were clearly affected by the need for his character to service the plot, because there was absolutely no good reason why he would run from Rick and the others. He had more than enough time to think about his next move, and frankly he thought SO wrongly.

His reasoning for attempting to make a break for it was that, in his own words, ‘I don’t know you’, but if he lived his whole life so wary of stranger danger then he must have been an extremely boring character in the first place! Not knowing a group of rational human beings is not a good enough reason to leave yourself at the mercy of a larger group of irrational and murderous zombies! If it were me I would probably take my chances with a group of people that want to use me as a bargaining tool, rather than run outside into a world filled with hungry zombies, tail between my legs and hands tied behind my back. If you have to choose between a rock and a hard place you might as well choose the rock, at least with that you know exactly what you’re up against, the hard place might just be a bigger rock with much more ragged edges.

The convenience of Glenn (Steven Yeun) and Maggie’s (Lauren Cohan) return was extremely frustrating. This convenience was two-fold and it was annoying on both counts. Glenn and Maggie’s initial return served one ridiculously well-timed purpose, which was to save Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam), Michonne (Danai Gurira), and Carl (Chandler Riggs) from certain death at the hands of the walkers. What really got to me about this scene wasn’t just the timing, but it was the fact that I didn’t care what was happening on screen because I knew that there was definitely going to be something which saved the day.

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via twdenthusiasts.com

I didn’t believe for a second that Carl or Michonne would get killed off, and by extension I knew that Gabriel would probably be fine as well. This is a massive failure on the part of the writers, because when you stop believing that anyone important is going to die on a programme about the apocalypse, you know things are far too tame. The show already loses credibility from the fact that none of the characters can swear, which is clearly a feature of everyday dialogue which would carry over into the zombie apocalypse, so to make them invincible as well just makes the show itself quite redundant. Why should I care about the characters being created if I know that only a select few of them are dispensable?

The second way in which this scene was convenient for moving the plot along was that, not only did it get the entire cast back together, but this reunion happened just in time for Maggie to see her dead sister being carried out of the hospital in Daryl’s (Norman Reedus) loving arms. How is it possible to have timing that good? Maggie should constantly carry an umbrella because she’ll always put it up just before the rain comes! The scene in which Glenn, Maggie, Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) etc., first return to save Gabriel, Carl, and Michonne, was an initial convenient plot point to set up an even more convenient plot point! Fantastic writing guys, keep up the good work!

The last thing I want to criticise from this episode was Beth’s death, which wasn’t really all that surprising, because it seems that whenever a character gets a bit more screen time on this show they are likely to be killed off. If a fringe character suddenly gets a more integral part in the narrative you can almost guarantee that things aren’t going to end well (so good luck Carol (Melissa McBride)).

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via yellmagazine.com

However, I did like how it happened, because although a lot of people have said that it didn’t make sense, (and in a way I agree because she gave up her life for someone she barely knew and left her sister and friends to mourn her death), she did the heroic thing and at the end of the day maybe she’d just had enough. There’s only so much you can take from people before you snap, which must be even more true when every day is about survival and you can’t turn a corner without wondering what could kill you on the other side, and she was almost suicidal at the end of Season Two, so this could just have been the final nail in the coffin.

All in all this was a solid enough episode by “The Walking Dead’s” admittedly low standards, and I did enjoy it; it was tense and exciting, even if it was slightly ridiculous and altogether predictable. Things certainly weren’t as action packed as I would’ve hoped from the mid-season finale, but there are plenty of avenues to explore when the show returns in February, and at least a ‘main’ character was killed off, as well as there being some resolution to the stories we’ve seen so far. “Coda” wasn’t earth-shattering or fantastic, but it was fine, and that’s about as much as I can allow myself to expect from this show.

As far as the mini-season is concerned (because at the end of the day these mid-season breaks come at the end of eight hour-long episodes and bring a reasonable amount of resolution to the storylines at play, so they aren’t the middle of a season at all, they are seasons in themselves, or at least that’s how I see them. The first season was actually shorter than this half-of-a-season pretender!), it’s been a decent improvement in quality as opposed to the last season of “The Walking Dead”.

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via uproxx.files.wordpress.com

However, “The Walking Dead” feels like it should be subtitled “Character Development For Dummies”, because the way in which characters evolve is so obvious and mundane that you have to wonder whether or not the writers have ever actually seen another television show. Having seen “Game of Thrones” or “Breaking Bad”, how can you allow yourself to create such stereotypical and generic characters?

Carol is suddenly strong because she no longer has her husband and has found freedom in a world where no one is left to abuse her, haven’t seen that before! Daryl has become kinder and less angry because he no longer has his brother leading him astray and he finally feels as though he’s found a place and a purpose in the world. Rick has become cold and bitter towards the world because his wife has died and he has seen the evil people can do. Nothing about how these character’s reactions to their situations is original or exciting, they’re all incredibly plain.

Things could be easily rectified if the writers had some guts and let one of their characters just lose it! If you want Rick to be this broody, vicious person, go for it! We’d all like to see it! Make him the anti-hero. Have him hit Carl and hate himself for doing it, have him get in a new relationship with another character but it become destructive, have him find drugs and start taking them, going off the rails. Have him do something. But if you are going to skirt around the issues and just hint at possible changes in character’s mentalities then don’t bother, because most of your target demographic isn’t paying attention anyway, they just like to see Daryl shoot his crossbow and think Rick is cool because he has a base level of authority over a tiny group of ‘heroes’.

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via needtoconsume.com

This isn’t the best series on television, and I don’t believe it ever will be. However, I feel as though it’s starting to realise that it works best when things go boom and it doesn’t try to overstep its mark. For that reason I’ve enjoyed the first half of this season a lot more than I did the latter half of last season, and I’m hopeful for more action set pieces and violence in episodes to come. Still, I get incredibly frustrated by the failure to realise potential on the part of the writers of this show, because they have a great platform to build off of in the form of Robert Kirkman’s series of graphic novels, and there are a lot of interesting stories to tell about people who are desperate to survive a zombie apocalypse.

This season has dealt with cannibals, rape, salvation (Eugene (Josh McDermitt) playing the role of a saviour, and Gabriel worrying whether or not he is damned), abuse, and loss, but it still feels incredibly hollow, which is a real shame because this show has a large audience and exploring those themes more carefully could create a programme really worthy of the popularity that “The Walking Dead” has right now.

Episode Eight, “Coda” – 6/10

The first half of Season Five – 6.5/10

The Walking Dead: Season Five Premiere – “No Sanctuary”

15 Wednesday Oct 2014

Posted by Ben Whittaker in Television Reviews

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Tags

Andrew J. West, Andrew Lincoln, Chad Coleman, Christian Serratos, Daryl Dixon, Josh McDermitt, Melissa McBride, Michael Cudlitz, No Sanctuary, Norman Reedus, Rick Grimes, Television, Terminus, The Walking Dead, TV Review, Walkers, Zombie Apocalypse

twdno1

via geekchicelite.com

“No Sanctuary” is the best season-opener of “The Walking Dead” since the first ever episode. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the writers managed to fit so much action into one episode, because one of my biggest problems with the show in the past is that it’s just been incredibly dull. This episode was certainly not boring, it was fast-paced, dark, and worthy of being part of a television show about a post-apocalyptic world in which zombies outnumber humans. There was very little melodrama in the episode and it definitely took a step away from the soap-opera-like feel of previous seasons.

(SPOILER ALERT) The title of this season opener refers to the fact that Terminus isn’t the safe haven that it had been claimed to be, as well as to the sign which Rick (Andrew Lincoln) alters at the end of the episode. The scene takes place after Rick and his group escape Terminus and are reunited with Carol (Melissa McBride), Tyreese (Chad Coleman) and Judith. Rick sees one of the signs which members of the group had previously read, a sign which suggested that Terminus was a place of refuge from the horrors of the outside world. In an effort to aid future survivors Rick uses blood to cover what had previously been written on the sign, leaving all but one word and then adding his own above it. As the camera turns towards the writing we see that it reads, (yes you guessed it), “No Sanctuary”.

Season four ended just as the finale seemed to be picking up steam, something which really frustrated me at the time because I was enjoying the episode, so the fact that “No Sanctuary” picked up right where the show had left off made a lot of sense. The feeling of excitement at the end of season four carried over into this episode and brought us back into “The Walking Dead” universe seamlessly.

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via onionstatic.com

(SPOILER ALERT) The scene in which Rick and the group are getting themselves ready for an all-out battle with Gareth and the rest of the cannibals from Terminus is a very clever way to begin the season, as we see our heroes arming themselves with whatever they can find, and this scene demonstrates that for the rest of the season they are going to be a lot more ruthless. The group aren’t cowering in the corner of the storage container scared for their lives, they are suiting up, preparing to face their foes head on. They are going to fight to survive and that will surely make this season a lot more interesting than many previous seasons, as Rick is no longer a mourning farmer, and Carol isn’t a broken woman lacking in self-confidence, she’s a completely new character and has made a huge transformation.

The more gory moments in this episode were really satisfying, and the lack of remorse shown on both sides of the battle was very refreshing. I’m not easily put off by blood and guts, so nothing in the episode really bothered me, I enjoyed seeing the way in which the Terminus inhabitants went about their business and then I also enjoyed how they were destroyed in a sea of walkers, bullets and fire. What’s not to love?

However, I did have a couple of problems with the special effects in the episode, as I felt that the huge explosion (seen on the trailer for the season) was pretty ridiculous. The damage it caused in relation to the blast didn’t seem to match up, and how Carol aimed her firework at the gas canister was quite miraculous. That particular scene didn’t look all that realistic, as I mentioned on the preview, and I was acutely aware that I was watching a television show at that point.

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via geeklegacy.com

Nevertheless, the effects were impressive in other areas, and I was particularly enthused by the makeup on the walkers, because it actually seemed as though an effort had been made to make them look threatening and true to what you would expect if such a creature were to exist in real life. Furthermore, it was pleasing to see walkers make a significant appearance in the episode, because the way in which Woodbury, Terminus, and the prison acted as walker-free zones really made me wonder why walkers are even a part of this show if they are going to be ignored for the majority of each season. I am aware that “The Walking Dead” is designed to be a show about how humans would react to this kind of worldwide catastrophe, but it is set in a zombie apocalypse, so to remain credible it has to feature a lot more walkers than it has done in the past.

In this episode, both groups seemed as though they had found their home in this world after the world, and the fact that the show runners weren’t afraid to show what the vicious folks at Terminus had been up to since the outbreak was both surprising and very welcome. I loved the way that the people at Terminus dealt with our heroes as though they were just meat, or ‘cattle’, and I felt that these individuals had the potential to be very interesting villains. (SPOILER ALERT) My only issue here is that I wanted them to be around for a much longer period of time, because you can really get behind your heroes when they’re fighting murderous cannibals, and it was a shame to see most of these characters die so early on. However, I’m sure that we’ll see Gareth (Andrew J. West) again in the not too distant future, and that he will prove to be an extremely hateable antagonist.

After seeing this episode I would say that my biggest error in the preview was claiming that the group would stay at Terminus for much longer than they actually did. After seeing the trailer, I was expecting the group to stay at Terminus for at least three or four episodes, and I thought that we would see the group sway Gareth into escorting them to Washington in order to rid the world of walkers and bring things back to the way they were before the dead roamed the earth, but instead we see that Gareth doesn’t really want to go back, or at least he doesn’t think he can, because it’s just too late for that. (This notion is definitely an ongoing theme of the show and I think we can expect to see this be carried through to the end of the storyline with Eugene Porter (Josh McDermitt), Abraham Ford (Michael Cudlitz), and Rosita Espinosa (Christian Serratos). I was pleased that the show proved me wrong because it demonstrated that it can still be unpredictable after airing for so many years, and because I feel that what actually happened in this episode was much more believable than what I was expecting to occur.

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via theflickcast.com

In regards to the rest of the season, I don’t really want to watch the group as they make their way to Washington or as they forage for supplies, just because it’s pretty awkward that they are happy to play follow the leader with Eugene and Abraham. However, I’m hopeful that the group won’t spend too long travelling to their destination after things accelerated so quickly at Terminus, and I do think that it will be interesting to see the end point of the storyline, because either the world will return to the way it was (which is clearly not going to happen) or Eugene is lying and we’ll get to see him pay the price for that deceit. I really dislike Eugene as a character, so that possibility fills me with glee. There’s no way that there is really a cure to all this trouble, even the show runners themselves don’t seem to know how “The Walking Dead” will end (or how the apocalypse started), so I definitely don’t believe that Eugene knows as much as he is claiming to.

(SPOILER ALERT) I wasn’t happy with the fact that nobody significant was killed in this episode, because in such a chaotic and heated battle there would have been casualties on both sides; someone should’ve strayed from the group and been attacked, or at least been taken hostage by Gareth as some sort of bargaining tool to get revenge on Rick and Carol for slaughtering his people. The fact that Gareth is still alive and well means that he is sure to reappear at some point, which I’m not complaining about because he is an interesting character, but this means that when he does finally come back there will be no surprise on my part. When this kind of thing happens in a television show you start to lose faith with the writers and never really believe that anything truly interesting will happen, because the story telling is clearly lacking.

Gareth got shot to feign death, so that less involved viewers would think that he wasn’t going to appear again, but anyone who has watched as much television as I have can recognise a cliché when they see one. The best way to deal with Gareth’s character would’ve been to just ignore him for the latter half of this episode, because then the majority of the audience would forget about him until his reappearance. I may be wrong again, because as a series regular we may continue to see Gareth in each episode (which would be great), and in that case I rescind my criticism, but I was frustrated that we saw Gareth take a shot which was never actually going to end his life, and then we were left to ponder whether or not he would appear again in the near future. Obviously he will, it is a well known fact that Andrew J. West is a regular cast member for this season, so why did you waste your time filming this scene?

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via blogspot.com

All the performances in “No Sanctuary” felt believable, and the actors playing the villains at Terminus did an exceptional job of making me despise them in such a short period of time. They were vicious, ruthless and extremely blasé about the horrendous things they were doing, which gave off the feeling that they had been doing this for a very long time, and that killing meant very little to them. I wasn’t as thrilled with Carol’s appearance in this episode as other reviewers have been since the episode aired, because I don’t believe that her character would change this drastically, or that she would have lasted this long in the first place. Nonetheless, almost all of the returning characters remained likeable, and the actors did a good job on the whole.

The ending of the episode frustrated me slightly, because it felt too optimistic and did venture into the realm of the overly campy. Given the fact that the group has nowhere to go and no means of getting there, and the fact that they have just gone through something so traumatic, they should probably be less joyous and focus on the task at hand. I did appreciate the fact that they got the group back together, because seeing them forming separate relationships did get pretty annoying, and I feel that the show works much better when we see the group struggle to come to a consensus regarding a moral decision, or when they are working together to try and overcome a much stronger enemy. Still, they have scarce amounts of food and water, nowhere to sleep and no means of transportation, so if it were me I’d worry about that rather than having a group hug.

“No Sanctuary” was a very promising way to begin season five of “The Walking Dead”, because it had the right amount of action to keep the audience interested, and brought the group back together just as things were becoming slightly tiresome. It seems as though the writers have taken some of the criticisms of the show on board, and have attempted to include more walkers and more violence in this episode. I welcome any change to the formula at this point and I was pleased that instead of talking about what they were going to do, Rick and the others actually took charge of their situation and acted for once. This episode was thoroughly enjoyable, and now I’m very optimistic for what lies ahead (please let there be a Carl-related death soon… please!).

8/10

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