'The Walking Dead' Season 11, Episode 8: "For Blood" Recap and Review
AS IT GOES INTO A FOUR-MONTH HIATUS, 'THE WALKING DEAD' FALLS BACK INTO OLD HABITS WITH A LAZY, PREDICTABLE CLIFFHANGER EPISODE THAT IS ONE OF THE SHOW’S ALL TIME WEAKEST.
Why? That's really all there is to ask about "For Blood," the eighth entry in what has so far been an overstuffed, overlong season of "The Walking Dead." Angela Kang has overseen two excellent seasons of the show, the operative word being excellent, an adjective long thought to be antithetical to the series after at least two really bad years beforehand. It's stunning after the amount of quality control - hell, quality, period - that went into seasons 9 and 10 that the train has suddenly derailed so spectacularly. Things were off to a rocky start with the jumbled two-parter "Acheron," inexplicably aired over two separate weekends despite AMC originally scheduling it to air on the same night. And therein lies a far more likely culprit than Kang: AMC are the ones who dictate their schedule, and therefore are the ones who decided that every season of this show since its second should be split in half, punctuated by a mandatory cliffhanger or story crescendo, aka the dreaded "mid-season finale."
There’s no way to spin this: doing cliffhangers this way is not only archaic, not only boring, but really, really bad. Cliffhangers can be exciting! When used intelligently, they can be incredibly effective from time to time, or even when used frequently. For example, “Breaking Bad” ended on a cliffhanger almost week-to-week, but it rarely repeated itself and moved its story along at a breakneck pace so that the audience would always want to see the resolution. “The Walking Dead,” on the other hand, thanks to AMC’s machinations, is now in its tenth consecutive season of a cliffhanger arriving precisely at the moment we expect - eight episodes in - because of the apparent necessity for the show to be split up into eight-episode segments ad infinitum. When you know where the cliffhangers are going to be the moment AMC releases the airdates for the episodes, they become more than stale; they become devoid of any impact whatsoever. Rarely, the show overcomes this - “Too Far Gone” and “Evolution” are both mid-season finales, and two of the show’s best episodes - but most of the time, we’ve gotten episodes that run the gamut from middling (“Coda”) to painfully dull (“Start to Finish”). In that respect, “For Blood” is a unique addition to the show’s mid-season finales: it’s easily the worst one yet.
The episode starts promisingly enough, with the horde of walkers led by Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) arriving at Meridian. Pope (Ritchie Coster) tasks one of the generic Reapers - he has a name, but it's not worth scrubbing back through the episode to remember what it is - with redirecting the horde away. The Reaper seems to make good headway, confidently but arrogantly leading the horde into the woods...only to suddenly see the other half of the horde coming at him from the other side, boxing him in. He starts to rapidly take down walkers with his blade, but soon enough, he comes across Negan in a walker mask, who effortlessly sidesteps the Reaper's attack and stabs him in the stomach, echoing the way the Whisperers killed Jesus in "Evolution." Maggie stabs him a second time, weakening the Reaper such that the horde easily takes him down and devours him. It's a delightfully gruesome start, but this entire sequence also foretells the episode's biggest problem: nothing is actually happening.
Rather than Maggie initiating the attack on Meridian with the horde, she’s suddenly halted their advance and is just pacing around in a holding pattern outside the walls. In a microcosm of the entire "part one" of this season, Maggie's plan literally halts - as does her storyline with it - so we can focus on Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Leah (Lynn Collins) for the next chunk of the episode. Leah’s disillusion with Pope grows after he sacrifices the Reaper at the beginning of the episode, just to confirm that Maggie is the one who drew the horde to Meridian. She challenges this, but Pope shuts her down. He then challenges Daryl’s loyalty, launching into a cliched villain speech about a stray dog he took in, comparing the dog to Daryl, and referring to his uncertainty each time he would reach out to the dog about whether it would lick him or bite him. We get a perfectly delivered quip from Daryl here - “don’t worry, I’m not gonna lick you” - which is followed by an overly telegraphed conclusion where Pope explains that the dog did eventually bite him, and he strangled it. Never heard that from a villain before, right?
Later on that night, the Reapers see the horde finally make a move towards Meridian’s walls - now that the story has progressed to a point where the attack can begin - but Pope is unfazed because...landmines? Deus ex landmines start to blow the walkers to pieces, thinning their numbers considerably. Negan and Elijah are both mildly wounded by shrapnel as walkers near them set off one of the mines, while Maggie and Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) flank the walls. Daryl sneaks off to where one of the Reapers - the one he connected with last week - is taking watch by himself, and kills the Reaper before tossing his body over the wall, preventing Maggie and Gabriel from being exposed. This allows them to sneak in under the compound, through a supply shed which Daryl breaks the lock on. All of the so-called action during this sequence feels half-baked, just a series of explosions added in for the sake of it. You could be forgiven for thinking you had accidentally switched channels to one of the “Resident Evil” films, though I’ll at least give the episode this one point: the filmmaking from Sharat Raju, who returns to the director’s chair again after last week’s episode, is at least coherent, something which can’t really be said about Paul W. S. Anderson. The weird lack of post-production that ruined last week’s episode aesthetically is still present tonight, but generally to a less-distracting extent.
It’s difficult to find anything nearly as complimentary to say about the storytelling, though. Maggie and Gabriel don’t do much of anything that’s sensible when they get into the compound. They have a discussion about getting the food for their people and getting out, but Gabriel proceeds to find a sniper rifle and take aim from one of the compound’s buildings, and Maggie hotwires a truck - presumably to transport the supplies - only to just use it to break open Meridian’s gate and send the walker horde streaming in. Pope, having had enough of this, orders his remaining men to ready their hwacha - a type of ancient multi-rocket launcher - and fire it at the horde so as to decimate its numbers even further. Daryl finally reveals to Leah that Maggie and the others are “[his] people,” that they just want food for their families, and pleads not to fire the weapon. Leah is incensed at Daryl’s duplicity, but Pope arrives to oversee the hwacha’s deployment before their discussion goes any further. At this point, with the horde and Maggie inside the walls of Meridian, Pope orders it to be aimed into the courtyard even though there are Reapers there as well. Leah counters Pope’s insistence that “God will protect them,” but the fuse is lit. Daryl draws his knives on Pope, teasing a big fight between the two...only for Leah to suddenly stab Pope in the throat. Daryl kills the Reaper manning the hwacha and cuts the fuse before it can fire, and that’s pretty much it for Pope save for Leah stabbing him a second time in the back of the head and finishing the job. This has got to be the worst dispatch of a villain in the show’s history. We met Pope four weeks ago in “Rendition,” where the psychotic zealot had a thrilling introduction and we got to see brilliant work from Ritchie Coster. Since then, however, the character and performance have been a cliche-spewing disappointment that never came close to living up to his introduction, and while it’s probably a good thing that he’s out of the way quickly, it’s also dramatically unsatisfying, and brings us back to that initial question: why? Why was Pope ever brought into this show if all we get of him is a taste of his insanity before Leah simply stabs him to death four weeks later?
We’ll have to wait a moment to continue that thought, as the episode also cuts back to Alexandria, which is suddenly facing a massive and destructive storm. The residents are holed up in one of the houses, but debris from the storm is battering them, including a piece of Alexandria’s wall, indicating a breach. As a result, Carol (Melissa McBride), Aaron (Ross Marquand), Connie (Lauren Ridloff) and Kelly (Angel Theory) leave to fix the breach, and we’re left with a handful of characters in the house, including Judith (Cailey Fleming), Virgil (Kevin Carroll), Lydia (Cassady McClincy) and Rosita (Christian Serratos). This entire section of the episode is more or less useless. The characters are barricading windows and physically holding doors closed; Rosita goes outside to “buy some time,” teasing a self-sacrifice but instead merely killing a bunch of walkers in an unnecessary sequence as we’ve already had seven seasons to know how badass she is; Aaron’s daughter Gracie acts like an idiot for the sake of drama; and the one saving grace of this entire chunk of the episode is a conversation between Virgil and Judith, where he assures her that Michonne is “with her, wherever she is,” if only because we once again get to see Carroll’s magnificent abilities as a performer. Predictably, the situation in the house deteriorates to the point where the doors are failing, and everyone moves upstairs where the walkers will have a harder time getting to them. Of course, Gracie once again has run off like an idiot, this time to the basement which is flooding in the storm, forcing Judith to lock herself with Gracie in the basement as the walkers storm the house. Weather is unpredictable in real life, and sudden storms and flash floods do happen, but the show has spent an entire season at this point forcing Alexandria towards the Commonwealth, and I’m sure that - in addition to no major characters dying - this latest catastrophe will finally destroy the town beyond repair. Again: why? Why couldn’t this happen three weeks ago? Instead of the characters salvaging blacksmithing tools from Hilltop in a last-ditch effort to repair the walls, why not just have them be too badly damaged then? What was the point of any of that just for this to happen three episodes later?
Finally, as Daryl tries to get Leah to leave with him, she rebuffs him, angrily condemning him for lying to her, and informing the other Reapers by radio that Daryl has killed Pope. It’s another predictable bait-and-switch - Leah didn’t kill Pope because she’s seen the light, she did it in order to usurp control over the Reapers and save those who are left from Pope - and, while Daryl escapes from the rooftop before the other Reapers arrive, Maggie and Negan are busy fighting off others in the courtyard only for Leah to order the Reapers to retreat. Maggie and Negan just stand there, dumbfounded, as the hwacha is relit. There’s at least 20 seconds where they could have taken shelter and got out of the way, but no, they just stand there as the flames set off the rockets and our episode ends. You know they’re going to survive this - the only plausible casualty might be Elijah as he’s a newer character, and Gabriel is still safe from the hwacha with his sniper rifle - given how much buildup and screentime the drama between Maggie and Negan has been given over these past eight weeks. But thanks to AMC, we have to wait four months to get confirmation that these two will survive, that Judith and Gracie will survive, and to hopefully reconnect with the Commonwealth storyline - the only storyline to see meaningful progression during this block of episodes - which was entirely absent from “For Blood” in favor of a giant helping of “meh.”
Is “For Blood” the worst “Walking Dead” episode to date? Not quite - we’ll always have “Last Day on Earth” and “Service” to fight for that dubious title - but it’s a lot closer than any episode of the Angela Kang era should have ever come. The pacing of this hour is downright atrocious, the characters make stupid decisions, a main villain is dispatched in an anticlimactic and dull way, and we’ve been given another awful mid-season cliffhanger by AMC. I don’t know what the production schedule is for the show, I don’t know if they’ve started filming the second set of eight episodes, if they’re finished principal photography, or if they’re still in the writers’ room, but something desperately needs to change. We’re going to have another one of these breaks before the season and series sees an end, and so far this final season has collapsed in on itself trying to stretch what should have been 16 episodes into 24. I really don’t place a lot of this blame on Angela Kang. It’s difficult for me to believe that after two excellent seasons, she’s suddenly lost her touch for storytelling. I think AMC are trying to milk what little ratings this show has left in an age where ratings barely exist anymore, much less matter, and between the extended episode order and the three-part broadcast schedule, Kang has had to grind her own show to a halt. Nonetheless, this is a profoundly disappointing run of eight episodes - several of the ones leading up to this are worse in retrospect thanks to “For Blood” - and a huge blow to both the momentum of the show, and my enthusiasm for it. On the one hand, it’ll be nice to take a break from it for four months, but on the other, that’s exactly the cause of the problem here.