'The Walking Dead' Season 11, Episode 7: "Promises Broken" Recap and Review
THE WEAKEST ENTRY YET IN THE FINAL SEASON OF ‘THE WALKING DEAD’ ALLOWS PROBLEMS IN ITS STORY TO RISE TO THE SURFACE, FURTHER HAMPERED BY A LETHARGIC PACE AND OVERSTUFFED SCRIPT.
WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
There have been weak episodes of “The Walking Dead” under Angela Kang. There have even been episodes during her tenure as showrunner that are far worse than “Promises Broken.” The reason behind this is simple: no showrunner can bat a thousand when they’ve overseen the production of nearly 50 episodes of a show with the demanding week-to-week schedule of this one. The final set of “bonus” episodes at the end of the last season hadn’t even finished airing by the time season 11 started filming, and here we are only five months later, one week away from the season’s eighth episode and first of two scheduled breaks in its release. However, while “Promises Broken” certainly isn’t a nigh-unwatchable mess akin to, say, “Diverged,” it’s kind of the culmination of a lot of problems that have been brewing under the surface throughout this segment of the season, mostly centered around the way the various storylines have been sequenced.
It’s admittedly a case of “be careful what you wish for,” as a frequent criticism of the show in years past has been how it couldn’t seem to tell more than two or three characters’ stories at once, an ensemble drama that would frequently splinter its cast or just randomly focus on one character each week. Kang seemed to find the right balance in the show’s exceptional ninth season, where nearly every episode featured most if not all of the main cast, organically allowing their stories to flow into one another, passing off the episode from, say, Rick to Michonne without it feeling like the editor was just randomly crosscutting. “Promises Broken,” like “Acheron” and “On the Inside” before it, overcorrects in that direction, cramming more storylines into the episode than necessary, and I largely blame AMC’s scheduling for that. The midseason break was a thing in television that more or less died 15 to 20 years ago, as sweeps became less and less important with the advent of cable and premium channels. Then season two of “The Walking Dead” happened, and now every season of a cable show that has more than a dozen episodes seems to find itself bisected, except sweeps haven’t made their return: instead, the cliffhanger ending has. With this season’s unprecedented 24-episode length, AMC have mandated not one, but two of these breaks, and as a result, the story is clearly gearing up for a crescendo of tension, and so all the storylines have to quickly ramp up as that first break is now one week away.
Let’s take stock of what this episode has to juggle. First, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) have to take a cue from the Whisperers and disguise themselves among a horde of walkers so they can infiltrate Meridian and hopefully put an end to the Reapers. Second, Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Leah (Lynn Collins) are sent out as a team to search for Maggie and the others, after Pope (Ritchie Coster)’s other underlings have no success. That makes for an A story and B story that mirror one another and are directly connected. Great! There’s your episode, right? Well, no. We spend about a third of this hour in the Commonwealth with Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Princess (Paola Lázaro), and Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), and that entire section of the hour both feels completely disconnected from the rest of it, and causes both of the other storylines to feel cut off at the knees. The Commonwealth storyline as a whole has kind of felt randomly slotted and jumbled into the season so far, and I really don’t think it needed to be. The cross cutting issues with “Acheron” could have been solved if they had just made one episode about Alexandria and the train tunnels, and the other episode about the Commonwealth, but instead we’re constantly jumping back and forth between the two. Then it gets slotted in randomly again during “Out of the Ashes,” but at the time that seemed to work okay. Now that we’ve had this week’s episode, though, I’m really wondering if there could’ve been a way to merge the two episodes’ Commonwealth scenes into one hour, and maybe shuffle some other things around so that the same characters and storylines get more than just 15 minutes of screentime per week.
The other issue is that the Commonwealth arc is already becoming fairly lethargic and unengaging. In the comics, it was a pretty lackluster way to conclude more than 15 years of storytelling, and it kind of feels like we’re headed in a similar direction with the show, assuming that they’re going to give it the same amount of attention in these final 17 episodes. We pick up with the story as the group, sans Yumiko, are clearing out walkers in nearby buildings so as to facilitate paying off a “debt” due to their crimes in “Out of the Ashes.” Ezekiel is struggling because of the pain in his neck, which I swear he was already being treated for by the Commonwealth, but maybe part of his punishment is that his treatments were halted. Eugene, meanwhile, is working with Stephanie (Chelle Ramos), who is apparently bearing the punishment alongside the trio. Eugene tries to ascertain how much clearing they must do before they will be let off the hook, and Stephanie convinces him to just trust Hornsby (Josh Hamilton). While they’re cleaning, we get a pretty convenient moment where a snooty asshole (Teo Rapp-Olsson) happens to be walking nearby and complains of the stench from the walkers within earshot of Eugene. Meanwhile, Yumiko interviews for a position under Pamela Milton, who has very much been portrayed as the de facto ruler of the Commonwealth so far, even though we haven’t seen her once. Yumiko petitions to meet with Milton personally rather than her assistants, and after she is granted an appointment, she meets again with her brother Tomi (Ian Anthony Dale). They get to more or less repeat their conversation about Tomi’s past as a surgeon from “Out of the Ashes” - something that this show seriously needs to stop doing, as there is no one tuning in at this point who wasn’t already watching week to week - and how he doesn’t want to return to that field. We learn a tiny crumb of information about how their father factored into his decision, but just as quickly as that is revealed, Tomi suddenly gets arrested by two Commonwealth guards without being told what the charges are.
In the meantime, Maggie, Negan, Gabriel (Seth Gilliam), and Elijah (Okea Eme-Akwari) have escaped from the Reapers thanks to Daryl’s misdirection last week. Maggie is still determined to press forward, get into Meridian, and get the food and supplies that Alexandria needs, and Gabriel backs her. Negan agrees to continue forward on one condition: that Maggie promises Negan that he doesn’t have to keep looking over his shoulder at her. Cohan and Morgan play this scene brilliantly, with Maggie almost being amused that Negan would trust a promise from her, and Negan showing a similar amusement when Maggie goes through with making said promise. This is interrupted, however, when a walker who was once part of Maggie and Elijah’s group comes out of the woods. This is revealed through exposition to be Elijah’s sister’s best friend, which pretty blatantly sets up a moment later in the episode. Negan suggests that they use walker masks to generate and then disguise themselves among a horde, a tactic he learned while playing double agent with the Whisperers, and Maggie agrees, though she takes exception to Negan’s glee as he quips about how he kept his mask as insurance. “This isn’t fun,” Maggie barks, and the former gym teacher in Negan comes out as he fires back, “well not with that attitude it ain’t!”
Nonetheless, after acclimating to the fact that she is, as Negan puts it, wearing “someone else’s face,” Maggie seems to quickly adapt to how she needs to move and carry herself in order to not only avoid being bitten by walkers, but to “command” them as the Whisperers did. Gabriel goes off to scout out Meridian, where he sees the Reapers’ chaplain go off to a nearby graveyard in order to pray. Gabriel ends up mere feet away from the chaplain, who pauses as if to sense Gabriel, talks to God, and then leaves, but he glances right in Gabriel’s direction as he does so. Gabriel, meanwhile, doesn’t attack him, appearing to be shaken by the chaplain having words with God, which is something Gabriel has been unable to do for about an entire season’s time since he killed Dante in “The World Before.” If this is setting up some kind of confrontation between Gabriel and the chaplain where Gabriel ends up a victim of the latter, but in death hears God again - after all, the comic version of Gabriel suffers an iconically brutal death which his television counterpart has been spared thus far - I don’t know if I’m really here for it. I don’t generally like to speculate in these reviews anyway, but I am tired of Gabriel’s crisis of faith, an arc which has begun to go in a circle, which is apropos to how “Promises Broken” feels a little repetitive.
Inside Meridian, Daryl and Leah encounter Pope as he berates the most recent search party, who return as empty-handed as the rest. Coster has been brilliantly sinister and largely understated to this point, but this scene where he explodes at his men is shaky at best. Coster’s put-on Southern American accent slips into his natural British more than once, and for all of his talents as a performer, the scene really feels like him reaching for something he either can’t get a proper handle on or doesn’t really believe in. Thankfully, it’s over pretty quickly, as he sends Daryl and Leah out to do another search for Maggie. As they walk together, Daryl and Leah have another conversation about how she got in with the Reapers and what Pope has done for her, which, again, is practically copied and pasted from past episodes. For a show that even in its worst years rarely beat the audience over the head with exposition, all of this repeated dialogue is becoming frustrating, and shows that maybe these episodes do need to overstuff themselves with storylines to fill the runtime. I’m not really sure what’s causing this issue, but it takes me out of the episode each time. They encounter a man in the woods who is immediately shown to not be part of Maggie's group or Alexandria. We've never seen him, and more importantly Daryl doesn't recognize him, but of course Leah doesn't know either way. He claims that his wife is "hurt," though why he is out in the woods rather than staying with his family isn't exactly clear. He hasn't gathered supplies or food, and so he's really just out here as a justification for us to learn more about Leah. Pope instructs her by radio to kill the man and his family even if they aren't "the enemy," and so Daryl and Leah hold him at gunpoint and order him to take him to the house where they are hiding.
Back in the Commonwealth, Yumiko confronts Hornsby about Tomi's arrest and the whereabouts of her friends. Hornsby counters by questioning why Yumiko tried to cut the red tape and see Pamela Milton directly, assuring her that Tomi is fine and that if she holds out for a few hours, she will be able to see Tomi and her friends. Hornsby then returns to Eugene with a rejuvenated Ezekiel - who explains that he has been given antibiotics and other treatment - and asks Eugene and Stephanie to take care of some walkers on the perimeter of the Commonwealth while asking Princess and Ezekiel to join him for another, undisclosed task. Eugene and Stephanie arrive at the location, where the snooty asshole from earlier is having a picnic with his date, oblivious to walkers which are converging on them. Eugene and Stephanie rush in to kill the walkers, but instead of showing gratitude for his life being saved, the snooty guy freaks out at Eugene for "disrupting" his date.
Eugene doesn't take kindly to this and gets into an argument with him, distracting him from another walker who is converging on his date, forcing Stephanie - who earlier revealed that she has been out of practice with killing walkers - to spear it, accidentally spattering blood on the snooty guy's date and prompting him to call Stephanie a "bitch," which Eugene responds to by popping him in the nose and possibly breaking it. Conveniently, Mercer (Michael James Shaw) and about a half dozen Commonwealth guards converge on the scene immediately, with Hornsby alongside them, and Eugene is arrested for "attacking" the snob. This coincides with Yumiko's scheduled meeting with Pamela Milton, which is canceled when Pamela's secretary (Margot Bingham) gets a call that Pamela's son has been assaulted. From that, we learn that the snobby asshole is (presumably) Pamela's son Sebastian, who is one of the most annoying and awful characters from the comics. Credit to Rapp-Olsson's performance, as already Sebastian's TV counterpart sucks, but if we have to deal with as much of him here as we did in those final volumes of the comics, we're gonna have a problem. A character this annoying should never get this much focus in the endgame of a story, and I sincerely hope Angela Kang isn't on the verge of making the same mistake Robert Kirkman did. Either way, Eugene finds himself in a cell, where Hornsby spells it out for him: either he reveals where Alexandria is, or he will never be freed after his assault of Sebastian. Eugene finally relents, asking Hornsby to wait and presumably telling him everything, but we won't find out for sure for at least one more week.
Maggie and Negan sit and eat together once Maggie has learned how to work with the walker mask disguise, and Negan has a heart to heart about what Maggie is going through. "I've been on the losing side of a massacre," Negan says, referring to two separate occasions where Rick's group slaughtered groups of Saviors essentially while they were sitting at home. Maggie counters that they didn't kill children at the satellite outposts the way the Reapers killed entire families at Meridian, but Negan bites back saying that they still created widows and orphans. "Where did Gracie come from then," Negan asks, referring to Aaron's adopted daughter, who Aaron took in as an infant when Rick killed her father in a fight. Negan goes on to say that the world as a whole is running out of people "to fight for, to fight over," an apparent regret in his voice. Maggie asks if he's saying he would have done things differently. "Yeah," Negan responds, "I'd have killed every last one of you," referring to when he had pretty much the entire main cast of the show on their knees in front of him five years ago, but only killed Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) and Glenn (Steven Yeun). Maggie is aghast at this. "Why would you say that to me," she asks furiously, to which Negan says he has to be honest with Maggie in order for this to work. Between Maggie's anger here, and an earlier scene where she admits to Elijah that she might not be able to keep her promise not to exact vengeance against Negan, the show has once again taken a giant step backwards with their arc, adding to the ways in which this third of the season feels like it's largely just shuffled the deck. Connie (Lauren Ridloff) finally reuniting with Alexandria last week feels like the most significant plot advancement of the entire season so far. Either way, Maggie, Negan, Elijah, and Gabriel use their walker masks to begin amassing a horde, including at least two dozen walkers from a nearby building. Here, as they proceed towards Meridian, Elijah sees his sister among the horde as a walker and breaks down, but not so loudly so as to break his "cover" among the walkers. He regains his resolve as Maggie comforts him the best she can, and they press on.
Finally, Daryl and Leah follow the man to his son and his mortally wounded wife, Leah tells the man to leave with his son. The wife asks to be mercy killed, and Leah prepares to, but tearfully cannot pull the trigger. Daryl carries this for Leah, using his crossbow to grant the woman a quick death. From this situation, Daryl garners that Leah is not as twisted and psychotic as the other Reapers, and prepares to "tell [her] something," but they are interrupted by an order to return to Meridian: Maggie and Negan have amassed a horde of walkers at least 200 strong, and they are on the Reapers' doorstep.
And so, "Promises Broken" ends with a setup to two confrontations for next week's episode before the mid-season (or, rather, one-third-season?) break. We're definitely going to get the Reapers vs. Maggie, Negan, and the horde, but don't be surprised if Hornsby or some other representative of the Commonwealth shows up at Alexandria's gates as well. Beyond that? I think I've made a point already of this episode's main issues, but it's worth adding that something was off visually. This is the 13th episode of "The Walking Dead" to be shot digitally, but where I think the show has generally done a good job of disguising this change, "Promises Broken" just looks like digital footage. It was aesthetically jarring and not very pleasant to look at. I don't know whether or not this is due to director Sharat Raju - another first-time director for the show, though he previously directed for the spinoff "Fear the Walking Dead" - but since, in keeping with the season's trend of directors helming two episodes at a time, Raju is returning for next week's episode, I hope this discrepancy is fixed. More importantly, while the course seems set in stone for a run-of-the-mill "Walking Dead" mid-season break episode next week, I sincerely hope the team have gone back to the drawing board for the final two thirds of this season. After how excellent the show has generally been under Angela Kang, show and showrunner alike deserve better than to go out with a whimper, and this episode is definitely a whimper.