The Walking Dead Season 10, Episode 19: "One More" Recap and Review
‘THE WALKING DEAD’ DIVES DEEP INTO THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TWO CHARACTERS - AND THEN INTO PURE HORROR - IN ONE OF ITS GREATEST EPISODES.
"The Walking Dead" celebrates its milestone 150th episode with an absolute home run of an hour. There's something immensely satisfying about a show reaching its full potential - something that, despite its bouts with inconsistency, "The Walking Dead" is no stranger to, with episodes such as "Clear" and "Here's Not Here" standing as a model of what this show can be at its strongest - and, with tonight's "One More", the series has once again hit a peak.
Centered entirely around Aaron (Ross Marquand) and Gabriel (Seth Gilliam), "One More" jumps forward to two weeks after the elimination of the Whisperers in "A Certain Doom", as the pair search out a series of locations on a map made by Maggie (Lauren Cohan) in order to gather supplies. Their search very quickly leads to frustration, as all of their efforts come up empty, from finding a prospective house burnt down, to a row of cars all picked clean. Aaron becomes resentful of the search by the time they hit a supermarket with nothing waiting for them except walkers, and only reluctantly continues when Gabriel urges him on: "one more," he says, as they head towards a water tower.
On their way to the tower, and after Gabriel has a messy encounter with a walker in a pool of mud, the pair arrive at a warehouse that wasn't marked on the map. Unable to ignore the potential of such a large, previously unknown location, they venture inside. There, Gabriel finds over a dozen Bibles - each one having had certain pages torn out - and, in a hidden compartment, a bottle of rare and expensive whiskey. Aaron, meanwhile, investigates a noise behind a closed door, only to find a wild boar which startles him, causing him to reflexively kill it.
It's tempting to nitpick the intelligence of this moment. On the one hand, it's a bit dumb in the universe of "The Walking Dead", especially after the characters have been hardened over the course of a decade, for someone to investigate a strange noise on their own, rather than to ask their ally standing 50 feet away to provide backup incase they run into something nefarious. On the other hand, Aaron has proven many times that he knows what he is doing and can hold his own in a fight, not to mention that, in this world, sometimes people do have to face potential threats alone, and Aaron is probably conditioned to that mentality in most situations. Ultimately, the overall episode isn't really affected because, once the boar is killed, the moment ends without injecting unnecessary action into the episode.
That night, as they cook the boar and sample the whiskey, with Gabriel curating the experience, the pair trade wisdoms, play poker, get drunk, and open up about the past. Aaron quips that Gabriel's past life as a priest might clash with him drinking and gambling now, but Gabriel counters that "God's probably okay with it." Gabriel then monologues about his upbringing, about his early mentor named Father George, and his earliest experiences with whiskey, brought about at a funeral by Father George, who taught Gabriel then and there that "real ministering isn't preaching from a pulpit, it's talking to people one on one...that's how I know about whiskey. That's how I know about a lot of things."
This entire scene is a beautiful character moment for Gabriel - whose pre-apocalypse life has never really been explored even on a surface level - and is delivered sensitively by Gilliam. On top of that, the entire scene is presented in a single overhead shot, which starts high above Aaron and Gabriel, but gradually pushes in until it's right on top of Gabriel's face, as if he were speaking right to us. Gabriel has been a controversial and arguably uneven character since his fifth-season introduction, but it has been in the Kang era of the show particularly - almost exactly in tandem with the loss of his eye - that he has really been allowed to come into his own. Also - and a rewatch of the series would be needed to verify this - at nearly four minutes in length, this oner must be the longest individual shot in the history of "The Walking Dead"; its ambition is matched in the direction throughout the entire hour, with Laura Belsey proving herself once again to be a tremendous asset to the series, with her strong sense of visual resulting in memorable frames in virtually every scene, and her remarkable patience giving each of those scenes the necessary time to sink in.
Not long after, the drunken pair doze off, until Aaron gets up to relieve himself outside. It's morning by the time Gabriel wakes up to see Aaron hasn't returned, and instead finds a mysterious, apocalypse-hardened and disfigured man with an AK-47 (Robert Patrick). Immediately presenting himself as a hostile interrogator, the man reveals that the warehouse is his home, only a moment before revealing that he also subdued and captured Aaron. He mocks Gabriel's faith - revealing that the Bibles with torn out pages are literally just toilet paper to him - and insists that Gabriel is as nihilistic and cynical as he is, citing remarks he overheard during the night, including Gabriel's remark about evil people being "the rule."
The conversation seems to be at a stalemate...until the disfigured man brings Aaron out, unties his arm, and puts a revolver on the table with one bullet in a random chamber. In one of the most intense sequences in the show's history, Gabriel and Aaron are forced to play Russian roulette with a twist: during each turn, the person with the gun can pull the trigger on themselves… or on the other person. As the rounds progress, both Aaron and Gabriel opt to potentially sacrifice themselves, while attempting to appeal to the disfigured man's nature. But when the gun finally, audibly lands on the loaded chamber, Aaron insists that he would never point the gun at Gabriel, as they are part of a family. The disfigured man, unmoved, recounts a story of how his own brother, whose family he had protected early in the apocalypse, came at him with a knife over a can of food, and had to be "handled." Gabriel launches one last-ditch effort to get inside the man's head, insisting that there isn't a hidden meaning to what happened with his brother, no grand design, and that all he is doing is sheltering himself from the truth: that Gabriel and Aaron are good people, that they are not killers, and that there is more to the world if the man would just open himself back up to it.
This doesn't seem to work, as the man tells Aaron to make a decision with the loaded chamber. He brings up Aaron's daughter Gracie - another bit of information he was eavesdropping on during the night - and counts down to one. Aaron raises the gun to his own temple, screams, and almost kills himself when the man stops him at the last possible moment. He breaks down, trying one last time to insist that the world is evil, despite witnessing two men willing to die to prevent harming the other. Aaron and Gabriel talk him down for good. He unties Aaron, and tells them his name - Mays - a split second before Gabriel, who was never tied up and who had grabbed Aaron's spiked prosthetic arm, bashes Mays' head in with it, to the complete shock of Aaron.
Patrick is an absolute powerhouse as, essentially, a one-scene wonder, but Gilliam holds his own opposite him, and Marquand does layered, intense work, particularly in the aftermath of Gabriel murdering Mays. Aaron looks upon the scene with a mixture of shock, horror, and disgust. When Gabriel insists that "it's okay, we're good," Aaron bites back with "are we," delivered by Marquand more as a bitter and sarcastic statement than as a question. Marquand has always been one of the strongest parts of the show's ensemble, and while he is generally well-respected critically - his spot-on impersonations of almost any celebrity you can imagine are a thing to be utterly awed by - he never seems to get the credit he deserves for scenes like this, where he not once chews the scenery, yet manages to fill the air with his intensity.
Finally, as the pair begin to leave the warehouse, Gabriel realizes they must have missed some kind of room or hideaway from which Mays could overhear them during the night. Sure enough, they find a storage compartment upstairs, where they find Mays' twin brother (also played by Patrick), severely disheveled and accompanied by two long-decomposed skeletons: that of his wife and son, who can be seen with gunshot wounds to their skull. Mays had forced his brother and his family to play the same game of Russian roulette years earlier, but without putting a stop to it. Gabriel attempts to free the brother, but he steals Mays' unfired revolver and kills himself with it, demoralizing Gabriel and rendering Aaron a speechless and traumatized mess.
Other than the way this scene sinks us, arguably, deeper into the potential horrors of the apocalypse more than ever before - more than Sophia in the barn, more than Negan demonstrating what a barbed wire-encased baseball bat can do to a human skull, more than the way Rick slaughtered a group of cannibals in Gabriel's old church - the thing that makes it so compelling is that it doesn't retrospectively absolve Gabriel of murdering Mays just because the latter happened to be an unspeakably evil man. There's no acknowledgement from Aaron, no hamfisted "well, phew, I guess you were right about that guy after all." There's just…nothing. They leave without saying a word. In a field outside, they see the water tower miles away and, with bitter reluctance, agree to press on to it: "one more." Because nothing waiting for them there can be worse than this.
"One More" could've been a horrible mistake for "The Walking Dead" if it were executed poorly. Any time a television episode takes these kinds of risks - general audiences tend to hate single-location bottle episodes; the bait-and-switch between the introspective, lighter first half and the borderline depraved second half is a nigh-impossible thing to pull off in a balanced way; and the darkness that this episode goes into with Mays' brother and his family will almost surely result in AMC getting at least one viewer complaint tonight - it deserves respect for taking them, but also an appropriate share of criticism if they don't land.
Every single thing about "One More" lands. The episode looks gorgeous. The series' newly-implemented digital photography has quickly found its style, having been used to incredible effect last week in "Find Me", and to an even greater result with tonight's entry. All three of the performances - Gilliam, Marquand, and Patrick, who are the only non-walker performers to appear this week - are delivered with pitch-perfect nuance and naturalism, broken up by delectable intensity in the Russian roulette scene. Giving Aaron and Gabriel, two characters who have both felt somewhat sidelined, the complete spotlight was also a stroke of genius, opening up a goldmine of opportunity for character expansion, which the episode delivers on. And, despite the suddenness and brutality of the episode's darkest moments, they don't feel egregious or unearned. Even Gabriel's murder of Mays fits in with the darkness we've previously seen boil under the surface of his character in episodes like "Conquer".
The only real criticism this week has nothing to do with the episode itself, but rather the way these "bonus" episodes have been structured and released so far. "A Certain Doom" ended on a cliffhanger of Eugene, Ezekiel, Yumiko, and new addition Princess being discovered and held at gunpoint by a brand new group of soldiers we've never previously seen on the show (but who have notorious roots in the graphic novels). This was treated as the biggest plot point from which to pick up from that faux-finale, yet not only have we gone three episodes without checking in on that storyline, we've now jumped two weeks forward from that point in time. It can be a little bit distracting to have a voice in the back of your mind saying "whatever happened in that trainyard has long passed" when we haven't gotten to witness any of it. Again, that's not the fault of this episode, but just something that bears mentioning in the context of the larger series. As far as "One More" is concerned, it's one of the show’s masterpieces. I'll eat my own words from just last week about how "Here's Not Here" is "something unlikely to be topped": "The Walking Dead" might have managed to pull exactly that off tonight.
