The Walking Dead Season 10, Episode 20: "Splinter" Recap and Review
A NEW CHARACTER IS GIVEN AMPLE ROOM TO SHINE IN THIS WEEK’S ‘THE WALKING DEAD’, BUT THE OVERALL EPISODE FEELS FAMILIAR AND SLIGHTLY UNDERWHELMING.
After a three-episode interim, the biggest cliffhanger from the finale-not-finale of season ten of “The Walking Dead” has finally been addressed…but hardly resolved. “Splinter”, this week’s installment of the series, picks up immediately from where “A Certain Doom” ended in October, with Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura) and Princess (Paola Lázaro) finding themselves held up at gunpoint by a squad of Stormtrooper-esque soldiers in a trainyard, with the person they ventured out to meet nowhere to be found.
Almost immediately, Yumiko makes a move against the soldiers, only to be knocked unconscious as Princess watches hopelessly. Princess is then thrown into an empty train carriage, hitting her head against the wall before hearing the same be done to the others. Princess, in a panicked daze, tries to calm herself down by reciting the U.S. state capitals in alphabetical order. It doesn’t take long for her to realize that Yumiko is in the “cell” next to hers. Princess attempts to pick her way through a rotten board with her bare hands to get to Yumiko, but only manages to break part of it away, in the process giving herself a splinter.
While trying to engage in conversation with Yumiko in order to keep her awake, fearing that her friend has suffered a concussion, Princess enters into a monologue about her abusive stepfather and negligent mother, particularly about how her stepfather once hit her in her right jaw. It is just as Princess realizes Yumiko has stopped responding that the latter can be heard being taken from her train car. Princess protests, asking the soldiers where they’re taking Yumiko, and to help her, but she goes ignored. With Princess once again left on her own, it’s worth mentioning now that Princess - and Lázaro along with her - is not only the focal point of “Splinter”, but rather carries the episode singlehandedly. Of all of these “bonus” episodes brought about by COVID, this is more of a bottle episode, and the closest thing to a one-person play, than any of the previous three.
After Yumiko is taken away, Princess notices - after having somehow missed it up to this point - that the other end of the carriage has an open hole covered up lazily with a piece of plywood. She makes a partial escape here, now coming face-to-face with Eugene, who tries to urge her to just stay in the train carriage and follow the soldiers’ directions. After all, it was Eugene who led the group into this situation, and he would rather generate good faith with whatever new community they’ve found than come across as rebellious and jeopardize whatever relationship would have developed. Princess reluctantly returns to her train car just in time to be taken away for an interrogation.
As she sits opposite a man who seems to be the de facto commander of the soldiers, she defiantly refuses to answer his questions about herself and the group, only to suddenly be struck in the very same spot she told Yumiko her stepfather hit her. She is taken back to her cell again, finding that Eugene is now gone from his cell as well. She begins to once again panic, until Ezekiel suddenly opens the train car from the top, having apparently escaped. Ezekiel attempts to urge Princess on, when another soldier suddenly enters the train car, ostensibly to bring her food, where Ezekiel proceeds to knock him out.
As the pair interrogate the soldier as to where they are, where their friends are, and who the soldiers represent, Ezekiel suddenly grows violent, threatening the soldier’s life and then beating him. Princess attempts to stop him, only to find herself sitting where he was, on top of the soldier, her hands bloodied, with no Ezekiel present. As she looks around the traincar in a panic, it is revealed that much of what she saw earlier isn’t there: the rotten board between her cell and Yumiko’s is undamaged; the piece of plywood and the hole she escaped through aren’t there, replaced by a standard wall; and the top hatch of the train car has never been opened.
Panicking, Princess runs outside, towards a fence, where she almost escapes without trying to rescue the other group members. There, she is faced with another hallucination of Ezekiel, alongside two walkers. Ezekiel talks to her about her mother, stepfather, and a series of apparently dead people Princess has never mentioned before. Princess seems to realize that she is hallucinating, and returns to the train car - interestingly, one of the imaginary walkers can be heard growling out “wait, come back for me” as she leaves - to finally answer the questions from her earlier interrogation as she frees the soldier. Notably, as she undoes the soldier’s handcuffs, Princess accidentally removes the splinter that had been bothering her. The two of them seem to finally have a rapport going, but right as the situation seems resolved, the soldier bangs on the door of the train car, shouting that he’s “got it,” and the door opens to reveal Eugene, Ezekiel and Yumiko standing with sacks over their heads, surrounded by soldiers. Before she can even protest, the soldier places a sack over Princess’ head as well.
On a surface level, “Splinter” is an oddball episode for “The Walking Dead”. It largely features just one character - notably, one that we were only introduced to six episodes ago - and spends practically its entire runtime developing her rather than moving the story forward. Most of all, the way it gradually unravels the fact that Princess is hallucinating - likely because of having hit her own head when she was thrown into the train car - plays as if David Lynch had directed the episode, mixed in with the kind of hints and layered twists that one might find in a Christopher Nolan film.
However, despite the execution of these elements feeling somewhat unique for the show, on paper “Splinter” feels like a Xeroxed version of things we’ve seen before. Princess’ hallucinations and the overall “it was all just a dream” feeling that the episode leaves, could be described as kin to Rick’s struggles during the third season episodes “Say the Word” and “Hounded”, where the latter received “phone calls” from characters in the show who had previously died, as he coped with and grieved the loss of his wife Lori. Even during this very season we had “Look at the Flowers”, where Carol hallucinated Alpha’s antagonizations even though the latter was dead, and “What We Become”, where a drugged Michonne lived through an entire alternate reality before coming out of the trip.
Most disappointing is the way the episode basically goes in a giant circle. When we left off in “A Certain Doom”, the soldiers had the group at gunpoint in the trainyard. As we end “Splinter”, the group are once again being held at gunpoint in the trainyard, except now they have bags on their heads. Especially given the fact that we had to wait four episodes for that cliffhanger to resolve, it’s a bit annoying that practically nothing ended up happening with it once we finally got our eyes on it. We didn’t learn anything about the soldiers - in the graphic novel series, they’re involved with the Commonwealth arc, but that hasn’t been confirmed or even hinted at yet in the show - and the situation of the main characters is ultimately unchanged.
Yes, “Splinter” is a “bonus” episode, but it is an episode nonetheless. When a show follows up on a major cliffhanger, it should come with some kind of resolution. Even the other episodes in this “bonus” set have been rewarding. “Home Sweet Home” introduced a new threat to the series with the Reapers; “Find Me” revealed a major romance for Daryl; and “One More” deepened Aaron and Gabriel’s characterization, just as “Splinter” did for Princess, but it also portrayed the deeper challenges of the post-apocalyptic world now that supplies have been raided from most anywhere, and it also set the pair on course for a new location. “Splinter” is merely a showcase for a new character and, thankfully, Lázaro makes the most of her time here. There is not a moment where she doesn’t electrify the screen - the scene opposite Payton at the fence is a particularly strong showcase of her abilities, giving us a front row seat on the emotional rollercoaster Princess rides during the episode - and, combined with the brisk 40-minute runtime of the episode, never lets it get boring.
The biggest positive of “Splinter”, along with Lázaro’s standout performance, is the rewatch value gained by the twist. Because we find out that Princess has been suffering hallucinations, and because of the way in which that is revealed, pretty much every frame of the episode is called into question. Was Yumiko actually hit in the head, or is Princess retroactively remembering the moment wrong because she herself suffered a concussion? It’s notable that the entire opening, until the moment Princess enters the train car for the first time, is shot in a sort of hazy blur, as if it’s a memory rather than a real time moment. Did the soldier interrogating her actually strike her? It’s telling that she happens to be hit in the exact same spot she had mentioned only minutes earlier. One thing that is clear is that Princess never actually left the train car on her own - the plywood-covered hole doesn’t exist, and there’s no way she later got out of the train, ran to the fence, had a hallucinatory conversation, and then returned, considering that it’s only 90 seconds later the door is opened again and we see the whole group of soldiers surrounding it with the main characters as hostages. There’s arguably no end to the theories and questions one can extrapolate on, and those conversations will likely continue in the days and weeks to come as “The Walking Dead” fans micro-analyze “Splinter” scene by scene to find telltale inconsistencies and details that can imply what was real…and what wasn’t.