'The Walking Dead' Season 11, Episode 1: "Acheron: Part I" Recap and Review
DESPITE AN ENERGETIC FIRST HALF, THE KICKOFF TO THE FINAL SEASON OF ‘THE WALKING DEAD’ ULTIMATELY STRETCHES ITSELF WITH CHARACTER BEATS THAT ARE TOO FAMILIAR AT THIS POINT.
“The Walking Dead” is back on AMC tonight as it begins its final, 24-episode season. “Acheron: Part I” is the first of a two-part opening to season 11, however AMC have opted to air the two episodes separately, despite initial plans to air them back-to-back. Right off the bat, narratively speaking, this is a mistake, but we’ll get to that shortly.
The episode opens with a nail-biting, nine-minute set piece where Daryl (Norman Reedus) leads a team raiding an abandoned army base, in order to steal a massive cache of military MREs (meal, ready to eat). Some of the shorter, lighter members of the team - including Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Carol (Melissa McBride), and Kelly (Angel Theory) - insert themselves by rappelling into the mess hall through skylights on the roof, avoiding a front entry for one reason: there are dozens upon dozens of “lurkers” - walkers who have not been put down, but are rather lying in a dormant, sleeplike state - covering the gymnasium floor.
The tension that director Kevin Dowling - in his “The Walking Dead” debut - wrings out of simple shots of the team tiptoeing around walkers, or the momentary panic when Magna (Nadia Hilker) accidentally picks a lock just loud enough to risk waking the lurkers, deserves to be commended. Naturally, this being “The Walking Dead”, something goes wrong: as they send the packages of MREs back up the rope line, one of the ropes breaks from the weight. Daryl makes a miraculous catch, but at the cost of slicing his arm open on one of his own arrows. As soon as his blood falls to the floor - directly on a lurker’s face, nonetheless - the entire room is stirred, and a gigantic shooting spree kicks off as the people inside the mess hall rush to the rappel lines.
Ultimately, despite terrible odds, everyone gets back onto the roof of the base unscathed, showcasing how these people have mastered the apocalypse. It’s a nice contrast to similar supply runs in past seasons where at least one character - granted, usually a one-off who had barely been introduced - would almost certainly become walker food. Moreso, it’s a microcosm of the ways in which showrunner Angela Kang has, in only two seasons, transformed “The Walking Dead” from the predictable cycle it had decayed into, a show where characters would so often make the fatal decision regardless of how dumb it seemed, back to a compelling drama about survivors using their brains and brawn alike to make it through each day.
When the team returns to Alexandria, Maggie and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) have yet another tense staredown, before Maggie reunites with additional survivors from her previous group. The joyous reunion is quickly undermined, however, as Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) breaks up a fight between two Alexandria residents who are trying to claim a scrap of the town’s rapidly dwindling food supply. At a council meeting, with the town’s crops having been destroyed by the Whisperers, and their horde of walkers having scared off nearby wildlife, Maggie provides a solution: they could head to her old settlement, Meridian, which is fully developed with cattle, water, and crops. There’s one issue, however, with recovering the supplies at Meridian: the Reapers (previously encountered in “Home Sweet Home”) captured it after murdering most of Maggie’s group.
Facing not only a long, risky journey out of the D.C. area but what must almost certainly be a bloody battle at the end of it, the Alexandria group nonetheless votes to go with Maggie, who brings Negan - being the one person actually familiar with the D.C. metro - along as a guide. Poetically, a torrential rainstorm falls on D.C. the same night that the group heads out, and Negan suggests they find shelter before continuing further. Despite hostility from some of the group, Daryl agrees, and the group enter an old subway station, with Maggie deciding - in an apparent homage to “Fallout 3” and the way metro tunnels are used to navigate its post-apocalyptic D.C. setting - to use the abandoned tunnels in order to get out of D.C. despite Negan’s hesitance. As they proceed further, the group are greeted with the sound of an intense, foreboding wail, courtesy of pipes in the tunnels that are being inundated with rainwater. As the group ventures into the darkness, the episode suddenly takes us a couple hundred miles away to West Virginia.
We rejoin Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), and Princess (Paola Lázaro) immediately following the events of “Splinter”, where they still have sacks over their heads and are being transported by the same Stormtrooper-like soldiers who had held them captive. Each of the four subsequently find themselves interrogated by auditors for the Commonwealth, all but confirming that this season will at least partly adapt the concluding arcs from the comic series. The auditors ask repetitive and invasive questions while an imposing member of the Commonwealth’s army (Michael James Shaw) looms over each interrogation, particularly in the case of the defiant, sarcastic Ezekiel, who seems unfazed by the hostility of his captors until he is suddenly overcome with a coughing fit, an apparent consequence of the tumor on his neck.
After the interrogations are over, the foursome find themselves in a cell in a holding facility, with a couple in one adjacent cell arguing over how long they’ve been there, and a man in another cell being taken away for “reprocessing,” at which point the group decide they must escape. We don’t really get to see the scheme play out properly: in the very next scene, Lázaro gets to once again flex her acting muscles as Princess - who seems to have an eidetic memory or something equivalent to it - utilizes a series of trivial and insignificant bits of information she’s gathered to devise a plan, on the spot, where they can subdue two guards and steal their uniforms. We don’t even get a simple, quick sequence where the theft and escape are initiated, but instead jump cut to Eugene and Yumiko - the other two guards’ uniforms apparently being the perfect height and size for the two of them - “escorting” Princess and Ezekiel out of the holding facility. They emerge into the night, and prepare to escape, until Princess sees a wall littered with hundreds of photographs of apparent missing friends and family members of Commonwealth residents. One of the photos is of Yumiko, atop a message from someone named Tomi, asking anyone who has seen “[their] sister” to contact them. Yumiko - apparently being given Michonne’s storyline from the comics now that Danai Gurira has left the show - declares that she must stay, and that’s all we get from this group of characters for the entire hour.
It feels a little hypocritical, as someone who has frequently bemoaned past episodes of the show for so often splitting up the cast in order to avoid telling ensemble stories, and for leaving cliffhangers unresolved for entire stretches of episodes as the show ping-pongs between each ongoing storyline, to turn around and complain when the show does the opposite, but the detour to the Commonwealth doesn’t really fit into “Acheron: Part I”. Yes, it’s nice to see all four of these characters; yes, with only 23 episodes now left, things should move along somewhat consistently… and yet we don’t really get anything new out of this other than to learn that the Commonwealth might be even more sinister than they seemed in “A Certain Doom” and “Splinter”, with Yumiko’s last-second decision to stay being the only tangible development. All this detour really does is distract from the A story of Negan and Maggie on a mission together, and unnecessarily pad the runtime.
When we do return to the tunnels, however, the group encounters a makeshift mass grave, presumably created when the apocalypse had been just beginning, with hundreds of walkers in bodybags who still have not been put down. Maggie orders the group to start putting down the walkers, a necessary step in order to clear the way to Meridian. At this point, Negan isn’t the only person protesting Maggie’s leadership choices, as Alden (Callan McAuliffe) also finds the task unnecessary when they could just wait out the storm and go back to the surface. Nonetheless, the group proceeds to start taking out the bodybag walkers, and it’s after they’ve gotten through most of them and are exhausted that a massive, bloated walker sneaks up on a young survivor and almost bites him, before Negan intervenes and saves the survivor’s life, nearly losing his own in the fight with the walker. Maggie’s only response - in addition to no one backing Negan up - is to insist that everyone “pay attention.” Negan mocks this, and is warned by both Alden and Daryl to shut up.
Negan, being Negan, speaks his mind anyway, insisting that Maggie is sending the group on a “death march,” and that he is leaving. The young man Negan saved immediately takes his side, as does Roy (C. Thomas Howell), but Maggie refuses to let them split up, attempting to reason that Negan knows D.C. and is invaluable. “Nobody here know how to read a goddamn map,” Negan asks, shutting Maggie down and outlining how the only purpose of this absolute death trap of a mission is so Maggie can find a a way to get rid of him, whether that be by letting him fall prey to a walker, to the Reapers, or - if all else fails - putting a bullet in him when no one else is looking. “Her head isn’t in the game because I’m in her head,” Negan says. To further provoke Maggie, Negan declares that he will not be “dragged through the mud and put down like a dog like Glenn was,” which gets him promptly sucker punched by Daryl, in a nice echo of the moment in “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be” - the very moment that resulted in Glenn’s death, nonetheless - where Daryl knocked Negan to the ground for similarly taunting the romantic partner of one of his victims.
Maggie then lays down the law to Negan: they’re in the tunnels because they cannot survive in the streets during a storm, they can’t wait the storm out because the people of Alexandria are starving, she’s in charge because that’s what everyone else wanted, and she thinks of killing Negan every day, but doesn’t, because a tiny piece of the person she used to be is still in her, but won’t be if he keeps antagonizing her. It’s the dramatic high point of the hour, a great character moment for Negan and Maggie, and an opportunity for Cohan and Morgan - who, as always, brings his A-game to even the most nonchalant pieces of acting - to properly play off of one another for the first time in nearly three years. It also seems to set the tone for the Maggie/Negan dynamic moving forward, which makes what follows even more disappointing.
When they get to the end of the bodybag walkers, the group find themselves at a dead end, blocked by a subway train with a blocked door, which has additionally had rubble piled up on either side of it, making it impossible to enter or pass other than by climbing on top of it. They discover the train at the same time that a herd of walkers, having trailed behind them, appears. To make matters worse, Roy and the kid have disappeared with most of the group’s supplies. Frantically, the group help one another atop the train so as to crawl across the roof, but Dog gets spooked and runs underneath the rubble pile, forcing Daryl to go after him. In the fracas, Negan gets atop the train before Maggie, who tries to climb up, can’t reach the top… and then finds herself face to face with Negan, who stares Maggie down, considers his options, and then turns away without making any effort to pull her up, seconds before Maggie loses her grip on the train and falls back toward the approaching walkers.
This is where AMC’s decision to not air both halves of “Acheron” together blows up: Maggie is not going to die in the season premiere all of six episodes after they finally managed to get Cohan back, there can’t possibly be anyone watching this ending who seriously thinks Maggie is about to die, and the cliffhanger therefore can’t hold any strength for longer than about 15 minutes. That makes it the perfect kind of “I really want to know what happens next” moment that will keep someone tuned to the channel for one commercial break, but when you make people wait an entire week like AMC are here, then you’ve just created another “Glenn and the dumpster,” where the fake-out death must be revealed to be a lie sooner or later, and the inescapable response is instead an eyeroll.
“Acheron: Part I”, aside from feeling very much like half an episode, with the needle of its story not advancing very far forward and a cliffhanger ending, also feels like a significant step down from some of the highs “The Walking Dead” reached with recent entries. After all, this episode comes on the heels of the series’ best-ever hour, and while not every episode of a show can be a home run, “Acheron: Part I” feels like it barely got on first base. It’s disappointing to see Negan take a backslide into what is practically villainy all over again, when we just got to spend and hour with him at least partially rediscovering his humanity, burning his barbed wire bat Lucille, and returning to Alexandria in order to try and forge a new path. The scene where Maggie sets the tone with Negan and calls the situation like it is, should have pacified him. It seems wildly out of character for Negan to abandon her to an apparent doom after that, especially when he then has to explain himself to all of her friends who are only a couple dozen feet away.
That, of course, is once again assuming that “Part II” doesn’t walk back both Maggie’s “death” and Negan’s betrayal in its opening moments. “The Walking Dead” is certainly back, but for the first time since Angela Kang took over, I’m concerned that Scott Gimple might be working under a pseudonym in the writers’ room.