‘The Walking Dead’ Season 11, Episode 2: "Acheron: Part II" Recap and Review
IN RACING OUT OF THE CORNER THE SEASON PREMIERE HAD PAINTED ITSELF INTO, THIS WEEK'S 'THE WALKING DEAD' SERVES AS A REMINDER OF THE SHOW'S STRENGTHS.
WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS
The final season of “The Walking Dead” charges forward tonight on AMC with “Acheron: Part II.” As predicted in our review of "Part I" last Sunday, Maggie (Lauren Cohan) is indeed alive, although the show tries to wring one last bit of unnecessary tension from an unnecessary cliffhanger. The episode begins with - again as predicted - a "Glenn and the dumpster"-esque fake-out, where Maggie loses her grip on the train car, lands on her feet, and kills a few walkers before finding herself overwhelmed by the herd. We see an overhead shot of a half-dozen or so walkers converging on the ground in front of the train car, no Maggie in sight, and just like that - in what might be the series' shortest-ever cold open - we roll titles.
Kevin Dowling, after making his "The Walking Dead" debut last week, remains in the director's chair for "Acheron: Part II," reaffirming the notion that the two episodes were produced as one, and meant to be viewed as such before AMC bumped "Part II" back a week. Dowling continues to find new ways to shoot this show, for example in the way he begins underneath the train, making us relive the final moments of “Part I” from a distance, as if we were overhearing it rather than seeing it. Ever since the show’s transition from film to digital seven episodes ago - one which seems to have ironed out the kinks nicely, as it’s difficult to tell “Acheron: Part II” apart from, say, “The Calm Before” from the ninth season - there has been a consistent movement to push the envelope stylistically, without creating something that is foreign to what came before. Laura Belsey has been particularly successful in this regard - her oner of Seth Gilliam in “One More” is a thing of beauty - and Dowling amplifies that as a completely fresh voice at the table.
When we come back into the episode, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Gabriel (Gilliam), Alden (Callan McAuliffe), and the rest of the team - sans Daryl (Norman Reedus), who finds himself crawling through rubble and drainage pipes while searching for Dog - regroup inside the train. When Maggie doesn’t follow behind, Negan feigns unawareness, claiming that she was “right behind [him].” The team don’t have much of a chance to dwell on this, what with the herd of walkers closing fast on the train, and so they press forward. They get one car forward when a banging from below - SOS, in morse code - reveals Maggie’s survival. She wastes no time, upon surfacing, in pistol-whipping Negan and telling the team that, when she slipped from the train car, Negan did nothing to help her. Facing accusations that he tried to kill Maggie, Negan deftly outlines how he didn’t: “she was in trouble and I didn’t help, there is a big difference.” With his back literally up against the wall, Negan stands his ground. “She was just talking about murdering me, and yet I’m the big ol’ asshole because I didn’t risk my nuts for her? I have been a golden asset for all of you.” The members of the team loyal to Maggie urge her to get rid of Negan, but before she can make a decision either way, they are interrupted by Gage (the kid from “Part I” who abandoned the team), desperately trying to break into the train car...having left the door behind him open, with walkers streaming in.
Alden tries to get the door open for Gage, despite Maggie’s insistence that doing so will only doom all of them. The other members of the group concur, wrenching Alden away from the door. Gage, attempting to avoid being devoured alive, stabs himself repeatedly while looking Maggie in the eyes, but still meets a “Walking Dead”-appropriate gory fate. After “Part I” managed to come and go with zero deaths, it was the perfect choice to make the first of the season memorable and bloody, which - while there’s more to this show than just zombies and gore - can at least appeal to the segment of the audience who are tuning in for that.
Faring at least somewhat better than the group stuck in a walker-surrounded train, Princess (Paola Lázaro), Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Ezekiel (Khary Payton), and Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura) find themselves back in the Commonwealth holding facility that they came within inches of escaping during “Part I.” While the final moments of this storyline in that episode seemed to imply that Yumiko would stay while the others fled, when it comes to established characters in unfamiliar places, four is better than one. When we first reunite with the group, Ezekiel is abent - a panicky Eugene insisting that he was “taken” - and, with nothing to lose, Yumiko approaches one of the guards and insists on speaking to someone in charge, and finds herself in front of the auditors once again. Yumiko wastes no time deconstructing who the auditors were before the apocalypse, how the Commonwealth works, and even asserts that their currency must be the U.S. dollar, given how they previously grilled Princess over a $2 bill she had on her. After asserting her skills and usefulness, Yumiko transitions to her true desire: expedited processing for her and her friends, due to the fact that she believes her brother to be a Commonwealth resident.
While Yumiko is being interviewed, with Princess and Eugene waiting outside of the room, Princess leaves to use the washroom - directed by one of the guards, whose conversation with Princess, in Spanish no less, implies that the Commonwealth has fully functional plumbing - and suddenly, Eugene is alone. He waits as long as he can before getting up, approaching the same guard that Princess spoke to, and inquiring about where both she and Yumiko are. The answer Eugene receives is that his friends are not there, and that he needs to leave, and meekly, Eugene complies, returning to the holding cell with all three of his friends now absent. Some time later, having fallen asleep, Eugene finds himself taken for another interrogation, however this time one of the auditors has been replaced by Mercer (Michael James Shaw), the imposing, orange armor-clad Commonwealth soldier who had a standoff with Ezekiel in "Part I."
A sweat-drenched, trembling Eugene is quickly pounced on by Mercer. "You can't lie for shit," Mercer drawls, "so don't lie." When Eugene insists that he wasn't going to, Mercer then encourages him to continue to be honest, implying that the opposite will be very, very bad for Eugene. Mercer demands two answers for two questions: where is Eugene's settlement, and why was his group at the train station (at the end of "A Certain Doom"). Josh McDermitt proceeds to give us his best scene to date, a three-and-a-half minute speech that starts off with him explaining how he first built his radio at Hilltop, how he came into contact with Stephanie, the moments they shared over the airwaves, and how that led Eugene and the group to a place where they could meet face to face: the trainyard.
What the speech morphs into, however, is Eugene passionately defending the lies he has told the Commonwealth, lies that he told out of fear of "[losing] the three friends I have in this world." He muses romantically about Stephanie, and the relationship he hoped to build with her, but that he also lied to her about his settlement, and his fear of losing that relationship if she were to find out. Finally, breathless from baring his soul, Eugene suddenly steels himself, and barks that everything else he has told the Commonwealth "has been the goddamn truth." It's this sudden, climactic snap from terrified nervousness to angry resolution that is most impressive. It almost seems a fool's errand for an actor to dig this deep on "The Walking Dead": in 11 years, the show has never gotten an Emmy nomination in an acting category, despite Andrew Lincoln baring his soul no less than twice a season for nine of those years, despite the late, legendary Scott Wilson being a main cast member for three, and despite Jeffrey Dean Morgan giving an all-time great television performance in "Here's Negan." And yet, despite the two dozen or so acting snubs the show has suffered, here McDermitt rides in with a powerhouse scene, during just the second hour of the season no less, as if to get the ball rolling before all of the other "for your consideration" campaigns.
Ultimately, despite Mercer's "threats," things turn out just fine for Eugene: he is taken back to the boxcars from "Splinter," as if to be condemned to imprisonment, only to find all three of his friends waiting for him, unharmed and unshackled. Ezekiel explains that he was taken to an infirmary in order to treat the growth on his neck, before Mercer strides in, declaring all four to have been accepted into the Commonwealth. Finally, Eugene is given one more gift: Stephanie arrives, granting Eugene the face-to-face meeting he thought he had lost.
In another train car, with Maggie, Negan, and company, things are not going so well. The herd of walkers, including a reanimated Gage, break through the door at one end, forcing the team to simultaneously fight while attempting to double back the way they came. Maggie, stretched thin, is forced to trust Negan with a gun. The pair share a momentary glance of understanding, and then Negan unleashes gunpowder-infused hell upon walkers coming from the opposite side. As this is happening, Daryl - who, during his journey, reunites with Dog, finds a site in the tunnels that has become a tomb and time capsule of the early days of the apocalypse, and rescues a badly-wounded Roy (C. Thomas Howell) - finds his way back to the train, rescues the rest of the group just as things seem the most dire, and enables them to finally return to the surface together.
As the group takes a breather outside, Maggie and Negan share a proper moment, albeit a small one, where she seeks his counsel regarding which direction they should go. They've figured one another out once and for all in the tunnels, and now they have a tentative alliance. This is where these characters should be at this point; the issue is that they would have gotten here even without the whole fiasco regarding Negan abandoning Maggie. Regardless, our characters head off to Meridian, but as they pass through a neighborhood Negan is familiar with, they come to a street lined with hanging, mutilated corpses. Just as this registers, and they turn to find a different route, an arrow takes out Roy and another wounds one of the Meridian survivors. The others barely make it to cover in time to see a huge group of Reapers, presumably led by Pope (who has been name-dropped a couple times as their leader), advancing on their position.
"Acheron: Part II" ends with another cliffhanger, except this time it does so while killing one (admittedly minor) character and putting most of the show's cast in jeopardy. Combine that with how there's really no way to predict how things might go, who might live or die, or how the group might be able to escape from the ambush, and it's a far more effective cliffhanger than "Maggie and the train" at the end of "Part I." This is an unquestionably better episode as a result, and the only thing really holding it back is, once again, a divided focus.
"Acheron" should really have just been one episode centered around the train tunnels, with the 10 or so minutes surrounding Negan abandoning Maggie, excised so as to fit the entire episode inside one hour. Subsequently, by allowing us to spend a separate, second hour with the group in the Commonwealth, we could use those 10 minutes to not make proceedings feel so rushed, and in the process, amplify the work that Payton, Lázaro, Matsuura, and especially McDermitt did during the two-parter. Either way, it's a relief to see that "Part II" stuck the landing, and it leaves me feeling as excited for what comes next in "The Walking Dead" as I have ever been.