'The Walking Dead' Season 11, Episode 6: "On the Inside" Recap and Review
LAUREN RIDLOFF GIVES AN EXPRESSIVE PERFORMANCE IN A VERY GOOD HOUR OF ‘THE WALKING DEAD,’ BUT THE EPISODE STOPS SHORT OF BEING A STANDOUT ENTRY EVERY TIME IT CUTS AWAY FROM HER.
“The Walking Dead” often excels when it goes off-format and showcases only one member of the main cast. “Here’s Not Here,” “Here’s Negan,” and “Live Bait” are just three examples of episodes that feature little in the way of action, or death, giving only one main cast member the spotlight, and, while the last of those three is controversial, you can probably find enough top ten lists online where the first two sit at the very top. That’s not to say the show can’t have a great hour when it focuses on the ensemble cast - it can, and it has - but something really special seems to happen when the show halts the often breakneck pace of its story, and focuses instead on the headspace of one of these people. After all, the show’s name doesn’t refer to the walkers, it refers to the people who haven’t died. The most important way to keep an audience invested through the cynicism of that premise, is to never let their humanity fall by the wayside.
In general, I make a point of not watching "next on…" sequences with serialized television. It's far more interesting to go into each week's episode not necessarily knowing which characters or storylines will be focused on next, or to know what might be in store. Nonetheless, one or two details always slip through, and it was really exciting to learn that Lauren Ridloff, after taking a twelve-episode hiatus from "The Walking Dead" to go shoot "Eternals," was not only making her return to the show as Connie, but was going to finally get the hour in the spotlight she has deserved since her introduction two seasons ago. Between Ridloff's engaging performance style, the anticipation for Connie's return, and the show's track record with smaller, single-character focused entries, it seemed like a standout entry was on the way.
With "On the Inside," that might have been the case...if the episode actually went for it. We get a riveting cold open, as Connie and Virgil (Kevin Carroll) narrowly escape a herd of walkers by barricading themselves in a seemingly abandoned manor. There's a surprising amount of tension built in this opening, considering the fact that we've watched humans stab, shoot, crush, and otherwise dispatch walkers for more than a decade. And when Connie finds herself holding back the front door of the house for dear life, Ridloff makes us believe it. I've remarked multiple times that Jeffrey Dean Morgan is the best actor in the show's cast, but Ridloff's absence has made me forget how she gives him a run for his money. She often plays Connie in a subdued and naturalistic way, but when Connie finds herself in a terrifying situation, Ridloff brilliantly contorts her face and ramps up her physical acting without ever veering into scenery-chewing territory. It's why the episode's failure to commit to Ridloff and give her the entire hour can't help but feel disappointing.
I can easily abide the first scene after the credits, where the citizens Alexandria are formulating a plan to find Connie, after learning of her survival last week, and I can certainly get behind the momentary focus the episode has on Kelly (Angel Theory) when she rides off on one of Alexandria's horses in order to find and rescue her sister. You can't just magically have them appear at the house without any setup at all of the search. That's just basic storytelling, and that's fair. Where the episode runs into problems is in how it dedicates half of the hour to Daryl (Norman Reedus) and his ongoing infiltration of the Reapers. For one, we just had an all-Daryl entry two weeks ago - and it's great, as our review outlined - but this is also the first time Connie has appeared on the show in a year, and it feels like we could've gotten more of her this week. We all love Daryl, but Angela Kang should consider easing back on his screen time in favor of the other characters.
Daryl is entrenched deeper into Pope's (Ritchie Coster) organization this week. The Reapers force him to partake in torturing Frost (Glenn Stanton) in order to find the location of Maggie (Lauren Cohan). Frost is aware of Daryl's efforts to take down the Reapers from within, and so plays along at great cost to himself: it would be suspicious if Frost automatically tells Daryl where the group are, information which Daryl already knows but the Reapers don’t, so he forces Daryl to cut off one of his fingers with a knife before giving away the location of the stash house Maggie is waiting in. Pope is satisfied with this, but Carver (Alex Meraz) doesn't trust Daryl, butting heads with Pope when the latter insists that Daryl join their search party. A squad of five consisting of Daryl, Carver, Leah (Lynn Collins) and two other Reapers converge on the stash house. Daryl manages to shake a downed power line, sending a signal to Maggie, while the other Reapers search the house that Frost sent the group to - the wrong house - which provides time for Maggie and the others to hide. Daryl tries to argue that they should wait in this house, watching for any movement in the rest of the neighborhood, but he is vetoed by the others, who move on to the right house next.
Connie and Virgil, meanwhile, search the manor, seeming to find it empty. Virgil tries to compel Connie to rest, but she ignores his pleas, doing another search for supplies. In one of the bathrooms, Connie finds an old razor blade disposal slot...where a pair of eyes flash by, sending her into a frenzy. It's a pure horror movie moment that "The Walking Dead" has rarely gone for, making it feel very fresh for the show despite how clichéd it may be in the larger genre. It's particularly effective as the scene is already happening inside Connie's headspace. Ridloff and the character alike are deaf - Connie is, arguably, one of fiction's greatest portrayals of a deaf person to date - and so the only sounds we can hear when the show enters her space are faint thuds from footsteps or knocks. She rushes downstairs to tell Virgil, but as he has only recently met Connie and has not yet learned sign language, they have to communicate through writing. But in her hysteria, Connie breaks her pencil, forcing her to desperately carve a message into the wall with a knife: "NOT ALONE."
Connie shows Virgil the razor disposal, but despite his best efforts to see some kind of hidden room, in the darkness behind the wall it is impossible to tell whether the other end is twenty feet away, or only a couple of inches. He tries to calm Connie down once again, but she insists that what she saw was real. Virgil agrees to search the house with her again, and Connie leads the way back down the hall, at which point a hidden bulkhead is slammed closed behind her, separating the two. Once again, we find ourselves in Connie’s headspace, as she has to navigate the hallways and - much more terrifyingly - flee from a mostly-naked man who has turned feral after a decade in the apocalypse. This is a genuinely terrifying threat on a level “The Walking Dead” hasn’t seen at least since the Whisperers killed off several characters at once in “The Calm Before,” but perhaps even further back than that. Greg Nicotero directs a second consecutive episode this week, following the trend so far this season to give each director two in a row, and his decades of experience with horror come to a head in how he evokes classic genre tropes but makes them feel fresh. Purely on that level, his direction of the scenes in the manor are arguably his finest contributions to the series yet, and this is a man who has directed some 35 episodes of the show. It just adds to how this should’ve been a Connie-and-Virgil-only hour, as we could’ve seen a little bit more of their time together before the manor, and the episode would have more real estate to not only build their relationship, but build the mystery and tension behind the feral people in the house.
With that being said, the scenes with Daryl aren’t bad, and it’s at least clear from a character dynamic perspective why they’re slotting them into this hour. Before Connie was separated from the rest of the characters last season, the character she was closest to, save for Kelly, was Daryl. He was the first to learn to communicate with her through signing, and there were even strong hints of a romantic relationship forming between the two. It’s been played subtly so far, but Daryl has been in a darker place ever since he seemed to have lost Connie, and while he’s still very much on the side of the good guys and almost certainly would never betray them, he’s also being forced to explore the darkest segments of his humanity in order to get closer to the Reapers and save his friends. In the process, he has become trapped with this group of insane villains, at the same time that Connie finds herself trapped with feral humans. He’s had to torture and mutilate one of his own people to try and save the rest, but he probably wouldn’t have done so if he were operating under the knowledge that this person he is incredibly close to is still alive.
As the group of Reapers move into the stash house, they find clear evidence that people were there only minutes before, but the house itself seems empty. Daryl sees a door into the house’s cellar - and indeed, thanks to Daryl’s signal, Maggie, Negan, Gabriel, and Elijah are hiding there - but Daryl manages to slide a carpet over the door’s edge with his foot unseen. Daryl, Carver, and Leah have a three-way standoff, as Daryl tries to prompt the group to move on, which Carver calls out as being contradictory to his suggestion that they wait in place before. Daryl argues that the group have clearly fled and that they are going to lose the trail if they wait around, but Carver continues to show his distrust. Leah tries to get both men to shut up, and Carver’s insistence that he’s “there for her” is countered by Leah, asking him if he felt that way when he set the fire that could’ve killed her during “Rendition,” giving a definitive answer to whether or not Leah was in on that test. Daryl makes a statement of his own that he’s there for Leah, that he doesn’t care about any of the other Reapers, but that he’ll trust them if she tells him he can. The situation at least seems moderately defused, but at the last second, Carver senses something off about the rug, and finds the trap door. Luckily, the group hiding in the cellar have magically escaped from the house just in time, crawling out from under the foundation. Obviously, it’s good that those four characters got away, and they kind of have to - at the very least, without Maggie and Negan you basically don’t have a show anymore - but it’s also irritating that they get away by means of deus ex hole-in-the-wall. It would’ve at least been more interesting if the other Reapers, or a set of walkers, or some other obstruction that had to be cleared silently so as to not be detected, stood in the group’s way, but the episode doesn’t have time for that, because this story isn’t its priority.
Connie flees into the basement of the manor, where she finds literal skeletons littering the floor, either people murdered by the feral humans, people that they lost during the apocalypse, or a combination of both. She doesn’t have time to dwell on the horror of this, however, as one of the feral people catches up to her, forcing her into a secret passageway. There, through another razor disposal - apparently the system the ferals track their “prey” through - she sees Virgil, who has managed to seal himself inside a room. She signals him to break her out of the wall, something she cannot do with her bare hands, but as he approaches her, another feral comes up behind Virgil through another secret passage. Connie cannot warn Virgil other than to pound on the wall more furiously, and so he ends up still being attacked. He manages to get the upper hand, but he is dazed, and so when he breaks through the wall to get Connie out, he narrowly misses her face with his knife, creating another clichéd yet not unwelcome image of the blade in front of her horrified expression. In a lot of horror movies, when an explicit homage like this pops up, I tend to roll my eyes. But Nicotero, somehow, gets away with it over and over again during this hour. In any case, Virgil does rescue Connie, resulting in an emotional embrace and the episode’s highlight, where he finally attempts to understand Connie’s language as he insists that she keep going no matter what happens to him, but she insists that they will make it together. Ridloff and Carroll have an undeniable chemistry together - other than their characters’ first, momentary encounter during “A Certain Doom,” these are the first scenes they have ever shared - and it will be interesting to see where their characters’ relationship goes, although I don’t think it should be at the expense of what the show has built between Connie and Daryl so far.
Connie and Virgil make their move to escape the manor, battling feral people all the way out. One manages to subdue Virgil, dropping onto him from the ceiling and stabbing him in the back a couple of times before Connie takes her out. Thankfully, if “Hunted” has taught us anything, taking a knife to the back a couple of times isn’t necessarily fatal, and so the pair continue on. When they get to the front door, however, the walkers outside are still surrounding the entrance, and Connie and Virgil find themselves surrounded by ferals on the other side of the door. Connie, thinking fast, cuts open a walker that Virgil had killed earlier, smears its innards on herself to mask her scent, blocks Virgil with her body, and then opens the door to the house, sending in a group of walkers who proceed to devour the ferals while the duo escapes. Virgil collapses from his wounds, and a couple of ferals make it out of the house, but at that moment, Kelly arrives with Carol (Melissa McBride), Rosita (Christian Serratos), and Magna (Nadia Hilker) to save the day. While the other three deal with the ferals and walkers, Kelly and Connie have a profoundly emotional reunion, the kind of human moment that has often fueled “The Walking Dead,” but which we seem to get less of as the show approaches its endgame. It would be a beautiful crescendo to end “On the Inside” with, but of course, we still have a B-story to wrap up.
As the Reaper squad returns to Meridian, Pope welcomes them, not disappointed that Maggie’s group got away, but instead elated that he has further tortured and murdered Frost while the group was out. Not only that, but Pope has left Frost tied to a tree as a walker, for no reason other than malice and insanity. Daryl is visibly disgusted by this, having previously given his word to Frost that he would keep the other alive in exchange for the information about the stash house. Pope takes Carver aside, walking into Meridian with him while whispering unheard remarks to the latter, though both glance back at Leah and Daryl while chuckling to themselves. This is probably just a psychological game they’re playing in order to further feel Daryl out - after all, Pope said to Daryl in “Rendition” that the trial by fire was only the beginning of his tests - but it has at least left Leah unnerved as the episode ends.
I don’t want there to be any misconception: “On the Inside” is overall a really, really good episode of “The Walking Dead.” It might even be the second-best of the season so far. It’s not that Daryl’s storyline is bad this week, and it’s pretty clear why they crosscut it with the main story surrounding Connie. It’s just that those scenes with Connie and Virgil in the manor are phenomenal, terrifying, and an emotionally satisfying return for a long-missed character and actress. Lauren Ridloff doesn’t disappoint with her return to the show, capitalizing on both her abilities and the material to deliver an Emmy-worthy performance. Unfortunately, like Andrew Lincoln, Scott Wilson, Melissa McBride, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan before her, I’m sure there will be a campaign for her work this week, and I’m sure it will once again fall on the Television Academy’s deaf ears. I hope I’m wrong, but either way, if the entire episode was as good as its main story, or even better, if “The Walking Dead” had gone down the same route they had with “Here’s Not Here” and made it all about Connie, “On the Inside” would probably be an all-time great entry. It’s still in line with Angela Kang’s quality streak as showrunner, but it’s not quite up there with the best the show has seen since she took over.