‘The Walking Dead’
Grade: D+
Season four of “The Walking Dead” was amazing — one of the best seasons of television I’ve ever seen. The first half of season five was pretty damn good, too.
But the mid-season premiere?
Snore-fest.
It took 25 minutes for a character to die.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sad that Tyreese is now chilling with his hallucination buddies in the after-bite life, but “The Walking Dead” took one of my favorite things about the show and did the exact opposite.
The best part of the show is when something big happens that makes you ask “What in the world?” and then gives you no time to recover.
Remember when Beth Greene died?
Boom. Shot through the head. Dead.
Remember when Lizzie Samuels killed her sister?
Tyreese and Carol were taking a walk, and then boom. Dead little girl.
“The Walking Dead” is great at screwing with its audience and throwing some crazy stuff at us by giving us no foreshadowing and no time to recover. It’s like a roller coaster where you can’t see what turns are coming and you have no time to catch your breath.
I can understand if this drown-out treatment was for one of the main characters — Rick Grimes, Carl Grimes, Carol, Daryl Dixon, Glenn Rhee or Maggie Greene.
But Tyreese was not one of the main characters. It shouldn’t take him this long to die. It slows down the show and takes away the frantic pacing that makes “The Walking Dead” irresistible.
As for the rest of the episode, it was kind of boring.
The entire group goes to Virginia to try and reunite Noah with family and potentially find a new place to settle down. But they get to the gated community and everybody is dead. Darn.
And some of the corpses have been cut in half — super weird, by the way.
At the end of the episode, they decide to go to Washington, D.C., to see what’s up in the nation’s capital. So at least we now have something to look forward to.
This episode reminded me of what this show needs most — a villain.
Whether its Shane Walsh, the Governor or the cannibals, that’s when the show is at its peak. We all know there’s going to be some sort of a villain this season — I just hope they don’t take too long to introduce him/her/them/it.
It’s a basic fact of storytelling. You need conflict in order to compel your audience. I hope for the rest of season five, “The Walking Dead” gives us what it’s done in the past: frantic pacing and somebody to hate.
Eye patch is optional.
