TV Round-Up: The Walking Dead – Season 5 Episode 1 – No Sanctuary

TV Round-Up: The Walking Dead – Season 5 Episode 1 – No Sanctuary

I think I’ve made my opinion known pretty widely that The Walking Dead was hopeless for me.  While season 1 showed some promise, in my opinion, no other season was able to capture that simple desperation so well.  While the show shined at certain moments, namely the episode where Judith is born (still, in my opinion, the series’ best), I had jumped the proverbial ship.  Quite simply, the amount of times they had fumbled the ball in adapting what was so eloquently put together in the comic books had me reeling.  I trudged through last year’s commentaries begrudgingly, sacrificing my own time and well-being for that of the listeners, but Kupka and I, for the most part, were pretty pissed at the show.  I can’t believe I’m saying this, and I don’t want to jump to conclusions based off of one decent episode (fuck you Strain), but maybe, just maybe, The Walking Dead has finally turned a corner.

I know, I’m as shocked as you are, but the fact is this episode was tense, creepy and atmospheric.  Despite one stupid plotline, which I’ll get to in a second, I didn’t feel like there was any wasted time, and I didn’t look down at my watch once to try and convince myself there are only oh-so-many minutes left to go.  This was genuine, visceral entertainment.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say they matched the level of intrigue they had in the series pilot by not focusing so much on characters whose individual stories mean almost nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Now about that stupid plotline…fuckin’ Dennis Wise’s Mommy Adventures are back again, ladies and gents.  God damn it, why the fuck do they have to keep emasculating this guy?  You know he didn’t kill that fuck in the cabin, just not in his nature at all, and I’m sure that will come back to bite them before the season is over.  I can’t believe they needed to waste more time this season on that crap, you’d think they’d have learned by now.  I understand story pacing and structure but there’s gotta be a better way than that to spend those cutaways.  This whole section, despite my being pleased with the episode as a whole, really did drag things down considerably.

Showing the current Terminus folks dealing with their own strife some time before this was really interesting to me and starts to propel this show towards a moral grey area that they haven’t successfully tackled yet.  While the entire ordeal with The Governor had shades of this, I’m really hoping they stick with this Terminus group’s backstory and flesh it out a bit.  I was getting some severely disturbing Holocaust overtones during their flashback scenes, and even found myself, especially by the end of the episode, sorry for them.  I think it says a lot when you can take a small group of characters your audience barely knows and adjust your perspective on them so drastically in the span of a five-minute scene.  This episode showed me that when given the opportunity and focus, the writers know what they should and should not be doing to be successful.  I’m hoping they lean towards the latter.  I can’t deny the fact that these writers still left what was probably the worst plotline from last season in this episode, but at the same time I can’t ignore how into this episode I was.  I’m not ready to completely get back on board with this shit, but they’ve got me for one more episode, those bastards.