The Walking Dead's Half-Dozen Calamities
Tonight's episode of the THE WALKING DEAD goes beyond Thunderdome but doesn't go anywhere interesting. "Hostilities & Calamities" is, instead, by-the-numbers TWD dreariness incarnate, like a greatest hits package of many of my past criticisms of the series.
1) Filler - Yep, this was yet another filler ep featuring yet another one-line plot in which nothing of any real consequence happened. Eugene is taken to the Saviors' compound and Negan, recognizing his skills, gives him a privileged position. This was the explicit reason Negan took him; if any further explanation had been necessary, a competently written series would have disposed of the matter in half a sentence in a later ep.[1]
2) Slam on the Brakes, Throw Out the Drag-Weights - After two eps in a row that had moved at a relatively reasonable clip,[2] this one brings all that momentum to a screeching halt for that static filler story, which ever-so-slowly deals with entirely irrelevant events that occurred prior to the stuff we've been watching for a few weeks now.
3) Repetition Is The Soul of TWD - TWD has a terrible habit of repeating exactly the same material over and over again and this entire ep was just a rehash of material previously covered this season in "The Cell" and "Sing Me A Song." Eugene take the place of Daryl and Coral from those eps, hanging around the Savior compound, learning how things--the same things--work, recovering Negan's marital arrangements and its discontents, watching Negan do his one-note '60s Batman villain act, going among the workers, learning the hierarchy, seeing the nicer apartments Negan's favored are granted (the apartment Eugene is given appears to be exactly the same apartment Negan used to try to tempt Daryl over to his side). It even replicates the scene from the Coral ep wherein Negan gathers his workers to dispose of someone whom he believes has crossed him. In this case, the fellow is killed rather than merely being burned nearly to death. The b-plot replicates the material from those early eps regarding Dwight, the melodrama with his wife and his rocky relationship with Negan, which is yet again challenged and to which he yet again decides to cling. We even get a brief reprise of the dreadful pop tune Dwight previously used to torture Daryl...
The full article is here:
cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2017/02/walking-dead-89.html