Tuesday, October 14, 2014

The Walking Dead - Season Five: No Sanctuary

The fourth season of The Walking Dead ended on quite a cliffhanger; Rick Grimes and his fellow survivors were captured by the people of Terminus and imprisoned in a train car to await an uncertain fate. The episode ended in such a way that the fifth season premiere would pick up immediately from where it left off (in previous seasons there has been a clear lapse of time; weeks or months). But before we get a chance to see an escape attempt we get a cryptic prologue depicting several members of the Terminus community, similarly trapped in a train car, lamenting the fact that they had put up signs, which had allowed “them” to find their sanctuary. Watching this episode for the first time I completely bought into this trick, assuming that Rick’s group had turned the tables on their captors and imprisoned them; I also made the snap-assumption that the ensuing storyline – Rick overthrowing Terminus – would cover the first half of this season.

I was wrong, and I don’t mind about that!

The escape plan doesn’t work out, because the people of Terminus have pretty intensive and methodical security measures, and Rick, Daryl, Glenn and Bob are gagged, bound and lined up over a trough along with four nameless expendable characters. There’s no holding back on the gore – and no time is wasted on these people we know nothing about – as one by one they are cracked over the back of the head with a baseball bat, and then their throats are sliced open. Terminus as a community seems to operate by a number of rules, but we don’t really stay there long enough to find out about them. All we need to know is that Gareth arrives just in time to impose one of these rules before Glenn can be taken out.

There is some genuine tension for a moment as Gareth threatens to kill Bob (the most expendable member of Rick’s group) if Rick doesn’t co-operate, but then an explosion shakes the whole building and Gareth leaves to inspect it, but not before stupidly telling his men not to kill Rick or the others. Once upon a time this show used to make a big deal about not killing living survivors, but that was a long time ago, and since the two goons don’t kill Rick, he cuts himself free and kills them both. Pretty awesomely, I might add.

Fans of the show had strong suspicions that the people of Terminus were cannibals, and any ambiguity was dismissed as we see some really hideous images of butchered corpses hanging from meat hooks. Rick takes this in, and gives the order not to leave anyone from Terminus alive.

This episode deals pretty heavily with the theme of “kill or be killed” (or “butcher or the cattle” to use the show’s phrasing). In the narrative we have now reached a point where that seems to be the only means of continued survival. Tyreese and Carol capture one of the people of Terminus, and after Carol leaves on a mission of ‘being all kinds of awesome’ (I’m assuming that’s how it was phrased in the script) he continuously berates and challenges Tyreese. It’s impossible to be a good person in this world, because people who try to live by their morals, and do the right thing all the time, are always at a disadvantage. The Governor had this mentality before a lot of others, when he remarked that if he’d been that way from the start, his daughter would have been afraid of him, but she would have been alive too.

Sure enough, Tyreese’s good nature is abused as his prisoner threatens to murder baby Judith, and with his hands around her throat he forces Tyreese to drop his weapons and then step outside to face the Walkers unarmed. But of course he’s not dead, because The Walking Dead wouldn’t waste a major character death by having it take place off-screen, and sure-enough after an uncomfortable silence he bursts back into the cabin and brutally beats his tormentor to death.

Meanwhile Carol manages to camouflage herself with Walker-entrails, and gets herself to a vantage point from which she proceeds to blow-up Terminus (or at least blast a great big hole in it). The escape from the sinister would-be sanctuary isn’t going to be a drawn out multi-episode affair, it’s happening right-damn-now!
We then alternate between Rick being a badass, and a Carol being a badass (of course Daryl gets a look-in as well, but for a change it’s not his moment to shine), but with Terminus in flames and a big herd of walkers swarming through it, everyone else wants to get in on the “it’s my turn to be a badass now” action. Everyone – apart from Eugene – gets a few walker-kills in before they get the hell out of there.

This episode is very heavy on action, but there are some nice character moments as well: Carol and Daryl are reunited, and Rick and Carl finally discover that Judith is still alive. These reunions are handled very nicely, as the show finally slows down allowing the audience to catch their breath.

Then we return to the people of Terminus trapped in their train car, and realise that this was a flashback (not a flashforward) as they are seen being tormented by evil men. This cruel treatment drove them to become violent cannibals, luring people to their bastardised sanctuary for the purposes of butchering them. It is an interesting approach to find out all of this, now that Terminus is no longer a threat, but Gareth is definitely still alive and will be eager to get revenge on Rick and the others.

And then, after the end credits there is another big event: Morgan Jones is revealed to be following the same road as Rick. The last time we saw this character was in Season Three, and he had gone mad due to the loss of his son. It will be interesting to find out what has happened in the meantime; Lennie James has done a fantastic job of playing this character, he’s only been in two episodes so far, but both times he’s been incredible.

The Walking Dead often catches a lot of criticism for being relatively slow-paced for the majority of each season, and this episode seemed to be the writers’ way of challenging that criticism. I was really amazed at how much took place in this single episode: about half a season’s-worth of storylines were packed into forty-five minutes (they even had Eugene reveal his ‘cure’ despite having been hyper-secretive about it up until now). They could definitely have afforded to have spread some of these plotlines over the next several weeks, but they decided instead to kick things off in a huge way. Then again, the second half of the fourth season had been almost entirely spent building up to this episode, so I can’t really complain – this is the finale that people were waiting for. No Sanctuary was a spectacular opener, but my concern coming off the back of it is that the season will not be able to maintain the standard it has set.


But hey, I’ve been wrong before – maybe I’ll be wrong again…