“The Ones Who Live” Episode 5 Review — Another Very Disappointing Episode

The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live The first five episodes were a bit complicated, but I’m starting to get worried. I really hated last week’s episode and the season premiere, and I really liked episode 2. Episode 3 was ok, but nothing special. Each episode is so important because the season is so short.

Tonight is the penultimate episode of the season, and while it wasn’t as boring as last week, it was completely ridiculous in almost every way. The sheer number of ridiculous coincidences and TWD bad habits that pop up throughout left me cold. I was really hoping to get back on track this week. Instead, aside from a few good parts, we just get a bunch of ridiculously convenient plot points because the screenwriters clearly couldn’t come up with anything better.

I’ll give spoilers ahead.

Tonight’s episode, “Become,” begins and ends with Gabriel (Seth Gilliam). This is an amazing cameo that I never expected.Everyone knew a cameo was coming, but many assumed it would be Morgan (Lennie James) who started looking for Rick (Andrew Lincoln) when he left. Fear the Walking Dead. I have to say this after many years. fear I hope we never see Morgan again because it completely ruined his character. At one point he was one of my favorites. now . . . Well, let’s just say they wasted a talented actor’s season after a terrible season. The sad thing is that he wasn’t really put to good use in the main show before that either, with the random moments of insanity and the whole “I know what it is!” Nonsense. It’s a shame.

Either way, I enjoyed the flashback scenes with Gabriel and Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh). It created suspense, especially when we learned that she had murdered her best friend. I thought for sure we were going to see Gabriel die. In fact, I think it would have been braver in this series to have her kill him, but this series has been very risk-averse lately. Instead, Jadis is the one who bites her bullet, or, well, gets bitten. And then she goes out with a little bit of cheese and rambles on about her side choices and who she’s become (see there’s an episode title!).

What didn’t work for me about this episode was that almost everything about it was unbelievable. Rick and Michonne (Danai Gurira) are on the run, and it looks like they made it out alive. They have long disappeared and are believed to be dead. They decide to hike to a cabin in the woods and encounter a trio of extras who have somehow become calcified and are being attacked by zombies they decide to call stonewalkers, or stoners. from now. Their skin is hard as a rock and metal bounces off their skin, making them seem difficult to kill at first. But there’s no problem at all. There is almost no inconvenience!

Michonne finds them very friendly and gives them some “Tasteful Noods” ramen (great name for a ramen brand, by the way), but the survivors attack them, point guns at them, and destroy everything. request. Rick and Michonne barely made eye contact. It’s not a tense showdown like “Nebraska.” Our hero seems to recognize the armor of his own intrigue and quickly defeats his enemies. He makes him promise not to be a bad guy anymore, and gives him back his revolver along with the bullets. I found this completely incomprehensible.Sure, don’t kill them, but don’t give back their weapons With a promise to be kind.

Of course, all three of these idiots end up dead by the end of the episode, so I’m going to ask a question I’ve asked many times before. How on earth do these people survive in this state for more than 10 years after the apocalypse? Are you stupid and incapable of basic survival skills? It’s really puzzling. I would expect anyone you meet at this point to be a version of Rick and Michonne, at least in terms of skill set. They’ve made it this far, so they must be pretty smart, determined, and capable. Almost everyone who made it this far would be a dangerous fighter (unless they were in some sort of safe zone where they didn’t really need to survive, which these three weren’t).

I was half expecting Rick and Michonne to start kissing during the fight. In fact, they now seem to be kissing at every opportunity. To be honest, it’s kind of funny. They didn’t do much romantic stuff on the main show, but now they’re just smooching endlessly.

it’s okay. At this point, I expect they’ll be more than a little greedy with each other. Good for them. They’re lucky too. Last week, they were able to find a fully powered smart home and stay there. It was such a nice place that we decided to have sex there while the building was literally falling apart. This week, they arrive at Three Pines Cabin. It’s a cozy retreat where you light candles, drink alcohol, and everything is bright and breezy.

Of course, it doesn’t last. The next morning, Jadis shows up with a pistol drawn, and this is where the episode descends into outright stupidity. The sheer absurdity of Jadis pursuing them is just beyond the pale. I can’t suspend my disbelief. Also, I’m annoyed. Because if they wanted Jadis to catch them, they could have had her catch them as she drove out of town in her car.They could have used her smarts to wait nearby and ambush her. Along with some soldiers to help her.

Instead, she goes alone and somehow tracks them to this cabin in the middle of nowhere, but her explanation is ridiculous. When she returned to the accident scene, she noticed that the car they were in was gone. That in itself is highly unlikely. It’s also not proof that Rick and Michonne received it, since this is an entire city with many potential residents.

But okay, Jadis has her premonition and manages to find them using her god-like tracking abilities. Because they threw the noodle wrappers out the car window and left a trail of crumbs at their place. But how did they find the noodle skins? It’s not that they are very obvious. She wasn’t walking. Most wrapping paper ends up being blown away. Why would they throw away the noodle wrappers in the first place? Aren’t Rick and Michonne on the run? Wouldn’t they be smart enough not to leave any evidence, even though it’s highly unlikely that anyone would see the noodle skin and use it to trace it?

I have no idea how she tracked them through the forest. There was no road. But for now, we must dispense with all plausibility. the walking dead, And they just write what they like and expect the audience to accept it, no matter how pointless it is. And this is both frustrating and insulting. Because they had countless ways to make this work better.

Jadis has tied them both to a bed, and she plans to shoot them – after the villain’s monologue, of course – and it sure seems hard to get out of this situation. . . But no. Again, no problem at all. There is almost no inconvenience!

Despite being tied up at gunpoint, the heroes escape. Jumping out of the way of her point-blank gunfire, Rick throws a bed at her (which blocks her bullets), and Michonne hits her with her hatchet. You might think her thick Kevlar body armor would protect her from her hatchet, but that’s not the case. Hardly a nuisance! (Sorry, there are a lot of moments like that in this episode). Mortally wounded due to her useless bulletproof vest, she flees Rick and Michonne, who were unharmed thanks to her extremely thick plot armor.

They chase her all the way to the road, which is quite a long way considering they walked to the cabin the day before, but even the seriously injured Jadis manages to get back to the car and a high speed chase ensues. Jadis escapes, but she encounters three thieves, identical to the ones Rick and Michonne encountered the day before. She enlists them for her own purposes and sets up an ambush at a nearby building.

Rick and Michonne walk towards it. “Four to two!” Jadis boasts, but it seems difficult for the heroes to get out of this situation! But I already know what I’m going to type next. Rick and Michonne are just too good, and when a stealth zombie silently sneaks up on one of the three idiots – zombies are so quiet when they need to be! –Everything goes to hell for Jadis. Soon, all three idiots become his lunch of zombies (I’m sure he just jumped into a pile of zombies). The remaining main characters are stuck in a stalemate. If Jadis dies, Alexandria will be a mess. But they can’t keep her alive either.

They made an agreement that neither party intended to honor. Michonne is allowed to return to Alexandria, and Rick ends up going with Jadis. When Jadis reveals that she intends to kill him, Michonne returns and points one of the CRM rifles at her. Eventually, another dastardly ninja stealth assassin zombie appears out of nowhere and bites Jadis in the neck with deathly silence.

This time, we also learn that she saved Gabriel a year ago. Throughout the episode, flashbacks are shown where they have been secretly meeting once a year for the past three years. She chooses not to kill him and not tie up her “loose ends” that we are supposed to receive as part of her redemption arc.

Naturally, the rest of her redemption comes in the form of her telling her lovers where her secret files are kept. She asks Rick to kill her and he does so. As with most of this episode, the rather long farewell monologue felt very Gimple-ish to me, so I’ll leave it out here.

That’s the plan. Rick and Michonne find a way to infiltrate the base where the files are kept, steal them, and escape again, returning to Alexandria with their secrets safe. The preview for next week’s episode certainly looks action-packed, but I’m not sure how he’ll satisfactorily wrap up this story in one episode.

The episode ends with Gabriel returning on the day he chose to meet Jadis, but not finding her. He waited, but he soon realized that she must be dead, or at least that she had chosen not to come for some reason. This is the same scene at the beginning of the episode when he hears what sounds like two helicopters flying over him. However, in the final scene, only one appears. Could it be his CRM reconnaissance helicopter headed for Alexandria? An invading force? Rick and Michonne make a triumphant return?

Maybe we’ll find out next week. Or in season 2, if there’s a season 2. Scott Gimple said of the possibility of season 2:

“Anything is possible. Even if Rick dies in the last episode, anything is possible… We’re focused on this right now. But this came together in a really amazing way and there were all kinds of plans. . And the world changed and we changed our plans.”

So I think Rick will die next week. perhaps. Thanks for the little info, Gimple. No one is going to ruin their show like the producers and marketing department of . the walking dead.

Overall, although there were some good moments here and there, overall it was another huge disappointment. It was too much for Jadis to pursue Rick and Michonne like that. The fact that our hero easily gets out of any scrapes negates the tension. It’s really annoying when they introduce a cool new zombie that looks like it’s actually hard to kill, and a few scenes later Rick stabs the zombie with a small knife. Because the cool new zombies are supposed to be a bigger threat.

oh yeah. It’s a shame. I was expecting a lot more. The production values ​​remain top-notch for the most part, but otherwise it feels like a half-baked story with too much padding for such a short season. We’ve been looking forward to this for years, they’ve also spent years coming up with a compelling story, but is this all we’re going to get?

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