‘The Walking Dead’ Episode 5.14 “Spend” (8 out of 10) Created by Frank Darabont; Starring Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus, Danai Gurira, Chandler Riggs, Steven Yeun, Lauren Cohan; Sundays on AMC.
We haven’t seen a whole lot of our supporting cast during the last few episodes, but tonight they sure made up for lost time. During this episode, we started to see how Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and his group have started to make things better in the walled-off town of Alexandria. While it was cool to see Abraham (Michael Cudlitz), Glenn (Steven Yeun), and even Eugene (Josh McDermitt) step up to the plate, it made the Alexandrians look utterly useless. Between their lack of common sense and their policy of extreme cowardice, it’s become surprising that they’ve managed to survive this long. Many spoilers ahead, folks!
Abnormal is the New Normal
One of the things that this episode did well was set up multiple storylines that each began with a bit of normalcy. Abraham is helping to reinforce Alexandria’s wall, Noah (Tyler James Williams) wants to be an architect, Rick is on the case of Jessie’s (Alexandra Breckenridge) broken owl sculpture, and Glenn is amicably leading a supply run with Aiden (Daniel Bonjour)—despite the fisticuffs that ensued during their last adventure. Other than Father Gabriel’s (Seth Gilliam) slightly unhinged moment of scripture vandalism at the very beginning of the episode, it seems like just another day in zombie-ensconced paradise. As the episode progresses, however, we soon see how quickly all of that normalcy can explode into a series of violent deaths and tragic realizations. Both Glenn and Abraham find themselves surrounded by lily-livered Alexandrians when shit gets real, and it ends up costing a few brutal deaths.
The two storylines have vastly different tones—Abraham’s is one of plain awesome as he wades into an encroaching zombie horde with a claw hammer in order to rescue an injured lookout while the other members of the construction crew just fall back and gawk. Cudlitz injected this scene with a savage glee, indicating that Abraham has missed hacking up zombies.
Glenn’s story is similar—we know that Aiden and Nicholas (Michael Traynor) are incompetent, but while on a routine supply run, that incompetence quickly turns to cowardice—and the resulting death scenes are truly nightmarish. Perhaps the most intense moment comes when our heroes find temporary refuge inside a set of revolving doors—they pin themselves inside while two walls of zombies close in on either side. I suppose if we’re going to blame someone here, it’s got to be Nick. He leaves Aiden to get ripped apart, and his panicked decision to escape opens the door for Noah to get yanked out and mangled right in front of Glenn. Both of these scenes were extremely difficult to watch—Aiden stares upwards as the undead julienne his midsection, and poor Noah gets his jaw detached from the rest of his skull. I figured Aiden would get himself killed sooner or later, but it was rough to see Noah go down like that.
While both of these storyarcs were bloody and tragic—two things TWD does really well—they also communicate the same message: Even Eugene, the weakest link in Rick’s team of zombie commandos, is more competent than the most hardcore Alexandrian. It’s always good to see the characters that we’ve stuck with through four seasons represent, but it would have been helpful to see the Alexandrians show a little bit more backbone tonight. After their laughable attempts to fight zombies and their apparent orders to save only themselves, it was hard to believe that they had enough grit to build and maintain a community like Alexandria. If the zombies didn’t get them, their lack of loyalty definitely would.
The Homefront
After Carol scared the fluids out of Sam (Major Dodson) the little boy last week, you’d think he’d have the brains to stay the hell away from her. But, like most little boys, he’s fascinated with danger. Their scenes are strangely cute—Carol pulls no punches and encourages him to steal chocolate—and they lead Carol to sniff out Sam’s father as an abusive alcoholic. We don’t see any physical evidence of this yet, but given Carol’s history with an abusive husband, she can smell it right away. When she brings this suspicion to Rick and encourages him to handle the matter with extreme prejudice, we once again see how life on the outside has sharpened our characters into ruthless pragmatists.
The final scenes seemed a bit rushed, but will no doubt stir up some additional conflict during next week’s episode when Glenn returns home without Aiden. Gabriel, who has officially lost his mind, warns Deanna (Tovah Feldshuh) against the acceptance of Rick’s crew, calling them the devil in disguise. It’s a huge betrayal, considering the billion times the crew has saved Gabriel’s ass, but I’m hoping Deanna will write him off for the lunatic that he is.
Verdict
Tonight’s episode could have been much clunkier than it turned out. Yes, the bulk of the action seemed overly concerned with proving how badass Rick’s teammates are, and yes, that’s something we already knew. However, the scripts and editing between scenes were tight, which facilitated the large amount of story and character development that took place tonight. It’s impressive to see a show juggle such a large amount of complicated characters in a way that still manages to tell a cohesive story. What will become of our friends over the course of the final two episodes? Only time (and zombies) will tell.