You took the thoughts right out of my head! I couldn’t believe the episode’s utter heavy-handedness. The Rick/Shane subplot back in the first two seasons delved into some genuine morally ambiguous territory, and after that the show gave us a series of conventional but still interesting villains. Now it’s just a generic action flick with zombies. The pathetic attempts to infuse it with self-important themes only highlights how far it’s fallen.

Of course, “We’re not so different” is one of the oldest cliches in the book anyway, but if the show wants to pursue that theme, damn, at least do it with some style!

Yeah, I keep thinking back to Rick/Shane subplot, Rick's been bad for some time now and so have his crew.

@Kylopod said:

The pathetic attempts to infuse it with self-important themes only highlights how far it’s fallen.

I don't know if I'd say it has fallen far--with a few notable exceptions, it's been really bad at Big Themes for most of its run--but it is getting worse. Here, the characters actions totally falsify the equivalence the writers are trying to draw, so they depend on just having people talk about how "we're just alike," and viewers are supposed to absorb it that way without reference to the actual behavior of everyone involves (behavior that renders the equivalence completely absurd and untenable).

Of course, “We’re not so different” is one of the oldest cliches in the book anyway, but if the show wants to pursue that theme, damn, at least do it with some style!

To pursue it, the writers would have to actually make some sort of genuine parallel between the groups, something they've rendered basically impossible by turning the Saviors into such evil cartoons.

@jriddle73 said:

Last week's WALKING DEAD ended with Rick, then prowling around for guns inside a Savior compound, being confronted by a gun-wielding Morales, a character who hadn't been seen since he and his family decided to split from the regular cast way back in season 1. He'd become a Savior, said other Saviors were on their way and his reappearance was such a portentous event, it became the note on which the curtain fell. "Wow!", the viewer is led to think, "where will this go?" The move seemed to herald some significant plot-twist, so when, a few minutes into tonight's ep, Daryl shows up and just shoots Morales in the head without a word, it was a moment of dramatic awkwardness that was absolutely hilarious. Moreso for me because sitting watching it, I'd just made a joke about how Daryl was up there somewhere--he'd been on the same floor as Rick--and suggested he should slip up on the fellow and kill him. Because that would be funny, not because I thought it would actually happen. After, Rick looks stunned. "Th- that was..." he stuttered and then Daryl cuts him off: "I know who it was," he says in that mumbling, dismissive way Norman Reedus has made part of Daryl's signature. "Don't matter." Which just made the already-damn-funny situation really damn funny.

Though the definite entertainment value in this was strictly unintentional, it proved to be the high-point of the ep.

It seems TWD's writers went through all the trouble of bringing back Morales just to have him introduce the Big Theme of the episode. Subtlety simply doesn't live in the TWD writer's room, so before Morales' hysterically funny demise, he called Rick a "monster," said the only difference between Rick and himself was that he had a gun and that this didn't make Rick any better, it just made him lucky. OUR HEROES ARE JUST LIKE THE VILLAINS, get it? It's material TWD has recycled so often the actors probably don't even need a script anymore to recite the requisite sentiments.[1]

And recite it they do. TWD has always set up and milked moral dilemmas for melodrama but genuine moral complexity has proven to be as beyond the capabilities of its writers as warp-drive technology. Throughout TWD's run, our heroes are, on rare occasions, shown doing ignoble things, almost always for the sake of some plot of the moment, but in the moral landscape in which they exist they're clearly on the side of the angels.[2] Last week when Rick killed a fellow who, it was then revealed, was protecting a baby, he was clearly sickened, even horrified. By contrast, the featured Saviors are just presented as the embodiment of every bad and vicious characteristic of the human species, brutish ravagers who slaughter their way across the landscape killing, terrorizing and stealing whatever they want, enslaving communities and taking great glee in their crimes against humanity. Their leader is a camp cartoon who bashes in the brains of a helpless prisoner in front of the fellow's pregnant wife then mocks the victim as he dies, who threatens to have his men gang-rape a teenage boy for shits and giggles. Rick and co. would have to suck really badly to suck as badly as the Saviors and they just don't. Not in that way.[3] That leaves nothing but false equivalences to be wrung from this "look how alike they are" theme but the writers throw it in the viewer's face repeatedly. The title of tonight's ep, "Monsters," flat-out screams it. Morales straight-up says it. Morgan repeats it like a mantra. "Y'see, we're the same! We're the same! We're the same." Mr. Sulu, warp factor 6...

The full article is here: http://cinemarchaeologist.blogspot.com/2017/11/walking-dead-97.html

Spot on JR!

They're not the same at all. It's ridiculous.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Rick's group has proven time and again the extent to which they've gone, at risk and loss to themselves, to be selfless and interested in others. They do not take pleasure or glee in hurting others, and they certainly haven't relegated outsiders to food sources or pit them against each other for sport.

TWD just needs to get on with the group we've been following for the last seven years carving out some peace for themselves to be together and be okay, as much as this new world gone mad will allow.

@lennonforever said:

Spot on JR!

Thanks. I try.

@DRDMovieMusings said:

They're not the same at all. It's ridiculous.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Rick's group has proven time and again the extent to which they've gone, at risk and loss to themselves, to be selfless and interested in others. They do not take pleasure or glee in hurting others, and they certainly haven't relegated outsiders to food sources or pit them against each other for sport.

As I said in my original piece, its writers were never exposed to the 1st Rule of Screenwriting, "Show, Don't Tell." Instead of showing the characters doing awful things and suggesting they may be losing their humanity, the writers have them stand around and make speeches on "Am I losing my humanity?" The disconnect between this and what's actually happening is sometimes fairly stark but rarely so stark as in that last ep, where the theme just looks like this completely ridiculous thing plastered on as an afterthought and completely disconnected from what we're seeing.