Justen Smith, Staff Writer
This review contains mild spoilers for Season 5
So concludes the second half of the fifth season of the Walking Dead. After the first half had wrapped up last November, I was so tired of the show that I loudly touted to everyone that would listen that the only way I would interminably stay with the Walking Dead was if the second half of the season stepped up the quality and got me interested. Irony tends to be funny that way, so here I am to tell you that this second half of the season did just that; it revitalized a show that had long run out of steam.
If you’ve been keeping up, the first half of the fifth season began with the group being trapped at Terminus and ended with Beth dying at the hospital. In between those events were a lot of filler and arbitrary plot points. Every episode in this series follows a formula to a tee; even if an episode is a slow character piece, there has to be at least one grisly murder shot of a zombie just to fulfill the zombie quota. It’s extremely noticeable and takes away from some of the cooler action set pieces. Plot threads like Eugene’s obvious lie about Washington DC being a safe zone go nowhere and serve only to pad out the season length. All of that changes in the second half.
The main crux of this half-season involves the group’s ability, or inability, to integrate into a genuinely beneficial community. After incidents like Woodbury, Terminus, and the hospital, Rick’s group were already hyper-aware of how evil people can be, even more so than their dead counterparts, and it was more than easy to assume that Alexandria, the newest walled-in “safe-zone,” would be some sort of death trap or have some nefarious dealings behind the scenes. That turns out to mostly not be true. The people inside are mostly ill equipped to deal with the outside world and, aside from the community’s ex-congresswoman leader Deanna, are wary of Rick’s group, as they are in survivalist overdrive. It creates an interesting dichotomy between staying strong for a cruel world and letting one’s guard down for a truly safe haven.
What I can appreciate the most about this half-season is the role reversal that takes place. Up until this point, most of what was happening to Rick’s group was entirely reactionary. They would be attacked or savaged by some outside force beyond their control and resort to living nomadically on the road. This resulted in a lot of filler episodes in the past, and many, many sequences of the group clearing abandoned houses. Now with Alexandria, Rick and his group are the outsiders, and they aren’t always on the moral high ground for what they do. Their violent tendencies set them apart and it harkens back to the more unstable characters previously vilified in seasons past, like Merle, the Governor, or Shane. It creates a dynamic that I personally love. One of the worst things a show can do after five seasons is stagnate, and while the Walking Dead skated dangerously close to that before, this half-season redeemed it again for me. Can’t wait for season 6 in October.
