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A tantalising offer of a “key to your future” saw the introduction of a new group: the peripatetic Georgie, Hilda and some little berk called Midge. Now Negan’s aware of Simon’s mutiny, and with Trevor Phillips in control of the Saviors come the episode’s end, I’m intrigued to see how Dwight handles the inevitable crossing of their metaphorical swords (penises).įurther intrigue came from the Hilltop, traditionally the place intrigue goes to die. There was something vaguely Shakespearean about Negan’s abandonment by his lieutenants, the powerful man left to die alone, as I’m sure was the intention, though I can’t be certain because I don’t actually know anything about Shakespeare. Only it was Rick, with a spectacularly timed sideswipe on Negan’s car, who afforded him the opportunity to do so without anyone but Dwight knowing about it. Simon did have designs on taking control of the Saviors when he slaughtered the Trash Pandas against Negan’s wishes. Simon, on the other hand, had an altogether more stabby-shooty-deathy-zombie definition of what “moving on” means.
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Dwight soon came to suspect that Simon, like some idiot savant, might have blindly stumbled upon a peaceful resolution to the cycle of violence: “Moving on”. Initially, there was a delicate dance between the two – Dwight a turncoat, Simon seeking a co-conspirator – as they sized each other up. Dwight’s grown on me hugely over the past season, and the precarious situation he’s now in often whips up decent amounts of hand-wringing anxiety. I enjoyed Dwight’s alone-time with Simon, and the gradual reveal of Simon’s plan to stage the most fortuitous and passive-aggressive coup in history. All the more frustrating because, elsewhere, The Key offered up quite a bit. I don’t want to make out that this ruined the whole episode, and we’ll come back to Negan and Rick later on, but it did leave a nasty aftertaste. Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Negan Photograph: Gene Page/AMC
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Instead it fell into familiar, rote patterns of Event TV – patterns, as The Walking Dead sheds viewers in their shambling hordes, it desperately needs to break free from. The show had a chance to throw us a much-needed curveball, to buck a trend of its own laborious making. I said this the last time these two came to blows, and the encounter felt similarly impotent this time round: all bluster and noise without anything of note actually happening. Negan was obviously going to live to fight another day, and then he did, because the season finale isn’t for another four episodes. So as entertaining as the (surprisingly chatty) pair’s scuffle was, it contained as much tension as the elastic in my lucky Chewbacca underpants, which is to say distressingly little. And things like that only happen in premieres or finales. Why? Because it’s not the end of the season. Did you ever, even for one fleeting nanosecond, believe either Rick or Negan would meet their doom in that zombie basement (zombasement)? No. It’s frustrating when a show capable of so much commits self-owns of such rigid simplicity. There was plenty to enjoy in The Key, but its centrepiece was wholly micturated upon by the latter.
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Worst, though, are instances in which you’re able to call something way before it happens because of boring and mechanical writing.
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Sometimes, predictability can arise because of cliched, ham-fisted writing. They give you a warm, fuzzy, familiar feeling inside, like what I imagine joy must feel like. Or because, over time, you’ve tuned sympatico into the same wavelength as the writers. Sometimes you can foresee a narrative because you’re sufficiently invested in the characters to have a fair idea of what they’d do in a given situation. Predictability can be the death knell of any show, and one whose foundations are precariously built upon shocks and suspense is doubly susceptible.