An action-packed, emotionally empty “Walking Dead” disappoints in “JSS.”
Review: 2.5 out of 4 stars
8 p.m. Sunday, AMC
After a stellar season debut, “The Walking Dead” fell into a familiar trap in “JSS.” The show does violence almost better than any other series on TV, but its non-violent moments often fall flat.
The episode begins with Enid’s backstory. Don’t remember Enid? You’re not alone. She’s one of the teenagers riding out the apocalypse in Alexandria. Anyway, Enid saw her family eaten by a zombie herd and ate a raw turtle before finding safety behind the city’s walls. Throughout the ordeal, she consistently spells out the letters “JSS” on various surfaces.
Enid’s whiny boyfriend Ron screams at his mom because she wants to give him a haircut. Teenage characters are kryptonite to TV writers. Must they all be whiny, long-haired mopes? Go into any high school in America and you’ll find bright, eager, determined young people. Granted, living in a zombie-ridden apocalyptic hell-scape would put a damper on even the most chipper kid. It’s just absurd that every teenager on TV dramas has to be the absolute worst person on earth. Nobody cares about your haircut, Ron. Go get eaten by a zombie.
While Rick and company are out trying to round up thousands of quarry zombies off-screen, the B-team is back in Alexandria. Maggie and Deanna talk about farming. A woman named Denise is introduced as the new town doctor, though she only briefly attended medical school.
In the midst of all this, a crazy guy with a machete runs into Alexandria and starts hacking away at its peaceful citizens. A guard gets hit in the face with a molotov cocktail. Suddenly, the evil scavengers called the Wolves are chopping everyone to tiny bits. Deanna’s son, Spencer, uses his sniper rifle to take out the driver of a semi-truck. When the truck hits the city wall, the horn goes off. That’s what Rick and the zombie party heard at the end of the last episode.
From then on, the episode focuses on Carol, ditching her feeble housewife persona to switch back into action mode. She shoots several of the Wolves, makes it to the armory and runs out with a bag full of guns, distributing them like Shotgun Santa. Morgan is also trying to stop the carnage, but still holding strong to his pacifist beliefs. While Carol is mowing the Wolves down, Morgan is capturing them alive or advising them to leave. Morgan’s mercy will probably come back to bite him in the throat.
As the surviving Alexandrians make their way through town, killing the remaining Wolves or incapacitating their corpses, Aaron notices that one of them was carrying a bag. Aaron opens it to reveal the photographs he used to recruit people to join the town. Whoops. Presumably, that’s how the Wolves discovered Alexandria. Now that Morgan turned so many of them loose, it’s likely they’ll be back to finish the job.
In the midst of the attack, Enid went over to Carl’s house to hide. She indicates she plans to make a run for it, but Carl doesn’t want to hear it. He asks her to promise not to say goodbye and Enid agrees. After the attack, Enid is gone and Carl finds a note she left behind. It reads, “Just survive somehow.” That’s the great mystery of the episode. Honestly, Carl already knows that. It seems Enid is on the run and we can only hope she brought her pouting, haircut-hating boyfriend Ron with her.
While all the action scenes in this episode were well-played, it suffered by putting too much emotional weight on characters we barely know. When the pre-credits sequence began, I thought Enid was some random girl. Even after discovering it was somebody I’d seen before, I couldn’t remember anything about her. A subplot with new doctor Denise trying to save a wounded survivor’s life fell flat because we literally met her in this episode and she was trying to save another brand new character who didn’t have any lines. The show is investing a lot of time in Ron, who’s still angry over his father’s death, but it’s not like we knew him as a happy-go-lucky kid before that. It was great to see Carol back in action, but we’ve seen that before. We’ve also seen Morgan espouse pacifism, so it’s not like we learned anything new.
More often than not, “The Walking Dead” rolls out episodes like this one: Full of action, light on reasons to care. It’s like eating a big bowl of candy for dinner. When the sugar rush fades, it just feels like empty calories.
