Morgan’s backstory is a total bore on “The Walking Dead.”
Review: 1 out of 4 stars
8 p.m. Sunday, AMC
“Here’s Not Here” is a perfect example of why it’s so hard to love “The Walking Dead.” One week after the best show in series history, we’re saddled with a slow, sappy meditation on the sanctity of life.
The episode begins and ends in the present. Morgan is addressing one of the Wolves he captured during their raid on Alexandria. Why would Morgan offer peace and reformation to an enemy? Funny you should ask.
The rest of the episode is a flashback, taking us back to Morgan where we left him in season three. He’s holed up in his bunker, going crazy. A fire breaks out and he flees into the woods. Morgan builds a base camp and starts killing zombies and any living humans coming through the area.
When Morgan hears a goat in the distance, he follows the sound and arrives at a cabin. An unseen voice tells him to disarm, but Morgan refuses. Out steps a man named Eastman (John Carroll Lynch), who conks him on the head with a staff and throws him into a jail cell inside the cabin.
Over the next hour, Eastman coaxes Morgan out of his PTSD and gets him interested in the martial art of Aikido. It’s basically “The Karate Kid” with Mr. Miyagi replaced by a doughy white man and Cobra Kai replaced by zombies. There’s even a waterside training montage.
Eastman explains he’s a forensic psychiatrist who once angered an inmate who then broke out of prison and murdered Eastman’s family. Eastman captured the inmate, threw him in the cell in the cabin and spent 47 days watching him starve to death. After that, Eastman saw the error of his ways and became the life-loving Aikido practitioner he is today.
When Morgan and Eastman go back to Morgan’s camp to pick up some supplies, they’re attacked by the zombie of a man Morgan strangled earlier in the episode. Morgan freezes, so Eastman runs up and pulls him out of harm’s way, only to have the zombie bite his back. It’s a super-clumsy moment for a man who knows a martial art and who explains that he walked 30 miles through zombies to retrieve his daughter’s drawing from their home. It’s an absolute eye-roller of an action scene.
Once the zombie is killed, Eastman puts its body in a cart and drags it back to the cabin. In the ultimate world-ending apocalypse, Eastman takes the time to bury every zombie he kills in a graveyard. Ridiculous. Even with a gaping bite wound in his back, Eastman wants to make sure the zombies get buried. You wonder if he administers last rites every time he smacks a mosquito.
Morgan buries Eastman, then heads off in search of Rick and company. That concludes our very lengthy flashback.
Back in the present, Morgan hopes the Wolf will follow his lead and reform. The Wolf explains that although he’s wounded, if he recovers, he plans on slaughtering everyone in the town. Morgan grimaces, then leaves the house, locking the door behind him.
“Here’s Not Here” fails for several different reasons. We’ll set aside the fact that a doughy middle-aged man can be a ninja one moment and a stumbling klutz the next. We’ll ignore the fact that when your survival is on the line, creating a giant graveyard for the relentless tide of zombies you face is moronic. We’ll forget that the episode came off as high-handed and preachy as that one friend who won’t stop sharing PETA articles on Facebook.
We already know Morgan goes from jittery survivor to pacifist monk. That means there’s virtually no tension in this story. Will he kill the doughy sensei? Of course not. Will Morgan be eaten by zombies? Nope. The only possible danger is that Eastman gets bitten. He is, of course. Someone with his priorities should have been eaten a long time ago.
This episode played out like an extended character backstory flashback from “Lost.” The difference is, “Lost” always interspersed the sometimes-boring flashbacks with present-day excitement on the island. The backstory often informed the character’s current behavior. In “Here’s Not Here,” the flashback told us basically what we already know. Morgan is a pacifist. He could have simply told this story in a three-minute monologue in the midst of an episode with more action.
“Here’s Not Here” comes off as a poor quality two-person, low-budget stage play. It didn’t need to be a 90-minute episode. Seems like this was a filler episode because the showrunners blew their budget on all the computer-generated zombies in the season premiere. Although Lennie James does what he can as Morgan, John Carroll Lynch plays Eastman like a folksy Andy Griffith watching over Otis in the Mayberry sheriff’s office. A man whose entire family was murdered, who then starved their killer to death and is living alone in the apocalypse should be a little more haunted, even after finding the Church of Aikido. It’s a bizarre, hammy performance out of step with the rest of the series.
This drag of an episode is even more unforgivable coming on the heels of last week’s excitement. Did Glenn really die? Will Rick start that RV? The fans want answers. Instead, they got this salute to pacifism. Real nice, “Walking Dead.”
Ben Bowman is a RedEye special contributor.
