Daryl trusts the wrong people in a decent but forgettable “The Walking Dead.”
Review: 2.5 out of 4 stars
8 p.m. Sunday, AMC
“The Walking Dead” excels at season premieres and finales, packing them with big action sequences and important character moments. The mid-season episodes can be a drag, though. The showrunners seem to want to keep all the big surprises for the bookends. Given that pattern, “Always Accountable” is a decent, though unremarkable mid-season entry.
Episode recap:
After Rick and company ran off to help the survivors back in Alexandria, Daryl, Sasha and Abraham were left to herd the zombies away from the settlement. As they zip down the highway, they’re suddenly ambushed by an unknown group of men who open fire on the convoy. Daryl darts off into the woods. Sasha and Abraham return fire, killing the would-be assassins.
Daryl is ambushed by a man and two women who tie him up and hold him hostage. It’s unclear who they are, though they say they ran away from another settlement because they were tired of having to follow their rules. The kidnapper trio explains that they set fire to the forest to kill the zombies and it definitely seems to have worked. The burned-out forest is filled with torched corpses.
The three kidnappers take Daryl to a gas company in search of someone named Patty. While there, a kidnapper named Tina suddenly collapses. Daryl grabs the bag containing his crossbow and makes a run for it. Having made his getaway, Daryl opens the bag to see a cooler containing Tina’s insulin. Daryl wouldn’t leave a diabetic to die, so he makes his way back to his captors and hands over the medicine.
The kidnappers scurry in fear when members of their old group arrive in search of them. Daryl helps them escape by luring one of the searchers into the path of a zombie. When that guy gets bit, the searchers head home.
Daryl appears to convince the kidnappers that he’s a good guy and it looks like he’s about to bring them back to Alexandria. Then Tina is eaten by the zombies of two people she used to babysit. How’s that for gratitude?
Daryl walks back to where he stashed his motorcycle and the two remaining kidnappers turn on him once again, stealing the bike and Daryl’s beloved crossbow.
While all this is going down, Sasha and Abraham are hiding out in a town, waiting for Daryl to find them. Abraham seems to have something of a death wish, intending to mow down every zombie he sees instead of playing it safe. Sasha went through a similar phase after her boyfriend, Bob, died last season. She talks Abraham down a little, sharing how she managed to find peace in all the chaos. This conversation takes place while a zombie is trapped behind a locked glass door in the same room. Nifty metaphor for keeping your demons at bay.
Abraham goes on a supply run and finds an impaled zombie soldier with a rocket launcher on his back. Abe wants the hardware, so he puts his life in danger, crawling within easy biting distance of the soldier-zombie. They scream at each other for a moment until Abraham realizes you can’t win a screaming contest with an undead monster. Shortly after this epiphany, the zombie wiggles free from its impalement, falling to its death and leaving the rocket launcher behind. Abe celebrates with a box of cigars he discovered.
Daryl discovers a gasoline truck in the woods and drives it back to the town, picking up Abraham and Sasha and presumably heading back to Alexandria. Along the way, they hear a voice on their walkie talkies asking for help. After Daryl’s latest Good Samaritan adventure, he might be less inclined to lend a hand.
Episode analysis:
This episode gets points for conveying what must be a regular reality for survivors in a post-apocalyptic world. You’re bound to run into situations where you’re caught between two randomly feuding factions. You’re bound to trust people you shouldn’t. You’re bound to lose hope and go a little crazy from time to time. Daryl was thoroughly Daryl in this episode. His time scouting for new recruits with Aaron seems to have softened him. Abraham’s moments of self-destruction seemed real.
Structurally, the episode left something to be desired. The kidnappers never seemed completely believable as potential good guys, so their double-cross wasn’t much of a surprise. You’d think Tina the diabetic would have died long ago. Insulin expires one year after purchase and we’re several years into the apocalypse at this point. The unidentified bad guys who came to capture the kidnappers didn’t seem all that threatening. As soon as one henchman lost his arm to a zombie attack, they packed up and went home.
Still, this episode was an upgrade from the previous lifeless Alexandria soap opera and Morgan’s 90-minute backstory. As throw-away midseason episodes go, it was fairly forgettable. I’m sure we’ll see the kidnappers, Daryl’s crossbow, his motorcycle and this mysterious Patty down the road. The episode wasted too much time on all of this for it not to matter eventually.
Once again, there was still no update on Glenn. Expect him to make an appearance in the mid-season finale. It’s unlikely anything truly eventful will happen between now and then. Such is the nature of this ratings beast.
Ben Bowman is a RedEye special contributor.
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