‘The Walking Dead’ Episode 6.12 “Not Tomorrow Yet” (9 out of 10) Created by Frank Darabont; Starring Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus, Steven Yeun, Danai Gurira, Chandler Riggs, Lennie James, Lauren Cohan; Sundays on AMC.
After the events of last week’s episode, I thought we’d at least get one episode’s worth of planning out how to take the fight to Negan, but things escalated a mite quicker than that—not that I’m complaining. Spoilers ahead!
Love is An Acorn Beet Cookie
Cookies have come to represent many things on TWD. Tonight, the opening scene depicted Carol (Melissa McBride) preparing and delivering cookies to her neighbors. Set to the bouncy, alt-country tune “Weeds or Wild Flowers” by Parsonsfield, it’s got an almost sitcom feel to it. It’s interesting to have this scene center on Carol—the scene conceals the true nature of TWD in the same way that those flowery blouses and pink sweaters conceal hers.
It sets up two interactions that add some new wrinkles to Carol’s character. The first is with Morgan (Lennie James), revealing that Carol has decided to keep their little snafu with the Wolf quiet. We see that the two of them may have buried their ideological hatchet, but there’s still some ice between them. The second, and more adorable (but still badass) takes place with Tobin (Jason Douglas). The two of them have apparently been stoking a bit of a romance, eventually sharing a kiss before the episode’s main event. The reason it was badass was because Tobin has Carol figured out. She’s the type of woman who can bake cookies and slit throats because she’s a mother, and only mothers have the capacity to love and protect with such ferocity. Beautiful stuff, really.
On the flipside of the relationship coin, Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) called it quits with Rosita (Christian Serratos) with a particularly harsh choice of words—“When I first met you, I thought you were the last woman on Earth. You’re not.” This brought some of the events from last week’s episode back into focus for me, though it’s tough not to feel bad for Rosita. Even Eugene (Josh McDermitt) and his “Virginia is for Lovers” t-shirt couldn’t lighten the mood for the poor girl. However, it does raise some interesting speculation as to whether or not Rosita and Eugene will hook up like they do in the comics.
Where’s Negan?
The bulk of this episode is dedicated to some pretty spectacular gunfights, all perpetrated towards Negan’s crew. The planning session was a little bit short—not a great idea to plan an assault based on two bad sketches and three zombie heads made up to look like Gregory (Xander Berkeley). Regardless, the plan goes pretty well right up until the episode’s conclusion. Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and his conflict resolution team rescue the Hilltop dude and handily mop up every last one of the onsite Saviors. It’s one of the more action-packed set of scenes that we’ve seen so far. I’ve gotten so used to humans vs. zombies that it’s thrilling to see a gunfight in such close quarters. Overall, it’s a clean operation—except for the part when Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Carol getting captured. That’s not great.
I’ve become a little bit obsessed with Glenn (Steven Yeun) and his potential fate. There was a moment tonight that caused me to move Glenn’s doomsday clock a little closer to midnight—let me elaborate. It’s a well-known fact that Glenn has yet to kill a non-zombie humanoid. It’s pretty impressive, and I love how he’s become this shining example of how one can take the high road in the zombie apocalypse and still be a badass. However, tonight, our Glenn broke his streak by stabbing two Saviors in the eye with a knife and then gunning down a whole bunch more later on. By the end of this episode, Glenn is a Savior-killing machine. Side note: there was something heroic but melancholy about how Glenn stepped in to avoid Heath (Corey Hawkins) from getting blood on his hands. Anyway, there are all kinds of things wrong with this. First and foremost, is that Glenn has broken a pretty admirable nonviolent streak (Morgan would be proud), and he’s clearly messed up over it. On a metaphorical level, this foray into the dark side could be considered karmic grounds for arbitrary violence to come and whack him in the face with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. I could be wrong, but every episode is making Glenn’s horrifying death seem more and more inevitable.
Verdict
Fantastic episode. Watching Rick and his team comb through that compound and destroy a bunch of Saviors was great TV. I know that there’s some scuttlebutt about how Rick should have done some more investigation regarding the Saviors, but that makes no sense to me. After Daryl, Abraham and Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green) made the judgement call to blow up Negan’s men with a rocket launcher, I figure Rick had enough info to peg them as psychos. I also thought that Morgan’s scenes were a little forced—we get that the dude doesn’t like killing (although, he seemed to be working pretty hard on something deadly at the end there), but given the gravity of this situation, one would think that he’d be a bit better at enunciating his point of view. I blame shoddy writing for that, not Lennie James, who can do no wrong in my book. Each episode is building nicely to what promises to be an epic conclusion—let’s just keep our fingers crossed for poor, possibly doomed Glenn.