In The Walking Dead’s Season 6 premiere, Rick comes up with a pla…WHOA! WE GOTTA DO IT NOW. DAMN STRAIGHT! WE DO IT LIVE!
By Matt Fowler
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow…
“First Time Again” picked things up a few days removed from the Season 5 finale, with some flashbacks (shown in black and white, presumedly for style and because they were so frequent) in place to fill in some of the minor gaps in between. Most of which dealt with Rick and Morgan reacclimating themselves to one another. Well, to be fair, it was mostly Morgan meeting this new, more intense version of Rick while, occasionally, laying in a few words of soft disapproval.
We want to hear it.
The trailer for Season 6 made it look like Morgan and Rick would clash in a big way. If so, then that’s still to come because it didn’t happen here. Because while Morgan may have needed to adjust a bit in order to absorb the new hard-nose man Rick’s become, it’s not like Morgan himself hasn’t seen tragedy and/or had to do extremely awful things to get by. Hell, the guy even went mad. So I’m glad Rick didn’t get an earful of hypocritical preach-ery. We get enough of that from Gabriel.
We want to hear it.
No, the (easily resolved) conflict here came from Ethan Embry’s Carter, who was part of a search team that had been away for the few weeks that Rick and his crew had been there. A slight cheat, to be honest, considering how no one spoke about Carter, Heath, Scott, or Annie at all during the back third of Season 5, but acceptable in the respect that you could buy that there was another “away team.” Plus, they’re all from the comics. Even Carter, though he was only mentioned as someone who died back while the town walls were being built.
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Anyhow, Carter was brought in (and then quickly dispatched) to help sort of help the series bring us up to speed on the basic themes of the Ricktatorship – which was now in full bloom. Whether or not you needed a refresher on the “strong vs. weak” aspects of the show at this point is you’re call. Most of it was a retread.
Morgan, meanwhile, helped Rick reclaim a touch of his humanity without overdoing it as the “new guy.” Morgan joining the Alexandria regime meant that Rick got to Rick-splain a bunch of stuff to his old friend. About how sheltered and unprepared everyone in town was and – perhaps most importantly – how some people were just going to “die no matter what.” As in, it was just a matter of time for Carter, even if he fell in line with Rick’s orders (which he eventually did). He’d just mess up at some point and that would be it.
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And that’s what happened. He totally had half of his face bit off and then Rick had to put him out of his misery. Morgan and Michonne paused a bit over this move, but there were no serious objections. They both know what needed to happen. I think they just wished it didn’t come so easily to Rick as both of them remembered him being a much different man at one point.
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Whatever. I’m totally burying the lede here. THERE WERE SO MANY ZOMBIES! Like, so so many. Rick and Morgan inadvertently discovered a massive quarry filled with trapped walkers and recognized it as one of the main reasons Alexandria, while tucked away, had dealt with such a paltry amount undead threats over the years. Rick saw it as a call to action, and proving that there’s no “die” in “team,” he got everyone on board and rigged up an elaborate re-routing system for this sea of skin-bags. And guess what? The zombie parade worked. In spite of all the arguments against Rick’s style of leadership, this was an effective plan. And only Rick’s badass group could have “done it live” like they had to when that one truck fell down into the pit and released Walkerpalooza.
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And they’d have all been in the clear had it not been for some a***hole sounding an alarm back in town. Who was it? Ron? I bet it was goddamn Ron. Ron. Carl. That’s what you get for giving young boys 80-year-old man names.
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It could also be Gabriel. Or Enid. Or Deanna, who could just be claiming to be on Rick’s side. Either way, the town’s seems to be right f***ed. Which made for a great ending to this episode, though it seemed to mostly set us up for a ton of chaos and carnage next week. This was a solid premiere. A bit repetitive given all we’ve already been through pertaining to Rick and those who would object to Rick, but it was still good. Not nearly as intense as the Season 5 premiere and the Terminus breakout though. The sheer amount of zombies certainly helped it. It’s was if the show unintentionally compensated for the meager amount of walkers on Fear the Walking Dead, which just ended last week.
We want to hear it.
There were smaller moments that worked here too. Morgan assuming Carol was an ex-cop because of how she looked ready to handle things at the drop of a hat. Carl possibly having a girlfriend now (go to hell, Ron!). Jessie not falling into Rick’s arms and actually having huge reservations about him now. Rick not killing Carter, despite Carter’s seditious intentions (though we’d come to know how Rick felt about Carter’s survival chances overall). Glenn not wanting to give Nicholas a chance at doing anything (and who could blame him?). Likewise, Rick shutting down Gabriel. Daryl not wanting to give up on finding new members. And Morgan explaining that someone taught him to use his staff after the world collapsed (Jesus?).
Oh, and the choice to go black and white with the flashbacks brought back memories of when AMC aired the full pilot episode that way. And, of course, the comics.
Though it may have repeated some of Season 5’s final act conflict by giving Rick a mini-foe in Carter, “First Time Again” was a great kick off for Season 6. Only Rick could be genius/insane enough to attempt to wrangle a sea of walkers the way he did and the show’s going to solid lengths depicting him as a one-of-a-kind leader. Despite having lost most of his altruism along the way.
