Despite being a giant fan of The Walking Dead, I'm continually finding it difficult to enjoy this series. This whole episode was very irritating in how it failed to accomplish anything from start to finish. Ultimately it was continuing on from episode 2 with the story of trying to bring everyone together. Just like the previous one, this was a really slow episode, I think the writers definitely have an issue with pacing. They fully brought in the Salazar family in this episode, who really didn't add anything. They're just another family to add to the already crowded canvas of family drama and upset, which was never a reason I wanted to watch this. Daniel Salazar's role in the show is basically just exposition (e.g. the episode's final words: "It's too late" or "good people are the first to die"), as the writers have no time to deal with the ongoing story of the out-breaking zombie apocalypse due to the focus on family drama, so his role is to occasionally drop a line to make sure the audience has a vague idea of what's going on, without the writers bothering to show us. Right now I have no idea if the Salazar family are going to stay, but I wouldn't care if they suddenly get eaten by a pack of zombies. Although I did enjoy watching Daniel Salazar questioning Travis' leadership, but that was more because of the degree of annoyance Travis possesses rather than me actually liking Daniel Salazar. Aside from Travis still showing no signs of character development or good acting, what really stuck out in this episode was the way he seemed to be holding back both the characters and the show. All of the decisions he made was utterly ridiculous, and I feel the show would be much more cohesive if he were to suddenly fall off a cliff or something.
Just to make the show less interesting Travis happens to be against the use of guns, which at this point was the last thing I wanted to hear. However if you found the lack of gore irritating in the previous episodes, at least I can say there was a fairly satisfying scene of Daniel Salazar taking a shotgun and blowing off a zombies head, which was fully shown and very gory. Asides from this it was another action-less episode, which was also slowed down by the lack of any other such event. When finally the families did reconnect they just stayed in their home longer, and when finally they left (42 minutes into the 48 minute episode), they came back less than three minutes later. It was genuinely ridiculous. And to top it off they barely gave a reason. I get that they wanted to help their neighbour, but once they had done this and answered all of the soldiers' questions why didn't they leave again? It's clear the show runners want them to stick around some more, but they could at least create a valid reason for making us sit through the boredom of watching them sit in their home for an entire episode (and it looks like for the next one too). We literally just watched them play Monopoly and...talk. And listening to the dialogue wasn't fun either, as this episode once again proves that the general dialogue needs a lot of work (especially when they try humour...).
This episode seems like the perfect opportunity for character development, as some really good character moments would make up for any lack of plot. Ultimately that's what happened in the majority of the second half of season 4 of The Walking Dead, where there were many episodes with just two or three characters not really doing much but developing their characters; and that was really entertaining to watch, as the show made use of the situation of the characters, instead of have them compete in a competition of who can be more boring, as we saw here. I have to say it wasn't all boredom though, as there was a great moment when an unaware husband returned to his zombie wife, who was then suddenly shot in front of us. This scene really had me glued to the screen, and was actually quite tense. If there were more scenes like this I would probably be writing a very positive review for this episode, but even by the end, there wasn't much to like here.
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