This was the episode in which - for me at least - the timeline got so distorted that I no longer knew where I was at all. While past and present storylines indeed continued to converge, it eventually transpired that a further-in-the-past storyline was also added, and that was the tipping point to get me lost. By the way, I bought the DVDs claiming that the product was "in colour", so do I get my money back for this episode, in which I almost forgot what watching in colour means?
The faint hope held out by "No One's Gone" is that we might now have reached the moment where the story can go forward - straight, as it were - since the technique applied in the first 8 instalments gradually came to get up my nose, big time.
And, as consequence of that, I'm remarkably unmoved by the apparently heroic (apparent?) loss of a character we've been with since the outset. Something's wrong if the crescendo moment of the mid-season finale - which bumps off the series's greatest hero - leaves a loyal viewer almost cold.
Part of that is the "tell the story" technique, which - while harking back to humanity's earliest history, it's true - makes the death of Madison look more like a legend than anything we might get moved by.
Was that wise?
And while the character of Laura-Naomi-June was also a bit of annoyance, the character of John Dorie was not, yet the circumstances conspire to leave him basically inactive and out of it for two whole episodes - what kind of waste is that? Even the great Victor was a bit neutered in the context of "No One's Gone", while Alicia simply looks like she's gone gaga. After all, half of the story in this one is about good people fighting good people, with Alicia vs Al at the centre of that. Zombies and bad guys are no longer enough, so now the heroes shoot at each other, albeit in a slightly half-hearted, chatty kind of way?
The only character giving a reasonably good account of him/herself in this one is Morgan, and he's the new boy...
How did we possibly get to that?
The faint hope held out by "No One's Gone" is that we might now have reached the moment where the story can go forward - straight, as it were - since the technique applied in the first 8 instalments gradually came to get up my nose, big time.
And, as consequence of that, I'm remarkably unmoved by the apparently heroic (apparent?) loss of a character we've been with since the outset. Something's wrong if the crescendo moment of the mid-season finale - which bumps off the series's greatest hero - leaves a loyal viewer almost cold.
Part of that is the "tell the story" technique, which - while harking back to humanity's earliest history, it's true - makes the death of Madison look more like a legend than anything we might get moved by.
Was that wise?
And while the character of Laura-Naomi-June was also a bit of annoyance, the character of John Dorie was not, yet the circumstances conspire to leave him basically inactive and out of it for two whole episodes - what kind of waste is that? Even the great Victor was a bit neutered in the context of "No One's Gone", while Alicia simply looks like she's gone gaga. After all, half of the story in this one is about good people fighting good people, with Alicia vs Al at the centre of that. Zombies and bad guys are no longer enough, so now the heroes shoot at each other, albeit in a slightly half-hearted, chatty kind of way?
The only character giving a reasonably good account of him/herself in this one is Morgan, and he's the new boy...
How did we possibly get to that?