A flashback to the mysterious cheese maker delves into the
story of how Morgan went from crazy violent to relatively pacifistic, filling
in the time between the great season three episode “Clear” and his arrival at
Alexandria.
Eastman wasn’t a very good cheese maker but he knew what he
was doing with that aikido staff. His story was chilling and the ending was a
sick joke: After taking 47 days to starve to death the man who killed his
family, Eastman goes to turn himself in and finds that the world as he knows it
has ended and now his brutality was just a drop in the bucket. Nobody would
care that much because everybody is numb. I liked how Eastman’s death was off
camera. We’ve seen this routine so often on The
Walking Dead that not seeing death and burial is sometimes more powerful.
I did like how Eastman’s story gave us a look into the past
before the zombie apocalypse started. The show doesn’t seem to do too much of
this lately, I guess because everybody is too busy fighting for their lives to
reminisce. An occasional look into who these people were before can be very
powerful.
The framing sequence with the captured Wolf was a jolt, as
Morgan weighs the practical necessity of killing the man he spared against the “all
life is precious” philosophy he learned with Eastman. In the end, he locks the
door, perhaps so the guy will starve and the problem will take care of itself
through malignant neglect and not action. (If they wanted a sitcom ending to
this, they could have had Carol rush in and shoot the Wolf in the head to a sad
trombone sound effect.)
This was a mostly good episode as a breather after the
intensity of the first three episodes, and we did need to see how Morgan got
more centered so we can understand his actions going forward. However, I
laughed out loud at some of the dialogue, like Morgan growling “I need to clear!”
and saying “Kill me!” I don’t know if it was the acting, writing or directing,
or maybe just that I have an empathy problem, but this sort of thing always
makes me laugh.
Another howler: “The door is open. The door was always open.”
The door, you see, is a symbol.
I felt bad for that poor goat.
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