Tuesday, November 17, 2015

The Walking Dead S6 E6: Always Accountable


Darryl just does not have good luck making friends in the woods. First he falls in with those homicidal bikers and now he meets a bunch of weirdoes who steal his crossbow. This is what Darryl gets after being a decent person and bringing back their insulin? These three people don’t know how lucky they are to have met an old softie like Darryl: Carol would have poured out their insulin on the ground before shooting them in the head.

“Sorry,” the one guy says after taking Darryl’s crossbow. “You will be,” Darryl snarls. I believe it. You took the man’s crossbow.

I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on with the clash of the two groups and the dispute over what the three people had earned but I like when the show just gives us an elliptical idea of what’s happening and makes us fill in the blanks.

The ashen forest was creepy. There didn’t even need to be a backstory to that; it was effective on its own. There were also some very effectively horrific zombie predicaments, like the two people lying in plastic in that ruined house and what looked like a skeletal child wearing a helmet (please never show that again). I like when the show gives us just enough information to be horrified by the person’s death, like when they found a zombie tied up in a trunk and we had to wonder if someone left the person alive in there and then the person starved to death and zombified. That suggestion can be powerful sometimes.

Also effective: that insurance agent locked in a room. It looked like he knew he was going to die and held out to the end. What he wrote on the whiteboard, something like “Proud to have added value, I pray for the world, keep going, stay cheerful,” was darkly comic. This guy died at his desk and expressed his final words in corporate-speak.

If there was a theme to “Always Accountable,” it was what you earn and what you steal. The trio earns insulin and then steals weapons and a bike. Darryl loses his crossbow and motorcycle but finds an oil tanker. Abraham finds some rocket launchers. I like both Sasha and Abraham so I am liking the possibility of a love interest there. I also like Sasha’s incisive point about Abraham having to keep scrambling and tormenting himself to avoid having to think about the future.

And then that voice on the radio: “Help.” Glenn, is that you?

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