THE WALKING DEAD Seeing Things Clearly

In the midst of a season that has ranged from worst to you-ain't-seen-nothin'-worst, THE WALKING DEAD pulled off something extraordinary tonight: an episode that was good and almost great. "Clear" doesn't have to clear any real hurdles to rightfully claim the crown of best TWD ep of this season to date ("Seed" was the only other installment that wasn't outright awful). Even burdened by many of TWD's chronic problems, it was clearly light-years ahead of anything we've gotten since the series' earliest days.

In the larger context of the series, it's essentially a filler ep, a side-story that once again comes up with a way to burn through another hour of the season without doing anything to advance the season's central plot. As the season's central plot really sucks, that's also the good news.

When Rick and co. took the prison earlier in the season, it was established that there was an armory somewhere near its grounds. The raid on it apparently happened off camera--the characters suddenly began carrying fully automatic weapons, set to full auto. That they've been using the weapons in this way implies a large stockpile of ammo and if such a stockpile exists, they've barely touched it. It could, of course, also just imply that they're idiots and one could cite this entire season and last to make that case. The stockpile is the charitable choice. I'm feeling charitable tonight. That's what a pretty good TWD ep can do.[*] Last week, in an effort to amp up the desperation of the situation at the prison, the writers began playing up the idea that our heroes were nearly out of ammo. That led, this week, to a mission to get more of it.[1]

Rick, Michonne, and Carl, in this search for guns and ammo, return to the town where Rick had worked and lived before the zombie outbreak. Entering the town police station, Rick is terribly upset to see that someone has gotten there ahead of them and has cleaned out the armory cage. His memory is apparently as short as that of the writers--Rick himself cleaned out that armory back in the pilot episode of the series.[2] So the entire story that follows is, as usual with TWD, built on an idiotic contrivance to get the characters to this particular town but given the ep's merits, this is, in the balance, a relatively minor gripe. The reason it's that town is because the centerpiece of the story is the return of Morgan, the fellow who, way back in the TWD pilot, found Rick when he was fresh out of his coma and wandering through a world gone dead.

Morgan has, unfortunately, gone a little squirrely since Rick saw him last. He fires on our heroes and has to be shot. Carl does the honors with his trusty Beretta but though Morgan is wearing heavy body-armor, which, in the real world, renders a Beretta's wimpy 9mm. little more than an annoyance, TWD's writers ludicrously render Morgan completely unconscious for an extended period, artificially dragging out their underplotted tale, as is their custom.

There's filler here. All tolled, "Clear" only features about half an episode worth of plot (and none of that is relevant to the season's overall story). This compares quite favorably to recent eps though--the previous three didn't, cumulatively, contain even that much--and the half-ep-buried-in-the-ep this week is pretty good, a tragic and atmospheric spotlight on this unforgiving world of the dead and on what the living have lost.[3] Other than the flaws already outlined, it's fairly well-told. There's some surprisingly good dialogue and character interaction. Michonne is finally made to look relatively human rather than the empty Angry Black Woman caricature she's been since she was first introduced. Our heroes blow past a traveler on the highway as the ep opens, never slowing down as he runs behind them and begs them to stop. His ultimate fate and their reaction to it displays a level of quality storytelling almost entirely absent from TWD. Warts and all, a lot of "Clear" provides some little hint of the caliber of tale it could offer every week in competent hands and reminds the viewer of the series' tragically squandered potential. Unfortunately, it's just a detour, and next week, things will probably just go back to being TWD.

--j.

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[*] UPDATE (5 March, 2013) - "MaxJets," a reader on the IMDb message board, has pointed out that, in "The Killer Within," the 4th episode of this season, a line of dialogue establishes that Rick and co. had found the prison armory cleaned out. Thanks for the correction, Max, and fill in this blank __________ with all jokes about my self-satisfied charitability.

[1] Last week, as an excuse to have the characters stand around the prison and yet again do nothing, the writers included a lot of paranoia about GINO posting snipers outside or blocking the roads from the prison; this week, no such concern.

[2] Two eps later, he explained "I cleaned out the cage back at the station before I left."

[3] That it's about anything at all would, alone, probably make it a cut above TWD's usual soap opera tripe.