“The Distance” was great
episode where we got to see the depths of Rick’s paranoia and someone, finally,
get in his face and question his authority which instantly brought an end to
the “Ricktatorship.”
While Rick officially brought
an end his dictatorial reign at the back end of season three and part of season
four, Rick still has made just about every major call since then without little
or no push back. As per usual, not all his decisions we’re great including the
dangerous 100 mile hike to Washington. But in “The Distance”, Michonne makes herself heard and makes Rick see
sense.
While we’ve seen Michonne grow
leaps and bounds from when we first saw her and in this week’s episode we see
her browbeat Rick into giving new character Aaron a chance. However, for all
that we’ve seen in the last five seasons of The Walking Dead we can’t fault
Rick from looking a gift horse in the mouth.
Just about every time the group
has placed trust in strangers they’ve paid the price from the Governor to the
Terminus residents and now a polite, well dressed and clean shaven man comes along
promising salvation is sure to cause suspicion. Rick paranoia pops up front and
center the moment Maggie and Sasha introduce Aaron to the group as Rick quizzes
him wearing his “I’m going to kill you and wear your face” look. Despite the
understandable skepticism, hostility and caution among Rick and most of the
group, Aaron manages to keep his composure selling his community to a tough
crowd.
From the first few minutes we
can tell that Aaron has perfected his pitch and is a skill salesman but trust
is hard enough to establish in the world we live in but so just imagine how
much harder it is to do in a zombie apocalypse where the only humans left are
more dangerous than the flesh eating monsters aimlessly walking around looking
for lunch. This point is punctuated as Rick gets sick of his well-polished
sales patter and nails him with a right
cross that put Aaron out cold.
And with that begun the episode
long clash between Rick and Michonne as she gets in Rick’s face for attacking
Aaron but Rick is too busy preparing for an ambush from Aaron’s group. Aaron
come back from right cross induced stupor and still manages to keep his cool despite
being decked and interrogated by a dead eyed Rick. In this scene Aaron makes a
great point about trust when he questions Rick skeptical mindset about as points
out to Rick that no matter how many of his people he says is out there, Rick
won’t believe him anyway because he’s skeptical from the outset.
However his well-reasoned and
argued point goes way over Rick’s head as he continues to wear his paranoia on
his sleeve. You can’t really blame him as for all that he’s lost since the
zombie apocalypse began; he still has the most to lose out of the group which
makes the safety and well-being of Karl and Judith his number one priority.
So for all the well-reasoned
and argued points Aaron can come up with under serious interrogation from Rick
and the group’s more skeptical members, he’s not making any hay on getting them
to join his community. However Aaron does kind of shoot himself in the foot
when making a point about what would happen if he had foul intentions by
describing how he would ambush a group. This was a whopper of a mistake given
all Rick and the group has shown him is hostility and suspicion. However I don’t
really think this the fault of the show’s new character but of the writers of
TWD looking for ways to introduce tension where it doesn’t exists.
The writers are well aware that
TWD suffers from a serious lack of dramatic tension in light of the show having
no real antagonist with The Governor gone and the Walker now a palpable but ultimately
manageable threat. So far Aaron has maintained his polite demeanor and has
given the group no reason to trust him but with the writers looking to
introduce tension where there isn’t reveals the writers eagerness to fix a
problem they can’t fix anytime soon.
After Aaron makes another
attempt to get the group to trust him by revealing that another member of his
community is up the road with a camper, Rick and Michonne clash again as Rick
thinks it’s a trick but Michonne, notably desperate for sanctuary in the second
half of this season, is willing to give Aaron the benefit of the doubt as is
Maggie.
Rick, not willing to take the
risk, retorts that Michonne’s plan to check Aaron’s claims out are dangerous
but Michonne rightly points out that living hand to mouth in a barn in the
middle of nowhere isn’t exactly safe either. Then what happens next is pretty
much one of the highlights of the episode as Michonne rallies the group into
following her plan and sternly insists that Rick plays ball. We’ve seen Rick for
the most part get his way without much resistance right or wrong but in “The
Distance”, Rick is forced to follow the lead of one of the group members.
This a good development as the “what
Rick says goes” regime the group has pretty much cosigned from the outset
clearly needs tweaking. Most of the group has been fine with merely surviving
but Michonne has been pushing for a place to settle and realizes that it may
take a risk like trusting a stranger to get it no matter how much what they
have to say or offer is hard to believe due to the group’s bad experiences with
other groups willing to take them in.
The group then splits in two
with some of group following Michonne while other hanging back looking out for
threats. Michonne’s plan was the smart play but leaving Rick with Aaron wasn't due to his paranoia clearly getting the best of him. We find that out pretty
quickly as Rick threatens to put a knife in the base Aaron’s skull if Michonne and co weren’t back in an hour.
In between the couple of scenes
where we see that Aaron’s story checked out, we see the depths of Rick’s
Paranoia after Aaron offers Rick apple sauce to feed Judith to stop her crying
because she might attract walkers. Rick then makes Aaron taste the apple sauce
before he gives it to Judith which is understandable but telling given the fact
that if Aaron did poison the apple sauce, it would be an automatic death sentence
for him given his job means he has to encounter groups with every reason to
distrust him.
When Michonne, Maggie, Glenn,
Rosita and Abraham return to the barn with a bevy of canned food, Michonne
once again campaigns for the group to leave the barn, most of the group is
onboard given Aaron story checked out and even Daryl, who’s been a Rick
loyalist for the longest, joins Michonne in her insistence to leave the barn
and join Aaron’s community.
Seeing that Michonne has pretty
much has the whole group on her side, Rick reluctantly agrees. Once again Ricks
mistrust puts him and others in danger as Aaron tells him and the group which road
to take back his group but thanks his paranoia, Rick decided to split group with
him, Michonne, Glen and Aaron take another route and the rest of the clan take
the route Aaron suggested.
The plan pretty much went Pete
Tong for Rick, Michonne, Aaron and Glen as Aaron was correct when he suggested
that Rick’s plan to go down a route his group hadn’t cleared of walkers was a
bad idea as Glen mows down a herd of walkers. The group get out of the car when
Aaron gets out of the car after seeing a
flare light the sky. If the plan hadn’t already gone awry it’s about worse as
the group end up having to shoot and chop their through a herd that nearly gets
them killed before they make it back on to the main road and walk the rest of
the trip.
As the group meet up again we
follow Aaron into as he meets up with his partner Eric and find out Maggie and
Glenn aren’t the only hope for relationships in the zombie apocalypse. The few
seconds we spent with Aaron and Eric revealed a relationship that’s tender and
loving which makes one of the bleakest and cynical shows on television today a
more bearable watch considering the emotionally draining episodes over the last
two weeks.
In the next scene we see that
Aaron has some steel to go with his politeness as he stands up to Rick when
tries to tell him where to sleep. This scene was particularly telling because
Aaron was prepared to take on Rick before Glenn stepped in to talk sense into
him. His steel is even more impressive as while he must have figured out by now
that while Rick is good man willing to do what it takes to protect the ones he
loves, he is also a stone cold killer with a serious case of paranoia made worse
by the burden of leadership.
The real highlight of the whole
episode was in the last three minutes of “The Distance” as get a close up on
Rick’s eyes and in them we see a man looking for hope while waiting for other
shoe to drop until the hears the sound of children playing which allows him
relax as we see the life rush back into his dead green eyes. For all faults the
show has, the performances from its cast are almost always on point with Andrew
Lincoln acting his boots off in this episode.
Ross Marquand, who plays Aaron,
was also pretty good in his first full episode as we, through his performance,
learned much about his character. Now that Rick and co are now part of another group,
we get to see how they deal with a group of real human beings that don’t want
to kill them and keep their walker remains or eat them alive.
The show has needed an instance
where the group joins a community where they’re not in control and now we get
to see whether they can really play nice with others or has the being out in
the world hardened them beyond repair.
We may get some answers on that
front next week.
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