The Walking Dead Season 9 Midseason Finale Review: ‘Evolution’

(Photo Credit: AMC)

The Walking Dead

Season 9 Midseason Finale

By Garrett Yoshitomi

Stumbling, soulless, meandering – no, I’m not talking about one of the many herds of walkers seen weekly on The Walking Dead, I’m talking about The Walking Dead itself and the state of the series after almost a decade on the air. The Walking Dead arrived with a bang in 2010, establishing itself as a show with an “any character can die” ethos rivaled only by Game of Thrones. While ignoring the pacing issues that plagued even the earliest of seasons would be revisionist history, The Walking Dead always managed to please fans with a combination of suspenseful storytelling and a grounded sense of apocalyptic adventure.

However, in recent seasons, the show’s lost a lot of this mojo, limping from episode to episode with a barely fleshed out plot and clinging to its former ratings glory by killing off characters in increasingly foreseeable and impact-less ways. Enter season nine and new showrunner Angela Kang, and The Walking Dead finds itself soaring close to the heights of its prime. With the help of a six-year time jump, Kang has brought the show back to its roots, giving The Walking Dead the kind of reset it’s so desperately needed. It’s fitting then that the season nine midseason finale is titled, “Evolution.” Although, it doesn’t apply to the walkers as Eugene hypothesized, The Walking Dead is in the midst of its own evolution, reinventing itself on the fly, while building towards new and exciting storylines to come.

(Photo Credit: AMC)

The midseason finale focuses largely on the group’s attempt to find Eugene- a subplot that’s been simmering since episode six, the first full episode after the time jump. It’s been a while since we’ve had a good old-fashioned rescue mission, and the team-up between Daryl, Jesus, and Aaron is a welcome combination of characters we seldom get to see interact. These three get to venture outside of their community’s respective walls (or respective raft tent, in Daryl’s case), returning to the elements that were once very familiar to them as the group recruiters. It’s a lot of fun seeing Daryl dip into his old bag of tracker tricks several times throughout the hour, and it keeps this fan favorite character present, without drawing focus away from the story’s more central characters. Daryl is a great character in this sense. He doesn’t require a ton of screentime on his own, and is able to still contribute to an episode, even when he hangs out around the periphery.

The precision and skill that this group exhibits during their search for Eugene does a great job of passively establishing just how apocalypse-hardened these characters have become. And, that’s one of the great things about a time jump. It allows writers to bake in useful character development, without necessarily requiring said character development to play out in real time. Even the once sniveling Eugene is able to secure himself a well concealed, structurally sound hiding spot, not necessarily out of cowardice, but as a practical means of survival. Several times, Eugene offers the others to leave him behind in order to ensure their safety, which is the kind of deal old Eugene only made once before learning his lesson, when he offered to pilot the decoy RV just moments before the group gets captured by the Saviors in the season six finale.

(Photo Credit: AMC)

The writers have made a concerted effort to show that Eugene is not the same man post-time jump, and even though the crux of this episode rests on his rescue, he demonstrates that he’s no longer the kind of able-bodied dead weight that the heroes get to drag to the finish line. These different skills and tactics that the group portrays are ones that we’ve seen in pieces throughout the series, but they all come together effortlessly in this episode, contributing to the feeling that these characters have truly gone through six years-worth of experiences during the time jump. And while their keystone maneuver to split up ultimately fails (because honestly, who didn’t see that coming?), the way it fails is unexpected, and transitions nicely with this episode’s climax.

As mentioned previously, there was a time in The Walking Dead’s run when no character, save for a few, felt genuinely safe from the deadly dangers of the zombie apocalypse. What’s more is that the ‘when’ and ‘how’ of most characters’ deaths were generally less easy to predict than they are now, contributing to the thrilling sense of suspense we’d get as we’d watch our favorite survivors traverse the unknown. Fast forward several years, and The Walking Dead has dropped all pretenses of surprise, going so far as to construct elaborate marketing plans advertising which character is the next to bite the bullet. Sadly, when the deaths start to become predictable, a lot of the tension gets sucked out of the show, eventually turning what should be an emotionally charged moment into nothing more than a box to be checked.

(Photo Credit: AMC)

In possibly its greatest feat, yet, season nine turns this trend on its head, as it delivers a throwback Walking Dead death scene that catches viewers by total surprise. Usually when someone succumbs to walkers, it’s because they’re either massively overwhelmed or caught off guard by a stray biter. To see someone die in such a unique way is genuinely shocking. The whole setup for this death is really quite simple, but the twist pays off in a major way, and it’s this simplicity that makes the end result feel that much more tragic. This wasn’t some effects-filled battle or a giant explosion on a bridge, the fact that a character can die during something so routine certainly reintroduces the feeling that at least somecharacters can die at any time, even if realistically there will always be people who are off limits. If characters continue to feel vulnerable in more ordinary situations, it will add stakes to this show in a way it hasn’t had in a long time, resulting in genuine levels of tension particularly outside of where we’ve been trained to typically expect characters to die.

This was a very solid midseason finale, which gels well with the overall increase in quality we’ve seen in season nine. Sometimes, The Walking Dead ends on an awkward, forced cliffhanger, leaving us with too many unanswered questions and not enough context. While we do get a cliffhanger-y ending for “Evolution,” I think it hits the right mix of revealing enough information (we get to see Daryl “unmask” a Whisperer), but also leaves us wanting more, as the episode fades out with our heroes surrounded by fog and menacing whispers. The second half of season nine is supposed to pick up roughly where the first half ends. And, if this first half is any indication, we should be in for an entertaining ride as the show enters its next big arc.