Spoiler Alert and Trigger Warning!
Only Eastern values can rescue Western man. That seems to be the takeaway from episode 4 of the 6th season of The Walking Dead: “Here’s Not Here.”
After the strongest opening in the show’s history, and the most consistently high-intensity pocket of episodes as well, TWD pushed pause on the main action of the storyline and drew viewers instead into a deliberately-paced, 90 minute retrospective on how Crazy-Morgan (Lennie James) from Season 3 became Zen-Morgan of Season 6.
Unfortunately, what must have seemed like a brave diversion or even necessary breather in the minds of the show’s producers actually feels like a jarring head fake in application, coming as it does after last week’s explosive double-cliffhanger. It is impossible to watch “Here’s Not Here” without feeling robbed of the urgent answers fans want to the Glenn-is-dead/Glenn-is-not-dead close of “Thank You” (for the record, Steven Yeun’s name was conspicuously missing from the episode’s opening credit’s…) and with Rick surrounded by an endless sea of walkers back at the RV.
But while the episode was poorly placed, it was excellently executed. In fact, “Here’s Not Here” may be the first truly successful purely dramatic character episode since the show’s inception. This is almost entirely due to the terrific performances by both James and guest star John Carroll Lynch, but also due in large part to the capable direction from Stephen Williams, who has the eye to show the natural beauty left in the world and the discipline to let the horrors speak for themselves.
In the episode, we pick up Morgan’s journey after his encounter with Rick in the Season 3 episode “Clear.” In those bygone days, Morgan had lost his son, and seemingly his mind. How does he find it again? And where did he learn his new martial-arts skills? In the woods of Georgia, of course, from a doughy psychiatrist named Eastman (Lynch).
Eastman, in fine Hollywood tradition, reminds us that only a white man who forsakes western values for the pure and primitive creed of some ancient non-white civilization can save a poor non-white man from the evils of the value system that gave us Shakespeare and penicillin.
It’s a tired old trope, and patently absurd on its face, but if you let things like that bother you, you probably don’t watch TV in the first place, so we’ll continue.
So the doughy white psychiatrist teaches the helpless but deep-down-noble-souled black man the ways of Aikido, and that taking a life is always wrong – even in self-defense or the defense of others – before, in true Walking Dead fashion, being himself killed for his trouble.
And that’s why we love The Walking Dead – because it remains brutally cynical while never quite resorting to full nihilism. Because The Walking Dead is honest enough, beneath its many flaws, to tell us that human life matters, even if it doesn’t know why, and that humanity is worth preserving, even though it will probably get you killed if you try. The show can be morally confused, of course. Morgan sparing three Wolves in episode 2 almost got Rick murdered in episode 3 and left him stranded in a busted RV with an impossibly large herd of walkers descending on him. But then the zombie apocalypse is morally confusing stuff. That the show continues to search for morality beneath the collapse of society is both the great joy and the great frustration of watching it.
While the premise may be flawed, “Here’s Not Here” was beautifully acted by both James and Lynch and was one of the most beautifully directed episodes to date. It certainly added depth to the Morgan character without robbing him of his mysterious textures. On the whole, if it had come at a better time in the season, it might well be considered one of the top episodes in the show’s history. It deserved better than to fall where it did. As is, it feels like a disappointment, though if Glenn really is alive under that dumpster (and the carcass of what’s-his-name), the real disappointment may still be ahead of us in the form of a show jumping the shark…