The Walking Dead Review: Inmates

Editor’s note: this review will contain some spoilers. I will try to keep them to a minimum, but they’re be there nonetheless. You’ve been warned.

After last week’s extremely focused episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead, we checked in with pretty much all the other survivors from the prison, and there aren’t many left. I was kind of dreading it, I kind of figured this episode was coming, especially on the heals of such a character driven episode like we got last week. The problem here is that the show has to manage a bunch of divergent story lines, many of which cover the same events from different perspective, and many of which have to be told in conflicting timelines. I love The Walking Dead, but strong writing has never really been the show’s driving force.

And that’s why I was so pleasantly surprised by “Inmates”. The deck was stacked against The Walking Dead‘s core strengths, and they pull off a excellent episode that succinctly caught us up with everyone without seeming rote or boring.

We start off with Daryl and Beth, as narrated by outdated entries from Beth’s diary. The opening was poignant and minimal, and turns into a argument about having faith and hope in the midst of horrific circumstances.

Now I’ve never really cared one way or another for Beth. She always seemed like a glorified extra to me, but her scenes in this episode really worked for me, not the least because of the actress herself. The young woman playing Beth has such huge, expressive eyes, it’s very easy to buy into her wonderment, naivety, and horror.

Next, we jumped to Tyreese, who fell in with the two young girls and baby Judith. This section worked well, but it also felt kind of cheap to me. Let me explain. Because Tyreese’s story jumped back in time and intertwined with Daryl and Beth, the show immediately set us up to think that we were watching them coming to doom, and then kept teasing us with it the whole way. It’s a sort of ready-made tension that the writers really didn’t have to work very hard for, and that I hope the show doesn’t re-use too often.

That said, the part with the girls trying to keep Judith quiet, and almost suffocating her in the process. It was sickening to watch, but just the sort of horrifying thing that could happen in the midst of panic. We also reunite with Carol, which should be interesting considering what Tyreese doesn’t know about her.

After that we got to one half of The Walking Dead‘s core love story: Maggie, who is drags along a Sasha and Bob in her quest to find Glenn, who she assumes is on the prison bus (he isn’t). This plays out more or less as expected, with the bus full of zombies and Maggie having to ensure that Glenn isn’t one of them. We get some nice back and forth between Sasha and Bob about the nature of hope, which nicely builds on Beth’s journal entries from earlier in the episode. I wish this had been built out a little more, but perhaps it’ll become a theme for the second half of the season, which could be cool.

Finally we get to Glenn, who was left behind at the prison. He scrounges up some supplies and teams up with Tara, who is deeply remorseful for her role in the Governor’s attack on the prison. They take on a group of zeds, but Glenn is all but overcome thanks to his weakness following the viral outbreak that went through the prison just prior to the attack.

Oh, and then we get a huge surprise in the final shot, which dovetails back into the comic’s story. That should be an interesting development.

All in all, it was a solid effort at putting all the pieces on the chessboard for the remainder of the season. I like how we’ve boiled down the cast to only a small number of survivors, and it’s fascinating to see how the toll of stress and loss has changed them all. The Walking Dead has come a long way since ‘Vatos” and getting stuck on Hershell’s farm.

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