So the episode starts with Rick cutting off his left hand and we're supposed to accept it's because he misses Michonne. I suppose the writers decided to do this to finally get their Rick to match the comic Rick. But a couple of questions come to mind.
First of all, you don't show your protagonist cutting off their hand in the beginning, even if it's a well-known character like Rick Grimes, or even if you do, you go back and show how he got to this point. We never get that in this episode. They only show how he got to the glass to the throat scene, which doesn't really work either. When a show or a movie does this, they at least show a flashback or a flashback montage of that character throughout the years and how he gradually reached this level that he would do such a thing.
The problem here is that they do none of that. Everything we see is from after the "5 Years Later" period and not before it. And we're supposed to think that Rick Grimes would do this?
The question that comes to mind is would the Rick we've known from The Walking Dead do this after all the things he's been through? He survived far worse things, he even survived a cannibalistic slaughterhouse. And now his whole plan of escaping this supposedly advanced military force is cutting off his hand and just running? That's it? He lost his hand to a two-sentence plan of "1 Cut hand off. 2 Run away."? Why does Scott M. Gimple always find the stupidest and the lamest ways for a character to lose their lives or limbs? Yeah, cutting your own hand is usually pretty badass, and the Assassin's Creed hand he gets is pretty cool too, but in the context of this show and the mediocre writing, it is the definition of lame.
Even Daryl enduring the Easy Street on repeat torture wouldn't do this to escape that hell he was in for months. But Rick Grime would do this to go back to Michonne?
Scott M. Gimple being the showrunner for this series gives me way less hope of this show actually being decent, but I can't say the entire episode was bad though because that would be ingenuine and not true. The episode is pretty entertaining and it's nice seeing some glimpses of old Rick here after all the years we've endured TWD without him. The visual effects are great too and I can see why this show was reported as having one of the network's highest budgets yet.
Now apart from the story structure which I didn't like, the dialogue is also really lame too and way too expository. This episode was the definition of tell don't show, and they expect us to care about the side characters because they tell some sad backstory of themselves. Not that telling your backstory is bad and they have to show a flashback for every minor character, but the way they do exposition here is just awful. I didn't care about any of the characters here and I certainly wouldn't've cared about Rick if I hadn't seen TWD before.
I couldn't tell if Okafor's actor was bad at acting, or if it was a miscast or the direction he was given was bad. Either way, his way of talking and acting was the goofiest and most overdramatic thing in this episode. It was like he was trying to impersonate Josh Brolin's voice. The scene of him telling his backstory and yelling had me giggling instead of the intended reaction the writer was looking for, because of how goofy he talked. Though I gotta say, even though I had a feeling he would not be a permanent character in this show, I did not expect him to go out like that. So the ending of the episode is pretty decent too.
Another thing is the dream sequences. I don't think the writer of this show has ever had a dream in his life or knows how dreams actually work. The way Rick is dreaming throughout this episode is like he's watching a new episode of a show every night, or he's pausing a movie and watching the rest time he's sleeping. I know that sometimes you can continue the same dream if you immediately go back to sleep, but these dream sequences here have the nature of flashbacks and not dreams. I think the writer mixed up the definition of flashbacks and dream sequences.
So regarding those dream sequences, they mention at the end of the episode that when Rick was a child his father set their farm ablaze and somehow got himself burned too, but he thought it was lighting at first and didn't know his dad did it so they could get a better farm and basically saved them with this act of arson. But instead of having this be the main focus of flashback and dream sequences, they decide it's better to have Rick and Michonne sit on a bench in the park and talk about pizzas and work? Really?
How impactful and great would it have been if they started the episode with the flashbacks (or dreams) of kid Rick being terrified of seeing their whole farm and house on fire, and gradually showed how much of an impact this fire had on his mind and maybe have the twist of the episode be the reveal that his fire was the one who started the fire and how this changed his whole world-view? But no, instead we get 10 minutes of mindless and pointless dream scenes of Rick and Michonne talking about things I've already forgotten about, and have this impactful event in Rick Grimes' life be this 1-minute exposition.
You see what I'm saying about the over-expository nature of dialogue in this episode?
It's also really weird that they don't really mention Judith Grimes until toward the end of the episode as if they forgot that Rick had a daughter and he only thinks and dreams and talks about Michonne.
Another thing I didn't like was how clean and digital the show looks. Which is funny because I used to think the original show looked way too grainy and dirty, and now I miss the way it used to look. New movies and shows look way too clean and crisp for their own good, especially something like a zombie show that would definitely benefit from film grain. It just looks way too clean and this kind of camera should be used for nature documentaries, not for The Walking Dead. It's like you're watching a highly-produced commercial, not a TV show.
It's also really funny how liberal they are with using the F-word when they made the actual show feel like a PG-13 movie with how scared they were to use the word in their gory zombie-killing show. These TV execs should be punished for these kinds of stupid decisions they made for the original show.
The ending is also really wack with how Michonne outright executes every other soldier but takes her time to unmask Rick and not kill him. How thoughtful of her. I was actually expecting this same thing to happen when Michonne, but I was hoping it wouldn't be this cliché and the writers wouldn't do this in 2024, but they did. I was saying under my breath "Ok, that's clearly Michonne, please don't kill everyone easily while they're masked and then unmask the plot-armored protagonist for no reason. Maybe Rick unmasks himself or it just falls off or something... Oh no, she actually unmasked him before killing him for no reason whatsoever."
It might seem I'm just complaining and went into this looking for things to complain about, but I was actually kinda excited to see Rick back and didn't even bother watching the other two spin-off shows, and was moderately disappointed with how this first episode turned out. I don't think it's the worst thing ever, and I'm actually giving it a good rating here, but it's ultimately meh, lackluster, and full of clichés.
Like I said, when the famous Scott M. Gimple who killed Carl Grimes for no reason is behind a project, my enthusiasm for that thing goes all the way down and I don't really have hope in this show's future episodes, especially after experiencing the mediocrity of the writing and the laughable dialogue of this first episode.
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