Alexa Mansour as Hope
Well that wasn’t a terrible opening episode of The Walking Dead: World Beyond, though it falls into the same trap that so many of the first season’s episodes fell into: It’s just kind of boring.
The important bit of information—or disinformation, really—is the lie Colonel Kublek tells everyone about the campus colony. She spins quite the yarn. Two “columns” of zombies—basically massive hordes comprised of tens of thousands of undead—converged on the campus colony after overwhelming Omaha. Nobody survived.
Apparently she didn’t even tell her daughter, Huck, about her plans to wipe out the colonies. Probably because, as far as decisions go, this one made no sense at all. Like Negan says, people are the greatest resource out there, especially in the apocalypse. Wiping out a colony full of bright young people and educators, all of whom could potentially help the CRM just like Hope is supposed to, makes no sense. It’s such a badly conceived plot point that it really kind of mucks up the whole show for me.
In any case, Kublek and Huck take Hope somewhere that is decidedly not where her father is and Kublek tells her this lie and tells her that she needs to make sure Hope will be an asset rather than a troublemaker. She gives Hope the chance to just walk away, and at first she does. Things don’t go well for her on her own and she decides to go to the CRM where she is finally reunited with her father. Tearful reunion ensues.
Meanwhile, Felix and Iris go with Felix’s boyfriend, Will, back to where he’s been hiding out. The small settlement is called the Perimeter and the people there have an uneasy truce with the CRM. Will tells them about the destruction of the campus colony and the story Kublek told of the two columns. Apparently when he questioned its validity, he inadvertently put a target on his back and the CRM tried to kill him.
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It seems clear to everyone that the story is BS and that Kublek and the CRM were the actual ones responsible for the destruction of the campus colony. Later, Iris goes out into the night foolishly and is almost caught by a CRM scout. She shoots him in the back with an arrow instead and the two grapple. She gets the best of him and stabs him to death, saying “It wasn’t empties” that destroyed her home, “It was you!” Stabby stab stab.
This is a weird show. The acting is mostly pretty good. Julia Ormond is terrific. I like Hope and Huck, but I just can’t get into Iris’s character. Felix is alright—and his emotional breakdown with Will was a nice touch; people are so rarely emotionally vulnerable in The Walking Dead universe—but he’s just sort of a flat character in spite of his sad backstory and dogged loyalty. Meanwhile, Silas and Elton were nowhere to be found.
So yeah, mostly good acting and the dialogue is mostly pretty well-written (except the bit where the Perimeter matriarch asks them “What do you live for?”) and the production value is great, but it’s all just a little slow and boring for my taste. We have so few episodes in this show and so many of them have been slow and boring. It’s very puzzling. Hopefully things pick up. The final episode of Season 1 was shockingly good so if they can just tap into that energy for Season 2 we should be alright.
What did you think? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.
And check out my video about the odd couple, Maggie and Negan, below:
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