This episode of Walking Dead might have been the best hour of television I’ve watched this year, which is an accomplishment considering… True Detective.
WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILER AHEAD
It’s brutal, and TWD neither flinches from it nor sensationalizes it. It is just a stark, gut-wrenching moment that offers no visceral entertainment, just a horrible feeling in the pit in your stomach that forces you to wonder how this awfulness could have been avoided, and whether it could be at all.
It was brutal, but you felt like it had to be done, which is such an unsettling feeling. It’s a feeling that The Walking Dead really assaults you with. You’re constantly torn between the morality you know and the new morality of the world the characters inhabit. No one has had to shift their morality more than Carol, and it’s been almost chilling to see how pragmatically she’s gone about it.
So let’s take one moment to add Chad Coleman and Melissa McBride to The Walking Dead actors who are knocking it out of the goddamn park the second half of this season. Carol’s tough exterior cracks and breaks down as Lizzie gets more and more fucked up; and the scene where Tyreese forgives Carol is, by itself, as good as any performance on the show.
This this this. Mika’s death and the subsequent dispatching of Lizzie were brutal, but that scene between Carol and Tyreese was unbelievable. That’s what almost brought me to tears. The grace Tyreese showed her was just… damn.