The Walking Dead: Bad News Travels So Slow

I didn’t hate this week’s episode; this is high praise given how unenthusiastic I’ve been about this season. But if I’m going to keep watching – and I am – I have to try to keep an open mind. I can’t decide I hate it before I watch it – I mean, I can but I’m not gonna treat it like my baby cousin’s first boyfriend just yet. So to be fair, this ep gave me a bunch of things I’ve been saying I wanted: character development, introduction of new characters (and societal structure), a brown person (whose safety I’m actively praying and lighting candles for), and more explanation of Negan’s tyrannical reign without suffering through his Joker impersonation and phallic adoration of Lucille. All of that was good. Add to that I had forgotten that when we first met Tara, the only defensive tool she had was her wit. She gets off the dark dry humor and we have a solid, if slow, episode. The episode doesn’t unfold in chronological order. So we meet Rachel (Lizzie 2.0), Cyndie, and Tara’s unconscious body first. If your going to have your lungs half filled with salt water and almost meet the working end of a spear, what more scenic place could you hope for? [divider type=”space_thin”] So real quick we establish that Rachel is a cold-hearted killer survivor while Cyndie still has some of her humanity weakness left. Then we jump back in time to a conscious Tara talking Heath in the RV. This scene is a little exposition heavy: they haven’t found anything, it’s been two weeks since they left, …