Episode: Slabtown
Original Airdate: 11-2-14
The Walking Dead has not spent an entire episode following only one of the main group since Rick’s awakening in the pilot. It pushed things in Season 4’s “Still,” abandoning all other characters for 42 minutes of Daryl and Beth alone in the woods, post prison invasion. Due to their opposing personalities the episode barely scraped by, but the unlikely duo as the main focus was still too much for a single episode and it remains one of the lowest rated on IMDb. Yet still the show runners thought an entire Beth-centric episode would make the people happy. It didn’t. Honestly, I haven’t thought much of Beth since her mysterious abduction near the end of Season 4, but seven episodes later the mystery was resolved in “Slabtown” and as I suspected, it was a bit underwhelming . I don’t fault the episode for being a character-driven one, because I’m not one to turn on the show when it abandons the carnage and action for quiet reflection. However, my interest waivers when Beth is the sole focus. She’s just not a character that can successfully carry her own episode. That’s not a knock to Emily Kinney who portrays her, but the writers, despite last season’s attempts, have written Beth as very vanilla and I’m really surprised she hasn’t been killed off yet. What did work for me in “Slabtown” was learning how another group of survivors is handling their world during the zombie apocalypse. These moments I find fascinating, and this particular group’s way of medically saving people only to hold them hostage in an abandoned Atlanta hospital until they work off their “debt” is terrifying, more so than Terminus’s cannibals, since the debts seem subjective to the vicious leader’s current mood. Sadly, the episode still leaves Beth’s fate open-ended, but Carol’s appearance toward the end gives hope that when we do drag the story back around to the younger Greene sister, things will pick up in a deadly way.
Channel: Superhero 