‘The Walking Dead’ Season 8, Episode 8: The Sacrificial Lamb

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Season 8, Episode 8: ‘How It’s Gotta Be’

As the eighth season of “The Walking Dead” has sunk itself into the “All Out War” story line and the extended conflict with Negan, the writing staff has entered into an unspoken understanding with its patient audience. This season has gotten repeatedly bogged down by chatter, positioning and repositioning characters for an impending reckoning. When a show makes the choice to frame so much of itself as anticipatory, it had better have the firepower to back up that promise. But much in the same way that leaders on both sides have reneged on their social contracts by neglecting to protect their followers, the writers have punished viewers with inertia and bitter nihilism.

After seven episodes of strategizing and interminably unproductive conversations about the value of life in times of crisis, the series has sputtered right when it should’ve begun roaring. The episode begins promisingly enough, as Negan mounts a counteroffensive just as it looked as if Rick’s coalition was seizing the upper hand. The script clearly establishes what’s at stake and assigns a timeline: Negan’s got the alliance’s compound surrounded, and they’ve got three minutes to surrender before the rocket-propelled grenades start flying. He goes the shock-and-awe route, flatly informing his enemies that “you lose, it’s over.” On all of this war’s multiple fronts — the Sanctuary, the road where Simons halts Maggie, the Savior refuge — Negan threatens to grasp the upper hand. His lieutenants spread themselves smartly and neutralize many of the threats before matters can get dire enough to require gunfire.

But it’s all in service of a climax that never arrives. Even at a bloated 90-minute run time, this week’s episode lacks the sense of momentousness that a midseason finale ought to possess. Perhaps the writers intend to save Rick’s inevitable showdown with Negan for the proper season finale, but all the same, they cannot muster a suitably dramatic substitute. This episode treads the same drawn-out, unaffecting path as so many have this season, briefly checking in with an array of minor players without crafting a particularly engaging character beat for any of them. The episode carries that splintered vantage into the final scenes, which divide attentions among multiple fronts through crosscutting that fails to produce the emotional response it’s looking for.

Within this fractured schematic, an unusual quotient of attention gets paid to young Carl in an instant sign of doom. It happened to Ezekiel before he lost his cherished tiger, it happened to Eugene before a complete internal break that sends him to the brink of suicide in this episode, and it happens to poor Carl when he attempts to make one last-ditch attempt at decency. In the post-apocalyptic wasteland, hopeful statements ring out like a death knell.

And indeed, the final moments reveal that Carl has been bitten by a Walker and his days are numbered. (Actor Chandler Riggs has confirmed that we haven’t seen the last of Carl; he’ll return when the series gets back up and running on Feb. 25, 2018 for a final goodbye.) Rick’s unmoored son finds purpose in mending the fences between the warring groups by any means necessary, no matter how extreme. In the episode’s most resonant scene, Carl takes it upon himself to barter peace and offers himself as a sacrificial lamb. It’s a naïve move, and Carl’s reasoning — that he can prevent any other deaths by causing his own — doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny. But he succeeds in earning Negan’s respect with his chutzpah. More than that, he proves to the audience that he might be more than the whiny-voiced kid who spent years as an albatross around his father’s neck.

He won’t get the chance, however. The writers have cut down Carl in his prime, a break from the comics with no discernible rationale apart from a streak of moral sadism, determinedly quashing any flickers of hope. The series has long equated goodness with weakness, a bitter pose neither entertaining nor deep. Carl was one of the last remaining vestiges of the former world’s standards for ethical behavior, having helped the ailing Siddiq earlier this season when Rick regarded that man as too risky or burdensome to take on. Carl’s kinder tendencies have been a peg on which viewers could hang their hopes for a livable future, and the sting from having that possibility snatched away lingers.

Episodes like this week’s, which appear to take a perverse pleasure in dangling the possibility of salvation only to snatch it away, call into question the relationship between the show and its fan base. “The Walking Dead” has evinced a bleak pessimism since its earliest episodes, but previous seasons have situated the misery in a meaningful context. Somewhere around the shameless manipulation of Abraham’s cliffhanger death at the close of the sixth season, however, sadness became a blunt-force weapon that the show has wielded carelessly.

A show that fashions itself as a deliberately joyless experience doesn’t make a person want to watch it. Shifting national attitudes may have played a part in the recent souring, too; everything’s grim enough that nobody feels the need to have his or her spirit ground into dust on a weekly basis. But irrespective of causes, the concluding “twist” exposes a dysfunction corroding the show from the inside out: The writers seem to have as much contempt for their viewers as they evidently have for their characters. Before better days can come, this drought of empathy must end.