The Walking Dead: “A New Beginning”
Photos via Jackson Lee Davis/AMC
Quick show of hands: How many of you Walking Dead viewers remember the way that season 8 of the show ended?
However many hands are raised: That’s roughly how many people seem to remember the season ending better than the writers of tonight’s first episode of Season 9. “A New Beginning” is accurately titled in the sense that it opens up plenty of new possibilities as the zombie serial skips forward in time by roughly 18 months, but simultaneously frustrating in the way it would like to forget what the audience has already been shown.
Namely, the meeting between Maggie, Daryl and Jesus that closed out the previous season of The Walking Dead, in which the three openly seemed to be discussing (or at least heavily implying) an open rebellion or outright assassination of Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes. At the time, the ending seemed like an incredibly strange, out-of-character swerve for everyone involved. Maggie and Daryl? They’ve fought and bled with Rick for every ounce of happiness they’ve ever enjoyed since the zombie epidemic started. He’s personally saved both of them on more occasions than one could possibly count. And Jesus? Well, he’s a really nice guy, and pretty much the last character who could reasonably be expected to rationalize making a move against Rick. That moment, which closed out season 8, was a poorly calculated bit of writing that telegraphed what should have been slow, complex character development in season 9.
That’s the irony, because this is actually what “A New Beginning” delivers pretty competently. We’re seeing some new power dynamics here, and they’re fascinating. Maggie has been through hell and emerged as a hardened leader on the other side, and a considerably more hard line one than Rick, or so it would seem. Carol and Ezekiel have finally cemented their budding romance. Jadis seemingly abandoned the junkyard and joined the group—although it isn’t really clear whose group. And Father Gabriel, well … he acquired a really great Lee Van Cleef hat, so I guess the last year and a half hasn’t been wasted. It’s refreshing and novel to see so many characters from different groups interacting on missions such as their raid of the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. … even if it means watching them attempt incredibly boneheaded maneuvers such as rolling a Conestoga wagon over a fragile glass pane that everyone and their mother knows is going to crack from the moment we first witness it.
Of those characters, it’s clearly Maggie who is the most important to “A New Beginning,” and this episode attempts to sow some seeds of the various conflicts and differences in philosophy she’s developed as opposed to Rick … which would be far more effective if we hadn’t already seen her secretly plotting against him. Maggie is also in the strange philosophical position of believing that Negan should have died for his crimes, while having spared the ever-squirrelly Gregory after multiple attempts to sell out The Hillside. It’s a classic double standard; one that is only solved by Gregory’s profound incompetence when he tries to have her killed in the least effective of ways and ends up sentenced to death via hanging. But it at least serves to illustrate Maggie’s increasingly isolationist mindset, as she listens to Hilltoppers who argue (in poorly reasoned fashion) that the community should only fend for itself. Nevermind the fact that all the communities will be far weaker when separated—I’m sure that will become quite clear to everyone involved by the time we reach the midpoint of the season.
“Hey Maggie, do you have a minute to participate in the world’s sloppiest assassination attempt?