Episode 4: Service
During the fourth (and feature length) installment of Season 7, we catch back up with Rick and crew in Alexandria to be witness to Negan's first official visit... albeit an early surprise since he promised to give them a week and apparently less than that has passed in show-time. A lot of people were looking forward to this episode for some cathartic grieving, but remember Maggie is at Hilltop with Sasha and we won't see her again until next week.
We're already seeing a lot of flack for the show, once again, spending entire episodes focused on one group rather than weaving the stories together. Remember though, this show has never really participated in that style of writing and it would feel quite odd to start now, seven seasons in. Yes, yes, it drives us crazy too... remember good old Woodbury? The episodes spent entirely in that town made us nuts and since we didn't particularly care for those characters, to be perfectly honest, those episodes bored and disappointed us. The good news is that we are much more fond of each of the characters splintered off into each of the now FOUR camps. We are far more interested in catching up with Carol and Morgan than we were Andrea, even if The Kingdom isn't our favorite of the camps. However, we are still aggravated that we have to sit and wait for the wheel to spin back around to check in with Maggie who, in this episode, was declared to be dead in order to protect her from being claimed for Negan's harem.
Back to the episode... it is just as excruciating as expected to watch Rick have to grovel to Negan. He is forced to hold Lucille for Negan throughout the visit, which Rick spends mostly looking like a beaten dog. They are robbed of even their mattresses, which Michonne later finds in a smoldering pile beside the road... a move designed specifically to weaken and humiliate, though it is a terrible waste to burn something that has to be replaced every 10 years that they're not exactly manufacturing anymore. Our survivors are burglarized of every bit of dignity they may have still owned.
Carl fires a warning shot at The Saviors who've come to raid the clinic of all, yes all (not half as promised) of the supplies. This prompts Negan to demand they hand over all of their guns. How this kid got away with that is beyond comprehension, except that it appears to be a nod toward the comics in which Negan is excessively fond of Carl. One thing is for certain; every action toward The Saviors has an incredibly disproportionately terrible reaction. Olivia is threatened with her life for not keeping the gun registry up to date (because Spencer has been playing his hoarding game again and hidden two in the A/C vent in his house), but fret not, in the nick of time Rick discovers them and hands them over to save her. This subplot was a little confusing since the episode starts with Michonne packing up a hidden gun and sneaking off to have a little target practice, so if you weren't paying attention you might've thought the missing guns were with her and that Olivia's fate depended entirely on Michonne making it back in time.
While Rick has clearly understood the gravity of the corner they've been backed into, there are those who are still dangerously defiant. Having realized Negan intended to confiscate all of their guns, Rosita obtains one off a walker in the woods and later issues a command to Eugene to make her some ammunition for it, so his fate as the munitions manufacturer of the comics comes one step closer to fruition. Once she returns from target practice, Michonne reluctantly gives up her rifle when Rick wants to use it as a demonstration of good-will (since it was undocumented in the gun registry they could have secretly kept it but hand it over anyway), but later she only half-promises that she will submit to the new rules, saying she'll "try". Rick's point is sobering but valid: now that all of their guns are gone, if The Saviors find any hidden or catch anyone with one, someone will die... and it may not even be the person who broke the rules that gets the bat... so we are left knowing Rosita has this ticking time bomb in her pants.
And Daryl *sigh*. Daryl has been dragged along and made to help gather up supplies from The Alexandrians. He doesn't say a word the entire episode, even when asked to plead his case for why Negan should grant Rick's request to let Daryl stay in Alexandria. Dwight has confiscated Daryl's bike as another piece of bait to lure Daryl over to the dark side, but Daryl just spends the whole ordeal looking broken and lost. And, now that they've had to lie about Maggie being dead to keep her away from Negan (something else we're certain will come back to bite them), Daryl believes that both Glenn and Maggie are gone.
And Carol still has no idea any of that went down.
EDIT: And, Rick admits he believes Judith is Shane's bio-baby. Not sure how we forgot that one.
Did anyone else find it a bit odd that Father Gabe had just dug an empty grave for no apparent reason? Do we arbitrarily make fake graves now, is that a "thing"? Did he have some kind of prophetic vision to tell him we might need to fake a death? If The Church Lady were part of his congregation she'd be talking about how conveeeeenient that was.
The naysayers are already proclaiming this to be the "worst episode" of the season so far. Actually we thought episode two was a bigger drag than this one, but we haven't seen anything yet that would make us scream foul or be bored. They could have sped up the pace a bit and accomplished the same amount in a normal-sized episode, but there were a lot of smaller tidbits baked in. We get into the head-space of several characters in addition to establishing how committed Rick is to following Negan's rules. We see what life under the rule of The Saviors will truly be like and how most people feel about that. And that, our friends, is a bitter pill to swallow. Fortunately for us, The Saviors took all our pills.
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