The Walking Dead Claimed Non-Spoiler Review: Finally Showing, Not Telling

There's an old expression in storytelling: Show, don't tell. Our readers have probably head it before; it's invoked frequently by fanboys unhappy with comics that are "too wordy," an accusation often leveled at writers like Brian Michael Bendis, Chris Claremont, Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis. I've seen an advance screening of Sunday night's "Claimed" episode of The Walking Dead, and while I can't reveal any spoilers from the episode, I can write a little bit about the tone of the episode and what's been revealed in the previews so far.

For most of the run on AMC's The Walking Dead, we've had character after character telling us that everyone looks to Rick to be their moral compass, their leader and to provide expertise in bad situations. When actually confronted with those situations, though, Rick's reactions have often been uneven. Much of the criticism that a scared, hysterical Carl heaped on Rick in the midseason premiere, titled "After," is, from one perspective, fair. He did, in fact, elect to hang up his guns and run the prison as a commune in spite of the fact that he knew the Governor--a dangerous lunatic and charismatic leader with a mean-on for their group--was out there somewhere. It can, of course, be argued that Rick's decision there was defensible--because what are the odds of finding one man in the wide world, particularly when you've no real idea where he went or how far he got?

In the upcoming episode "Claimed," which airs on Sunday at 9 p.m. on AMC, we finally see what everyone was talking about: Rick Grimes as a smart guy, a leader and arguably the only person in the episode who is consistently not acting like an idiot. Well, we'll back up just a minute. There are other characters in the episode who don't act like idiots--they just don't get a ton of screen time. Of those actually appearing as a principal part of the show's narrative, Rick is far and away the least moronic. Using the word "moronic" probably gives readers the idea that the episode itself is moronic and, thus, not good. This isn't the case; it's the best of the three episodes since we returned from the break, as far as I'm concerned; they've started to really figure out the direction they want it to go in, and we're not stuck with a ton of exposition, since for the most part we've done that over the last few episodes. The fact that Rick's portion of the episode sticks out so much is a tribute to both the writing in that segment and also to Andrew Lincoln, who pulls the episode off perfectly. The Glenn/Tara portion of the episode should, by all rights, be what people are talking about (and from a plot perspective, it probably will be)...but it's simply not as impressive as what Lincoln does with his screen time. All that said, prepare for a massive meltdown on social media partway through the episode, as a particular line, delivered just before a commercial break, will plunge anyone who hasn't read the comics into a "we have just lost cabin pressure" kind of moment. It's such a killer cliffhanger that I'm surprised it didn't end the episode--or at least cut to Rick and Carl when they came back from the commercial break. Instead, they choose to deal with (some of) the ramifications of the potentially game-changing moment right away.

And, yeah, it's not fully resolved in this episode. So if you haven't read the comics yet, don't start just now, and don't search the Internet for any of what's going on in tonight's episode. Alanna Masterson is a bit of a weak point. While I've really enjoyed her portrayal of Tara up until now, she's becoming part of the cast now, and that demands that she start to progress a little beyond the handful of exasperated facial expressions that she's been using since her character was introduced. It sticks out this episode more than it did last week because she's given less to do--and because she's competing for screen time and establishing character beats with Abraham, Eugene and Rosita, who make their first full appearance and give their statement of purpose this week after their brief cameo at the end of last week's episode. The writers deserve a lot of credit for managing to keep the momentum going this week; some characters aren't seen at all, but their absence isn't conspicuous; it isn't until the end of the episode that you realize what and who you did and did not just see.