The Walking Dead: What Comes After
November 9, 2018 5:10 AM - Season 9, Episode 5 - Subscribe

Rick is forced to face the past as he struggles to maintain the safety of the communities and protect the future he and Carl envisioned.

This episode sees lots of flashbacks and the return of some of our favorite (or not) characters.

Indiewire Review

Vulture Review
posted by LizBoBiz (9 comments total)
 
I hope I'm not stepping on any toes jimw. But it's almost been a week and so much happened!

Rick didn't die maybe but rode off in a helicopter! I bet he totally thought he was hallucinating. Will we ever learn where these helicopters keep coming from??

AMC did a preview of the next three episodes so I'm a little unsure what was in the episode and what's upcoming.
posted by LizBoBiz at 5:13 AM on November 9, 2018


Yeah, this whole episode was just Rick up on his high horse again.
posted by Catblack at 6:22 AM on November 9, 2018 [3 favorites]


Yeah, well... that was just silly.
posted by porpoise at 7:04 AM on November 9, 2018


I was very annoyed that Rick didn't tie himself to his horse and then just let the horse take off. It knows how to get home.
posted by LizBoBiz at 7:46 AM on November 9, 2018 [1 favorite]


A misstep in an otherwise good season, but if one lackluster episode is the cost of getting Rick Grimes off the show I will gladly accept it.

The helicopter storyline with all of its "I have an B; I can bring you an A" mysteriousness feels very Lost-ish to me and I do not like it.

When Rick first got to the bridge and everyone showed up and rescued him I immediately knew he was hallucinating but for a moment I thought that they were going to reveal that the entire episode had been an An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge-style dream and Rick had never gotten off the rebar. Revealing that the arrival of Rick's gang had been a hallucination and then immediately following it up with the gang arriving for real felt… pointless? I can't exactly put my finger on it but it felt sloppy.

Rick's visits with various deceased characters felt very much like the send-off the show did for Tyrese. It didn't work for me then; it doesn't work for me now.

I am intrigued by the time jump and hopeful that it will have moved the timeline far enough forward for Negan to have shaved his terrible beard.

I am looking forward to the next episode, even if this one was a bit of a let-down.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 3:25 PM on November 9, 2018


So I watched the Talking Dead which fills in something of Rick's fate as well as the future of the franchise. Rick's off on an excursion with Ann exploring the wider Walking Dead world in a trilogy of movies to be broadcast on AMC. Other compounds, other parts of the world, perhaps some of them uninfected even.
posted by scalefree at 1:46 PM on November 10, 2018


I dug this episode, even with all its obvious flaws. The whole premise of “a dying character is visited by characters he’d let die before” worked for me, even if it was clear that they were working with the actors they could get and not the characters who would make the most sense. (Like, why would he see Sasha but not Lori or Carl or Glenn? And this is just my opinion but it would have been great if he’d met the more villainous types, like Merle, the Governor, and Cannibal Denise Crosby, so he could reaffirm the importance of his philosophy rather than exchange platitudes about family.)

It was a letdown that after a whole episode of emotional send-off, Rick happened to wash ashore alive right in front of Ann, to be spirited away by the helicopter. For one, it was a fake-out. For two, it means the helicopter will not be resolved in the series proper, and we’ll have to watch the spinoff movies to learn what it’s about.
posted by ejs at 9:40 PM on November 10, 2018 [1 favorite]


Don’t feel bad about not waiting for me, I didn’t have a chance to catch up on this episode until today.

The Rick stuff was meh, but probably about what was expected. It is a shame that the returning featured characters didn’t have a good through-line.

I’m excited for bad-ass Judith.

This retooling of The Walking Dead isn’t as severe as the one that Fear the Walking Dead underwent, but it has been fascinating to see these shows reinvent themselves this year. I wonder if we will see some of the FTWD cast show up in the Rick Grimes movies.
posted by jimw at 10:12 PM on November 10, 2018 [1 favorite]


so much happened!

But also: so little happened! Most of this episode was an extended farewell tour for Rick; the only significance was the first and last few minutes.

This arc riffs quite hard on Bridge on the River Kwai: the bridge is Rick's folly that he pursues despite the reservations of his subordinates, and that he ends up destroying at the end.

Is the show just going to pretend going forward that nobody saw the helicopter? The way the show was edited it felt like it landed just across the river from the Alexandrians; nobody's going to be like huh, that was weird? I guess the handwave is that Rick washed up a way downstream and a while later.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 10:48 AM on November 13, 2018


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