It’s looking like The Walking Dead crew have found a nice little formula where occasionally they’ll venture away from Rick and catch up with with the plights of peripheral characters every now and then. We got two episodes focusing on The Governor last season, and while they had their faults, the show established that it can do these episodes quite well, and they usually build up to something epic (like “Too Far Gone”). Now we get to catch up with Beth after the was taken by a white-crossed car last season while travelling with Daryl.
It turns out Beth was taken back to Atlanta, to Grady Memorial Hospital which is full of cops, a doctor, and other survivors. The well-paced episode does a great job of slowly peeling away layers to reveal that the hospital isn’t the most ideal of locations; but then again, what is. As doctor Steven Edwards (Erik Jensen) says, “as bad as it gets, it’s still better than down there.” But the question this episode asks is it worth it? Is being at the bottom of some sort of survivor hierarchy more ideal than living amongst the walkers? If it wasn’t for awful Officer Gorman (Cullen Moss) and his attempt of sexual violence towards Beth, I would be leaning towards a yes.
“Slabtown” may have moved slower than any Season 5 episode so far, but we did get to play around with the politics in the hospital and the focus on individual utility in a post apocalyptic world. Beth and Noah (Everybody Hates Chris’ Tyler James Willians) seemed to be on the bottom rung, hence Officer Dawn (Christine Woods) and the others had some sense of possession towards them and felt like they were owed something for protecting them against walkers. Noah played his part, as the quiet janitor type who was secretly hatching an escape plan, driving Beth towards the realisation that this isn’t somewhere she wants to be.
Joan (Keisha Castle-Hughes) was Beth’s first clue as to something not being quite right at the hospital. The abused nurse attempted to escape, got bitten, and Dr Edwards ended up needing to fish-wire her arm off in an uncomfortable scene. Her neglect to tell Beth about why she was so fed up with the hospital was a bit frustrating, but Beth soon found out that one of the ‘favours’ these lower-rung survivors are expected to provide to the ever-dominant cops seems to be in the form of sex, as creepy Officer Gorman forced a lollipop into her mouth.
“The happier my officers are, the harder they work to keep us going…that’s what makes you worth something” – Office Dawn.
While Dawn didn’t seem be an entirely bad person, her willingness to let her officers do immoral and disgusting things to people just because she saw them as nothing but ‘support’ was a pretty dark side, spilling over to others and corrupting them so they could keep the system in tact. The perfect example of this was Dr Edwards, who seemed like a genuine guy aside from the fact that he made Beth unwittingly kill for him to keep his value in tact. By injecting the injured Dr Trevitt with the wrong chemical, Beth made sure Dawn still needed Dr Edwards and would therefore keep him safe, similar to a certain situation on Breaking Bad.
While sneaking around Dawn’s office to steal a key for her and Noah’s escape, Beth stumbles across Joan – who had killed herself – and is busted by Gorman, who proceeds to force her into sex until Beth cracks a jellybean jar over his head and leaves Joan’s reanimated corpse to take her revenge. It’s our first real bit of action in the episode and makes up for the lack of characteristic gore with a nice release of audience bloodlust as well as a poetic ending for the cop. It’s great to see that Beth, just a few scenes after Dawn tells her how weak she is, has become fairly capable and clever, taking Gorman’s loaded gun and using it to shoot a path clear for her and Noah once they escape down the elevator shaft.
While Noah escapes past the walkers – or “rotters”, as the hospital folk call them – Beth falls back into Dawn’s hands, but to be realistic, she probably would have been bitten had it not been for the cops. So while Beth is back at square one, she has a more intimate knowledge of how things work around here, calling Dr Edwards out on his cowardly murder and walking around with a small knife (no idea what she planned to do with that; surely that wasn’t reason enough to kill Dr Edwards?). Having Carol wheeled in at the very end is a nice twist to relatively unexciting episode, setting us up for a return to this scene and hopefully a more fast-moving exploration of this context.
Next week seems to be about the D.C bound group, so I think it’s safe to say we can expect more of the splintered approach that The Walking Dead used for the tail end of Season 4. The results can be mixed, as we’ve seen, but it should give the series a bigger scope leading up to the mid-season finale.
Now when we return to the hospital, I think it’s possible that Daryl came across Noah and has brought him back to the group; that’s who was in the bushes behind him at the end of last week’s episode. Which will probably mean that Rick and the others will be making the trek back to Atlanta to save Carol/Beth, most likely in the mid-season finale.
Review Score: THREE STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Hightlights:
1. Slow but paced well
2. Dr Edwards cowardly but smart
3. Carol introduced at end
4. Interesting look at individual utility
Lowlights:
1. Dull at times
2. The lollipop scene an awkward way to spell out Gorman’s intentions
Episode MVP: Beth
Walker Kill of the Week: Beth
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